Life is beautiful inside and outside

Feb 21, 2010, 12.00am IST
Balgangadharnath Swami.



Should you live? With joy and exuberance. Joy should come not only from serving society but also from enjoying the best things in life. Just live with them, enjoy them. You do not have to possess something to enjoy it.


Look at the butterfly. Its lifespan is so short, yet it enjoys itself thoroughly. It goes from flower to flower, the most beautiful creation of nature. It sucks nectar the sweetest thing in nature. Give it anything else to eat or drink, but it chooses only the best, honey. Similarly, we should speak only sweetly, think and live beautifully and enjoy life. Sweetness is the secret of a beautiful life. Once we speak sweetly the whole world will speak sweetly to us. This should become our nature. Only bhakti can ensure this, because bhakti means love.

What do we do in temples? We put a stone there and offer archana , which means we lavish praise on the stone for all the qualities we value. We say you are our father, our mother. We invoke agni and offer praise, not one or two but one crore prayers each time. By doing this, we invest power in that stone.

One day a priest, adept as he was in offering worship, came home and heaped praise on his wife. You can imagine what a happy home she made for him. We have to develop the ability to appreciate the good in everyone. If we are happy and so are others, our speech will become sweet. Life then becomes easy, weightless. Otherwise the mind is full of problems and we are always ready to fight. If we develop sattvik qualities, wherever we go we will be happy.

We are also quick to point out different things that have disturbed our equanimity. If you think deeply you will find the fault always lies with others, never do you find yourself at fault! Actually it is the other way round.


One day a man felt he needed to see and talk to God. He went to a forest where he saw a sage sitting in meditation. He placed his request. The sage told him to collect rainwater in a pot and look into it till the mud settled. ''When you see your face in the water, you will know you have got gyana .''

The man did as instructed. Just as the water was becoming clear and he was beginning to see his face, the sage disturbed the pot. He did this repeatedly. Finally the seeker got upset. ''Oh! I am not disturbing it. I just shook it,'' said the sage. It is in the nature of worldly things that people keep ''disturbing'' or interfering with your life and time.

So if you find that someone has put you in a bad mood and so you cannot say nice words, or that when you see a person you remember his bad qualities and find nothing to praise, you know that the external world has disturbed the pot in your mind. Do not let it do so. God and everything divine is within you and in everyone around you. If there is happiness within you, you would not quarrel. And to find that happiness you have to find the divine in everyone.

As told to Sudhamahi Regunathan. Balgangadharnath Swami is the 71st pontiff of the Adichunchanagiri Mutt, Karnataka.