*Chapter 2 - Offering & Gratitude*
From Waves of emotions
When you go home after attending a satsang, have you ever thought that you are really a fortunate person to have been able to attend it?
If you have ever thought that you were fortunate, then you cannot get miserable. What is the reason for misery?
It is forgetting that we are fortunate people. The ash is covering the live charcoal. It is not just a little bit here and there.
A thick coating of ash has covered you. When you try to blow it away, it can fly up and get into your eyes. So, you should blow gently.
Remember that we are fortunate, then you will not be miserable. What happens when you become miserable? In those moments you forgot that you are fortunate.
However fortunate a person actually might be, the moment he or she forgets it, then there will be unhappiness. This is the misfortune that you are all thinking about.
When you are unhappy, there is boredom. You feel like giving up everything. At such times, the mind should turn inwards.
Then it will move towards its consciousness. This happens when you acquire knowledge. When knowledge mixes with misery, the mind goes towards the source of the misery.
When knowledge does not merge with misery, then misery constantly keeps changing its form from one to another. You get bored.
You are bored in one place, so you go to another. May be to a shopping centre. Do you feel happy the moment you get to there?
You become even more bored there. You go somewhere else from there and your boredom increases. Finally, you return home exhausted after inhaling all the petrol fumes.
And then you get so much more bored at home, that you go to sleep. You sleep out of boredom. That boredom in you sleeps well.
How do you get rid of your boredom? You will be rid of your boredom by the consciousness, by awakening, and by knowledge.
Compressing the ash on to the live coal will not disperse it. That is what most of us do. What do people do when they get bored? They just leave everything and go somewhere.
They try to do so many other things. They do not try to look at the situation with an alert consciousness, with awareness.
They do not try to accept the boredom. They do not surrender to it. And then what happens? The misery continues to increase.
At the end of misery there is happiness again. How will there be an end? The end of misery is our true self. Our true self is nothing but pure bliss.
It is completion. Blissful completion is the true happiness of our self. There is complete bliss in love and devotion and that bliss is filled with all the colours.
The amount that you grasp depends on the amount of consciousness in you. If you let down a tumbler into a well, you only get as much water as the tumbler can hold.
If you let down a small pot, then you get a pot full of water. If you let down a bucket, you get a bucketful of water. If you use a pump, the amount of water that you will get will depend on its capacity.
So too, our consciousness has all the energies in it. And depending on how much force we apply, how much mind we apply to it, we gain that much.
What do we do? Satsang is last on our list of priorities. We decide to go to a satsang if we do not have anything else to do. So if you give such low quality time to satsang
then you only get back low quality results.
Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankarji
