Sunday, January 10, 2010

If you are happy and joyful



In every human being, there is an aspiration to become better, more loving and more concerned about one another and the planet. But people are trying to work towards it from the wrong end. People are trying to be loving, they are trying to be good. When you look at yourself, if you are happy and joyful, naturally you are a very loving, generous, wonderful human being. This is true for everybody. On the other hand, when you are in a state of unhappiness, frustration or any other sense of unpleasantness within yourself, you may be nasty. There is no point trying to be loving, trying to be pleasant to somebody else. When you are feeling pleasant, you are naturally pleasant to everyone around you. The fundamental thing that human beings have to work towards is to make themselves truly joyful and blissful. Trying to produce good human beings has never really worked. When people are joyful, they are all wonderful human beings. Joy is the best insurance against all evil.
People will always find ways to subvert values, morality and ethics. But when you are very joyful, when you are very pleasant within yourself, you are naturally nice to everyone around you. So, my whole work is to make human beings truly blissful. Spirituality does not mean going away from life. Spirituality means becoming alive in the fullest possible way so you are not just alive on the surface, you are alive to the core. If you look at how full of life and joyful you were when you were five years of age and how alive and joyful you are today, has the level gone up or gone down? For most people, it has gone down. It need not be so. With age, physical agility may go down but the level of joy and sense of being alive need not go down. If your level of joy and aliveness is going down, it is as if you are committing suicide in instalments. This happens because you only focus on certain aspects of life, but without including every aspect, you cannot live a full life.
Unfortunately, most of the time, belief systems are passing off as spirituality. The moment you believe something, if you believe “this is it”, you are bringing a certain degree of rigidity into the very life process that you are. This is not spirituality. The spiritual process is always a quest, a seeking; that is why when you say, “I’m on a spiritual path,” you say “I’m a seeker.” When you say “I’m religious,” you say “I’m a believer.” There is a significant difference, because believing means you have assumed something that you do not know; seeking means you have realised that you do not know, which brings an enormous amount of flexibility. Whenever you say, “I do not know something,” you are flexible. Whenever you think, “I know it,” you become rigid. This rigidity is not just in attitude; it percolates into every aspect of your life. This rigidity is also the cause of an enormous amount of suffering in the world. How human beings are, that is how the society will be. So, creating human beings who are flexible and willing to look at everything rather than being stuck in their ideas and opinions definitely makes for a different kind of society. And the very energy that such human beings carry will influence everything around them.

Go beyond the mind.



go beyond the mind Too much analysis leads you nowhere. There is in you the core of being which is beyond analysis, beyond the mind. You can know it in action only. The legitimate function of the mind is to tell you what is not. But if you want possitive knowledge, you must go beyond the mind. ………………… A general longing for liberation is only the beginning; to find the proper means and use them is the next step. The seeker has only one goal in view: to find his own true being. Of all desires it is the most ambitious, for nothing and nobody can satisfy it; the seeker and the sought are one, and the search alone matters.

Separation of the soul from the body



Death is separation of the soul from the physical body. Death becomes the starting point of a new and better life. Death merely opens the door to a Phenomenon of death, higher form of life; it is only the gateway to a fuller life. He who is born begins to die. He who dies begins to live. Life is death and death is life. Birth and death are merely doors of entry and exit on the stage of this world. In reality no one comes, no one goes. Eternal soul alone exists.
Just as you move from one house to another house, the soul passes from one body to another to gain experience. Just as a man casting off worn-out garments takes new ones, so the dweller in this body, casting off worn-out bodies, enters into others that are new. Death is not the end of life. Life is one continuous never-ending process. Death is only a passing and necessary phenomenon, which every soul has to pass to gain experience for its further evolution. Death is like sleep. Birth is like waking up. Death brings promotion to a new and better life. A man of discrimination and wisdom is not afraid of death. Every soul is a circle. The circumference of this circle is nowhere but its centre is in the body. Death means the change of this centre from body to body. Why, then, should you be afraid of death?
The supreme soul or paramatman is deathless, decay-less, timeless, causeless and spaceless. It is the source and substratum for this body, mind and the whole world. There is death for the physical body only, which is a compound of five elements. How can there be death for the eternal soul that is beyond time, space and causation? If you wish to free yourself from birth and death, you must become bodiless. Body is the result of actions. You must not do any action with expectation of fruits. If you free yourself from likes and dislikes, you will be free from action. If you kill egoism only, you can free yourself from likes and dislikes. If you annihilate ignorance through knowledge of the imperishable, you can annihilate egoism. The root cause for this body is therefore ignorance.
He who realises the eternal soul, which is beyond all sound, all sight, all taste, all touch, which is formless and attributeless, which is beyond nature, which is beyond three bodies and five sheaths, which is infinite and unchanging, self-luminous, frees himself from the jaws of death.
The individual souls build various bodies to display their activities and gain experience from this world. They enter the bodies and leave them when they become unfit to live in. They build new bodies again and leave them again in the same manner. This is known as transmigration of souls. The entrance of a soul into a body is called birth. The soul's departure from the body is called death. A body is dead if the soul is absent...
Natural death, it is said, is unknown to unicellular organisms. When life on earth consisted of these creatures, death was unknown. The phenomenon appeared only when from unicellular, the multi-cellular organism evolved.Laboratory experiments have shown that after the cessation of an individual's life, parts of the organisation can continue to function. The white blood-corpuscles, if cared for, can live for months after the body from which they were withdrawn has been cremated. Death is not the end of life. It is merely cessation of an important individuality. Life flows on to achieve its conquest of the universal; life flows on till it merges in the eternal.

