Iyya

Eckhart Tolle had a profound spiritual experience when he was 29 years-old. It virtually dissolved his old Cambridge- and London-educated identity and dramatically altered the course of his life. Until then he had been living in a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression.

But after the transformation, “it feels now as if I am talking about some past lifetime or somebody else’s life,” Tolle was to write in The Power of Now which went on to top best-seller charts translated into 32 languages. “For the next five months, I lived in a state of uninterrupted deep peace and bliss. After that, it diminished somewhat in intensity, or perhaps it just seemed to, because it became my natural state. I could still function in the world, although I realised that nothing I ever did could possibly add anything to what I already had.”

The essence of his message was this: leave your analytical mind and its false created self, the ego, behind if you want to make that journey into the power of now requires. Be fully present and take each step in the Now, Feel the ‘reality’ of such things as the inner-body, surrendering, forgiveness. Open yourself to the unmanifested potential of the Now.

This is virtually similar to what a Harvard psychology professor wrote in the 1960s. He took LSD first, which apparently inspired him to resign his appointment, then travelled to India to sit at the feet of a Guru in the Himalayas. Thereafter he wrote a popular book called Be Here Now: The key to happiness, the ‘reformed’ academic argued was to stop thinking so much about the future.

But as countless seekers, including Arjuna, have discovered, why is this easy enough to prescribe, and virtually impossible to practice? “Not to think of the future requires that we convince our frontal lobe not to do what it was designed to do,” answers psychologist Daniel Gilbert in Stumbling on Happiness, “and like a heart that is told not to beat, it (your brain) naturally resists the suggestion… Why can’t we just be here now? How come we can’t do something our goldfish find so simple?” Could it be a matter of constant practice (abhyasa) and detachment (vairagya), as the Bhagvad Gita advises?

Does this lead to a shift in consciousness? Absolutely, says Tolle: Become aware of awareness as the background to all your perceptions and thinking; this leads to the dawn of inner stillness.

By: Vithal C Nadkarni

Source: The Economic Times

YannMartel’s Life of Pi is an epic story of survival that could teach Robinson Crusoe a trick or two. The Booker Prize-winning novel charts the adventures of an Indian boy named Pi ship-wrecked in a lifeboat on the Pacific, with only a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker for company. Now how does one illustrate such a novel that caught the imagination of millions of readers across the globe? That was the question, The Times, London, posed almost two years ago. The international competition attracted hundreds of entries that entailed “oceans of ink and paint” the editors said, in all sorts of artworks including digitally rendered “manga”, pen-and-ink drawings, serene linocuts and scratchy, weathered acrylics.
The winner turned out to be a Croatian artist named Tomislav Trojanac. But when he received the congratulatory telephone call, the 35-year-old artist was taking a nap in his home in the mountainside town of Orahovica. It came as such a pleasant surprise, he said, because I didn’t have any expectations really, because, as they say, expectations are simply preconceived disappointments.
Cognitive psychologists would endorse the artist’s insight: when a person expects to receive an honour, prize, or even a salary rise, he immediately takes “partial title” to it as it were. Arguably, the greatest thing the human brain does is ‘making the future’. Since it’s such a superb “anticipation machine”, you begin to reap gratification even from a completely non-existent gift. But when such a person fails to win the muchcoveted prize, he may experience as much sorrow as though he had actually received and then lost the award.
Intense disappointment is thus generated even when the original expectation is highly unrealistic in the first place. “(Such) people who live the future in the present, experience an anticipated loss as an actual one,” says the doyen of cognitive therapists, Dr Aaron Beck. “A woman, when informed that her husband would be leaving for a brief business trip, felt as sad as she did when he actually left. When she thought ahead to the time when her children would grow up and leave the house, she was brought to tears.”
Wisdom, therefore, would lie in focusing on the present, on the here and now. This is the strategy the newly shorn cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni uses, to defeat ‘anticipatory’ pressures of games yet to be played.

