Saturday, September 30, 2023
Anthony Bourdain
“Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom…is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.”
Dennis Waite Author of How to Meet Yourself (and find true happiness)
Who you really are does not need any help. The problem is that you have completely mistaken the nature of yourself and the world. You are confusing what is real with what is unreal. Once this confusion has been untangled, both meaning and purpose will be revealed. This book will disentangle your mind! It will explain to you what you are not so that you can understand who you really are and, ultimately, come to the realization that you are already happy now!
Sri Atmananda Krishna Menon
The ordinary man has the deep samskara ingrained in him that he is the body and that it is very, very insignificant, compared to the vast universe. Therefore the only possible mistake you are likely to be led into, while taking to the 'I'-thought, is the habitual samskara of the smallness attached to the 'I'.
This mistake is transcended by the contemplation of the aphorism 'Aham brahmasmi.' Brahman is the biggest imaginable conception of the human mind. The conception of bigness no doubt removes the idea of smallness. But the idea of bigness, which is also a limitation, remains over.
Ultimately, this idea of bigness has also to be removed by contemplating another aphorism: 'Prajnyanam asmi.' ('I am Consciousness.') Consciousness can never be considered to be either big or small. So you are automatically lifted beyond all opposites.
Ashtavakra Gita
The wise one is neither pleased by praise,
nor annoyed by blame. He neither rejoices in life nor fears death.
On Death Kahlil Gibran 1883 –1931
Then Almitra spoke, saying, We would ask now of Death.
And he said:
You would know the secret of death.
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.
If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.
For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.
In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;
And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.
Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king?
Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
When the stream of love flows in its full strength, it purifies all that stands in its way, as the Ganges - according to the teaching of the ancients - purifies all those who plunge into its sacred waters.
Lahiri Mahasaya "Autobiography of a Yogi"
On this auspicious day, may the purifying waters of our beloved Yogavatar's love, be with us constantly and forever. Shanti. Om.
My worship is of a very strange kind. In this, Ganga water is not required.
No special utensils are necessary. Even flowers are redundant.
In this puja all gods have disappearedand emptiness has emerged with euphoria.
Friday, September 29, 2023
Amitabha Buddha Day
As we celebrate Amitabha Buddha Day, may your life be filled with the purest form of joy that comes from inner peace and spiritual fulfillment. May your journey toward enlightenment be filled with love, purpose, and a deep connection with the teachings of Amitabha Buddha.
LORD SHIVA AND SHAKTI
From the union of Purush and Prakriti or Lord Shiva and Shakti, the creation emerges. The action results from positive and negative forces, at the root of creative force we find Adi Shakti as the Universal Mother.
Sri Aurobindo
In brief, we have to replace dualities by unity, egoism by
divine consciousness, ignorance by divine wisdom, thought by
divine knowledge, weakness, struggle & effort by self-contented
divine force, pain & false pleasure by divine bliss. This is called
in the language of Christ bringing down the kingdom of heaven
on earth, or in modern language, realising & effectuating God
in the world.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
The wise of all ages have taught that it is knowledge of the divine Being that is life, and the only reality.
Anon I mus (Spiritually Anonymous)
Dare to see me beyond the veil of my outer appearance (my race, gender, personality, class, status, etc.) deeper into the nameless, formless and timeless field of universal intelligence that perceives through it.
And I will have the courage to do the same for you.
Baba Ram Singh
"The devotees who enshrine love for God within the mind, never forget the Lord." (Guru Amar Dev Ji, Adi Granth)
Baba Ram Singh: "They continually sing the Lord's Name -- Hari, Hari -- with the tongue of thought. Whoever has attached their attention to that true Love within, they can never forget it. The true Love resides within us, and if that Love becomes manifested even one time, it will never slip away from our remembrance. Love is the most attractive power; nothing can equal it -- not the intellect, not the mind, not the outer wisdom. Within us that true Love is dwelling; Love is the form of the Almighty Lord. The soul is Love, and Love is the Guru. So He tells us that when that real Love or virah (the pain of separation from the Beloved), appears in the within, how could it ever be forgotten? When that Love manifests, then our soul remains united with the Dhunatmak Naam -- the Inner Sound -- day and night. We cannot bear to become separated from that Naam for even the fraction of a second. Now we are so bound to mind and Maya that we can never forget them. But when the virah awakens within us, then, in our heart we can remember only the Naam; no other thought strikes there. This is the meaning of virah."
