Destiny - a dumping ground for all failures and setbacks ?

Whenever things don’t work out, people often blame their Destiny. How true is it?

How often do we think about destiny when things work out well ? – Hardly. How often do we take refuge in destiny when things go sour ? – Mostly. Now do you observe a distinct pattern of thinking here ? We need to understand that this PATTERN has nothing to do with destiny being there or not. And you have complete freedom in shifting this pattern. When things go sour, this pattern “automatically” sways toward taking refuge in destiny, without any conscious intervention from your side. Your will is not required to do this. This sway toward making destiny a scapegoat for all setbacks, is what the mind, conditioned by an unconscious past, is programmed to do.

There is pain in each of us hidden in the form of our unconscious past. This unconscious past is what conditions the mind. It is this pain that finds expression in the form of anger, hatred and jealousy. The seeds of anger, hatred and jealousy are all within us. The external situation or person is just a trigger that sprouts the seed. This pain needs to be processed to free the mind which can result in the clarity happening. And what it takes to process this pain is also inbuilt within us. This is where your free will plays a crucial role, in turning the sway from “automated responses” to situations in life, to conscious ones. The whole purpose of one’s life (or the spiritual journey) is to ventilate this unconscious past thru our inbuilt mechanism, which frees you from your sense of limitedness.

Destiny is not anti-growth. Destiny gives you a field of some good, some bad and some ugly events so that you can observe, learn, filter and glean wisdom from these experiences. Mere experiences in life need not automatically translate into wisdom. I can live to be ninety and may have achieved and experienced a lot in life and still may not have gleaned enough wisdom from my experiences. This field is required to jolt us out of our reverie of getting lost in personalizing these experiences. Are you the experience or the one who is experiencing ? Are you the situation or the dealer of the situation ? If I’m sure that I’m not the experience but the dealer of the situation, then can I not use my will consciously, to deflect the “automatic response” which would have swayed me from getting drowned in the experience to – looking at the situation as apart from me and observing it. Then being human, after giving my self some amount of space and time to compose my self after the setback, (If I continue to see my self as the dealer of the situation and not once again get "drowned" in the experience) can I not detach (objectify) my self from the experience in due course of time ? Mind you detachment does not mean negating the experience. It means I played a role in that experience but now I’m above (transcended) that experience. I have let-go of that experience and moved on. Letting-go again, does not mean forgetting that experience. It means I have developed enough strength and wisdom to not let it affect me anymore. Now, I’m able to see life with more depth on a bigger canvas and this gives me a breather and some space to move on to the next milestone with awareness.

As you continue to expand your vision of life, You’ll be surprised to see how help comes your way in so many different ways. Much later, you will also see that this help had always been there even before you realized it, only you were so blinded living in the projected world of your mind, that you had not raised your frequency or vision to be able to see the help available around you. You see that you can now objectify not only the bad experiences of life but also the good ones. You can see that even a good experience is just an experience in which you played a role. If the “goodness” of that experience was absolute then why doesn’t it last ? The “goodness” is also as relative as the bad experience. In fact now one can deduce that the degree of “goodness” or “badness” that one goes thru after an experience, is proportionate to the degree of attachment one had to that experience. And this degree varies from person to person and from one experience to another. Hence you find two people who may love and respect each other very much, at complete variance in their responses to the same event.

This kind of conscious analysis with awareness, can become a very powerful tool leading you toward the ultimate Truth. So it is important to understand that if you truly desire to know your self and understand the purpose of life, you need to invest in some amount of time, effort, patience, trust and courage. And if you’re ready to do this you need not worry about what destiny has in store for you. If you dare to do your homework of objectifying (see yourself as apart from the experiences) all experiences of life, let destiny do its job, you do your’s. Both sub-serve each other. Remember, the most important person in life is YOU.

Love and Wishes,

Rekha

Myriad symptoms of the same disease

Can you throw some light on Why one reacts ? How does one overcome it ?

There are more than one way to look at this problem. Let’s refer to these ways as frequencies. The most common frequency with which we look at problems like hurt, pain, anger, jealousy, setbacks, guilt and despair is – “why did this happen to me ? What wrong have I done to deserve this ?”. Let’s say this is the default frequency which we’re all born with. We need to understand that there are other frequencies too available from which to look at a problem. All these other frequencies are higher (more powerful) than the default frequency. A higher frequency can give a complete twist to how I perceive THE SAME problem, in a way that I don’t feel threatened by it.

