In the previous episode, we had witnessed the continuation of Bhagawan Krishna heaping praises over Yudishtra for his meticulous following of “Dharma” at all times. We’ve also witnessed till date that irrespective of whether he suffered or was happy, Yudishtra has been steadfast on following “Dharma” by giving his 100% to it as a commitment. This is the characteristic that captured Bhagawan Krishna’s heart and thus, He heaps praise on Yudishtra for this quality. In these lines, we’ve also spoken about how this characteristic applies to today’s life as well – Are we giving our 100% effort in whatever activity we perform today? Especially, if that activity is focused towards “Dharma”, are we really giving our full effort and time to it? Or, are we doing things just for the sake of doing it? If we introspect within ourselves, we would get startling answers! We would be alarmed to find out that we keep performing many things in life in a very monotonous way, not giving it a thought! I had given this example yesterday about how we clean our house – Do we really clean every portion of our house with that utmost dedication, thinking that this is Bhagawan’s dwelling place? Or, do we clean our house in a very monotonous way, just because we’ve to sweep and mop our house every day? If we give our 100% to our work, we would definitely achieve the real fruits of it. This is what we’ve to understand from Bhagawan Krishna’s words of praise about Yudishtra.
Moving on thus, to highlight this same point on how important is cleaning ourselves and cleaning our homes, Mother Sita explains an anecdote to Ravana. This is worth visiting in this context here – When Mother Sita was in the “Ashoka Vana” being imprisoned by Ravana, she was undergoing untold suffering and misery, which we’ve already witnessed in detail during our previous Ramayana project. Once, when Ravana comes along to meet Mother Sita and to express his wish to marry her, Mother Sita gives a beautiful explanation thus, “Oh Ravana! You have so much dirt in your mind and heart, which you need to throw out. Only if you clean both your mind and heart, will you be able to think and walk the path of “Dharma”. At this moment, your dirt is blocking your eyes from looking towards the path of “Dharma”. This dirt is nothing but anger and jealousy that you have in you. By looking at me wrongly, you’re only trying to shift the dirt from one place to the other. You’re shifting your wrong looks from one woman to the other. This is completely disgusting. However, what you should do here is to eradicate the dirt of jealousy and anger. If you’re not going to do this, life is going to be very difficult for you!”
Thus, the lesson that we can learn from this is that, these two factors – Jealousy and anger can ruin a person completely. Why do you think we get anger and jealousy in life? If we move towards certain expectations in life, and if these expectations are not being fulfilled as per our will and wish, we get into the angry mode. However, if we see other people fulfilling similar expectations with ease, we start feeling jealous about them! This is where we’ve to think twice – Are we doing the right thing by feeling jealous about somebody else? Life is like a “Chakra” (Wheel) and happiness and sorrow keeps rotating up and down. We’ve to go through phases wherein we would be happy and at the same time, we would also be going through phases of suffering as well. Just because one person is going through a happy phase in front of our eyes, does that mean that we would feel jealous of him / her? The moment we start feeling jealous about someone, automatically we would start feeling the anger as well. With both these qualities starting to dominate, we would ultimately lose our focus towards our work. We would instead start thinking of how to pull down the success of other people, rather than focusing on our own work and success. This is where all the problems start, and we’ve to be extremely careful and mindful of our activities.
Moreover, if we start feeling angry on someone, our mind starts losing our thinking capability. Ultimately because of this, we start making wrong decisions, and our 100% effort goes for a toss as well. Thus, even if we’re doing the most interesting activity, our anger and frustration would not allow us to give our 100% effort into it. This is where, we’ve to be extremely careful. At any cost, we should never give into these two bad qualities in life – Both on the personal and professional fronts. So for today, let us understand this point very clearly, and we should realize that these two characteristics have the full potential to hamper our 100% dedication and effort into whatever we’re doing! We shall wait till the next episode to continue this discussion further! Stay tuned! 🙂
The Indian Dharma 