The ‘Me’ that wasn’t

Things are important so long as you give them importance. Free yourself from judgement and peace will flow through you. People around you suddenly don’t become angels, but love ,harmony and oneness will have blossomed into you. You start living in untarnishable joy. If you have truly learned at the feet of a great master, then your old self cannot survive. Satsang is a strong transformative experience on who you think you were. That superstar student disappears, absent even at his graduation! That identity is absorbed by a limitless expanse of bliss. You die to yourself. If ‘you’ survive, you are clutching on to imagined treasures of an identity called Mr. Ego! If you were your ego, then why are you trying to get rid of it? Aha! You know that it is something other than you. Hopelessness, desperation and sorrow, are not you. You observe their coming and going, but when you identify with them you say, “I am hopeless, sorrowful or depressed!” These are but lifeless transient thoughts but you empower them. Choose the quality of your thoughts. Mental association with your past, is suffering a self-created fiction. Thoughts come and go like clouds. Suppose you fall in love with a cloud . The poor cloud doesn’t even know. You became the enchanted lover and cried when it floated away. Witness all from a standpoint of neutrality. Even when you say “I want to be free “you are actually saying, “I am in slavery”.! When you throw the light of inquiry ,the mental ghosts disappear. Fighting the ego is as hopeless as a paper kite struggling against a storm. Don’t. Just be. Silence, contentment and beatitude is the wealth of consciousness. The ‘I’ thought is the son of a barren woman, can you kill the one who never existed?

Prarthna Saran, President Chinmaya Mission Delhi. Email: prarthnasaran@gmail.com