(Contd.........Part 2)
It all depends upon
how we behave
It is well said that the respect one wishes to command depends upon one’s own self. This is so because others’ abuses indecent behaviour does not mean loss of respect to him who is treated in this manner. Only when he himself lets go his hold on his self, i.e. on the feeling that he is the child of the Supreme Soul, who is the ocean of knowledge, peace, bliss and love, which feeling connotes his cognition of himself, he loses all this and succeeds only in rendering himself sad and morose.
Forgetting himself, he indulges in meaningless gibber. Instead of becoming contemplative, he is extrovert and obstreperous, and is himself responsible for lowering himself in other’s esteem. People then understand that he is not a sober person; he too is wanting in tolerance, endurance and magnanimity. Far from being sober or sweet, he too is as uncultured, ignorant, weak and harmful as the other man is. This we should thus come to be regarded b others as bad to this extent is certainly as insult, and hence it is wrong for anyone of us to say, “He insulted me in presence of other.”
The reason is that when anyone behaves badly with us and we remain unaffected, it is he who is, according to the on-lookers, subjected to insult while respect for us continues unabated. But, if we also adopt the same bad course as he has done, i.e. when we ourselves throw away our purity and magnanimity or ourselves cast off the crown of peace, we have automatically lost the respect that we used to have before.
Inculcation of the
qualities of tolerance and sweetness in the self
Let us now talk about a contingency of another kind. It happens that a mistake or a defect of ours causes someone’s failure or loss, as a result of which he treats us, in presence of others, to a feast of stormy and bitter words. In that situation, we should not lose our equanimity, but endure it as a penalty for our own actions. Suppose my brother tells me, “you should reach the railway station along with my baggage at quarter-past-four.” But, thinking that there is lot of time yet, I might as well start a little later because I feel like resting while I get up from sleep and, in spite of my best efforts, reach rather late.
My brother had been waiting for me and the train was about to leave. He then rated me in presence of others, saying, “you have no sense; you have no value for time! You always spoil things. A worthless one in our family, get away.” It is possible that I feel that my brother has insulted me in presence of his friends and that I, therefore, and sad and upset. But wisdom demands that I should not give to sadness or allow myself to be upset. In a situation like this, I should take it that I have been chastised as a punishment for my negligence and wrong conduct.
So, I should have endured all this calmly because, by that means, I should be rid of old scores of Vikarmas – my bad acts or omissions and commissions on my part. Of course, my brother is using harsh words, but I should not follow his example of improper conduct by getting excited or restless. No improper words should pass my lips, as otherwise I would be reviving that old score and, very likely, it becomes heavy, by the utterance of my opprobrious language or even by thinking of ‘tit for tat’ or harbouring ill-will. It is my own negligence that has brought about the situation in question, and it is my duty, therefore, to derive the lesson of the good thought that I shall, in future, work with greater sense of responsibility and be more serious and not lax at all.
Well, he who does not agree to this way of thinking, might say, “if anybody insults me simply because I have committed a mistake, I just then realise it and decide to remove this defect of mine, even if at that very moment, I feel that the means, he has adopted to bring home to me my mistake, are wrong.” I find his ways rather painful to me. I feel disturbed to think of what opinion others would form about me. Seeing me humbled in the dust, they would laugh at me. They might go so far as to say, he is a coward, that’s why he has kept silence; he bears insults because he has no sense of self-respect.”
Now reflecting dispassionately on this, from the standpoint of wisdom, one can reach the conclusion that thinking in the manner, which these aforesaid remarks denote, is a sing of one’s weakness of mind and wrong conception. Experience tells us that if we just smile and not grieve over the turn of events and, shutting the door upon any exciting and turbid thoughts, treat people with love and respect, the insulting remarks, aimed at us, lose their sting while others present do not attach any importance to those remarks, with the result that the whole affair is laughed off. If we get affected and feel greatly agitated, special attention of others is attracted, but if we just laugh it off, they too would cease to think of it.
So, the right thing to do is that, by treating others with love and tolerance and sweetness and without hurting their respect, we can overcome difficult situations, as otherwise our own situations will pierce our vitals through and through and we shall truly be, thereby, disgraced and upset. We shall feel we have received abuses and find that our hearts are inflamed exceedingly.
When bullets are flying about in any town or village, the inhabitants think first of all of the ways of taking shelter. When there is a fire, every sensible man will apply means to extinguish the fire or, at least, devise means of his escape into safety. Similarly, if anyone hurls insults and abuses on us or tries even to burn at our hearts, as it were, setting it on fire, we should find an escape from all this, and the only means of escape is to shield ourselves with our divine virtues, keep calm by dint of remembrance of our real self, and cheerfully getting through this ugly situation, vanquish him by treating him with love and respect.
