Journey to Enlightenment Part 01

Author(s): Chitrabhanu, Chetana Catherine Florida, Nirmala Hanke, Raksha Penni Helsene
Publisher: Create Space

Page 97

June 1993: Life is a Lesson to be Learned
The following are Excepts for Gurudev's message "Awareness of the Meaning of Change", June 16 1991
You will solve a lot of your problems when you recognize what you are. Mainly people are confused about what they are - they don't know. We don't know if we are coming or going, most of us. But to know oneself is knowledge, and the clarity comes from your experience. So when you sit for a meditation you affirm that you are soul, you are energy. If you go on affirming it again and again, then you will start feeling your presence. When you feel your presence, no outside presence is going to influence you or invade your consciousness.
As long as we are at one in the universe, we do not attract bad karmas. We know to accept, have patience. And as we are living, all things don't happen. Even presidents or prime ministers are not able to fulfill everything they want to do. So you have to plan the life. When you know you are indestructible you have the frame. And when you have the frame, you have to know how to bend and how to stand. When the storm comes, the leaves and trees, which are supple, bend. When the storm goes, they are fine. So in life also, there are times we have to bend or get uprooted in the wind.
Today we take the message inside and make the philosophy to experience pain for gain and use it, accept it. Instead of fighting, try to remove it and prepare that new pain will not come because you are living in this way. So my friends, our main concentration today is that this life is a lesson to learn and anything happening in life leads to some new insight.
I was four when my mother died. At this time I did not know what death was so I asked an old friend why my mother was not here, and why did they take me away from her. He said, you mother has gone up, to live in the house of the moon. There is a big mansion. You can see the moon at night? There your mother has gone. But why, I say. He said she has gone to have a holiday - don't you wish your mother should also have some peaceful time? I say yes, so while I missed her I was feeling good that at least she was enjoying her holiday. Every night I would look up to the moon and the stars and I would imagine a big mansion and I fell in love with the moon and stars, and I started seeing so many stars and I started fantasizing so many things about the moon and stars, and how I could travel there. I started traveling in my dreams to the stars and moon. As I grew, I knew that mother had expired, but by then I was 9 or 10 and I could accept it and there was no trauma. From the pain, I gained.
When I was 13, my sister died. I was with my father when we got the news and I felt shock and pain. My first questions were why did she go, where did she go? I had to find out why she had gone so early and where did she go, and from that came a quest started to find out what is called death, where people go after they part. And slowly, this search lead me to investigation. I was reading, I was thinking and in between I had so many experiences. When I was 19 I had graduated from college. At that time I had a friend in Calcutta and she
98- Journey to Enlightenment