Girish's Blog

  Photo Credit: Pinterest Silence The Divine dwells within our space of stillness.  Silence contains all of the answers to our search for Truth, because in the presence of silence all questions, as well as the questioner, disappear. The Truth is already within ourselves, it is already ours and has always been ours.   It lies within us, waiting to be discovered, we simply need to stop both chasing the truth or running away from it. Silence is the contemplation of our inner Truth. When we interrupt the flow of our thoughts and break free from our inner noise,  we enter our sacred inner space of silence . We begin by visiting our inner temple whenever we feel the desire to be there until it becomes our natural dwelling place. Silence is beautiful only if it is rooted in awareness; if it is not rooted in awareness, then it is utterly empty. With awareness silence has a depth, a plenitude, a fulfillment, a contentment, an overflowing joy. With awareness silence bloo...

  Photo Credit: Write Spirit The World is a Stage Shakespeare in his play ‘As You Like It’ had said – ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’. If you have gone through the play, you will know that Shakespeare is talking about the seven roles a person plays from infancy to old age, defining each role in poetic verse in his inimitable style. If you look closely at what Shakespeare is trying to say you will understand that man shifts through various roles and wears different masks from childhood to old age. Actors too play different roles during the course of their career and some of them go so deep into the role that they actually become the person whose role they are playing. Thus, for actors’ spirituality comes easily. Role play is something they keep doing all the time and then they have to come home to be themselves. In one’s childhood one passes through a stage of being a child, but you were not identified with it. If you were actually the child...

  Photo Credit: DP Sayings Be Mindful of the Mind Our mind, our intellect is very tricky – when the mind is caught up in desires, the direction emanating from the heart is not reliable because it could be just to fulfill our desires! It is extremely tough to differentiate between what is coming from the heart or from the mind, which is hell-bent in fulfilling the body’s desires and therefore is always finding excuses. The only way for one to distinguish is to watch what it is saying – is it clear-cut? Or is it dependent on some desire that one is trying to fulfill. One needs to watch this in complete awareness (takes time to learn) and one may need the help of a spiritual Master to find out whether the thought coming from within you is pure inspiration from the heart, or it is laced with some hidden subconscious selfish desire. Many times, we are unable to discriminate when we think we are repeatedly called to do something which may not be always right. In such situations we ne...

  Photo Credit: Hoopoequotes Right Conduct In a global world, we are in search of universal values—values based on a contemporary understanding that unifies us as human beings beyond the divisions of religions, nations, and race. When it is said, ‘right conduct’, it means right relationship with others. You need not be false. When you can be true without hurting anybody, be true. But if you feel that your truth is going to hurt many and is unnecessary, it can be avoided, then avoid it, because it is not only going to hurt others, it will create patterns of cause, and those causes will return as effects on you, they will become your karmas. Then you will get entangled, and the more entangled you are the more you will have to behave in wrong ways. Just stop. Just see the situation. If you can be true without hurting anybody, be true. To me, love is greater than truth. Be loving. And if you feel that your truth will be hurtful and violent, it is better to lie than to be true. Wa...

  Photo Credit: Quotefancy||Sri Chinmoy Become a Useful Instrument For us to become useful instruments for whatever purpose we need to be healthy. Our health defines the way our body can be used for whatever purpose we choose for it. If we want to be sports-persons we need to train our body and also maintain a diet which makes our body fit for whatever sport we are training for. Our body is a very complex machine and like any machine it needs to be maintained. All of us always try to look good, beautiful, handsome – these are all external appearances. To do this a lot of facilities are available – apart from the gym, we have beauty salons where all kinds of treatments are given to make us look good. While looking good is important, feeling good is far more important. One can feel good only if we are at peace within ourselves. This inner peace comes through meditation under the guidance of a realised Master. Yoga and meditation are the tools that take us towards inner peace wh...

  Photo Credit: Pinterest Real Love Love is intrinsic to humanity – it is actually human nature! We live in society and the concept of love in society is a bit different – it is defined by relationships – mother/father-children, husband-wife, brother-sister, teacher-student and so on. This love is based on emotion and attachment to the other person. And if you truly introspect, you will find that this attachment itself becomes the noose around your neck. The attachment leads to extreme emotions - jealousy, anger, hatred, and so on – all this from tainted love. Fear dominates attachment giving rise to ‘what if?’ questions! The mind is so powerful and imagination such a movie maker that it never lets you rest in peace. One needs to get beyond love which is in a binary relationship with attachment. Love within has to become universal without any attachment. Once love starts flowing through your very being it truly implies that you have learnt to love your ‘self’ – this comes fro...

Photo Credit: Pinterest   Spirituality and Free Will Sri Ramana Maharshi accepted the validity of the laws of Karma but said that they were only applicable as long as a person imagined that he was separate from the Self. At this level (the level of the agyani or the ignorant) individuals will pass through a series of pre-ordained activities and experiences, all of which are the consequences of previous acts and thoughts. Every act and experience in a person’s life is determined at birth and that the only freedom one has is to realise that there is no one acting and no one experiencing. However, once one realises the Self there is no one left to experience the consequences of actions and so the whole structure of Karmic laws then becomes redundant. If the agent, upon whom the Karma depends, namely the ego, which subsists between the body and the Self, merges in its source and loses its form, how can the Karma, which depends upon it, survive? When there is no ‘I’ there ...

  Photo Credit: Sivana East Marriage and Spirituality We had not seen so many marriages breaking up in India in the past as compared to today. Most marriages are happening out of companionship and lust or potential future wealth creation rather than pure love. Divorces take place for the flimsiest of reasons and most of them end up as contested divorces with a lot of bad blood between the couple and their families. The most important thing is that we have stopped marriages resulting from pure love, that marriages are happening without love. A marriage devoid of love does not create a spiritual bond – a bond which is only possible with the presence of love. The harmony, the rapport, the music that is required to give birth to a great soul is not created between the man and the woman. The love between them is merely cosmetic and as a consequence there is no meeting of souls in their love, none of the movement that brings two beings together into oneness. The disharmony in the w...

