Surrendering Personal Dharma for Bhagavad Dharma

Namaskar. Each of you has a duty, a duty to humanity, a duty to follow Dharma. Your first and foremost duty is to follow Bhagavad Dharma, to move your life in the direction of the divine, to move your life in alignment with Parama Purusha, with the supreme entity, to bring yourself into harmony with the core of the universe. That is your number one duty.
 
And the way you do it is through your own personal approach, your unique expression in this world. Each of you has a unique expression, a personal Dharma that you are to realize. And within your personal Dharma, there must be this direction towards the supreme; otherwise, it goes astray. If, in attempting to manifest your personal goals and desires, you give up Bhagavad Dharma, you give up that way to Parama Purusha, then you will find that your mind and your efforts begin to become destructive, and you begin to have a desire to achieve personal wealth, power, attachments, and greed.
 
Desire comes and conquers the mind, and then where are you? Where are you when desire conquers the mind? Then all you can do is think about how I must get this, how I must get that, how I must achieve my personal ambitions. And so your individual Dharma begins to interfere with your capacity to know the supreme. You’ll find that you cannot focus beyond your own desires. And when they collapse, you are in despair. When you don’t get what you want, you are distressed, which is the cause of suffering.
 
But when your mind is always directed to the sublime, then you begin to detach from these personal achievements and desires, and you begin to feel it is the way of the supreme whether this happens or that happens. It is the will of the supreme that guides my life. And you begin to find a certain detachment from all of the passions and desires, and you then surrender your life, surrender your desires to the one infinite entity; for no one is an island, no one is perfect in themselves.
 
You are part of an integrated whole. You are an expression in the mind of the infinite. There is no separate you. It is a matter of perception.
 
When you reinforce the separate sense of self as a body-mind entity, you can win successes for a time, but for all your successes, there will be losses. There will be times when it doesn’t work out, when your health is bad, when loved ones leave you, when your power and position fail you. Even if you are the most powerful man or woman in the entire world, this will happen. What rises falls.
 
You come in as a babe, and you struggle, struggle, struggle to achieve, to learn to accomplish, to express, and then you reach the peak of your life, and then you begin to age, you grow old, and all that you have built seems less important, and then it dissolves. And you leave this body.
 
For all the great tragedies in this life, and all the great romances and accomplishments, they come and go. But what does not come and go is essence, your essence. For your essence is in the cosmos, in the mind of the sublime.
 
Your essence is Parama Purusha. Your essence is pure awareness, consciousness. You are the knower of both the tragedy and the comedy and the romance. You are the knower of all the accomplishments and all the disappointments of your individual self.
 
You are the Atman. But the Atman is the manifestation of the Paramatma, the cosmic Self focused on your personalized existence. But it is the same consciousness that is aware of the entire cosmos. It is the pure peace of being, the infinite source of love, the Self of yourself. That is the very source of your existence.
 
The source of all the troubles and pain you experience is your identity with your body-mind attachments. The individual “I” experience and all of the attachments that I am engaged in I must have; I need; I must be to survive; I must accomplish; I must have. All of those things are the source of your suffering.
 
When you step back into the Self of yourself, into the cosmic Self, into that sublime consciousness, then you realize, “I exist beyond the body, beyond the mind. I have always been and will be as pure being.” But being has become engrossed in manifestation and believes itself to be a separate entity, thus struggling with the ravages of time, gain, and loss.
 
But this is not who you are. This is the expression, the play, the dance. And it is only enjoyable if you’re not so attached to it. It is only enjoyable if you realize there is a deeper Self, an immortal Self that lives through many lives and many bodies, that rises and falls, is here today, gone tomorrow, then again.
 
That temporal self is governed by time, rising and falling, but you are immortal. The eternal witness, the peace that underlies all being, the eternal Self, is your own nature. There is nothing else than this.

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