Sense-objects a Trap: Man Bound.

Adi Sankara, author, is very appropriately reminded of the various examples provided by nature where certain species meet their death due to extreme attachment to one or the other of the five senses in the following Verse:


The deer, the elephant, the moth, the fish
And the honey-bee—these five are annihilated
because of their salvery to one or the other of the
senses such as sound etc., through their own
attachment. What then is the condition of a man
who is attached to all these five?

- Verse 76: Vivekachoodamani.

COMMENTARY

The deer is always fascinated by melodious sound and the deer hunter signs to charm the deer. Attracted by the melody of sound, the deer has no awareness of the danger it is in, and turns in the direction of the music; the hunter soon makes it his target. The elephants, especially in the matting season, become extremely attached to the sense of touch; rubbing against each other and walking without caution, they fall into the pits got ready to catch them. The moth is enchanted by form and attracted by the brilliance of the flame. It flutters towards it with an agonizing impatience and gets burnt. The fish, ravenously hungry at all times, in its gluttony, swallows the bait, is caught and thus meets its end in the stomach of fish-eaters. The poor honey-bee, attracted by the fragrant smell of flowers, pursues its industrious vocation, collects honey from the flowers and hoards it in its hive, until at last, heartless man set fire to the hive in order to loot the honey-wealth of the bee.

Thus, the author gives us five typical examples wherein each has met its doom because of its attachment to one or the other of the five senses. Most dramatic it becomes when the author concludes with the exclamation, “What then is in store for man who is attached to all these five?”

When a man of ignorance, having neither discrimination nor detachment, vulgarly runs after sense-objects for his temporary nerve-ticklings, he becomes a sad victim of his delusion, and meets a calamitous end for he has allowed himself to be bound by the five strong ropes.


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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Reverentially called Bhagavatpada Acharya (The teacher at the feet of Lord) and Adi Sankara (roughly "the first Sankara"), Sankara (approximately 788-820 CE) was the most famous Advaita philosopher who had a profound influence on the growth of Hinduism through his non-dualistic philosophy. He advocated the greatness and importance of the important Hindu scripture known as the Vedas (most particularly on the Upanishads, also known as Vedanta)and gave new life to Hinduism when it was suffering due to the increasing influence of Buddhism. He was born in Kaladi, a small village in Kerala, India. His teachers include Gaudapada and Govinda. Reverentially called Bhagavatpada Acharya (The teacher at the feet of Lord) and Adi Sankara (roughly "the first Sankara"), Sankara (approximately 788-820 CE) was the most famous Advaita philosopher who had a profound influence on the growth of Hinduism through his non-dualistic philosophy. He advocated the greatness and importance of the important Hindu scripture known as the Vedas (most particularly on the Upanishads, also known as Vedanta)and gave new life to Hinduism when it was suffering due to the increasing influence of Buddhism. He was born in Kaladi, a small village in Kerala, India. His teachers include Gaudapada and Govinda.
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Source:
Excerpt from the Talks on Sankara’s Vivekachoodamani by Swami Chinmayananda.

DRAGONFLY

At the bottom of a quiet pond lived a little colony of water bugs. They were a happy colony, living far from the sun. They did notice that every once in a while one from their colony seemed to lose interest in going about with his friends, and clinging to a lily stalk, he gradually moved out of sight and was seen no more. “Look!” said one of the water bugs to others. “One from our colony is climbing up the lily stalk. Where do you think she’s going? Wasn’t she happy here? Where do you suppose she went?” No one had an answer. Finally one of the water bugs spoke up, “I Have an idea. The next one of us to climb up the lily stalk must promise to come back and tell the rest of us where he went and why.”

As providence would have it, the very water bug who had suggested the plan found himself climbing up the lily stalk. Up, and up and up he went. Before he knew what was happening, he had broken through the surface of the water and fallen onto a broad lily pad above. When he opened his eyes, he couldn’t believe what he saw. A startling change had come over his old body. His movements revealed four silver wings and a long tail. Even as he struggled, he felt an impulse to move his wings. The warmth of the sun soon dried the moisture from his new body. He moved his wings again and suddenly found himself above the water. He had become a dragonfly.

Swooping and dipping in great curves, he flew through the air. He felt exhilarated in the new atmosphere. Every now and then, the new dragonfly landed happily on a lily pad to rest. It was then that he chanced to look below, at the bottom of the pond. He was right above his old friends, the water bugs! Then the dragonfly remembered the promise. Without thinking, he dived down. He hit the surface of the water and bounced away. He winged off happily into his wonderful new world of sun and air. After experiencing the freedom of his new surroundings for some time, he again landed to rest on the lily pad, of course, having realized….. “If I had not chosen to outgrow the colony of water bugs, to which I was so attached, I would ever become a dragonfly. Now that I have become a dragonfly, even if I want, I can never go back to where I came from. Even if I somehow manage to go back, the colony of water bugs – my old friends – will no longer be able to recognize me in new form…. they won’t understand me. I have to wait till one of them also becomes a dragonfly, for, only then will they understand what has happened to me.”


COMMENTS:

The law of life is ‘When the lower is pushed, the higher delights’. When the body is pushed beyond its perceived limits the mind delights. When the body tells you ‘I can’t walk one more block. I can’t run another lap. I can trek no more,’ and then when it is pushed beyond its perceived limits and when it walks that additional block, runs another lap and treks further – the mind delights. Against the pleading of your body when you do a few more push- ups or few more reps of the bicep curls or another dozen squats – the mind delights. When the lower – the body is pushed, the higher – the mind delights.”

Struggle, suffering, challenges, testing period, tough times – in fact, all these are vocabulary of a man who is seeing only the lower being pushed without recognizing how the higher delights in the process. You are saying the caterpillar is being pushed. I am saying the butterfly is born. Every time man is pushed and got delights… for, it is through this push, man is created. Align yourself to this spiritual truth and so much of your life will change.

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Source: Excerpt from the article published in “Frozen Thoughts” April 2008.

CONVERSATIONS ON CONSCIOUS IMMORTALITY with Ramana Maharishi

CONVERSATIONS ON CONSCIOUS IMMORTALITY
WITH RAMANA MAHARISHI
Recorded by Paul Brunton and
Munagala Venkataramiah

Question: We grieve when a person whom we love dies. Shall we avoid such grief by either loving all alike or by not loving at all?

Answer: If one person dies there is grief for the other person who still lives. The way to get rid of grief is not to live. Kill the one who grieves. Who will then remain to suffer? The ego must die. That is the only way. The two alternatives amount to the same state. When all is the Self, who is there to be loved or hated?
There is a class of people who want to know all about the future and past births, but they ignore the present. The load from the past is the present misery. Why recall the past, it is a waste of time.
The Self is the electric dynamo, the mind is the contact switchboard, while the body is the lamp. When the karma hour comes to give death, the mind switches off the current and withdraws the light-life from the body. Both mind and vitality are manifestations of the supreme life force, the Self.

Question: What happens to an individual after death?

Answer: Engage yourself in the living present. The future will take care of itself. Do not worry about the future. The state before creation and the process of creation are dealt with in the scriptures in order that you may know the present. Because you say you are born, therefore talk about it.
What is birth? Is it of the “I-thought” or of the body? Is “I” separate from the body or identical? How did this “I-thought” arise” Is the “I-thought” your nature? Or is something else your nature?
The “I” of the wise man includes the body but he does not identify himself with the body. For there cannot be anything apart from “I” for him. If the body falls, there is no loss for the “I”. “I” remains the same. If the body feels dead, let it raise the question. Being inert, it cannot “I”. “I” never dies and dos not ask. Who then dies? Who aks?

Question: From where does the ego arise?

