New Year present

I got my copy of this book a few days back on New Year Eve - Thank you my dear friend who couriered it to me from India. I couldn't have asked for a better present as I have heard so much about this book. One of the referers was Aryan's mom who also happens to read this blog ! I had forgotten about this book until she mentioned and recommended it to me sometime back. Aryan's mom, I am looking forward to read this book and exchange notes with you :-)

Know your real self

Behind the curtain of your intellect and emotions is your self-image or ego. The ego is not your real self; it is the image of yourself that you have slowly built over time. It is the mask behind which you hide, but not the real you. It is a fraud, who lives in fear. It wants approval. It needs control. And it follows you wherever you go.


There is a beautiful poem by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, who is speaking to God: "I came out alone on my way to my tryst. But who is this that follows me in the silent dark? I move aside to avoid his presence, but I escape him not. He makes the dust rise from the earth with his swagger; he adds his loud voice to every word that I utter. He is my own little self, my Lord; he knows no shame. But I am ashamed to come to this door in his company."


The ego is the prison you have built around yourself, and now it holds you captive within its walls. How do you know this has happened? You have to know that any time you feel discomfort in your body, your ego, which is e-g-o or edginggod-out, is overshadowing your inner self. Fear, doubt, worry, and concern are some of the energies associated with your ego. So what do you do? The best way to dissipate these energies is to feel your body. Just feel the localised sensations in your body, and keep feeling them until they begin to dissipate. And how do you break free from captivity? You break free by choosing to identify with your inner self, the real you.


You break free from the prison of conditioning when you feel neither beneath anyone nor superior to anyone, when you shed the need to control other people, when you create space for others to be who they are and for your real self to be what it is. You break free when you no longer defend your point of view, when you no longer use stereotypes or harbour extreme likes or dislikes toward people you hardly know. You break free when you refuse to follow the impulses of anger and fear, when you act from humility rather than belligerence, when you tread gently rather than with a swagger, when your speech is nurturing rather than scathing, when you choose to express only your love.



By Deepak Chopra

The mystery of life & death

We all live in the shadow of the fear of death, we believe that life and death are opposed to each other. This feeling causes us to miss life and we miss death as well. When we are born, death is born with us.


Every day changes into night, and every night changes into day. The present elapses into the past and the future dawns upon the present. This cannot happen without the element of death. This process of change is death. If you want to die peacefully, live totally, completely. Death is the crowning glory of life lived intensely and fully. But our life is wasted in searching for the meaning of life.

The meaning of life is in life itself. No philosophy, no scripture, no cause can give meaning to life. You have to seek your own meaning and nobody except you can come upon it. It is your life and it is only accessible to you. Only in living will the mystery be revealed to you. Once you know what life is you will know what death is.

Death is also a part of the same process. Ordinarily we think death comes at the end, that it is against life; we think death is the enemy, but death is not the enemy. If you think of death as the enemy it simply shows that you have not been able to know what life is. Death and life are two polarities of the same energy, of the same phenomenon - the tide and the ebb, the day and the night, the summer and the winter. They are not separate and not opposites, not contraries; they are complementary.


Death is not the end of life; in fact, it is a completion of one life, the finale. A man who has understood what his life is, allows death to happen; he welcomes it. He dies each moment and each moment he is resurrected. Each moment he dies and is born again."



Amrit Sadhna

Spiritual solace in dance

If you ask me whether a person who wears luxurious Gucci or sports sensuous Cavalli can be deeply spiritual, I would say, why not?' And while I agree that greed, materialism and bonding with the Divine cannot run completely parallel, I would still maintain, that a person can be sexy, glamorous and yet, intensely spiritual.



The bottom line, however, lies in the level of obsession. If anyone wants to wear designer wear and look glamorous at the cost of something or someone, then it could turn ugly. Otherwise, I can say that some of the most high-flying people I know are very spiritual and do huge acts of charity that no one else even gets to hear about. As for me, however, I'm not personally comfortable about being overly materialistic. I believe that 'true spirituality' is about being able to share. In my life, I know for a fact, that a superior force has guided me all through. Even when I plan something to the last detail, I've found that it happens only the way it is supposed to happen. This, I believe, has a lot to do with my karmic cycle. Even when I made elaborate plans and thought that life was going to be hunky-dory, there was a complete turn of events. Much later, I realised that this was meant to be. It was almost like an external voice saying, 'I run the show'.



When I decided to call it a day in my marriage, I found myself going through one of the most traumatic phases of my life. I was barely 30 and didn't know how to face the world. I would often wonder what I was going to do. I was not trained for anything except for dance and I had moved away from professional dance almost entirely during my marriage.



