MUSINGS ON “REMEMBER AND OFFER”
Beloo Mehra
“Remember and offer” (CWM 3, 1977, p. 26) — an Integral aspect of Integral Yoga.
How simple does it sound! But how difficult it is to practice!
If one could remember the Divine at every moment and if one could offer everything that one is outwardly engaged in, every act, however mundane it may be — this is what is asked of us.
How easy would the path become if one could actually do this!
What is it that prevents us from practicing this advice of “remember and offer”? What prevents us is our mixed-up, egoistic outer nature. From brushing the teeth to eating the dinner, be it TV watching or entertaining guests at home, folding the laundry or cleaning the bathroom, working outside the home, driving back home in the evening — the task in front of us is to grow in our inner consciousness so that at every such moment one spontaneously remembers that it is not the separate ‘I’ that is doing all this, but that all this is Mother’s work and you are only Her instrument, that the Divine is always present around you, inside you, everywhere, that all work is nothing but an offering of yourself and everything that you are at Her Feet.
There is a lot of stuff that occupies our daily lives — stuff that keeps us away from remembering. It is almost like second nature, or first nature, for most of us to say — oh, let me finish this work and then I’ll sit down and meditate for half an hour; now I have this one more thing to do, so where’s the time for my prayers; after I am done with this I need to go and do this other thing, so there is no way I will be able to sit quietly for ten minutes and remember God; now this, now that and so on and so forth. We keep postponing the act of remembering. We get so occupied by forgetfulness, that it becomes super-convenient to forget and stay forgetful.
We don’t offer because we ignorantly perceive that what we are doing, feeling, thinking are not the ‘stuff of Gods’, but the ‘stuff of us’. We forget that it is all His, it is all He, He is in All, and is All. So how can the ‘stuff’ be ours? Or if all the stuff is His to begin with, why offer it back to Him? This question doesn’t even make sense. Because if all is His and He is in all, we are also His and He is also in us — so who is offering what to whom?
We forget that by not offering we keep living under the illusion that the stuff is ours, the outcomes of our actions are determined by us, the responses to emotions and thoughts are ours and the consequences are ours. We keep getting sucked in by this ignorance and keep living with the pain and suffering of ‘owning’ our ‘stuff’.
