Supporting Loved Ones Through Difficulties
Mental illness in the family is just to be accepted for what it is. It is just common sense to do our best for those who are mentally affected or schizophrenic, or paranoid, or whatever. I could name you a hundred diseases, and some of them are considered terminal.
The family can only accept it. But to accept it, you have to be strong. You need a hundred times more strength to accept than to reject. So, if you can make yourself strong enough, you will be able to accept the condition of your child or a family member, realizing that there is no accident in this world. Nothing happens in this world by accident, and it is the past karma of this person, family member, or friend who is afflicted by this ailment. So, the best one can do is send forth love.
Every person has an abundance of healing energy in them, but if it is coupled with the right, sincere, selfless quality of love, those energies can be imparted. You can never take away someone’s illness, but you can ease the person’s problems, and this has happened in our organisation a lot: the blind have learned to see, the deaf have learned to hear, and the lame have started walking. I was looking at a newspaper clipping someone brought me, about a person who could not walk for 13 years and has started walking, things like that. It is the grace of God that does that, if energies are channelled. But it is very important to remember that no Spiritual Master can take away your karma. Never. He can defer that karma, or the payment for it, to a future existence, which will not help that person, because he will have to pay for it in some way or another, unless that person changes his entire lifestyle and banishes the karma.
THE SPIRITUAL MASTER’S GENTLE PUSH
In the time of Jesus, why did he only make a few people see, or a few people walk, when there were thousands and thousands of blind people in the world, thousands and thousands of people that were lame, thousands and thousands of lepers? Why only for one person, or two, or three, or five, and not the rest? Is everyone not a child of God? Here is what happened there. This person with a particular ailment was just on the verge of completing that little karma that was left. A true Spiritual Master can give him a little push, like a schoolmaster, where a child needs fifty percent to pass his exam to go to another standard. Still, the schoolmaster sees that the child has potential, but is only one point short of the fifty percent. So why take away a whole year of a child’s life and let him do the standard, or the form, as you call it here – different countries have different systems, we call it standards in South Africa – standard one up to standard ten, which is matriculation, and then you go to University.
That is what the Spiritual Master does, “Look now, there is only one little per cent left. Let me give him a push,” and that push the Spiritual Master pays for by intense meditation and rebalancing certain energies. But if that person still has a long way to go, karmically speaking, it will not be removed by the Spiritual Master because it will only be deferred to another existence. That is how it works. So, they are very careful not to defer the payment where they would have to pay perhaps in a more extreme form, but if they require a little push, he will do that because they could meditate that away.
Yesterday I received a little note sent by someone. One woman who is in a severe, severe nervous condition and very elderly wrote this note to me: “Guruji, would you please take over my total nervous condition.” She could not even write, so she had someone write it for her, and when you see her signature, you can see she is a total nervous wreck. “Could you please take it over?” So, in other words, look at the selfishness. ‘Oh yes, I must be totally well. It means total selfishness: “Take away my troubles, but you suffer for it.”
THE MAHABHARATA’S LESSON IN SELF-CENTREDNESS
There is a very amusing story in the Mahabharata, which is one of the great Hindu epics. It is a story of five brothers called the Pandavas, who fought the Kauravas on the field of Kurukshetra, which is the name of the place where they had this big battle. It is in this battle that Krishna taught Arjuna, and that is how the Bhagavad Gita was born. The Mahabharata is the background of the Bhagavad Gita. But amongst these five Pandavas, there was one brother who was a big eater; he could eat up five big platters of food.
This is mythology, but it has a lesson. So, this brother was in such deep worship of this particular deity that the deity appeared to him and said, “Look, you have been so faithful, and your worship has been so deep; ask for a boon.” Meanwhile, he had an uncle, whose name was Shakuni, remember this is mythology, and he did not like this uncle. So, he says, “Lord, seeing that you have appeared to me and offered me a boon, may I ask you the boon to be able to eat even more, but Shakuni must go to the toilet.” So, is that not the general mentality? I must have the enjoyment, but let someone else do the suffering for it. That is the meaning of the story. It was reflecting the world’s mentality.
