Much of life today is based on depreciation and denigration of public leaders, groups, governments, religions, corporations and even family members. This is negative living, always pointing out faults in no uncertain terms and ignoring the virtues. A Hawaiian civic leader lamented to us recently that people are cruel in their complaints. “It’s OK to criticize,” she said, “but they should be kindly when doing so!” ¶A story I was told decades ago relates. A guru was sitting with two disciples under a sprawling banyan tree in India. The older student inquired, “Gurujī, how long must I wait until I realize God?” The teacher responded, “Enlightenment is not something that can be predicted, but since you have asked,” he leaned over and spoke in the right ear, “It will be twenty more lives.” “Oh, no!” the youth cried in dismay, “I don’t know if I can wait that long!” The other follower, naturally curious, asked of his own future. The guru whispered, “Liberation will come after you live as many lives as this banyan has leaves!” Hearing this, the seeker jumped to his feet and began to dance. Why? He was suddenly overcome by the assurance that he would ultimately be liberated. Ecstatic with appreciation, he transcended the mind and attained his liberation that very moment. ¶The first student was on the path of depreciation. For him the pot was half empty. The second followed the path of appreciation and was immersed in thankfulness. For him the pot was half full. “Some people complain because God put thorns on roses. Others praise Him for putting roses among the thorns.” ¶Appreciation is a beautiful, soulful quality available to everyone in every circumstance—being thankful for life’s little treasures, grateful for the opportunity to begin the day where you are, appreciating the perfect place your karma and God’s grace have brought you to. Appreciation is life-giving. Depreciation without appreciation is heartlessly destructive. Yet, it is the all-too-common way of our times. When something is done that is good, helpful or loving, it is often overlooked, treated as something expected. No acknowledgement is shown, no gratitude expressed. But if a shortcoming is seen, everyone is swift to point it out! ¶The Vedas, the Tirukural and our many other holy texts indicate a better way. The wise ones knew that all people possess freedom of choice and the willpower to use it. Today that freedom is usually used, unwisely, to downgrade others, as well as oneself. Ignorance seems to be almost as all-pervasive as God. We find it everywhere and within every situation. It does not have to be this way. ¶Gratitude is a quality of the soul. It does not depend on how much we possess. Its opposite, ingratitude, is a quality of the external ego. When we abide in soul consciousness, we give thanks for whatever we have, no matter how little or how much. When in ego consciousness, we are never grateful or satisfied, no matter how much we have.§
I have faith in human integrity, in that unfailing “still small voice of the soul” which each who listens for can hear. We are essentially pure souls temporarily living in a physical body. We can and should use our God-given gift of free will encased in love to make a difference in the world today, even if it is in a small way. All of us making the same difference together do so in a big way. Śishyas should be grateful to their gurus, husbands to their wives, wives to their husbands, parents to their children, children to their parents, students to their teachers and teachers to their students. It’s far more effective to praise others and appreciate what we have than to find fault and complain about what we don’t have! ¶Gratitude and appreciation are the key virtues for a better life. They are the spell that is cast to dissolve hatred, hurt and sadness, the medicine which heals subjective states of mind, restoring self-respect, confidence and security. Shall we review them one at a time and consider a practice, a sādhana, for each? ¶First, gratitude. It is a feeling within the heart that we cannot suppress for long when overcome with abundant memories of all the good that has come into our lives. Most often, people remember the bad happenings, perhaps because they make the deepest impressions in the subconscious and are not expected. Good happenings are expected and therefore tend to be overlooked. ¶The sādhana here is to take out paper and pen and list all the good that has come into your life during the past five years. The list will grow as memory is stimulated. Should it not be possible to think of even one good thing, then write the affirmation several times, “I am a spiritual being of light maturing in the ocean of experience.” Soon a good memory will come up, followed by more. Feelings of loving appreciation will begin to flow toward those who participated in the good times. Forgiveness then wells up for the bad times. Amazingly, on the day I was writing down these thoughts about gratitude, a Kauai islander handed me a paper on which was written the following wisdom from the Catholic mystic, Meister Eckhart: “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.” ¶Now