Spiritual Awakening (Part 2)
Kishore C.S.
(February 2001)
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Count your blessings
Whether you believe in God or not, God takes care of you.
Hoping that someday you will take him more seriously. If you want to believe in
God, just start count your blessings. Instead of thinking about all the
failures or problems you have, just reflect on the blessings you have received,
the positive things that happened. Some of the things might have happened to
you without your efforts. These are your blessings.
Through our ego, we tend to feel we are in complete control
of our lives. But we know and realize that many times in our life when a
situation takes you in a completely different direction as if you were guided.
After sometime you realize that you have been lucky to get into the current
situation.
Life is not a chance. Life is a very complex situation –
difficult to understand. We feel proud of ourselves when we are happy and then
think ‘I am happy’. When problems come, we start blaming god, others and
the world and say ‘I am unhappy because of so and so…”
What should one do in such a confusion state. Simple. Surrender
to GOD.
Yes, Surrender to God is the only salvation for leading a
contented life. Take every situation as God’s blessing. He will take care of
your needs. What he has been doing without your awareness will now happen with
your awareness. You will start counting the blessings more often and then you
feel you are blessed. It also happens that you will face the problems. One
should not loose faith in God just because you are facing the problems. They
are ‘testing times’. Lord tests your faith once in a while and if you trust him
also during the ‘difficult situation’ also, he will be convinced that your
surrender is complete. Once the complete trust between Lord and Devotee is
established, the spiritual journey begins.
Lord will bless devotee for his life and gradually give the
devotee the spiritual experiences he needs. Once the devotee goes through the
spiritual experiences, Lord then make the devotee perform God’s service. The
devotee will gradually become self less and start serving the society, the lord
and continue to spread the Lord’s name.
The period of spiritual experiences would be tough period
for the devotee. The experiences would overwhelm him and he needs a very good
mental balance to handle the situation. Such experience cannot be given to
person who is not mentally and physically prepared for the same.
One needs to have patience to reach the stage of ‘spiritual
preparedness’. This includes physical fitness and mental fitness. Mental
fitness means building a character that will be pure. Having qualities such as
truthfulness, fearlessness, determination etc are important.
Summary:
So if you are confused about your state of spirituality judge
yourself about your preparedness.
Stage 1: If you have never counted your blessings you are
not convinced about existence of God.
Stage 2: You have counted your blessings and now you realize
that God may be there who is blessing you
Stage 3: You trust in God and you are preparing yourself for
Spiritual experiences. This is the stage you need to work in establishing a
very good character
Stage 4: You are having spiritual experiences.
You evaluate your life and check at what stage you are in.
Realize where you have to go. Create your life goal and work towards the same.
It is only a Guru that can help an individual in moving from one stage to
another stage. The above is just a guide to create an awareness of your
spiritual status.
Everyone has such spiritual pursuits that are very personal.
Everyone seeks his own path towards spiritual realization. Indian philosophy,
religion are all aimed at helping individual reach the spiritual goal.
But once we are educated, we think we know how to reach our
own spiritual goals. We make attempts to reach spiritual goals with incomplete
knowledge. We feel we have made some progress. Example would be we will start
practicing meditation on our own after reading some books. We feel we are going
on right track and suddenly we feel lost. We look for another method. We start
seeking a very easy and simple process for spiritual enlightenment. Major
hurdle in this the ‘ego’ that we believe, we know better than anyone else. We
fail to accept anyone as spiritual superior and the struggle goes on. We come
across a new method and again we falter. Even after years we feel we have not
made any progress in spiritual life even though spirituality is the top most
‘new year resolution’ every year.
Seek a Guru. Approach the Guru with sincerity. Give up your
ego and surrender to the Guru. Seek Guru’s blessings and most important of all
TRUST the Guru completely. Never ever doubt your Guru’s spirituality. Take
initiation and follow Guru’s words. You will see a complete transformation in
your spiritual life.
Words of Advice from personal experiences:
-
Reduce Ego that is born out of ‘modern education’
-
Don’t consider yourself superior to any spiritual person
because you have read more books than the spiritual person you just met. God
realization gives more knowledge to a spiritual person than all the books you
ever read on philosophy and spirituality
-
Trust and Faith are very important
Your chance of finding a Guru depends on how severe is your desire for God. Spirituality is not a fashion to boast of. Many times we say ‘I do meditation’, ‘I go to temple every Sunday’ as proof of our spirituality and think that is enough and we will find a guru.
Spiritual yearning is a deep desire to realize God. It is
not something you pursue during your free time. It is something you should do
as main goal of life. Once you take this seriously finding God will send you to
a proper Guru who can guide you.