 Dispassion and Desire
 Intense
love purifies one's mind, one's
heart, one's body and one's surroundings. If God
longs for one thing, that is for intense love. God has everything, but He longs
for the longing of intense love. And the peak of love is silence, is
contentment, is a state of complete fulfillment, is deep meditation.
"Don't hate anybody"
- This saying is for your good. Not because you will do some harm to them.
Because when you hate some body, whom so ever you hate, you imbibe their
qualities in you.
There is a story in the Puranas.
The guards at the gate of Vishnu once behaved in a disrespectful manner to
saints. God is a servant of the servant, so he is a servant of the saints. The
saints got angry with them (the guards). Now what to do, and how to get over
this anger and repent.
So they had two choices. One
was to get born as a good person for one hundred life times, or be born as an
enemy, a completely bad person for three life times. It seems, they chose three
life times to be born as an enemy to God. They were born as enemies, as demons,
and they hated God so much that they got liberated. Because when you hate God so
much, you imbibe the qualities of God in you. So when you hate some body, you
imbibe the qualities of whom so ever you hate.
 That
is why it is said, - don't hate anybody, love everyone. So start from somewhere.
Think of someone whom you love. Feel all the love in you, and then you will see
their face, their form fades away. What remains is just love, and that is what
you are. "Thou art that". You know, the Master would say, "Thou
art that". Do you see how much love you experience? "Thou art
that". Everybody is made up of this same love, and you are that love.
When our consciousness is
happy, or when it is in love, it is expanding. And when the consciousness
contracts, that is when you feel unhappiness, sadness, sorrow. Have you noticed
when you are unhappy, what happens? The mind shrinks. Shrinking of mind is
unhappiness. Expansion of mind is happiness. So, when mind expands, often we
lose awareness. Because we have known expansion of mind only in sleep. And in
sleep, what is happening? The mind is expanded and relaxed. So when we are
happy, we are all over the place, and at the same time, we are not focussed. We
are not centred. We lose all that quality of awareness. Right? When we are
unhappy, we are very focussed, we are very keen, but we are shrunk.
 And
meditation is that technique (which) keeps the focus and attention alive, and at
the same time, enables you to expand. It is the fourth state of consciousness -
the Turiya or Shiva. That consciousness as we practise more and more, everyday,
we start imbibing it in our nervous system.
See, everyday there are
different molecules in the brain which are functioning. There are zillions of
molecules, and only some function at the same time. Some others take over the
next day, another time. All this is functioning, so we do this everyday, because
we want all of our neurons, all the cells, to be educated, to be trained to do
that, to live that awareness. Like we call a city totally literate when each and
every person in the city has learned how to read and write, isn't it? Like that,
in the city of your body, some people get turn today to learn, some people get
turn tomorrow to learn, some others get the next day to learn. So everyday,
there are different people, different molecules going up front. So every time,
every day, you meditate, you culture them. So it takes some time to culture all
the neurons in the brain. Then they are all cultured to live the bliss. Does it
make sense?
Sri Sri Ravishankar
(Founder, Art of Living)
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