Let’s take hurt. Someone hurts you. Now this becomes a thorn in your flesh. Just by someone passing a comment, why does my world go upside down ? A problem is a problem only when I perceive myself as far smaller than the problem. And as long as I perceive myself as smaller than the problem, I feel threatened. I feel pushed into a fight or flight situation. So in order to reduce the threat, I throw caution to the winds and run after acquiring things so that I can feel big, slyly converting luxuries into necessities, investing a good amount of time, energy and money, possibly compromising health and other values. Finally when I do acquire these “add-ons” (sometimes one may fail to acquire too) I feel BIG, full and complete and there’s happiness. Mind you, this happiness is not the unlimited happiness which is not dependent on the external situation, but limited to counter the hurt that was inflicted on me and to fill in the gap of - the big problem minus the small me. Now I’m happy because I perceive myself as, bigger than the problem.

Well, how long does it last ? Till my neighbor buys a bigger car and brags about it. I feel deflated. Now we know that only an inflated thing can deflate. Which means the big-ness I felt after acquiring the add-ons, was not real but hyped. Now I’m jealous of my neighbor. But while interacting with my neighbor I put up a façade of well being and suffer some amount of guilt too because I know I should not be jealous. Secretly I’m seeking a solution to this problem of jealousy because once again I perceive myself as small and insignificant. In desperation I repeat THE SAME MISTAKE of seeking add-ons to make myself feel bigger and complete thru inflating.

The default frequency blocks my vision from understanding and realizing the powerful potential within me. This block divides me. The fundamental damage that this division does is that I “lose” (seemingly, not really) a grip over my own powerful self. As I grow up, I’m searching for a solid anchor outside of me in the external world. Beginning with my parents as a solid anchor, as I grow, I realize they’re fallible. Once again I feel alienated. In my desperation for another anchor, I hook on to an uncle or an aunt, or a neighbor, or teacher for a while. No sooner I find they too are fallible, I seek a partner who can give me “unconditional love”. When this too dashes my hopes, then slowly I shift my seeking into higher qualifications, bigger house, money, other material possessions, fame, power etc. – not realizing that the only solid infallible anchor is within me, but this block is hiding this fact. This is the disease.

Another offshoot of this block (which divides me) is that, I look at hurt, jealousy, despair, anger etc. as water-tight compartments. So I seek solutions for each separately, thinking that once this problem is solved I won’t have any other problem. I don’t realize that these are all myriad SYMPTOMS of the same DISEASE and that instead of running around in the external world for treating the symptoms, I need to look within to crack thru the disease. But for this I need to raise my frequency to a higher level. One can spend an entire lifetime or even hundreds of them remaining in the default frequency without ever realizing their higher potential.

Initially, what I need to do is – accept quick fixes (whatever suits you best) to treat these symptoms for a while but simultaneously and with awareness learn to loosen the grip of the default frequency by questioning – is hurt/ pain/ anger/ jealousy the only responses available to a stimulus, or IS THERE another possible way to look at the situation ? Is it possible that all my life I may JUST MAY have been wrong in my assumptions about myself ? For the first time you are seeking answers by looking inward. This is what I call the “pause” mode. Mind you when you ask yourself this question for the first time and dare to respond DIFFERNTLY, the whole world – your relatives, friends, colleagues and of course not to forget the powerful default frequency itself will all have daggers drawn telling you you are “crazy”, “stupid” and all kinds of negatives. The default frequency on its part will remind you of past hurt, how you’ve been treated unfairly or just dangling another attractive carrot – why all this ? Because you’ve dared to swim against the tide.

The only thing that can sustain you is a strong will. But to keep the will strong you need to accept that there is something about you that you still DON’T KNOW and your urge to know must be strong too. If your will is strong and the urge to know yourself is strong and you continue to take your responsibilities in life, as “THE ALCHEMIST” says, the universe conspires to bring in people, forces and circumstances in your life which will help you travel to the next milestone.

Love and wishes,
Rekha