*Chapter 14 - Pride, Humility & Luck* 

The very purpose of so many varieties in creation is to somehow bring you back to yourself. 

You are beautiful, you are beauty and in that bliss, all that you need, all that you would want, simply keeps happening. 

Adi Shankaracharya describes it so beautifully - "There is a wish-giving tree in a small island right there in an ocean of milk.

In that island is a beautiful house called chintamani gruhe (awareness) or house of wisdom. In that ocean surrounded by the wish giving tree, is the bed - the couch of Shiva. 

O Mother you are sitting there smiling. And who would worship you? If someone is not lucky, he cannot. Who can love you? Only those who are lucky."

Even to experience beauty you need to be lucky. Don't think of luck in terms of justice or in terms of the analytical mind. 

It is just an expression of the

heart. You realise that you cannot do it with your mind, your abilities or your capabilities. 

It is beyond your comprehension and wildest imagination, then one calls it luck. You can find out 1000 reasons why you are lucky. 

You could be lucky because you are not a frog. Or you are not a fish about to go into the frying pan, then into somebody's stomach, then through the intestine. 

You could feel you are lucky that you are not a lamb. There are innumerable reasons to be lucky. 

Reasons are peripheral, the sense of feeling lucky is primary and vice versa. You could also go on feeling or enquiring why you are unlucky. 

Don't you see this gives a new direction to look at things? Amidst plentitude is the wish-giving tree. So when you feel a lack, then it is a desert. 

But when you feel plenty Jesus also said more will be given to those who have there is abundance. The ocean is a symbol of abundance, meaning everything is present there. 

The consciousness is always referred to as an ocean of milk. In our own consciousness when there is abundance, amidst it is the wish giving tree called siddhis. 

Before you need anything, things keep coming to you. In the midst of that is - knowledge, wisdom, discrimination and sharpness of intellect.

It's not completely spaced out. There is total awareness, aloofness, discrimination and sharpness of intellect. 

In that is house 'shivaakare manch', in that bed which is Shiva innermost innocence, inside wisdom.

Often people who have a lot of wisdom become crooked. There is no innocence. The more one is wise, the more he starts thinking, plotting and manipulating. 

In that bed of innocence, of purity, of transcendental bliss, lies the power of creation, the secret of spiritual glory. The shakti resides in that innermost core. 

And who can worship? If you are not lucky, you cannot be here at all, you could not even do the Sudarshan Kriya. You cannot experience the joy. it is out of question.

Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankarji

Waves of emotions