SHRI KRISHNA ~Bhagavad Gita as it is 5.29
“A person in full consciousness of Me, knowing Me to be the ultimate beneficiary of all sacrifices and austerities, the Supreme Lord of all planets and demigods, and the benefactor and well-wisher of all living entities, attains peace from the pangs of material miseries.”
Thursday, September 28, 2023
BHAGAVAN SRI RAMAKRISHNA
Even if you have the least desire, you cannot attain God. The progress of actions can be very subtle. Say you have to thread a needle. It will not enter the eye of the needle if there is the least amount of fiber sticking out.
Swami Achutanand Baba, “Yoga of Inner Light and Sound”
Light and Sound Form the Very Basis of Life
“If we look at the universe we will appreciate that light and sound form the very basis of the whole of the universe surrounding us including our own bodies…the creation… If these two elements are somehow removed from the universe, the universe would collapse or get dissolved or even more appropriately put, would simply cease to exist. This process is known as involution or ‘laya’ (in Sanskrit), as opposed to evolution. Light and sound form the very basis of life…
"Besides, as if to underscore the significance of these two components – light and sound – almost every religion has some tradition of symbolically including the light and sound in their places of worship. In Vedic tradition we can see lamps burning (light) and ringing bells (sound) hanging in a temple. In a church and Buddhist monasteries also candles and gong or chimes can be found. In mosques also the loudspeakers for azan (prayers) and incense sticks or chirag (lamp) are seen. These are just symbols but they do leave some hints at the importance of light and sound which are both in fact varied forms of energy. The subtlest of these energies is that Word or the Quintessential energy or anahat nada, Om, or sar shabd or the Word that springs forth directly from Him [God] as discussed earlier and, hence, is the most suitable or appropriate guide or escort to take us along to Him. That quintessential sound pervades all creation – gross, astral, causal as well as supra-causal. Nothing can be formed without it…
"The soul has now to concentrate on the sounds that are heard reverberating within, by practising nada dhyan/surat shabd yoga/nadanusandhana (Yoga of Inner Divine Sound [inner Sound Meditation]). Countless varieties of sounds including the ocean’s roar, thunder of clouds, melodies resembling those of musical instruments like drums, sitar, lute, flute etc… are heard. These sounds are so captivating and pleasing that the soul forgets everything else. These sounds become more and more melodious as one moves into higher and higher realms. By learning the right tact from a true Guru one can grasp the five central sounds, as described above, one after another and go on rising further and further. All these words or sounds are flowing from higher realms and clasping on to them it is very much possible for the perceiving soul to keep ascending, just as a fish can swim against the stream or current.”
Joseph Campbell
"Mythology is the song of the Universe, the music we dance to even when we cannot name the tune."
Joseph Campbell
"I dare say that we shall one day discover in astrology a great deal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected upon the heavens."
Carl Jung
"The mind is a miniature universe and the universe is the expansion of the mind. He who directly experiences this truth sees the universe in himself and sees himself in the entire universe."
Jacob Bohme
Albert Einstein
“ A calm and humble life will bring more happiness than the pursuit of success and the constant restlessness that comes with it. ”
Rumi
To say that "I am God" is in fact a great humility. The one who says this has annihilated himself. He has cast himself to the winds. Such a man says "I am not. God is all. Nothing has existence but the Divine. I am pure non-entity. I am nothing." Rumi
India’s great gift of higher knowledge to the world Author Unknown
Why Hindu dharma is the world’s most profound philosophical tradition
India’s great gift of higher knowledge to the world that remains at the cutting edge of science, spirituality and psychology today.
There has been much discussion about the nature of Hinduism as it is not always easy to understand for the modern person. The vastness and complexity of the Hindu tradition, as well as its differences from western religions, keeps it outside the usual definitions and dichotomies of western thought.
Most current discussions look at Hinduism according to its rituals or social practices. Though the yoga and vedanta side of Hindu dharma has spread worldwide, many people are not aware of how integral these spiritual practices are to the tradition as a whole.
Hindu dharma contains what is probably the world’s oldest and most extensive philosophical tradition, emphasising exalted spiritual philosophies of self-realisation and god-realisation. Its philosophies have predated and influenced the other philosophies of the world, East and West.
In this regard, we should look beyond the term Hinduism to its original meaning as Sanatana Dharma, which can be translated as the “eternal way of knowledge,” as the term dharma implies both wisdom and its application.
We should look beyond the idea of Hinduism as a religion like Biblical traditions and examine it as a science of consciousness.