Answer: Soul, mind, ego are mere words. There are no true entities of the kind. Consciousness is the only truth. Forgetfulness of your real nature is the real death; remembrance of it is the true birth. It puts an end to successive births. Yours is the eternal life. How does the desire for eternal life arise? Because the present state is unbearable. Why? Because it is not your true nature. Had it been your real nature, there would be no desire to agitate you. How does the present state differ from your real nature? You are spirit in truth.
Troubles arise because we consider ourselves limited. The idea is wrong. In sleep there was no world, no ego, and no trouble. Something wakes up from that happy state and says “I”. To that ego the world appears. It is the rise of the ego that is the cause of the trouble. Let him trace the ego to its source and he will reach that undifferentiated Source, a state that is sleepless sleep. The Self is ever there; wisdom only appears to dawn, though it is but natural.

Question: Are ego and Self the same?

Answer: Self can be without the ego, but the ego cannot be without the Self. Egos are like bubbles in the ocean. Impurities and worldly attachments affect only the ego; the Self remains pure and unaffected. All these are only mental concepts. You are now identifying yourself with a wrong “I” which the “I-thought.” This “I-thought” rises and sinks whereas the true significance of “I” cannot do so. There cannot be a break in your being. The father of your personal “I” is the real “I,” God. Try to find out the source of the individual “I” and then you will reach the other “I.” When the individual goes, the desire also go.

True Self-Reliance
Question: I was once very self-reliant I fear in old age that people will laugh at me?

Answer: Even when you said you were self-reliant, it was not so—you were ego-reliant. Instead of this, if you let go of ego, you will get real Self-reliance. Your pride was merely pride of ego. As long as you identify yourself with the ego, you will recognize others as individuals also, then there is room for pride. Let that drop and you drop others’ ego as well and so there is no more room for pride. As long as there is the sense of separation, there will be afflicting thoughts. If the original source is regained and the sense of separation is put to an end, then there is peace.

Consider what happens when a stone is thrown up. It leaves its source, is projected up, tries to come down, and is always in motion until it regains its source where it is at rest. Similarly the waters of the ocean evaporate, form clouds that are moved by winds, condense into water, and falls as rain. The water rolls down the hill in streams and rivers until it reaches its original, source the ocean. After reaching there it is at peace.

So you see where there is sense of separateness from the source there is agitation and movement until the sense of separateness is lost. So it is with yourself. Now that you identify yourself with the body, you think that you are separate. Before this false identify ceases, you must regain your source, then you can be happy.

Gold is not an ornament but the ornament is nothing but gold. Whatever shape the ornament may assume and however different the shapes of the ornaments are, there is only one reality, which is gold. Similarly with the bodies and the Self, the Reality is the Self. To identify ourselves with the body and to seek happiness is like attempting to ford to take a lake on the back of an alligator. The body identity is due to extroversion and the wandering of the mind. To continue in that state will only keep one in an endless tangle and there will be no peace. Seek your source, merge in the Self and remain as one.

Rebirth really means discontent with the present state and a desire to be born where there will be discontent. Birth, being of the body, cannot affect the Self. The Self remains ever, even after the body perishes. The discontent is due to the wrong identity of the eternal Self with the perishable body. The body is a necessary adjunct of the ego. If the ego is killed the eternal Self is revealed in all its glory…

A wise man crushes the ego at its source. It rises again and again, for him as well as for the ignorant, impelled by nature, which is prarbdha. Both in the ignorant and the wise the ego sprouts up, but with this difference; the former ego is quite ignorant of its source, or is not aware of its deep sleep in the dream and wakeful states. On the contrary, a wise man enjoys his transcendental experience with this ego, keeping his attention always on its source. His ego is not dangerous; it is only the ash-skeleton of a burnt rope. Even though it possess a form; it is ineffective. By constantly keeping our focus on our source, our ego is dissolved.

The Nature of the Ego
Question: How is realization made possible?

Answer: There is the absolute Self from which a spark proceeds as from fire. The spark is called ego. In the case of the ignorant it identifies itself with some object simultaneously with its rise. It cannot remain independent of such association. This association is ignorance whose destruction is the object of our efforts. If ego’s objectifying tendency is filled, it remains pure and merges in its source. We can separate ourselves from that which is external but not from that which is one with us. Therefore, ego is not one with the body. This must be realized in the waking state.
The quest of “Who am I” is the axe to cut of the ego. The intellect always seeks to have external knowledge, leaving knowledge of its own origin. The mind is only the identity of the Self with the body. It is false ego that is created; it creates false phenomena in its turn, and appears to move in them. If the false identity vanishes, the Reality becomes apparent. This does not mean that Reality is not even now. It is always there eternally the same.

Question: How to get rid of egoism?

Answer: If you see what the ego really is, that is enough to get rid of it. It is the ego that makes efforts to get rid of itself, so how can it die? If ego is to go, then something else must slay it. Will it ever consent to commit suicide? So first realize that is the true nature of the ego and it will go of its own accord. Examine the nature of ego. That is the process of realization. If one sees what one’s real nature is, then one will get rid of ego. Until then our efforts are just like chasing our own shadow; the more we advance, the more distant is the shadow. If we leave our own Self, then the ego will manifest itself. If we seek our true nature, then ego dies. If we are in our own Reality, then we need not trouble about the ego.
Seek your source. Find out from where the thought of “I” springs. What object can we be surer of and know more certainly than our Self? This is direct experience and cannot further be described. If the present “I” goes, it, the mind, is known for what it is—a myth. What remains is the pure Self. In deep sleep the Self exists without perception of body and world, then happiness reigns.

Question: You say that we shall find the divine centre inside us. If each individual has a centre are there then millions of divine centers?

Answer: There is only one Center to which there is no circumference. Dive deep within and find it. Meditating on Him or on the Seer, the Self, there is a mental vibration “I” to which all are reduced. Tracing the source of “I”, the primal “I” alone remains and It is inexpressible.

Question: Is there not an unchanging Self and a changing self?

Answer: Changefulness is mere thought. All thought rise after the arising of the “I-thought.” See to whom these thoughts arise. Then you transcend them and they subside. That is to say, tracing the source of the “I-thought,” you realize the perfect “I”. “I” is the name of the Self……

Seek the True Self
Question: Is it possible to know the after-death state of a person?

Answer: It is possible, but why try to know it?

Question: Because I consider my son’s death to be real from my level of understanding.

Answer: The birth of the “I-thought” is the son’s birth; its death is the person’s death. After “I-thought” has arisen, the wrong identity with the body arises. Thinking yourself as the body, you give false values to others and identify them with bodies. Did you think of your son before his birth? Only as you are thinking of him, he is your son. Where has he gone? He has gone to the source from which he sprang. He is one with you. As long as you are, he is there too.
See the real Self and this confusion with the body will vanish. You are eternal, and others will be found to be eternal. Until this truth is realized there will always be this grief due to wrong identity. Birth, death and rebirth should only make you investigate the question and find out that there are no births or rebirths, they relate to the body and not to the Self.

Question: What happens to the created ego after the body dies?

Answer: Ego is “I-thought”. In its subtle form, it remains a thought whereas in its gross aspect, it embraces mind, senses and body. They disappear in deep slumber along with the ego. Still the Self is there. Similarly it will be in death. Ego is not an entity independent of the Self in order that it might be created or destroyed by itself. It functions as an instrument of the Self and periodically ceases to function, that is, it appears and disappears as birth and death.

Question: I want to find the real “I” and always be effortlessly in touch.

Answer: It is enough that you give up the individual “I” and no effort will be reduced to gain the real “I”. Do not think that there is any such difference between you and the Self; then surrender yourself to Him, merge yourself in Him. There should be no reservations, as you cannot cheat God.

Question: What about after death?

Answer: Inquire first who or what it is that is born. It is the body not you. Why trouble about things beyond you such as death when your Self is here and present?

Question: How long does one stay in other worlds between births an deaths?

