Live Today, Love Today!

Topics: Living fully in the present; Understanding Success and Failure. This week, Mohanji gave clarity to many aspects of our everyday life. He just held up a mirror to ourselves, for us to see who we are, what are we doing and where we stand in life. Kindly read on !

Q. It feels like time is rushing past, like I’m always on the go. I have too much to do and so much on my mind. I am also witnessing a wide array of emotions – up, down, up, down, like a rollercoaster. What does it mean really to live fully in the present?

 

• Today. This moment. That is all we have. This moment is our property. We are custodians of this moment. We cannot own anything. We can only use this moment. We can live this moment using our intellect or our emotions.
• If we use our intellect, we save ourselves from further agonies. If we use this moment emotionally, we invite further agonies associated with emotions. We do not know our tomorrows.

What will happen? Who knows? We assume that everything will be fine. We assume that all the people whom we love will be with us. We assume everything. Does our assumption become right all the time?

• So, Live today. Love today. Live this moment to the fullest. Live this moment without guilt, fear or anxiety. Live this moment fully, with the clear understanding that we do not own our morrows.
• The sun is shining today. The dew drops are glittering. Nature is beautiful. Enjoy it today. Do not sit inside the walls of your own mind, nurturing your fears, anxieties and sad thoughts. Get out of your cage and enjoy the nature today, just like an innocent child.
• Inhale the fragrance of the flowers in the garden. Sing with the birds. Relish the love and protection of the mighty trees. Feel the grandeur of the mountains. Adopt the persistence of the waves of the oceans. Enjoy the soothing love of the caressing moonlight.
• Be blissful with nature and feel your blessings. Divinity is in its full regalia, all around you. Look around. FEEL. So, Live today and Love today.

 

Maybe what we did today hurt someone unintentionally. We are humans. We make mistakes. Correct it, apologise and move on. Whether the other person accepted your apology at that point in time or not, does not matter. You apologised sincerely and you move on. Others will understand you and follow your sincere love sooner or later.

Expectation leads to sorrows. Never expect. Never mind. Do not postpone a word or an action. Live today and Love today.

Maybe my moves were all wrong today. I could not perform well today. It does not matter. When you understand and recognize the wrong moves you made, you also recognize what is right. Understanding is important.

Corrective steps are spontaneous. Remember, life is all about the experiences. Everything is about experiences. Nothing else but experiences. Enjoy each experience without guilt. Never blame yourself.

You are a human being. Human beings tend to err.

A child falls many times before it learns to walk. It must keep trying, ignoring the falls, otherwise, it will never walk. A child is ignorant that the society considers falls as failures. It is blissfully unaware of that. A small child fortunately remains unconditioned by the society till it reaches a few years on earth.

If we ignore consciously, or if we are unconsciously ignorant that failures of life are unacceptable to the society, life is smooth. Ignoring failures with full awareness is a beautiful state indeed.

Success and failure are part of our existence. Accept your mistakes gracefully and walk boldly towards the next opportunity to test your mettle once again. Nobody is ever a failure. The other side of success is failure. Failure leads to success, just like pride over success, and the associated ego, definitely leads to failure. So, live your failure and success with ease today, love it today.

 

Maybe I feel sick today. I will be fine tomorrow. Maybe I indulged in food today. No problem, be careful tomorrow. Accept today as it is. Do not judge or criticise.

Live today, Love today.

We never know about our tomorrows.”

Q.  How can I bounce back from failure without harming myself?

 

A: Remember that ego brings you to an artificial world. For example, you fought hard, you did so many things and it all became successful. You became successful, and so you naturally developed an ego.

Yes, you are reasonably successful, you are a successful person, you have made money, you have riches. These were all events or situations that rapidly enhanced your ego.  Ego then leads to expectations. It leads to firm conditioning. You start telling yourself that you have to be continuously successful, that you cannot be anything but continuously successful, and that you cannot even afford one drop of failure.

Failure refers here to the social state, according to the social criteria. You cannot afford the failure, you do not allow it, and if that should happen, then your self esteem goes down. You will start calling yourself a loser. A small loss can mean a lot in that situation. It sometimes even leads to suicide. This is the fall.

When your self esteem goes down, fears and anxieties creep in. So, again, you fall back and then you have to climb up. You may need assistance to climb up too.  This pulls you down. Sometimes people really fall hard; and sometimes they fall out of the game of life too. Success and Failure should be handled with equanimity. Both are part of the same existence.

Do you see how the chronology of existence works? Success leads to ego, ego leads to expectations and expectations narrow the “walking space” of your path. This means, first of all, the failure side is not acceptable, so you only have the “success” possibility.

Life, however, is not like that. Life has both sides. So you cut off all the failure sides, and walk the narrow path of success. If you happen to switch to failure, you have not found permission for that, and you fall out.

Sometimes you pull yourself down completely with that. Sometimes, you will even pull your relatives down with this. So, please, accept failure gracefully, and gratefully that it lead you to some new awareness.

Tell yourself that this is fine, and this is part of our very existence. No problem. That way you can move on. Otherwise, your self esteem will fall so much and you get very hurt inside. That situation is totally unnecessary. You can counter your failures with awareness that “even this will pass away”.

