Aptavani 02

Author(s): Dada Bhagwan
Publisher: Mahavideh Foundation

Page 42

Aptavani-2
Aptavani-2
your own, torments you. Such is the worldly life.
Minding one's own affairs This world is a huge trap and not even an ounce of it belongs to you. The house in which you live is yours only if you pay rent for it. If a sparrow has built a little nest in your house, do you think she thinks of you as her landlord? No, she thinks it as her own house because she too lives in that house. A lizard on your wall too thinks the house belongs to her. Every living being has a claim of ownership of this world.
The Lord said, "Everyone should mind their own affairs. I will take care of my own." There was a group of milkmen who lived and worked together but they cooked their own meals. They had set up a camp in an open ground. Each one of them had their own special cooking clay pot in which they cooked khichadee (rice and lentil). They would put their cooking pot over a fire between three stones and left their khichadee to cook slowly before they went to town to sell their goods, leaving one person in charge. When they returned in the evening, one of the milkmen could not remember where he put his cooking pot; he could not find it. He could not remember which tree he had set his cooking pot under. He thought for a while and decided that if he picked up the wrong one, others would think he was strange so he pondered a little. He then picked up a large stone and called out, "I am going to break open my cooking pot: please take care of your own pots." All the other men reached out for their own pots and he found his!
We need to take care of our own cooking pots' as we proceed in this worldly life. This worldly life is like people traveling on a boat, each one will go his own way when the shore comes. And yet you say, "I can't live without her!" How will you make progress if you take this approach to life? All relationships are unfolding of karmic accounts of past life; how long can you go on living like this? Why this interference (why
create new accounts)? There is nothing to give and nothing to take. All you need is a little food for your sustenance, so why take the weight of the world on your shoulders? And when you fall sick, no one will come to ask after you. You will have to take care of yourself. Did you not know from the start that all these relationships are temporary? We can do everything for them if they were real, but these are all temporary and relative relationships and there is no telling when they will fracture. If relationships were real, then if a father dies, the son too would die with him. Do you think anyone in the city of Mumbai dies this way? No, no one does. So should you not realize from the beginning that all these relationships are relative? Furthermore, you should not be rigid in these relationships, you could afford to do so in a real relationship. But what is the point of hanging on to relationships that may break anytime? So know from the start that all this is relative, and concentrate on your own accounts.
That which is temporary, is like clothes. One changes clothes daily and those clothe' (body) are changed at the end of sixty or seventy years. You suffer because you believe you are the clothes. You have not attained the knowledge of the Self and that is why you have wandered into territories that are not your own. You conduct your worldly life under the belief of 'I am Chandulal', and when you come to the final destination, Chandulal will be left behind and you will have to move on but along with you will come, all the problems you created in this life as Chandulal. The path to attain the Self is extremely rare indeed.
In this worldly life, suffering begins as a blast within at the most unexpected moment. There is no peace of mind and yet they live in flats worth hundreds of thousands of rupees. It is a wonder in itself how these poor creatures manage to live. However, what else can they do? Should they jump into the ocean? That too is against the law! They have no choice but