One thing has to be understood very clearly.

The whole of Existence is an auspicious happening. You are part of Existence, so everything happening around you is also auspicious. This is the truth of Existence. Nothing that happens in Existence is inauspicious. Everything is only a blessing.

If this is understood clearly, there is nothing to complain about in life. If this is understood clearly, your very eye becomes a grateful eye. It sees everything as extraordinary. Nothing appears mundane. Everything appears as a miracle. Miracles are continuously happening in front of our eyes. But we continuously miss them! Only because we miss them, life itself appears to be dull sometimes. When we start perceiving them, our entire life becomes a miracle. The truth is, there are too many miracles happening around us in our lives.
If we celebrate the three things, the existence of the self, world and god, we will experience the whole of Existence as a blessing that is happening continuously. Let me explain.

When you celebrate the existence of the self, god and world, all three will reveal their mysteries to you. Please understand that when I say celebrate the self, god and world, I am not giving you moral advice. I am giving you a spiritual technique.

The first step: you will never be able to realize or understand yourself until you accept yourself and celebrate what you are. As long as you fight with what you are, you will never be able to realize what you really are. Usually we carry two identities within ourselves. One is the outer world identity and the other is the inner world identity. The outer world identity is what we present to the world, as how we want the world to see us, how we want to be recognized, how we want to present ourselves. This identity will always be much more than who we really are.

The other, the inner world identity, is what we believe we really are. This identity will usually be much less than what we actually are. This is what we refer to as low self- esteem.

Your whole life is nothing but the fight between these two identities.

You constantly try to fulfill your outer world identity, and this is in conflict with the inner world identity. The struggle between you and you, the struggle between these two identities, eats your whole life.

It is time to stop this struggle. It is time to just celebrate whatever you are. Just accept and celebrate whatever you are and you will see that you slowly realize the real Self. Self-realization is postponed again and again only because of the fight between these two identities. The moment you stop the fight between them, you will see that both of them disappear into the realization.

The two identities exist only because of the non-acceptance in you. So just accept whatever you are in the outer world and in the inner world. Just accept and say a deep ‘yes’ to you as you are. Suddenly you will see that both these identities have no utility or purpose for you. They simply disappear. They leave your body. They disappear from your very inner space. Then you accept and celebrate your self as it is. You understand that you neither need to develop the self in the outer world nor do you need to develop it in the inner world. Out of this understanding, suddenly you will see that the Self will be realized!

In the next step, we come to the celebration of the world. Understand that all the difficulties and problems between you and the world are because you do not look at the world as a mystery. You continuously try to demystify the world with your logic. You try to understand the world with your intellect instead of celebrating it, accepting it, enjoying it. You analyze, segregate and try to bring it under your control. It is not possible to achieve this! It is too vast and too intelligent! It is meant to be enjoyed and not analyzed.

Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, an enlightened master from India, tells a beautiful story:
Two men entered a mango grove. One of them sat and counted the number of trees. He studied the variations in their size, the number of branches, density of leaves and number of mangoes across the trees. He tried to determine the varieties of mangoes. He thought about where they would sell, what would be the cost etc. The other man simply ate a few mangoes, enjoyed himself and then left!

When you have entered the world, understand you have entered the mango grove. If you continuously use your logic to analyze and judge and try to bring things under your control, you will miss the whole thing.
I have seen people who can’t enjoy a resort unless it is owned by them. They can’t enjoy anything unless it is legally owned by them. Their logic has to conquer things, only then they can enjoy anything. Your logic does not have to conquer everything. You don’t need to own things to enjoy them. Trying to understand the world is nothing but trying to intellectually own the whole of Existence, the whole world. Trying to understand intellectually is also nothing but trying to possess, trying to own intellectually. You will never be able to celebrate if you follow this path.

Just accept and celebrate Existence with all its different dimensions and paradoxes. Don’t judge anything.

