Home | Peace Of Mind | Children
BRANAVAN GANESAN (Age 10) (Branavan was raising an abandoned baby squirrel that he had found. One day, when he was carrying the squirrel on his shoulder, it fell off. He accidentally stepped on it, and it died. Branavan was very upset and came to see Bawa Muhaiyaddeen for comfort.) BAWA MUHAIYADDEEN: Little brother, you are a good child, a very good child. Your heart is very good, and your compassion is very beautiful. The thought that you have in your heart is a very good thought. Your reasoning, your actions, and the love and compassion that you show toward other lives is also very good. Your love is like God’s love. I was the same way when I was young. I would cry whenever I saw someone suffering or in pain. If I saw somebody crying, I would cry too. That was my state until about eight years ago. Only then did it occur to me that if I cry when others cry, who will comfort them? After that, whenever I saw someone crying, I would smile and comfort them, even though inside I would be weeping. In creation, there are five kinds of lives: earth lives, fire lives, water lives, air lives, and ether lives. These lives receive their nourishment from the five elements, and they would die without them. Similarly, man would die if there were no God. If God’s food were denied to him, he would die. That is the difference between man and the five other kinds of lives. If man would reflect and analyze with his wisdom, he would understand that each creation is bound by an agreement that determines how long it will live, and he would know how much time is allotted to each creation before it changes over and is destroyed. Man is the only one who can understand all this. Because he possesses divine wisdom (gnanam) and a soul, which is the power of wisdom, and because he also has the judgment capable of controlling and assessing everything, this gives him the capacity to understand the right and wrong in what happens. From the tiniest atom, to the earth with its precious stones, to the grass, weeds, trees, shrubs, creepers, insects, worms, and the various types of food and fruits—all creations need the five elements in order to stay alive. They need water, air, earth, ether, the warmth of fire, the different colors, and illusion and its glitters. And every life is governed by an agreement concerning its limit, but only man has the capacity to understand those agreements. Now suppose you sow some seeds. When a seedling grows, you feel joyful. You are able to protect it and help it grow, and later its crop can benefit mankind. But since weeds grow faster than plants, they might strangle some of them, or worms might eat them, or winds and heavy rains might destroy them. They could even die from the intense heat of the sun or because they don’t get enough water. Should you feel sad about this? No, you carried out your duty correctly and did what you had to do. But you need to realize that the very thing that helps something to grow can also cause its destruction. You should not feel sad about that. Your duty is to pour the water, spread the fertilizer, pull the weeds, and protect the crop. That is your duty. Other than that, should you feel sorry about things that occur above and beyond your duty? No, you shouldn’t. When such things happen, you must say, “This is not the result of my actions. Everything happens in keeping with God’s will. Nothing happens because of my deeds. I performed my duty correctly and did nothing wrong. What happens beyond that is God’s duty. It is the duty of the One who created.” You must reflect on this with your wisdom. Do you understand? You must realize, “It’s all right, that life’s agreement was over.” You need not feel sorrow. Suppose the allotted time for a particular crop to grow and ripen is between three and four months. What is your duty? You must harvest it at the proper time. If you don’t, it will perish anyway, on its own, because that is all the time it has to live, according to its agreement. If you do not make use of it at the right time, it will just decay. Should you feel sorry about that? No, that is its agreement. Even though you protected the crop and helped it to grow, it is impossible to keep it past that time. For example, when we harvest rice, before we can store the grains, we must separate them from the husks. Even then, we can only keep the rice for a little while longer, or it will become infested with insects and be devoured. Why should we feel sorry about that? That is nature. These things happen naturally. Suppose you grow a nice apple tree, giving it water and fertilizer, and then it produces beautiful fruits. After the apples ripen, they have to fall from the tree. That is their agreement, or limit. Should you feel sad about that? No. Your duty is to carefully pluck them before they fall and then either eat them or sell them. If we use our wisdom, we will know what we should do. You must not feel sad about their end. Or, say some nice grass is growing in your yard. If you tie a cow there, it will eat all the grass. Should you feel sorry when the grass is gone? No, you should not think like that. Man has to think about these things with his wisdom. All lives are limited by some agreement. There are earth lives, water lives, fire lives, air lives, and ether lives. These lives do not have divine analytic wisdom. They have only three levels of consciousness—feeling, awareness, and intellect. If they have an itch, they will scratch. If they are hit, they will run. They defecate where they eat, and sleep where they defecate. This is how cows, goats, reptiles, and other lives behave. Do they have divine analytic wisdom? No. Do they know what is clean or unclean, or good or bad? No. It is natural that we raise these lives, and it is also natural that they will do what they do. But sometimes their actions subject them to certain accidents. In this world, lives catch and eat other lives. So, there is always the possibility of accidents happening. Say you are lovingly raising a goat, but it wanders off and is caught by a wolf or a tiger. Should you grieve and cry about that? Or suppose the goat goes out to graze and falls off a