Life

Causal energy is very powerful. Many people build big empires out of this energy. This energy comes out of the desire to grow bigger and stronger. Human beings have so many fears the biggest fear being the fear of death. There may be three different responses to these fears. First I want to protect and preserve myself and therefore I play defensive. Somehow trying to protect my existence against the attacks of the opponents and circumstances. This is a Tamasik approach to life. The second approach may be the attacking one. I try to expand myself. I attack the other person before the other person attacks me. That's a Rajasik approach. People with the rajasik approach expand their existence. They build empires and gather money and power so as to feel safer. The third approach is the Satvik approach. Such people try to set up systems and bring harmony so that everybody gets equal opportunities. In Tamasik actions, I am the center of the universe and the basic instinct is to try to pro...

The meeting of the two glaciers is probably an impossibility till the time they decide to melt. They love their form more than the meeting. Meeting needs melting and melting makes glaciers disappear. Till the glaciers prefer to stay as glaciers, they can not meet even the rivers.  That is the saddest part of the human civilization. We become so engrossed in our bodies and associated pleasures, that we freeze like the glaciers. Water water is everywhere and not a drop to drink. We get so obsessed with ourselves that our entire life becomes just a race to increase the height and width of the glacier. Nature tries to connect to us by pouring the rain and we convert the rain-water too into the glacier and start claiming its ownership. The other glaciers too are just ways and means to help us grow.  Some of us are more like the clouds, so much lost in thoughts that our entire existence is like the clouds. There are clouds of different sizes, shapes, and colors. They too have differ...

Probably there is no direct correlation between happiness and accumulations. However, what surprises me is the mad race of people for the accumulations. For accumulating money, power, and tools for comfort. Probably, one of the biggest reasons is that our brain mistakes pleasures for happiness without realizing the side effects of pleasure. Just like our body feeling pleasure with the intake of glucose without realizing its side effects. A larger amount of glucose needs the body to secrete a greater amount of insulin to digest the same and a high level of insulin has its own bad effects on the body. Similarly, a high threshold of pleasure requires a person to spend more and more energy to get such pleasures which almost depletes the vital life forces, and that depletion of the life forces makes us unhappy. It just needs a little observation to understand that we are happy so long as the breath is balanced. During any physical ailment, psychological disease, moments of sadness, anger, o...

Love has great power. It can make us do so many seemingly impossible things. I have experiences in my life that on many occasions love made me do certain things which were seemingly beyond my capacity. Love for parents made us stay awake the whole night with sick parents, while we could not have stayed awake all night otherwise. Love for the kids, makes a mother bear the unbearable pain of delivery. Love for trekking makes people climb the most difficult peaks in this world like Mount Everest. Love for the discovery of the truth makes the Scientist spend all of his life on a particular project. Despite such powerful love, we spend almost the whole of our lives driven by fear or pleasure. In fact, if we examine, it appears that fear and pleasure are just two sides of the same coin. We experience pleasure in this body, and that is the reason why we are so afraid of death. In fact, death is one of the most fundamental fears of all human beings. we feel pleasure in relationships, and that ...

Often we see language in airlines with the tag "handle with care". That indicates that the language is fragile and the handlers need to keep the language with care and without jerks so that the valuable inside is not broken. We too handle a very sensitive soul inside which needs to be handled with love. Not only do we need to handle ourselves with love but all the people we deal with.  Probably three types of communication take place among people. The first one is "mind-to-mind communication". This is the normal communication that takes place among the human beings. When two human beings communicate with each other, both of them identify themselves with their mind and the content thereof. The content is our experiences and understanding of those experiences. We all identify with our name, family, community, qualifications, experiences, and organization. When two or more human beings communicate "mind to mind" they center themselves around their own experie...

I don't know why are we so stressed? Leave aside the elder ones, even kids are so stressed nowadays. They have acute stress from the examinations. If we look at the reality around us, the stress appears to be logical. There is so much of a struggle for survival. For one single job, thousands are standing in the queue. There are examples where for the job of a peon, MBAs have been recruited. It all creates stress in the minds of the kids. They get quite tense about their career and life. There are so many diseases all around and so much struggle from getting admission in the hospital to arranging money for the treatment to getting the right treatment to the recovery to getting leaves for the treatment. However, isn't much of this stress the result of our own insanity. To me, it appears that most of the stress comes when an elephant tries to run like a lion or a lion tries to jump like a monkey. We feel stressed when we just try to follow the crowd without understanding ourselves...

If Hanumana spent his entire life without meeting Rama in Kishkinda, we would simply say what a waste of life. However, to the contemporary residents of Kishkinda, that may appear to be quite normal. Because they are not aware of the potential of Hanumana and therefore consider life without Rama to be normal. Probably that's what happens with most of us. We spend our lives in such a routine way. We hardly realize our potential ever.  Fears, comfort, and pleasures take away almost the whole of our lives. We feel so disconnected from our soul that we somehow develop a strong identification with the body and mind. Such an identification results in a strong desire to protect the body, our ideas, and our beliefs. Such a strong identification brings a natural survival instinct which in turn brings strong motivation to work hard to get a good job, promotions, power, and position. However, it also makes our worldview quite unidimensional. Almost all of our decisions are based on running aw...

All of us have fears of different types. Some of those are known to us while many of the fears stay deep inside our psyche. We are afraid of death, the fundamental fear. These fears lead to many associated fears such as the fear of hunger, falling ill, fear of accidents, and fear of physical harm due to violence. A hungry baby looks forward to the mother for feeding and that is probably the reason why the fear of losing a mother is one of the biggest fears of a baby. As the baby grows, he sees that working parents support the family, and therefore the fear of losing parents grows inside them. As the kids grow further, they discover that money helps us survive. With money, we can have food and shelter to stay safe. With money, we can buy medical services if we grow ill. With money, we can have safer modes of communication and manage to stay safer. As we grow further, we realize that we need power and connections to stay safe, in a country where systems are not so well placed. So, many o...

Rules, rules, and rules. Sometimes we get sick of following the rules. In fact many times the rules appear to be quite illogical and unreasonable. The road is free of traffic and good for driving at the speed of 70 and yet there is a speed limit of 50. There are so many compliance requirements by so many of the laws that seem complex and unnecessary. Not only the rules, but at times systems seem quite complex. Sometimes, the social conventions appear to be out of sync with the present-day reality.  Probably these rules and customs develop over a period of time in order to help human beings grow. As an individual, we would not have been able to face the tough weather, wild animals, and diseases. It was the need of the hour to organize in the form of a community and that is what we did. Organization in the communities required certain rules: whether written or unwritten. Firstly we developed language and then we used that language to communicate with each other and then grew differen...

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...