It is far too easy to open Instagram, or TikTok, or whichever app has us that day, and compare our very real lives to a version of someone else’s life that they chose, carefully, to show us. Not fake, just picked. And somehow we let a few chosen frames convince us we are behind. If they go on vacation, we wonder how it must feel to be them. If they buy something expensive, we wonder how they got the money, how they got so lucky, why it couldn’t have been us instead.
And if that is not what is happening, then we are doing something even less fair to ourselves: comparing a life we have lived every second of to someone whose company we have maybe sat in for two hours total, and somehow those two hours outweigh however many years we have actually been alive.
The worst feeling in all of this is not the comparing itself. It is the sense that we are not doing enough, that we do not meet our parents’ expectations, or someone else’s, or our own, that we are not worthy of the better things, whatever “better” is even supposed to mean. It is a common enough feeling, especially when everyone around us seems to be doing something we have decided is better than whatever we are doing. And whether it comes from the scrolling or from that quiet sense of falling short, both together or either alone, it leads us to the same place: a slow erosion of our self-esteem and our self-worth. We are human, we want good things for ourselves, and in the search for them, we started believing our worth was something we had to go find.
But that worth was never lost. It was just never ours to search for in the first place.
There is a line in the bhajan “Mane Pragat Malya Purushottam Aj” that, if we actually sit with it, tells us exactly what we are worth. The whole bhajan is about what it feels like to become so fulfilled, so unbothered by the ordinary world, because we have met Bhagwan, because we have attained him in his entirety through Bapa. It starts with the simplest promise of all.
“Mari raksha karshe va’lo aj,” my beloved will protect me. To truly understand that line is to understand that nothing which happens to us falls outside of what Bhagwan has already planned, that whatever comes, good or bad or terrible, he was there for it before it happened and will be there for it long after. He is the one behind every part of this world, as he says himself in “Bolya Shri Hari Re,” “Mari marji vina re, koithi tarnu nav todaay,” without my will, no one can pluck a blade of grass. The same Bhagwan who controls that much, down to a single blade of grass, is the one who protects people as small as us, and the word “va’lo,” beloved, is doing so much work in that line. We are loved by him more than we could ever measure, and somehow we love him back too. Not just attached to him, but his. And there is something about that phrase, my beloved, that hits in a way that is hard to put into words. We are his, and he is forever ours, and that is the promise this whole line was making from the start.
And once we actually believe that, once we know we are protected like that, everything else starts to look small in comparison, and there is a different verse in the same bhajan that says exactly that: “Mane jagat bichaaru shu karashe, maaru darshan karashe te tarashe,” what can this poor world do to me, even those who have my darshan will be liberated.
Sit with the first half of that for a second. What can this world really do to us now that we have attained Parabrahma Purushottam Narayan? Why worry about anything this world has to offer when we have Maharaj, when we have the one Bhagwan that takes people millions of births to reach, and we somehow reached him in this lifetime? We are not ordinary, and that attainment is exactly what makes us not ordinary, what makes us unworthy of the world’s small expectations and worthy instead of something we cannot fully picture: the transcendental world where Maharaj and Swami reside and pull us toward them. That is why Bapa sees divinity in every one of us.
But the line does not stop at what this world can no longer do to us. It goes further, into what we, just by having that association, can do for someone else. Even those who have my darshan will be liberated. That might sound like a stretch even for people like us, but this is the line that says it all. Bapa explained once that some people have seen Maharaj through Shastriji Maharaj, Yogi Bapa, Pramukh Swami, and Mahant Swami, that because we have seen the Gunatit Gurus, we have seen Bhagwan, and those people have had the true association of Maharaj and Swami. But then he took it further, because there are millions of people who have never seen or been associated with any of the Gunatit Gurus, and yet through their association with us, people no better or more devoted than random strangers, they have had that association too. That is the line that tells us what we are worth: that through nothing more than our association, someone gets the chance at Bhagwan despite never having seen him the way we have. That is why Pragat Aksharbrahma sees us as divine. We see ourselves as regular people, we hold ourselves to worldly expectations, and when we fall short of them we decide we are not good enough. But we forget, we were never meant to be measured against those expectations in the first place.
Worth was never a worldly verdict for us to wait on. It was already given. We were the ones Maharaj and Swami chose to walk beside in this lifetime, long before any of us had done a single thing to deserve it. Maybe that is the whole point. We were never supposed to earn it. We were only ever supposed to receive it, and live like we actually had, not like people still waiting for a verdict. This world will forever have its scoreboard. We just were never playing that game to begin with.
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