Answer: The Sense of time is relative. In a dream you may live a whole day’s events in a couple of hours. In the subtle body of the death world you may do the same and live like what seems a thousand years, although by our time it may be only a hundred years.
Do we fear sleep? Sleep is temporary death. Death is a longer sleep. Why should you want continuance of the bodily shackles? Find out your undying Self and be immortal.
As long as you identify yourself with the gross body, thoughts materialized as gross manifestations must be real to you. Having existed here it certainly survives death. Hence under these circumstances the other world exists. On the other hand, consider that the one reality is the Self from whom has sprung the ego. The ego loses sight of the Self and identifies itself with the body, which results in ignorance and misery. The life-current [the Self] has passed through innumerable incarnations, births and deaths, but is still unaffected. There is no reason to mourn. The mind is of the ego, and the ego rises from the Self.
The sacred bull [Nandi] in India represents the ego, Jiva. It is always shown in our temples facing God with a flat circular stone in front of it. This stone altar is where sacrifices are offered and it all symbolizes that the ego must be sacrificed and must be turned towards the inner God.

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Source:
Excerpt from the Mananam Series Book on “The Sages Speak About Life & Death”.

INTELLECT VERSUS INTELLIGENCE

The crux of the problem that humanity faces today is the failure to distinguish the intellect from intelligence. Even the educated are ignorant of the exact nature of the intellect. Much less do they realise the importance of its role in human life. And educators the world over have been focusing all their attention and effort in merely building intelligence. They have invested little thought or effort in developing the intellect. Consequently the human intellect remains completely neglected.

Intellect is Not Intelligence
Intelligence is built in an individual by gaining information, knowledge from external sources. From teachers and textbooks, from schools and universities and other information bureaux. Using those sources you become informed, knowledgeable, even brilliant in one or more subjects that you take up. Just think for a while. Try to understand what you have achieved. The intelligence that you have gained provides you with the means to make a living. No more. All creatures, save humans, need no education to make living. The carnivores and herbivores are naturally provided with this expertise. So are birds in the sky or fishes in the ocean. The human species alone requires some form of education to sustain itself. With knowledge acquired from external sources you only come up to the level of animals. Education has deteriorated to such an extent.

Distinct and different from intelligence is the intellect. Any amount of intelligence gained cannot per se build your intellect. Intelligence is acquired by you from external agencies much like data fed into a computer. All the information stored in a computer does not enable it to function independently. It cannot use that knowledge on its own. Likewise, you cannot use the knowledge gained without the help of your intellect. You need the intellect to think, plan and programme your life with the available knowledge. In the case of all other species save human, they are provided with a built-in-programme of life. Their lifestyle is fixed. They cannot live apart from their inherent nature. So they do not need to plan and programme their lives. They can do without an intellect to guide them moment to moment.

The intellect is the faculty to think, to reason, to judge, to decide on the pros and cons of life. The capacity to question, enquire and not to take anything for granted. You will have to develop your intellect all by yourself. No external agencies can achieve that for you. Do not blindly follow the line of your predecessors. Instead, build the strength of your own intellect. You can achieve that by using your ability to think, to reason, to question everything you meet in life. Do not accept anything which does not admit logic or reason. The constant exercise of thinking, reasoning, question all through your life would strengthen your intellect. Galilei Galileo, often referred to as the father of modern astronomy, wondered why humans have discarded this wondrous faculty they possess: I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended their use.

Intelligence Does not Develop Intellect
The capacity to absorb fresh knowledge is called udana in Sanskrit terms. This capacity is maximum at infancy. And it diminishes gradually as you grow older. In the passage of life this process of absorption helps you gain information, knowledge, intelligence. But the intelligence acquired does not make you think freely, originally, reason independently. Udana will not build the intellect. There is no cause and effect relationship between intelligence and intellect. Ironically, the entire focus throughout the world is to gain intelligence while the intellect remains poor as ever, undeveloped. Today it is all intelligence, no intellect.

That explains why out of millions of doctors turned out by medical schools only a few have proved to be outstanding, extraordinary in their research and findings. Who have discovered life-saving drugs or subtle techniques to transplant organs in a human body. So too out of countless engineers graduated from engineering schools only a few have produced wonders like the Panama Canal, Golden Gate Bridge or Euro Channel Tunnel. In the field of law again there are but a few prodigious lawyers who overshadow even the most reputed ones. The difference arises in the strength of intellect in the former which he latter, possessing abundant knowledge of law, lacks. To cite an example: In Chennai, India over seventy years back, the High Court was deciding a famous case on forgery. The defending lawyer defending the accused made an elaborated presentation covering practically all points of law. And when the opponent layer’s turn came up, he requested the judge to merely put up the original document against the light.

He beseeched, “Do you see a watermark in the document, my Lord?”
The justice cooperated, “Yes, I do see an elephant watermark.”
The lawyer rejoined, “This paper was manufactured in 1932.”
And the original document was dated 1930! Of course, he had earlier obtained the proof of it.

The above observations demonstrate the power of a developed intellect vis-à-vis intelligence, a mere stockpile of knowledge. All the intelligence that people carry without the intellect to apply it in life tantamounts to gold bars on a mule’s back. Again intellect, the steering wheel which controls and directs it. You will do well to make sure you have a power steering!

The faculty to think, to reason is a human prerogative. All other beings lack this faculty since they do not possess an intellect. The intellect renders a human being the chef d’ouevre of creation. But the world is unaware of this unique status. And people do not care to develop this life-sustaining, life-surpassing equipment, the intellect.

Also you fail to realise that thinking, reasoning is skilled work. That you need to learn and practice. Like playing the violin or golf. You believe that thinking is a natural process like seeing, hearing or breathing. That you can think clearly, precisely without putting in the necessary effort on your part. You must understand that to develop the faculty of thinking, reasoning you need to devote as much time and effort to it as you would to learning any other art or skill.

Need to Develop Intellect
For a long period of time there has been no awareness or endeavour by humans to develop the art of thinking. As a result the lives of people are based on groundless beliefs. And their beliefs rest on some absurd superstitions. Or mere assertions which bear no proof. And now they find it difficult to question their veracity.

Following this trend humanity has reached a perilous state. People must wake up. Realise the emergent need to develop, strengthen the intellect. The process of thinking should have started from an early age. Having failed to do so, at least start the process now. Develop the art of thinking. Follow it up with the study of the impeccable truths of life. Delve deep into the truths. Accept those that appeal to logic and reason. Apply them in practical living. Adopt this procedure all through life. It will enable you to build your intellect. Nobel laureate Albert Einstein has observed: Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.

Humans need a strong intellect to exercise the right choice of action in life. The world presents endless trials and tribulations. The human species alone is provided with an intellect to fight against and surmount mundane challenges. All other species, devoid of intellect, are helpless victims of the rigours of the external world. A powerful intellect helps humans overpower these onslaughts. But the role of the human intellect does not end there. Far above its suzerainty in the world the intellect has the unique capacity to even transcend the world and reach the ultimate state of spiritual Enlightenment. No other creature save humans can conceive, much less achieve that exalted state. You must make good use of the intellect to attain this very purpose of human birth.

Unaware of the dire need to build the intellect, people entertain themselves with merely reading others’ periodicals and publications. They indulge in the mere length of study. Just poring over pages of literature apathetic towards the message therein or its deeper implications if any. Rare indeed are the ones who go into the depth of study. Thus little is assimilated, absorbed by the readers. People have been mere educated robots for generations. And have been traversing through life without knowing the meaning and purpose of it. Like mariners who sail through the seven seas without fathoming the depth below. But the rare one who cares to know, drops the plumb line anywhere and instantly finds the depth. So too, one must use the intellect to go into the depth of one’s life to claim to be truly educated. It is the vertical and not the horizontal line of study that matters in life. Herbert Spencer, a thinker and write, was one such truly educated luminary. Someone had asked him if he was a voracious reader. He instantly quipped: No sir, if I were as big a reader as others, I would have been as big an ignoramus as others.