Upanishadic wisdom of self-knowledge
Hindu philosophical texts like the Upanishads are older than those of the Greeks like Plato and Aristotle and predate the formation of Western philosophy.
They are in many respects more profound as they emphasise universal consciousness and cosmic intelligence and more notably, how to realise it, which western thought still does not understand.
They promote a level of inquiry and meditation that can take us much deeper into the mysteries of life than mere reason, philosophical dialectic, or religious faith and belief that western thought centers itself upon.
The Upanishads are older than the philosophical and theological texts of Christianity and Islam that are based upon Greek philosophers like Aristotle, Plato and Plotinus, though rejecting their pagan background.
Western religions relied upon the Greeks and Romans for their science, mathematics, art, architecture and medicine, from which modern western science and art arose again after the Renaissance that followed a return to pagan thought.
Hinduism has also sustained its older traditions of these types that continue today, asin Ayurveda, Jyotish and Vastu, Indian music and temple art. It has never rejected art, music or science as unholy. In fact, it has turned these into paths of Yoga.
Upanishadic texts emphasise the role of self-knowledge, much like the ancient Greeks. Yet the Upanishadic self-knowledge is not the knowledge of the mere human self, as is usually the case with the Greeks, but the inner self of pure consciousness beyond body and mind, karma and rebirth, which resides in all things.
Most of the theological discussions that occur in Christian philosophy, can be found in older Hindu texts, like the Brahma Sutras making God both the efficient and material cause of the universe, yet regarding the divine not as a God apart from nature, or limited to a particular savior or prophet, but as the very self of all beings.
Hindu thought emphasises the role of pure being or pure consciousness as the ground of existence, much like early Greek thought, while western thought since Aristotle has progressively moved into the transient realm of becoming, forgetting the primacy of the Eternal and Infinite for a more practical view of life.
This philosophical shift to the mundane has helped develop science and technology but has lost much of the world’s older spiritual, mystical and meditation traditions that have been remarkably preserved in India.
Robert Adams
“There is a place that is beyond bad and good, right and wrong, happy and sadness. That place is where you are now. Awaken to it.”
Recognizing the Buddha in You by Garchen Rinpoche
"Do not worry about enlightenment; the Buddha is within your mind already, ready to be seen. But because we cannot turn inward and are constantly distracted, we fail to recognize the Buddha.
When past thoughts have ceased and future thoughts not yet arisen, in this space between fixations, you can glimpse the nature of mind abiding like space; this is the Buddha. If you remain within this nature continuously, you are enlightened."
Nisargadatta Maharaj
Your love of the world is the reflection of your love of yourself, for your world is of your own creation. Realize that you are the Eternal Source and accept all as your own. Such acceptance is true love."
I Am
That God has and will never abandon you, it is we who abandons God in the quest to feed the ego with desires, wants and beliefs. We are ONE with God, That Brahman am I.
Yogananda
As God is the Essence of our own being, we cannot truly express ourselves until we learn to manifest His presence within us. That is the truth
John Burroughs
“Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the centre of the world.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”
Sri Aurobindo
"Buddha and Shankara supposed the world to be radically
false and miserable; therefore escape from the world was to them
the only wisdom. But this world is Brahman, the world is God,
the world is Satyam, the world is Ananda; it is our misreading
of the world through mental egoism that is a falsehood and our
wrong relation with God in the world that is a misery."
Wednesday, September 27, 2023
Chamtrul Rinpoche
Stop continuously trying to change the outer world in a way that it always brings peace to you. You will never succeed, and you will lose so much of your precious energy.
Use your precious energy to change your inner world instead, so that whatever arises in the outer world, it will not affect your inner peace.
Nisargadatta Maharaj
The self is near and the way to it is easy. All you need to do is to do nothing; just be. Here and there you may forget, it does not matter. Just remember to look past the temporary. No need to remain in a lonely dream of lack and unease when the true matter is always on hand.
Aurobindo
The Vedic deities are names, powers, personalities of the universal Godhead and they represent each some essential puissance of the Divine Being. They manifest the cosmos and are manifest in it. Children of Light, Sons of the Infinite.
Hazrat Inayat Khan:
It is when one has lost the idea of separateness and feels himself at one with all creation that his eyes are opened and he sees the cause of all things.
Adyashanti
Let go of all ideas and images in your mind, they come and go and aren’t even generated by you.
Tuesday, September 26, 2023
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