You just believe something that you do not know.



Is there a God - or not? Whether i say 'yes' or 'no,' it does not get you any closer to reality. You believe there is God or you believe there is no God, you just believe something that you do not know. The problem is just this - you are unwilling to see that you actually do not know. Belief essentially means that you are assuming something that you do not know.
If you do not even know where Creation begins and where it ends, how do you know where the Creator is? If you do not even know the nature of yourself, how do you know the nature of the Creator? You just believe something that you have been culturally conditioned to believe. Believing and disbelieving are fundamentally not different; it is just believing in a positive way or believing in a negative way. This will not get us any closer to reality. Belief systems started because you do not have any logical explanation for the nature of Creation, its extent, magnitude and magnificence. So, a simple child-like answer is, somebody is sitting up there and doing it. Because you are human, you think God is a big man.
We have assumed unnecessary significance about our existence here. Certain belief systems hold that the human being is created in the image of God. Such ideas have made humans show disregard for every other life form. Until the Middle Ages, people were made to believe that the Earth was the centre of the universe, the most important place in existence. Later, scientists found that the Earth is not the centre of the universe, it is not even the centre of the solar system. Now we know that the solar system might eventually cease to exist. Compared to the cosmos, it will just be a tiny empty space; nothing will be missed. So we should not assume too much importance to our existence. Existence is not human-centric - life and Creation is happening in more dimensions and ways than you can imagine. If you are experiencing only the physicality of Creation, you will not know the significance of life.
The very source of physical creation is also within you. Your body is created from inside, so is your mind. If you begin to experience yourself as the Creator, the very source of Creation, you will live your life magically. And then you are the centre of the universe. You can either exist here as just a piece of Creation, as just a bundle of flesh and bones, or you can exist here as the very Creator. This is the choice every human being has. The choice is yours because Creation and Creator both are right here, within you. There is Creation; obviously something created it - you as a person did not create it. Since your experience is always from the context of who you are, accordingly, you try to create images of the Creator. If you see these images as stepping stones for a higher possibility, it is perfectly OK. You are a piece of Creation. You clearly know this Creation is happening from within, not from outside. So, the source of Creation is within you.
You are alive, you are conscious. If you long to know and experience, now is the best time, not upon your deathbed. If you strive to transcend the limitations of the physical, the maker of the physical cannot be missed. If your experience of life remains on the surface, you exist as a piece of Creation. Move to the core and you become the very source of Creation.

Deepest wisdom of your soul.



Silence is a valuable constituent of the game of life; silence is the key that has the potential to open doors; it can free you of confusion. Silence empowers you think things through and come up with solutions because it is only in silence you can listen well. You can listen to the deepest wisdom of your soul. In the absence of silence you tend to get overtaken by the mind and the body, and emotions. The clutter prevents you from listening to your psyche and soul. To listen to your psyche, your soul, your Divinity, you need to establish a strong relationship with silence; without it we might remain unaware of many things. When we live on the surface, the noise is overpowering.
It may be interesting to carry out a small experiment with your life. Go some place where there is plenty of silence and quiet. Sit in silence and observe yourself. You will find that in that silence you are beginning to get to know yourself. People go to the Himalayas and the caves to find a silent, secluded place free of distractions. The ambience of quiet engenders the exercise of looking within. The life we have designed and created; the life most of us live, is an outer life. The outside is a very beautiful world; we have created it with our consciousness. However, the inner world is even better, more powerful, stronger, greater and bigger. Whatever exists in the universe outside also exists inside you. The whole universe, and maybe more, exists inside you. With our limited mental, vital and physical capacities we are able to become a little bit aware of the outer world, but by bringing alive our inner world we can know much more. We wish for possible happiness and success; its the inner world that has the capacity to open many more possibilities for you. Right now you are enjoying travelling. This is a possibility. You take decisions on the basis of the possibility of a peaceful, joyful, harmonious, healthy, mindful and clear life, without any kind of insecurity or fear, pain, sufferings, worries. That is the desire, the aspiration every one of us nurtures. If we are searching for those possibilities in the outer world it is not possible, because the outer world has different kinds of possibilities also. It can give every comfort you ask for, but with every comfort, there comes some discomfort too. With any outer joy, pain will also be there. With any outer happiness, unhappiness would come too. Anything that comes from the outer world comes with its opposite in tow.
Take some time off every day to be silent, even if for five or 10 minutes Feel it, experience it, and observe it. That is the moment when you are with you, when you available to yourself. When you are in silence you are living in the present, which we dont do very often. Silence does not mean absence of speech. Silence is an inner state. Something will automatically change in your state, in your nature, and silence will establish itself. Even if you are in a catastrophe, no one can destroy your silence; no one can take the inner quiet away from you. Once silence starts helping you, helping your evolution, then you can enjoy the beauty of life. Silence is a state of consciousness. Silence is not an effort. If you are making an effort to be silent you are making more noise. Silence is an effortless effort. It will be born spontaneously with your understanding. Silence is the birthplace of your soul.