Everything is part of you
This text was machine-transcribed from the printed book and may contain errors. Select the words and choose “Report a mistake”.
24 June, 2013
Fourth principle, ENRICHING.
Many times, even your Enriching others has a selfish motive.
You think, ‘If I enrich this person, I may get something back from them.’
Do not enrich with that small purpose.
Even in our sangha, so many devotees and disciples are stuck without having the right reason for Enriching. Now I am giving the right and complete reason for Enriching:
Because everyone is part of you, Enriching every being is nothing but enriching some part of you.
Anything you see is an extension of you. Anything you experience is an extension of you. Anybody whom you experience in your life is an extension of you. Your wife is the extension of your unbending logic! Your husband is the extension of your confusion! Understand, everyone whom you see in your life, everyone you experience in your life, is an extension of yourself. So, when you enrich them, a part of you is enriched. When they feel completion, that part of you will become complete.
Somehow, continuously, even in Enriching, you have your own small understandings and small goals and small purposes. The same work, if you do it with a small reason, you will have a small result. If you do it with a higher reason, you will have a higher result. That is why, in the Zen tradition they say, ‘You serving someone and an enlightened being serving them, brings a totally different result, even if both of you do the same action.’
If you ask me, ‘Then why is my wife torturing me? Why is my daughter torturing me? Why is my mother torturing me?’, understand that they are nothing but the expression of your own incomplete patterns. When people come and ask me, ‘Swamiji, my mother is torturing me. Please somehow stop it.’, I want to tell them, ‘Actually you are torturing yourself ten times more than your mother is torturing you. Please stop torturing yourself first.’
All the people who you experience as an important part of your life are extensions of you. Even terrorists are nothing but extensions of your flash fears.
All of us have this flash fear pattern. ‘Suddenly if this building collapses in the rain, what will happen?’ ‘Suddenly if there is a flood in the river Kaveri and it washes away the ashram, what will happen?’ All of us have this flash fear pattern. Terrorists are nothing but the representatives of that, embodiments of our flash fear pattern. Even they are part of us. Everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone is part of you - whether you accept it or not, whether you realize it or not.