We’re all very good at creating negative thoughts and patterns. Stop letting the negative energy drive you. Rather, let positive thoughts and emotions drive you to a new destination.
You might say stopping the negativity especially when it is all around you sounds easy. You might even say that nothing good is happening in your life currently so therefore it is impossible to have positive affirmations. This is simply untrue. The only thing that controls that difference between where you are and where you want to be are your emotions and your ability to stop negativity. Live in the present. If you have a dream and you want to accomplish something then describe what you desire as though you already have it, as if the dream has already been accomplished.
State your affirmations and be positive. Your brain does not do well with negative comments….Use power words. If we want to change our lives we need to select words that allow to expand our level and create positive results. Words shape our beliefs, and they create action. Change your state. Self doubt stems from our state. One of the best ways to end self doubt is to end your state. Change your body language and you simply can change your self doubt.
The moment you feel sad, lonely or depressed, simply do something that can change your state. You can exercise, go for a walk, watch a funny show or movie, read a good book or go to dinner with a friend. Visualise the result. Visualise what it would look like if you reached your pleasure without the doubt.

Drew Stevens

Source: The Economic Times

During my days of parivrajaka, wandering as a sanyasi, I was traveling in Amarkand in Madhya Pradesh, doing a parikrama, circumambulation of the sacred river Narmada.
For a while I lived with the tribal people in that area. They were very simple, honest and sweet people, extremely hospitable. One day in front of the hut I was staying in, across their temple, they erected a new hut. When I enquired they said that this was for a festival.
Later that day, a pregnant woman walked into that hut. Ten minutes later, she walked out smiling, a baby in her arms. No one went in with her. There was not a squeal when she was in that hut. Soon after, they dismantled the hut.
I asked a village elder about the festival that was to take place. He simply said that the birth of that child was the festival. Next week the same exercise was repeated. Another hut, another pregnant lady, another child and another festival!
This time I could not contain my curiosity. I asked the elder: “I am amazed at the simplicity with which the ladies deliver their babies; no doctors, no midwife even and no pain. How is this possible?” In my experience I had never seen something like this. Mothers have so many examinations, check in to hospitals, and scream in pain at delivery; but here it is so different.
The old man said: “Pain, what pain? Why should there be pain while delivering a child? Yes, there is pain if an animal attacks and hurts you or you break an arm or leg; but, at child birth, why?“
In their language there was no word for pain. They had no concept of pain during child birth. They asked: “Animals deliver their offsprings naturally and do not cry, why should humans?” I had no answer. I could not comprehend what I was seeing.
It was only after meditating upon these incidents I understood that pain is a result of our verbalisation. These words such as pain, hurt, and suffering create the feeling of pain in us.
Our mind drives our body. Our mind creates thoughts and concepts and embeds them as verbalised and visualised realities within us.
Pain has no reality outside of our mind. The neuro sensors that evoke the pain response cannot create the pain unless our mind accepts the fact that there can be pain. Pain is a matter of conditioning; and you can decondition your mind away from pain.

PARAMAHAMSA SRI NITHYANANDA

Source: The Economic Times

This incident happened when I was in Lhasa, in Tibet. I had heard that there were people in this area who lived long, some who were over 300 years of age. I wanted to meet some of them and talk to them. One of the lamas in the Potala Palace directed me to another lama working on a nearby filed.
I asked this lama who looked fairly old, “Sir, I am told you are very old. I would like to u n d e r s t a n d how you live.” He was very active at work pulling of weeds and repairing the field when I went to him.
He laughed. “I am only middle aged! I am just 136! There are many here who are far older than I am! You should go and meet them if you wish to see old people, not me.”
I saw a medical report testifying he was over 136 years old! I asked him how it was possible for him to work so hard at this age. He simply said that for us lamas 300 is a normal life span. That is what we believe and that is what we see. There is nothing surprising in some one working hard physically at 150 or 200 years of age.
I asked him again, “how did this belief come about?” He said, “In all our ancestral burial places it is written when they were born and when they died. They all lived to about 300. to die at 200 would be an early death.”
What your mind believes, it makes happen.
Medical science now understands that every part of our body gets renewed once ever so often. Millions of cells out of the estimated 60 trillion cells in our body die every day and get created again. Limbs are recreated. Our entire body becomes totally new once every 18 months or so. Not one cell in your body now was there some two years ago. Not one cell that is present in your body now will exist as it is now two years from now.
As long as you do not disturb our mind body system and allow it to function the way the Tibetan lamas do, you too can live to 300! These lamas understand the science of how the body recreates, renews, and regenerates itself and have established both the concept and the process to make this happen. So can you!

• PARAMAHAMSA SRI NITHYANANDA
Source: The Economic Times

Don’t make life difficult for yourself and others.

The high-strung person must walk daily. Walking raises happy hormones norepinephrine. Moreover, walking is nature’s acupressure.  

