
It was a pleasant evening, as we all assembled to do a group meditation in an old age home. It houses aged women for their stay, as even some are differently abled. Everyone greeted me with love as I entered to be part of this program. To start with, I explained them how to be connected with the God during meditation. The connectivity happens, when one becomes thoughtless and disconnected with world outside in the meditation merely keeping the focus on the divine light in the heart. A supposition for this connectivity.
The meditation kept these elderly souls bound to their inner World keeping away from the struggles and situations that would have brought them to wherever they are. The cool breeze on this winter evening engulfed us in serenity. Just got united in the divine connection effortlessly with multiple people meditating together. Always said, the group meditation or prayers multiplies exponentially the individual act.
As we finished, an elderly women asked me, How to know that we are experiencing the grace of God? The question really amazed me, as the same thought was there in my mind few days back. Happened to even hear a lecture by one of the enlightened soul explaining that. What a real coincidence, encountering the same search. I attempted to answer that explaining the normal philosophy of that we are divided into mind, body and Soul. The body and mind are acquired here and the soul is eternal. It is difficult to perceive with the limitation of the mind what grace of God is. The mind activities are purely the outcome of experiences through five senses what we have had in our life. Then, this limited mind cannot perceive the unlimited grace surrounding us all the time. That brought me to a stop to rethink, then how do we experience the grace. Not sure, whether I gave a convincing reply with my limited knowledge. But the question tagged along with me, as I returned back from that place.
Is the grace shine on us through Light of the Sun, moon and celestial objects or the air we breathe or water and food we take to keep us alive or being in places of worship or anything beyond all these? If that was so, how do I know that I am experiencing the grace. Even, I have heard many saying the actions we do is because of His grace. That is all the presumption for one to accept it with blind faith. I went ahead in further thinking, is it not that anything that is making us joy is the way to experience the Grace. It may be an external thing or internal state of being. Joy is conceived to be beyond happiness or it is even mentioned as bliss. As I walk on the road, a glance at beautiful flower which reflected my inner beauty can also be said to be a grace. Again, am I using my mind to experience it or was my soul experiencing it?
A question that made me to ponder over and over again, still that search remains in me. I may be reflecting many of you, in this search. Let that search be on in this Journey of life walking with His Grace knowingly or unknowingly. In any way, I will end up benefiting by that Grace.
Written by : Ramesh Kumar K (Ram)
Founder and CEO of Aikya-Oneness Foundation
Reach the author on socialservices@aikya-oneness.org
The grace of God is a continued experience by oneself. This ultimate bliss of experience of God’s grace can be different for different individuals, as it need not objective, at different times, at different locations and at different situations.
The moment you think you’re blessed, you are. It is so simple and natural. Each Soul is blessed and is in bless all the time. The Joy in the experience reflects the bliss.
Regards,
Medhatithi Shastri
Very nicely said. Thanks for sharing your views.
When one anticipates the happenings and accepts every step of life as is , that means Grace of ultimate spirit exist in life. Why is that thought? A simple thing is that, we are in line with the happenings of the universe shredding all our expectations and living the life without binding to the wants of the individual.
When we separate our thoughts, wants with the happenings and cry for what do not happens that means we have rejected or we are away from the ultimate spirit as we fail to understand His language or His plans. When we lean on him completely , then there is no work for the mind…it’s just walking life as it comes having the needs in mind and not the greed.
Thanks Ram for a wonderful triggering thought.
Surrender to God is a way to embrace His grace always. Very wonderful said. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Ramesh, my brother, very interesting paper on divine grace. I so enjoy the questions your mind and soul working together create.
As I read through your thought process I felt a need to define our terms so that we could all be on the same page in a discussion of these matters. So, here is my understanding of how we are defining terms such as grace, soul, and mind.
In the Christian world I was raised in the word soul is most closely associated with the word Indians typically use with mind. The word that you use for the aspect of us the interfaces with the spiritual realm (including the experience of things such as enlightenment) is what we were told is the spirit, and you were taught is the soul.
This means that I must take discussions with you through a bit of a conversion process. It does not look to me like the two cultures are seeing things terribly differently, they are only phrasing what we see of the human being differently.
