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We are all waves in the ocean of existence. Existence itself is pure, intelligent energy. This loving Existence desires that each of us succeeds and experiences fulfilment in life. The effect of the peace radiated by a person, fully satisfied and blissful within himself is similar to the waves that happen in a lake when you throw a stone into it. Everything in the lake is touched by the effect of the stone. The waves of bliss radiating from a peaceful person naturally and automatically touch the people , animals, trees, and rocks, affecting everything nearby.
To make the whole world blissful and happy, you don’t have to do anything. Just change your centre. When you are seeing a horror movie, your world will be filled with fear. But if you just change the channel to say a comedy movie, you can see how your whole world changes!
With the inner awakening happens the higher emotions. It all finally boils down to your own experience of what is happening. If you want to save the world, all you need to do is save yourself! Everything is happening in this world — great spiritual sessions where enlightenment is being shared and at the same time terrorist training camps where violence is being shared. The world that you attract and see will appear to be so according to what you tune yourself with. You will attract the same type of people and situations in your life.
Even one person struggling for enlightenment, seeking, raises the consciousness of at least a million people. Not only are we all connected to each other socially, the great Truth is that we are all part of the whole, the collective consciousness. We are not individual islands. Our thoughts , emotions, and feelings not only affect us but also the whole world.
When we realise our role in the existential scheme of things, we can no longer feel separate from all those around us. We can only feel separated when we feel unconscious of our role, when we are unaware. All calamities around the world are created only by unconscious human beings . Only by creating more and more people who are awakened, who are enlightened, can the collective influence of individual negativity be destroyed.
Existence desires that each of us succeeds and experiences fulfilment in life. When we realise this, we can simply let go of our fears, desires, jealousies, pains, and depressions and relax into the loving arms of existence.
Be Blissful!
PARAMAHAMSA NITHYANANDA
Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen got 77 rejections for their idea Chicken soup for the soul. In retrospect each rejection could be seen as a turning point. They had the option of throwing the towel every time; to say enough is enough; or to keep on trying for the nth time. But the 78th publisher they met at a literary jamboree said “Yes” and they went on to sell over 100 million books. The moral of their story is to remember that you are only one choice away from changing your life. Don’t let the past be your guide.
A similar sort of insight becomes applicable when one is trying to resist potentially crippling effects of our collective achievements. “Forget the past,” advises the noted novelist Allegra Goodman. “Nothing stops the creative juices like thoughts of the literary tradition. You’ll never be John Donne!’ your inner critic shrieks. Or Middlemarch! Now that was a book!’”Such thoughts used to fill her with gloom. Then she went to graduate school at Stanford and steeped herself in Shakespeare , Wordsworth and Defoe and the experience set her free.
Goodman’s Aha moment came when she was sitting in the Green Library, struggling to write a short story. As she looked around, at all those shelves lined with rows upon rows of books, “Suddenly the obvious occurred to me,” she writes in her Calming the inner critic and getting to work.
“All the great Romantic poets and Elizabethan playwrights and Victorian novelists that tower over me — they’re dead! Think about it. Past masters are done. Their achievements are finite, known, measurable. Present writers, on the other hand, live in possibility. Your masterpiece (like Canfield and Hansen’s Chicken soup for the soul) could be just around the corner . Genius could befall you at any moment.” But don’t worry too much about the future either . Be in the present . As Horace says, “Seize the day trusting as little in the future (Carpe diem quam minime credula postero).”
The Bible also echoes this when it advises you to “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die”. So make the most of current opportunities because life is short and time is fleeting. But Horace also tempers his Epicurean spiel with stoicism: “Whether Jupiter has allotted you many winters or this final one, be wise, strain the wine, and scale back your long hopes to a short period. While we speak, envious Time will have {already} fled.”
Vitalc Nadkarni
The seven-plus-seven traits and manifestations, denoted by the seven alphabets, each in the word ‘success’ and ‘failure’, could, as noted by Dr Maxwell Maltz, serve as the basis for accurate analysis and self evaluation. Through intelligent application, the aspirant can thus reduce the intensity of the negative aspects within, while also further empowering the positive traits, already inherent. This is not merely personality development, but shaping one’s potential, future and destiny. To a large extent, thus, one can be the master of his fate and the captain of his soul!
