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)