Blissful Life

Category: spiritual

  • Pale Blue Dot

    Can you see a tiny little dot in the above picture. That is our good old earth. Just that it was photographed 3.7 billion miles away from the home of anyone reading this. And the famous Carl Sagan gave the following words relating to that little speck:

    “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
    The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
    Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
    The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

    It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

    There’s nothing more I can add to what Sagan said. Just see that picture once again and take a few breaths.

  • The Worst Thing for an Ambitious Young Man is – Spirituality

    If most of your dreams for your life can be seen as ‘highly improbable’ or ‘least likely’ by many others, if the cheese in you is not older than a quarter century of years, if you would love to continue loving life and fearing death, don’t read anything after this period ‘ . ‘

    OK. So you agree that you are ready to take on the sole responsibility of whatever happens to you by reading this article henceforth as yours. Remember, you are gonna be wandering in a lost world, and there is no turning back. This is your point of no return – .

    That was a bold action.
    Think.

    Let X denote your name. (Here, your refers to the body and mind that is enclosed inside the 6 or less feet long and much less wide and deep magnitude of volume sitting in the chair)

    So, Mr.X, if I say that you are your hands, will you agree?
    Or if I say you are your legs?
    Or heart?
    Lungs?
    Brain?
    Torso?
    Your whole body?

    Then what are you? Your body + your mind?
    Now you can say, that your mind is a part of your brain and hence you are your body itself, the hardware and the software installed in it.

    But, I disagree.
    I say that you are not your body or your mind, nor both. But YOU are a consciousness, that is watching over your mind, and your body. Your body is just a tool that serves the act of receptors of radio signals. Your intellect, another tool that process these information. Your mind, yet another tool that adds emotion to spice up your dinner and to serve it to you, the consciousness, which witness everything.
    Understood?
    You are not your mind, or body, but the consciousness that presides over the ceremony.

    The mind is just a screen onto which the ideas are projected by the reel (body) and you are the audience in the theater who watches the show.

    Now the problem is, people tend to think that they are their body or mind. They associate their existence with their body or intellect or mind. That is why they feel pain when the body is pierced, they cry when the mind is hurt. They can’t bear insult. They can’t suffer hardships. They just freak out for help.
    Try disassociating yourself from your mind and body. See yourself as that consciousness. And you will soon realize that life is fun.

    Now, even if you did not pay heed to my previous warnings, you are still safe. It is not late to close this page or to shift to some other posts.

    OK. Then.

    Until now, we were just discussing a psychological brain washing which can be used productively to bring the best out of anybody, without having him to break down.
    But from now, we dive into the deepest depths of Hinduism, Advaita and all such religious thoughts, that are far too complicated to be understood let alone be experienced. But, the very fact that we can’t understand these makes us try to understand it. And the more we understand it, the more we realize that our lives are meaningless.

    Now, where did we stop? Yes. The consciousness.

    This consciousness, was called atman by Vivekananda and many other Indian sages. The rough English translation brings us to the dictionary entry – soul.

    So, it is this atman that defines us. We are not the sum of our body made up of matter and mind made up of even finer matter. But we are the infinite atman that stretches into every nook and corner of the universe. [Can’t understand, right? Me too]

    And this atman is a part of the greater atman – the paramatman, the superconsciousness. The superconsciousness is the sum of all consciousnesses. It is the air into which all the gases called atman melts into. [If we can agree on the previous paragraph, why not this?]

    So, when man reaches such a level, where he is devoid of any thoughts about his mind, or any sense towards his body, he attains the superconsciousness. He is then logged into the Godly consciousness and has the infinite access to all the knowledge in the world. He knows the answer to every questions that gave him sleepless nights – Why am I here? What should I do? Who am I? – and it gave him happiness, eternal bliss. [But though I searched all through Vivekananda’s works like Google does with internet, I couldn’t find the login form where we can enter our username and password so as to access the aforesaid things. Sure, Google misses something]

    Now you are in a confusion. You understand that there is some timber in this tree. But you can’t just cut it and make a sofa set for your living room. You want to make one. But you don’t have the axe or the chisel. You are gonna employ everything you’ve got around you to try and bring that tree down. But you can’t.

    That’s why I warned you previously. You are gonna be wandering.

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  • WAS GANDHI A TANTRIC?

    A lecture by Nicholas F. Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho on the brahmacharya of Gandhi.

    It starts like this:

    My meaning of brahmacharya is this: “One who never has any lustful intention, who . . . has become capable of lying naked with naked women . . . without being in any manner whatsoever sexually excited.”

    Read the remaining here.