Friday, March 19, 2010

Sadness is not natural to man

What is attachment? It is the body, consciousness. So, misery occurs due to attachment to the body. But, one can be happy physically as well as spiritually if one's senses are under one's control. In fact, sadness is not natural to man. Therefore, methods have to be found out to remove sadness, which is artificial.

Misery can be removed only by prayer and by following the spiritual path. If idle horses are overfed, they will be still lazier. Similarly, if you act according to the whims and fancies of your senses, your senses will get strengthened day by day and ultimately you will cease to be a human being.

-Sai Baba


Greed and eating too much result in an out of balance world

Everyone knows that eating too much is bad for their health. But what they should also realize is that when people eat more than they need they habitually take what was meant for others; and if lots of people do this, with some eating too much and others not enough, the result will be a world out of balance.

The root cause of all misunderstanding and confrontation is greed and the lust for possession, the lack of moderation of those who accumulate wealth (food, land, objects) that others are then deprived of.

Yes, a great moral can be drawn from the simple act of eating. The need people have to take and absorb more than they should leads them to enslave others, even to suppress them at the least sign of resistance or opposition. So this need to hoard everything for oneself should be controlled, moderated and dealt with as soon as possible. If it is not watched, it can reach such gigantic proportions in all areas of existence, it will become the source of the greatest injustice and ensuing unhappiness.

Each day, several times a day, you must use meal times as opportunities to reflect on this problem.

-Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov



Truth is one, not two - When you are dual-minded, you cannot experience this happiness

Today people have no regard for truth. Many people do not really mean what they speak. They have something in their mind but say just the opposite. They manipulate their words according to the person and situation. Truth is that which does not change with time. Truth is changeless in past, present and future. Truth is one, not two.

The Upanishads (ancient Indian scriptures) extol the principle of truth in many ways. Truth cannot be described in words. Bliss is its form. When you close your eyes and start contemplating on truth, you will experience inexpressible bliss. Unknowingly, you start smiling. Where has this smile come from? It has come from your feelings of bliss. And what is the source of bliss? The source of bliss is God.

The happiness you get by your union with God is eternal. Happiness is union with God. When you are dual-minded, you cannot experience this happiness.


-Sai Baba
Divine Discourse, October 14, 2002.


"Thy Will will be done"

It is the horrible body-idea that breeds all the selfishness in the world. Just this one delusion that we are wholly the body we own and that we must by all possible means try our very best to preserve and please it. If you know that you are positively other than your body, you have then none to fight with or struggle against; you are dead to all ideals of selfishness.

So the Bhakta declares that we have to hold ourselves as if we are altogether dead to all the things of the world; and that is indeed self-surrender. Let things come as they may. This is the meaning of "Thy Will will be done"; not going about fighting and struggling and thinking all the while that God wills all our own weaknesses and worldly ambitions.

-Swami Vivekananda


The danger of focusing on the negative side

As most events and situations have both a positive and negative aspect, there is a danger of focusing all our attention on the negative side. Obviously, we should not delude ourselves and see only what is good, but neither should we dwell on what is bad, for then we no longer even see the good.

You're thinking, 'Oh, we already know all that.' So, put it into practice then, if you know it! Watch yourself, and you will discover how often you forget what you know, giving way to unhappiness and pessimism. And then, not only do you fail to reason correctly, you also prevent your soul from opening out and taking flight.

This is how people destroy themselves spiritually, even physically. Yes, why do we say colloquially, when someone is anxious and dissatisfied, that worry is 'eating them up' or 'gnawing away at them'?

-Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov


Your business is to keep quiet

Do not run away from worldly activities, only always keep in the "I am SELF," stay as the screen on which all the projected activities take place.
In all activities simply keep quiet and know "I am Home."
Your business is to keep quiet.

- Papaji



Sunday, March 14, 2010

All religions are but facets of the one Truth

Sanathana Dharma is the only religion that declares that there is no religion that can be labeled "one and only". It says that all religions are but facets of the one Truth, that all names are names of one God, that all forms are but His forms. No religion can claim to represent fully the universal eternal Truth. This is the teaching of Sanathana Dharma.

Therefore, if any one finds fault with another's faith, he is casting a slur on his own faith. If any one defames another's religion, he only reveals his ignorance of the nature of religion and the glory of God.

-Sai Baba


Building good images

The first image that you are always going to dwell upon and build within you is: There is no limit to my success. If this image increases, the subconscious trash that says, "I will always fail," comes out and burns away. Opposites draw each other and whichever opposite is stronger, that is the dominating force within you. That is one of the mental laws. Opposites draw each other. Whichever opposite is stronger, it controls the other and eventually eats it and annihilates it.

