Family or No Family in spiritual journey?

This is a very common question in anybody's mind when he/she tries to walk the path of spirituality. Forget about even spiritual path, for that matter everybody who has not married goes through this question - whether to marry or not marry, whether to have family or not have family. There are several things going on in the mind. More so in the minds of the Millennials. 

Some think they will loose their freedom if they marry. Some are scared to take any family responsibility. Some think marriage will ruin their quest to achieve their goals be it material ones or spiritual ones. Some even want to be a celibate thinking that is going to take them deep in spiritual journey.  Some want to marry and have family to expand their progeny. Some want to marry just to be with that one person they always dreamt of being with. Some think marriage is part of the social system and whether they like it or not, it is one of those customs that they need to follow. Some marry just because their parents want them to get married. Some just want to be in a live-in relationship with no commitments. 

Most of these thinking arise out of misconceptions about life itself. Opportunities in life present themselves in various ways to experience Love in different forms. Yet instead of being in that space of love, we look forward for something special and we are also often afraid of getting entangled. There are deeper secrets as to why those moments present themselves which I will not talk about here. Instead let us look at what we do about those moments. For example let us take a situation when some boy looks at a girl and falls in love - Love at first sight. There are some sensations arising all over the body. A feeing of thousand flowers blooming within the heart, songs of romance playing all at once in the ears and uncontrollable smile! But right after, fear starts whether the other person will also love. What if the person rejects his love! So effectively the moment of Love got lost and all the focus got shifted to the future. But nobody bothered to see where this surge of love came from? No doubt the other person was responsible to create a spark, but what is the source of the feeling of that love in enormity? You will be amazed to realize that the actual source is deep within us and we are the source of Infinite Love! You may have noticed a happy person writes nice poem looking at the moon whereas a sad person looking at the same moon starts describing it as a depressing object with rashes all over! The moon is the same! But how one feels about it is entirely dependent on the state of the person looking at it. This clearly proves that though the external object/person may be a trigger, the source of the emotion is within the person experiencing that object/person. When you experience a sense of deep love looking at a person or an object try this - forget about the person/object who kindled it for a moment and go deep into yourself observing the sensations caused by that experience of love. You might notice the experience of love multiplies many times more! This is a natural phenomenon and that is why we often close our eyes when experiencing deep moments of love. When you regularly meditate, you can easily slip into the state of ecstatic love at will without even any object or a person having to trigger it.

When you don't know this truth, we keep wandering around searching for that experience of love thinking marriage might give that, family might give that, or being independent without a family might give that. And we end up going around in circles along with the moving target. The moment you know this truth, you soon realize it really does not matter what you do, but the bliss of love stays within you no matter what! When you experience the true love deep within, a natural tendency arises to share that love with everybody around. You cease to expect joy from some object or a person, but your very actions start becoming an expression of that pure Joy and Love from deep within. You start taking every opportunity that life presents with both hands happily accepting it and fulfilling them without any regrets, because you stop expecting joy out of the completion of the action. The action simply happens as an expression of the joy within. His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar often says we are all made up of a substance called bliss or love and all other emotions are deformations of pure love itself. When we know this, it really does not matter - Family or No Family is not a question anymore! The whole world becomes your family - Vasudaiva Kutumbakam!!!