  Photo Credit: Pinterest Life should be Challenging There is a poem by Robert Frost ‘The Road Not Taken’, which ends, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.” Always choose the new, the less travelled road, the unknown path and that is life’s real challenge. Everyone follows the easier path when life arrives at a fork – the easy and the difficult, most choose the easy, the tough is chosen by a very few people. Life grows only by choosing challenges, by walking into the approaching storms, by taking risks most would run away from. To take up meditation and become a sanyasi one needs courage. In the earlier days people expected the sanyasi to become a recluse and renounce the world. In those days one went into a monastery, lived there – undisturbed, undistracted by the world. Meditation became one’s whole life with no other distractions – life became monotonous! The words monastery and monotony come from ...

Photo Credit: The Mindful Word Understanding ‘God’ The greatest misunderstanding is that God is a person, a supra-natural being, and it has prevailed for such a long time that it has become more or less a fact in the minds of people. When a lie is repeated continuously over centuries it is bound to appear as if it is a truth. The Sanatan Dharma does not subscribe to this concept, according to the sanatan dharma God is omniscient, omnipresent and exists in every being. God is a presence, not a person. Hence all worshipping is meaningless. Prayerfulness is needed, not prayer. There is nobody to pray to; there is no possibility of any dialogue between you and God. Dialogue is possible only between two persons, and God is not a person but a presence – like beauty, like joy. God simply means godliness. It is because of this fact that Buddha denied the existence of God. He wanted to emphasise that God is a quality, an experience – like love. You cannot talk to love; you can live it. Yo...

  Photo Credit: Famous Quotes & Sayings Accessing Bliss from the Soul In the course of the process of our spiritual evolution we acquire the ability of going within and gaining access to the Bliss from our soul. Every one of us is at different stages of spiritual evolution. The quality and quantity as well as the duration of the experience of the Bliss are directly proportional to the stage of our spiritual evolution. When we look in the mirror every morning, we are so used to seeing the image of ourselves. But have you ever wondered what you would look like if you could see an image of your soul? We can have the most brilliant of lights within us, that is the soul, but even the brightest of lights if covered with thick blankets would be hidden from view. This darkness that surrounds our soul is the ‘spiritual ignorance’ of our true state that is Bliss. This spiritual ignorance refers to our inability to see beyond our five senses, mind and intellect and pe...

  Photo Credit: Sivana East Human Beings – A Spiritual Perspective Modern science has gone in some depth into understanding the physical body. Yet its understanding of the other aspects of human existence is still very limited.  The human being is made up of the following bodies according to spirituality – the gross body, the vital body, the mental body, the intellect or causal body, the subtle ego or supra-causal body and the soul or God principle in every human being – the Atma. The gross boy or the physical body is best known to us. It comprises of the skeletal framework, muscles, tissues, organs, blood, 5 sense organs, etc. The vital energy body or the prana-deha provides the vital, life sustaining energy for all the functions of the physical as well as the mental body. There are five types of vital energies or  praana : Prāna:  Energy for the activity of inhalation; Udāna:  Energy for the activity of exhalation and speech; Samāna:  Energy for th...

  Photo Credit: Quora Kundalini or Latent Serpent Energy The universe is sustained by God’s mere presence. According to the Path of  Kundalini  awakening, God’s energy that is used in the running (i.e., creation, sustenance and destruction) of the universe is Divine consciousness ( Chaitanya ). With respect to a person, this Divine consciousness is known as  chētanā  and it is that part of God’s energy required for the functioning of a human being. This  c hetana  is of two types and, depending on its state of activity, it takes on two different names. Active  c hetana  – also known as Vital energy ( Prāṇa – shakti ). The Vital energy sustains and gives energy to the gross body, mind, intellect and subtle-ego. It is distributed through subtle energy channels known as  nāḍīs . These energy channels are prevalent throughout the body and supply energy to the cells, nerves, arteries, lymph etc. Non-active  c hetana ...

  Photo Credit: Solancha Chanting for Health Problems that have their root cause in the spiritual dimension can best be overcome by spiritual practice and other spiritual healing methods. In the current era, the recommended form of basic spiritual practice is the chanting of the Name of God according to the religion of one’s birth. Chanting brings about physical, psychological and spiritual well-being. Understanding the root cause of a disease, the spiritual reasons behind it and the percentage of the spiritual cause is all part of the spiritual or subtle-dimension which is difficult to understand. In addition, the availability of a person who understands the subtle-dimension and can tell us the remedy for it is not always possible. Therefore, one is not always able to understand exactly which organ is affected, what spiritual remedies (chant,  mudrā  and  nyās ) can be done to make it stronger in order to reduce the disease to a considerable extent. Patients alo...

  Photo Credit: Pinterest Reality of Life Spiritual research has shown that worldwide, the average human being is happy only 30% of the time, while 40% of the time he or she is unhappy. The remaining 30% of the time, a person is in a neutral state where he or she does not experience happiness or unhappiness. For example, when a person is walking on the road or doing some mundane task and, not thinking happy or unhappy thoughts. One of the contributing factors to this dilemma of more unhappiness in our lives is our educational system. The system is set up to teach students a vast array of subjects, but it does not teach students the subject of lasting happiness in its curriculum. We are not formally taught how to be happy irrespective of the situation we may face in life. You could have a suave gentleman with an impressive business card who feels depressed and suicidal should he face some kind of financial loss. You could have a woman who is ...