The world abounds in personalities with one-sided development. Intelligence and no intellect. An example of one such person suffering from this human imbalance is a renowned scientist. He is an alcoholic and his liver is damaged. He is extremely short tempered and his blood pressure has shot up. And he is stressed, unable to face even the petty challenges of the world. Just reflect over his state. Analyse his personality carefully. He is brilliant scientist with profound knowledge of his subject. He has acquired abundant intelligence but never cared to develop his intellect. His intellect has always remained weak. It lacks the strength to handle the multifarious demands of the mind. His mind craves for alcohol. His intellect is not powerful enough to control the nagging desire. So too his mind raves in foul temper. His poor intellect is unable to control its ravings. And when his mind is humiliated, strained and stressed by the problems confronting it, his frail intellect looks on helplessly.

On the contrary, there are luminaries possessing awesome intellects which hold their minds under perfect control. Some of them possess no academic qualification but academies are built around them.

Educational institutions therefore need to maintain an equable balance between acquisition of intelligence and developing an intellect.

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Source:
From the Book on “THE FALL OF THE HUMAN INTELLECT” by A. Parthasarathy.

VEGETARIANISM

The greatness and dignity of human beings is their ability to sacrifice their lives for others.
- Swami Tejomayananda

A question often asked by people concerns vegetarianism and non-vegetarianism. This is a relevant topic because it involves the value of ahimsa, which is an important aspect of sanatana dharma.What is the position of manu smrti on the question of eating meat? The general commandment given (called a samanya) is: "Do not eat meat." There are a number of reasons why this injunction is given. One is from the spiritual standpoint, that there is one Self or one Life that pulsates in all beings; since all beings want to live happily in this world, we do not have the moral right to take away a life or to cause any unhappiness or sorrow to others. This is a simple dharma, to understand.The second reason is that the greatness and dignity of human beings is their ability to sacrifice their lives for others. The person, who sacrifices his comforts or wealth, his happiness, or even his life, in order to protect, sustain, and help others, is considered great. Therefore, we are cutting the very root of the glory of human life and degrading ourselves.
In recent times, several organisations have been formed to protect wild life and forestry. A movement of this kind is necessary nowadays because there are so many greedy and cruel people who are concerned only with their own acquisitions and pleasure and are ready to destroy anything for their own sake. Human beings should sacrifice for others, not sacrifice others for their own personal comforts, pleasures of other pursuits.

A third reason for not eating meat is given with respect to an argument put forth by some non-­vegetarians. If all beings have life and vegetarians kill and eat plant life, why should we not eat animals also? However this argument is really a fallacious one, for if we extend this reasoning a little further, we would then be asking why we cannot eat human beings also. If it is necessary to destroy life no matter what we eat, then why is there a shortage of food? But, of course, everyone would reply, "Oh, that is horrible! How can you say that?" No one will agree with the argument when it is taken that far.Even though there is-life in all beings, in both vegetable and animal kingdoms, there are degrees of evolution and of the manifestation of intelligence. The degree of feeling and understanding, of mental and physical pain, is much less developed in plant-life as compared to animal-life. According to our dharma sastra, the purpose of human life is to know the Truth. In order to know the Truth we must sustain our lives, but it needs to be done with proper discrimination.When a patient goes to a doctor, the doctor will try to treat the patient with as little medicine as possible and without an operation. However, if an operation is necessary, the doctor performs it, generally with anesthesia, so as to give the least amount of pain and discomfort to the patient.

In the same way, although life must be sustained with life, it should be done by causing the least pain and disturbance to nature. This means that even when eating vegetarian food we should eat,moderately and with discrimination. Even from an anatomical point of view, the body structure of a carnivorous animal is meant for eating meat whereas the human body is not. From a medical standpoint also, many people today are advised to reduce their fat and cholesterol intake, which generally means the reduction of red meat in the diet. It is needless to explain here that not only meat-eating, but excessive eating of any kind is not good for physical health.

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(Courtesy: Mananam - Hindu Culture Part II, Vol. XV, No.1, January 1993)

THE BREATH

Discover inner space by creating gaps in the stream of thinking. Without those gaps, your thinking becomes repetitive, uninspired, devoid of any creative spark, which is how it still is for most people on the planet. You don’t need to be concerned with the duration of those gaps. A few seconds is good enough. Gradually, they will lengthen by themselves, without any effort on your part. More important than their length is to bring them in frequently so that your daily activities and your stream of thinking becomes interspersed with space.

Being aware of your breathing takes attention away from thinking and creates space. It is one way of generating consciousness. Although the fullness of consciousness is already there as the unmanifested, we are here to bring consciousness into this dimension.

The fact that breath has no form is one of the reason why breath awareness is an extremely effective way of bringing space into your life, of generating consciousness.

Being aware of your breath forces you into the present moment—the key to all inner transformation. Whenever you are conscious of the breath, you are absolutely present. You may also notice that you cannot think and be aware of your breathing. Conscious breathing stops your mind. But far from being in a trance or half asleep, you are fully awake and highly alert. You are not falling below thinking, but risking above it. And if you look more closely, you will find that those two things—coming fully into the present moment and ceasing thinking without loss of consciousness—are actually one and the same: the arising of space consciousness.

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Source:
From the Book on “A NEW EARTH – Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose” by ECKART TOLLE.

DIVALI OR DIPAVALI – A Festival of Lights

MEANING AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE

INDIA is a land of festivals. Divali is the festival of lights, a festival of the Hindus traced back to ancient times. It is the most gorgeous festival celebrated all over the country.

‘Divali’ is derived from “Dipalavali” meaning ‘a cluster of lights’. The celebration of Divali is marked by illumination everywhere. Rows of rows of small earthernware lamps are seen in every home. Divali is also known for fireworks which go on practically the whole night. In every house the children, even elders, light fire crackers. That night sounds like a battle-field everywhere.

Every next morning before sunrise, every member of the family takes the holy bath and wears new clothes. From the poorest to the richest Indian, wearing new clothes is an established ritual. Thereafter all of them visit relatives and friends where gifts are exchanged and sweets consumed with much gaiety.

STORY OF NARAKASURA
Divali, or more correctly Dipavali, is a joyous celebration of the death of the Titan of hell, Narakasura at the hands of Lord Krsna. Narakasura, known as the son of the earth, was all-powerful. He was an intolerable menace to the gods, sages and all men of piety. He looted and plundered not only the earth by heaven as well. He carried away 16,000 fair daughters of the gods and imprisoned them in his harem. The gods led by Indra approached Lord Krsna and supplicated the Lord to destroy the demon. Krsna readily greed. He fought a fierce battle. After destroying thousands of demons Krsna slew Narakasura. Thereafter, he rescued the imprisoned damsels and at their earnest prayers took them as his wives.

PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE
This festival, like other festivals and rituals, explains the inner personality of man and his ignorance and ego to attainment of his supreme nature of God-realisation. The darkness of the night represents man’s total ignorance of his Self, ignorance of his Godhood. In that darkness reigns the desire-ridden ego which destroys peace and brings about sorrow and misery in the bosom of man. The 16,000 damsels represents the desires that arise in an egoistic man. Desires dwell in ignorance under the control of ego. All these desires cannot find fulfillment in this limited world. They remain frustrated. Thus man is driven to a state of sorrow and suffering by his own negative tendencies.

To pull himself out of this state man has to employ his positive tendencies to direct his attention to the higher Self. Every man has within him both positive and negative tendencies. They have been represented in almost all religions as gods and demons respectively. The gods’ approach of Krsna for help signifies man’s positive tendencies reaching for the Self. When man turns introvert and seeks the inner Self his negative tendencies get destroyed one by one. His desires get annihilated. This is represented by the fireworks on the night of Divali. The battle with ego, the fight with the negative tendencies, the destruction of the desires goes on the whole night, that is as long as ignorance lasts. With the rising of the sun all darkness is dispelled, all ignorance removed, all desires destroyed. Ego, the Narakasura, is killed. Man is transformed to his original Godhead.

