Genuine Grace

 

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Genuine Grace

False things are always cheap. We can always purchase a mask for our face, a beautiful mask. In reality, transforming our face into a beautiful one is an arduous journey. It needs great transformation in our being because our eyes show that which is within us, our face radiates our inner reality.

Unless our whole being is transformed, we cannot have real beauty. Authentic grace is possible only when our innermost core becomes illumined, when it becomes a light unto itself. Then certainly from our eyes, from our face, from our hands, from all our actions and gestures, our inner reality is conveyed. But that needs great work.

To purchase a false mask is very simple. We can purchase a mask and look like Buddha or Jesus or Krishna. And we can learn how to act like somebody else. Acting is not a difficult thing. To be a real Christ is one thing, to act as Christ or Buddha or Krishna is another. Millions of people of different faiths are acting as if they are enlightened – specially the religious leaders of different faiths!

During Easter, Christians carry the cross and re-enact Christ’s crucifixion, Krishna followers celebrate Krishna Jayanti and commit to follow Lord Krishna’s path and on Buddha Jayanti there is a commitment by followers to reach nirvana. Acting is so cheap, that’s why millions of people have chosen the easier course, the short-cut. But once we choose a lie, we will have to choose a thousand other lies to support it, and we will become afraid of truth because a single truth will destroy the whole edifice of our falsity.

It is because of this that the Jews had to crucify Jesus. He was destroying their traditional lies. Socrates was poisoned for the simple reason that he started talking about the truth, he started persuading people into enquiring what the truth is and not being blind followers, not being believers but enquirers. And that was a danger to the whole establishment. The establishment immediately took action. This man had to be stopped. If he did not listen then he would have to be killed.

Why have people been so much against truth? Because of their investment in the lies. But the trouble with lies is that although they are cheap, simple, easily available. We can find all kinds of lies in the churches, in the mosques, in the temples, in the gurudwaras, everywhere. We can choose. They come in all shapes and sizes; whatever fits us, we can choose that kind of belief. But we remain miserable.

That is the real price we are paying. On the surface they look cheap but ultimately, we come to realise one day that our whole life has been wasted, our whole soul has been destroyed - and we have done it. It is a suicidal act, and our whole life becomes nothing but a long tragedy, a sequence of miseries, from one misery to another. Of course, one always hopes that something good is going to happen but it never happens. Lies can never deliver the goods; only truth can bring bliss to us, only truth can bring celebration to our life, only truth can bring spring.

In India orange is the colour of spring - when all the trees burst forth in red colours. They dance, they sing, suddenly their whole being is rejoicing. A tree flowers only out of overflowing energy. It is so overflooded with joy, it has to share it with the existence. Flowers represent bliss, celebration, spring, youth, resurrection. If we renounce all lies, our whole past is renounced. We will be reborn; in that renunciation is a rebirth.

When life is fresh and clean of all the junk of the past, we can again have the same wondering eyes of a child, the same innocence. And it is innocence that can have a communion with the ultimate - not knowledge but innocence.