The turning point for me came in 1986, when an important dance performance was held in Hyderabad, called National Integration Through Performing Arts, which was about music and dance. My guru Kalyanasundaram chose me to represent bharatnatyam. I wasn't sure I could handle that performance, as I was so stressed.



I remember sitting down, closing my eyes and thinking of the supreme power. I said, 'If there is a power that people say exists, then guide me and tell me what to do'. At once, I felt that something or someone told me to go back to dance and I know I have never looked back since. Even today, I can say that dance is where I find spiritual solace. I've also realised when one door closes, another one always opens. The puranas also indicate the success of good over evil. Whatever you do will come back to you and life always takes full circle. Sometimes, it seems like the other person is getting away with it, but he or she will be paying for certain deeds in a way we cannot see or understand. The universe throws back to you what you give it, whether positive or negative.



To me, spirituality is about introspection; spirituality is an inner voice telling me right from the wrong. Spirituality is about understanding the need of others. I don't consciously make the effort to listen to the small voice within me, but that doesn't mean that I don't hear it. I do go to temples, churches, prayer rooms and dargahs. There can never be a formula for happiness. It is a very relative term: what may make me happy may not be the same for someone else. Man is so greedy that when he gets what he thought would make him happy, he does not stop there. His happiness quotient changes. But for me, happiness is when I do things for others and see that satisfaction on their faces. We can't put our life on pause and go on a pursuit of happiness. We just need to look within us, as happiness may be dormant in our bad phases. It just needs a catalyst for it to blossom.



(Vani Ganapathy is a well-known classical dancer)

Tackling the enemy within

Osho narrates a Sufi parable:

A man was very worried because every night someone would enter his garden and destroy all the plants. He did everything that could be done to protect it. He posted guards all along the boundary, but never was anybody seen entering the garden at night. Yet, every morning, the garden would be trashed. The man did everything he could but nothing helped.

He then went to a Sufi master, in the hope that the master would be able to see things he and the guards could not. The master closed his eyes and said, "Do one thing. Fix the alarm on your clock for two o'clock in the night." The man said, "How is this going to help? My guards are continuously watching and patrolling around the house." The master said, "There is no need to argue. Just do what I say. Fix the alarm for two o'clock. Then come the next day and tell me what happened."

The man was unconvinced but he tried it. Two o'clock, when the alarm went off, he was awake. He was standing in his own garden, wreaking havoc on his plants. He was a somnambulist—a sleepwalker! In some way or the other, we all are somnambulists. We sow our seeds of misdeeds in the deep night of unconsciousness, and then we wonder why our lives are so miserable. We love others and soon we see that we are doing something else in the name of love. It isn't difficult to see if we use a little intelligence and a little awareness.

Osho says:

You love somebody, and then you start possessing him. Tares are entering your relationship. You love, and then you become jealous. Now weeds are growing. You love, and for trivial things you get angry. You love meaningless, petty things. Thus hate arises. Now the wheat is getting mixed with tares. When you love you feel happy. Every love starts with deep happiness, a celebration, and every love ends in deep sadness. The other day I was reading The Hollow Men, a poem by T S Eliot. The poem ends with these lines: "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper." Well, this is how everything ends. Your love, your meditation, your virtue. Not with a bang, but a whimper. But it need not be this way. If we wake up, we become alert. We need to shake ourselves up.

Osho gives us a method of mindfulness: Remain a watcher, remain a witness. Remember that. Remind yourself continuously. Sadness has come. It has happened to you; it is not you. The moment you remember this, suddenly you will see a distance arising between you and the sadness. It does not affect you any longer. When you lose awareness, it affects you; when you gain awareness, there is a distance. The more your awareness rises, the more the distance increases. A moment comes when you are so far away from your sadness that it is as if it's not there at all.

The same has to be done with happiness also. It will be difficult, because one wants to cling to happiness. But if you want to cling to happiness, you are sowing the seeds of unhappiness. That's how this parable is of tremendous significance. The master himself-in his sleep, in his unawareness-came to the field, the wheat field and sowed the seeds of weeds. In deep sleep! He was a somnambulist. In the morning he started asking, "Who has done this?"

You have been doing things to yourself. In the morning, when you wake up, you ask, "Who has done this?" And you start searching for the enemy. The enemy is within, the enemy is just your unconsciousness.

SWAMI CHAITANYA KEERTI

Express your spiritual gifts

What does it mean to be comfortable in your own skin? It's about expressing yourself in a way you feel is the most appropriate.

