Love and Sacrifice

There was a blind girl who hated herself because she was blind. She hated everyone except her boyfriend. The girl told her boyfriend that if she could only see the world, she would marry him.

A few days later, her doctor told her that someone donated a pair of eyes to her. She underwent the surgery and she opened her eyes to see everything, including her boyfriend.

Her boyfriend asked her, ‘Now that you can see, will you marry me?’ The girl was shocked when she saw that her boyfriend was blind. She said, ‘I am sorry but I can’t marry you because you are blind.’

Her boyfriend walked away sadly. He told her just one thing, ‘Just take care of my eyes, dear.’

Love gives tremendous courage and energy

When his teacher initiated Ramanuja, he gave him a special chant. The teacher told him not to pass on the chant to anybody and that if he did so, he would go to hell. Ramanuja asked him what would happen to the others with whom he might share it. The teacher said that they would be led to salvation. What would we have done? Naturally we would have kept quiet, thinking, ‘Why unnecessarily go to hell?’

Ramanuja immediately stood on a platform in a temple and called out to the whole village. He loudly pronounced the chant given by his teacher and told the people, ‘Let you all go to heaven! I am not bothered about me going to hell. Let you all reach heaven!’

When you are deeply in love, you feel as if your whole being is open and you are ready to go to any extreme for the sake of anybody. Your being is totally open. You don’t feel insecure when you are wild with love. That is why people who are in love always do risky things. They take the risk because they feel they have nothing to lose. They feel so expansive. Love gives tremendous courage and energy. It opens you up. It makes you finally available to yourself. As of now, you are not available to yourself. Love can make you available to yourself.

Power of Thought and Prayer

Another real incident from history:

When India was under British rule, the British soldiers found that when they carried water from England to India in their ships, the water got spoiled even while on the ship. But when they carried water back from India to England, the water not only stayed fresh through the voyage, but also remained fresh until they consumed all of it back in England! When scientists studied this surprising phenomenon, they found that this fresh water was from the sacred river Ganga in Calcutta which was worshipped by millions of people from around the world. It had the natural properties of neutralizing harmful bacteria and purifying itself.

Billions of people have been praying to Ganga for over thousands of years. Naturally they have left their prayerful thoughts as imprints on this water which is so energizing and self-healing.

Even in Egypt, the river Nile has been studied by the Egyptians over thousands of years by measuring its flow, level, turbulence etc. They have found that many times these parameters reflected the calamities like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis, that have happened or are about to happen in even distant parts of the world.

Imagine the effect of words of love on each of us then!

The perfect wedding gift

Adapted From "Guaranteed Solutions" on Love

A husband and wife were celebrating their fifty years of marriage. The wife presented the husband with two shirts. He was very touched and declared that they would go out for dinner instead of cooking at home. It was a very tender moment for them.

He freshened up and to make his wife happy, wore one of the gift shirts and appeared from his room. As he came down, she looked up and smiled, but soon her expression changed and she asked, ‘So the other shirt is no good?’

We always want to make sure we wont deceive anyone. We go out of our way trying to satisfy everybody. You can go on maintaining certificates, but understand that ultimately, you can never satisfy everybody!

Feeling like your world is collapsing?

Adapted from "Guaranteed Solutions" on Love

If you have seen children play, you might have seen them building castles with cards. They will place the cards at a certain angle to each other and build several layers of such patterns in a pyramid shape. It will be beautiful to look at. But if you remove even one card from the castle, from anywhere, the whole castle will collapse! The higher the castle, the more the chances of collapsing.

Just like this, we build our own self-image like a castle, out of people’s opinions of us. We collect certificates or signatures from our father, mother, boyfriend, girlfriend, teacher, friends and what not, and arrange all these certificates and build a castle to form our self-image. The image will look beautiful and we will feel happy. You will feel in ‘love’!

But if even one person withdraws their certificate, what happens? The castle collapses! You start feeling miserable about yourself. You feel depressed. You feel that the whole world has come to an end, that nobody loves you!

At least in the case of the children, they build their castles with their own cards. But we build our castles with others’ cards, with others’ certificates!

The solution: start investing a little more time and energy in knowing yourself. Give yourself an appointment from time to time! This way, you will never get deceived, and you will never depend on others to feel in love.