let’s look at appreciation, turning our thanks toward the people in our lives. The sādhana of appreciation is to approach those you are grateful to and tell them, to their face, while looking deep into their eyes, how much you esteem and value them. Be specific. Find details to share so they know this is not a shallow compliment. Explain what each one has done to inspire this loving confrontation and convince each in turn that you are sincere. The look of a full smiling face, eyes shining and heart full of love, perhaps followed by a big hug, is convincing enough in itself. Words of appreciation are words people do not often hear. These loving confrontations do not happen nearly often enough among friends and relatives in today’s world. ¶Loving appreciation is a life-changing force just waiting to be used. Express appreciation to community leaders, business associates, spiritual mentors, family members and friends as often as you can. Loving appreciation is a magic formula that works both ways. When we commend another, we are automatically uplifted.§
Here’s a true story to show how effective a timely expression of appreciation may be. A young man tried the above practice on his rather gruff employer, whose heart melted when he heard the words, “One of the things that I appreciate most about you, sir, is your brilliance as an inventor. You have so much to teach me.” After saying that and more, the youth urged the astonished elder to pass on the voicing of appreciation to another person. The man sat with his only son that same evening and awkwardly told him how much he appreciated his many fine qualities. “I never take time to say such sentimental things,” he said, “but rather tend to keep to myself and be demanding and harsh because of the pressures of work. But please know that I do love you.” The youth began sobbing and confessed, “Father, thank you so much. You can’t imagine how glad and relieved I am to hear that. I was planning to commit suicide tomorrow because I thought you didn’t care about me any more, or even like me. Now I won’t.” You never know how much difference your appreciation will make. ¶To prepare yourself for this sādhana, stand before a mirror and look at your face, right into your eyes, and say aloud, as if talking to another person: “I am grateful to you and appreciate your being in my life.” Then describe to yourself in many sentences all the good you have done during the past five years. You can jog your memory by reading from your list of goodness that you made earlier. You will soon see the reflection in the mirror soften and begin to smile as it absorbs the happy feeling of your appreciation. Once this art is perfected between you and you, you can begin to appreciate others in the same way. Don’t be shy. No one is shy when angry. Why be shy when we are happy and lovingly grateful? ¶There is a brave new world on the horizon for followers of dharma, one in which we are kindly to each other, trusting and aware of one another’s feelings, a world in which we acknowledge our debt to others and express our thanksgiving, first in our silent heart and then outwardly. Gratitude is one of life’s richest resources, containing the power to change people’s lives. Its opposite is a disease that erodes all contentment and fills our life with emptiness and despair. Take heart. These sādhanas on gratitude and appreciation have worked wonders for many. Yes, each one of us can make a difference. The world is changing, and we can make it change for the better, or we can leave it in the hands of those who make changes for the “badder.” It’s our choice. ¶I appreciate you, our reader of Living with Śiva, you and other men and women, boys and girls who are strengthening Hinduism in hundreds of remote communities, upholding the Sanātana Dharma, being a beacon light to others on the path. It is you who are inspiring us to produce this series of books on contemporary Hinduism, giving us so many ideas and cheering us on. You are making a great difference by simply living the dharma, aspiring for self-transformation and speaking on these high principles that are so important to us all and to the future of humanity. ¶Just a little bit of kindness is so easy to express. Just a little bit of kindness heals the mind. And in this day and age, when so many are frustrated, troubled and need a little bit of help, appreciation and encouragement, your kindness can help. Your criticism, your gossip about them, hurts them and also hurts yourself. But the kindness that you express in what you do is healing unto you, too. So, see yourself as a being that always expresses kindness. What you think about, you become. §