When we think about expressing ourselves, we automatically think of the superficial ways. The way we dress. The way we wear our hair. The car we drive. If you wear jeans and a T-shirt one day and a business suit the next, what is it expressing about you? Is it that you are sophisticated one day and unsophisticated the next? Actually, your outer appearance expresses very little about who you truly are.

Instead, when we talk about expression, we should look at what's harder to change about ourselves. Our habits. The words we use. How we treat people. And, most importantly, how we express our spiritual gifts.

Ah, spiritual gifts. That elusive term. It's also known as your calling. But how do you express those properly? We could each have similar gifts, but decide to express them differently. For example, let's say that three women are trying to figure out the best way to express their calling of teaching. One woman might become a high school teacher. Another might teach English in a foreign country. While another woman might home school her own children. Who is expressing their spiritual gifts properly? All of them.

It is a personal decision.

You might say that the first two women are career women. Some women might look down on the woman who chose to be a stay-athome mom. But is this fair? Does that mean that the way she is expressing her spiritual gifts is any less fulfilling or any less valid? No, not at all. The concern about others judging us is often what stops us from getting comfortable in our own skin. What if our family doesn't like what we're doing? What if our friends think the path we're taking is weird?

Too many of us are embarrassed about what others will think of our spiritual journey. We end up sabotaging our own happiness. We are missing out on the great opportunities that will open up once we get comfortable in our own skin.

As you begin reflecting on your spiritual gifts it's great to keep track of your progress. You can do this throughout the day or at the end of the day. You could add your thoughts to a journal or record them on a microcassette recorder.

Here are three questions to ask yourself to begin the process of getting comfortable in your own skin: First: "Have i taken the time to identify my spiritual gifts?" Get in touch with those inklings, those glimpses of what your calling might be. For example: topics that you are continually drawn to, but you aren't sure why; what you do in your spare time that makes the day more enjoyable ; things that you do that make it easy to lose track of time when you're doing them.

Second: "How am i expressing my spiritual gifts?" Remember that there are many ways to express who you really are. You might try one way for a while and find that it isn't a good fit. If something isn't working, don't be afraid to make changes at a pace that is appropriate for you. Expression of your gifts is so personal. No one has the right to tell you that you are doing it right or wrong.

Third: "Am i genuinely happy with my personal and professional life right now, in this moment?" Are you just postponing your happiness until you accomplish your goals? Maybe you're even envious of what others have accomplished in their lives.

Happiness isn't in the accomplishment. It's in the journey. If your goal in life is to become rich, you might be so focused on your current financial state that you are missing out on the lessons to be learned in the journey.

If you are striving to express your spiritual gifts, life will seem almost effortless. You will meet the right people and find the right opportunities. That is where you will find your happiness.

I started out by mentioning the superficial ways we can express ourselves. What's so interesting is that when you are expressing your spiritual gifts, people will notice a change in your appearance.

They will start mentioning how much happier you look or that you look younger. They'll notice something different about you, but they won't be able to put their finger on it. You truly will be comfortable in your own skin - inside and out.


Leila Johnson

It's all in your mind

How would you feel and act right now if you had everything you wanted? Well, let's just pause for a moment and visualise this: right now, see yourself acting as if you did have everything you wanted. See yourself acting in that way; capture the feeling of completeness and satisfaction that you would have. Luxuriate in that thought... What a wonderful feeling that is, and it is possible!

But let's first ask ourselves how do we manifest prosperity? It is a fact that prosperity begins in mind. First as an idea, and then it comes into form. Thoughts are things and your thoughts create your reality. This, then, is absolutely true and in exact correlation with having enormous wealth and prosperity in your life. You can only have things that are in harmony with your thoughts. The great spiritual truth in regard to our wealth and prosperity is that God is the source and substance of your supply and people are merely channels! Well, it's true on this human plane that it is people who hire us for our jobs, give us our paychecks, our bonuses and the like, but it is God that is the one true source.

When you are aware of this wonderful spiritual truth and incorporate that into your consciousness, you will begin to stop holding onto people, jobs and things so tenaciously and fearfully because they actually represent only one of many, many channels available to us. Stop giving your power away to these people and things and affirm, "This or something better." Ease up. When we meditate and pray for more wealth and abundance in our lives, we don't necessarily know where it's going to come from and we don't need to know.

To get more prosperity in your life you should affirm that you are prosperous. For those of you who are not familiar with affirmations or why they are important to your success, just think of them as positive statements that we can use to change our mind, belief system, attitudes and actions and therefore get the results we want.