There is no limit to my beauty, to my power, to my service. You are going to build this program. When you program yourself like that, it is impossible for you to fail because this mental programming has special powers.

A mental program is a magnetic disk, which draws from Space corresponding phrases, formulations, or programming. You become stronger and stronger and more successful because it is bringing more and more of those thoughtforms, of those thought energies that are related to your success, your beauty, and your victory.

Such a positive attitude has foundation because you are essentially a divine Spark in which all potentials are in existence. All that you need is to be aware of it and gradually release the giant sleeping within you. It must be gradual because your personality vehicles need time to grow, to transform, and to adjust themselves to the glory awakening within you….

I will live a long, healthy, and happy life. In this category we have millions of self-defeating thoughts all the time. You become a little fat and you say, "I am dying." You lose twenty pounds and you say, "Ah ha, I am going to the other world."

What are you going to do? You are always going to think in optimistic ways. If you have a little pain on your nose, you think cancer is developing. Well, remember that you are putting that in the diskette. Always you are going to find a way not to admit that you are going to die, that you are going to be sick, that you are going to be in trouble because when your computer is programmed by the fear of dying prematurely, it is going to come. That is why they say, "Whatever you fear, it comes to your life." You have already programmed it. That is why it comes.

I can find the keys of the treasury of wisdom. You are going to have faith in yourself and build an image that if the Teacher dies, if the books are taken away from you, if the lessons are taken away from you, you can still find the treasury of wisdom because the treasury of wisdom is God and that One is within you. You always have access to that treasury, but too often people become hopeless, discouraged, and they no longer search for the wisdom because the one who was feeding them disappeared or refused to continue.

All nature loves me, respects me, and needs me is the next one. Immediately you get a little down or depressed, you say, "Nobody loves me. Everybody hates me." Of course everybody is going to hate you because you are evoking that kind of reaction. On the contrary, you are going to develop the image that everyone is loving you.

No slander, no treason will discourage me from my image, but I will learn great lessons from it and even be able to improve my nature. Any slander, any treason is an effort by other people to build within you a nasty program to destroy yourself.
What is gossip? What is slander? It is an image they are building to project into you and make you use it on yourself. Once you start believing what they are saying or thinking or imagining, you are already caught in their programming. Every morning you are going to say that these things are not going to affect you, and in the meantime you are going to be sensitive to what they are saying if there is a little truth in it. You can say, "Well, I know I made a few mistakes but that is nothing. I am going to correct myself." But you are not going to accept wholesale what they are saying because what they are saying is not the pure truth. There are malicious feelings, hatred, and destruction in the image that they send to you.

I am formed by the image of the Almighty Creative Force so my possibilities are unlimited. You can notice that all these things you are programming are really true. They are not plaster. They are not artificial. They are true because, essentially, you are a Spark of the Almighty Spirit. Everything that that Great One created and all that creative power is within you, so you are not hypnotizing yourself. You are not even doing self-suggestion.
You are really opening your mind to the Reality that is within you. That is the difference you must see.

You can try to separate your daily image from the Eternal as follows. When you notice that you are caught in transient activities, forced by your glamors and illusions, stop a moment and remember your Eternal Image and try to act as if you were the Eternal Image.

Really, I never have failed, but I have learned lessons. People sit and start crying, "I failed, it is finished, I failed." You have never failed; you have learned a big lesson. But can you stand in that programming? It is so serious. You are defeated, people really crushed you, and you are thrown into the prison. Your whole reputation and fame have gone and you say, "That is all. They defeated me." Can you stand there and say, "It was really a nice comedy. I learned so many things that I could not have learned in ten million years." Maybe that is true.

Everyday in building your new images you automatically, naturally destroy all negative, poor, miserable, and ugly images from your mind. By always dwelling in your positive images, you slowly destroy the images that you built in the past. If you do not like all your physical, emotional, and mental beingness, still you built them and it means that now you are going to build a different image.

Actually one of the great duties and responsibilities of the leader is to teach people how to build positive images for themselves. You can give them outlines but not details. If you give details to them, you may trap them in their own vanity and ego. They must build the image, but you will inspire them with the outlines.

Positive images are not built by hallucination, imagination, or by repeating words. How are they built? Your success image is built not because you imagine success, not because you hallucinate success, not because you read about success. Here is the secret: Success images are built by remembering over your whole life the smallest successes you have had and bringing them into focus. And remembering that God within is the source of success.

It is good to go back and find your successful experiences, but you are not going into the pit of the subconscious. You are going to go to your memory banks. Memory banks are not the storages of your subconsciousness. There is a huge difference between memory banks and the subconsciousness. Maybe we can say that the subconscious is like your hard disk, the memory is like your diskette.

