QnA with Sri Sri
THURSDAY, JANUARY 29, 2015

Q: How do people who do wrong things rise up in life?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: You know, when you see people who do wrong things rising up, you lose your courage, your conviction, your morality; you lose your ground and you feel broken. That’s when you need to remind yourself that they are only rising up to fall back down. Bad elements need a fall, that’s their final destination. But even to fall you need to rise a little higher, only then do you really get broken. So they raise to get a big fall. If you are convinced of this reality, then nothing whatsoever can touch you; no event can pull you down, no event can demoralize you, no nervous breakdown can happen, nor will you ever have heart breaks. Your morale becomes very strong with this conviction.
See, every event creates some knowledge and some emotions. Often events have some lessons to teach you, and also create along with it some emotion. But what do we normally do? We don’t learn from the events at all, but we carry forward the emotion. And the emotion keeps haunting us, like a scar or a craving.
When knowledge is not learnt, you are left with a bag of emotions. Be it positive or negative, it is going to bother you in the present and in the future.
The stronger the craving for a pleasurable experience, the more painful it will be in the present. This is because the pleasurable experience has created an intense craving in you which carries over to the present and keeps you in a bigger mess. Am I making the point clear? For example, if you have gone through a break-up which was intensely painful, that is because the pleasure in the relationship had been equally intense, which is why it was so painful. It is the craving (for that pleasurable experience) that made it so painful, leaving you in the present moment with only a bag of emotions.
Now what does a wise one do? He takes forward the lessons from the past and leaves behind the emotions in the past. If someone has cheated you, then learn the lesson from the experience. What did you do that someone could cheat you. How unintelligent were you that you allowed someone to cheat you. Just learn the lesson instead of carrying anger, frustration and hatred towards the other.
Most of us, instead of learning the lesson, we carry the emotions of the past. It is not an intelligent thing to do. The intelligent thing to do is to carry the lesson and drop the emotion so that you can keep your smile genuine, unblemished and untouched by the event. What do you say? You can keep your spirits high, come what may. Now! Now! (Snapping his fingers indicating ‘Be in the present moment’). Life is always a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant things; things which you like and things which you don’t like. Life is a mixture of this.

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