Baba says, ‘your original religion is peace and true peace is found in the land of peace‘. Stabilize yourself in your original religion.

The Father says that this is a world of sinful souls. Back about a cycle ago, Bharat was the land of happiness. There were no other lands; there was just the one Bharat. There was comfort and happiness in the golden age and it was called heaven. The same Bharat is now hell and the world is too along with it. Not only is this hell but it is the extreme depths of hell, it is the land of sorrow. How then, Baba asks, can there be comfort, that is, peace and happiness, in hell?

On any given day, there are any number of words and behaviors that can be upsetting. There are situations at home, at work or just in the world at large that are challenging. If I am going through life taking all this in and thinking that when so and so changes or when the situation resolves, I will be peaceful then I am setting myself up for disappointment. As Baba reminds me, this is the land of sorrow. There cannot be peace here.

That does not mean I become a sanyasi and leave for the forest, turns out, there isn’t peace there either! Baba says, ‘only I give you the inheritance of liberation-in-life’. He teaches me to be liberated, to be peaceful while living in the midst of peacelessness, of impurity. I have to emerge my peace, love and all the other virtues here in this impure land to be able to become a resident of the pure land. I receive the inheritance of heaven, in hell.

The way to be peaceful is to renounce body consciousness, He teaches. Give this donation, He says, and you will rid yourself of the bad omens. To be relieved of bad omens is to become peaceful again, it is to be at rest again.

It is when I am body conscious that I am stuck, caught up in the vast maze of false ‘I’s and ‘mine’s. Where there is limited ‘I and mine’, there is a need to control, fear and anxiety of losing any of the identities or things I deem as belonging to me. Where there is anxiety and control, there is anger and frustration, there is worry, there is exhaustion. Renounce all the artificial masks, this falsehood and simply remember who you are and the Father, He tells me. The only true ‘I’, is I, the soul and the only true ‘mine’ is one Baba.

It is freeing when I can situate myself in my truth- as a pure soul, a child of God. This is called being peaceful purposefully. Peace will not walk into my life, I have to be purposeful about it. I have to guard and protect it.

If I am going through life regretting the past and worried about the future, that is not guarding my peace. Let me learn from past mistakes and let it go. Let me have the humility to remember that this is an unlimited classroom that I am attending. There will be mistakes – let me be open to learning from them and making the change. Similarly, let me have the wisdom to understand the fruitlessness of worry. More often than not, I am worrying about hypothetical situations that I think may occur in the future. If I were to reflect on my life so far, I’d find that most things I worried about never came to pass. And even if something is to happen down the line, let me have the faith in and understanding of the drama that I will have the necessary strength by then to face it. Right now, I only have strength and grace for today, let me not worry about something that may happen 2 years from now! That will always look daunting because I don’t have the wisdom, the maturity, the preparation for it today. But if I pay attention to what I need to do today, I will have, in the process, prepared myself to face whatever comes in the future. Instead, if I spend my days worrying about it, I am depleting my resources rather than conserving and building.

Do I see every day as a gift or as a test? Am I fortune focused or misfortune focused? My attitude creates the atmosphere around me, it determines the quality of my life. Every scene in the drama, every situation is a learning opportunity, it is teaching me something, preparing me, molding me. It is taking me closer to my destiny. Do I stay open this way? Do I believe drama cherishes me? Do I go through life feeling grateful, do I tune in to the moment? If I do, then I engage with the drama whole-heartedly, with enthusiasm. I am not afraid of it, I am at rest. I don’t worry, I know everything is working to my benefit. If I see the drama as my enemy, as a never-ending test paper, then I will live my life in fear and anxiety, unhappy and restless.

Give me your burdens, He says. This is not just God being nice, He actually needs me to hand over my burdens. Only then can He get to work on me. If my mind is tied up in fears and worries, He cannot get through to me. I delay my own destiny. Yes there are things that come up daily that I need to think through and resolve but let me not dwell on them, worry about them. When I worry or become fearful, I am inadvertently putting the worry or the fear or the situation on my heart-throne and taking God off. Just when I need Him the most, I separate myself from Him and make myself alone.

Baba says, you are making effort to receive the inheritance of heaven from the Father. Only the one Father makes you constantly happy.

Throughout the day, let me take a couple minutes to remember Baba as He is- in the incorporeal form, in the sweet silence home. That home is the land of peace, and my Father is the Ocean of Peace. When I go home and I plug in to the Source throughout the day, I fill myself with peace. I release the negative, the worry, the hurt, the insult and all the other toxins that might have cluttered the mind, and clogged the intellect. I fill myself with peace, with power, with true love. It brings me clarity and power to face the next hour. Peace is your original religion, Baba reminds me. Practice this bodiless stage all through the day, He says, and you will be able to situate yourself in your religion. This is being peaceful purposefully, this is guarding my peace.

When I can do this, I make myself available to God to use me as an instrument for world transformation, for world peace. I become His instrument to change hell back to heaven.