Coupling Practical Wisdom with Spiritual Advancement – A Comprehensive Harmony

Paying attention to wise instructions with regard to practical matters is part of good living. In the area of spirituality, however, freeing oneself of all Dos and Don’ts is necessary as it prevents the ego from getting a chance to have its ways. 

In a truly spiritual life importance is given as much to mundane matters as it is to the vaster consciousness.  Understanding the consciousness beyond the conventional neurology cannot come through following a set of instructions.  It needs patient application in the form of intuitive awareness of what lies beyond the apparent.  So, in the field of spiritual advancement, Dos and Don’ts, acquisition of verbal knowledge and so on cannot go very far.  However, those can help us lead our daily life with practical wisdom.       

Here we look into five items that can be instrumental in our keeping cool and going about our life with confidence and equanimity.  Once we begin to show interest in leading a vibrant life, the five items are likely to manifest themselves in our psychology without our effort. 

The Five Wise Items

Delegate and Relegate.

Sincere application to practical matters on hand, setting apart (‘delegate’) proper attention and time to them, followed by unconcern (‘relegate’) is what is implied in this. The important thing here is the ‘relegating’ part which can relieve the mind of unnecessary burden through the habit of thought.

Reflect and Reject.

Items that emotionally disturb the mind deserve this kind of treatment.  It involves calm reflection and understanding what requires to be done practically, followed by rejection in the sense of not letting the thought vortices demand our attention with regard the issue.  Again, this prevents the mind from feeding on the item repeatedly as a matter of habitual neurology.

Accept and Act.

It is good to accept people and things as they are and adapt oneself to them.  This    prevents rancor building up in us and helps us develop rapport with life, no matter what it chooses to bring. Soon this accepting and adapting oneself to life becomes a source of peace.  Acceptance is to be followed by action to see how matters can be improved, where necessary.  A positive, constructive and optimistic approach is always healthy.

Weave it and Leave it.

Well-meaning aspirations - molded, fostered and kept clean (not sullied by thought) - set up a healthy current in one’s life. Such aspirations will be fulfilled on their own chronological time.  The usual problem is the psychological time that corrupts the mind.  If we understand what it means to wait without knowing when, it will be wonderful.  In fact, there is then no waiting in the conventional sense of the word.  This takes away the poison of psychological time.  Once the aspirations are lovingly woven in a wholesome way in the interest of oneself and others, it is good to drop them into the bottomless abyss.  They will sprout at the right time!  

Unconditionally Unload, Unfold and so Explode!                 Understanding this item requires self-awareness to the point of sensing how the habitual thought process accumulates poisonous garbage. Attention to this matter leads to unloading of all such garbage that would otherwise set up harmful offshoots in due course. Because of this unloading and the consequent clearing, Divine Essence unfolds from one’s deeper region submerging one in a state of progressive calmness. It furthers itself, making our consciousness expand limitlessly. That is the explosion. So, it is a matter of implosion followed by explosion.  In that respect, it resembles a stupendous astronomical phenomenon, the Supernova!

Related matters are covered in the website http://spirituality.yolasite.com

Avenues of Reflection for Inner Peace and Harmony

Understanding oneself is the secret behind stable inner harmony.   It implies an awareness which helps us gain clarity of the way the conditioned mind functions.  Here are some avenues for reflection that can lead us to that understanding.

People who are busy hoping to gain some predetermined results using religious approaches and meditative techniques get embroiled in chasing ego-satisfying outcomes and so are not interested in understanding themselves.  This is like trying to find a solution without knowing what the actual problem is.  The fundamental problem is the mind itself and not the problem it projects!  Unfortunately, this seems to escape the notice of the vast majority of people. If you are reading an article of this kind with some attention, then you are not one among them.  What fallows would be of interest to you.

The quiet self-awareness has no self-interest. That is, it is not generated by the ego.  It takes place when the interest in understanding oneself is detected as the fundamental movement towards bringing in stable harmony.  At the initial stages of this inwardly turned attention, reflection on some of the habitual ways of the mind is helpful.  Here we see three of those ways.  These pointers are expected to function as catalysts, triggering the curiosity of the reader. 

The First Pointer:  This is related to the way the ego functions. It operates through pockets of energy, each pocket representing an emotional attachment to people, things or ideas.  Symbolically, they are like knots in the brain.  These knots get energized every time our thought operates through them.  That is akin to winding a spring.  The more it is wound, the more violently it lashes out when released.  The knots related to one’s relatives, religion and nationality are usually the most- wound ones.  Watching a knot’s process in action generates the necessary awareness on how we destroy ourselves by falling a prey to the ‘knotty’ behavior! On such self-observation and understanding, the intensity of the knots comes down and the knots themselves begin to dissolve.  One feels a kind of inner relief from the self-generated tension.

The Second Pointer:  It stems from the adage “One believes what one wants to believe”.  This is a sure way by which people deceive themselves.  Most of us feel that the psychological concepts we are holding on to are based on truth while they are no more than ego-satisfying tenets necessary for the ego’s self-assurance.  The more we probe into this adage the more we see the need to free ourselves from the tricky self-deception the ego brings on.

The Third pointer:  During our daily life, it is easy to see how the mind is constantly chattering.  It is a kind of energy wastage. Regarding these habitual thoughts, Eckhart Tolle says that most of them are unnecessary and are, in fact, quite harmful.  This is an important issue whose poisonous nature can be brought to light by self-awareness.

The inwardly directed awareness cannot be brought into action through any method or technique because they are all rooted in the past while awareness is a matter of pure action in the ‘Now’.

There are many pointers of the kind indicated above and reflections on them can help us move into the calm source deep within us.

In Conclusion:  People who feel drawn to these avenues of reflection will soon see their center of attention moving from the habitual mind to pure consciousness.  They will free themselves psychologically from belonging to any group because they see that group-psychology is different from mob-psychology only in degree, not in kind.  Their daily life will be guided by the purity of aloneness and not by any clannishness or group-fanaticism.  Interested readers may visit the website http://spirituality.yolasite.com