Girish's Blog

Photo Credit: Dadabhagwan.org Inner Blissfulness If we think our work is important, the first thing we should do is work upon our own self, so that internally we are a stable being, no matter what the situation is externally. When we are running a large business or enterprise, it's not just about us. Often, there are another thousand people involved with us. So, how we handle a situation not only impacts our life, but another thousand lives. Once we grow, the challenges also naturally grow; there is no question about it. But if we want to get into a jockey's place where we want to handle the horse, if we want to handle a situation, no matter how large, the first thing we must do, is equip yourself. There is a way with which we can create a stable and blissful chemistry within our own selves, our ability to deal with all the variety of ups and downs in life can be greatly enhanced. How? With yoga and meditation. Yoga-meditation gives us this possibility that if we simply sit...

  Photo Credit: Pinterest Life is Uncertain Nothing in the outside world is certain, that's a fact. It’s uncertain and that’s what makes it challenging. Uncertainty means things are changing; in other words, there is no limbo. If you are walking fast, every step is new terrain. This new terrain is what you are calling ‘uncertainty’ right now. For those of us who are seeking opportunities, uncertainty is the best time. Those who have a vision will make it a possibility; those who don't, will look at it as a problem. But, because we are in a constant state of compulsive reaction in our mind, we are seeking certainty. Certainty is a state of limbo. If there is certainty there is status quo. Status quo in a business, political or social situation means nothing changes; nothing evolves. By seeking certainty, ultimately, we are pitching for stagnation. If things are stagnant, we will get bored. If things are happening rapidly, then we don't have the balance to h...

  Photo Credit: Minimalist Quotes Love and Lust The whole world is going through a unique kind of neurosis, which was not there in the past. This is simply because modern man has stopped using his body to a large extent. In the past, when we intensely involved ourselves in physical activity, a lot of our neurosis was worked out. Our nervous energy got spent. There are several people, especially young people, who have psychological problems, simply because they cannot expend their nervous energy due to lack of physical activity. In the past such people would just start swimming or playing some sport daily and then everything became okay. Because of enough activity, the energy was expended. Today, people have become physically inactive like never before. They could not afford to be so physically inactive earlier, as they had to do so many things physically, just to survive. They have become more neurotic than in the past. As a general phenomenon, there were neurotic people then a...

  Photo Credit: Pinterest Liberation – Ultimate Freedom - 2 Concluding post. Imagination is a renewed past. We are twisting the past into various shapes and get excited about it. Nothing completely new can ever happen in our imagination – it is permutations and combinations of the past – so many that every time, it looks new and exciting to us. When we were children, we made our own kaleidoscope with three pieces of mirror and bits of broken bangles in different colours. We can spend days looking at it. Every time, there is a new design and a new possibility, but it is the same old pieces of bangles, rearranging themselves in many ways to excite our childish mind. The same thing is happening with life – it’s a kaleidoscope. We are always building our own kaleidoscopes. This is okay for our entertainment, not for finding the ultimate nature of life. Non-existence means to become that which is neither this nor that. This is how far language can go. Since language is a product o...

  Photo Credit: Pinterest Liberation – Ultimate Freedom - 1 This post is in two parts. Swamiji has introduced us to the concept of moksha or liberation. Birth and death are two phases of life. There are various dimensions between birth and death – infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. A dimension has proportions, something that can be defined, described, grasped, and understood. What we are referring to as moksha is dimensionless – it cannot be defined, described, or grasped. “Will I attain moksha?” Never! Nobody will. When we cease to be any dimension – not physical, not metaphysical, not this, not that, nothing – when we become dimensionless, that’s moksha. Dimension means there is a boundary. Moksha means there is no boundary, no bondage. This is all negative terminology, but it is a very positive possibility. Moksha is non-existence. Shiva means non-existence – that which is not. Moksha means to become like that. It is wrong to even refer to Shiva as “h...

  Photo Credit: Salon.com Memory – a Doorway Human memory is a fabulous thing; it's because of this ability to remember we have science, we have technology, we have a civilization, we have information technology; it's all about memory, isn't it? But at the same time, it's human memory which is the source of all bondage. What we call as karma is just memory on different levels of life. Memory is like a doorway; a doorway can open but also it can close. In our life if doors are opening for us wherever we go, we see door as a very wonderful thing but if it's always slamming in our face, door becomes a horrible thing. Memory is just like this. Memory is what has given us the ability to be informed; it is because we are capable of making ourselves informed about various things, many beautiful things have happened in our lives. The very basis of civilization is memory. Today what goes as learning is simply memory. Memory transmitted from generation to generation; th...

