Anything Fully Experienced Turns to Joy or Bliss.
An introduction by Krishnarajji, dasa at Oneness University, India.
Becoming awakened doesn’t mean you don’t face challenges and difficult emotions like fear, pain, etc. All these are experiences that are very much a part of the mind. This is how the mind begins.
The objective of all spiritual processes put us into a state of consciousness where you do not resist. How well can you experience, how quickly can you pay attention to your feelings, and turn the experience of hurt and pain into joy?
When you move to gratitude, you feel stillness inside, and there’s not much need to resist or fight with anything. Things look more still, perfect and calm – this is bliss. This is your aim: to help people reach a state where there is a constant stillness and calmness, while experiencing life’s situations and emotions. Stillness is NOT the absence of thought.
Move into a position where you can watch the experience, and observe the mental activities. When there is resistance to what is happening inside, the process of trying to move away consumes a lot of energy. It makes you feel low, and that is when you cannot experience reality as it is. This is when you go on accumulating more charges, end relationships and create many problems in your life.
Your most important focus in life is to ask the question: How can I pay attention to these experiences?
Freedom is about experiencing what is inside, not about finding a way where all life situations are perfect without adversity.
Nine steps for Handling your Experiences, by Sri Anandagiriji
1. Become conscious that you are suffering. You need to admit it . When a charge surfaces, when you are not feeling all right, the force of habit and social conditioning is to tell yourself that you’re feeling fine. When you are in pain and suffering, you need to acknowledge and accept it. When you are in fear, there is no point in saying, I’m feeling fine. Admit you are feeling low.
2. Become aware of the habitual questions of the mind that take you away from the discomfort. The mind throws up these questions: Who caused this suffering? Why did they do it to me? Why should life be so cruel to me? This makes us interested in finding the cause and then blaming somebody or something, and takes us away from experiencing what is going on inside. If you get stuck in these questions, you cannot concentrate. What habitual questions are you asking? Once you’re suffering, the important part is how you deal with it. Who caused the suffering is irrelevant.
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