HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR LIFE?
QUIETNESS OF THE MIND OPENS THE HEART
Because you are Divine, every cell in your body is Divine. If we say God is omnipresent, then He should be present in every cell of you. The only failure man has is that he does not recognise or does not have the cognition to know that he is Divine.
If you stand down on the street, you will only see part of the road. But as you climb up a hill, you would have a whole big panoramic view of the city.
When the person starts meditating apart from the physical and psychological benefits, another thing happens. The person becomes more aware of himself and his environment. Your awareness expands, and with expanded awareness, all the actions you perform would be right actions.
Then not only the mind develops, not only does the mind go to its quieter self, quieter centre – but that quietness that is experienced by the mind opens up the heart. When the heart, which is the core of the human being, the core of the human personality, when it opens up, there is greater coordination between the mind and heart, so you become a more loving person.
Someone tells me, for example, “No one loves me.” So, I say, that is very easy: become loveable, and everyone will love you. You do not need to go to call the butterflies. They will not come. Just make your garden beautiful, grow beautiful flowers in your garden, and automatically the butterflies will come.
IMPROVING THE ENVIRONMENTS THROUGH MEDITATION
Through meditation, one adds that extra depth to one’s life. One discovers oneself, and thereby, life becomes better, and when life becomes better, everything around you becomes much more enjoyable. There is joy. You are made of joy, but we have lost the art of enjoying the joy, but this art can be regained.
Through meditation, you will find that your entire environment is improving. A greater understanding develops between husband and wife, employee and employer. You will also learn how to forgive, how to love. People talk of love, and they say, “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” But how can you do that when you do not know yourself?
Through these spiritual practices, you start knowing yourself, you start knowing your true worth, and you will begin saying one day, that “I and my Father are One.” For you are at-one-ment with Him all the time. The only thing lacking is the recognition or the realisation of that oneness. When you discover this oneness, how can you hate another, for there is no one else to hate except you, and do not hate yourself? Then you would say, “I am my brother’s keeper” in its truest sense.
ACHIEVING THE TRUE GOAL OF LIFE
From these very simple meditational practices, you achieve the true goal of life, for man’s goal, is to recognise his reality. We are living on the surface level of life only. Like the ocean’s surface waves, the turbulent waves, and we are being tossed around by those waves. But if you dive just a bit deeper within yourself, you will find the ocean to be calm, and once you experience the calmness, you will appreciate the beauty of the waves. Then you would not say, “Oh, look at these waves, how turbulent they are!” But you will become a surfer and enjoy surfing on the waves.
What do you learn there? You learn acceptance of life. With the growth of awareness, you become more and more accepting, and when you learn to accept things or situations as they are, you will naturally start surrendering. You see how all these virtues, all these good qualities which religion talks about, which all theologies speak about, are so interrelated that when one quality is developed you automatically start developing the other qualities.
BECOMING FEARLESS AND GUILTLESS
Fear is the greatest bugbear in the life of man today. He fears everything. Everything becomes fear-full when there is nothing to fear. You go down a dark road, and because your mind is filled with fear, you would think that a shadow you would see there on this road to be a mugger that is going to mug you. Meanwhile, it could just be a tree stump there, but you would be afraid to go through the road. If you have fearlessness, by recognising, by experiencing that Divinity that is within you, every aspect and every facet of your life becomes improved if you do not fear.
Another great problem which human beings suffer from is the sense of guilt. Guilt, they are riddled with guilt, and that causes untold psychological problems. But in a way, it is suitable for some people to be guilty or else the psychologists and psychiatrists would starve. The idea that is implanted in us since childhood is the sense of guilt, and you grow up with the idea that “I am a sinner, I am a sinner, I am a sinner.” You do not need that. You are not a sinner. You are placed in certain circumstances by the various impressions that whirl in your subconscious mind, which you have to work through. In Sanskrit, they call it karma. That is a different subject altogether.
How about approaching life with the attitude that, “I am strong, I am strong, I am strong.” Not with the attitude of “I am weak, I am weak; I am weak.” For if you say you are weak, you will become weaker.
A Frenchman started a clinic in France, and many clinics opened afterwards, and there was only one principle he used. He used to tell his patients that when you wake up in the morning and before you go to sleep at night, you say that I feel better and better. I feel better and better. I feel stronger and stronger. The cures were remarkable. They started feeling better and better, and today doctors agree that all illnesses come first from the mind. They used to say that about sixty percent of illnesses were of mental origin, but now they have started saying that a hundred percent of illnesses come from the mind.
BECOMING JOYFUL
You think, and your thoughts make you what you are. Therefore, when you gain the strength through our meditational practices, you will feel that strength within you, and you can honestly and truly go about life and say I am strong, I am strong, I am strong and thereby become stronger and stronger. After all, what is your mind? The mind is nothing else but a whole set of patternings that you have created yourself.
You cannot get rid of these patternings, but you can superimpose good patternings over the negative patternings, and thereby the negative patternings are pushed to one side. In meditation, they are not only pushed to one side, but they are also dissolved, and the new patternings, positive patternings start functioning, and life becomes joyous. Then you are living your true nature. For in reality, you are nothing but joy. You are Divine as you are now, and with the realisation that “I am Divine,” and because the nature of Divinity is joy you become more and more joyful.
THE SUSCEPTIBILITY OF THE HUMAN MIND
You are the one that creates an atmosphere around you, and everyone must have had this experience, that when you go out to someone’s house, at some places you wish you could get away in two minutes, the atmosphere seems so negative and heavy. Everyone has had that experience, and at some homes, you can sit and feel relaxed, and you do not want to move away; you can sit there for hours. It is not the home, but the people in the home, how they live, how they think, that creates this atmosphere.
From there, you could also see how susceptible your mind is that the atmosphere in a particular person’s home would make you run away, while in another person’s home, it would make you stay. Yet it is not tangible. The atmosphere is not tangible; you cannot touch it; you cannot feel it; you cannot smell it; you cannot taste it. Yet it is there. You can feel it. You feel it is very heavy and you want to go.
This proves how susceptible the human mind is. Another thing that meditation does for you is that it strengthens the mind, so you do not become vulnerable to any negativity around you. You become non-attached and not affected at all. Then you can truly stand on your own feet and feel the joy and the strength of Divinity.
IMPROVING YOUR LIFE
I am trying to point out that all the benefits one gain from meditation, from the simple art of meditation, which relaxes your body, relaxes the mind, makes you more attuned to the Kingdom of Heaven within. It improves the quality of your thoughts; it enhances the quality of your actions.
Then you are a true human being because you have been born endowed with all these qualities, all these virtues of kindness and humility and compassion and love. What more can we ask for in life? And that is the goal of life. When the body is relaxed, the mind is relaxed, yet you perform action and become more efficient in your actions.
… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang US 1983 – 47