A fabulous affirmation for prosperity would be: "By day and by night, i am being prospered in all my ways!" Another great affirmation is, "I am now, in the process of attracting greater abundance, prosperity and success into my life in everything i am undertaking!"

Each one of us has the gift of free will or the freedom to think whatever thoughts we choose to concentrate on most throughout each day. Ask yourself right now what thoughts are you concentrating on right now? Are you thinking about prosperity and success in your life or are you thinking about lack and limitation? Your environment and your feelings will let you know exactly what you are thinking because they are an exact replica of your thoughts and beliefs. It's true that no one can think of prosperity all day long and we are all in agreement there.

As Emerson said, "A man is what he thinks about all day long." Your primary thoughts, the ones you concentrate on most, will be what you will see in the people you attract to you as well as in your life circumstances. One of the most popular sayings is 'change your thoughts and change your life,' but, of course, Rome wasn't built in a day! It will take time to replace your habitual thoughts that are negative to more positive ones, but you can do it!

Domenic Polifrone once said if we wanted a new car that we needed to go down to the showroom and test drive it. He said it didn't matter if we didn't have one penny in the bank. Just go down to that showroom, get behind the wheel of that car and test drive it! Get a few brochures to keep. See and feel yourself driving and owning this beautiful, new car. Get into the consciousness of "i am prosperity and i am in the process of buying and owning this beautiful, new car!" Try it. This experiment works! Your mind is one of your most prized possessions. It has been said that you are the architect of your life.

Ask yourself right now what kind of life are you building for yourself ? A magnificent life or a limited life? Everything that has been available to everyone is also available to you. There is a wonderful quote which underscores this fact. He said, "No one is superior to what you might become!"

Start knowing that the potentiality of one is the potentiality of all. If anybody has wealth you can have wealth; if anybody has a beautiful home, you can have a beautiful home. Life is a state of consciousness. "As a man thinks in his heart, so is he." Change your consciousness and change your world.


Jane Abram

Stop seeking, you will find your God!

All around us, we come across people who are running towards God. Or who they think God is!

They spend so much time and effort in seeking God in all kinds of places. Often, after they believe they have found Him in one place of worship, they will again begin their search in some other new place. They become professional seekers. Even those who deny God, the atheists, are seekers. They too are seeking their own version of God!

In reality, seekers do not ever truly find God. This is because in the inner world, the logic is very different. The process of seeking is not the same as in the material world, where things exist in separate physical forms. In the spiritual realm, God is not at the end of a journey, He is not the achievement — He is just in the Awareness.

God is already in each one of us, only we have lost the sensitivity to know His presence! When God is all around us, and inside us — it means that we cannot run towards Him, for in which direction shall we choose to run? He is everywhere! This is the Awareness we need to have to reach God.

This is in fact true of all goals. Goals are not reached by frantically running towards them. That makes us tense and creates barriers in the quest.

The path should be the quest, not the destination. If we move towards the destination without expectations, if we work towards goals with no attachments to failure or success, we will find that we become far more productive. We would then work with no stress at all, completely focused on the journey, the process, and the present.

To work in the present in our daily life we need to trust life itself; we need to trust existence or God. This abiding trust in existence is actually the path to God. But we spoil this path by judging all events against goals set by our minds. When we sincerely make efforts, immersing ourselves in trust, whatever happens will be good for us. This is what I mean by saying that you actually achieve your goals when you stop running towards them.

PARAMAHAMSA SRI NITHYANANDA

Spirituality is a letting go

Firstly, spiritualism is not the right term for spirituality. As traditionally used, it refers to mediums, psychics, spirits, contact with the dead and everything that has to do with the spooky world of the occult. Spirituality, on the other hand, is an understanding of consciousness that allows you to experience everything in its contextual and relational nature. It is to have a religious experience without being religious. It is to experience your non-local self, your transpersonal self.

Since the infinite being is infinite by definition, it expresses itself through maximum diversity. To a spiritual person, nothing human is foreign. In other words, the measure of your enlightenment is the degree to which you are comfortable with contradiction, paradox, and ambiguity. The nature of reality is that nothing can be put on pause. Change is the only change. There is nothing to pursue in a constantly evolving universe. Spirituality is a letting go, in which you join the ecstatic evolutionary impulse of the universe, as it expresses itself through creativity.

Morality is the domain of hypocrites and self-righteous morality is just jealousy with a halo. It has nothing to do with spirituality.