mountain. Because it has no wisdom, it fell and met with a sad death. Should you grieve or cry because of that? No. One who has divine analytic wisdom must protect a life that does not have that wisdom or use it, but beyond that he is not responsible. Now, let us consider your squirrel. You intended to look after the squirrel. That was certainly your duty. If it had been left outside, a crow might have carried it away. Even if a crow didn’t carry it away, a cat might have caught it. Or if a cat didn’t catch it, a dog might have caught it. If a dog didn’t catch it, a hawk might have swooped down on it, or a snake might have swallowed it. You saved that squirrel from all those possible accidents. It is all right for you to protect an animal that does not have divine analytic wisdom, but you might have kept it in a cage. However, because of your love for it, you carried it around on your shoulder. Since the squirrel has no wisdom, it fell off, and you stepped on it. Was that your fault? No. All along that squirrel was meant to die, one way or another. Sometime or other it had to go. In any case, it had to die within three years. That is the extent of its life. So why do you feel sad? Did you make this happen? No. You did your duty. What happens beyond that is not your duty. Did you do it knowingly? No. You did not know that was going to happen. If you had done it deliberately, then you could cry, because a little bit of sin would have been attached to that deed, and the responsibility would have remained with you. That would be the opposite of compassion. But you did not know this would happen. You could have used your wisdom and thought, “This animal has no analytic wisdom. I should keep it in a place it should be kept. Even though I have love for it, I should not carry it on my shoulder. It might have an accident. If it jumps one way, a dog or a cat might catch it. If it jumps the other way and climbs up on something, a crow might catch it. Because it could be subject to so many accidents, I should keep it in a cage.” This is what you might have done. But even so, why should you feel sad? All of God’s creations are like this. If you feel so sad about this, how can you bear to live in this body? We, too, have a body, and one day or another we will have to leave our body behind and go. Like this, every life has to give up its body sometime and return to its source. Earth lives will return to the earth, fire lives to fire, water lives to water, air lives to air, and illusory lives will join with illusion. Each one will go back to its own life force (sakthi). But a human being has to join God. Why? Human life is God’s treasure, and it must go back to Him. In the future, do not let your mind dwell on these things. If you look around, you will see that all lives are limited by an agreement. To the extent that it is possible, we must protect what we can. But beyond that, we have to say, “There is nothing I can do. My actions cannot accomplish anything else. O God, everything happens as a result of Your doing,” and we must hand over all responsibility to Him. Do you understand? That is how you must act. Don’t cry. You are crying, your father is crying, your mother is crying, and your sisters are crying. It shouldn’t be like this. Make your heart strong. Use your wisdom. You certainly should have compassion for all lives, but then you must reflect on that duty and hand over the responsibility to God. Do you understand what I have said? Now you have a parrot, and you are raising it with a lot of love. Let’s say that one day you forget to close the door, and the parrot escapes and is caught by a cat. Should you grieve about that? Or let’s say the parrot flies away and is caught by a hawk. Should you feel sad about that? Instead of worrying about that parrot, realize that we all are raising a parrot with the cage of our body. That parrot is our mind, and it is always chattering and squawking and flying here and there. First we have to discover how to raise the parrot that is within us. We must learn how to control it and train it with our wisdom. If we let this mind constantly squawk and fly about, what will our life be like? What will our future be? We will die, having wasted our life. The world will laugh at us, because, although we were born as such rare beings, we will have wasted our life. After all our searching, we will have gone to our death in this state. This mind is a parrot that simply repeats whatever it hears people say. If someone laughs, it laughs. If someone whistles, it whistles. Such is our mind. Whatever it reads in a book, it repeats over and over again. If we could make that parrot stop its squawking, it would be very good. But if we allow our mind to make all these noises, we will definitely have a lot of trouble in our life. We must correct and train the parrot within us and give it peace. That will be good. Do you understand? That is what you must try to do in the future, little brother. Do not let your mind suffer so much. Do not let your heart tremble over something like this. This is a very small matter. It is God’s responsibility. It is not your fault. Your duty goes only so far and no further. Use your wisdom in everything. You must not cry. Do you understand? You need to reflect on this. Wipe your tears. If this had not happened, the squirrel would have been caught by a crow or a cat or something else. It was not your fault at all. What happened was according to its agreement. You need not feel sad about that. Look with wisdom. If you had analyzed with wisdom, this sorrow would not have come to you. All right? Now smile! May 1, 1978 Muhaiyadden, Bawa. Why Can't I See the Angels?. Philadelphia: The Fellowship Press, 2002.
Article Source: http://www.godarticles.com
Bawa Muhaiyaddeen for over 50 years selflessly shared his knowledge with people of every race, religion—from all parts of the world. Before Bawa’s passing in 1986 he wrote “Peace and the Mind” and requested that everyone in the world receive a copy. If you would like your FREE copy please Click Here! www.onegodonly.com
Please Rate this Article
5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5
Not yet Rated
