Dr. Vijai S Shankar MD.PhD.
Published on www.academy-advaita.com
The Netherlands
29 September 2019
Patience (4)
“Understanding”
You need to understand that you gain every moment as a gift from life because man does not make any moment in life. Those who cannot recognise that life where you are is a gain and those who think that life is a futuristic gain, for them impatience will exist and not patience.
Because you do not recognise that you gain every moment, without doing anything, you are not able to celebrate the gain of any moment. And you want to gain so that you can be happy in your life.
Everyday you say, I want to be happy always, but you are not. When tomorrow comes you will be saying the same thing again: ‘I want to be happy always’, but you are not.
In every aspect of life, be it objective or subjective, you say: I must meet him; I must meet her; I must have this; I do not want that; I do not want that to happen; I only want this to happen. Otherwise, you feel that you will not be happy.
Where you are, live it. Do not be dependent on the future to be happy. You do not accept the moment as it is in life. You expect how the moment should be in life. How the moment should be in life can never gain you patience in life.
The understanding that there is always something in the moment gains you patience. Understand that in life something is already there every moment. You cannot make another thing be present in the moment where something is already there, because you do not make any moment in life. This understanding brings patience in your life.
When you begin to recognise that which is already there, which is your aliveness, and understand, in that aliveness, that you are receiving what you are meant to receive, patience will happen to you.
Life will provide and life provides without your asking for it. You do not ask life to provide a moment, yet life provides every moment for you. Understand that what is provided in the moment is only for you.
Therefore, in your life, stay where you are. The moment you understand that you have been provided with what you are meant to have in the moment where you are, patience will happen to you.
The enlightened provide everyone they know with the wisdom that life provides everyone with what they are meant to have. When this understanding happens to man and woman, patience happens to them.
The enlightened are patient in every moment of life.
Author: Dr. Vijai S. Shankar
© Copyright V. S. Shankar 2019
Editor’s Note:
‘Consider the lilies of the field – they toil not, neither do they spin – yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’ Over the ages literature has been recognising nature’s care of animate life. Everything is provided to sustain its growth and happiness - without prior request. Aliveness itself has been the supreme gift from life itself to every detail in nature. Did you put in a request to be alive? Yet man has forgotten his birthright, which is life itself – being alive. Man has fought man instead to establish his birthright, albeit illusory. He has lost his aliveness and found death. But for the compassion of the enlightened, whose gift of understanding is offered in this article and elsewhere for those who may receive it, man will remain impatient and in need of more. Not so for those who come to understand.
Julian Capper, UK