I listen to my inner silence in waking, dreaming and sleeping. By and large, religious institutions are quarrelsome, divisive, and sometimes idiotic in their behaviour. The moment of truth is a moment of self referred consciousness, where one is independent of the good and bad opinions of others, and therefore immune to criticism and flattery. I am not here yet. I feel amulets and bracelets and photographs of God are cover-ups for insecurity, and so are Roberto Cavalli designs, innerwear with pictures of gods. They are a particular "brand" of god, and have nothing to do with infinite awareness. To be identified with any brand, whether marketed by a temple or a designer, is to dis-empower yourself and lose your authenticity.

Deepak Chopra

Surrender to God

Total surrender to the Almighty is the highest form of bhakti. It stands for accepting every situation as a gift or prasad from God. It means living every moment to perfection by using all your mental, physical and spiritual potential to the maximum.

Spirituality means doing things in the right spirit and with complete faith. No situation is frivolous or insignificant because it always contains a hidden message. There are no flaws in the Divine's design, this is what we all must be aware of just like one dev-doot, or angel, did when he was banished from the heaven to lead a life as a cobbler to make him realize the consequence of questioning the wisdom of the Almighty.

This angel had become so evolved spiritually that he was just one step away from becoming one with the Supreme. Pointing to a young woman on Earth, God asked him to take away her soul as it was time for her to die. When the angel reached the woman's house, he witnessed a heart-rending scene. Dressed in rags, the woman was cradling a three-month-old baby in her arms and was trying to pacify her two other children, aged two and four, who were crying with hunger. All looked malnourished and pale. There was not a morsel in the house. The woman had lost her husband, their sole breadwinner, a few months ago. With three little children to take care, she was unable to make ends meet. Now she was running high fever and was wondering what was to become of her and her children.

The sight of the poor family living in such trying circumstances brought tears to the angel's eyes. He could not be so unkind and deprive the helpless kids of their only living parent! His compassion and benevolence got the better of him so he decided to return to the Heaven empty handed. His disobedience earned him the Almighty's displeasure.

Since every act of the divine is guided by divine love and benevolence, God decided to make him realize his folly of interfering with the Supreme Law or design by banishing him to Earth for a lifetime as a cobbler. The only way he could return and be with the Almighty once again was by laughing at his plight three times.

Thus the angel was born on Earth into a family of cobblers. He grew up beating smelly hides into smooth leather to make footwear. One day as he sat making footwear, the irony of it all dawned on him and he laughed at his situation -- once a Dev-dhoot, God's chosen one, was now on Earth working with animal skins, making footwear for mortals.

Any way, instead of whining, the Dev-dhoot accepted his situation and continued leading his life in total surrender to the Almighty, giving his whole being to what ever work that came in front of him, whether it was beating leather into shape or making footwear. Soon he became so good at his work that his masters and customers started praising his work. And one day he was asked to make shoes for none other than the king himself!

The angel put his mind, heart and soul into his work and before he could realize, he had created the most beautiful pair of chappals ever. But his masters were livid with him for being so careless, wasting raw material and time on a pair of chappals instead of the shoes that the king's men had ordered.

Soon they arrived but much to everybody's surprise, the king's men asked for a pair of chappals instead of shoes. The king had just died and they wanted chappals to the fit the corpse before it could be cremated. It was a ritual in those days that the body of the king was adorned with chappals rather than shoes on his final journey. The dev-doot was speechless. Nothing seemed frivolous or meaningless in the Almighty's scheme of things, he thought and laughed to himself the second time.

As days passed by, the angel became increasingly well known for his fabulous footwear. One day, a rich elderly lady escorting three pretty girls came to his shop to place a huge order for fancy footwear for the girls as they were all of marriageable age. When the angel asked her whether the girls were her daughters, the lady shook her head and replied that she was a rich businessman's wife but could never have any children. But one day her neighbours told her about three helpless orphans who had lost their parents. She felt the Almighty had answered her prayers and she adopted the three kids. The lady was in fact talking about the same children whose mother the Almighty had once ordered him to take away! Marveling at the Divine's design, the angel laughed to himself the third time. It was all about surrender and accepting every situation as a gift from God, to be lived through with all our potential. He had been banished to Earth in the first place because he had failed to do so, but later he got the opportunities to laugh his way out of this human life because of his surrender. His life's mission was now complete. He was ready to leave for his heavenly abode where the Almighty was waiting for him with open arms. He knew it well that now he would be with the Supreme forever. He had learnt the ultimate message meant for all humans on Earth that the only way to cut our Karma Cycle, the cause of birth and death, for total liberation and merging with the Supreme is to perform every given act, whether in thought, word or deed, as an offering to the Lord in total surrender, without doubting or questioning the purpose behind it.

This is true realisation. This is the essence of life.

Meena Om