4th May, 2000

Chapter 1 - The You That You Want To Change

Day 26 - Sorrow

The only thing you must remember is how fortunate you are. When you forget this, you become sad. Sorrow indicates your attachment to your negative qualities as well as your attachment to your positive qualities. Your negative qualities make you sad. And when you think you are so great, you start blaming others, this also makes you become sad. 

The purpose of sorrow is to bring you back to the self and the self is all joy but this realisation is possible only through knowledge - through awareness. Knowledge or awareness leads sorrow towards the self. Without knowledge, the same sorrow multiplies and does not get completed. Knowledge completes sorrow. Only with the power of knowledge do you transcend sorrow. 

If on this path you have everything. You have this beautiful knowledge that has all flavours - wisdom, laughter, seva, silence, singing, dancing humour, celebrating, yagyas, caring, complaints, problems, complications - and chaos to add colour. Life is so colourful. It is only through merit that you can have faith. When you lack faith, there can be no happiness in either the inner or the outer world.

Happiness springs from faith. Happiness is forgetting the body consciousness. Pain or sorrow is holding on to body consciousness. When you are happy, you do not feel the body and when you are miserable, you have aches and pains.

Question - Then why in guided meditation is the attention taken to various parts of the body?

Gurudev - For an arrow to go forward, it must be pulled back. In the same way when you take attention to the various parts of the body, that process frees you from body consciousness.