In this Weekly Wisdom, Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar shares beautiful insights on how to balance opposites like fear and courage, emotions and self.
Know that you’re such a positive person that if any negative emotion comes to you, it will turn into a positive thing. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared about others’ negative emotions that you don’t know. They can come to you anytime, waking, dreaming, or sleeping. But it doesn’t affect you when you’re sleeping. Does it? You don’t know.
When you’re sleeping you don’t know your own emotions. Any negative emotions from anywhere in the world can pass through you. You have the ability to transform the negative into positive. You’re much more than negative and positive emotions, and these opposite values must coexist at every moment.
Fear and courage
Nothing can touch you! A cloud can’t do anything to a rock. Be like a rock! Emotions are like clouds. They’ll come and caress the stone and move away. No rock on top of a mountain is fearful about the clouds. It doesn’t say, “Oh, dark clouds are coming! Save me! White clouds, oh, I love them.” No! Be solid. You’re radiating sunlight. You radiate energy.
Negativities are like clouds. They pass through. Never mind. Observe it. Know it. If someone is angry and they pass by, their anger catches onto your mind. You feel that anger welling up inside you. Just watch it. Observe it. Laugh at it. Or take a deep breath and say “Hmm.” But don’t keep doing that all day. Someone might think something’s wrong.
Observe and you’ll see those emotions come for a second and then they vanish. If it seems to grip you, sometimes you can take a couple of deep breaths. Then you’ll see that it has transformed. Don’t be scared of others’ negative emotions so much.
You think you don’t have courage. You simply have to know that you don’t know what you have or don’t have, number one. If you think you don’t have it, trying to have it isn’t going to work. So realize you don’t know what you have.
The next thing is to understand that you know you have it. You have that courage. Even then, if you fear that you can’t do something, know that you’re not alone. The Divine is with you. A greater force is your great friend.
Right or wrong actions
Wait for the results of an action. Some results will show immediately. Some results will come in due course. What you need to see is whether your intention is correct.
If your intention is right, actions will always yield positive results. But if your intention is wrong, then even though your actions seem to be good at face value, it isn’t going to give you the result that you would want it to.
Diversity and oneness
Life is full of contradictions. Sometimes you eat ice cream. Sometimes you want hot tea. If you ask me, “How can I want hot tea and cold ice cream?” Yes, both are part of your life. In the same way, bhakti, or love and devotion, has its role. It happens in your life naturally.
That’s how it is in nature. On the atomic level, there’s only one thing. The whole universe is made up of one substance. But on the molecular level, they’re all so different. There’s duality.
That there are two different molecules is a reality. Diversity is a reality. When you go deeply into the diversity, you find the uniformity, the union, the oneness of subatomic particles. That’s also reality.
The oneness of subatomic particles is a reality. A diverse molecular structure is also a reality. They coexist in the same place at the same time. In the same way, love and devotion can coexist with the awareness that this is all one.
Devotion (bhakti) is not an action. It’s a state of mind. It’s the nature of one’s being. It’s the pinnacle of emotion and the nature of the self. So it doesn’t vanish. Though it is experienced in duality more vividly, as reality, it doesn’t contradict the oneness of Advaita.
Permanence and change
Everything is impermanent. This is what we need to know. Only that you can know. It’s easy to know. It’s easy to see that things are impermanent. So when this understanding becomes clear, then you see the reference point by which you saw everything is impermanent.
There has to be a reference point that isn’t changing in order to even know that everything is changing. If everything is changing, there’s no way to know that everything’s changing unless there’s something that doesn’t change.
When you know everything is changing your understanding then turns inward. You’ll see that there’s something so unique, so beautiful, that doesn’t change.
Adi Shankara, the exponent of Advaita philosophy, called it “Aparokshanubhuti or non-indirect experience.” Paroksha means indirect. He said aparoksha, the “non-indirect” experience. He wrote a beautiful treatise called “The Non-indirect Experience.”
You can’t directly experience, and not indirectly. It’s neither this nor that. You can neither catch it nor miss it. Nobody can miss it. Yet, nobody can catch it. That’s the real mystery and that’s what life’s all about.
There’s nobody who can say, “I’ve never slept in my life.” Yet, there’s nobody who can say, “I know my sleep.” It’s in your experience. Yet, you don’t know it. That one thing is sleep. And that one thing which causes sleep is in sleep and enables you to wake up, that is the Self.
That’s even more mysterious, without which you can’t exist. There’s no existence at all without it, and yet it’s not felt or known unless through this awakening, knowledge, and grace. That’s self-knowledge.
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