School of Life: How to Learn from Good and from Evil.

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.