The bath at the dawn of Divali indicates the cleansing of the egoborn, egocentric desires. The new clothes signify the newly acquired Godhood. That transformation brings about gaiety, joy, bliss represented by eating sweets and merry-making. The visiting of relatives and friends the next morning carries this new vision, the vision of Divinity, the vision of the Supreme Self in one and all.

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Source:
Collected from the Book of “The Symbolism of Hindu Gods and Rituals” by Swamy A.Parthasarathy.

KNOWING YOURSELF AND KNOWING ABOUT YOURSELF

You may not want to know yourself because you are afraid of what you may find out. Many people have a secret fear that they are bad. But nothing you can find out about yourself is you. Nothing you can know about you is you.

While some people do not want to know who they are because of fear, others have an insatiable curiosity about themselves and want to find out more and more. You may be so fascinated with yourselves that you spend years in psychoanalysis, delve into every aspect of your childhood, uncover secret fears and desires, and find layers upon layers of complexity in the makeup of your personality and character. After ten years, the therapist may get tired of you and your story and tell you that your analysis is now complete. Perhaps he sends you away with a five-thousand-page dossier. “This is all about you. This is who you are.” As you carry the heavy file home, the initial satisfaction of at last knowing yourself gives way quickly to a feeling of incompleteness and a lurking suspicion that there must be more to who you are than that. And indeed there is more—not perhaps in quantitative terms of more facts but in the qualitative dimension of depth.

There is nothing wrong with psychoanalysis or finding out about your past as long as you don’t confuse knowing about yourself with knowing yourself. The five-thousand-page dossier is about yourself: the content of your mind which is conditioned by the past. Whatever you learn through psychoanalysis of self-observation is about you. It is not you. It is content, not essence. Going beyond ego is stepping out of content. Knowing yourself is being yourself, and being yourself is ceasing to identify with content.

Most people define themselves through the content of their lives. Whatever you perceive, experience, do, think, or feel is content. Content is what absorbs most people’s attention entirely, and it is what they identify with. When you think or say, “My life,” you are not referring to the life that you are but the life that you have, or seem to have. You are referring to contents—your age, health, relationship, finances, work and living situation, as well as your mental-emotional state. The inner and outer circumstances of your life, your past and your future, all belong to the realm of content—as do events, that is to say, anything what happens.

What is there other than content? That which enables the content to be—the inner space of consciousness.

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Source:
Book on “A NEW EARTH – Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose “ by ECKHART TOLLE.

Everyone inhabits a reality of non-change lying beyond all change

EVERYONE INHABITS A REALITY OF NON-CHANGE LYING BEYOND ALL CHANGE. THE EXPERIENCE OF THIS REALITY BRINGS CHANGE UNDER OUR CONTROL.

At the moment, the only physiology you can maintain is time-based. However, the fact that time is tied to awareness implies that you could maintain an entirely different style of functioning—the physiology of immortality—which would correspond to the experience of non-change. Non-change can’t be created as a product of change. It requires a shift out of time-bound awareness into timeless awareness. There are many gradations to this shift. For example, if you are under extreme time pressure at work, your body’s reaction to the pressure is not automatic; some people thrive under time pressure, using it to fuel their creativity and energy, while others are defeated by it, losing incentive and feeling a burden that will bring no satisfaction compared with the stress it creates.

The person who responds with creativity has learned not to identify with the time pressure; he has transcended it at least partially, unlike the person who feels constriction and stress. For him, identification with time has become overwhelming—he cannot escape the ticking of the internal clock, and his body cannot help but mirror his state of mind. In various subtle ways, our cells constantly adjust to our perception of time; a biologist would say that we have entrained, or locked in sequence, a series of processes embracing millions of related mind-body events.

It is all-important to realize that you can reach a state where time-bound processes can be realigned. A simple analogy demonstrates this: Look at your physical body as a printout of signals being sent back and forth between your brain and every cell. The nervous system, which sets up the kinds of messages being sent, functions as the body’s software; the myriads different hormones, neuron-transmitters, and other messenger molecules are the inputs being run through the software. All this constitutes the visible programming of your body. But where is the programmer? He is not visible, yet he must exist. Thousands of decisions are being made in the mind-body system every second, countless choices that enable your physiology to adapt to the demands of life.

If I see a cobra on the path in India and jump back in fear, the visible apparatus controlling this event can be seen in the muscle reactions I display, which are triggered by chemical signals from any nervous system. My increased heartbeat and panting breath are other visible signs that the hormone adrenaline has kicked in, secreted by the adrenal cortex in response to a specific brain chemical (ACTH) sent from the pituitary. If a biochemist could track down every single molecule involved in my fear reaction, he would still miss the invisible decision maker that decided to have the reaction, for even though I reacted in a split second, my body didn’t jump back mindlessly. Someone with entirely different programming would exhibit entirely different reactions. A snake collector might bend forward with interest; a Hindu devotee, recognizing a form of Shiva, might kneel in awe.

The fact is that any possible reaction might have occurred—panic, rage, hysteria, paralysis, apathy, curiosity, delight, etc. The invisible programmer is unlimited in the ways he can program the visible apparatus of the body. At the moment I stumbled across the snake, all the basic processes of my physiology—breathing, digestion, metabolism, elimination, perception and thinking—depended on the meaning that a cobra held for me personally. One sees the truth in a saying from Aldous Huxley: “Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.”

Where can you locate a meaning? The quick and easy answer is to say that it is located in the brain, but this organ, like every other, is in constant flux. Like migrating birds, billions of atoms are flying in and out of my brain every second. It swirls with electrical waves that never form the same pattern twice in a life time. Its basic chemistry can shift if different kinds of food are eaten for lunch, or if a sudden mood swing is experienced. Yet my memory of the snake doesn’t dissolve in this sea of change. My memories are available to the programmer who stands above memory, silently observing my life, taking account of my experiences, always ready to entertain the possibility of new choices. For this programmer is nothing but the awareness of choice. It appreciates change without getting overwhelmed; therefore it escapes the time-bound limitations that arise in the normal cause-and-effect world.

The “me” who is afraid of snakes learned that fear somewhere in the past. All my reactions are part and parcel of the time-bound self and its tendencies. In less than a thousandth of a second, its pre-programmed fear arouses the whole sequence of bodily messages that produce my actions. For most of us no other “me” is apparent, because we haven’t learned to identify with the decision-maker, the silent witness, whose awareness isn’t defined by the past. Yet in a subtle way, we all sense that something inside us has not changed very much, if at all, since we were infants. When we wake up in the morning there is a second of pure awareness before the old conditioning automatically falls into place; at that moment you are just yourself, not happy or said, not important or humble, not old or young.

As I wake up in the morning, this “me” dresses itself in the mantle of experience very quickly; in a matter of seconds I remember that I am, for example, a 46-year-old doctor who has a wife, two children, a home outside Boston, and ten minutes to get to the clinic. That identity is the product of change. The “me” who is beyond change could be waking up anywhere—as a 5-year-old in Delhi smelling my grandmother’s cooking, as an 80-year-old in Florida listening to the wind rattling the palms. This changeless “me”, whom the ancient sages in India simply called the Self, serves as my real reference point for experience. All other reference points are bound by change, decay, and loss; every other sense of “me” is identified with pain or pleasure, poverty or wealth, happiness or sadness, youth or old age—every time-bound condition that the relative world imposes. In unity consciousness, the world can be explained as a flow of Spirit, which is awareness. Our whole goal is to establish an intimate relationship with Self as Spirit. To the extent that we create this intimacy, the experience of ageless body and timeless mind is realized.

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Source: BOOK ON “AGELESS BODY, TIMELESS MIND” - A PRACTICAL ALTERNATIVE

TO GROWING OLD BY DEEPAK CHOPRA
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Time is not absolute. The underlying reality of all things is eternal, and what we call time is really quantified eternity.

