One of the daunting truths about life is that we are essentially alone. We come alone into the world, and depart alone from it. Right through life, even while embedded in a network of relationships, we are alone with our grief and joy, our confusion and clarity, our success and failure. No one else can feel what we feel, and no one else can walk in our shoes.
That is the down side. The up side is that we are not really alone. The Universe is on our side. We are tenderly looked after. If you do not believe this, look back on your own life and recall the number of near accidents that were averted, the problems that got resolved through someone’s interventions, the calamities we fearfully anticipated which dissipated into nothingness. There is a force that watches over all of us, and ensures that only what is impossible to avoid because of our karmic baggage, is meted out to us. Grace mitigates much more of our karmic debts than we can possibly know.
I myself cannot recall the number of times I have slipped and would have fallen, had not some mysterious force righted me up. At such times, I always think that a legion of angelic beings must have come rushing to my help. As a naive 16-year-old on her way back home after her first term in a Mumbai college, I found myself stranded penniless in Nagpur halfway between Mumbai and Orissa, where my family lived. What could have been a tragedy ended with a benevolent station master lending me the money to board the train to my destination. My mother attributed this to the hand of God and I agree.
The more we walk towards God by aligning ourselves to the laws of life, the more strongly we will become aware of how truly we are supported and loved. God is always constant. We have the choice of drawing closer and experiencing Her presence powerfully, or pulling away and muffling the connection.
All seekers have the marvellous experience of walking along a coherent path that apparently seems to unfold before them. Where once life seemed random, confusing and directionless, one now gets a distinct sense of being led along in a particular direction. Everything that we look for in the spiritual or even mundane realm mysteriously manifests. Knowledge and insights come to us from books, conversations, or even from a piece of paper floating in the air. Coincidences abound. We think of someone and they call us. We desperately need a lawyer, and behold, a lawyer friend who we had lost touch with materialises out of the blue. In his book, Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda shares how his brother Ananta, tests his ardent faith in God by sending him and his friend to Mathura with no money and no return ticket. In a striking example of God’s providence, he was taken to an ashram where a banquet meant for some royal visitors who did not turn up, was offered to him instead. Later, a young man appeared, took them around the town, bought him and his friend tickets back home, and pressed some money into their hands as well!
So walk towards God and you will find that although challenges may still arise, you will also be guided and supported. Slowly, you will grow in faith and trust and eventually repose in surrender — that wonderful state when you are so sure that all that comes to you comes for your highest good, that you no longer fret and worry, but instead simply flow through life unresistingly. You are now on God’s side, and His grace will submerge you!
The writer is the former editor-in-chief of Life Positive magazine and founder, facilitator of the Zen of Good Writing Course. Contact her at sumavarughese@gmail.com
