#186 Acceptance and letting go of blame (2 of 3)

(Excerpt from Pujya Swami Dayananda Saraswati ‘s Morning Meditation prayers)

The basis for any form of prayer is not one’s helplessness; it is the acknowledgment of one’s helplessness. The key to an efficacious prayer is realizing my helplessness. Prayer is born naturally when I realise my helplessness and also recognise the source of all Power, all knowledge. if both of these are acknowledged, prayer is very natural. 

If everything is in order I need not pray. All prayers have their fulfilment in keeping everything in order. If everything is in order, prayer becomes redundant. My prayers have already been answered. 

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 no outside help from a person like myself is of any use. I go to the source from where such help is possible. I invoke the Lord in prayer.

I intimately realise that I am a victim of my own past. As a victim of my past, I cannot but be apprehensive about the future. I become worried. I become cautious. I become frightened of my future. To deliver myself into the hands of the Lord, I deliver myself to the order that is the Lord. 

The Lord is not separate from the order and the order is not separate from the Lord. My past then becomes 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, if there is such a thing.

All’s well that shapes well, that ends well. Past mistakes become meaningful as long as they have made me wiser. To acknowledge my helplessness is in itself a great step towards recognising the order. I intimately acknowledge my immediate past and remove the past from my life. 

As a child I had no will of my own. I was in the hands of my parents, my elders, my teachers and other adult members of the society. As a child, I see that I was absolutely helpless. My knowledge was limited and my perception was never clear. I was insecure. I was learning with a small mind and with meager information, without any worldly wisdom, without any wisdom at all. Naturally, I made conclusions about the world and myself. Those conclusions formed the basis for my interpretation of the events to come. In the process, these interpreted events definitely seem to confirm my conclusions.

Look at the helplessness. As an adult I cannot remove the conclusions I made as a child and therefore I become a victim of my own past. Whom should I blame? I cannot blame myself. Nor can I afford to blame the world. Blaming is to retain the past and does not help me let go. It is one thing to acknowledge the mistakes of others but quite another to hold on to them and retain my fears and anger. I have to eliminate all forms of blame in order to be free of my past.

I may have valid reasons to blame. I see those reasons and I let go of my past. By allowing my blaming to continue, I allow the past to continue. If I was a victim of the behaviour of my elders, by blaming them now I continue to be a victim. I Understand it all, but still I am helpless. 

Dear Bhagavan

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 

Others themselves have others to blame   

Help me accept gracefully 

What I cannot change

Blaming means

I want to change the past

I want my past to be different

How can it be? 

Dear Bhagavan

Help me accept gracefully

What I cannot change

I let go of my resentment

Anger and dissatisfaction

By accepting gracefully

What I cannot change

Dear Bhagavan

Perhaps what I went through

Was meant to happen

Perhaps it was all in order

For it has given me 

The ability to pray      

The years of pain

Struggle

Groping

Seem to have paid off 

For I am able to pray

And by prayer 

Everything 

has become meaningful

My pain

My past

Has resulted 

In my coming to you

To seek help

Intimately

I acknowledge 

My helplessness

I seek your help

Your intervention

To make me drop 

What I cannot change

To make me accept 

What I cannot change

Which even you cannot change

You cannot change

What has happened

Nor can I 

Nor anyone else

Intimately I acknowledge

The fact that what has happened

Cannot be changed  

Dear Bhagavan

Help me totally

Accept what I cannot change

My mother’s behaviour

Her omissions and commissions

My father’s neglect

His anger and indifference

His lack of care

His mishandling and mismanagement

His drinking

The fights between them

The confusion at home

My being left alone

Not cared for

This is how I felt

Not cared for

Not loved

I was wrong perhaps

But it was how I felt     

Dear Bhagavan

I cannot change

What has happened

Please help me accept gracefully

What I cannot change

I do not want to bury the past

Nor do I want to forget the past

I cannot

I just want to accept the fact

Accept the past

Gracefully

I accept the past

I even begin to see 

An order in all of this

For do I not pray now?

I have come to be objective

I see some order here

Dear Bhagavan

Please help me accept gracefully

What I cannot change.