Although our bodies, and the whole physical world, are a display of constant change, there is more to reality than process. The universe was born and is evolving. When it was born, time and space came into existence. Before the instant of the Big Bang, time and space didn’t exist as we know them. Yet the rational mind finds it nearly impossible to ask questions such as “What came before time?” and “What is bigger than space?” Even Einstein, when he was a young physicist working out quantum principles for the first time, held on to the old notion, embraced by Newton, that the universe existed in a steady state—time and space were eternal constants, never born and never dying.

This steady-state version of reality is still the one our five senses report back to us about. You cannot see or feel time as it speeds up or slows down, even though Einstein proved that time does this; you cannot sense space as it expands or contracts, yet this too is part of a rhythmic universe. To go even further, to imagine those dimensionless regions where time and space are born, requires a radical shift in perception. This shift is forced upon us because the universe had to have some kind of timeless source—and the same holds true for us.

You perceive yourself as existing in time because your body is composed of change; to change, one must have a flow or sequence. In this sequence there is a before and after—before this breath was the last breath, after this heart beat will be the next heartbeat. But theoretically, if you had the time and the equipment, you cold make an EKG of all the heartbeats someone has had in a lifetime, and by holding the printout in your hands, you would have past, present, and future contained in one place. You could look at it upside down or backward; you could fold it in half so that the last heartbeat and the first one were next to each other.

This kind of manipulation is what quantum physics reveals about the most basic space-time in Nature. As they exchange energy states, two particles can move backward in time as easily as forward; things that happened in the past can be altered by energy events in the future. The whole notion of time as an arrow shooting inexorably forward has been shattered forever in the complex geometries of quantum space, where multidimensional strings and loops carry time in all directions and even bring it to a halt.

The only absolute left to us is the timelessness, for now we realize that our entire universe is just one incident springing forth out of a larger reality. What we sense as seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years are cut-up bits of this larger reality. It is up to you, the perceiver, to cut up the timeless any way you like; your awareness crates the time you experience. Someone who experiences time as a scarce commodity that is constantly slipping away is crating a completely different personal reality from someone who perceives that he has all the time in the world. Is your day full of time pressure? Do you suffer the breathless, panicky symptoms of “time sickness,” which the body translates into rapid or irregular heartbeat, distorted digestive rhythms, insomnia, and high blood pressure? These individual differences express how we perceive change, for the perception of change creates our experience of time.

When your attention is in the past or the future, you are in the field of time, crating aging. One Indian master who seemed remarkably young for his age explained this by saying, “Most people spend their lives either in the past or the future, but my life is supremely concentrated in the present.” When a life is concentrated in the present, it is most real, because the past and future are not impinging upon it. At this instant, where are the past and future? Nowhere. Only the present moment exists; past and future are mental projections. If you can free yourself of these projections, trying neither to relieve the past not to control the future, a space is opened for a completely new experience—the experience of ageless body and timeless mind.

Being able to identify with a reality that is not bounded by time is extremely important; otherwise there is no escape from the decay that time inevitably brings. You can catch a glimpse of timelessness with a simple mind-body exercise: Choose a time of day when you feel relaxed and unpressured. Sit quietly in a comfortable chair and take off your watch, placing it nearby so that you can easily refer to it without having to lift it or move your head very much. Now close your eyes and be aware of your breathing. Let your attention easily follow the stream of breath going in and out of your body. Imagine your whole body rising and falling with the flow of each breath. After a minute or two, you will be aware of warmth and relaxation pervading your muscles.

When you feel very settled and quiet inside, slowly open your eyes and peek at the second hand of your watch. What’s it doing? Depending on how relaxed you are, the second hand will behave in different ways. For some people, it will have stopped entirely, and this effect will last anywhere from one to perhaps three seconds. For other people, the second hand will hesitate for half a second, then jump into its normal ticking. Still other people perceive the second hand moving, but at a slower pace than usual. Unless you have tried this little experiment, it seems very unlikely, but once you have had the experience of seeing a watch stop, you will never again doubt that time is a product of perception. The only time there is the one you are aware of.

You can learn to take your awareness into the region of timelessness at will—meditation is the classic technique for mastering this experience. In meditation the active mind is withdrawn to its source; just as this changing universe had to have source beyond change, your mind, with all its restless activity, arises from a state of awareness beyond thought, sensation, emotion, desire, and memory. This is a profound personal experience. In the state of timeless or transcendent awareness, you have the sensation of fullness. In place of change, loss, and decay, there is steadiness and fulfillment. You sense that the infinite is everywhere. When this experience becomes a reality, the fears associated with change disappear; the fragmentation of eternity into seconds, hours, days, and years becomes secondary, and the perfection of every moment becomes primary.

Now that meditation has entered mainstream Western cultural experience, researchers have applied scientific measurements to the subjective experience of silence, fullness, and eternity. They have discovered that the physiological state of meditators undergoes definite shifts towards more efficient functioning. Hundreds of individual findings show lowered respiration, reduced oxygen consumption, and decreased metabolic rate. In terms of aging, the more significant conclusion is that the hormonal imbalance associated with stress—and known to speed up the aging process—is reversed. This in turn slows or even reverses the aging process, as measured by various biological changes associated with growing old. From my experience with studies on people using Transcendental Meditation, it has been established that long-term meditators can have a biological age between 5 to 12 years younger than their chronological age.

The most fascinating aspect of this research, which has been ongoing for over two decades, is that the biological process of aging itself does not have to be manipulated; the desired result can be achieved through awareness alone. In other words, meditation alters the frame of reference that gives the person his experience of time. At a quantum level, physical events in space-time such as heartbeat and hormone levels can be affected simply by taking the mind to a reality where time does not have such a powerful hold. The new paradigm is showing us that time has many levels and all are available to us in our own consciousness.

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Source: BOOK ON “AGELESS BODY, TIMELESS MIND” - A PRACTICAL
ALTERNATIVE TO GROWING OLD BY DEEPAK CHOPRA

A PRAYER

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy Peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to
be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

-- By St. Francis of Assisi (translation anon)

THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

The First approached the elephant,
And, happening to fall
Against his b road and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
“God bless me! But the elephant
Is nothing but a wall!”

The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried: “Ho! What have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me ‘tis mighty clear
This wonder of an elephant
Is very like a spear!”

The Third approached the animal,
And, happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:
“I see,” quoth he,” the elephant
Is very like a snake!”

The Fourth reached out his eager hand,
And felt about the knee:
“What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain,” quoth he;
“ ‘Tis clear enough the elephant
Is very like a tree!”

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: “E’en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an elephant
Is very like a fan!”

The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Than, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
“I see,” quoth he, “the elephant
Is very like a rope!”

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

So, oft in theologic wars
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an elephant
Not one of them has seen!

Poem by John Godrey Saxe.


COMMENTS:

The present custodians of religions are like the blind leading the blind. They try to convey their concept of God out of their fanatic beliefs. They are like the six blind men who described an elephant in a Poem by John Godfrey Saxe. These blind men wanted to know what an elephant was. They groped and felt the different parts of the animal. Arrived at different conclusions. That it was like a wall, a spear, snake, tree, fan and rope. And each declared authoritatively his own opinion of the elephant. All of them were right from their view point yet all of them were fundamentally wrong. The above poem convey the message.

Vedanta gives no such names to God as these blind men did to the elephant. Its approach to God is methodical. It systematically bridges the gulf between you and God. It provides you the philosophy to study, contemplate, assimilate and apply it in your life. For you to evolve spiritually. And reach the ultimate state of Self-realisation, God-realisation. The supreme godhead lies within you. It is your original nature. Your ignorance veils your supreme Self. Vedanta gives you the knowledge to discover your self.