Look in the mirror. You have created your face through your many thoughts that have accumulated through this lifetime. Ask yourself, “Am I happy, or am I looking for others to make me happy?” Allow yourself to be kind; allow yourself to express the qualities, the beautiful qualities, of your soul. Your happiness then will come from within yourself, along with a deep contentment and inner peace and joy. Only a moment of thinking kindly about someone, and making a plan that will enable you to help your fellow man, even just a little bit, will awaken from your soul that deep, inner satisfaction, that depth of security you are really seeking. On the other hand, if you allow your mind to dwell in the realm of critical thinking, in the realm of gossiping, without the thought of helping others, you will feel insecure, unhappy. Nothing that could happen will bring you an inner satisfaction. You will be constantly desirous of acquiring, and that which you do acquire will not be satisfying to you. Why? Because there will be no love in your heart. If you find yourself in that state of mind, turn the energies around and find the quietness within you through being kind, being generous, being helpful. The doing brings its own reward. Only in the accomplishment of being big enough to understand the experiences of life that others go through, being tall enough to overlook the many, many things that you could take issue with and perhaps retaliate for, only in acquiring that depth which comes from your soul, can you truly find inner happiness and peace. ¶Go out into the world this week and let your light shine through your kind thoughts, but let each thought manifest itself in a physical deed of doing something for someone else. Lift their burdens just a little bit and, unknowingly perhaps, you may lift something that is burdening your mind. You erase and wipe clean the mirror of your own mind through helping another. We call this karma yoga, the deep practice of unwinding, through service, the selfish, self-centered, egotistical vāsanās of the lower nature that have been generated for many, many lives and which bind the soul in darkness. Through service and kindness, you can unwind the subconscious mind and gain a clear understanding of all laws of life. Your soul will shine forth. You will be that peace. You will radiate that inner happiness and be truly secure, simply by practicing being kind in thought, word and deed. ¶A sure indication of the manifestation of the soul nature on the physical plane is consideration for other people’s feelings, consideration for other people’s state of mind, which means appreciating their good qualities and overlooking their qualities that need improvement. Someone who is considerate is understanding. Those who are not considerate don’t understand and don’t understand that they don’t understand. They don’t understand, and they are not considerate and not appreciative, because they are wrapped up in their individual ego. Yet they expect everyone to be considerate of them. §
Consideration deals with the knowing principle. The opposite of consideration deals with the thinking principle. “I know what he means, and I know it is the best thing for me, but I don’t think that it is right for me to do right now.” That is how the thinking principle conflicts with the knowing principle within us. What does that create? It creates the individual, egotistical personality. ¶Consideration is a great principle to understand, and even a greater principle to unfold within yourself. If you can’t be considerate of someone else’s feelings, your soul is as if locked up in a little cage; and it can’t get out, although it may be crying to express itself and hitting against that wall of the thinking mind which knows nothing at all about the qualities of the soul. ¶Knowing is the manifestation of your spiritual will. Consideration is also a manifestation of your spiritual will. When your spiritual will is awake, you have consideration for other people’s feelings. When your spiritual will is awake, you give in on little things, and you have the power to hold firm on big issues, like keeping the twenty restraints and observances of the ancient Sanātana Dharma. You have an inner culture awakened within you. ¶Have you ever asked somebody to do some little thing, and he says “no”? He refuses to do it because he didn’t think of it first, because he considers within himself that if he did do it, he would be falling under your domination? Why does he feel that way? It is because he has very little control over himself and is caught up in the thinking mind. But if you ask another type of individual to do something, it is done almost the minute you ask, he is so in tune with you. He has consideration for your feelings. He has consideration to the point where he doesn’t want to upset the vibration around himself or around you by creating a situation. ¶By using the power of the thinking principle alone, we create situations for ourselves to face at another time, because each situation is of the subconscious mind and will manifest itself in life at a later date. Consideration is born of knowing, and knowing is a manifestation of your spiritual will, and your will shines forth when your soul begins to unfold itself. So, in order to be considerate, you have to exercise this knowing principle until it becomes manifest in your life every minute of every day. This is how to cultivate consideration. ¶How do we exercise our power to know? We have to look at people and ask ourself, “What do I know about my friends? What do I know about the depth of them? How deep are they?” We ponder, “What do