Dr Maltz also observes how all characteristics finally boil down to expressions of one’s own self image, which actually is the sum total of all the stuff, the ‘goings on’ and the matter within — one’s ‘personality’, to sum up.
For instance, ‘sense of direction’, ‘understanding’ and ‘charity’, in a ‘success’ mechanism, are born of one’s own healthy self image that he himself is a truly capable personality, fully respectful of others’ capacities too. He also sympathises with their imperfections, caused often by their limitations and troubles, as they too are children of God. The other traits of the ‘success’ personality — ‘esteem’, ‘self confidence’ and ‘self acceptance’ are also outer signs of the fulfilled self image within.
Similarly, regarding ‘failure’ mechanism, the seven traits sprout from the person’s own self image. To illustrate, one who is given to resentments over others’ unfairness or injustice, is possibly one who finds such reasons to justify his own self image of one who is a “pitiful person, a victim, who was meant to be unhappy”.
Taking cue from external traits should thus be a process, which should also go with watching one’s own self image and enhancing this through positive thinking and healthy vibrations all over. Awareness of one’s own potential, promise and latent capacities is as important, as being aware of the limitations and infirmities within.
This, verily, is right auto suggestion, based on this famous success formula of Emily Coue: “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better”. This also is the process of further empowering the positive traits within, simultaneously weakening the undesirable ones. The crux thus lies in discovering and shaping for oneself the appropriate self image, which, doubtless, is the base for everything!
K VIJAYARAGHAVAN
There seems to be a perpetual dichotomy in our lives. It is known as the work-life balance problem. In the pursuit of happiness, man is rushing to make money so that he and his family can enjoy. But the more he rushes to earn the less time he has to enjoy. And the more he enjoys, the less time he has to earn. So it seems that the two are in eternal discordance. How is it possible to balance these two opposing forces?
The great Einstein has said that the a problem cannot be solved by the same type of thinking that created it. So let’s try to look at the problem differently.
One way of doing so is: why separate work from enjoyment. Why consider work as a mere source of money which will then buy enjoyment. Why not enjoy work itself? That may well be true but then comes the question, how? How does one enjoy work which is not always enjoyable. Let us take recourse to literature — The Elixirby George Herbert:
Teach me, my God and King, In all things thee to see, And what I do in any thing, To do it as for thee: ... A servant with this clause Makes drudgerie divine: Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, Makes that and th’ action fine.
Put less poetically, it talks of the having an higher ideal or higher vision in one’s work If there is no ideal in the action, the work becomes mechanical, dull, routine, boring. But even is there is an ideal in the work, if one is able to work for something beyond the money, status, etc. There still remains the question of time. A person needs time to spend with his family and other interests. If all time is spent at work what about the rest of life?
Is there a way to spend less time at work and yet achieve more? Yes, there is such a way. It is known as clearer thinking. The more clear the thinking, the more the work accomplished in the given time. Fuzzy thinking makes a job take longer. It is the difference between working hard and working right. A handcart puller is working very hard but what he will achieve may not be much.
Sharpening the axe is better than chopping away with great effort with a blunt one. Some people make in one day what is a year’s salary for others. Clearer thinking gives a quantum leap in output. Like inventing the wheel raised life onto another level.
The way to develop clearer thinking is through reflection. The more the thinking one does, specially on philosophical literature , the more clear a thinker does a person become.
Janki Santoke
Science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke famously said that “any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.” What he had in mind as analogy was what would happen if we could travel back in time some 2,500 years and show a television or calculator to some of the greatest minds of ancient Greece. We could tell them, “this is the way we entertain and inform ourselves by sending moving pictures through the air over vast distances .
And this is how we do our most intricate and complex calculations in a matter of seconds which would otherwise require the mental labour of hours or perhaps days.”
How would Plato react? What would Aristotle make of it? Despite their awesome sagacity, intelligence and rhetoric there would be no way they could coherently deconstruct these devices into their existing worldview comprising concepts of either science or philosophy . Even if a highly trained team of technologists from our time were to try and explain how such things worked, it would still be futile. Like where does one begin? Can one seriously back up more than two millennia of scientific developments to convey a comprehensive picture? No, it would be only understandable in terms of magic.
