This is part two of the adventures in Advaita Vedanta... will you travel with me a while?


Saturday Satsang

Hari Om


A spiritual seeker should not try to run away in the very beginning into protection but must court life and plunge into the centre of it and take life as it comes - good, bad or indifferent – and learn to balance himself in spite of all the imperfections in the circumstances.

A family, a brother and so on are pieces set up around you to give a defined experience, which alone will be conducive to your progress. Take what life has to give you as the Lord’s gift – prasāda. Sorrows polish off the vāsanās, and tears are the brasso of the mind.

The eternal law provides each of us with a circumstance in life to enjoy or suffer strictly according to and in continuation of our past. There are no accidents in the eternal law. Moment-to-moment, life is progressive, continual and logical.

What is to be avoided is not the world outside. In the impulse of the moment, in a rising tide of disgust at some specific failure, people often renounce in a hurry and run away from life. Such people, without exception, come to live in regret, suffering endless mental agony arising out of their physical privations.

The exhaustion and fatigue suffered by them in this subjective storm is the source of all worldly sorrows. This storm is in the mind, which they will carry wherever they go. What has to be changed is the mind, not the environment.

Let a person stay where he is stationed and placed in life, which is all prescribed according to his psychological texture, and proceed according to the work allocated to him, the duties enjoined on him, according to his qualifications, his psychological nature, his dharma. Doing his dharma, he will be serving the higher cause.



2 comments:

  1. "What has to be changed is the mind, not the environment." ... I have heard and read about this ... in various different forms, in different places.

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    1. Hari OM
      This ancient wisdom is an eternal one - and many modern 'self-helpers' know that attitude and perspective are an important part of the coping mechanism in life! Yxx

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