I know about what I am reading—not just what I think about what I read? What do I really know about anything that I pick up and hold in my hand?” The knowing principle is very, very great. We study our mind: “If my intuition is working, do I know it is my intuition? If my subconscious mind is influencing my actions, do I know that I am attached to that state of mind?” What do you know? What do you not know? That is very important to know. ¶Going against what we know is a great pitfall. It is born from lack of consideration, lack of the ability to live in harmony with others, to fit into situations. Lacking consideration, we fail to fulfill the basic law of spiritual unfoldment: “Never miss an opportunity to serve.” When we deliberately go against what we know, we create a burden that we don’t want in our life, and we suffer under it. Then we ask, “Why do I feel so uninspired? I was doing so fine. I was so spiritual. I was feeling just wonderful. I felt all the life forces flowing through me, and all of a sudden it all stopped. Why did this have to happen to me? I thought I was doing fine. I was feeling so good.” That’s what I call a negative slump. §
Everybody falls into negative slumps at one time or another when they deny the God principle within themselves, when they deny their knowing power, absolutely, deliberately deny it, by allowing their thinking principle—what they themselves think as a little ego—to take hold and cancel off, just like an eraser on the blackboard of life, the soul’s attempts to express itself. ¶For example, you are going along fine, just wonderful, you are feeling great, and a little opportunity to serve comes up and you miss it. You know you should, but you don’t think it is quite the time, when it would be just as easy to fulfill whatever you know you should fulfill. But you think, “Well, this isn’t exactly the best time for me.” You have very good reasons to say no, excellent reasons, because the thinking mind is always filled with excellent reasons. They are wonderful for the time, but they wear out. That is why we don’t exercise our memory and remember all the reasons we had for our actions. ¶If I asked why did you do this and that and those unseemly actions, you might say, “Yes, I know what you’re thinking. I had a very good reason at the time, but I can’t recall it just now.” You don’t want to remember the reason, because you know it was only an excuse sufficient for a time. Yet the action remains, along with the reason, which was a weak one, vibrating in the subconscious mind. If you accumulate two or three such incidents, pretty soon you fall into a negative slump, where you don’t feel like doing anything and nothing seems to make sense to you in the spiritual world or any other world. You just drag along and say, “Oh my, the burdens of life are getting pretty heavy.” Eventually that condition wears out, too, and you swing back and get a little light in you. That is why people turn to stimulants, excesses of chocolate, sugary yum-yums (the junk food business makes millions on the negative slumpers) and various innervating beverages, such as coffee and soft drinks, to pep up the physical body. But the body can take only so much of these negative slumps before it reacts and, in its reaction, becomes unhealthy. Finally it succumbs to disease; it is not at ease within itself because the subconscious mind is not at ease. ¶When you refrain from denying that soul source within you and fulfill what you know you should do, then you are filled and thrilled with life force. Your soul is shining out in the material plane. You don’t go into negative slumps. You become like the people who don’t just get up to do things, they jump up and are happy to do anything they have an opportunity to do. But deny your knowing principle, and it becomes an effort to do anything—even an effort to remember how you should respond and what you should do. ¶Many people know they should do certain things to help out, to help their families, their relatives and friends. But as the weeks go by, what they know they forget, because they really didn’t want to do it in the first place. They didn’t think they had time; they didn’t think they could help; they didn’t think they could afford it. They have so many limitations. They put their poor old soul into a cage. Excuse me, I am going to rephrase that. They put their poor young soul into a cage, because old souls manifest consideration. Young souls are just learning how. And this poor young soul climbs right into this little cage and sits, like a newborn baby, waiting for the subconscious mind—which has been filled with negative activity, negative thoughts and a negative approach to life—to unwind itself. But the soul within has to first watch itself wind up—and it winds up through the many lives, with all its negative creations, all of its thinking versus knowing, and thinking winning out every time. Then it has to unwind, and when it does unwind, pretty soon knowing gets stronger than thinking. Then we notice a spiritual unfoldment. Then we know that observation is taking hold. ¶Do you know how I can tell when someone is spiritually unfolding? When I suggest something, and he takes me up on the suggestion and observes and thinks of the next step before I think of it, I know that he is spiritually unfolding, because through his observation he is producing knowing, and through his knowing he is being considerate of his fellow man, just as he expects everyone to be considerate of him. §