The memory bank is in the etheric brain. Memories in this bank either slowly sink into the subconscious mind or are annihilated by various thought processes.

Often, people are taught to build a health image by imagining that they really are going to be healthy. This is positive and may help. But the best thing is to go to your childhood memory banks when you were running free and wild and climbing trees, jumping into the ocean, and doing every kind of fun thing to show that you were really healthy. Bring that image back into focus.

When you bring these things out of your memory banks and compile them, these compilations of success moments will be an image of success within you. This image has a basis, a foundation. It is real. But the memories were far apart from each other a million years, fifty years, ten years. They were not effective. Their effectiveness and influence increase in you when you collect them, put them closer together, and thus create greater and greater tension. Let them start controlling your life. Instead of closing your eyes and going on about how many people damaged you, hurt you, scolded you, cursed you, gossiped about you, slandered you, instead of falling into the trash, do just the opposite. Then you will find success.

Here is even a little deeper layer of what we were saying. Sometimes we mess the images that we made for ourselves by projecting bad or ugly images on others. When we gossip about and slander people or say bad things about them, we build an image in our mind, and this image contradicts the beautiful images that we were trying to build in ourselves. This must be understood.

For example, I am saying to this man, "You know, I am trying to be very successful, very beautiful, very healthy." Now I have built that image in me. Then later I turn to him and say, "You are a nasty, ugly man. You are really square. You are really going to fail in your whole life."
What am I doing? The things that I am saying to this man, I am saying first to myself. The beautiful image that I was trying to build in me is already messed up. That is why the religions and higher philosophies forbid us to speak evil and slander other people. When we do this to others, we first build a dirty image within ourselves. If we are thinking ugly things about others, we mess up the image we are building in us. Why? Because when we are building an image for ourselves, we are almost neutral, happy, and relaxed. Hatred, force, and willpower are not involved in it. But when we say to another person, "You stupid, you rascal, you failure, you defeated man," our thoughtform is filled with a tremendous amount of force. That thoughtform is overpowering and destroying our relaxed image that we built within us because the image does not have the same tensity of force, anger, fear, furiousness, obnoxiousness. These words are names of forces.

The thoughts that you think about others, these are the thoughts that affect your programming. For example, if you think that people are really beautiful, you do not damage the beautiful programming for yourself. But from the beginning of the day until midnight, people think evil about others, in the meantime thinking they themselves are so beautiful. Eventually it happens that they become the most evil and ugly persons. Continuously thinking evil about others makes you evil because before that image goes to them it is really impressed in your mind and in your diskette.

If you think about this very carefully, you will not spend so much money on doctors or asylums.


-Torkom Saraydarian
(from The Mystery of Self Image, pp. 115-139.)


How can a benevolent God permit evil?

Ultimately, there is no good or bad. God did not create evil as a force distinct from good. He granted to souls the loving edicts of dharma and experiential choices from very subtle to most crude, thus to learn and evolve. Aum.

From the pinnacle of consciousness, one sees the harmony of life. Similarly, from a mountaintop, we see the natural role of a raging ocean and the steep cliffs below--they are beautiful. From the bottom of the mountain, the ocean can appear ominous and the cliffs treacherous. When through meditation, we view the universe from the inside out, we see that there is not one thing out of place or wrong. This releases the human concepts of right and wrong, good and bad. Our benevolent Lord created everything in perfect balance. Good or evil, kindness or hurtfulness return to us as the result, the fruit, of our own actions of the past. The four dharmas are God's wisdom lighting our path. That which is known as evil arises from the instinctive-intellectual nature, which the Lord created as dimensions of experience to strengthen our soul and further its spiritual evolution. Let us be compassionate, for truly there is no intrinsic evil. The Vedas admonish, "Being overcome by the fruits of his action, he enters a good or an evil womb, so that his course is downward or upward, and he wanders around, overcome by the pairs of opposites." Aum Namah Sivaya.

-Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami

http://www.himalayanacademy.com/study/mc/daily_lesson_html/lesson_359.shtml


Do not speak of your love

Why tell someone you love them? You love them, that's enough. Love is felt and seen; in fact, it's the most difficult thing to hide - it is shown through how you look at someone, your gestures and your attitude, and it's not necessary to speak of it. Humans rely too much on the verbal or written expression of their love. Once they've spoken of it, they think that's settled the matter. Not at all; they speak of it over and over again, but their behaviour increasingly shows their love is fading.

You should guard your love as a very precious thing, the most precious thing, and not express it in words. In this way it gradually creates the greatest freedom in your soul, the greatest delight and magic. If you speak of it, you will soon get reactions from all sides which will create misunderstandings, and this will be a shame. Do not speak of your love, and it will live in you forever.

-Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov