Can the Heart Expand to This

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Can the Heart Expand to This?

Can this be considered with an open heart?

Isn’t it selfish to not allow selfishness
Whether individual or group be the case
It is not justification for any conduct
But accepting things as they are just now

In different states of evolution are all
Experimenting by expression and experience
The inexorable law of cause and effect
Teaches all—from within silently

We don’t get hurt by selfishness
But by its non-acceptance and resistance
Let things be just as they are
Some days are warm, some cooler

Someone always pays the bill
For foolishness that must be worked out
This is not an excuse to hurt others
We are all each other have to evolve

Someone does pay the bill—but who knows
The privileged ones change each round
Oppressors become oppressed sometimes
To exhaust silliness or limitation

It takes a big heart and mind
To let each and all have their room
And not get worked up about it.
Just let people and things be as they are

As each must bring about self-change
From within themselves and by themselves—
And till then, each is each other’s training aid
Acceptance enlarges heart and mind

Expand the heart so there’s room for all—
Including all these things we are appalled by
It is very difficult but real spiritual practice
The heart must have room for the whole world!

When you include all within your heart
They do not bother you anymore
Abandon outsideness and otherness
And see—you stand together with everything

He who made kittens and rabbits
Also put snakes in the same grasses
In nature each understand compatibility
Without contempt—just living carefully

To respond naturally amidst everything
We first have to return to naturalness
Naturalness knows how to move about
Amidst the multitude of its own variety

We try to compensate by shrewdness
It does not work, we hurt and hurt others
Naturalness does not fumble here at all
It does what is right every moment naturally

Some may still get hurt in nature’s play
But this is seeing things from outside
Nothing stands outside nature, it includes all
Waves rise and fall in the same ocean

Differences are nature’s call to you
To return to inward no-difference
Rooted in the unchanging there’s no problem
The ocean never worries about her waves

Swami Suryadevananda