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

The Intrinsic Impropriety Behind Opinion Mongering – Are We Aware of This?

Many quarrels arise on account of insisting on one’s opinion being accepted or on demanding the approval thereof.  It cannot be solved by controlling oneself but only by understanding the whole gamut of its genesis and expression.

It is common experience that most of us, if not all, treat our own opinion as the final judgment on an issue and be ready to take up the cudgels if it is opposed. Many relationships are damaged by this neurological habit and have even engendered fist-fights between individuals when carried too far. There was an occasion, way back in the sixties, when one of the writer's friends was sitting in an evening club in Chennai (India), playing carom-board. Others were engaged in card games, chess etc. Two people were conversing about cricket, analyzing the England team in particular. One of them was in favor of Colin Cowdrey and the other opined that Ken Barrington was the better batsman of the two.  At the beginning, the debate was innocent enough but soon it gathered momentum along the wrong lines. It became hot and they began to exchange blows!  The onlookers had to abandon their games and rush to separate the two opinion mongers. One of the Good Samaritans passionately asked, "While Barrington and Cowdrey themselves are friends, why are you doing this?"!

Now, we all sense similar trends in our opinion mongering but, perhaps, are wise enough to veer away from the hot avenues at some point. If we look into the matter in order to get to the bottom of this black business, we begin to wonder how this monster of a habit arises and keeps us under its thumb. Self-awareness sets in and the exploration into ourselves begins to tell us the whole story behind the neurological process underlying opinion mongering. The thought-running habit is primarily responsible for sustaining the 'I', the image about oneself. From our young days, we groom this habit and the 'I' gets tougher and tougher as the years pass by. The 'I' is built around one's conclusions which give a sort of identification to it. This includes the emotional attachment to those conclusions too. By the time we reach 25 or so years of age, this 'I' strongly influences our neurology and the monster becomes uncontrollable. Because we are interested in understanding this process, the awareness takes us to the bottom of this issue and the monster begins to shake in its foundation! As it is no longer supported by the unawareness that gives it its life, the monster has no alternative but to dissolve. Watching it dissolve can be fun.

What is purported above can be considered a matter of oversimplification. Yes, it is true that the matter is not so easy. Nevertheless, with patience and sustained interest in that direction, the hard ice begins to melt. When we see this happening, we sense the power of self-awareness and how it can dissolve centuries-old neurological habits.

The deeper the self-awareness flows into us, the more peaceful we begin to feel; the calmer we are in our interactions and opinion mongering no longer figures in them. For purely practical purposes, however, exchanging opinions has a rightful place but it will not involve the ego, especially if we are alert about how the monster can take charge and vitiate the harmony. We would no longer indulge in converting others to our view points, religious or otherwise. All these transformations pave the way to living a naturally spiritual life; we would be deeply passive inside but be very active in our practical life.

By the way, we are reminded here of the Shakespearean lines:  "Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice; Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment." Though this advice can be considered to belong to the realm of Dos and Don’ts, understanding the essence of those words is what brings about the transformation and not the conformity to a bunch of instructions.

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

Mental Serenity through Athma Vichara – The Soul Search

Life on this planet is fraught with many difficulties.  Amidst all that turbulence, bringing about mental serenity is not easy.  People take recourse to religious and meditative approaches to overcome the difficulties and find peace. These things can surely help but cannot go very far.

The reason why religious practices can help only to a limited extent is that, even though the person is well meaning, his ego takes over at some point to use the religion to the ego's own end and so the causes for mental disturbance are sustained.  That is how a person gets very disturbed, even after many years of practicing the religion, when his or her religion is criticized.  If the ego is not involved, there can be no disturbance.  As long as the ego is in charge, there can be no stability to the mental serenity brought about by the practices.  Self-deception in the form of chasing a shadow becomes inevitable.

So, the question is: Can anything help at all towards bringing about inner serenity without overtly or covertly feeding the ego in the process?  This is an interesting challenge for those who understand the limitations of conventional  religious and meditative practices.  So, they move into an investigative process that can be called Athma Vichara or Soul Search.  Such an approach begins an inward journey of understanding how the mind brings about its own trap – the prison it builds around itself that keeps the ego intact.  Obviously, understanding the prison is necessary before a movement towards freedom can take place.  