Those who are not considerate get very hurt when someone does not consider their feelings. Why? Because their feelings, their personality, are sticking out like antennas all over them, ready to be kinked up and twisted up when somebody is not considerate or loving toward them. Yet they don’t show others the same consideration which they expect for themselves. ¶That is what creates the negative dream—everyone expecting everyone else to be very considerate of their feelings. And that is why we have etiquette books, to teach people to be considerate of other people’s feelings—to teach those who really don’t want to be considerate, but have to learn to be because they are out to build careers and make money, and they know they won’t do so well unless they learn to be considerate, so they have to intellectually know how. But it is all surface. The word insincere describes the person who doesn’t fulfill what he knows he should fulfill, but pretends that he does. We call him insincere. ¶That insincerity doesn’t hurt anybody but himself, because you can’t send out anything out into the world but that it comes back. When does it come back? It comes back later in life. He may get along fine when his body is young and healthy. He can be just as insincere as he wants to be, but later on in life he won’t get along so fine, because the karmic rebounds start coming back, the reactions start coming back. They start coming back from other people, who become insincere with him. They also start coming back from deep within himself, from his conscience, when he learns that the way he had been was not right. Someday, unless he is fortunate enough to study yoga and clear it all up—perhaps through burning up the emotional memory patterns using the vāsanā daha tantra—he will suffer over it. And he will suffer over it a great deal. ¶The art of consideration is a real art, because it is a constant study. It really is a constant study. And it is a creative study. It is the art of learning how not to just get by; it is the art of learning how to fulfill your destiny through following the knowing principle inside you. ¶When you are in for the realization of the Self, you have to stop the cycles of hurt feelings and regrets. Just stop! You have to learn by exercising your knowing power and realize, “If I do this, it is going to have that kind of result. If I do that, which opposes my knowing of what I should do, I also have to know what kind of result that is going to create.” Everything we do does have its consequences. It is up to you to sit down and meditate on such matters. That is what meditation is for. Meditation in the beginning stages is for getting a grip on your lower states of mind, so that the lower states of mind come under your control, so you learn to use your brain and don’t loan it or rent it out. ¶When somebody causes you to do something that you don’t feel that you want to do, or that you know is not the right way for you to behave, you are loaning out your brain to him. If somebody can make you feel antagonistic all day long because he didn’t treat you right in the morning, he is using your brain, because he put that feeling into motion. He started something in you that you cannot conquer. But if, at the time of the incident, you straighten out the vibration with the person who made you feel antagonistic, by being considerate of his feelings, then you would be using your brain, and that is what you have to do. Maybe he is a young soul who will not learn to be considerate for a long, long time, and we couldn’t expect that of him. That is why you have to meditate; that is why you have to get these things figured out—who’s who on the scale of evolution. ¶Remember these three principles: 1) Your thinking is going to fight what you know. It is going to fight it all the time. You know you should do certain things, but you may not do them, because you have other reasons, and your other reasons will be good reasons, which you quickly forget because they are only good for the moment; 2) If you allow your knowing to dominate, you will be exercising your spiritual will. You will be alive. You will be dynamic. Spiritual forces will flow through you; 3) If you exercise your spiritual will, you will have a great power of observation and a great power over your own mind. No one will do your thinking for you. ¶After you have awakened your power of observation, your soul shines forth, and after meditation you will go into contemplation. You may think you are attaining high states of spiritual consciousness, but for real progress, your soul will have to manifest itself in what you do on the Earth all the time. So, these are your steps. Don’t allow the thinking to fight the knowing. Don’t allow the thinking to rule your willpower. Then you will be spiritual. §