Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Desire to Desire

Every desire is a desire for happiness. Be it a kid’s demand for a tricycle, toy, chocolate or a
Adult wanting that new house, money, job, mobile...... fill in the blank. We want things that make us happy. In other words we seek happiness through the things we desire and the object of desire is our medium to that happiness.
On achieving our goal, we are happy. This fulfilment leads to a short-lived state of joy. But sooner rather than later we have a new desire and then our intention is directed towards this new obsession. Often when we fail, we are overcome by sadness and disappointment.
This is everyone’s story. We are encountered with this duality throughout our lives happiness and sadness come as complimentary packages, one following/leading the other. Yet we pine for our happiness, seek it in the material we see on the outside. When a person acquires all the things he materialistically desires (money, status, power) he yet finds a void within himself, he turns to charity.
By sharing with others he finds contentment and happiness but still does not satisfy his drive to be happy. At this stage of evolution, he realizes that nothing he seeks on the outside is ever going to make him permanently happy, he is directed inwards gradually he realizes that the true happiness he knew-not-why he searched lies within him.
God is bliss (ananda), non-dual, every lasting, perpetual bliss. With no opposites , no illusions pure bliss. It is this bliss which every soul seeks throughout its journey (countless lives). Miss directed intention makes us seek this happiness in the with-out. We make God out of small things, that is the power of human intention. There is no difference when we long for that toy as a kid or car as an adult , we are all programmed to seek happiness , just that we search in the wrong places. Unfulfilled desires of one life are carried forward to the next, be rest assured that every desire your soul has ever conceived will come to pass, the desire is what keeps us human. So our lives are a journey from one desire to the next, making every intermediate desire important, until we single-mindedly desire Him, at that point the object, the desire and the Desiree become one.
As Sri Krishna once said, “Seek me truly, you will find me.”

Monday, November 10, 2008

God made man .... Man made God

World over there are groups people who could kill for their religion, supreme duty they say.
Society calls them “fanatics” , still a milder, non-violent version exists and is treated quite differently. Religious sects , communities, and cliques all pride on their copyrighted version of God.
There was just one Great Mahavira, yet we find two distinct sect Deravasis and the Sthanakvasis, The Great Prophet Mohammad taught the world the meaning of God and the true surrender (Islam) to Him and yet people are more concerned whether you’re a Shia or a Sunni. Or the Christian divide on the basis of the virginity of the great Mother. The Hindu is classified till he fits a cosmically insignificant but egoistically supreme prototype, similar to how the animal kingdom is classified.
We take great honour in our engendered roots and identify ourselves. This is ego-religion.
I have met a few atheists (those who do not believe in the existence of God) and their lives are similar to everybody else. Happiness, victory , joy , sadness, birth, death, accidents, miracles seem to be part of their lives too. Yet I have a strong faith in my God, as a child I had been taught to say his name every night and it works miracles for me. Every time a pass a temple I bow my head in respect.
This is my up-bringing my set of laws, laws which reward and punish my actions. Entering a temple with shoes on is profane, or so is accepting Prasad with my left hand, but still to my dear catholic friend it is no more than a sweet. I have never attended Sunday mass or observed ramzan but still I turned out ok and so goes for my brothers who do not follow any hindu ritual. If a certain religion was supreme then all those who did not follow it would be doomed. An atheist would never get past a measly existence. So would that mean that religion/God is defined by a set of rules and rituals handed down from generation to generation, becoming an individual’s reality based on which family he is born?
Gautama Buddha was not born a Buddhist his thinking made him the supreme one. But these days we do not retrospect religion, what is told to us is what is and what we do not believe in is fiction .
Whatever we believe becomes true for us. A small play of cosmic delusion (Maya, Satan).
We find our God in our sub-conscious rather than look into the all inclusive non-dual super conscious.
We have a man-made god. We are the God that we seek in that temple, mosque, church. We define our rules, play by them and prepare our own score card. Whereas our sole purpose of existence is to merger back into the absolute.
A little thought and it would dawn upon us that every great teacher taught us about the same truth. The same reality the same objective of Human life. The sons of God all descended down the ages to tell us the same thing .Still we are more concerned with the language the message is written in rather than the message!

