The basis for any form of prayer is not one's helplessness; it is the acknowledgment of one's helplessness. Prayer is born naturally when I realize my helplessness and also recognize the source of all power, all knowledge. When I am helpless, I seek help from any person I can. When the helplessness is in terms of my incapacity to let go of my past or to let the future happen without my being apprehensive, then outside help from a person like myself is of no use. I go to the source from where such help is possible. I invoke the Lord in prayer.
Realizing that I am a victim of my own past, I cannot but be apprehensive about the future. I become worried and frightened. If everything is in order, I need not pray. All prayers have their fulfillment in keeping everything in order. When I surrender to the Lord, I actually deliver myself to the order that is the Lord. My past then becomes a part of the meaningful order of my personal life. The future unfolds itself in keeping with the same order, an order that includes my previous karma.
All's well that ends well. Past mistakes become meaningful as long as they have made me wiser. To acknowledge my helplessness is itself a great step towards recognizing the order. I acknowledge my past and neutralize it in my present life.
As a child I had no will of my own. I was in the hands of my parents, teachers and other adult members of the society. As a child, my knowledge was limited, my perception was vague, I was helpless and insecure. The conclusions I made then about the world and myself formed the basis for my interpretation of the events to come, which, in turn, tend to confirm my old conclusions. Thus, I become a victim of my own past. Whom should I blame for this perpetual helplessness of mine? I should blame neither the world nor myself, for to blame is to retain the past. If I was a victim of the behavior of my elders, by blaming them now I continue to be a victim. I understand that I have to eliminate all forms of blaming in order to be free of my past. But I find it very difficult to do without the Lord's help.
O Lord, help me. Help me accept gracefully what I cannot change. Let me be free of blaming anyone, including myself. I cannot blame myself for what happened to me. Nor can I blame others because they themselves have others to blame.
Blaming means that I want to change the past. But the past cannot be changed; it must be accepted as it was. I let go of my resentment, anger, and dissatisfaction about the past. O Lord, perhaps what I went through was meant to happen. Perhaps it was all in order as it has led me to prayer.
All the years of pain, struggle and groping seem to have paid off, because I pray and by this prayer everything has become meaningful. My pain, my past, has resulted in my coming to you to seek help, your intervention, to make me accept what I cannot change.
I do not want to bury the past, nor do I want to forget the past. I just want to accept the past, gracefully. I even begin to see an order in all of this. So, Lord, please help me accept gracefully what I cannot change.


--Swami Dayananda

(contd. from previous post...)
Practicing accommodation you come to terms with yourself psychologically-with yourself as a personality. That is what we call yoga-sadhana. It is not an exhaustion of impressions (vasanas) but an understanding of certain realities that are there. Look back at the situations, the people and events, which disturbed you in your life. They are not mere memories but remnants of reactions. A reaction is not something you do consciously. You cannot consciously get angry, for anger is not an action but a reaction that takes place, something you have no control over. Reactions create a great impact on you and become part of your psyche. They are aspects of the personality of a person. In fact, they are false, born of a lack of alertness on your part. Memory itself is not unpleasant. Unpleasantness is there in your mind because of lingering reactions and emotions which have become as though real. Therefore recall those people and moments that caused you pain. Or perhaps you carry guilt because of some hurt you caused another. In the seat of meditation recall them all and let them be as they are. With patience you free yourself from all residuals of the reactions.
When you look at the blue sky and the stars, or the birds and mountains, you have no complaints about them; and you are happy. You see the rocks on the riverbed; they did not do anything to please you. Yet you are happy because you accept them as they are, and therefore you are pleased. The river flows in its own way; it does not bother you. You do not expect its fullness to be greater or to flow in a different direction. In fact, you seek out natural spots because they do not invoke the displeased person, the angry, hard-to-please person that you seem to be. The demanding cord in you is not struck by them. You are one with the situation, an accommodating self, without the need of the world doing anything to please you.
Thus, you are a pleased person with reference to a few things. That is the wedge you have to create in yourself. When you go to the mountains, the mountains do nothing to please you; but you find you are pleasing to yourself. See how pleased you can be, and bring that pleased person to bear on all situations and people who had displeased you and whom you had displeased at one time or another. Then look at yourself just as you would when you look at nature. Accept others as you accept the stars. Pray for a change if you think you or they need a change, and do what you can promote change. But accept others first. Only in this way can you really change. Accept others totally and you are free; then you discover love, which is yourself.