Wisdom does not consist in getting wounded with indignity, however, bullet-like it might be, or in being burnt to ashes by anyone’s remarks. To cry like one overpowered by fate and say, “my mind is distressed; my heart, it appears, has begun to stop, my brain refuses to work” is a not wise man’s way. Aren’t such men as these like so many buffaloes who do not run away from the line of fire or bullet but look on sheepishly, and never attempt to be safe?
Have a spirit of
detachment towards this world
Several times, events take a singular turn. Because a good turn done by a man to others is not recognised or properly appreciated by them, he thinks that he has thereby been slighted or even disrespected. For instance, there is a man who has brought up his children with loving care and spent a lot on their education. These very children, when they have grown up, regard him (their father) as orthodox or backward and themselves as modern or advanced, with the result that they do not carry out his wishes or pay proper attention to what he says. The man (father), therefore, is pained, and says to himself, “how strange the world is these days!
The vary ones whom I brought up on my hard earnings, do not respect my wishes nor show proper regard to me. Even in presence of others, they pass by what I say and thus insult me. People then say that the children of Mr. So-and-so are worthless; they don’t care a fig for him.” Now, if we reflect rather deeply over this matter, we find that it should not cause any mental upset, but should be regarded as a testing ground for the qualities of non-attachment and resignation, which are two highly valuable gems.
When the man himself admits that times are changed, he has no reason to feel pain or unrest. He should be able to understand that the present era, which goes by the name, Kaliyuga, is the age of degeneration, when character is low, and people are ungrateful, fallen from righteousness and are disregardful of their duties. The best that can be expected of them is that they would brush aside father’s advice or views by labelling it as conservative.
In the age that is rightly called kaliyuga, divine ways are conspicuous by their absence, and even this yuga is fast nesting its end. Man has reached the depths of unholiness. We should not be surprised or grieved. For, has not the world turned unholy and vicious? It is not futile to hope for loving and happy contacts?
Hence, a wise man should make himself realise that whatever happens to him is a means of reaching him shun attachment with things of this rotten world and to attach himself to the Supreme Father, the Supreme Soul, who is his truest Friend.
At present, all souls follow the behest’s of Maya, and those whom he considers to be his children are not his; they are the offspring’s or the young ones of Maya, while he should keep God ever in his memory because he now belongs to Him. Doing even his daily routine in this spirit (with this awareness), he should be filled with the spirit of resignation. He should not recognise or form any mental link with this routine but spend his life in a spirit of dispassion.
How to forget and
forgive and free the mind of vain thoughts?
One common cause of peacelessness is that, every now and then, man remembers and then recounts the story of the sorrows of his pas. Let us take an example. Man would say to himself, “such and such a person has not treated me properly; another has not helped me when I needed his help; one of my sons has not obeyed me. Mr. So-and-so has defects of such and such in kind…” In conversation, he relates with pain these things of the past. We might as well say that constant repetition of these stories makes painful effect to last much longer even though the man who re-capitulates them does not seek this.
One who recounts such stories, opens, as it were, the sad chapters of his biography and reads and re-reads them, as if he is reading Shrimad Bhagwat – God’s biography, or the Mantra and formula of Beatitude or the ‘True story of Satya Narayana1. He who has this habit, succeeds in confounding his own self, and, holding the wrong end of the stick, like an owl’s body hanging head downwards from the branch of a tree and asking loudly for help and entreating passers-by to put him straight!
Collect flowers not
thorns
In order to achieve peace, man should learn that these feelings of his are like those of a person who plucks thorns by choice instead of collecting flowers, and inflicts pain on himself. Th sting of one thorn is hardly our when another thorn – hard and sorrowful event – comes up on the surface and wounds our feelings, rather opens old sores. If I, now and again, apply to myself the stinging memory of past events, my mind will be filled constantly with them, which will faster, producing, in course of time, a cancerous growth.
Being suddenly reminded of these events and consequently pained, or not forgetting them for sometime, all this indicates that the thorns are still there. Now that my aim is Peace and I have to achieve happiness, I shall remove the thorns and burn them up in the fire of yoga. Do not wise men pluck only the flowers, casting aside the thorns?
1. In India, people read these stories to get peace.
Consider the past
events as ghouls
The word ‘Bhoota’ in Hindi means that which is past as also evil spirit that possesses anyone. You get what you feel or ask for, and, naturally, he who rakes up the past (Bhoota) wakes up this evil spirits and joins their fraternity. Hence, he who has the bad habits or remembering the past, should realise that the unpalatable happenings of the past are like so many evil spirits.
