MySAR for 28th September
My heartfelt Shraddhanjali to Pujya Swami ji ....
Swami Dayananda Saraswati passed away at his ashram in Rishikesh on
Wednesday night. He was 85. He had been ailing for quite sometime.
Born in 1930 in Manjakudi, Natarajan, as the Swami was known in his
pre-monastic days, was drawn to Indian philosophy, particularly the
Advaita school, listening to Swami Chinmayananda. During the late 1950s
and early 1960s, his association with Swami Chinmayananda grew closer as
he began taking Vedanta lessons. In 1962, he took ‘Sanyas’ to become
Swami Dayananda Saraswati.
He continued his association with Swami Chinmayananda for a long time
and the two set up Sandipani Sadhanalaya in the then Bombay to train
people in Vedanta.
His contribution there and subsequently with Arsha Vidya Gurukulam saw
hundreds of people learn Vedanta, take up renunciation and spread the
Vedic message.
I have got previleges to be a student of Swami ji and listen to his all lectures whenever organised in Ahmedabad.
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Fear....How to overcome it..??
Fear is simply because you are not
living with life, you are living in your mind. Your fear is always about what’s
going to happen next. That means your fear is always about that which does not
exist. If your fear is about the non-existent, your fear is hundred percent
imaginary. If you are suffering the non-existential, we call that insanity. So,
people may be in just socially accepted levels of insanity, but if you’re
afraid or if you’re suffering anything which does not exist, it amounts to
insanity, isn’t it?
People are always suffering either
what happened yesterday or what may happen tomorrow. So your suffering is always
about that which does not exist, simply because you’re not rooted in reality,
you’re always rooted in your mind. Mind is – one part of it is memory, another
part of it is imagination. Both of them are in one way imagination, because
both of them don’t exist right now. You’re lost in your imagination, that’s the
basis of your fear. If you were rooted in reality, there would be no fear.
 The Hallucinatory Mind
You must decide whether you have come here on this planet to experience life or to avoid life. If you have come to
experience life, one thing that is needed is intensity. If you do not have intensity you will experience a meager life. The moment you
use fear as a tool to protect yourself, your intensity will go down. Once it
goes down, your ability to experience life is gone. You become a psychological
case. What happens in your mind is all there will be. You will never experience
anything fantastic and ecstatic because when you are fearful, you will not have
a sense of abandon. You can’t sing, you can’t dance, you can’t laugh, you can’t
cry, you can’t do anything that is life. You can only sit here and grieve about
life and all the risks of life.
 When it comes to looking at the nature of your thought or your emotion for that matter, any number of times in your life, it has made you believe so many things and after little bit of time it makes you feel like a fool for what you believed yesterday. Today your emotions tell you that this is the most wonderful man, then tomorrow your emotions tell you that this is the most horrible man and both seemed 100% true. So both your thought and emotion are tremendous instruments of deception. They can make you believe just about anything.
If you look at it carefully, what is
fear about? Your fear is never about what has happened. It is always about what
may happen. It is always about the future. The future is yet to happen. It has
not yet happened. That means, it is not in existence. So, being fearful means
you are suffering that which does not exist. If you suffer that which does not
exist, should we call you sane or insane? Your only comfort is “everybody is
like me.” You have the majority with you! But that still doesn’t make it right
because you are suffering that which does not exist.
How to Overcome Fear
Fear is not a product of life. Fear is a product of a
hallucinatory mind. You suffer that which does not exist because you are rooted
not in reality but in your mind which is constantly eating up on the past and
excreting into the future. You don’t actually know anything about future. You
just take a piece of the past, apply make-up on it and think it is future.
You can plan your tomorrow but you cannot live in your tomorrow.
But right now people are living in tomorrow and that is why there is fear. The
only thing you can do about this is, come down to reality. If you just respond
to what is there right now and not imagine something that does not exist, there
is no room for fear. Once the hallucination is gone, where is fear? You will not
imagine something that does not exist, you will respond to what exists right
now.
Generally in the world, everyone thinks of fulfilling
their dreams. Whatever your dream may be, it is an exaggerated extension of
your past. You cannot dream of something you do not know. Essentially, you
fixed the destination based on what you know. When you fix the destination from
what you already know, you have ensured that nothing new will ever happen. A
dream like this is not a possibility, it is a certain hopelessness. You are
seeking the past in the future. You are actually shooting back but you think
you are moving forward.
To simply live here goal-less is what a spiritual
process is about. That does not mean being lethargic and lax. A spiritual
process means to live in intense involvement with what is there right now but
with no goal. If you have the courage to sit here in such a way – “Wherever the
hell it goes tomorrow is fine with me, but right now I will do my best in
whatever I am doing,” you will naturally be spiritual.
Please look at it and see, what the
hell can happen after all? At the most you will die, nothing more. At least
live before you die because anyway you will die. We are not wishing it upon
ourselves. We are planning to live for many years, but it can happen, isn’t it?
There is really no security with life. It is just a question of how gracefully
and with how much freedom you lived this life. If you have lived, it will be worth
dying. Otherwise life will be a regret, death will be a
regret.
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