“In this world men are not meant for quarrelling like cats and dogs. Men must be intelligent to realize the importance of human life and refuse to act like ordinary animals.” – Srila Prabhupada (Introduction, Bhagavad Gita As it is)
If you win one million rupees, you could either waste it away or double it by proper investment.
Right now the good Lord above has bestowed you with a million rupee gift.
If I ask you to give me one of your fingers for a thousand rupees, would you give it away? You have ten fingers on your hands and legs? Then you have kidneys, liver, pancreas, and other limbs that you dearly value; all of them mean more than a million rupees to you!
Your body- mind-time (BMT) is your unique gift. How you use it determines your happiness. How you take care of your BMT reveals if you are in charge of your life or if someone else holds the reins, and are you a mere puppet, a victim of conditions beyond yourself?
If you closely analyse your gifts, you’d realize that you have the ability to think, rationalize, discriminate, take decisions, make choices, inquire, and explore a higher dimension of happiness. This is amazing! And it’s come to you! Now the question we need to ask ourselves is: what am I doing with the BMT given to me? Am I using this gift to make my social life better or maybe I am also using it to make my internal life stronger.
Our two lives – external and internal
Most of us use BMT for our external lives – the party, office, relationships, money and social media presence.
But do you realize you have another life – an internal life – where you are all alone, with your fears, deep insecurities, concerns, and subconscious patterns- which doesn’t go away even if you are busy the whole day.
Travelling from Borivalli (a northern suburb of Mumbai) to Churchgate (Mumbai south) in the local trains of Mumbai, you meet many strangers, packed together in a compartment. You pick up a conversation, maybe have an argument as well on recent political situations, and then you discuss other issues. At Andheri some of them get down, and new passengers enter. At Dadar a few more leave you and finally as you near Churchgate, you realize you were all alone, anyways. You may never meet them again. We meet many ‘strangers’ in our sojourn in this world – we make relationships, work together, serve and love. One by one, we all part ways, sooner or later, and eventually a realization dawns on each one of us – we are all alone.
When the last part of the dust settles after the caravan passes, you sit all alone on a bench in this lonely forest of your inner world. A gnawing vacuum stares at you. Are you at peace with yourself? Do you accept yourself the way you are? Do you spend time connecting to your own inner self – do you ask and discover answers to the question of ‘Who am I?’ or ‘What’s the purpose of my life?’ Or maybe we are too busy to pause and ponder. Our inability to relax and reflect on what’s really meaningful to us, leads to a disconnect from our inner self, and our busyness simply leads to more pain and suffering. And ironically, we lose control of our lives, although we are busy. We are engaged but lost!
And yet, we needn’t be lonely. When we connect to God, we find shelter and can also have effective and meaningful relationships with all the ‘strangers’ we meet in the train journey of our lives.
“Find the sweetness in your own heart, then you may find the sweetness in every heart.” – Rumi (13th century Persian poet and Sufi mystic)
