Friday, April 12, 2013

PRARABDHA’S WAY - Bhagvan Maharishi



Those who have realized that prarabdha itself serves up one’s food [and other necessities for sustaining the body] will never feel anxious or agitated about food. You should know that for all people, whether they desire it or not, that [ordained] food will not fail to come.
Guru Vachaka Kovai v 150

Prarabdha is the karma that determines the course of one’s current life. Since prarabdha is deemed to be a fixed and unchangeable sequence of events, it is sometimes translated as ‘destiny’.

MURUGANAR: Those who are firmly convinced that prarabdha will take care of the body will not feel anxious and wander about seeking food, and so on. All the enjoyments ordained by prarabdha will surely come. Hence, it is clear that accepting and rejecting are the deluding activities of the mind.

‘I[Annamalai Swami] have this desire to live in a place where nobody visits. I feel another desire to get food without effort. I also want to meditate constantly with my eyes closed, without seeing the world at all. These desires often come to me. Are they good or bad?’…
[Bhagavan replied,] ‘One who leads a righteous life will never make plans of this sort. Why? Because God has already decided what will happen to us even before sending us into this world.’
[Living by the Words of Bhagavan, p. 191.]

Siva shines within each jiva as the witness, [enabling] him [the jiva] to experience his prarabdha through his [Siva’s] presence. Whoever knows his nature to be mere being-consciousness, without imagining through ignorance that he is the experiencer of prarabdha, shines as that supreme person, Siva.
Guru Vachaka Kovai v 151

Siva here denotes Iswara, the personal God, not Sivam, the impersonal absolute consciousness. When he spoke about prarabdha, Bhagavan generally adopted the position that God, Iswara, gave each jiva its prarabdha and also ordained that each jiva must experience the fruits of its actions so long as it identified with the body that was performing the ordained activities.

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