Your eternal shelter- Mother's Day Special

God and Guru are Our Everything -
"You are also mine, and I am also Yours." - By understanding the true meaning of this statement, we can attain our ultimate goal. In the material world, we are constantly burdened by our attachments - we claim many things to be "mine" - my house, my husband, my son, my father, and so on. Managing these endless relationships is exhausting because someone’s mood is always off, sometimes many people at once. We remain stressed all day because of this. However, God assures us, "Your relationship with Me is not like that."

What, then, is our relationship with God like? - It has all relationships in one place.

In the material world, we establish various relationships, as one or two relations are not enough for us. For instance, if one doesn't have a sister due to destiny, they deliberately make someone their sister so that they can celebrate the festival of Rakhi. This is because we desire every kind of relationship due to our karmic impressions from infinite lives. Maintaining these relationships poses significant challenges.

So God says - "divyo deva eko nārāyaṇo mātā pitā bhrātā nivāsaḥ śaraṇaṃ suhṛd gatiḥ:।", "gatirbhartā prabhuḥ sākṣī nivāsaḥ śaraṇaṁ suhr̥t। prabhavaḥ praṇavaḥ śa‍r̥‍ṣṭhā praṇayaḥ pralayaḥ stha‍i‍tam॥" -
"I alone will become everything for you." To the extent that God even considered the Gopis to be His Guru -
sahāyā guruva: śiṣ‍yā bhujiṣ‍yā bān‍dhavā: striya:। sat‍yaṁ vadāmi te pārtha gop‍ya: kiṁ me bhavantī na॥
He proclaims, "My devotee is everything to me, and just as I am everything to my devotee." Thus, God is our all-encompassing relationship. All our relationships are with Him alone. Worldly relationships are limited by their roles. For instance, if someone calls their mother a wife, they would be labeled insane. But with God, such limitations do not exist. You can address Him as Father one moment, Mother the next, then as Son, and then as Husband. Not only can you merely say, but you can develop the corresponding feelings in your heart so that your mind doesn't wander elsewhere seeking relationships. Focus your love in just one place. This is the essence of exclusive devotion - ananyata. māmeva ye prapadyante - the condition is that all relationships should be only with Him.

Accept God's name, form, pastimes, qualities, abode, and saints as one entity, and bring only "these" to your mind. These are pure, and they will purify the mind. Don't bring impure, worldly relationships bound by Maya into your mind because that will further pollute your mind. Remember, you will attain whomever you love after death. Even a paramahams so great as Jad Bharat had to be reborn as a a deer due to his attachment to a fawn. Thus, worldly love traps us in a cycle - we love our children, they become our parents in the next life, and the cycle continues. This is how relationships keep forming across births.

When Abhimanyu was killed, Arjun was distressed and pleaded with Lord Krishna to show him his son one more time. Despite Shri Krishna’s explanations, Arjun insisted on seeing his son. So, Shri Krishna summoned Abhimanyu’s soul and gave it the same form that Abhimanyu had previously. Arjuna became overwhelmed by seeing him and said, "Son!" Abhimanyu instantly retorted, “Don’t you dare call me your son! You have been my son countless times before!” It is the body that defines relationships - mother, father, son, etc. - not the soul. It is the body that gets created in the mother's womb, not the soul.

Hence, "God is mine" - to this statement, we must add the word "only."

We are part of God. We have every kind of relationship with Him. The devotee tells God, "Why are you so possessive? In this world, no mother tells her son to love her alone and not his wife. But You say, "If your mind is directed elsewhere, even 0.1%, I will walk away. I won't stay in your heart." Arjun took the shelter of dharma, and he also took the shelter of God. God told him, 'māmekaṃ' - do not take shelter even in dharma - sarvadharmān parityajya - give up everything and surrender exclusively to Me. Just love Me alone. And that love should be 100% and not sometimes but always - 'evam satatayukta,' 'teshām nityābhiyuktānām'.

We sit in a room for half an hour or an hour and express a little love to God. Afterward, we return to loving our worldly mother, father, son, wife, or husband. In our prayers, we say, tvameva mātā ca pitā tvameva - "O Lord, You alone are my mother and father." Yet we still stealthily love our worldly parents, too. This is deceit, and God cannot be fooled. It is precisely this divided love that has kept us away from Him since eternity. Even in this world, if a husband discovers that his wife accepts another man as her husband, he will reject her. God says to love Me 'alone,' but we kept saying 'also,' loving Him as well as the worldly relations. God says, "Consider Me as your everything, and I will also consider you as My everything."

