Editorial
Build up your Future Now
Today you are rich, affluent, have an excellent family, enjoy comfort and are very happy. Why? You may say that it’s all due to your hard work. In a way true. But don’t limit your idea of “hard work” to your present job situation only. There are other factors which may be unknown. For example, do you “see” how energy comes to your muscles when you work? You don’t. You have just read or heard that the food you enjoy becomes energy. The process is for you not a reality but theory. Similarly, your present happiness is your “hard work” plus something more. Look backwards still.
One of the biggest factors for your present state of life is not just your present business, but your own past. Accept it or not, the story is longer than you can imagine. Otherwise, you cannot explain a family where a blind child is born, though for 15 generations, no one was blind in the family. It is not heredity or gene. It is deeper.
So comes the ideal of karma. Karma is a well-known concept and everyone speaks of it. But what everybody does not tell you is, don’t think your present luxurious lifestyle is permanent. It will change. Just as the past is longer than you imagine, the future also is longer than you can imagine. It doesn’t end with the falling of the body. Things will change, your beautiful family, money, everything will change. Happiness will go, everything will go. Why should they change? It’s because your bank balance will not remain the same. With every expenditure, it becomes less. So with your karma stock. You are now enjoying benefits, which means that you are exhausting your past good karma. When you become bankrupt, what do you do? Declare insolvency? You can see thousands of souls living in the slums — dirty, dark, filled with filth. What have they done to be there? Their bad karma is exhausted and they will get better opportunities in the future.
Thus here comes the purpose. Why are you rich, having an excellent family, and so on? Just to be happy and to enjoy? No, not for that. It’s an opportunity. An opportunity to build your future. Life is an unending process. If you halt to enjoy the “fruit” and don’t do anything, you are spending. You will land in terrible states and no amount of weeping, blaming others, and cursing God will help. You wasted your time. This world is not called “bhoga bhumi” [the place of enjoyment] but “karma bhumi” [the place of building up your future].
Utilize your present good situation as an opportunity to build up your future. That is, grab every opportunity to do good karma. You may ask, “What will I get by doing unselfish work?” You are building up your future! You are accumulating tremendous karma-bank-balance for the future.
Repeat these words of Swami Vivekananda a hundred times until it soaks into your nerves: “Unselfishness is more paying, only people have not the patience to practice it. It is more paying from the point of view of health also.” Do a little unselfish work without thinking, even for a moment, what it will bring you. You will have unconsciously been adding to your karmic bank balance. As spiritual masters say, don’t be like that animal which is satisfied if its stomach is full this moment. It never thinks of its future.
So using this present moment as an opportunity to build our future is the right way. And that is called dharma. Dharma is positive.
Finally, what is the goal? How much future should I think of? You must think of that point in future when you will be happiness itself, bliss itself, Ananda itself. That is your true nature. Absolute Ananda.
May Sri Ramakrishna’s grace be on all of us.
Swami Sunirmalananda