Life

I see that many of my colleagues and friends have started following the one or the other path of spirituality. I think, by the time we reach our 40s, most of us have the realization of the futility of the targets that we set for life as a student. We get jobs, marry, and have kids. Then we start developing a mid-life crisis. Now what? Many of us accept that we will live a routine life for the time left. Some more adventurous ones reset the target and develop ambitions in terms of money, positions, power, or knowledge. Fewer of the remaining feel the pain of society. They devote their life to the service of society in different forms.  Very few out of the remaining start their adventures into the world of spirituality. I am calling it to be an adventure since in the beginning, it looks like an adventure. Reading every book and listening to every discourse in the beginning fills us with curiosity. We want to know more and more about the world of spirits. Reading books like "Search f...

Sometimes, I really get surprised with people's priorities and goals in life. Many of us place so much of a premium on so many things that hardly carry any value in the overall journey of life just to face that crude laughter of death making us realize the meaningless life we spent our entire life in. It's not so easy to accept this feeling. In fact, many of us start realizing the meaninglessness of the aims we set during early adulthood in our forties. However, this is so difficult to accept. We do not want to feel as if we have wasted our 40 years and therefore take support of pretensions.  We pretend as if we are happy with our jobs and promotions, wife and kids, and society. Many of us start drinking liquor which has the effect of making the awareness further dull so that that nagging thought of meaninglessness is turned down. We seek company of the friends who have a similar thought pattern and similar ways of living. That makes us feel secure. Few stupids feel secure toge...

I see so many stressors around. Power cuts in the morning, fear of kids missing the school bus, traffic jams, farmers' agitation, and related border closure, a society that is ever ready to jump to judgments to make your life hell, imperfect systems in different organizations we deal with, dealing with egoistic people, unfulfilling relationships, dealing with self-centered people, and the list may go on forever.  All these things cause stress. Probably because we are stuck with something and these stressors threaten those attachments. We are attached to the comfort of taking a bath with warm water and power cut threatens that comfort. We are attached to our schedule and missing the bus by the kids will disturb that schedule that we do not like. Traffic jams keep us on the roads for a longer time than we plan for that. Judgment by society is not a problem at all rather the problem is that we are afraid of rejection from society because we seek security in acceptance by society. Impe...

Human beings are a strange species. We can take credit for giving birth to a baby and feel helpless for our own ill behavior at the same time. Isn't that strange? We take credit for the things, we hardly have any role in and we try to run away from the responsibilities that are quite basic.  Our own experiences and choices shape our own perception of reality. For example, a child may be quite ambitious for his career and take responsibility for the same. Every time the decision clicks, such a child takes credit for the same, and every time it fails, he takes responsibility. He may be least concerned about what society thinks or feels about his achievements. On the other hand, somebody may give more importance to social validation. He may feel happy when people praise him and sad when people criticize him. He may, at times, even compromise with his career for these social validations.  Generally, we make choices as to what is central to our existence, and what is central to our...

This world is an extraordinary place. We give so much importance to our relations, to the extent that we believe that we live for our family and friends, yet when it comes to real-life situations, "Me" comes before everything else. Often discussions turn into debates and we often try to win these debates by giving different arguments to justify ourselves and the stand we took, as if we relate more with our viewpoints than our closed ones. I find no problem with the discussions. That is like sharing of the viewpoints. It enriches both persons and widens their perspectives. The problem is with the debates where we just stick to our viewpoint as if that is the eternal reality and just try to prove that the other viewpoint is incorrect or inferior.  I often wonder what makes us so fixated on our viewpoints. Why don't we see the viewpoints as just viewpoints? Why don't we understand that we are different from these viewpoints and the viewpoints keep changing?  Probably tha...

Often we pass through tough phases of life and we pray to the divine to help us. Most of the time we pray for the change of the situations so that we feel comfortable. We are happy in our comfort zone and pray for the restoration of the comfort zone. However, if the comfort zone is restored, how will we evolve? Most of the good things in our lives happen when we step outside our comfort zone.  I feel that the divine is always providing us with the opportunities to grow. Most of these opportunities come in the form of difficulties. We perceive these opportunities to be difficulties because our intellect is quite limited and unable to make out how these seemingly tough situations will result in growth and expansion. Therefore, generally, the mind reacts to these situations as difficulties. However, as we connect to the divine, we can observe the reaction of our own mind. We can see how our own perception changes as the mind gets exposed to the greater plan of the divine. Prayers form...