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Aum

According to Hindu philosophy there are three principle gods, the trinity as it’s called, Brahma the creator, Vishnu the protector and Shiva the destroyer. All other heavenly beings are considered to be reincarnations or manifestations of these three principle entities.
The universe is in Brahma consciousness, created by Brahma, hence the Sanskrit phrase Aham Bramhasmi “I am Brahma”. Which tires to remind us that I am he, a divine being made in the image of god himself.
Lord Vishnu is the divine sustainers and Lord Shiva represents the destroyer of evil or veil of Maya.
Maya is cosmic disillusion, Satan according to the bible which prevents us from realizing our true divinity.
Maya keeps us in ego conscious with its limitations and individuality making us feel that we are separate being and that our physical body and surrounding are in fact the only reality.
This trinity of Brahma Vishnu and Shiva are represented by AUM. The syllable ‘Aa’ is Brahma, ‘U’ Vishnu and ‘M’ Shiva. When we chant AUM we capture the entire cosmos, all words, all things all of everything stems out of this universal sound of vibration. Thus there can never exist any word more powerful than AUM because the word includes Everything.
Yoga means to join. Joining of the Atma to the paramatma. A yogi is a seeker of Cosmic consciousness, seeking the non-dual every lasting bliss (in Sanskrit “Sat chit Ananda”) which in more colloquial terms is God. As a true yogi has an expansion of consciousness, he reaches the realm of the AUM consciousness where he experiences the whole universe as a vibratory outcome of the AUM chant. This is an evolved state of being wherein the observer, the observation and the observed become one.
Anyways for starters, AUM meditation can be a very powerful stress buster, a simple 5 min a day chant can work miracles into your life. Try it because when you chant AUM you are in tune with the song of the Universe.

(Sat: True, pure Chit: consciousness Ananda: bliss)

Friday, October 10, 2008

The Nature of Everything

There is an innate desire in all of to seek answers, answers to fundamental questions that are at the very core of our existence. Each of us as per our beliefs, experience and introspection tide down this search into a set of perceptions, which we then believe governs everything. Religion, superstition and ritual are then all outcomes of trying to quantify the elusive. Nevertheless the apparently endless quest continues.

Albert Einstein in with his theory of relativity proved that all we perceive (Light and matter) is in reality Energy, i.e. matter and energy is inter convertible.
E=mc^2
m:mass c: Speed of light (constant)
This is further corroborated when matter is put under an electron microscope, the observation reveals that 99% of what we conceive as solid is in fact hollow. Thus energy is all that exists. Energy be it light , sound, heat, electrical or any other form vibrates. Just as Energy is at the heart of all matter , it is the vibration that is an inseparable entity of all energy. So we may now modify the equation to
Vibration = mc^2 x constant
This hypothesis that everything around us including ourselves are vibrations. The most subtle form of a vibration is a thought. Each time we think, we create a vibration. Thus now, the equation can be transformed into its final form:
Thoughts = mc ^2 x constant
Thus we conclude that our entire universe has its origins in our thoughts.
Quantum physists now postulate that it is impossible for a universe to exist without mind entering into it. The mind is shaping the very thing that the mind is trying to perceive. In other words, the perception of the perceived is being distorted by the perception of the perceiver. A fact proved during quantum level experiments where the outcomes vary depending upon the observer.
The ancient hindu scriptures also proscribe to the theory. AUM in Hinduism (Ahem in Christianity, Amin in Islam) stands for the universal sound of vibration. The vibration gave rise to the entire universe.
“At first there was the word, and the word was Ahem” - Matthew
Where does this point us to? If our entire universe (and countless other universes) originated from a single vibration, where is the origin of that vibration? Who conceived that thought? What is the nature of the creator?
A simple exercise may help: Chant the word AUM repeatedly and rhythmically....
It would go something like this: AUM AUM AUM AUM........
Observe that between two AUM there is a pause! A moment of silence , a void ..... a nothingness....
Or we can say silence gave rise to AUM!
But even in nothing you need something to know that nothing exists, “ something which is perceivably non-existent but still conscious of itself ” A entity through which all of everything manifests , the cosmic creator..... the cosmic consciousness.... the true nature of everything!