FROM PUTTAPARTHI...SPIRITUAL QUOTIENT - 16: JUST LET GO!!!

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SPIRITUAL QUOTIENT – 16

JUST LET GO!!!

There was once a sadhu, who was a sadhu only by vocation; but not by thought, word and deed; for he had donned the ochre robe not because he had any immortal longings for liberation but because this life suited his laziness!

This fake sadhu had a small hut by the Ganges; the water of the Ganges quenched his thirst and the generosity of the gullible pilgrims satiated his hunger – enviable was his position.

One day, while sitting on the banks of the Ganges as he was entertaining his idle curiosity; he saw a shiny object floating down the stream. Without a second thought, he plunged into the water; swam with deft strokes; reached the shiny object; retrieved it out of the water; held it close to his bosom; claimed it as his and to his utter amazement and joy he saw that it was a beautiful silver vessel. With that vessel held in one hand, he started swimming back to the bank.

As he was swimming, he realized that the current was so strong that the more he tried to extricate himself, the more viciously it sucked him to its center; for he had only one hand to save himself!

After a desperate struggle, the instinct of self-preservation gained the better of his greed. He let go of the vessel and with both his hands and with a Herculean effort, he swam back to safety. On reaching the land he looked back and saw the shiny object floating away from him.

He couldn’t bear the anguish and burst out into tears and wept and wailed: “Oh! I lost my silver vessel!”

A real sage – a man of genuine dispassion and renunciation - was seeing this entire panorama, all this drama.

He came to him and said: “Friend! That vessel was floating down the stream and would have continued in its course had you not interrupted it. You swam to it, gleefully grasped it, claimed it as yours, then to save your own life you let it go and now you say you lost your vessel?

When was it ever yours? Is not all this sorrow your own making?”

First we painstakingly strive to possess them and then madly wrestle to preserve them – all the while forgetting the fundamental fact that everything in this world follows the law of movement and change. Nothing belongs to us.

 

“Welcome all that comes to you. Stand not in the way of that which departs you.” (Including human beings) For what is yours’ will be yours’ & will come to you. What is NOT yours’ will never come to you!!! Then why grieve? JUST LET GO!

 

To be completely at ease, relaxed and contented with what is there with us – is real renunciation.

 

This doesn’t mean however that we shouldn’t strive to have material possessions. We can enjoy every materialistic possession & ‘let go’ of the same when the time comes without any grief when we realize that the same has been given to us for rent by the UNIVERSE!!!

 

The same applies to ‘near & dear’ ones as well!

 

SAIRAM

Moderator,

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