In this world, it is impossible for anyone to love someone truly. Worldly love is rooted in selfishness. If someone loves another here, they calculate whether the other person also loves them back and how much. “I called her twice, but she didn’t respond even once,” or “He called me four times, so he must love me dearly.” But all this is deception. He called her four times only to fool her. However, you don't need to use your intellect to calculate how much God and Guru love you. There is a simple formula to gauge their love - "yathā mām prapadyante" - however much the soul loves the Guru and God, They must reciprocate with that much love. This is guaranteed - there is no deception in the divine realm because this is an unbreakable law. You no longer need to calculate how much God loves you - just see how much of your own love is genuine and how much of it is fake. Merely placing your head at the Guru's feet while harboring ill will inside won't work. Such pretense will only earn you their mere act of loving, not true grace. Who can deceive God and Guru? They enter your heart and see everything within - we have no privacy left. They take note of all our thoughts.

God says, "Accept Me 'alone' as your own." Here, 'Me' constitutes God, His names, His forms, His qualities, His pastimes, His abode, and His saints. He says, "If you love My devotee and not Me directly, it is not a problem. I will still bestow My grace upon you." In other words, all those who belong to My realm are pure; bring them into your mind. Do not bring the impure into your mind. Your mother, father, son, wife, husband - all are impure. Their minds are tainted by the sins of countless lifetimes. If you bring them into your mind, your mind will become even more polluted. And after death, you will attain whoever you love. If your mother or father is a God-realized Saint, then you can love them. In that case, you, too, will go to Golok. But if they are bound by Maya, then you will have to go to them in whatever form they end up becoming. If they become a donkey, you too will have to become a donkey."

So, 'God is mine' - to this, just add 'alone.' That’s all. God cannot say, "I am not yours." We have every type of relationship with Him. If you understand the meaning of this Vedic mantra, then everything will become clear:
dvā suparṇā sayujā sakhāyā samānaṃ vṛkṣaṃ pariṣasvajāte। tayoranyaḥ pippalaṃ svādvattyanaśnannanyo abhi cākaśīti॥ (śvetāśvataropaniṣad 4.6)
There is a tree (the body) and a nest (the heart, to the left) in that tree. In that nest, two birds (two conscious beings - the individual soul and its father, the supreme soul, Paramatma) live together (no matter which body we take). One bird (the individual soul) eats the tree's fruits, while the other bird (the supreme soul) is mighty - He does not eat the tree's fruits; He simply keeps watching and noting the first bird.

God does not leave our side even for a 1/100th of a second. If we become a dog due to our destiny, He stays with us in the dog's body. The individual soul is a part of God. A part cannot be separated from its whole for even one-hundredth of a second. We have all kinds of relationships with Him:

1. sājātya - we are similar to God - we are conscious, and God is conscious too. We have made the entire body conscious. We belong to the same species.
2. sakhya - God is our friend, our well-wisher. In the mother's womb, He creates such a miraculous body for us that no one in the world has fully understood it despite performing many surgeries. And the body grows inside the mother's womb - a single microscopic part develops into a body with several organs, without any craftsman. He gives us the body, arranges food and water for our sustenance, and bestows the fruits of our past devotional merits by making us meet our Guru. Worldly friends abandon us over trivial self-interest.
3. sāyujya - ya ātmani tishthati - we reside within God. It is by His power that we remain conscious. If God were to remove His power, we would cease to exist. A fan spins because of the power it gets from the powerhouse. If the power is removed, the fan will stop spinning.
4. sāddeśya - The individual soul and the Supreme Soul always stay together in one place. God always stays with us in our hearts. Such a friend is He to us.

'God and Guru alone are my everything, and I also belong to them' - if you embed this principle firmly into your mind, you will no longer run towards the world. Instead, you will turn towards your eternal Father, true Mother, and true Friend, who are forever.

We have made infinite mothers, whether in the bodies of dogs, donkeys, or humans. Where did they all go? Worldly relationships change with each birth. Each time, we make the same mistake and say, "This is my mother; this is my father." None of these are truly yours; He alone is yours. So, understand and accept this truth — only then can you attain your goal.