We should not remember them; otherwise, our disposition and ways will be like those of evil spirits (ghouls). Thus we should regard past events as ghouls and try to be rid of them. We should look forward because our feelings and actions should be good and as bright as the life we have to lead according to our ideals. And, it is plain to see that our future shall be determined by the quality of our actions.
One who recounts
that past events is left behind
We should never, even for a moment, lose sight of the fact that this world is like a drama, or say a stage, where, on a screen, there is all that we see in this world. The reel of this film goes on rolling itself out as moment follows moment. To revive past events in memory is like trying to unroll that part of the reel which is rolled up, and, obviously, that is not the way to watch a reel. Hence, we shall continue cheerfully watching every scene that rolls by in the course of this drama.
If we try again and again to remember the past, we would miss the events to come and thus be left behind. Man has, therefore, to observe as a neutral observer all events as they happen and not get entangled in what has passed as part of the inevitable, nor ever stick to its memory.
Let the past be
past
These are occasions when man thinks of the past and says to himself thus, “such and such person a person did not behave with me, as he did not help me in a law suit which I lost..” Several other things also come to his mind. In these circumstances, he ought to know that the affairs he is thinking of, belong to the time that does not exist now and the person or persons, he refers to, are all now changed owing to the passage of time. Conditions have suffered change.
The fruits of my karmas in that respect I have had, till nothing is left now, and I am not what I was then and I must also welcome change. That event in question was the result of some karmas of mine. I have had what was due to me, and to think of it again and again would be simply to protract the duration of that pain, as one would lengthen out, as they say, the thread of a painful existence.
Does not this kind of rumination mean that pain and restlessness are loved by me, for, otherwise, weaving a texture of pains would be but useless. But normally that the cannot be because everyone wants peace and happiness. Like all others, my object is to achieve these two, and so what I have been doing all along, in fact all my occupations have been wrong.
Man should realise that what is past is past, the old world is dead and that he should put in his best to build his feature. He should not foul the atmosphere and weaken it by introducing the memory of bad things of the past. He should not only not disseminate sadness but work out methods of achievement of happiness.
One should pick up
pearls like a swan and not behave as a crow
Everyone has observed that a crow perched on a scrapheap gets busy, breaking its surface, whereas, the well-known saying goes that a swan picks up pearls or its leaves aside water and picks up milk instead. Hence, the way for man is clear. Does he, like the swan that picks pearls, find it joyful to adopt virtues, spotless as pearls, or he likes the crow that sits and feeds on dirt? Shall I prefer being called a swan or a crow?
Obviously, the swans ways are, all of them, likeable. Hence, raking up painful events which are like so much scum, and cawing and calling others to heap – this habit of drawing people’s or one’s own attention to dirt – should be renounced at any cost.
Man should learn lessons from one’s own past. But we should not repeat its chapters only to learn by rote. It betrays mental weakness to repeat past events, and this amounts to reversing the course of efforts and leaning backwards. Hence, those, who are desirous of improvement, should gain experience from only past and should at the same time, march onwards to the goal.
Time goes on
ceaselessly
Besides, one should not forget that time is never at rest, recording every second as it passes. In man’s life, events follow one another to form what is called his past. If I spend my present time thinking of the past, I shall rue the fact that the present too has slipped out of my hands, and I have wasted my time over thinking of things now extraneous to me. Now I have thought of my Master. The previous period was lost in grief while the present one is being lost in memory of it.
So, instead of wasting my time over the memory of the past, I should think of the timeless Purusha, The Supreme Soul, because it is remembrance of Him and Him, alone that brings happiness and renders every moment of our lives highly valuable. Instead of saying to myself, “He has not been good to me”, I should learn to think that whatever has happened to me is the result of my own actions, and that I should leave off thinking of people of that sort or what they have done to me so that I devote my attention to the Supreme Soul, our Father on high, and to regulating our activity by the norms of goodness.
Otherwise, the score of unless thoughts and feelings as also of vikarmas – wrong deeds - will go on
increasing. An ever-growing burden of arrears this! Considering time to be an
ever-moving meter and our past to be but the result of our own actions, we
should take care that we do not indulge in the useless occupation of increasing
our burden of the past but that we square up our past accounts also by
our own
efforts. We should realise that by recalling to our mind the actions of others,
we shall lose our own happiness. Instead of reflecting on defects in others and
misery suffered in the past, we should reflect on the Supreme Father as
otherwise all our life shall have been wasted.
Contd....Part 4
Prajapita Brahma Kumaris Ishwariya Vishwa Vidyalaya
