People are chasing myriad ways to lengthen their lifespan, without finding peace in the present moment. Then what’s the point?
The principles of finding peace are simple 1. To know that everything is impermanent – which can be simply observed and 2. To develop an attitude of compassion in everything you do. Knowing this is easy, living it is difficult. Hence the people able to do the latter are called Saints, who are far and few.
If your spiritual path is not making you a humble, compassionate person, rexamine it and make a course correction.
Whether you evaluate your life in terms of time or money, you are wasting both by accumulating and managing clutter(things that you don’t really need or use). I realised this once more when I had to spend time deleting mails from my gmail account and observed that I shouldn’t have allowed the clutter to accumulate in the first place. As they say, if you wish to save/conserve water then you have to first find and plug the leak. Time is non-renewable so don’t spend it on things that are useless…
Use the declutter techniques of “Not used for more than 1 year” or simply think that you are shifting your home and are moving into a studio apartment – what would you take and what would you leave? It is difficult to let go of the objects with emotions attached – Oh I bought this on this trip or so & so had gifted it to me, etc. Most difficult is the clutter of relationships we have with people. This is emotional clutter which also has to be eventually dealt with.
Self Realisation is nothing but realising that “I/Me/Mine” is the ultimate clutter that has to be decluttered, sooner the better…
In Feudal Japan, “Samurai” were warriors who protected their Lord/Master and were called “Ronin” upon passing away of their Lord/Master. The underlying warrior remained the same but just the nomenclature changed since they did not perform any specified role anymore.
When people give prime importance to “doing” over “being” complications arise and you feel lost/inferior if you don’t do something respectable in the eyes of the society. Very few can move away from this trap of allowing “doing” to define you since almost everyone is in the same trap. So they keep “doing” as per dictates of their ego not knowing that bliss is possible by simply changing the context of life and not the content. Changing the context means transcending ego – “being” instead of “doing”…
So where ego is the master, it is better to be a Ronin than a Samurai.
“Confirmation Bias” is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories. Most people work through this paradigm and denounce what doesn’t fit their opinions – hence the conflict between Hindu Muslims, bhakts and non bhakts, Bulls and Bears, etc continues unabated.
There are whole new worlds out there waiting to be experienced if only we can step out of our limiting beliefs.
Welcome to the concept of omnipotence
For one to be right the other needn’t be wrong,
For one part to grow the other needn’t shrink/die,…
We are all Divine and hence omnipotent – we need to start living it and experience a completely different world of possibilities which starts with realising the Divinity within…
Dussehra is when you polish and worship your weapons to enable Good to triumph over Evil but the dividing lines between the two have blurred so much that it’s difficult to distinguish…
There is evil in all of us in the form of kama, krodh, moha, mada, matsar, which is metaphorically referred to as Mahishasur or Ravan, but there is also good which is the faculty of conscience that is Ma Durga or Lord Ram that guides us to steer away from these demons that reside within us and to uphold good in the world.
Pray that you are granted the courage to uphold your conscience in every situation. That is the best offering you could give to Ma Durga/ Lord Ram
Everyone needs a break, especially from oneself. If you observe, from the moment you wake up to the time you go to sleep you attend to your habits of what you do, how you behave, what you eat, how you sit,….This is dependent not only on yourself but also your surroundings, you behave differently when at home, at office, on vacation…you behave differently when around different people…But a combination of all these varying habits is what you term as “I” which is not a constant, it keeps changing as per situations.
In Accounting, Zero–based budgeting (ZBB) is a budgeting method that requires all expenses to be justified and approved in each new budget period – wherein you make forecasts based on absolutely zero past overhangs – this provides a perspective of the future possibilities without the limitations of the past/legacy. Similarly, you need to do a zero base budgeting for your own life to disconnect from your past and think of where you want to use the energies that you have been granted for the remainder of your life. If you like the possibilities that this exercise throws up, then choose one that resonates best with your wisdom and work towards it one day at a time and have the acceptance to forgo all the other possibilities that cannot be accommodated in your plan….
Usual things happening on a daily basis and we seem to have accepted them as a part of ‘normal’ life and people who don’t accept all this are termed ’Raja Harishchandra’ & viewed as not ‘worldly wise’…Most people want the world to be black and white but in reality it is many shades of grey…
It reminds me of a question by a friend that if we know that the world is filled with corruption should we teach our children how to deal with it & live in a corrupt world or that corruption shouldn’t be tolerated? The answer is actually a bit of both but acceptance and non-tolerance rarely stay under the same roof, so the struggle continues…
Here I take a leaf from my fathers approach to his career as a Police Officer wherein he told all his juniors that I will not indulge in corruption and till you work with me do not indulge in it, what you did before or after is your Karma. So you have to steer yourself away from indulging in corruption but be aware that it exists in varying degrees so also know how to deal with it…
There is no right or wrong answer here, it is just where you draw the line….
Zero assumes meaning only being placed after the number, but if placed before some number it is meaningless. Where you place it in your life determines the quality of it.
Zero(The Source) is always behind the number(Ego), but most people attempt to place it after and chase it as a number to be achieved to acquire riches/power/fame which post acquisition holds no value but by then you are already addicted to the chase and then can’t seem to stop. It is like running downhill at full speed since it is easier than stopping and returning back uphill to find out why you started the chase in the first place.
This process of stopping and turning back to move uphill is ghar wapsi – Return to Source which has no meaning in social terms and yet the most important thing for anyone to do. Are you prepared to stop and turn back?
Just came across this final email that Steve Jobs sent himself in his final days of battling cancer and it reminded me of “Ubuntu” – The African concept that signifies “I am because We are”. If we understand this and choose our goals and desires accordingly, then it will be a life well lived.
The paradox of life is everyone likes a grateful, humble, ever helpful person but no one wants to be one…despite realising that you are playing a limited overs match and you could be bowled out any time, not by your choosing but simply that its game over…It is not about what match you are playing, it is how you are playing it that makes all the difference…
Bodhisattva 