Swami Dayananda

Vedanta is a teaching about oneself. Vedanta is an inquiry wherein one discovers that the real meaning of the word 'I' is the self who remains unchanged from childhood to youth to old age, whose nature is pure awareness that is absolute contentment and love, and who is free from any sense of limitation. To appreciate yourself as that limitless wholeness you require a mind that is prepared to assimilate that knowledge. For the one with an unprepared mind, Vedanta is like calculus for a person who is learning basic mathematics. In Vedanta the preparation required is a mind that has, in relative measure, that which it seeks to discover in the absolute sense. If the self is absolute contentment, then the mind of the seeker must be relatively content. If the self is absolute love, then the seeker must be a relatively loving person, a person who happily accepts people and things as they are.
To gain such a mind means to develop certain values and attitudes and to be clear about them as far as understanding their importance. Accommodating others is such a value. In fact, anger is due to lack of accommodation. If you expect the world to conform to your desires, then it is your own expectation that brings anger to you. Accommodation is an understanding that the other person behaves as he does because he cannot act contrary to his nature. You have no right to expect something different from him just because it suits your needs. If you think you have a right to ask him to change, then he has the right to ask you to let him live as he does.
In fact, only by accommodating others, allowing them to be what they are, do you gain a relative freedom in your day to day life. In many ways, everyone interferes in everyone else's life. Everyone creates a global effect by his or her actions. Ordinarily you just look at things from a small perspective, and you find the person you are angry with looming large before you. In face, you are never free from anyone's influence or from all the forces of the universe. Nor can you perform an action without affecting everyone else. Even your statements will affect others. Therefore our freedom needs to include the fact that we are all interrelated.
Even the swami is not free. A couple of people passed when I was at a zoo. One said to the other, "Did you check out the new one?" People often make such comments. I try not to disturb people, but it seems that my clothes, the traditional robes of a renunciate do cause them to react. I have made a decision, and it will definitely affect others. If I am disturbed by other's comments, then I gain only that much freedom that they grant me. But if I reverse the process, if I give freedom to others to be what they are, to that extent I am free. So I do not argue with them. My freedom is the freedom that I give to them to have any opinion they want about me, even though it may be wrong.
Thus, there are benefits to accommodating people as they are. If someone makes a comment about you, allow him to do so. If the comment is not true, you usually try to justify your actions and prove him wrong. If you are objective, you can see if there is any validity in his criticism of you. If he has put you down for his own security, give him that freedom and then you are free. What tightening can you do to a bolt when the threads are not there? Similarly the world can disturb you only to the extent you allow the world to disturb you. And you do not allow the world to disturb you if you give the world the freedom to do what it wants within the rule of society. By changing yourself totally in this way, you gain according to your value for accommodation, relatively abiding contentment and freedom.

Swami Dayananda
(to be contd..)

Q: All of a sudden, we find very educated and smart people having a tough time coping with the effects of the credit crunch. What guidance would be the most appropriate to those who are hit by the crisis, and to those on the fringes?

A: This underscores the fact that to be educated and smart is not the same as being intelligent. To be intelligent is to be intimately alive to certain realities.
In life, loss is inevitable. Everyone knows this, yet in the core of most people it remains deeply denied- 'This should not happen to me.' It is for this reason that loss is the most difficult challenge one has to face as a human being.
So the first step in coping with loss is to accept that it has happened. How? We have to start with the facts. If the fact is that I cannot accept it, I first accept that I cannot accept it. This is where prayer will help; eventually, being kind to oneself and being prayerful, one will be able to accept the fact.
Grief will follow, naturally, since one is human. Being human is a matter for celebration, so we need to respect that grief, even, I would say, welcome it. It is as much a part of the natural order of things as loss. This acceptance of loss and the attendant grief involves so many things, but one of the most important things is not to waste energy blaming, either oneself or others, even when there are perceived injustices.
Here, our understanding of karma is a great blessing to us, and we can press it into service to help us move on. Then we are free to focus our energies on finding solutions to this new problem.
And above all, we are free to ask, "What do I learn from this situation?" What is crucial in dealing with loss, is not to lose the lesson. That makes you a winner in the most profound sense.
None of this is easy; there can be a certain helplessness at any stage, right from accepting the loss. But here we can help ourselves a lot with prayer. Prayer in any form is efficacious, because it is an action. It will, therefore, have a result. That is the law of this universe in which we find ourselves.