Crossing The Ocean Of Maya

Shun bad company. There is a saying by someone, “If you want to Know a person, know him through the company he keeps or the books he reads.” Shun bad company. What is bad company? The company which solidifies your negativity is bad company. 

You have some problem, you have a complaint, you go and you talk to someone and they make your beliefs more strong in that negativity that is bad company. And you go to someone else with the same problem, same thought, same negativity. 

And they will just make you feel lighter and when you walk away from them you feel that the problem is not as big as you thought it was before. That is the right company. Don't think people who agree with your grievances, with your problems, are your friends. They are not. 

Those people who make your negative feelings and your frustrations grow more and more in you may appear to be friends, but they are your enemies. They are bad company. Right company, good company, is that which makes you feel the problem is nothing. 

“It is solvable, it is simple, don’t worry .” They pump enthusiasm in you. Haven't you had this experience? Many people you talk to confirm your negativity while there are others who simply dissipate your negativity. Shun bad company if you want to grow in love, because bad company provokes ambition. 

Why should we get rid of bad company? Why should we not keep bad company? It says it brings lust or ambition in you, feverishness in you. “That person has a Rolls Royce, I, too, should have one. That person has this, I, too, should have that.” And then behind ambition comes anger. Actually, if you look into it, it is your own mind which is either your friend or your enemy. 

The negative tendency in your mind is your own enemy. Don't think it is in the other person. You can turn around the other person’s mind too. If the other’s mind is negative, you can break the ice there, you need the skill to do that. 

Bad company brings ambition, desire, frustration, anger and delusion. You build a whole castle in your mind about negativity - how things are, how people are, how the whole world is. Haven't you had this experience before in your life? 

You thought such and such a person is hopeless and you made a whole concept about him in your mind just by listening to someone else and then suddenly you found out that all your opinions and ideas about the person were false. 

They fell apart. Your opinions prove to be wrong. How many times in your life have your own opinions failed you? Yet we do not learn from our own past.

That company which gets you lost, which doesn't let you learn from your own experience, is bad company. You can gallop on such a horse forever without being aware of anything in your life. That is how people commit the same mistake over and over again and get totally dejected and depressed their whole life - and they do not even know that they are miserable. 

They are no doubt miserable and they make everyone around them miserable, isn’t that so? That is bad company. They forget all about themselves. There is no memory of them left, of who they are, what they are, what they want, where they are heading. They have no idea who they were, how they were. 

All adults forget that they were teenagers once, and that they, too, had problems as teenagers. When they have teenage children, they think the children are not doing well. Every adult feels that the children don't listen - they forget that they, also, did not listen to their parents at a particular time. 

When the delusion comes, the memory loss happens. You lose your memory, you lose the knowledge of who you are. The intellect becomes clouded. When the intellect is hazy, not clear, not sharp, everything appears wrong. It is the intellect, the buddhi, that says, “This is good, this is not good; this is right, this is not right.” That which is, that which brings short-term joy and longterm misery is bad. 

That which brings long term joy and short-term misery is good. This is the definition of good and bad. Good brings long-term joy and short-term challenges/problems, and bad is something that brings long-term problems and short-term joy. It is the intellect which decides whether this is good or not good, and when the intellect, itself, is gone, everything is lost. 

When the discrimination power in you is lost, then you are totally lost. This is what you will find if you go and talk to prisoners in jail. At the spur of the moment they lost their intellect and they lost everything. All crimes can only happen when the intellect or the discrimination is lost, and most of them lose it through bad company. That is why mobs create more violence. 

The individual person cannot do so much harm -in a mob they throw stones, put fire to buses and trucks and break things. The mob becomes more violent than a single individual person. It is the mob psychology- a mob is more violent because they lose their intellect, they lose their discrimination. That is why bad company is to be shunned. 

Good company is that which cheers you up, which elevates you, which brings a pleasant attitude and feeling within you. In the beginning it may be just like a small wave, a ripple, but when you are associating yourself with bad company continuously, it will become like an ocean. Don't think, “Oh, it is just one party there, just one little thing that I’m doing.” 

No, that one little thing can just rip you. That is how alcoholics who have recovered from being an alcoholic get sucked back into it. It is just one party, one peg- these sort of justification they give, they go for one little party once in a while and then that’s it, finished. And they end up again entering the rehabilitation centre.

Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankarji