Keno Upanishad II-5: Here if one has realised, then there is accomplishment. Here if one has not realised, then there is utter ruin. Having realised Brahman in all beings, and having withdrawn from this world, the wise become immortal.
I shall attempt to write something scary today, that which has been heard by every Hindu during their religious discourses or interactions with religious gurus, spiritual leaders, or scholastic works that have captured our attention towards sacred texts many a time.
But I’ll scare you this time by influencing you to take action. Do you want to shout with all your might to gain freedom of expression and have a say, or do you want to be bubbly gossipers, teasers, and material seekers?
Then I must warn you that you will give up very soon on accomplishments and become depressed or welcome frequent failures. This advice is from someone who hasn’t ever judged her failures and success and has just moved herself further ahead with time. When people gave up on her or misunderstood her intentions, she retreated and balanced her life alone for the better.
This lesson is very different from the ones that ask mortals to withdraw from worldly pleasures and retreat in the form of penance to gods in oblivion.
The lesson is to retreat every day to yourself each evening and give up on something and achieve one single step towards thought cleansing, knowledge, or education regarding your culture, skill, spiritual pursuits, or most loved activity you did or discovered among people, even if you know it is not right to pursue it, because you do not know. Were you quarrelsome and opinionated?
No one knows anything. Those who know don’t, and those who don’t, know.
Self-realization and acceptance of each person as Brahman will take away your vices against them along with your stress that comes from poor interpersonal relationships.
A Brahman is the most evolved soul according to Hindu scriptures. Such a person is most knowledgeable. Try becoming evolved.
Have you realized that each of them whom you talk about is a Brahman?
How many times have you had futile and vicious grievances against them, or have you wanted to subdue them through your clever ways?
When you realize that they are Brahman, you will be positively observing them and not finding faults.
To the young and dynamic individuals, such a state of mind will be scary. It is difficult to renunciate at a young age or during the peak of your career, for example. It is very difficult to give up in actuality.
You had dreams with people. You wanted to stand out among them, but you found to your dismay that someone who claims to own their spirituality is only some enterprise wanting to earn money to carry out their preachings and develop a brand of products that harm the appetite rather than soothe bodily vagaries.
Can you renounce chicken, eggs, and fish? If this is what renunciation means, our tastes will not allow us to, and according to medical recommendations, we must never give up on our protein requirement that would be unfulfilled otherwise.
But we can always replace non-vegetarian food with soy proteins, isn’t it?
Do we want lots of money to survive, or is it that we just need something to survive while engaging ourselves in academics, spiritual work, and divine knowledge? Are we ready for the Buddhist stage of attainment?
What is our position or quality as a person?
For now, your progress towards wisdom is to realize the sanctity of another person by not needing to set them right. Retreat to the confines of your mind and tune melodiously into the life’s song unsung by you because you were scared to give up on your vices previously.
Give up on changing your circumstances. Tread steady alone amidst people, as you sometimes are left with no other way, no other hope in your life’s trajectory.
You upskill yourself daily in spirituality and in religion and think about your actions if need be, but mostly think about goodness, honesty, work, routine, and care for other human beings, and utter limited words out of your mouths until you think that your words might be needed.
These would be drastic changes in your upskilling because spiritual people read the Bible of medicine at least 40 times in their lifetime, yet only say, I am in the process of learning. They renounce cleverness and ego to work hard and prepare for just another patient to solve who might seek you for curing them.
You are wise; you decide not to follow the crowd but accept the crowd as a part of Brahman and Brahman in itself.
You enjoy the boredom. You laugh a lot at children and their antics. You eat modestly, exercise to survive, buy to remain clean, and learn.
You are bound to your routine, undeterred. You are always grateful by default. You have no reason to be grateful at times, but this is what you practice most days of the week, and you ruminate on your ways towards self and thought control.
You will not become a saint this way. Instead, you will become a person who lives their life according to them. You will have no patience to live another way and truly live that way, like an immortal.
Realize the Brahman in yourself and others. Cultivate self-realization, which is according to you. People might judge you; make peace with it. Your judging mind only pursues knowledge, or Adhyatam. Nothing else impresses you, and you give up on worldly pleasures to only subsist on worldly duties. Once you reach such a state of mind, experience a change in your trajectory.
What you will achieve is truly your achievement. You acknowledge it and no one else. Others might have walked your path also, so do not compare who is better.
You are your own betterment, one step ahead in spirituality.
Initially you will feel scared of yourself, because it is very difficult to embrace divine abundance all by yourself. And one day you will be lucky that you achieved it. Now you are a strong person with a soft heart that melts and is expressive but is not fragile enough to sway with massive storms that you might face at some points of time.
Storms are inevitable. Recover and reconstruct from them. Retreat from the usual mortal ways and become immortal.
Splendid you shall feel with honest hard work and small gains while losing 0.5% vice about others with each coming day.
Those who know spirituality, Brahman, gods, rights, and wrongs do not know them. Try to find your way out towards spirituality and wisdom.
You can always share spiritual lessons with keen people who are like-minded and dare to differ in a way that should be respected as their opinion about your ideas.
I have a few such influential friends in my life. I am lucky. I feel so.
Until my life ends, I shall live like an immortal, fulfilling myself through self-actualization.
Know the Brahman inside you, but remember that you don’t know. You know nothing. Dare not to know to know.
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