AWAKENING TO YOUR DIVINE NATURE
Do we live only for our five physical senses: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and feeling? Is that the meaning of life, or is there a higher meaning? Happiness can only be found if you strive for the higher meaning of life.
You are Divine. You imagine yourself to be non-Divine, and that causes you the miseries of life. But if you think, “I am born in the image of God; I am that Divinity,” then all miseries will disappear. Nothing can affect you if you can only reset from the externalities of life and bring yourself into the internality. Affectation is a product of your mind, and your mind as everyone else’s in the world, ninety-nine point nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine percent is affected by the mind. Are you ruling your mind, or is your mind ruling you? If you say to yourself, “I am feeling sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick,” you will feel sick. But if you say to yourself, “I am well,” you will find that energy welling up within you because your mind is the greatest obstacle to your misery, and it is the most significant help to your development and non-misery.
ACCEPTANCE BRINGS FREEDOM
Misery means that you feel uncomfortable within yourself, and conflicting thoughts fly through your mind, thoughts where one thought conflicts with the other and causes friction that makes you feel miserable. But if you eliminate conflict, it is natural and logical that you will feel non-conflict. The secret to non-conflict is not controlling the mind. The more you try to control your mind, the greater the conflict will occur because you are pressurizing a non-conflicting force against a conflicting force, and because of these two opposites, you create greater conflict. But if we can allow our minds just to flow.
Someone has said a bad word to me; how will I accept those words? How will I allow what this someone has said to me or anyone else has said to me? Whose business is it? It is my business because I am the one who is allowing myself to be affected. You go out now, and you find it to be cold. Who is feeling cold? Not the weather. You are feeling chilly. If you go outside and if it is warm, you will feel warm. So why not treat the mind similarly, where you could say to yourself, “Ah, it is cold. Why not? Let it be cold.” If it is raining, why not let it rain? Does that rain not give us food, flowers, and beauty? If it is so hot, can we not just think that the food, flowers, and everything grows because of the heat? Is it not the heat and the rain that sustains life to its fullest? So, whose fault is it?
Here is something I am going to tell you which is revolutionary. It is not your fault, nor the fault of the weather, the environment, or anything else. The fault lies in the patterning of your mind. If your mind can be patterned in the way of total acceptance, whatever befalls you, then the mind will unconditionally accept the patterns because the mind becomes unpatterned. You walk out of this room and put on your jersey and coat, which is cold outside. You are going to feel cold outside. But if your mind says, “Oh well, if it is cold outside, so what.” It is also part of nature as you are a part of nature. Because nature can only interact with nature, nature can never interact with anything which is not natural. So, if you have the attitude of saying, “Ah, it is going to be cold when I walk outside. So what!” There is always a remedy for it. I will have a hot cup of coffee or a scotch. Your whole attitude will change, and that cold you will find outside will not be felt because your attitude has changed and is not discordant with natural laws.
So, when you develop the acceptance of your environment, life becomes happier. Your attitude influences everything in your life. I have known of a person who was in a wheelchair, suffering so many diseases, and yet this lady, who must be about sixty years old, was the happiest person I have found in the world because she accepted her condition. She received her position. She accepted the Serenity Prayer, “Let me accept the things that I cannot change and change the things which I can change.”
FINDING STRENGTH THROUGH SIMPLICITY AND AWARENESS
Many things in our lives can be changed. You study your work situations, you study whatever you want to study in every aspect of your life, and if you can look at it from a positive angle, you will find that everything can be changed immediately.
What you need are very, very simple principles.
We are one family. I am not apart from you, and you are not apart from me. The same Spirit creates us, and the same Spirit flows through us all. So, when people talk to me about misery, I say it is not necessary to suffer misery. You can be so happy, and the principles are so simple. That is the tragedy that I feel and suffer for, that the principles are so simple, and people just do not do it.
If you only meditate, quiet the mind, and become the observer of these thoughts that flow through your mind, the mind could never be empty. Observe them as they play on the cinema screen; do not allow them to affect you. Because whatever is happening on the cinema’s screen, you cannot influence it; you are sitting in the audience. Things are happening. You watch it, yet you know that what you see on the screen is not reality. It is a play. So, if it is just a play, why should it allow to affect you? And yet you know that a play is happening on the screen, and you sitting in the audience can do nothing to change what is happening in the play. One man socks the other man. What can you do about it? Or if one man is unfaithful to his wife and makes love to another woman, how is it going to affect you? You are watching a play, a drama which is enacted there. But it must not be allowed to affect you.
You, your life, and your authentic self are untouched and unblemished, and nothing can affect you if you do not allow it to affect you with your small little mind because what you have put into action is not your authentic self. You have put into action that small little mind whose thinking power is ruling your life when your life is as vast as the universe. That small little mind is ruining and running your life and making it a hell and a misery. Why? Do you know why? Lack of understanding and lack of strength.
IF GOD IS PURITY, THEN THE IMAGE, TOO, MUST BE PURE, HAPPY, AND BLISSFUL
The reason I go round the world, seven, eight months a year out of twelve, is to teach people that wholeness of themselves, not to be dependent on that little fraction of the mind, but to use the totality of yourself and enjoy the beautiful happiness, the totality of life. You hear the sound of eternity flowing through you as a vibration through your Mantra, and you are happy. You say you are unhappy, but there is no such word. You are using the word happy and negating it with “un.” It is a negation. Why deny that which is true when you can experience that which is true without negating it?
When you negate, you are negative, and negation is married to negativity, and I pity that husband and wife. We get rid of negation, and we find peace, which is non-negative. Non-negative means realizing one’s inner self, that I come from Divinity, and I am Divine, and I have added on all this rubbish to myself, this dirt, to make me not feel the Divinity within me.
If I am born in the image of God, which is purity, then should the image not also be beautiful, pure, happy, and blissful? So all of you here, ninety-nine point nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, would you carry on nine, nine, nine, nine percent are absolutely lunatics, mad. And to be angry, I suppose, could be bad. So, through our meditational practices and other spiritual practices, we bring and focus the mind to a greater and calmer level, where the mind does not function independently. Still, the mind penetrates the depths of the heart, the inner core of one’s personality, which is Divine. When you can combine the thinking and intellectual ability with that which is divine and unthinking, how happy can life be?
AWAKENING THE DIVINE WITHIN
So what happens is that you feel that bliss, that joy within your inner self. And I talk of experience; I do not talk from books. I chucked up reading books many years ago. Sometimes, I read a book just to see what others say. When you feel that peace and calm deep down within yourself, you translate it to the conscious level of the mind, and then the conscious level of the mind works in unionism with the superconscious level within yourself. So, the conscious level appreciates what it formerly had been unaware of.
When the conscious mind grasps that inner level of quietude, of the peace that passeth all understanding, your conscious mind through which you function every day in your work, in your jobs, in your factories, whatever you are doing, when it grasps it, the conscious mind also develops a level of peace, serenity, quietude, calmness. You feel confident within yourself that I am not a lost soul. I am born of God. I am born in His image, and I am the essence of Divinity, and I am Divinity.
… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang UK 1985 – 01
