The intelligent person should take the essence out of all sources, from scriptures small as well as great, — like the bee from flowers.
— Uddhava Gita
Yeah, in addition to taking the essential wisdom from all sources, you can also pollinate the wisdom!
(Photo by Tambako the Jaguar)
“I am the wisdom of the wise.” — Bhagavad Gita (Song of God)
This blog is titled ‘The fire of wisdom’. What is wisdom? Is wisdom something to be gained? Is wisdom something that can be acquired? Is wisdom like a vegetable that you can buy from the market? Or is it like money that you accumulate and deposit into a bank account?
Wisdom, to me, is a state of being, the natural state of being. Wisdom is not something you acquire or accumulate. Buddha was called Buddha (the wise one) not because he acquired wisdom from somewhere else, but he simply removed the veil of ignorance and raised himself to his natural state of pure wisdom. Being in wisdom is your real nature. All you need to do is to uncover yourself and get rid of certain prejudices, misunderstandings, misconceptions, attachments that prevent you from realizing your real nature. The sun has always been shining behind the clouds. The cloud is temporary, but you think that being cloudy is your real nature. Sometimes, without your asking for it, the clouds of ignorance break up a little and you get a glimpse of wisdom, just for a moment, and you call that phenomena as intuition. But it’s not necessary to be at the mercy of the clouds. You can systematically blow away the clouds and let the rays of wisdom totally bathe you!
There are various methods to blow away the clouds of ignorance. Sheer devotion to God can raise you to the level of God who is nothing but wisdom. When you learn to enjoy unselfish work, you can free yourself from attachments that prevent you from being in the state of wisdom. Certain physical postures called yoga asanas, and exercises like pranayama can free you from inflexibilities and free the energies that gets clogged up in parts of your body and in nervous centres and you will be able to freely access the state of wisdom. Meditation and awareness can directly expose the dross in your mind and you can’t help but to rid of the dross, and then wisdom shines. Sparks of wisdom in the form of words coming through wise men and women can burn away a little ignorance in you, that’s what this blog mostly deals with.
There is no best method to disperse the clouds of ignorance. The best way is to use all these methods in varying proportions according to your circumstances. The important thing here to remember is that all these methods don’t deal with wisdom directly, they only help you clean up the impurities and ignorance. No master, no method, no book, no blog can ‘give’ you or ‘bring’ you wisdom. All they can do is make you aware of your ignorance and it’s upto you to choose wisdom or ignorance.
Wisdom is not personal. There is only one wisdom. It’s not my wisdom or your wisdom. There is only one sun whether you look at it from Antarctica or Australia or India or Mars or Jupiter. Wisdom is there for you to behold, but it’s not something you can hold on to. Wisdom flows. It’s like the present moment. When you try to hold on to the present moment, it’s already past! When you say ‘my’ wisdom, it’s no more wisdom, it’s only the residue. And wisdom is not in the future, you cannot anticipate wisdom. Wisdom IS. In fact, present moment awareness is a gateway to the state of wisdom… in fact, living in the present moment is wisdom.
Wisdom is not dependent on you. That you are currently experiencing night time doesn’t mean that that the sun has vanished. It’s always there on the other side. Just that you live in that half of the earth that is temporarily hidden from the rays of the sun, that temporarily goes through the phase of night. When you raise high above earth, when you come out of your comfort zone and float in space, there is no more night and day for you, you have transcended relativity, you are directly exposed to the sun of wisdom. It’s true that life on the dark side of the planet can be beautiful too. Living in the shadow, we have greatly been enjoying the beauty of moon, the twinkling stars, the meteor showers, and what not! But darkness is not eternal, the night has to give way for the day, sooner or later. And don’t you think we have lived in darkness for long enough? So long that we have totally forgotten that there are such things as sun and day. Don’t you think it’s time for dawn? Whether you are ready for it or not, the dawn is coming! Now, you don’t even have to raise high above the earth, you don’t have to renounce the the world. When the dawn comes, when sun of wisdom rises, it lights up everybody and everything right here on earth. Don’t worry that you will miss your stars and the moons. The sun is much more brilliant than the moon and all the stars combined, the day much more beautiful than you can imagine. The thieves that thrive in darkness — the dark forces — are so desperate now because these forces know that their times are coming to an end. The era of ignorance is coming to a close. Better prepare yourself for the dawn! Prepare yourself to bask in the glory of wisdom! 
As the rising sun dispels darkness from men’s eyes and discovers what before lay hidden, so the dawn of knowledge removes evil from men’s intellect and reveals the Atman. Then do men know themselves as the Atman, and the Atman as themselves. — Bhagavatam.
How to get rid of such negative emotions as hatred, jealousy, anger, etc.? We may be intellectually convinced that that these negative emotions are harmful to ourselves and everyone else, but we sometimes find that these negativities lurking around in our own minds. How do we get rid of these negativities?
Well, here’s a suggestion from God himself!
O noble soul, open thy divine sight and regard and honour all beings as myself. Wise is he who looks with an equal eye upon all beings, seeing the one indwelling God in the hearts of all. He who meditates on my divine nature as present in every man becomes free from rivalry, from jealousy, from hatred, and from the consciousness of ego.
— Srimad Bhagavatam: The Wisdom of God
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Translated by Swami Prabhavananda. p. 303
Indeed, we all come from the same Source, we all ultimately go back to the same Source, and it’s the same Source or God who lives in the hearts of all beings and expresses Himself (or Herself or Itself) variously. The expressions themselves may be beautiful or distorted, but they keep changing, they are not fixed or eternal. God, the indweller, outlives everything else, and He alone is the one eternal existence. When I recognize that the same God who lives and works through me lives in and works through the other person too, there is no question of hatred or jealousy in me. In fact, the other person is just another expression of myself, he/she is a mirror reflecting an aspect of myself and helps me discover myself. Only when we forget the oneness of existence and give too much importance to the differences, that’s when these negative emotions raise their head.
What happens when somebody else hates you and attacks you? When somebody attacks you, it’s reasonable for you to defend yourself, it’s perfectly okay to defend yourself. But even then, remembering the oneness of existence and acknowledging that the other person is the same as you in the core will prevent you from introducing further hatred. Further hatred on your part only escalates the problem, whereas when you look at the problem objectively, it always helps bring the situation under control and you can even help the other person overcome his hatred. This attitude has always worked for me. When I find myself having some problem with somebody, I internally acknowledge that we are both same in the core, it’s the same God who expresses himself through both of us differently. When I do this, the feeling of hatred immediately dies down even though the difference of opinion may persist for some time. Just that we both are looking at the same thing from different perspectives, the glasses might be of different colours, but it’s the same eye that looks through the different glasses. These differences are temporary, the clouds of misunderstanding has to pass, however dark they may be, however hopelessly overcast the conditions are, the clouds will disperse sooner or later, and suddenly, we find that the sun of understanding has always been shining resplendently. In fact, when you look at it from the perspective of the sun, the clouds have almost no existence at all!
Let me leave with you with a quote from Swami Vivekananda, who puts it in his own characteristically strong manner:
In one word, the ideal of Vedanta is to know man as he really is, and this is its message, that if you cannot worship your brother man, the manifested God, how can you worship a God who is unmanifested?
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