There are different emotions that people suffer – anger, sorrow, the pain of loss, the feeling of loneliness and emptiness, the feeling of betrayal, the desire for revenge. So many different emotional states come -- difficult, negative ones and positive ones -- feelings of joy, feelings of happiness, feelings of great love, connection, wholeness, feelings of success, feelings of well-being.
The range and gamut of human emotions is very wide. Then there are those who tend to be very muted in their emotions who live lives that do not have so much emotion. They are simply practical, doing doing doing without emotion. Others are very highly emotional who swing from one emotion to another.
All of these emotions are like flickering flames of a candle. They come and go in reaction and response to daily activities and experiences. Today, everything went well and you are blissful. Tomorrow something happens or the Moon in its wrong phase or a friend ignores you. Something happens and you are sorrowful. You are worried. You are anxious. The next day, some great opportunity opens up before you and someone is very kind and loving to you and you are flying on top of the world. Emotions rise and fall. They flicker like the flame of a candle.
But awareness of your infinite nature is a solid state of being, a knowing, not with the intellect, not with the flickering emotions, a knowing that is deep within you, within the core of your being that is experiencing your emotions and experiencing your thoughts. When you have a deep and connected relationship to Divinity, you experience the oneness that you have with all life and interconnection with all life becomes known to you.
You become able through deep feeling and deep longing to move beyond your daily activities and experiences into the stratum of your Soul, into the deeper layers of your being where the difference between you and that infinite Beloved melts away. You enter into the ocean of divine grace and there you find your unity in the wholeness of being and experiencing that unity, you know, deep within you, you know, there is only one Soul, one Self, one infinite love, one being.
Though the forms are many in this world, the essence is one. Knowing that unitary whole directly through your own experience, you realize you are not separate from the whole. Your sense of individuality, your sense of separation is due to your identification with your body. Out of the body comes the feeling of I as opposed to Thou, as opposed to everyone and everything else, of Me as opposed to you. When that feeling grows, there is not the ability to know or understand the unitary wholeness. You fall into the dream of duality where all is separate. It comes back together when in the depths of your meditation or internal contemplation you begin to experience your association with the whole. You begin to experience your wholeness, your divine nature and the divine nature of all that is.
Questions and Answers Q. When we are going through a really difficult situation, how can we come back to center and remember oneness?
A. Very good question. When the mind becomes loud with different thoughts and the emotions become loud in reaction and you are feeling despair or anxiety, when you are struggling with your thoughts, it becomes difficult to concentrate and it may seem it is very hard to connect with that inner wholeness.
Really speaking, in those times of greatest need the divine grace is often most available. For that, you do Guru Puja. You offer everything to God. You surrender everything and you ask for guidance and love. But you keep surrendering. You keep saying “Thy Will, not mine.” You do your puja, you offer the lotus of your heart and all the troubles that are burdening you. And you realize from the infinite Brahma, all of it has come. All of it is composed of the infinite Brahma. All is done by the infinite Brahma. Everything and all returns to that One. You are held in the arms of that love always.
When the mind is very loud, when the internal conflicts tear at you, surrender them. Realize that they do not belong to you. They are part of the play of the whole of Creation, which is one dream in the mind of the Great Dreamer, one appearance in the deep stratum of reality. You surrender and you surrender and you surrender and you keep offering and you hold on like a lifeline to the thread of the infinite love and compassion that is being showered on you every moment, knowing that everything belongs to the Divine, not to you. You are not responsible. It doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to that which is everything the all encompassing intelligence of the universe.