The Challenge of Human Life

 Namaskar. Many different feelings and emotions come in human life, many different types of experiences. And some of them are very painful, very difficult. Difficult experiences can be unique to you, or you can be part of a collective Karma, where those experiences involve a whole group of people.

Regardless of your experiences in your individual patterns or in the collective pattern of the society or in a sub-society, when times get difficult, there are losses, there’s grief, sorrow, anger. All of those emotions arise because of your engagement with the external world, with the environment around you—whether it be a marriage that has gone bad, a child, a parent that you struggle with, a job, friendships. There are many different places that struggle can occur.

Or whether it be the collective society and the norms of the society and how they promote injustice, indifference... Can you imagine to have a family member dear to you shot—how you would feel? How many people have suffered? And yet despite their suffering, they have had nothing but injustice for years upon years. Such things happen in human life. They happen individually and they happen en masse—whole communities wiped out in wars.

Human beings have an exceptional ability to be cruel to each other: a shadow of human experience that needs to be recognized and addressed, and addressed inside yourself, observing in yourself that shadow which can be cruel; which can be angry; which can be resentful, revengeful; which can be bitter, and want to aggress against others. Observe that part of your own human nature, because it is a part of human nature, a part of the human experience.

But there is another part of the human experience: the desire to care for others, to be of service to the world, to love living beings, and to try to figure out how to love them genuinely and sincerely without hypocrisy, without secret motives. This is the challenge of human life, and it is the challenge to follow the path of Dharma toward the deepest love of human experience, towards the one eternal soul, the Self of all beings. It is a journey of learning how to love.

The journey of spirit is one of learning how to love and how to let go, how to surrender to the will of the infinite, be it painful or joyous. Today the winds may favor you; tomorrow they may go against you. But can you ride these winds of the world in peace within yourself? Can you find that peace which is lasting, which can surround you and permeate you, and even though life goes high and low, you remain even in that peace deep inside of yourself?

Yes, when dealing with the world, you go up and down with the world around you. But you can find that deep peace within you, and that can be a solid rock in the storms of life, a place of calm, a place of love.

For peace and love go together. When love is deep, compassionate, and unconditional, it brings peace in the mind. It brings contentment. For the deep love doesn’t vary, doesn’t want anything. It just is: a great compassion that just is. That is the nature of grace, that great compassion that is a shower of infinite love, healing, a healing balm on a troubled heart, a settlement of wounds from the world.

That love is something that can permeate you, and not only permeate you, it can flow through you into the world. So that you feel that unconditional love, that shower of grace, that infinite compassion, and it flows through you and into the world of form. Can you allow yourself to open to that grace, to that love which is so compassionate, so unconditional, and let yourself melt into it, melt back into it?

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Let go, let go of everything you’ve been holding on to, of all the beliefs about yourself, all your beliefs. Let go and let yourself feel God’s presence; feel that love that the divine has for you and for all beings, and let it flow through you, permeating you, permeating every cell of your body. Let it flow through you into the world, to those around you. Be a hollow bamboo through which the love of the universal one flows into the world.

This is the great potentiality of human life. You have a choice, a choice that you make every moment of your life. You have a choice to follow the lower emotions, the wounds which have hurt you, the injustices; to follow the anger, the resentment, the bitterness, the greed, the fear.

You can follow those, or you can witness them as part of your humanity, but choose not to follow them in your life, and instead place yourself in this flow of unconditional love, in the shower of grace, shower of love, shower of light. And let yourself fall back into it, dissolve into it, and let it flow through you and give you the knowledge in every moment of the right action in that moment, the kind action.

Because when you align yourself with Dharma, when you align yourself with the love of the infinite and the shower of grace, then that comes through you. You begin to mirror that which you associate yourself with, and you melt back, you have more and more parallelism with that divine existence, and then it begins to express through you. And you become a vessel of Dharma. Then, you can really follow Dharma. 

If you try to follow Dharma from your intellect and your ideas and your beliefs, it will not work. It is not enough. Dharma has to be followed from your heart. Dharma lies with the great. So when you align yourself with the great, Dharma flows through you. Love flows through you. Then service is naturally there.

So you make choices every moment of your life. So be conscious, be aware of these choices, and choose to align yourself with that one eternal divine being that is the core of your own nature and the core nature of all beings. That divine being, Parama Purusha, has only one intent, to draw all living beings home into this ocean of love, ocean of truth, ocean of being, in the peace and stillness of absolute love.

When you align yourself with the intentions of that one, and you become a vessel for that grace, then you are truly a Dharmika, one who follows Dharma, and a gift to the world.

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