SERVICE TO HUMANITY AS SERVICE TO THE DIVINE
But a true Spiritual Master will show you, guide you, and help you to get rid of that which is bothering you and impart a spiritual force that will guide you. I will not be a guru in my next lifetime. Sujay from America calls me Babuji. Babuji means father. He says, “Babuji, even if they give me a million pounds a month, I will not take your job because you have to be a Psychologist, a Psychiatrist, a Philanthropist, a Teacher, a medicine man, doctor, you have to cure, heal, you have got to be everything.” But how many of them realise what suffering that old boy would have to go through for all that!
But we do our dharma. It is my dharma to do that, and my karma might have produced my dharma. But it is good, as we have said that a man must serve humanity, and by serving humanity, you are automatically serving God. Because the concept of Divinity, and I mean it is a conceptless concept, because it is abstract. So how can you serve the abstract? You serve the concrete, which is the manifestation of the abstract, and that is why our teachers and others here serve humanity.
To go back to the suffering child or the afflicted person, by helping or serving that person, you are doing yourself greater good than you are doing to the person, because it is an infallible law, and I have said this many times, you give one, and you will get ten back in return. It will give you peace of mind knowing you have done your best. That is how it works.
In adoption, there are lessons beyond loving and beyond blood.
You choose your parents, and you need the proper genetic combination and the chromosomes and what have you, to be able to be born through those parents into adverse circumstances, so that means you had to learn those lessons. So, you get born through them. There is no such thing as an accident, so in the case of adopted children, some tragedy happens, or something happens, and you get adopted. When a husband and wife go to an orphanage, they will look at the children. I do not know how it is done here in this country, but they will look at children and choose one. Why did they choose that particular child? Is it an accident? No, it is not an accident. It proves that the child and the adoptive parents had some affinity or karmic ties. Because those parents who could not bear children also had a karmic lesson to learn, they could not have children, so they adopted a child who had an affinity with them in a past life. And to repeat, it is because of this affinity that they choose this particular child. You know, you could also have an affinity with a cat. You pick up any stray cat and bring it up very kindly and with so much love. Yes. There was an affinity there. Perhaps in one of your cats’ lives.
That was no accident either. Why did they choose that particular child for you? That is no accident either; the karmic tie was still there. After choosing the child, the child is learning, and so are the adoptive parents. The lesson they are learning is how to give love to someone not of their own flesh and blood, unselfishly. It is very easy to love your own child, for a woman, a child that came from her own womb, or a child that came from her father’s own sperm. It is very easy to love them, but to love totally and selflessly a child that never came through your being, your physical body, that is a selfless act.
The child learns to appreciate how kind these people are to me.
THERE IS A SPIRITUAL VOID IN THE SOCIAL SYSTEM
There is something that should really be revised or changed. Those Social Workers who handle these things because they have read some books and have a BA degree behind their name think they know it all, and that is wrong. What do they know of spiritual values? So, it should be amended so that both have an equal say in the choice. These Social Agencies, or Adoptive Agencies, are just taking the psychology of a person, the thinking patterns of a person, and if the child would be okay for them and they are okay for the child, that is all they look at.
For dating, for example, you have it on your computer nowadays. Yes, you can join an agency. I have seen some “Apps” where you give your details and what kind of person you would prefer, and they match you with a man and a woman. And that is supposed to be love. So, there are a lot of things in this world that could radically be changed. Unfortunately, many social reforms are required, and if they become more spiritual, they could really make this world a better place. If that very Social Worker had dived deeper and deeper into spirituality, there would not only be what the books have taught her; she would also develop that intuitiveness that would complement her book knowledge, and both intuitiveness and book knowledge could work together. A lot of things are amiss in this world as we know it, and if things were not amiss, we would not have so much strife and conflict and all kinds of things, with the threat of war, nuclear war, looming over our heads—things like that. Fear would be gone. More love would be there because the mind and the heart could never remain a vacuum. As soon as you remove hatred from yourself, it fills up with love. And as soon as you remove love from you, it fills up with the opposite. So the opposite fills the lack of its own opposite. That is how it works.
… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang UK 1983- 17
