Book Title: Journey to Enlightenment Part 01
Author(s): Chitrabhanu, Chetana Catherine Florida, Nirmala Hanke, Raksha Penni Helsene
Publisher: Create Space
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April 2003: Chetana is Soaring
We all know that she was the incarnation of love and light. In her you could see three loves - the love of Jesus, the compassion of Buddha, and the reverence for life and ahimsa of Mahavir. She was beyond walls and she had transcended walls. Ten thousand years ago in the Sanskrit language there is a stanza: the soul departs from the body just as we discard old clothes and wear new clothes. In the same way when our mission is complete, our karmas are burned and when the heart is purified with love, peace, sisterhood and brotherhood and we see life in everything then the soul, the spirit departs from the body. That is why we see the mission she has completed. It is not the years by which we count the life, it is the achievement, the purification, sharing and caring and daring to break the walls. This is the purpose of life and Chetana has completed her mission.
When she met me she was not ready to give up smoking. She said, “I can do anything but this one thing I cannot do." So I said, “Then you cannot come to that holy place Shatrunjaya until you overcome your weakness."
But she wanted to be on that mountain Shatrunjaya and she worked and one day she said, "All right I am ready”. It is courage, inner courage and strength to give up addiction and habits. I have seen many, many spiritual people but they are slaves to their habits. But Chetana was not a slave to the habit. She gave up many things to become vegetarian, she gave up fish and foods which are staple foods but she was able to do it. And she reached that state where she started thinking that nobody should not starve. So recently, last year, she started to feed the hungry and at the Lighthouse Center they started collecting money from people. She gave up one meal a day.
And this time when she was honored by the International Vegetarian Society Reverence for Life, all the people admired her; they saw that a person who is born in the western world has deeper meaning of eastern teaching where all the eastern teachers come - Buddha, Mahavir, Jesus and Moses all came from the east. Moses and everything. No one was born here, they all came from the east and she was representing that teaching here in the west.
So in reality, in our teaching, what we practice in her departure is a celebration. As your son or daughter goes to India or England for higher study you miss him, you miss her, but you feel that my son or my daughter will have a higher education, he or she will be upgrading. Life is a departure. The moment we are born the meter starts, as a parking meter does when you put in the coin.
So departure is not something new, it is from the moment we are born, from that moment the time is starting to come to the end. So the end is in the beginning. And that is the one thing we have to understand. We miss her, we feel a kind of sorrow, sometimes the tears roll down on our cheeks, but at the same time we see her riding and flying on the wings of light and love and peace. It was difficult for her to carry on the mission because her body
138 - Journey to Enlightenment
