Ramana Maharshi said that the true guru is within. The more we give up the notion of the personal “I”, the more we open our experience to multiple streams and expressions of consciousness. In recent times I have come to recognise one such stream of consciousness which I have labeled The Inner Guru. The words of The Inner Guru simply arise, without thought and are accompanied by a very distinctive quality. Once these words have been written, the personal mind often engages with them and adds further commentary. For clarity, in these articles the words of The Inner Guru are presented in italics and the commentary in normal type.
“Why do you want to change the world? Because you want the world to be more to your liking. But if you try to change the world, that means you have an agenda and where there is agenda there is attachment. Attachment means you want this but you don’t want that. But whenever you don’t want something, you make it more powerful, because you resist it. With an agenda you may succeed in bringing about what you want, but you will also be feeding what you don’t want and this is bound to manifest at some point in time. Consequently very little is achieved.
For this reason I do not advocate the use of intention to change the world. Instead I advocate the cultivation of love, appreciation and acceptance.
Accept everything, appreciate everything, love everything. If you practise this the world will quite naturally become more to your liking. Not because you tried to get more of what you want and less of what you don’t want, but because you embraced everything that life had to offer you.
The world will continue to change without you believing that you are the one who has to change it.”
Do not confuse this approach with the notion that all you are doing is making yourself feel better about not changing the world for the better. Acceptance, appreciation and love are not passive. In fact they constitute what we could call Inner Activism because they are the most powerful forces in the inner realm and it is the inner forces which give rise to what you see in the outer world.
Many are now being called to take action in the outer world but remember that there are many paths and outer activism may not be your calling. Whenever someone takes action in the outer world, from where does the motivation, the inspiration or the idea arise for such action? We may feel encouraged by the actions of others but ultimately the driving energy behind what we do comes from within. Therefore the cultivation of inner qualities is of the profoundest importance because whatever you cultivate inwardly is shared with the world whether you engage in outer action or not.
