HOW TO RECOGNIZE DIVINITY?
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Kṛṣṇa asks: How can you recognize divinity when you are covered in ignorance? How can you recognize Me when you are not aware? Out of the thousands who come to me, tens of thousands, the vast majority seeks favors of one kind or another. They come for the healing of the body and mind, or they come for repairing relationships, and for material benefits. Even those who do not look for material benefits may aspire to that intangible peace and bliss. It is the rare person who comes without asking anything. They are attracted like iron filings to a magnet. It is a call from their being which leads them to me.
In Mahābhārat, the Pāṇḍava princes could recognize the reality of Kṛṣṇa. No one needed to coach them for it. On the other hand, their cousins the Kaurava for the most part denied Kṛṣṇa. They rejected and ridiculed Him.
Duryodhana, who was offered the first choice by Kṛṣṇa to choose either Him unarmed or His Yadava army, chose the utilitarian army! That was all Duryodhana could see. That was his level of awareness, steeped as he was in ignorance. Arjuna jumped at Kṛṣṇa’s offer. All Arjuna wanted was Kṛṣṇa, His presence, not His army, not His divine powers, nothing else.
It is a choice that all of us need to make, whether we wish to be Duryodhana or Arjuna. It is not a difficult choice, as it will be determined by our being and our awareness. Fear and greed are what drive us, says Kṛṣṇa. That is our delusion that leads us away from Him. Attachment and aversion, rāga and dveṣa, form the duality, the polarity of human life.
© 2020 Sri Nithyananda Paramashivam. All Rights Reserved Even at the fundamental cellular level, biologists have shown that this tendency is exhibited. If you place a single cell in a petridish and place a drop of nutrient, it is attracted to it and moves towards it. If you place a drop of toxin in the same dish, the cell moves away from it. At the cellular level, attraction aids in growth and aversion in survival. A cell can either grow or protect itself. Unfortunately, what works well at the cellular level does not work so well at the human level simply because humans have greater intelligence. Cells obey Nature and are directed by Nature to recognize instinctively what is good and what is bad. They also automatically accept the consequence.
Humans are different.
They bypass signals from their
body, refuse to accept what
Nature tries to tell them and
indulge in or avoid activities or
objects based on their logic.
Logic overriding Nature always
leads to suffering.
Shedding attachment and
aversion is the first step to
awareness.
Attachment and aversion are
born out of our past; based on
experiences and memories that
form the root thought patterns,
what we call saṃskāra
in Saṃskrit.
Based on these saṃskāras, we
try to define our future.
The problem is that these saṁskāras
operate at an unconscious level and
drive us from unawareness to
unawareness, from incompletion to
incompletion. Therefore, we end up
acting instinctively, but unlike our
cellular brethren, without listening to
Nature Human beings are given
intelligence so that they can rise
above instinct and logic and operate
out of intuition. This intuition is born
from awareness. It comes through
meditation. With awareness, we
understand that there is truly nothing
that we can be attached to, since
everything is impermanent. The same
is true of aversion.
© 2020 Sri Nithyananda Paramashivam. All Rights Reserved
It arises from insecurity and fears.
What is there to be afraid of in life?
Every occasion that we are afraid, we
actually die inside us. If we shed our
fear of death, we lose all our fears.
When we move into awareness,
through meditation, we settle within
the boundary of our body-mind and
we enter the present moment.
When we are in the present moment
there is no duality of like and dislike,
attachment and aversion. We respond
to each event as it unfolds with
clarity, with intuitive intelligence,
with completion and we are always
right.
