The
Sacred Texts tell us that without receiving mercy from the Spiritual
Master and from the Supreme God it's impossible to overcome for
good the
egoistic attachment toward mundane things. In order to succeed, not
only we need to have received divine benevolence, we must have kept
it too.
In
which way we can receive mercy? Firstly by seeking it ardently,
and behaving consequently, by dedicating ourselves with diligence and
faith to spiritual practices and so awaken Love and Awareness.
And in
which way we can keep it? By offering it to others. Then and only
then, through constant and coherent efforts toward achieving Bhakti
in our lifespan, we will be increasingly able to discriminate reality
from illusion, the essence from appearance, the eternal from
ephemeral.
Mice see the
cheese but not the trap. In the same way conditioned souls see the
promises of pleasure in this world's things, but hardly can
understand that this pleasure hides a trap. A mortal trap.
How to
be detached from the world and its overwhelming beauties? How can we
resist when we see something appealing, pleasing, good smelling and
shining? We should think about it in connection to God. It is
difficult to deny this world; the more we deny it the more we are
attracted to it, risking
to become hypocrites who refuse the world's attractions outwardly while inwardly craving them (Bhagavad-gita
III.6). Therefore we should not refuse this material world's
beautiful things, but to use them to serve God with Love, correlating
them to our spiritual origin, and living them in the vision of eternity. Accordingly, in any circumstance of our life we can connect
to the Lord and to our deepest spirituality. Even bitter experiences,
the biting words we received, the mistakes we made, at the end can
turn into gifts, only if we can learn from the lessons they offer us.
Gratitude and appreciation can permeate everybody and everything
appear in this world, because we make use of every experience to get
closer to God.
This
gratitude can be felt and can be expressed both when we receive "good
things", and when we get "bad things", being
conscious that the light of the day cannot be appreciated without the
night's darkness.
As you
would expect, it is necessary that we learn how to discriminate
between vice and virtue, between good and evil, so we can choose once
far all righteousness and be firm in sattva-guna, but also we must be
aware that Reality is beyond. It is that pure spiritual dimension in
which mundane good and evil are transcended, and they merge in the
"sommum bonum": the supreme goodness beyond duality. And
supreme goodness is unconditioned pure Love that change and purify
everything. Such dimension can be reached when any desire we have
becomes an offering to the Lord and all our perceptions are dedicated
to His service.
By
living in this perspective we will find treasures around each corner,
hidden in any occurrence of our life. And we will walk toward death
full of gratitude because we understood that by practicing Bhakti
even death leads us to life.
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