  Photo Credit: Daily Quotes Bank Fear of Falling Sick Everybody wants to be healthy. At the same time, we must understand that once we assume a body, illness, old age, and death are natural processes of life. Taking good care of the body is definitely our business, but once we have a physical body, we know that illness may happen at any moment. However, if we are paranoid about ill health or death, we will not take good care of the body. The very anxiety of what may happen will destroy the body. If we become excessively concerned about illness or health, that itself becomes an illness. An illness is something that restricts our life. That is why we don't like it. But just the fear of illness also restricts our life. There are so many people whose fear of illness becomes very strong once they cross forty or forty-five years of age. When they were young, they didn't have this fear because they thought they were immortal! It is only as we grow older that the fact that we are ...

  Photo Credit: Gracious Quotes Creating an Exciting Future For the kind of possibilities human beings hold, life is a brief amount of time. Only for people who do not explore the full depth and dimension of who they are, for those who are miserable and depressed, life is long. This is because time is a relative experience. If we keep ourselves vibrant, exuberant, and joyful, life appears to be brief. There is no point in dwelling on yesterday, as long as we did our best. The important thing is that what we thought was the best we could do yesterday should not be good enough to us today. What we are doing today should be much better. That means we are growing. If we act to the best of our ability and intelligence, every day will be an explosion of possibilities. If we are driving fast, there is no time to look back. Only those who are living in a parked car keep looking in the rearview mirror, because they are not going anywhere. There is no point in doing postmortem about yest...

  Photo Credit: Twitter Clearing the Path Spiritual process means different things to different people. A lot of people think spiritual process means to always be loving, always be grinning, to always walk gently. Others think spirituality is some kind of a disability. Another common belief is that spirituality means trying to be good. Some people think spirituality means doing something wild – smoking pot, going crazy, being irresponsible. For others, being spiritual means trying to be joyful, peaceful, or ecstatic. Being spiritual does not mean any of that. Being spiritual means becoming in some way more of a spirit and less of a body. What it means is losing one’s body consciousness while enhancing one’s soul consciousness. There may be certain obstacles that do not allow us to experience this right now. We must know what our handicap is. It may be that we are so good that we have no sense about life around us. Or we are so crazy that we have no sense about life within and ...

  Photo Credit: Pinterest Giving Ourselves Volunteering is a process of giving ourselves. It’s an opportunity to give ourself. We can simply sit here, close our eyes and give ourself to the world. It is possible but that level of awareness is not there in most human beings. Unless there is activity, people do not know how to give themselves. They need action to give themselves to something. Normally, what little work we do, calculations are there, “How much should I do? Why should I do? What will I get out of this?” In these calculations, all the beauty of doing is gone and the very process of life has become ugly. Most of the things that we are doing in our life are things that we have chosen to do. In spite of that, we are doing simple activities with so much struggle because we are unwilling to give. Somewhere we have forgotten that we started this willingly. The whole process of Yoga is just to give ourselves. People may not know how to simply give themselves. People need s...

  Photo Credit: Maria Erving Reminder of our Mortality Right now, it takes a lifetime for people to understand that they are mortal. When we are young, we think we are immortal. As the body starts creaking a little bit, we start to realise that the earth is calling. This body is a loan from this planet. The very body that we are is just the food that we have eaten. The food that we ate is just the earth. So, we are just a piece of earth. The earth is calling us all the time but when we are old, we hear it very clearly. We need to celebrate and enjoy every moment of our life because life is ticking away; it does not wait for us for even a moment. Especially because we are mortal, it is extremely important that we make this into a joyful and fantastic process. If we were immortal, we could enjoy a hundred years each of depression, anxiety, madness and misery, and then on the 500th anniversary, we could become joyful. But it is not so; we are mortal and life is ticking away. There...

