Nothing Belongs to Us

 

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Nothing Belongs to Us

I am sure all of us have heard the qawwali – ‘Khali haath aaya hai, khaali haath jayega’ – meaning ‘I have come empty handed and will leave empty handed’. I used to love that qawwali and would pay money to have that qawwali sung during weekends out with friends – this qawwali has great depth of meaning and it used to touch me to the core. This was way before my spiritual transformation brought about by His Holiness Shivkrupanand Swami.

Swamiji too, in his discourses talks about being alone – here he refers to the soul and not the person in his physical form who has parents, friends, family, colleagues and so on. In this form the individual is in duality and he has yet to start his journey towards unity, towards the sense of oneness.

Who has given us this physical body? Who gave us the opportunity to assume this physical body? It is our parents – so, this body too does not belong to us, our parents are responsible for bringing this body into existence. Similarly, everything else that we think we own does not belong to us, our house, our cars, our love, our children – nothing belongs to us – we actually take it on rent for the duration of our journey on earth! When we leave, everything that we think we own is left behind – we don’t even take our physical body with us – it returns to mother earth!

This concept of ownership comes from the ego, from the conscious mind, where ownership is everything – ‘my family, my wife/husband, my job, my property’ and so on – where the ‘my’ defines who you are! It is nothing but your ego which is on display. Even poor people have an ego – ‘I don’t have anything’ they say – and in so saying they stay awake at night on the streets to protect their ‘belongings’. The ego keeps transforming in multiple ways, in ways you can never fathom – you think you have lost your ego, and it crops up again in some other form. For you to recognise it, you have to practice meditation and learn to become a witness – when you learn to watch, you will learn to recognise your chameleon like ego – the small voice inside you will tell you – be careful, don’t let this ego get the better of you!

It is a deeply humbling experience when one recognises that nothing belongs to one – it is the unconscious ego that is being humbled. No matter which form it takes, it knows that ultimately whatever it has will be taken from it. When one realises that one truly has nothing, then whatever is there in this current life becomes a gift from God. When we accept that, we had nothing, we have nothing, and will never have anything – our life becomes free from bondage, we attain peace withing, we become one with the self!