Awareness and Problems
Many of us have felt that our problems increase once we start meditating. Quite a few succumb to negative inputs from friends and relatives who keep saying that your problems have increased since you started meditating. In a way one feels this is true, and those with weak will power give up meditating and in spite of being awakened fall asleep all over again.
While listening to various discourses of various Masters, we have learnt that our problems are within us, and they have and always will be within us. What happens when we meditate under the guidance of a living Master, is that our awareness increases. With increased awareness, we begin to see things far more clearly, and our problems appear in front of us in bold. Before we started meditating, we lived in an unconscious state and even though we had problems, we never considered them to be problems as we never had that kind of insight.
We have heard the story of the man holding on to a rope in the dark and people shouting — ‘you have caught a snake; you have caught a snake.’ But the man does not believe that, and he clings on to the ‘rope’ till somebody switches on the light, and the moment the man realises that he has a snake in his hands, he lets go! It is just that when there is light, awareness happens, and we see things more clearly.
And it is good to be aware, because then we can avoid the snakes. We have many problems which we are not seeing — which in fact, we do not want to see. We go on postponing. We are so afraid of seeing those problems, because then we will have to solve them. But by postponing them, they are not solved; it is not so easy.
We cannot postpone our problems. But people are postponing. They go on pushing them this way and that way, everywhere hiding them, thinking that some miracle will take place, and things will settle down and problems will be solved. This is not going to happen. On the contrary, those problems will create their children. They will start finding boyfriends, girlfriends — two problems meeting together, and a third problem is produced, and we will be in more difficulty. It is better to go on facing each problem as it comes by.
Meditation has not created our problems — meditation has simply given us a little more awareness. Our problems have always been there. Meditation has given us the opportunity to solve them. And one should enjoy solving one’s problems. It sharpens one’s intelligence. Each problem is a challenge. Each problem makes one more intelligent.
And the day we do not have any problems, the mind will come to its utmost clarity — because no dust, no problem. Our mind becomes a mirror, so pure that it reflects reality. But do not think that someone is creating our problems. Meditating just gives us an insight, awareness, silence, so that we can see our problems and solve them.