Problems such as anger, depression, sadness, self-criticism and self-dissatisfaction, for the most part stem from one’s childhood. I am not to blame for these problems. The outside world is to blame, parents, teachers, other elders and society consisting of a number of people, situations and events. All these are to blame. Either we blame ourselves illegitimately or blame others legitimately. 

I free myself from blaming myself. I am not to blame for what happened to me as a child. As a child I was helpless. I did not have the necessary knowledge or information with which to understand, to take action appropriate to each situation. When someone else was to blame, I did not have the knowledge to say, ‘You are wrong.’  I thought I was wrong.  I was not an adult, therefore could not make decisions and act upon them. Others had to make decisions and do things that affected me. I am not to blame.     

I free myself from blaming others also. If I blame others, then I still carry the past. As long as I continue to blame, the factors that cause damage to me continue.  The ‘I’ that was subject to pain continues to be, along with the anger and resentment.    

I cannot forget my past. How can I? I know what has happened. How can I forget? To bury the past is easier said than done. No one can bury one’s past. All I can do is to accept the past gracefully. I cannot afford to blame any one or anything. Nor can I afford to blame myself.

Even as an adult, any omission or commission on my part was determined by the helpless ‘I’ that was the child. I see that I am not to blame. I also see the uselessness of blaming others.       

I gracefully accept the past because I cannot afford to blame. Perhaps there was a meaning to all that has happened in my life. All is well that ends well. Whatever happened to me might be in order because now I am ready to accept the entire past gracefully. People do not accept what has happened, even in their old age. My pleading to the Lord, ‘Please help me accept this situation,’ makes the entire past meaningful.    

Please help me, O Lord. Help me to accept my entire past gracefully. Let me not blame anyone, neither myself nor anyone else. Please help me accept the past gracefully. 

There are a number of things I can do, of which one I am doing right now. I can pray. I can change my attitudes. I can change some of my personal habits, habits in thinking and in behaviour which cause recurring problems.

Let me have the will and effort necessary to fulfil it so that I can bring about the desirable changes in my life.

Let me be objective enough to drop any false ideas and concepts held by me against all evidence because of my emotional attachment to them.

Let me have the courage and the honesty to drop ideas, beliefs and speculations.

May I be open enough to explore, to know where there is a valid belief. May I understand it as a valid belief. May I not be confused between a fact and a belief, nor between a valid and a baseless belief.   

May I have the ability to change, to reshuffle. Let me not be afraid to be wrong. Let me not be afraid to face the fact that my forefathers and my parents might have been wrong. May I have the love to know, the love to be objective.

O Lord

Give me the will

Courage

Honesty 

And sincerity of purpose

To change what I can change.  

A prayer is always from an individual. It is never from the self, ātmā but from the individual, jīva, who is in fact the ātmā. It is this individual who prays.

To whom does the individual pray? I do not pray to another individual. Other individuals also have the limitations that I have as an individual. The power and knowledge of the one I pray to are free from any limitation.    

Let there be no confusion about whom the individual is praying to. The self? The individual is the self. The self is not an individual, but the individual is the self. 

Therefore the prayer is not towards the self but towards the self as Īśvara. The self that is now an individual is praying to the self that is Īśvara, the total, the Lord. 

Let there be no confusion. A prayer is always to the Lord. Even the enlightened person who knows the meaning of the sentence, ‘tat tvam asi, you are that,’ can offer a prayer as an individual because the difference between Īśvara, the Lord, and jīva, the individual, is evident, even though, in actual fact, there is no difference.           

Non-difference between the Lord and the individual is a matter for knowledge. That the difference is apparent, mithyā, must be recognised. But, now, as an individual, when I see myself helpless, I cannot but pray. So, prayer is not against the teaching. In fact, any form of ritual is also a kind of prayer and is not against the teaching. I pray because I seek help. Therefore, the prayer is never to the laws themselves but to the laws as the Lord.  Therefore, the prayer is always to the Lord, the maker of the world and its laws. Even a prayer directed to a deity, with reference to a given phenomenon, like sun, water, fire, and so on, goes to the Lord.      

O Lord

I seek help

In order to accept my past

The past is not a villain

Nor does it have to be looked upon

With contempt

The past makes me what I am

Every experience 

Was an enriching experience

The problem is 

Not that I have a past

But that I see myself 

As a victim of the past

Because I do not accept it

Om shantih shantih shantih