And note that we’re just talking about the difference in development over a few paltry thousand years. What if our descendants were to travel back in time from a million years or more in the future and show us what they had accomplished? Supposing they demonstrated methodologies that were so incredibly advanced by our current scale of thinking that our minds were not able to understand , extrapolate or accept.
Suppose they said something like, “this is the way we make a universe out of nothing and then grow life on it to seed the stars into intelligent civilisations who try to make sense of what they observe around them.”
Applying Clarke’s celebrated sound bite would fall so greatly short of its magicality as to sound absurd. Mere sorcery would not suffice. We would have to rephrase him to “any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from divinity.” Seeing their all knowing and unlimited universal power what else would there be left to do then but venerate and revere such authority? And why not? We would only be worshipping ourselves. Communing with what we too can be. What we will be.
Mukul Sharma
Mind, according to vedic psychology, is a process.Mindisnota machine but a process. It is constantly happening. The word manas, which is the Sanskrit word for mind, means a constant happening, something that is not passive and dead but something that is dynamic and alive.
We all believe unconsciously that mind is matter , a thing or a machine. That is why constantly we connect all the past happenings of the mind as a chain, and start believing our mind is a solid thing. The low mood that you experienced years ago, months ago, weeks ago or days ago are all unconnected and independent incidents . Fifteen years ago, you would have felt the low mood and felt depressed because your toys were lost.
Few years ago you would have felt depressed or disturbed because your son was not listening to you. The reasons were different , situations were different, and the cause was totally different . However, when you connect all these low moods and decide , ‘My life is full of depression ,’ you have created hell for yourself! It is only what you believe to be your past that you will reproduce in the future.
When we believe the mind is a thing, we create problems that do not exist. You need to understand this one truth: you are a process, and that by your very nature, your thoughts are unconnected, independent and ‘unclutched’ .
What you think as your identity is not required for you to run your life. You may say, ‘No, if I am unclutched, unconnected , how will I plan for my future ? I have deadlines , project plans , etc. How will I work? How will I run my day-today life?’ These are big questions that haunt you.
You have an automatic intelligence to run, to maintain , to live and to expand your life. For example when you are driving, do you plan every step? Do you plan how much you need to press the accelerator, when you need to press the brake, when you need to turn right, turn left? No. In the initial level when you are getting trained, you may plan but once you learn driving, you just sit. Many times you don’t even remember what happened while driving . Only when you park your car in front of your office, suddenly you realise that you have been driving all this time and even reached your destination!
PARAMAHAMSA NITHYANANDA
Tiger Woods has now ‘rediscovered’ his childhood religion. The championgolfer , who faced censure for his alleged extra-marital liaisons, said he hoped to relearn the lesson of selfrestraint taught by Buddhism. His statement had been analysed “like a State of Union address even though the only union Tiger Woods addressed was his own” , a sympathetic columnist said, “( for) this was no voluntary conversion to an old religion. Rather , this was a forced one to the new Oprahite religion of emotional openness and making public one’s miseries and failings.”
Newspersons who asked the Dalai Lama to comment discovered that the Tibetan spiritual leader was blissfully unaware of Tiger Woods’ travails, having somehow been uninformed of the golfer’s triumphs as well. When the matter was explained to him, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist extolled the importance of ‘self-discipline with awareness of consequences’ .
The embattled golf champion himself said as much in his carefully scripted statement of apology: in recent years he had ‘drifted away’ from the Buddhist values of his upbringing which taught that “a craving for things outside ourselves causes unhappy and pointless search for security” .
But would that satisfy the scolds berating Woods for letting his impulses get the better of him? As his former coach, Butch Harmon , said, “( They) want Woods to stand there in front of everybody , take his medicine, be humble , be embarrassed, be humiliated , and answer the questions.”
His self-lacerating public apology could also be part of the famous 12-step plan for recovering from addictions, compulsions and other behavioural problems. The process starts with the admission that one is powerless against the demons of addiction and compulsion . One then moves on to admit “a greater power that can give strength” .
One way of achieving this, as encoded by the next step, is by establishing cosmic connections: make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand Him, says the original Alcoholics Anonymous programme . In its summation, the Bhagavad Gita calls it the supreme secret of transcendence (psychologists might call it ‘transference’ ) which promises to empower the seeker to withstand most severe soul-crushing pressures . But what if one has no faith in redemption? Then beg, borrow or steal some!
Vithal C Nadkarni
