Feeling Obliged

Column by Sri Sri Ravishankar
  

Feeling Obliged?    

Belongingness can bring about a host of negative emotions. Like demand, jealousy, unawareness and lack of gratitude. Just look into your own life, you feel more grateful to strangers than the people you feel "belong" to you. Belongingness reduces gratefulness, awareness, and gives rise to demands which destroys love. This is the biggest problem in relationships. People are nice to strangers and give more attention to them. With a sense of belongingness comes carefreeness and lack of attention.

Look belongingness can make you insensitive, dull, and take away the charm in life!


Anyway, who belongs to whom in this world? Here you are a stranger and everyone is a stranger to you!
Blessed are those who feel themselves as a stranger!


You feel more obligation to a stranger than the person you feel belongs to you. Obligation is very good to keep a check on your ego. It makes you humble. There is no greater antidote to ego than humility. Being humble is the beginning of all virtues.


People have such resistance for obligations. They do not realize that they are always under obligations, whether giving or taking! Dull people think that one is obliged only when one takes. The wise knows that even when one is giving one is under obligations, as the person has accepted what one gives. So whether you give or take you are under obligations. And if someone does not give or take, you are still under obligation! For they are freeing you from visible obligations!!


That is to say, you are obliged to all those who do not make you obliged!!! Got it?


Life (you) renews itself everytime by becoming a stranger in this old and familiar world.
You are simply loaded with obligations and you are a total stranger in this world every moment!
How does it feel?


Jai Gurudev!! 

EGO

Column by Sri Sri Ravishankar
  

 EGO 

 When does Ego happen?

1. When you don't get attention.

2. When you seem to be losing attention.

3. When you get attention.

Ego causes heaviness, discomfort. It doesn't let love flow. Ego can be transcended by knowing the Truth; by inquiring "Who am I?" Often, your attitude towards one who has ego is of contempt or jealousy. But rather you should have compassion, or even pity, isn't it?

There is also a positive aspect of ego. It drives one to do some work. A person will do a job either out of compassion or out of ego. Most of the work in the society is by boosting the ego. But in Satsang, work is done out of love. Ego is separateness; non-belongingness. It is wanting to prove and to possess.

And when you wake up and see, there is nothing to be proved and nothing to possess, ego dissolves.

Jai Gurudev!!  

Go away!

It was a hot scorching noon
She held a glass of water
under a cool shaded tree
He was a lost and weak man
She gave him all that she had

He sat next to her and spoke
Forgetting his pain, he smiled
Never had he felt so comfortable
He slept in peace as she looked on
Hearing his breath and the breeze

While she was busy with work
he lost his heart to a beauty
Now he had the strength to leave
He did not need her any more
No longer was he lost and weak

He thanked her for her help
He held his love and walked away
When she ran behind them in tears
He threw her aside and yelled
"Thank you for the water, now go away"

Love is my Form

I was fortunate to study for 5 years in Sai Baba's school in Ooty for my primary education. Till date I remember this song sung by Baba:

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Love is my form
Truth is my breath
Bliss is my food
My Life is my message
Expansion is my Life

No Reason for LOVE
No Season for LOVE
No Birth No Death


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