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DESPITE THE APPEARANCE OF BEING SEPARATE INDIVIDUALS,WE ARE ALL CONNECTED TO PATTERNS OF INTELLIGENCE

You and your environment are one. Looking at yourself, you perceive that your body stops at a certain point; it is separated from the wall of your room or a tree outdoors by empty space. In quantum terms, however, the distinction between “solid” and “empty” is insignificant. Every cubic centimeter of quantum space is filled with a nearly infinite amount of energy, and the tiniest vibration is part of vast fields of vibration spanning whole galaxies. In a very real sense, your environment is your extended body: With every breath, you inhale hundreds of millions of atoms of air exhaled yesterday by someone in China. All the oxygen, water, and sunlight around you are only faintly distinguishable from that which is inside you.

If you choose, you can experience yourself in a state of unity with everything you contact. In ordinary waking consciousness, you touch your finger to a rose and feel it as solid, but in truth one bundle of energy and information—your finger—is contacting another bundle of energy and information—the rose. Your finger and the thing it touches are both just minute outcroppings of the infinite field we call the universe. This truth inspired the ancient sages of India to declare:

As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm.
As is the atom, so is the universe.
As is the human body, so is the cosmic body.
As is the human body, so is the cosmic mind.

These are not just mystic teachings but actual experiences of those who could dislodge their awareness from a state of separation and identify instead with the unity of everything. In unity consciousness, people, things, and events “out there” all become part of your body; in fact, you are only a mirror of relationships centered on these influences. The famous naturalist John Muir declared, “Whenever we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” This shouldn’t be a rare experience but the first building block of everything we know.

The possibility of experiencing unity has tremendous implications for aging, because when there is harmonious interaction between you and your extended body, you feel joyful, healthy, and youthful. “Fear is born of separation,” the ancient Indian sages maintained; in this statement they probed deep into why we age. Seeing ourselves as separate, we create chaos and disorder between ourselves and things “out there.” We war with other people and destroy the environment. Death, the final state of separation, looms as a fearsome unknown; the very prospect of change, which is part of life, create untold dread because it connotes loss.

Fear inevitably brings violence in its wake. Being separate from other people, things and events, we want to force them to be what we want. In harmony there is no violence. Instead of futilely trying to control the uncontrollable, a person in unity learns acceptance, not because he has to but because there actually is peace and orderliness in himself and his extended body. The modern sage J. Krishnamurti lived into his nineties with wonderful alertness, wisdom and undiminished vitality. I remember seeing him bound up the stairs to a lecture podium when he was 85, and I was very moved when a woman who had known him for many years told me, “I have learned one thing about him—he is completely without violence.”

The transformation from separation to unity, from conflict to peace, is the goal of all spiritual traditions. “Don’t we live in the same objective world?” a disciple once queried his guru. “Yes,” his master replied, “but you see yourself in the world, I see the world in myself. This minor perceptual shift makes all the difference between freedom and bondage.”

All of us are in bondage to the disorder we create by seeing ourselves as separate and isolated. The perfect example is the Type A personality with its driven, frustrated behavior its constant sense of being pressured by deadlines. Unable to relax into any kind of acceptance or flow, such a person nurtures his past hurts as anger; this repressed turmoil gets projected into the environment as hostility, impatience, blame and unacknowledged panic. Endlessly trying to control others, such a person reacts to minor stresses with harsh criticism of both self and others. In the act of creating so much chaos, the Type A person, particularly in the business world, is deluded into thinking that he or she is competing successfully. In actuality, the level of efficient work is very low, and as frustrations mount, the feedback the Type A personality receives from his or her extended body creates more havoc within the physical body. Cholesterol and blood pressure rise; the heart is subjected to needless stressful arousal, seriously increasing the risk of a fatal heart attack or stroke.

Type A is an extreme example of the harm created by not interacting harmoniously with one’s extended body. As we will see, perceived stress in the environment is directly related to most of the age changes that overtake everyone. What makes us old isn’t the stress so much as it is the perception of stress. Someone who doesn’t see the world “out there” as a threat can coexist with the environment, free of the damage created by the stress response. In many ways, the most important thing you can do to experience a world without aging is to nurture the knowledge that world is you.

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Source: BOOK ON “AGELESS BODY, TIMELESS MIND” - A PRACTICAL ALTERNATIVE TO GROWING OLD BY DEEPAK CHOPRA
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IMPULSES OF INTELLIGENCE CONSTANTLY CREATE THE BODY IN NEW FORMS EVERY SECOND

Creating the body in new forms is necessary in order to meet the changing demands of life. A child’s view of reality, for example, contains much that is unfamiliar, and until he learns more about the world, his body expresses itself in untrained and uncoordinated behaviors. At 3 months old, a baby cannot tell the difference between a staircase and a painting of a staircase. His brain hasn’t grasped what an optical illusion. By 6 months, his reality has changed; babies can recognize optical illusions by that age, and using that knowledge, their bodies are better able to negotiate three dimensional space (mirrors don’t look like holes in the wall, real stairs are to be climbed but not paintings of stairs, roundness is different from flatness, etc.). Making this perceptual shift isn’t just mental; a whole new way of using eyes and hands has been achieved, and the physical dimensions of various brain centers for shape recognition and motor coordination are affected.

As long as new perceptions continue to enter your brain, your body can respond in new ways. There is no secret of youth more powerful. As one 80-year-old patient of mine succinctly put it, “People don’t grow old. When they stop growing, they become old.” New knowledge, new skills, new ways of looking at the world keep mind and body growing, and as long as that happens, the natural tendency to be new at every second is expressed.

In the quantum world, change is inevitable, aging isn’t. The chronological age of our physical bodies is beside the point. The youngest-looking 50-year-old has molecules that are the same age as those of the oldest-looking 50-year-old. In both cases the chronological age of the body could be stated as 5 billion years (the age of the various atoms), or 1 year (the time it takes for these atoms to replace themselves in our tissues), or 3 seconds (the time taken for a cell to turn over its enzymes for processing food, air and water).

In truth, you are only as old as the information that swirls through you, and this is very fortunate. You can control the informational content of the quantum field. Although there is a certain amount of fixed information in the atoms of food, air and water that make up each cell, the power to transform that information is subject to free will. One thing you can own free and clear in this world is your interpretation of it. There are remarkable medical cases of young children, for example, who feel so unloved that they stop growing. This syndrome, called psychosocial dwarfism, occurs among severally abused children who convert their lack of love and affection into depleted growth hormone, in defiance of the fact that growth hormone is supposedly released on a preprogrammed schedule imprinted into every child’s DNA. In these cases the power of interpretation overrides the genetic imprint, causing a change in the body’s information fields.

Interpretations arise from a person’s self-interaction. You experience this as internal dialogue. Thoughts, judgments, and feelings are ceaselessly swirling through one’s mind: “I like this, I don’t like that, I’m afraid of A, I’m not sure of B,” etc. Internal dialogue is not random mental noise; it is generated from a deep level by your beliefs and assumptions. A core belief is defined as something you assume is true about reality, and as long as you hold on to it, your belief will hold your body’s informational fields to certain parameters—you will perceive something as likable or un likable, distressing or enjoyable, according to how it fits your expectations.

When someone’s interpretation changes, a change in his reality also takes place. In the case of children suffering from psychosocial dwarfism, putting them into a loving environment proves more effective than administering growth hormone (their belief in being unwanted and unworthy can be so strong that their bodies will not grow even when hormones are injected into them). However, if loving foster parents can transform the children’s core belief about being unlovable, they can respond with bursts of naturally produced growth hormone, which sometimes bring them back to normal height, weight, and development. When they see themselves differently, their personal reality is altered at a physiological level. This is a powerful metaphor for how our fear of aging and our deep belief that we are meant to grow old may get transformed into aging itself, as a self-fulfilling prophecy generated by a withering self-image.

