Do we choose our family?
A devotee was asking me, 'Swamiji, in every birth, do we choose to be born together with our family, loved ones and the ones we have karmic relationships with?
Let me tell you, you don't even want to be born in the same continent as your spouse!
By nature, no two humans want to stay together.
This is the truth.
Understand, the human mind is not hardwired for living together.
When you are forced to live together due to some circumstances, once you leave the body, you just escape from the other person! Such suffocation is experienced with the other person that you just escape the moment you leave the body. You don't even take birth in the same culture.
Love of the loved one disappears the moment your consciousness leaves your skin.
There is no karmic relationship, so don't even be afraid that at some time you may have prayed to have the same husband or wife for seven janmas, seven births, and now it is really going to happen! Only those who have achieved the maturity to understand their boundary and the other person's boundary, and who are independently dependent, will even be born together.
There is a story by Rabindranath Tagore called Eternal Love Story. In that story, the man and woman were in love for 50 years. They started seeing each other when they were 20, and they lived till 70. Do you know the secret? They lived on opposite banks of the Ganga, and they met each other only in their own separate boats!
So do not bother.
There is no karmic relationship, and you don't stay with the love of the loved ones.
Meditation
Destroy all the patterns that exist in you!
You hold so tightly onto your possessions, your relationships, your experiences, and your identity, only because you have never really confronted the truth: none of these can be with you forever.
A single intense experience that all this can be utterly, irreversibly destroyed in a moment is enough to disillusion you about all that you are clinging to.
Naturally, your awareness is centered in that which can never be destroyed.
Both yukti and bhakti are awakened in you.
This 21 minute meditation burns down all what you think you are.
Instructions
Here, you visualize everything around you and within you being burnt by Kālāgni, the flames of annihilation. Whatever you experience inside and outside, is burning and getting extinguished in this mighty fire. The whole material world is being consumed by flaming tongues of fire. The entire inner world including all your thoughts, feelings about people, situations, and experiences are all burning to ashes. Visualize continuously that whatever you think about the world, about anything, is burning. It no longer exists. Your attitudes, your interests, your passions, your greed, your desires and your fears are all being consumed in the fire. When everything is burnt, what remains? Only your awareness, I am. This experience can drastically break your conditioning and push you into enlightenment.
Everything is Business
A disciple who wanted to take sannyas once came to me and said, 'Now I understand, Swamiji, how every relationship is business: father, mother, brother, sister, friend. Other than the relationship with Guru, everything is business!'
I said, 'Stop! Even this is business. Even between us is business. '
Listen: each one has their business with you.
Your lover has business with your beauty, your looks. Your partner has business with your money. Your employer has business with your degree, your certificate.
I have business with your consciousness.
Each one looks at your identity in a certain angle.
Your lover who wants to physically enjoy you is going to look at how you look, and make his decisions based on that. That is his business.
A person who is looking at employing you is going to look at your education, your productivity. Your parents' business is to look at how much you will support their ideas about life and society, or society's ideas about them.
Each one is busy with their business.
My business does not bother about your education, your money, how you look, or your social background. That is why my decisions are not based on that.
My decisions are based on your consciousness.
I am very clear what I want from you. I want you to be enlightened and take up the responsibility for enlightening others.
Only as long as you are expanding in that direction, I am going to be working with you. If that is not happening, I am going to work with somebody else.
If you understand that my business is actually your business also, you attain at-one-ment.
Then a unique love happens between you and me, which is eternal.
This is what I call Mahabhava – the great relationship.
Contemplation
Understand what business the Cosmos wants to do with you. Understand what business society wants to do with you, what business your company wants to do with you, and what business your family wants to do with you. When you understand that every level is business, the weak sentiments will be forgotten.