Unsure of the meaning of happiness, I have been exploring this for quite a long. The literature is full of books on the pursuit of happiness. There have been so many movies on the topic. In fact, most of the Bollywood movies are in and around the pursuit of happiness. Some feel that happiness is correlated to marrying their beloved, some relate that to taking revenge, and some set free of the trap of poverty. There is "The End" of the movie after the target is achieved and we presume that the hero lived happily thereafter. However, in reality, is life like that? Experience tells quite different things. Experience tells us that we keep facing one or the other situation in life. Sometimes we feel health issues, sometimes loss of friends and relatives, sometimes little troubles with the job, sometimes loss or litigation. Astrology tells us that all these things are bound to happen in each person's lifetime. Dashas and Antardashas of different planets keep changing and accord...

Sometimes it appears that we are so unsure of ourselves that we are all the time trying to prove ourselves to be smart. We are unsure of ourselves because, like a lost baby, we have forgotten what we are. We just keep trying the whole of our lives for somebody to adopt us and in the process, we keep complying with the standards of different social groups. Since the present day society gives a lot of premium to smartness, we try to prove to be smart.  I feel that there is no problem in being smart but the problem lies in pretending to be smart. Since we have lost connection to our true selves, we feel quite insecure and restless. This restlessness gives rise to anxiety and anxiety in turn gives rise to pretensions. Each one of us is different. That is the beauty of nature. Some seeds take two weeks to grow into a plant while certain others take months and even years to grow. If they try to fasten the process in order to compete with the faster-growing seeds, they will end up landing...

We are all so connected and yet so disconnected from each other. We are closely knitted to each other in a close unit such as a family or a small organization. Yet, there are so many conflicts in even such closely-knit relationships. Siblings fight with each other. Spouses have a long history of fighting with each other. In fact, we are happy with shallow relationships. Intense relationships are like fire and we cannot bear their heat.  Strangely, we all feel the need for intense relationships. We all need to share our deepest secrets with somebody, whom we can rely on blindly. Yet, almost all our intense relationships are quite stressful. Probably, there is one fundamental cause of this conflict. We all feel lost and lonely in this world. That loneliness is due to the loss of the inner connection with the Divine. Lost in an unknown city, we look for a person who can tell us the address of our home. Alas, every other person in the town has equally lost the address of his home. It's...

Astrology provides us great insights to understand human life. There are nine planets in Astrology which may be broadly arranged into 3 different planes, comprising 3 planets each, as follows: 1. Causal plane comprising of Moon, Sun, and Saturn: 2. Plane of energy comprising Jupiter, Mars, and Venus; and 3. Mental plane comprising Mercury, Rahu, and Ketu. These planets represent different forces of nature. So far as my understanding goes, the causal plane is the plane of old samskaras and operates at a quantum level. The forces of nature operating at this plane may be best compared to the atom. Saturn is like the nucleus of the atom, which is the storehouse of our past samskaras. Moon is like the electrons that orbit around the nucleus. Sun is like the photons that give energy to the electrons to move around the orbits.  Similarly, these 3 forces of nature operate at an unconscious level. While living life, we come into contact with many people and pass through different circumstan...

I was listening to a video from Dr Alok Pandey on Auromaa YouTube channel this morning when a sudden thought came to my mind. In the video, Dr Pandey was talking about the impossibility of the existence of this universe had there not been ignorance. The aware self would naturally merge back into the divine. It may not be separated from the divine thereby denying the possibility of the existence of this universe. This universe exists because of a sense of separation, which may be called ego. Probably ego is acting as a centrifugal force that prevents the revolving worlds from merging into the Core.  The ego has the same fundamental nature as that of the Divine. It wants to expand. It is also full of all the possibilities since it is basically part of the Divine. However, since it loses awareness of that connection with the Divine, it feels narrow and limited. Out of this feeling of narrowness, it feels insecure and it wants to expand like the Divine. However, even if a drop of the o...

Sometimes I wonder why we waste most of our lives in routine and unfulfilling relationships. We all feel that routine is very unfulfilling and yet we hardly take any steps to come out of the routine. We all see that most of our relationships are based on pretensions, yet we continue to spend time in those relationships. Probably we have very little connection with our soul and that is the reason why the routine keeps driving our lives. Our condition is like an electron orbiting the nucleus which keeps orbiting for a long time as a routine. We too keep living the routine life with unfulfilling relationships almost the whole of our lives unless we get an escape velocity. Sometimes this escape velocity is just sufficient to settle us to the next orbit of routine. Sometimes, we cross a few orbits to settle into a different orbit of routine. Can we examine why we settle down in these orbits and what is this orbiting doing to us? I feel that the first and foremost reason for settling in thes...