To escape this prison, we need to overturn the beliefs supported by fear. In place of the belief that your body decays with time, nurture the belief that your body is a new at every moment. In place of the belief that your body is a mindless machine, nurture the belief that your body is infused with the deep intelligence of life, whose sole purpose is to sustain you. These new beliefs are not just nicer to live with; they are true—we experience the joy of life through our bodies, so it is only natural to belief that our bodies are not set against us but want what we want.


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Source: BOOK ON “AGELESS BODY, TIMELESS MIND” - A PRACTICAL ALTERNATIVE TO GROWING OLD BY DEEPAK CHOPRA
***

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E P I L O G U E

He, the One, is the flaming torch,
He also is the tomb,
And He the candle set on the tomb,
But the delight of self-annihilation
Fails only to then circling moth.
Thou didst not learn from the nightingale
The secret of independence.
The imprisonment of the nightingale in the garden
Lasts only till it remembers its nest.
As long as I was singing sweetly,
Light filled the garden;
The garden disappeared in a flash.
I am a dust-heap,
Haunted by the fragrance of musk.
Caught up in the cares of the world,
I became a desert.
Do not ask for my boundaries,
They embrace both heaven and earth.
I myself I am the bell,’

Its music sleeps in my veins.
This is my silence
Will end when the caravan moves.
Create he means to expansion.
There are no more eddies and whirlpools
When once the waters area stilled.
The weeping of the melting candle
Does not solicit tear from the eye.
Learn, O heedless one,
That there is sovereign independence
In the melting of the heart.
As long as there is youth,
We are secure in joy and excitement:
Our house is but hired and tenanted.

****

Source: THE SONGS OF ENLIGHTENMENT by
Swamay Rama Tirthaa.

Renunciation of the World

He who abandons his worldly home
Finds his true home.
He who retains the home of his own ego
Feels miserable in any home.
If one gives up wealth,
One lives in riches:
If one gives up pleasure,
One comes to relieve the pain of others.
He who gives up his life
Never dies.
He who abandons a soft bed
Sleeps on a litter of flowers.
He who abandons thoughts of others’ women
Obtains access to a queen.
He who abandons deceit and lies
Acquires the gift of prophecy.
He who abandons slavery to the mind
Finds all his whims realized.
He who gives up everything
Acquires everything.
He who has no desires
Finds his deepest desire realized.
He who abandons taste
Tastes the nectar of immortality.
If one asks for nothing
One finds what pleases the heart.
Renunciation gives you the three world,
This the Veda proclaims.
He who remains unkempt
Washes off all impurity.
He who retains the home of his own ego
Feels miserable in any home.

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Source: Songs of Enlightenment by Swamy Rama Tirtha
Translated from the Urdu and Perisian by A.J.Alston –
Heritage Publishers, New Delhi, India.1983.

SELF KNOWLEDGE

There was a cage formed of mirrors,
With a fresh rose hanging in the middle.
The flower was one, but each reflection
Was a separate object of love
To the nightingale caged within.
Every time the nightingale flew towards a flower,
It received a rap.
What it thought was a flower
Was only a reflection.
When it flew towards it,
It knocked its head against the glass.
When it looked to the right,
There was the rose.
When it ran to the left,
It suffered the same fate.
When it flew forward
It stubbed its beak.
And when it fell
It received another wound.
But once it turned back
And lifted up its eyes,
There was the real rose smiling.
Feeling startled, it thought
‘Let there be no more deception.
Is this a real rose
Or a rose only in name?’
It flew up at once to the rose.
Now there was joy, no cage, no mirrors.
It was free.
O Man, this is your condition
Encompassed by the world.
He in search of whom
You are wandering from door to door
Is shining peacefully within your heart.

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Source: Songs of Enlightenment by Swamy Rama Tirtha
Translated from the Urdu and Perisian by A.J.Alston –
Heritage Publishers, New Delhi, India.1983.

PERCEPTION IS A LEARNED PHENOMENON by Deepak Chopra

The power of awareness would make no difference in our lives if Nature had outfitted us all with the same responses to experience. Clearly, this didn’t happen; no two people share the same perception of anything. The face of your beloved may be the face of worst enemy, the food you crave may cause nausea in me. These personal responses have to be learned, which is where differences originate. Learning is a very active use of the mind, leading to very active changes in the body. Perceptions of love, hate, delight, and nausea stimulate the body in extremely different directions. In short, our bodies are the physical results of all interpretations we have been learning to make since we were born.

Some transplant patients report an uncanny experience after receiving a donated kidney, liver, or heart. Without knowing who the organ donor was, they begin to participate in his memories. Associations that belonged to another person start being released when that person’s tissues are placed inside a stranger. In one instance, a woman woke-up after a heart transplant craving beer and Chicken McNuggets; she was very surprised, because she had never before wanted either. After she began to have mysterious dreams in which a young man named Timmy came to her, she tracked down the donor of her new heart, which had come from the victim of a fatal accident; when she contacted his family, it turned out that the victim was a young man named Timmy. The woman was stunned to discover that he’d had a particular fondness for drinking beer and had been killed on his way home from McDonald’s.

Rather than seeking a supernatural explanation for such incidents, one could see them as a confirmation that our bodies are made of experiences transformed into physical expression. Because experience is something we incorporate (literally, “make into a body”), our cells have been instilled with our memories; thus, to receive someone else’s cells is to receive their memories at the same time.

Your cells are constantly processing experience and metabolizing it according to your personal views. You don’t just funnel raw data through your eyes and ears and stamp it with a judgement. You physically turn into the interpretatation as you internalize it. Someone who is depressed over losing his job projects sadness everywhere in his body—the brain’s output or neurotransmitters becomes depleted, hormone levels drop, the sleep cycle is interrupted, neuropeptide receptors on the outer surface of skin cells become distorted, platelet cells in the blood become stickier and more prone to clump, and even his tears contain different chemical traces than tears of joy.

This whole biochemical profile will alter dramatically when the person finds a new job, and it is more satisfying one, his body’s output of neurotransmitters, hormones, receptors, and all other vital biochemicals, down to DNA itself, will start to reflect this sudden turn for the better. Although we assume that DNA is a locked storehouse of genetic information, its active twin, RNA, responds to day-to-day existence. Medical students at exam time show a decreased output of interleukin 2, a critical chemical in the immune response that fight cancer. The production of interleukin 2, is controlled by messenger RNA, which means that the student’s anxiety over passing his examns is speaking directly to his genes.

This point reinforces the great need to use our awareness to create the bodies we actually want. Anxiety over a medical exam eventually passes, as does depression over a lost job, but the aging process has to be countered every year. Your interpretation of how you are aging is critical to what happens over the next four, five, or six decades. In neurological terms, a brain signal is just a set of energy fluctuations. If you are in a coma, these signals are meaningless; when you are alert and aware, the same signals are open to infinite creative interpretations. Shakespeare was not being metaphorical when he wrote Prospero’s line “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” The body is like a manifest dream, a 3-D projection of brain signals as they transform themselves into the state we call “real.”

Aging is nothing but a set of misguided transformations, processes that should remain stable, balanced, an self-renewing but deviate from their proper course. This appears as a physical change, yet what has really happened is that your awareness—whether in your mind or your cells doesn’t matter, you can bring your body’s biochemistry back into line. There is no biochemistry outside awareness; every cell in your body is totally aware of how you think and feel about yourself. Once you accept that fact, the whole illusion of being victimized by a mindless, randomly degenerating body falls away.

***
Source: BOOK ON “AGELESS BODY, TIMELESS MIND” - A PRACTICAL
ALTERNATIVE TO GROWING OLD BY DEEPAK CHOPRA
***
FOR FREE DOWNLOAD AUDIO BOOK PLEASE VISIT FOLLOWING WEBSITES
http://rapidshare.com/files/74885560/Ageless_Body__Timeless_Mind_-Part_1.mp3
http://rapidshare.com/files/74914037/Ageless_Body__Timeless_Mind_-Part_2.mp3