“[Paramahansa Yogananda] said “take care of the minutes and incarnations will take care of themselves.” And that is really a spectacularly interesting teaching. It’s, in this moment, what am I doing with my consciousness? And here is the most helpful way to think of it that I have found. Because this world is dual, and because we’re caught in duality, and because we have the potential for god-realization and we have the actual magnetic pull of where the vibration of our consciousness is now, there’s always a dynamic tension in our awareness. If we’re blessed to know that spiritual growth is even the point, there’s a dynamic tension. And so we are always operating in a state of duality in which there is an upper and a lower boundary of our potential.
When I got really mad at someone once for something that they did, and it happened in public I had the opportunity to blow my top right in public, (about 30 years ago)… I thought to myself the worst I can do is begin to scream right now. The best I can do is Christ-like forgiveness. Christ-like forgiveness is not an option, but it isn’t necessary for me to begin to scream right now. So over time I gradually brought the top down and brought the bottom up until there was a private moment when I could, with a relative degree of calmness, express my feelings. Because the option of not expressing was never there. Because that would have been suppression not transcendence, and I’d learned by then not to go there.
In every circumstance there is always a worst and a best. I don’t really want to do all the dishes, but I’m going to stack all the dirty dishes in one place. I don’t want to really scream at my family member, [so] I’m going to go out for a little walk and I’m going to write a little note. I don’t want to finish this whole project but I’ll do just a little more before I stop.
Take care of the minutes. And then what will happen, and this is the issue with genuine spiritual realization, it takes time. it shouldn’t but does, it takes time because we are a car going 150 mph in the wrong direction, or at least not quite the most efficient direction, and it just takes time to shift the momentum. There’s a lot of force going in one way and we have to generate enough energy to shift the direction. …Moment by moment trying to be a little better than my worst… a whole lot of ground [can] be covered. “
~ Asha Nayasami in Ask Asha Q&A October 2020]
“Even a little observance of this discipline saves one from great fear”
“Even a tiny bit of effort protects one from great fear (the colossal sufferings inherent in the repeated cycles of birth and death).” —The Bhagavad Gita II:40
