The most clear resistance I meet with is the push against living our lives to the fullest. So sad. Baba wanted me to be independent and free to experience the Bliss of the world, which in fact is the bliss of God. Granted, there were times when I fought him, not out of thinking he was wrong but out of my own deficiency. I was afraid to stretch. Ultimately, and luckily for me, I loved Baba more than I loved my shrunkenness. He pushed me, stretched me, prodded me, encouraged me, punished me; he did at any given moment the appropriate action to move me to God.
How do we move toward God? By accepting that we are alive and living our life to the fullest. Not by being selfish and boxed into our personal narratives, thinking we are safe. Remember, if you are boxing yourself in, you are also boxing everyone else in. The boxes in which you put people may be smaller or larger, but they are boxes nonetheless.
“But I wish…”, people say. This is wrong understanding; it is just a comfortable kind of hopelessness, a refusal of life. And if you really want and wish, then go for it and see whether the direction is appropriate or not. I always say I would rather make my own mistakes than someone else’s. Taking responsibility in this way is living your own life. If we look outside for our motivation, then we can tell ourselves we are not responsible; whatever or whoever is out there is to be blamed when things do not go according to our plans.
Living to the fullest is riding the horse in the direction it is going and accepting where we are going in harmony with God’ s will.
In 1979 when I was Baba’s appointments secretary, I hit a wall. I was seeing too much around me that I did not feel comfortable with. This was never about Baba, but some of the people around him. A person I worked closely with was more interested in personal power than in God. I could not at the time resolve it within myself and be okay. So I was in conflict with the environment around me. I loved working and being close to Baba and did not see that there was a way out if I wanted to remain close to him. Little did I know, Baba knew everything, including all the power plays and politics. He knew how I felt. He knew it all. I was in fact limited in my understanding; I still equated physical closeness with internal closeness. I also loved Baba as an amazing expression of humanity. So I wanted to remain “close”.
Baba wanted me to be free and independent. He did not want me to be small. He did not want me to be afraid. He did not want me to settle and not live my life. Baba wanted me to fully express God’s greatness. This is what he wanted for each of us. He was fighting for my Life. And in his love for me Baba destroyed my narrative. Not what I would have expected. He did not care about the organization; he did not care about the mission. He cared about each of us in the truest sense of the word. He cared that we live in our Hearts, and express and be the Bliss of God.
So for the sake of the Self, one day Baba turned my world upside down. I thank him every day for that gift. Baba quietly spoke to me for over an hour. Without so much as raising his voice, he told me how disappointed he was in me for not having been true to myself and spoken up. Then he removed me from my position as appointments secretary. As he made clear later, he did it out of Love, so that I could be free.
As the days, weeks, and months moved on I kept my mouth shut. I did not complain to people close to me or to myself. I did not blame. I was responsible for what happened to me. My job was to learn from it, not wallow in it. I kept quiet internally so as not to support a narrative that had no reality such as victim, unjust, mean, or anything else I could have come up with. By keeping quiet inside and out I knew I was burning up the karma. This was not easy, but I wanted freedom and Baba was helping me attain this. He was making sure anything that was in the way, whether I was aware of it or not, was removed.
If we want to live our lives fully, we first have to recognize and accept that our shrunken selves are not self-illuminative. We have to realize that the only source of light is the Self of All. Until we make that leap, we are merely like the moon, deluding ourselves into believing that we are the source of the Light we only reflect.
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