Understanding Other People

Love is the source of understanding. You know intellectually that within you resides the potential, expressed or not, for all human emotion, thought and action. Yet, you no doubt meet or observe people occasionally whose life and actions are repellent or unacceptable to you. The absence of love has created a vacuum of understanding. For the meditating person, there should not be a single human being whose actions, habits, opinions or conduct lies beyond your ability to love and understand.

Try this. This week look at everyone you meet, and feel, from your finger tips right down to your toes, love welling up from your deepest resources and radiating out to them through every cell of your body and especially through your face. Say to yourself, "I like you"--and really feel it. There are many thousands of things that most people do not understand from their confused states of mind, and they therefore act in unseemly ways, due to the ignorance of past karma. Should their ignorance confuse you? Should it cloud your own understanding?

Certainly not! We do not love the flower and hate the muddy roots from which it grew, and we cannot hate the instinctive roots of mankind.

With understanding, a great thing happens--your life becomes even, balanced and sublime. The ups and downs within yourself level out, and you find yourself the same in every circumstance, find yourself big enough to overcome and small enough to understand. Then you can really begin to do something. When emotional ups and downs are allowed, what happens? Your poor nerve system is terribly strained in a constant state of frenzy and uncertainty. All of your energies are then devoted to coping with yourself, and not much is reserved to accomplish creative, productive projects. As your life evens out by using the great power of understanding, the emotional self of you heals and grows strong. Your nervous system, believe it or not, grows, and it grows strong if you feed it correctly by handling your mind. Understanding is the best nourishment for the emotional body.

You must have a basis for understanding your fellow man, and a very good basis is: "I perceive him with my two physical eyes. He appears to be forty years old, but I intuit him to be emotionally a little younger and mentally about sixty--a learned person. I know he is a being of pure awareness going through the experiences he needs to evolve further. Therefore, I shall understand him in this light and make allowances accordingly." This is not something to think about and appreciate philosophically. It must become as much a part of you as your hands and feet. It's an easy process if we apply it and a difficult process if we ignore its practice.

Understanding, loving and making allowances--these are the strengths of the soul awakened through sadhana, once the emotional ups and downs and the barriers of the instinctive influences of fear, jealousy, anger, deceit and disappointment are conquered. If you are creative, you will begin to truly create. If you are a mystic, you will have deeper and ever more fulfilling insights in your daily meditations. All of the mysteries of life will unfold before your inner vision once the instinctive mind is mastered in your life."


The Master Course of Himalayan Academy by Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami
http://www.gurudeva.org/mc