Page 74 - Liberal Exposition of Pranahuti Aided Meditation

civilized society is one where the food is shared first with children then with elders then with oneself.
So the principle of sharing which we have learned from animal instinctual level, we got it as an aspiration and we said in this land when somebody comes to you, you treat that person as an athithi and give him food first and then only you take later. A value which we seem to have almost forgotten today for whatever reason it may be, that is what it is. Even relatives are not welcomed and thanks to certain amount of westernization, do not go to a house without information and we say if anybody comes to you without information treat him as a God. You can see the difference in value points of the two societies. One society does not want a person to come without intimation. Another society says if anybody comes to you without intimation treat him as a God. This is another important thing that you should be very very careful in meditation. In meditation what happens is you get certain thoughts totally uninvited, you have got all sorts of thoughts coming to you and all of a sudden some thought comes to you. That thought is God and Godly but we are the first persons to miss it, we always miss the athithi, uninvited guest is God always.
It is from the adhyathmika point of view, our people have brought in the tradition to the mundane level day to day life they brought in the concept of athithi because the athithi comes to you more in meditation than elsewhere. There are more sparks of the Divine during meditation than you can think of or you can dream of because God loves us so much that he is always yawning towards you. He would like to enter into you and the moment you create a vacuum He is prepared to fill it but then we are so attentive to the other things like our going to the market which takes precedence over our attentiveness to this. That is the reason why we say please be attentive and alert, athithi can be recognized only when you are attentive. There are umpteen number of stories of people when God has personally visited them and this man has said ‘no no I have got something else to do’ and he forgot, he never attended to them and it happened to be the wives of some saints. A lady received a guest, the God Himself who comes, she does not recognize Him as such because he came uninvited uninformed, he came and then it was left to the saint to recognize later and poor man he said ‘you are more lucky than me you have seen the God and I have not’. The stories go, these are all common knowledge you should be knowing. My point is the sharing as a principle develops.