 

Secondly, realize that success and failure are determined by ourselves. Society has nothing to do with it. We judge, criticize and censor ourselves much more than society does and we do not accept failure at all.

We think “What will they say? What will “four people” say?” We are worried about “four people”! We then try to modify ourselves to fit inside such limitations, we become bound by the four people (four people being society of course). Oh! What will society think if I am like this? Or, if I have long hair, they will think I’m crazy, so I cut my hair.

In this way, we are bound and controlled by “four people”. This is our fundamental cage. We created this cage, with our fears of what others think!!! 🙂 Do we have the guts to live our life? Do we have the guts to be ourselves? If Yes, That is the fundamental shift that will lead you to subsequent liberation.

 

Indeed, we create several cages, or walls, around ourselves. One is “four people” (Fear related to social standing), one is our own expectations about ourselves and others, one is our non-acceptance of our own reality as it is (we want to accept our reality as we’d like it to be, which is not possible as primarily we have to accept ourselves as we are and before that we should know who and what WE ARE and why we came here.) and the fourth is resistance to changes (resistance to changes always leads to elimination of various kinds from our life and that leads to calamities inside). These essentially make up the walls of our cages.

Then of course there are others, such as desires, education, all the conditionings, etc. They are also part of our cage. Everything adds to that “reality”, and finally we end up with no walking space. Sometimes, we pretend we know. This is silly. We do not know and it is better if we accept that. Most easiest way is to pretend. Most of us are living a pretentious life. We fake happiness, we fake love, we fake everything. Finally, we forget the difference between reality and make believe, because we are so used to faking. Look at your own daily life. You will know what I mean. Do not kill me for telling the truth.

 

We become a victim of the cages that we ourselves created, with the help of our society that believes in cages, so that everyone becomes predictable. We love predictions and predictability. We are used to killing those who were unpredictable, eg: Jesus, Socrates. Our society is rule oriented. Rules that ensure predictability, which in turn restricts our walking space. This is not a joke. Look around. Our society is not creating men. We are only creating BRICKS which are identical!

Unfortunately for the society, people are unique, even if they look alike. That is why you sometimes see people behaving in a strange way. They may consume alcohol, drugs or seek strange sexual experiences. They think that this will help liberate them.

This is actually escapism. They are feeling so suffocated here, in their current reality. They want to do something else. That is why, unconsciously, people are doing it and you can’t blame them for it. You have to blame the cages they have made for themselves. Otherwise, if you are going to have a drink because you love to have that drink – that’s a different thing.

But is that the way people are resorting to alcohol these days?

For many, an innocent habit has become an addiction. They are helplessly victims of addictions. Addictions created by ennui and boredom. Addictions created by vacuum.

So, are people happy?

Mostly not. They are drinking because they want to escape from something else. But, it does not happen. Reality always re-surfaces, in an uglier way than before. People waste a lot of money on dancing girls and such things.

What is the benefit?

It’s a momentary pleasure. You give money to the dancing girl, she smiles at you and you feel very good.

What is the big deal?

Some kind of ego satisfaction!

What are they trying to do here?

We are jumping from one cage to another. One habit to another, trying to fill the emptiness within us. The new habit fascinates us for sometime, just like some people marry many times. The new wife fascinates them for sometimes, then they become bored. The quest continues. They never reach anywhere, let alone liberation. Simple logic.

How can you be liberated if you are too bound by hundreds of materials that you continue to fancy?

When we try to swap from one habit to another, temporarily we feel fine. This is especially so, when we start on hyper ventilation (Pranayaama) or Yoga. Then, it becomes a habit. It is like buying a new car from the showroom. For a few days, it will be thrilling to drive it. Then it becomes monotonous. Too much dependency on external objects for our internal fulfillment!

Food, Films, Wine, Women.Life has got to be more liberating.  Right?

We are just trying to fill the vacuum due to the absence of a sense object with another.

We are afraid of the vacuum within. When we start falling in love with the vacuum, emptiness becomes deep pregnant silence; the silence of the Divine, which leads to detachment and eventual bliss within; and most importantly, we will not be pressured for pleasure anymore. We will not be afraid to be alone. Aloneness will be in beingness. Beingness in bliss. The pressure for doing-ness will change. Doing-ness will become purpose bound. Action for the sake of necessity, not for the quest of external pleasure.

 

Escaping from their routines, their own cages, people are trying to do something else, and they do not understand that this other thing is merely another trap. All they are doing is jumping from one trap to the other. They are just flying from trap to trap.

Liberation is very difficult. Liberation is conscious awareness. There is no conscious awareness here. There are only traps, traps and more traps. You jump from this trap to another, from this habit to another. Even if it is a spiritual habit, it is still a trap. For example “I cannot live without my meditation.” This is a trap.

You should be perpetually fine. This is the liberation that we are talking about. Whether you meditate today or not, you feel good. Whether you do yoga today or not, this is fine. Can you be in that mood? That is where you attain your liberation.”

With love

Mohanji