Pujya Gurudev Pt. ShriRam Sharma’s Kripa

Delight 

(Akhand Jyoti,Sept.oct.2006)

In awakened awareness, seeing beauty results from ones perception and not necessarily from the thing perceived. What we often describe as beautiful is merely a conditioned interpretation that is trained to see one thing as beautiful and another as revolting. Awakened awareness, however, overrides this conditioning and is able to see beauty in the most unlikely of places because it sees the universal essence of things. Some years ago I was in India to visit my teacher- Poonjaji, when a dramatic shift in my perception occurred. I had become, over many trips during the previous twenty years, more and more allergic to India. By that I mean I had developed such revulsion for the sights, smells, and sounds that accost ones senses every day that I went around with a slight feeling of nausea. Nevertheless, India continued to draw me because of its rich spiritual heritage and the great teachers who lived there. 

I also enjoyed being occasionally unplugged from the hectic pace of Western life. But I had long ago lost all romantic notions about much of India and instead noticed its disease, pollution, poverty, and superstition. It seemed after a while that my eye fell upon ugliness at nearly every turn. Being with Poonjaji changed all that. I began to sense the presence of the life force in myself and, soon, in everything around me. While I was showering one day, the bath tiles came alive as I imagined, could almost feel, their subatomic particles swirling within. When walking, I no longer experienced myself as a separate body but as a movement in and through an all-encompassing landscape. 

This perception in turn produced feelings of warmth and appreciation for every strange, wonderful, or ordinary thing I chanced upon. Now, wherever my eye landed, my heart was lit up by the indwelling presence it recognized there. The wart hogs eating garbage on the side of the road became beautiful to me because I could feel my own essence in them. They and I, embodying different forms, were just part of the unbounded panorama of existence. In Zen they say, "When you wake up, the whole world wakes up". Ones awakened awareness recognizes its own nature in everything, seeing its source as the source of all.

One then perceives in love and wholeness, experiencing beauty not merely in certain objects, people or places, but as awakened heart intelligence at one with the world. So often our definition and appreciation of beauty comes from limited awareness. Sure, we can see beauty in the creamy pink cheeks and shining eyes of a child, in the purple and red glow of sunrise over a snowy field, or in the languid grace of a gorgeous woman. Identifying these as beautiful requires no special intelligence. Our genes and cultural conditioning do that work for us. We easily respond to typical triggers of instinct and what we have been taught to define as beauty.

Thanks GOD, Thanks Sadguru,

Shiv Sharma