Aptavani-2 Aptavani-02 | Page 82

Aptavani-2 33 your own, torments you. Such is the worldly life. Minding one’s own affairs This world is a huge trap and not even an ounce of it belongs to you. The house in which you live is yours only if you pay rent for it. If a sparrow has built a little nest in your house, do you think she thinks of you as her landlord? No, she thinks it as her own house because she too lives in that house. A lizard on your wall too thinks the house belongs to her. Every living being has a claim of ownership of this world. The Lord said, “Everyone should mind their own affairs. I will take care of my own.” There was a group of milkmen who lived and worked together but they cooked their own meals. They had set up a camp in an open ground. Each one of them had their own special cooking clay pot in which they cooked khichadee (rice and lentil). They would put their cooking pot over a fire between three stones and left their khichadee to cook slowly before they went to town to sell their goods, leaving one person in charge. When they returned in the evening, one of the milkmen could not remember where he put his cooking pot; he could not find it. He could not remember which tree he had set his cooking pot under. He thought for a while and decided that if he picked up the wrong one, others would think he was strange so he pondered a little. He then picked up a large stone and called out, “I am going to break open my cooking pot; please take care of your own pots.” All the other men reached out for their own pots and he found his! We need to take care of our own ‘cooking pots’ as we proceed in this worldly life. This worldly life is like people traveling on a boat, each one will go his own way when the shore comes. And yet you say, “I can’t live without her!” How will you make progress if you take this approach to life? All relationships are unfolding of karmic accounts of past life; how long can you go on living like this? Why this interference (why