How To Find Peace

By

Sri Swami Chidananda

This article is a chapter from the book The Divine Destination.

Direct your entire being—mind, intellect, emotions, sentiments, towards that one and only Being, the sole Source in whom there is enduring, eternal, unalloyed, unmixed, total happiness that would not decrease or change. That is Brahman. That is God. Make all your activities God-oriented by spiritualising them.

You may ask: ‘All said and done, how can I implement it? I am involved in this world. This is a familiar ground for me. But I don’t know that unknown, unfamiliar Being. How can I have any love or affection, inclination or longing for That?

True, your problem is genuine. But the solution is quite simple: Detach from here, attach There. So first of all, you should get yourself familiar to That whom you want to worship, love, adore, on whom you want to meditate upon, towards whom you want to move. There are three different ways.

The first is the heredity. If you are born in a family where parents are devotees and they are doing Puja and Kirtan, singing devotional songs, reading about the Lilas of the Lord and the lives of saints, talking about Him, you will automatically develop love for Him.

Secondly, if you are not born in such a family, you should think about our rich heritage, you should get yourself acquainted with it by reading the spiritual books. There is a unique tradition in all the parts of India. There are some people whose sole occupation and allocation is to master the scriptures and to go to various places and narrate, expound and elucidate them. So even an illiterate villager also knows some philosophy; he knows about Shabari, Ahalya and many such characters. He knows about Bhakti, he knows about God’s grace.

Our scriptures abound in Stotras and Stutis, hymns and paeans of the Lord, glorifying Him. We develop great admiration, adoration, reverence and veneration for the Supreme Being. If you listen to the glories, grandeur and greatness of God and the desirability of that wonderful Experience of attaining that Being and attaining the supreme Bliss, Peace and Happiness, and going beyond all sorrow and suffering, it will create in you a longing for God, for that Experience and your life will certainly be changed.

Thirdly, once your taste is developed in this direction, you develop a strong desire to acquire more knowledge. So you begin to read and study our great scriptures in your leisure hours, prepare your own personal notes and discuss the finer points with like-minded friends. You slowly build up your own library of inspiring literature. What you argued to be unknown and unfamiliar becomes known and so close to your heart that you will spend most of your spare time on That and you don’t like to waste your time on the worldly things. Now, you like to read about It, you like to think about It, you like to talk about It and you like the company of people with such tendency only. Now unknown That becomes your best friend and guide, the remote becomes the closest, He becomes a part of your life, you cannot live without Him.

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