Questioner:
I had a lovely thing happen yesterday, I was going along and I felt a general kind of liking for everything, and, it was very, very mild. And everything was just fine, just okay, but not a big deal. All the people who happened to be around, I liked seeing them in the street. There were a few woodchips around some tree, and the color was so nice and I felt like it was a revelation to me, except the word revelation sounds dramatic. It was not dramatic.
Swami Premodaya:
That is an essential seeing. And most people go from cradle to grave never seeing it even for one second. At least you saw it for an hour or a day or however long you felt it clearly—that this is how a human life is supposed to feel; just what you described. You are supposed to generally like everything. In a quiet way; not in a dramatic way. Not in a pushed strongly in one direction, pulled strongly in one direction or another. You are not supposed to have huge strong preferences.
You are supposed to like everyone and everything. Not because that is a “should,” because that is a law, because that is a rule, but because that is the nature of how a human life is meant to be.
More like a dog or a cat or a duck or a flea—it does not discriminate so much. “I like that one, but not that one.” Every once in a while there feels an energy that runs across somebody “Oh—I’ll stay away from them.” But other than that, everything has been made acceptable.
You have been given everything you need in an acceptable manner, and the essence of how to live life is contained in your report, in your description. You are supposed to—not because God commands it; not because it is some kind of proscription—but because that is really the nature of how it is meant to be. And the society, may or may not be in favor of that. Our society is not in favor of that. Because if you like everything, you will not be a very good consumer. You won’t care that there are twenty-seven different brands of wheat flakes in the supermarket aisle and you have to choose the one you like because that somehow ‘represents’ you. You will not care about stuff like that because you will be okay with anything and everything. So this society is not geared toward the enjoyment of life. It is geared toward the consumption of things.
But obviously when you like everything and everyone enough; even mildly, let’s say, no one who comes across your path you find offensive somehow in any big way—obviously, that makes everything very enjoyable; like floating in a rowboat on a sunny day on a lake. That is the feeling you are supposed to and are meant to have in life. It is supposed to be a joy ride. It is supposed to be non-serious. One of the main things that divert it, that makes it serious in your mind, and by you, I mean you, is that whole thing of, “I like this; I don’t like that.” Then it starts to get serious. “Well, if I don’t like that, I got to make sure that doesn’t come my way. If I like this, I got to make sure more of that comes my way.” And suddenly, things are more serious.
So at least understand the very nature of the base experience of a human life; what it is ideally supposed to be, meant to be, naturally structured to be: You like everything. You enjoy everything. You accept everything. And life is very enjoyable. Now, if life is not that way for you, then you have to do something to move in that direction. You have to actively find a way to facilitate that it becomes more like that, at least more of the time.
You are not supposed to have any big complaints. That is not natural. That is not natural to a human.
If you have a number of reasonably significant complaints, and I suspect many of you do; you are far away, really far away, from a real human life as it is meant to be. You are living an artificial life of picking and choosing, and therefore screening out and screening in. And in that basis, yes, it feels right to have certain complaints; it feels like it is normal. But it’s not; it’s not natural—and it is not how it is meant to be. And in a better world, it is not that way. In those parts of the world that are a little more sane than our consumer culture, people don’t have big complaints. A monsoon carried away my house and my entire family—that is a complaint. Your complaints, don’t count. Your complaints are out of proportion to what they really represent—they really shouldn’t be put forward. You really do not have the right to complain. If you are breathing, ninety-nine percent of your complaint potential is already invalid. As long as you are breathing, you don’t have a strong basis for really any complaint. You do have about one percent, depending what seems to be going on and how terrible it might be for you. But if it does not rank as truly terrible by objective standards, meaning most reasonable people would agree, you probably are not complaining legitimately.