 As of now, only a small percentage of human beings recognizes this matter of inner evolution as a precursor to stable mental peace.  Even though of a small minority, those human beings are already aiding the process of planetary transformation towards collective harmony and wholesome life on this planet.  If you feel drawn to this matter, you will also be able, in your own unique way, to bring about mental serenity for you and your family.  In the process, you will augment the planetary transformation.  You may contact me at gopal.tc@gmail.com for mutual discussions.  Please visit the site http://spirituality.yolasite.com for additional information.

The Test on Spiritual Transformation

Many people who have sworn allegiance to some religious system talk of religion and spirituality as though they are the same thing.  It would be a pity if it were to be so because, while religions are sectarian in practice, true spirituality is universal.  It cannot be the monopoly of any group nor can it have anything to do with events in history because it is beyond time.  Unfortunately, the religious people want to wrap up spirituality into their fold not knowing that sectarian religious practices are essentially a matter of conditioned response while spirituality is beyond all that.  It is rather obvious that sectarian religions and spirituality are mutually exclusive.

Sectarian approaches are inevitably tied up with beliefs and system-oriented practices.  Except in the cases of philosophically oriented religions, the system expects rigid conformity and no questioning is allowed.  If somebody were to point out any inconsistency in the system, he or she will be ostracized from that community.  Emotional attachment to the system is expected. For that very reason, creating enemies of the other groups becomes inevitable.  Can all these be ever part of a true spirituality which can move us towards the Truth? 

The spiritually oriented person understands the corruption that thought plays in one's attempt to find shelter in a system which promises grandiose things through conformity.  He or she moves away from looking for a psychologically comforting system and applies oneself to understanding the hidden harmony behind the apparent chaos.  That is what moves them towards sensing Truth, Divinity or what one may call the Ultimate.  Beliefs and disbelief do not attract them because they see the meaning behind the adage "One believes what one wants to believe."           

Sectarian religious practices do not bring about any transformation in the psychology of the adherents.  Practicing the religion for 30 or 40 years only increases their dependence on and expectation from God, so the 'I' remains intact.  If their religion is criticized, they would feel hurt and may even react violently to the criticism, indicating that the practice has only served to intensify their ego.  If such practices are truly spiritual, the opposite would be the case.  These are elementary facts, but millions upon millions of people do not want to acknowledge those facts, because they fall a prey to the two essential demands of the ego: satisfaction and security.  The sectarian religious practices provide them.  The adherents would rather be with satisfying illusions than question their own conditioned response and the harm it does to themselves and humanity.             

Inner freedom is possible only for those who are willing to move away from dogmatic religious practices and the egoism they support.  Then, there is the possibility of imbibing pure self-awareness untouched by man-made influences.  There lies the greatness of the pristine spirituality and its transformation.  You may visit the website http://spirituality.yolasite.com

Mental Peace – Through understanding the wider consciousness.

It is interesting to note the way in which we cognize things and come up with feelings and emotion with respect to various items in the world. Understanding these with regard to a wider field of awareness leads to confidence and peace.

The sequence in the wider field seems to be as follows:  There is the expansive consciousness that may be called the Universal Consciousness.  When it functions through the brain (which is the physical organism), it issues out the mind as a stifled outlet of the Consciousness.  So, we can write:

   Universal Consciousness  ->  Brain  ->  Mind

This indicates that the perception by the Mind is always influenced by the Brain as a repository of memories and as an interpreting medium through the accumulated knowledge.  The Brain also carries the genetic conditioning apart from the conditioning by circumstances in which the human being finds himself or herself.  This causes the mind’s cognition and interpretation to be a matter of conditioned output and so it leads to improper understanding of what there really is.  One of  the inevitable outcomes of this warped awareness is the rising of the ego which is essentially a product of thought. 

 Thus, if we can reverse the above process, we begin to get a glimpse of the unspoiled Consciousness as evidenced by the following two ravishing experiences that human beings have gone through over the years:

1.            OBE  (Out of Body Experience)

2.            NDE  (Near Death Experience)

The above two have also demonstrated the significant fact that Consciousness can function without the brain being involved.

Once we explore the deeper aspects of Consciousness, Brain and Mind, we move into the esoteric aspects of life.  That lays the right foundation for wholesome and peaceful living.  This field of awareness forms the theme of the websitehttp://spirituality.yolasite.com