A thief used to come and steal from Swami Sivananda’s ashram in Rishikesh. During a festival, the ashram was giving prasad in the form of blankets and other necessities to poor people living in the area.

The thief came to be given this prasad.

Prasad is tangible nourishment blessed in a ritual invoking a form of the Enlightened Self: a Guru or Deity.

Some residents of the Ashram came to Swami Sivananda and advised him not to give prasad to the thief. They felt that the thief had already taken many things; why should Swami Sivananda give him more?

Swamiji answered simply: Thieving is what he does. Giving is what I do.

Many times in life, we feel that we don’t want to do something unless we get the response we are seeking.

We don’t want to be generous or loving unless the other person is generous and loving back to us. We don’t want to work hard or do a good job unless we will be praised and tangibly rewarded.

On the other hand, people often say, “I can’t do what I want to do because so-and-so won’t like it.” We do some things to win recognition and praise, and we don’t do other things in order to avoid criticism, or another response we feel is “negative.”

This means that our fundamental relationship to the world is manipulative. We are always bargaining and cutting deals.

Sometimes we say we are being “nice” or “compassionate,” and that is why we are not following our dharma. But really we are just seeking approval and avoiding responsibility for our life, using the other person as an excuse.

People also suffer because they are fixated on demanding that other people play by the rules of  karmic vision.

We all know someone, or perhaps we are that someone, who feels cheated by life, or is always outraged by everything, and who demands that others have the same reactions even when those others don’t!

“Why can’t he or she be more like I want him or her to be?”  “What’s wrong with that person! Why doesn’t he or she feel the way I do?”

In fact, most of the conversations people have about their relationships consist of complaining about how other people feel and act.

We go through all of these machinations because we don’t want to feel our loneliness. We want to create a feeling of dependency. We want to feel entangled with others, even if we suffer, because it is better than feeling alone.

Divine impulse, divine wisdom, causes us to want to feel connected. Even when we are complaining about others, we are still trying to connect. However, karmic tension creates  limitation on our ability to discover a more natural continuity with life.

When we begin to discover our natural continuity with the whole, we can better tolerate each person’s unique dimension. The diversity of life is no longer so threatening to us.

In order to find real contentment and connection, we must totally surrender to life. Paradoxically, when we do this, we are surrendering to our own true nature and so become capable of expressing our uniqueness more fully.

In Ma’s love,

Shambhavi

Posted by Shambhavi on December 18th, 2009 | Explore More! Tags: Compassion and Generosity, Naturalness, nonduality