  Photo Credit: ArtofLiving.org Life & Death in One Breath The greatest calamity of the human mind is that it is against death because the moment we reject death, we also reject life. Every moment of living here, we can either refer to this process that we are going through as life, or we can refer to it as death. Death is not something that is going to happen to us. Death is not in the future. The moment we are born, one half of death has occurred. Our inhalation is life, our exhalation is death. When a child is born, the first thing the child does is one gasp of an inhalation. And if we look at our life, the last thing we will do is an exhalation. It is strange we celebrate the day we are born as birthdays instead of death days, because with each passing year we are approaching death. In fact, we live with each inhalation and die with each exhalation – if we do not inhale after the exhalation, it is the end of the story, chapter closed! Between life and death – life nee...

  Photo Credit: Yoga Netri Significance of Amavasya Amavasya means no moon day or new moon day. Whenever something or somebody becomes absent, through that absence, their presence always becomes more powerful. If we had a friend or a loved one who was with us, we never felt their presence so much. But the moment they disappear, we feel their presence so much – it is so powerful, isn’t it? Even on the emotional level, it is true. We do not really feel their presence when they are around. Only when they are gone, the vacuum that they have left behind has become more powerful than their presence itself. Similarly with the moon, her absence makes her more present than ever before. On any other day, even the Purnima, she is there, but on Amavasya, the presence is felt even more – that quality is even more. The earth broods on Amavasya; the life process is slowed down on the planet and it is a great opportunity because the integration of life happens much better on this day. When a c...

  Photo Credit: Amino Apps Fear of Snakes For some, the sight of a snake strikes intense fear within. For others, snake symbols are interwoven with spiritual traditions. We have all seen snakes in our ashrams. A fork stick is always kept handy to catch the snakes and move them to the forests nearby. Of the almost 4000 species of snakes in earth only 15% are poisonous. The chances of us encountering a truly poisonous snake during our lifetime is miniscule. More people die in car accidents than of snake bites – but we still get into cars, drive them, don’t we? So, our fear of snakes is unreasonable. Our knowledge about snakes and fear of snakes are inversely proportional. The more we know about them, the less we fear them. The less we know about them, the more we fear them. This is the only creature in the world where even if it is in the wild, if we keep ourselves in a certain way, we can just take it in our hand – simply like that. It will come into our hand without resistanc...

  Photo Credit: Spiritual Quotes Fear of Failure For a person who sees this life as a stepping stone for a larger purpose, for him there is no failure. Life is full of possibilities and it is important to recognise one’s own possibility very early in life. For those who are looking at the simple events of this life itself as the goal of life, for them there is failure and success. If we are just seeing this life as a stepping stone for a larger possibility, if we have a good deal, we use that for our well-being; if we have a bad deal, we use that for our well-being. When the economy is on the boom everybody gets carried, isn't it? When there is a meltdown, it takes something else to be successful. So, when the economy was booming, we could have brought a certain dispassion towards the money that flowed in. Now the economy is down, the taps are all closed up. It's time to come, meditate, walk in the mountains; there is lots of time. When there was money, it took away our tim...

  Photo Credit: Pinterest Living a Better Life Early in our career as we progress, we always get the thought about how to live a better life. At that point in time, unless we are already evolved spiritually, we always think about living a better material life. I have seen family members staring at a well-stocked wardrobe trying to make a choice on what to wear while going out. Even after having such a wide choice there is stress on what to wear – why not just have seven pairs of clothes – one for each day of the week. Then there would be no stress. If we can gracefully walk through the material world, it is fine. But if we are going to carry the material world on our head, possessing everything that we touch, we are not going to live better. There is substantial scientific evidence for this. In the evolutionary process itself, only those creatures flourished that learned how to co-operate and think of each other’s wellbeing. Those which only thought, “I must survive at any ...

  Photo Credit: LinkedIn Cleanliness – it’s Significance The question whether cleanliness in the house and its environment has any impact on spiritual development keeps arising in people’s minds. When we were growing up our parents would always tell us to wash our hands, feet and face when we came home from play or school. We were taught to wash our hands before every meal. Were these societal requirements or is there a deeper significance which has been lost in the passage of time? Shaucha , or cleanliness, is an important aspect of one’s spiritual development. Cleanliness is not just about the body. It is also about our surroundings. Everything that we perceive through our sense organs can either create filth or wellbeing within ourselves. Whatever we perceive, if it is pleasant upon our senses, we experience it one way. If it is unpleasant upon our senses, that becomes filth in our experience. If our surroundings are not clean, or in other words, if our surroundings are no...