The high promise that hides behind the harsh reality of this world

I recently read an article about the world economy, and of course it was alarming – it described how the stock market has been artificially inflated, and how the books of various companies have been “cooked” to make them appear more valuable.

I won’t give a sermon on the stock market, because it’s just too tedious. But the issue that interested me is that the capacity to gather wealth quickly and effortlessly simply doesn’t make sense.

Certainly, you can work hard for many lifetimes and reap the fruits in this life. And then people see how effortless it all seems, and they draw the wrong conclusion.

But the hard fact is that you cannot harvest great wealth, as an individual or a nation, without working very hard to create that wealth.

In this context, I remember a radio interview with a young man who started a high-tech company and became a billionaire almost overnight. The interviewer said, “You’re twenty-four, and you have more money than your parents saw in their entire lives.”

The young billionaire said, “Well, after all, I devoted two years of my life to this company.”

He said it with a straight face – as if amassing great wealth a simple matter of brains, timing, and luck.

But that isn’t how life works. Life is an exchange of energy, and there is – however unfortunately – never a “free lunch.” There are fixed realities that we cannot avoid, and that we have no choice but to accept and work with.

Years ago, I gave a weekend workshop on relationships. I tried, based on many things that Swami Kriyananda had said, to explain that, yes, we can find happiness in our love relationships. But nonetheless, a great deal of self-discipline is required.

Swamiji once remarked that everything we presently believe about marriage and relationships needs to change. There’s a widespread belief that we’ll find somebody who’ll give us everything we’ve dreamed of, and that we won’t have to put out a lot of energy and effort to get it. But, again, it isn’t how life works.

In my workshop, I gave a well-reasoned presentation, very hopeful and positive, on the many ways we can work with one another to create happy relationships. And at the end of the day, after I’d talked for five or six hours, a man raised his hand and said, “Well, yes, but you never talked about the effortless kind of love affair that’s like falling off a log.”

I thought, “You’ve sat here listening to me talk all day, and you expect me to tell you that it’s effortless?”

After that, I stopped giving workshops on relationships, because I realized, “How can I possibly get people to understand this?” In fact, people generally learn life’s lessons only by gathering their own hard experiences.

Today, there’s enormous confusion around the thought that we can get big results with little effort. But it’s a dreamy, low-energy kind of thinking, and it’s completely divorced from reality. It’s a virus that infests our minds: “I’ll be happy if I can put out a tiny bit of energy and get a great deal back.”

It’s a question that devotees are not immune to, because very often, we’re tempted to look for shortcuts on the spiritual path.

It’s the subconscious mind at work. The subconscious dreams that it can fulfill its desires effortlessly. Meanwhile, the superconscious mind understands life clearly.

In our higher self, we understand that whenever we offer ourselves as instruments for the divine consciousness, we reap tremendous happiness. And a defining quality of divine consciousness is that it never wastes time asking, “Let me see how little I can do.”

Looking at the world, it’s striking how well-made it is, and how much effort goes into its creation.

A woman in our community planted a star lily next to our home, and for months we walked past it, watching the little shoot grow. Then one morning we walked by and – boom! – there was a flower with a beautiful star face.

You look at something like the lily, and it’s so intricate, interesting, and ephemeral, and on a certain level it’s utterly pointless. I mean, what’s the point? God makes a flower that hangs around for our entertainment for a while, and then it withers away and it’s gone.

The point is that God enjoys doing many things as well as He can, with one-hundred-percent effort, care, and attention. It’s a powerful hint for those of us who may be tempted to think “Let me try to work the angles and beat the odds. Let me see how much I can get by doing very little.”

It’s simply not God’s way. And it’s why the Bible says, “Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.”

It isn’t that there’s a cosmic gardener standing over us with his sharp shears, ready to cut us out of his creation. It’s that we cut ourselves off from the wonderful experiences that God wants to give us, if we would just learn to follow His cosmic law.

We’re part of an incredibly intricate tapestry. And even though we’re only one thread in the whole, whenever we begin to see ourselves in the context in which we live, we find a deep happiness and fulfillment expanding within us.

I read about a mother who related how, in the twenty-second week of her pregnancy, there was a leak in some vital organ, and the amniotic fluid in her uterus began to leak out. The doctors told her that her baby wouldn’t survive. But she had a strong intuition that it would be fine.

Shortly thereafter, an unusual thing happened. The doctors saw in the sonogram that the baby had turned itself around and put its little bottom against the place where the fluid was leaking, and that he had extended his leg and was bracing himself against the opposite side of the womb to stop the leak. And for ten weeks he stayed like that until he was ready to be born.

Because he had pressed with his leg for so long, his knee was stiff and wouldn’t work properly after he was born. The mother never explained to the child what had happened. But when he was eight, they operated on his knee, and the little boy explained to the doctor that the problem with the knee was due to a terrible time when he was in the womb, and felt he would be pushed out of that place. And he braced himself because he didn’t want to be pushed out prematurely. And he said that it was why his knee was bad.

Isn’t that astonishing? Now, when you think of the tiny baby in the womb who knew exactly what to do, and when you think of the star lily growing and withering and dying, you realize that none of us can devise these things by ourselves.

The story of the little boy suggests that we’re more involved with a greater reality than we understand, and that we are not living alone in a little, separate ego self. We are part of an extraordinary drama that becomes tremendously interesting when we look at it with seeing eyes. And if we play out our lives in the right way, it’s a great deal of fun.

Paramhansa Yogananda said that we are guests in this world, and that most people are bad guests, trying to grasp a little piece and claim it as their own. People are always trying to take credit for a part of this great show, which they had absolutely nothing to do with creating.

Swami Kriyananda pointed out how much more satisfying it is to be an instrument for that great reality, rather than try to claim it for ourselves. He said that this world is a show, put on by the Divine. He joked that it isn’t “Songs by Donald Walters, script by Donald Walters, costumes by Donald Walters, sets by Donald Walters, produced by Donald Walters, directed by Donald Walters.”

It’s absurd to claim that I’m the producer, director, and creator of my life and experiences – “Flowers by Asha Praver!” God is doing it all, and God is creating and sustaining us at every moment.

Life can be so much more fun than we realize. It only takes stepping to the side for a moment and admitting that we are branches of a great tree, and that the fruits we bear are created by the One who has made and is making us.

We need to bring ourselves to the point where we can offer ourselves to the divine gardener and say, “If this is what it will take for me to bear fruit, I’ll not only accept it, I’ll embrace it with all my heart. Lord, show me what to do, and how You want me to do it.”

Yogananda urged us to get away from the ocean of suffering that this world is, without God. Get into the divine light, the spark of divinity that shines in you. And everything that you’ve been seeking will be yours, because it is yours already.

(From a Sunday service by Asha on July 14, 2002.)