INNER PEACE

*The Beggar King*

A great flood threatened a city in olden times. The waters were up to the palace doors. The king and the queen in the interest of the prince's safety put the baby in a basket to prevent it from drowning. Unfortunately, in the confusion that followed, they lost sight of the baby's basket.

The crown prince was separated from his parents. The basket with the baby prince went far with the flooding waters and finally ended up near the home of a poor family. They took care of the baby the best they could; no one knew that he was the crown prince. The prince was raised in poverty and as a beggar in the street. For a livelihood, the prince would spend most of the day begging; he too, did not know that he was really the crown prince. Thus, he would become happy if someone gave him something to eat or some money, and would be sad if he did not get any food or money from begging.
Now, the prince had a birthmark that the king and queen knew of. They searched high and low through the kingdom discreetly for a person with that birthmark. Luckily, after many years they finally found the prince, raised as a beggar. Suddenly the beggar's life changed. He was well cared for, educated, and raised to be the next king. He was very happy, as now he spent his time in luxury and learning from the best. A few years later, the king died and the prince was crowned king. He ruled his subjects well.

One day, the beggar prince who turned king, was thinking about his life; he reflected where his life had taken him. Suddenly, he felt like going back to the street and begging, just for the experience of it. So disguised as beggar, he went begging for a day. Just like before, some people gave him money or food, and some people did not.
However, this time he did not feel anything if he got anything or not from begging. Whether people gave him money or not, he continued to be at peace, because inside the disguise he knew he was the king.

*Moral:* This story teaches us about who we really are. Each of us is a child of God; God’s Blissful soul is in each of us. However, we do not realize it and do not feel Bliss. When something bad happens to us, we feel bad; when something good happens to us, we feel happy. In life, something good or bad will always happen to us.
However, if we want to be Blissful all the time, we have to do spiritual practice, that is, realize that we are God’s children with His Blissful soul in us. Then, we will live like the beggar king in this story.

Karma & its effects

Karma and Retribution.😊🙏🏼😊

Once there was a king who distributed food to the brahmanas.
One day, as he was giving out food to the priests, an eagle flew above holding a dead snake in his claws.
Out of the mouth of the dead snake fell a drop of poison into the food that the king was distributing.
No one knew or saw that this had happened, so the king continued distributing the food.
The Brahmin who accidentally got the poisoned food from king died, and the king was feeling very sad about it.

Chitragupta, one of the assistants of Yamaraj (the god of death) who had the job of assigning retribution for karmas to the living beings had a problem.
When this incident with the king and the poisoned food happened, he did not know who to give the karma to.After all, it was not the eagle's fault that it had carried the dead snake in its claws (since this was its food), nor was it the dead's snake fault, nor was it the king's fault because he did not know that the poison fell into the food.
So Chitragupta went to Yamaraj for a solution. Yamaraj told him to wait patiently. Soon a solution would present itself, the lord of death assured him.

One day, few other brahmanas entered the kingdom in order to meet the king.A woman was sitting next to the road, selling wares and they asked her: "Do you know where the king's palace is and how we can get there?"She said: "Yes," and pointed at the right direction. "But, be very careful," she said, "the king is known to kill brahmanas!"
The moment she said that and criticized the king unrightfully, Chitragupta got his answer.He decided to give HER the karma for the death of the brahmana!

Moral of the story:
If you criticize anyone and you are right about their deeds, you will get half of their bad karma.But, if you criticize someone and you are not right about their deeds, then you will get 100% of their karma.So be careful about what you think or say about other people.- Srimad Bhagavatam (5.10.17)

DO NOT LIMIT YOUR GROWTH

"Once upon a time in a faraway land, there lived a Chinese wise man and his disciple. One day in their travels, they saw a hut in the distance. As they approached they realized that it was occupied in spite of its extremely poor appearance.

In that desolate place where there were no crops and no trees,a man lived with his wife, three young children and a thin, tired cow. Since they were hungry and thirsty, the wise man and his disciple stopped for a few hours and were well received. At one point, the wise man asked:
“This is a very poor place, far away from anything. How do you survive?” "You see that cow? That’s what keeps us going,” said the head of the family. “She gives us milk, some of it we drink and some were make into cheese. When there is extra, we go into the city and exchange the milk and cheese for other types of food. That’s how we survive.”

The wise man thanked them for their hospitality and left. When he reached the first bend in the road, he said to his disciple: "Go back, get the cow, take her to the cliff in front of us, and push her off.” The disciple could not believe what he was hearing.
“I cannot do that, master! How can you be so ungrateful? The cow is all they have. If I throw it on the cliff, they’ll have no way to survive. Without the cow, they’ll all die!”

The wise man, an elderly Chinese man, took a deep breath and repeated the order: “Go ahead. Push the cow off the cliff.” Though outraged at what he was being asked to do, the student was resigned to obey his master.

He returned to the hut and quietly led the animal to the edge of the cliff and pushed. The cow fell down the cliff and died.

As the years passed by, remorse for what he had done never left the disciple. One spring day, the guilt became too much to bear and he left the wise man and returned to that little shack. He wanted to find out what had happened to that family, to help them out, apologize, or somehow make amends.
Upon rounding a turn in the road, he could not believe what his eyes were showing him. In place of the poor shack there was a beautiful house with trees all
around, a swimming pool, several cars in the garage, a satellite dish, and on and on. Three good-looking teenagers and their parents were celebrating their first million dollars.

The heart of the disciple froze. What could have happened to the family? Without a doubt, they must have been starving to death and forced to sell their land and leave. At that moment, the student thought they must all be begging on the street corners of some city. He approached the house and asked a man that was passing by about the whereabouts of the family that had lived there several years before. “You’re looking at it,” said the man, pointing to the people gathered around the barbecue.

Unable to believe what he was hearing, the disciple walked through the gate and took a few steps closer to the pool where he recognized the man from several years before, only now he was strong and confident, the woman was happy, and the children were now nice-looking teenagers.
He was dumbfounded, and went over to the man and asked:
“What happened? I was here with my teacher a few years ago and this was a miserable place.
There was nothing. What did you do to improve your lives in such a short time?”
The man looked at the disciple, and replied with a smile:
“We had a cow that kept us alive. She was all we had. But one
day she fell down the cliff and died. To survive, we had to start doing other things, develop skills we didn’t even know we had.
And so, because we were forced to come up with new ways of
doing things, we are now much better off than before.”

Moral :
Sometimes our dependency
something small and limited is the biggest obstacle to our growth. Perhaps the best thing that could happen to us is to push our “cow” down the cliff...the biggest successes  people have achieved are mostly outside their comfort zones but purely with their effort zone !!