What should you do if you are high-strung? First, understand that being high-strung is unease or dis-ease; being equi-poised is ease or good health. High-strung people become hypertensive, suffer from blackouts, eye/ear problems, skin rash, hormonal imbalance, insomnia, acidity and, generally, make life difficult for themselves and others.

High-strung people worry a lot. They see white as black, compliments as ‘left-handed’ or having a ‘hidden barb’. They live at a high emotional pitch. This stokes the adrenal glands into secreting the stress hormone cortisol, which pumps in a frenzied, urgent energy to survive but makes health into hell.

Please understand: cortisol was required in the jungles where we needed that urgent surge of energy to fight or flee from dangerous animals. But we don’t need to invoke it anymore. Our life is not at stake. There are no dangerous animals, only our dangerous thoughts. High-strung people complain incessantly about past injustices and speculate fearfully about future outcomes; the present apparently does not exist. That is no way to live.

Change your way of thinking and behaving. Relax completely in the present. Enjoy gazing at the vast sky, the crow flying across the white cloudy tracks, the stunning stillness of greenery. Joy is right here, not in the past or future.

Bust that bias  

Experiencing joy is a vital and necessary lesson for the high-strung mind which constantly swings between the past and future, between anger and fear, between liking and disliking. Why multiply misery when you can multiply joy?

Start with experiencing your breath. Sit comfortably, back straight. Inhale and exhale naturally with eyes closed and get a sense of yourself. When thoughts come, give them no importance, no energy. Just observe them and they will go. Keep bringing your attention to your breathing. Observe it quietly. If you find this a struggle, if your thoughts are too loud, chant a mantra to propel your mind into healing channels. Allow the mind to experience moments of harmony, moments without biases. Then, stop and be silent. Watch your breath — inhaling, exhaling. Your mind will hum to the melody of the chant. When the mind is experiencing such healing peace, it purifies the biochemistry of the blood. The cortisol level drops lower and lower. This is ease and good health.

Mealtime harmony  

Please remember to maintain this mental equanimity at meals. Treat your lunchtime and dinnertime as additional moments of joy. Enjoy the flavours and textures. Enjoy the heat, the cold. If the salt is less, add a little without reacting. Eat at a comfortable — preferably slow — pace. Don’t think of the things you have to do after your meal. Concentrate on the present joy of eating and tasting. The high-strung person drains a lot of nutrients from her/his system due to her/his constantly agitated state. It is wise to replenish certain nutrients regularly every day:

Vitamin C: it gives vital support to the brain and immunity system.

Vitamin B-complex: it keeps the metabolism in order and makes you feel stronger when you are deluged with tension and weakness.

Some beneficial foods are:

Bananas raise the levels of serotonin — the calming neurotransmitter — in the brain.

Apples are great diuretics that help flush out salt and bring down blood pressure.

Cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli contain powerful antioxidising bioflavonoids that protect the body from being harmed by free radicals that are generated in a high-strung state.

Warm milk not only helps you sleep better, it has a nice stomach-filling effect that makes you feel full and nourished and banishes agitation.

Hot oatmeal with milk for breakfast helps to start the day with composure.

Sip warm water through the day — it settles ruffled nerves.

Walk away the worry  

The high-strung person must walk daily. Walking raises happy hormones norepinephrine. Moreover, walking is nature’s acupressure. Every point in the foot gets pressed. And, as you know, the feet are said to have points each of which correspond with a particular organ in the body. So, when you walk, you correspondingly strengthen the energy flow in the liver, gall bladder, kidneys and so on. Over the days, during your walk, think of the fresh air, sunshine, open outdoors as your friendly companions. It’s a beautiful time to reflect and decide to purify yourself.

Let go any bitterness you may be harbouring. Forgive those who have hurt you. Forgive yourself for hurting others. How, asked one of my students.

As you walk, hand over your grudges, grief, anger, hurt, bitterness to Mother Nature. Her healing patterns, her seasonal changes can bear our emotional burdens. She knows how to transmute storms into sunshine, winter into spring. Literally say, ‘I hand over to you my grief’.

Simultaneously, resolve to use your thoughts for good purpose. Every time a vicious thought arises, observe it dispassionately. Tell it, ‘I will make you into a virtuous thought.’ Follow this up with the words of a beautiful song, poem or mantra. What greater victory than deliberately using your power to transform chaotic vicious energy into harmonious virtuous energy?

The writer is co-author of the book ‘Fitness for Life’. 

Source: The Hindu Business Line