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SriRangaSri List Archive: Message 00146 Jan 2003

 
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Dear friends,

I am delighted to share with you another extract from the book
"Thousand Names of Vishnu" (Vishnu Sahasranamam) written by
Sri.Eknath Eswaran. I really enjoyed reading it and am hoping you
will all too.

Regards,

dAsan,
Sudarshan

----------------------------

(QUOTE)
RUDRA

Another of the Thousand Names associated with 'karma' is RUDRA, which
comes from the root 'rud' which in Sanskrit means "to cry". We
associate the Lord with love, so we find it difficult to understand
how he can be called "he who makes us cry". But if God is all, he is
suffering as well as joy. As Rudra, he personifies the unavoidable
fact that most of us learn from our mistakes only because they bring
us sorrow. Suffering is not the Lord inflicting punishment on us. Our
ignorance in making choices is responsible for most of the sorrow we
bring upon ourselves.

A certain amount of suffering in life is not only inescapable but
even necessary for growth. It took me a long time to understand this,
though my spiritual teacher tried to teach me very early in life.
When I made a mistake and suffered for it, she would be very
sympathetic. She didn't gloat over my suffering or withdraw her
support of me either; but in wordless ways, she helped me to learn
not to make that mistake again. At the time I didn't understand what
seemed a strange lack of sympathy. Today I know that if someone has
been behaving selfishly, it is much better for that person to suffer
the consequences and learn to change than it is to remain blind and
fail to grow, which just means letting problems grow instead.

Everyday I see the verification of the law of karma. Ill health is
often an instance: if we do not take care of our body and maintain
our peace of mind, our health is bound to suffer. That is Rudra
making us cry. When our breathing is laboured, when our digestion is
upset, when our equanimity is destroyed, we do cry -- and this crying
is a signal, a red warning from body and mind, reminding us that
something fundamental in our life is wrong. Pain, illness,
insecurity, and mental turmoil are all loving signals from the Lord,
who is telling us, "It's time you gave yourself a checkup. It is time
you learned to change your ways". That is Rudra speaking to us.

Sometimes we manage to delay payment in the operation of karma, but
then it hits us with heavy interest. I prefer the cash karma, where
if you make a mistake you pay for it immediately. However painful
this may be for the moment, there is no interest hanging over your
head. You give out six dollars worth of inconsiderateness, and on the
spot you get six dollars worth in return. The debt is cancelled. When
you make a mistake, in other words, it much better to take the
consequences on the chin than to try to put them off, for
consequences tend to compound, making the karma load bigger and
bigger.

When I was growing up, it was considered imprudent in my village to
have any kind of debt. No one would borrow unless they absolutely had
to; the consequences of debt were just too serious. If you borrowed a
small amount and paid it back quickly, the penalty wasn't bad. But
there are certain moneylending practices in India whereby the
interest on the loan ends up greater than the principal, so that the
longer the loan is drawn out, the more you owe. You can borrow a
thousand rupees, pay interest every month, and find out after three
years that you owe not one thousand rupees but fifteen hundred.
Similarly, in the spiritual realm, the weight of unpaid karma can be
a tangible liability. When you accumulate karmic debts, therefore,
pay them back right away, because interest builds up. Don't be
tempted to reschedule your karmic debt, and don't wait for interest
rates to go down; it doesn't happen.

IN India we have a peculiar phrase, "to file the yellow paper". It
means to declare insolvency, and it is looked upon -- especially by
creditors -- as being less than fully honest. When you go to ask for
a loan, the lender always asks you to declare that you have no
intentions of filing the yellow paper.

One of the perennial paradoxes of the human condition is that if you
want to avoid filing the yellow paper in life, the only way is to
give. By giving you can never go bankrupt, because the more you give
of yourself, the more you receive. In fact, it is only by giving that
you can avoid going bankrupt. When you go through life refusing to
give, the yellow paper comes and sticks to your forehead.

Most people who are insecure, for example, have difficulty giving of
themselves. Insecurity is a warning from the bank within that you are
getting low on funds. But such people needn't go on to the point that
they become actually bankrupt in love. They can make themselves
solvent again, even rich, by learning to give. As St.Francis de Sales
says, we learn to give by trying to give; we learn to give more by
giving more. Instead of dwelling on ourselves and asking what we can
expect from others, we should start looking for ways to give our
time, energy, and resources to causes more important than ourselves.

------------------------

(UNQUOTE)

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