Lift Yourself by your Self

A SMALL STORY

(His Divine Holiness Bhagavan Sri Nithyananda Paramashivam has delivered almost 20,000 hours of recorded talks till date. As part of the talks, He shares simple small stories that give powerful cognitive shifts to the listener. Following is one such story.)

Once you become aware of how you are driven by guilt, you can start practicing to come out of it. When you start practicing anything, naturally you will slip a few times. When you practice to be without guilt, you are bound to slip back into the older patterns of greed and fear. Then suddenly you will remember, 'Oh, I started working out of fear,' 'I started working out of greed.' Then you will start afresh. When you start working, naturally you will see these things happening.

A small story:

A monk from a big spiritual organization was sent to a remote tribal area for doing service. Suddenly, the headquarters received a lot of complaint letters about the monk. The president after reading the letters said, 'We have posted the right person.'

The secretary asked him, 'What is this Sir? We are getting complaints about him. How do you say we have posted the right person?'

The president replied, 'If we are getting complaints, it means he has started working, there is something happening!'

When you start something new you will have three phases. The first is resistance. The next is just indifference– people will neither care nor resist. The third is acceptance.

In the same way, when you start doing anything inside Your system, you will start growing, but these three phases will be there. The first phase will be resistance. You will feel the new practice is a difficult change in your current system. Because of this, the next thing that happens is you start avoiding opportunities where you should be practicing the change. Again and again you will go back to your older ways. Your system will resist, it will try to create all kinds of complications, all possible arguments. If you allow the resistance to grow, you become your own enemy.

Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, 'Let you lift yourself by yourself. If you don't, you will be your worst enemy.' It is up to you to help yourself as your best friend or hurt yourself as your worst enemy. Nobody can hurt you unless you allow. Nobody can help you unless you allow. If you have forgotten the practice, remember and again and again lift yourself. Don't fall into depression, don't have guilt. Don't think you will not be able to do it. Even if you read in the life of enlightened master Buddha, he was about to leave the body when his disciples asked him to give his ultimate message, and he said Atma deepo bhava – Let you be your own light, Let you be guided by yourself.