Adonai

The truth of life is…if you choose not to surrender, it will remain a continual struggle. The ego strives to maintain its notion of omniscience within your being. The ego has as much control as one may allow it. The ego is akin to a stubborn, wanton child, screaming, writhing about, and attempting to get its way. The Divine is akin to the mentor, the benevolent and observant bystander that waits to be granted intervention.

There will come a point in your life in which you have realized that you have suffered quite enough. When this takes place, it can imbibe a realization that a being is not living in harmony with their hridayam, their spiritual heart and core. At this point, one may succumb to the intervention. By acting upon this instinct to give up a solely ego-based conceptual framework, one must also accept faith as a core tenet. In faith comes the realization that there is a universal ‘consciousness’ that supersedes the ego, beyond the quantifying measures of science and physics.

The purpose of life is accepting that there is only the ‘now’, and the ‘is’, let go and experience who the true self is, which is unbridled compassion. Speak and act love and nothing else. Approach the pitfalls of common existence with reverent discontent. Eliminate the elements that cause you and others to suffer. The purpose of life is to serve each other, and to make our time and experience here on Earth as propitious as humanly possible. Make a list of all that you are attached to, all of the objects or issues that cause you to suffer. Look at what they are and look how you can eradicate them from your life. What can you really be prepared to eliminate? When you are ready to let go of them, you are free and suffering has been expelled from your very being.

Take note of your insecurities and self criticisms, everything about yourself that you have not chosen to accept. Practice accepting each one of those things in your life, every quality and quirk. Some of us maintain the belief that we don’t deserve ‘God’ because we are sinners or inherently evil, we can’t have that kind of infinite compassion. When we accept that we are the very essence of ‘God’, that it has been within us all along, we can accept all of our insecurities without self judgment. That is how it is in the presence of an enlightened being such as Ramana Maharshi, compassion is unconditional and infinite in nature. When a being accepts that he or she has the capacity to act on solely compassion, the essence of what we call God shines through.

So how can you do all of this? Aren’t we already too far gone? Drop the melodramas from your life. Be free of ego level attachments, free of criticism, free of suffering. It’s hard to take accountability for it because we create all of it so fervently. It is the hardest thing to realize. Once we’ve taken blame for our self induced dramas, we can begin the fundamental practice of Bhakti tradition. Bhakti is devotion, and devotion within the hridayam for the rest of your life. When the hridayam unifies with what we conceptualize as God, infinite compassion, we have maintained a homeostasis within ourselves and our ethereal essence. The path of Bhakti Yoga is purifying the mind.

That is where humility comes in. When things are seemingly going well with our new path, we feel very independent, in control. In many cases the ego attempts to supersede the realizations, and we may begin to spout.. ‘I’m doing this all on my own. I don’t need anyone or anything’, after which life and nature come along to give us a slap and say…’Wake up!’.

We have the capacity, the potential to exist in a certain harmony, you and I and everything else, but our realities worlds apart. It may be you who seeks the corporeal glory while I may seek its cause. What could give your glory value? What could give my cause justification, or even existence? Although we exist separate, of our own accord, we are always conscious of each others existence. While a part of our physical extensions of consciousness may seem to act on its own, without meaning or purpose, there are no accidents. There is no chance, beyond our chance of misinterpreting the fate of the soul. It does not conceive the past and cannot predict the future because there is only here, and now.

Enlightenment is seeing past the ignorance, seeing and confronting the injustices and still choosing to embrace a life of compassion instead of misery and attachment to melodrama. We must choose against remaining fearful of change and progression and choose to integrate new concepts, new ideas, and new beliefs to benefit our experience as human beings. To be happy and healthy are all any of us have ever wanted.