How can we expand our limited and narrow idea of what family is and love more people? A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi
first words from the podcast
Tonight what I want to talk about is family. Anandamayi Ma said that there is only one family of seekers and that is everyone in the entire world. What she called family was everyone in the world. And the question is how do we—from our more limited perspective and experience—come to embrace everyone in the world as a family, one family, a single family of seekers?
Well, it turns out that the answer isn’t anything about what we try to do to transform our idea of family. We don’t really have to think about this because it happens naturally. I realized that this week when I was thinking about family. The same process of moving from very little View and experience of family to larger View and experience of family happens starting from when we are an infant. And it happens exactly the same way throughout our lives until eventually—when we are more consciously seeking something like waking up—then the more subtle parts of that process unfold very naturally.
If you think of an infant, a baby, they really don’t make much distinction at first between themselves and their mom and their dad. They’re having an experience of their mom and their dad as kind of being an extension of them. And then anyone who’s been around kids or has kids knows that at some point fairly soon—I don’t know exactly what age—the child begins to notice—oh, there’s stuff out there, and I’m having this experience of space in between me and stuff.