You continuously judge what is going on as something is right or something is wrong, something should have happened this way or something should not have happened this way.

Become aware that whatever happens in Existence is auspicious. In Sanskrit, the word shiva means ‘Causeless Auspiciousness’. Shiva is also the name of a Hindu god. For no reason in particular, auspiciousness is overflowing all the time. You too are continuously expanding and growing, whether you accept it or not. Every birth, every action, every single incident happening in your life is increasing your frequency, raising your intelligence. Causeless expansion is happening in you also. But you may or may not experience it this way. That is a different thing.

In the whole world there are only two kinds of people. The first kind feels that whatever is happening in the world is against their will and things have to be slightly altered all the time. Such people will try to alter, judge, criticize and develop the things happening in the world according to their ideas.

There is the other group, a rare group, that feels that whatever is happening is auspicious – Shiva-like! Whoever feels what happens is auspicious, live in Shiva-Consciousness, in eternal bliss, in celebration. The other group continuously suffers because it tries to change things all the time.

Everything has a message for us including death and disease. Everything has something to teach us. Every incident raises our intelligence, raises our frequency of consciousness. In the whole drama of the cosmos, anything that happens in our life brings auspiciousness to us. It adds to us. All we need to do is look at the world as a mystery, as an intelligent mystery.

Existence is not an accident. It is independent intelligence.

When you understand that it is an independent intelligence, when you understand that it is a profound mystery to be experienced and not solved, everything in your life will open itself and reveal to you the lesson it has brought with it. When suffering comes to you, if you approach it with non-acceptance, with resistance, it will create only pain in you. It will add only suffering to you. If you approach the same suffering with deep respect and gratitude, suddenly you will see that it reveals its mysteries to you. It will show you the reason why it happened in your life and the lesson it brought to you in your life. If you approach the suffering with acceptance and intelligence, suddenly you will see that the very suffering gives you enlightenment! It adds joy and experience to your life.

Everything happening in the world is auspiciousness, including what you call natural calamities. There is no such thing as inauspiciousness. Natural calamities are nothing but nature’s ways of adjusting itself to certain actions of human beings. So accept and celebrate the very existence of the world.

In the third step, we come to celebrating god, the root and the source for the other two steps that are the self and the world. As long as you carry doubt or faith about the existence of god, you won’t experience god. Just like doubt, faith is also an obstacle. I have seen people who believe but never try to experience god. They continue to have faith but never experience god.

So now, drop your doubt and your faith about god’s existence or non-existence.

Even if you believe in god’s existence, you will have only an idea about Him – that He will have ten hands or eighteen heads, that He is tall or short. Whatever idea you may have, even those ideas can be hindrances to finally experiencing god. So drop your faith and doubt. Just remember that if there is a creation, there should be a creator. The moment you see an object in front of you, you know that the creator of the object exists, is it not? If the creation exists, the creator also exists. Even the word ‘creator’ does not exactly fit god.

He is simply creativity overflowing for no reason, that’s all! He is just constant creativity that is expanding. He is a constant Big Bang…a constant black hole that is happening.

The creation, the created and the creator – all three express as just creativity. God is creativity. So celebrate the existence of creativity. Unless creativity exists, creation cannot happen. The very existence of creation is solid proof that the creator or creativity exists. Creativity is not a set of dead rules. It is an intelligent independence. It is intelligence and independence. So just celebrate the existence of that independent intelligence. Celebrate the existence of god as creativity.

When you celebrate the existence of these three – self, world and god, suddenly you will see that these three barriers were created only by your unconscious mind. There is no barrier, there is just pure Existence, pure consciousness, pure celebration.

Living with the clarity that self, world and god are not three things but the single core of Existence, and celebrating the existence of this one core, is what I call Living Enlightenment.

If you celebrate the existence of all these three, self, world and god, you will suddenly see that only celebration exists. All the three disappear into the celebration!

When all these three disappear into celebration, what remains is what I call eternal bliss, nithyananda.