Baba says, ‘you have to practice becoming stable in a second‘. The final paper will be of a few seconds, you need to be ready now.

We don’t know when the final moment will come or what it will hold exactly but we have been given an idea. There will be a pull from all all sides – the body, people and possessions, nature, body conscious sanskars, vibrations, atmosphere etc. and yet, I have to remain stable amidst the chaos. I have to be able to remain detached from it all and only attached to Baba. Am I ready?

Baba says, ‘you need the practice over a long time‘.

I might understand the knowledge, I might understand the sanskars and all of it intellectually but old sanskars don’t go away just by understanding them. I don’t just wake up one day and feel detached from everything or just automatically feel uninfluenced by the atmosphere. I need practice.

The Drama is benevolent – it offers me opportunities to practice every day and often multiple times a day. I might not know what I need to learn but the Drama does and picks it out for me. Usually, I feel as if I am unfortunate: ‘why does this happen to me?’, ‘how did this happen?’…That should be the exact opposite of what I should be feeling and doing. Let me approach the Drama with the attitude that the Drama cherishes me. It is preparing me for success in my final paper. Let me engage with every scene as a student in the laboratory experimenting. Let me put into practice the points of knowledge I have learnt- someone is angry and saying rude things, let me pause and ask myself- how do I want to respond? When I am able to go against my usual rash response and instead succeed in remaining stable, I gain power. The more such moments I accumulate, the more power I accumulate.

If I don’t use the knowledge, I will lose it. It will become useless. It’s just like anything else. If I was learning a new language and I might know the words but unless I practice it by speaking it with other people, I will not become fluent in it. In time, I will forget it. But if I do practice, I improve my pronunciations, my grammar and gradually it become natural to me. That’s the idea- to make the divine virtues natural to me, to make stability natural to me, to make remaining beyond the influences natural to me.

No one gets there in a day or even two or three days, it takes practice over a period of time. Baba says, ‘you have a little time now, practice’. When I do, it means I respect time and use it wisely. Then, I find that time too co-operates with me. If I waste away this time, then I’ve lost it forever. The class would have moved on to the next chapter and new lessons present themselves but if I am still stuck in the previous chapter, I don’t feel prepared to face them.

Through it all, the Drama helps me return to my essence, it is making me firm in is the very first lesson- I am a soul, a child of God. That is my only truth, my only introduction. I am nothing else and no one else is mine. The more I practice being soul conscious, the easier it becomes to shed all the labels and masks, the easier it becomes to let go of what was always false ownership over people and things. It becomes easier to let go of the old world and its trappings altogether.

So, let me check- do I see myself getting attracted to the old world from time to time? if yes, let me check my practice and identify what aspect I need to pay attention to. What is still pulling me back? Then, let me make a firm determined thought to let go or change and pay attention to it until it becomes natural to me. Often, Baba says, you make the thought and set forth to do something but you still fall short. This is because you fall short in your determination and in the precaution of constantly paying attention.

As the adage goes, practice makes perfect. There are no short cuts. 2020, what remains of it, feels like a perfect opportunity to check and change, to prepare myself for the next chapter. Let me make the most of it.