Okay, so much for the words mind and soul. Now onto the definition of grace. I view this word as meaning that which our mind cannot produce for us apart from its union with the soul (the spiritual aspect of our being.
This definition I think gets to the core issue you raised in your post. Saying that our mind can operate from a place of disharmony with the soul (the spiritual aspect of us) implies that the dysfunction our species runs into is not generated by our functioning mind, but by our mind attempting to function outside of its natural union with the soul.
This, in turn, means that our objective is not ultimately to suppress the opperation of the mind, but to experience a restoration of harmony between it and the spiritual aspect of our being. Of course in order for us to experience this restoration of harmony we must be willing to turn away from our mind in its present disharmonious state and focus on the voice of the soul within us (as you mentioned in your post).
The problem with this proceedure is that we do not know how much or little our disharmonious mind is a part of the proceedure of turning away our broken mind and turning toward our soul. If our mind is covertly directing our turning, then we are doomed from the start to end up where we started, only with more pride in our acheivments rooted in our mind, thus guaranteeing even more dysharmony with us.
It is this question that I see being the core issue addressed so miraculously in the story of Amrta. There has always been this problem our species has had to resolve; that our mind must be involved in the pursuit of spirituality, and yet it is our mind that has done all of the damage our species experiences. So, how can we proceed?
Interestingly, this is where the grace of God comes in. What our mind cannot generate in its present condition, God can. The thing that holds our species mind in a state of dyshamony with the soul is that our mind was seduced to thinking it needs knowledge of good and evil, of the right path and wrong path, in order to guarantee that we ourselves remain right. This effectively puts the entire weight of our destiny squarely on the shoulders of our mind’s efforts and ability to know what is right and what is wrong. And this effectively divorced our species mind from its soul.
It is the great irony of our species that our fear-driven quest to ensure we remain right with/acceptable to God/love/life led to us no longer being right with (in harmony with) God/love/life.
And now our species must somehow return to a state of inner hamony with God (our spiritual self/our soul) while using our damaged mind.
This is hwere we see the story of Amrta really shine. Siva (god, the image of the human mind in harmony with the soul) must sacrificially swallow the poison of shame, guilt, produced by those inner fears (the Asuras), inorder to save those aspects fo our mind that know we are loved and accepted (the Devas).
It is those aspects of our mind that knows we are loved that generate all of the creative, industrious, insightful, practical, and productive things our species generates. When. We fear that we are not worthy of being loved, we conversely produce all of those destructive, compulsive, obsessive, prideful, actions.
Only in seeing that God (our spiritual self/our soul) is willing to take the poison of guilt on himself, that is, to forgive us our sins) can we be free to pursue restoration of the inner harmony between our soul and mind (enlightenment) , without our damaged mind commandeering our quest for restoration/enlightenment.
This is an emminently Indian idea, because it is an emminently human idea. All cultures of humans across the planet have run into this very predicament. God has gifted the Indian culture with a strong focus on things spiritual, so it is the culture that generated this story that expresses this human issue in such wonderful detail.
We can all learn from this marvelous grace from God, but we will have to first let go of our own fear-driven attempts at producing enlightenment (Amrta/the food of the God).We practically come to this letting go by means of us humbly accepting that we have done much that is wrong, but that God still loves us anyway, enough to forgive us our sins. Accepting this can only happen at the cost of our fear-driven mind’s attepts at making ourself right by its nervous focus on what is the right path and what is the wrong path.
Only in response to divine grace (forgiveness) does our mind become free to feel loved. And only in this state of feeling loved will it not generate even more subtle destruction in our lives.
Brother John, I felt so good to see your comments. When we try to amalgamate the two cultures i.e. eastern and western, a symphony of life music comes out bringing in the best.
The ripples in the ocean doesn’t disturb the true ocean itself. The mind only act as ripples in this case. When one learns to look beyond these ripples a union with the God or ultimate Spirit experiencing his Grace happens. A revelation of true Self of being a human. All qualities reveal, as one is required to. Beyond all negativity holding us to be a being.
Deeply thank you for the valuable time taken to share your thoughts. Certainly, it induced me to think more deep into it.
Yes, how beautiful His grace. This is the day He has made! I am so grateful to breathe His grace today.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Ramish.
Thank you for Sharing your Joy of Grace. Be blessed always.