Iyya

what is there inside a seed? whatever is required for the tree is inside that. when a baby is formed, who keeps it eyes and ears?

GOD.

namma undaakaromnu nenaikarom. ellame kadavul undaakaradhu thaan.

One who is privileged to be born as a human being must learn to think. For this it is essential to differentiate between thoughts and thinking as they are different. They can be compared to owning a car and knowing how to drive it. In life we are given education which involves imbibing a lot of thoughts, but unfortunately in the case of religion thoughts are imposed. The first step in spiritual life is learning to think for oneself just as one learns to drive when one is given a car.

In his discourse, Swami Suddhananda said the body and the mind were given to every individual and a beginning could be made by learning to see them as they were. If one considers how the body functions it will become apparent that it is ‘innocent’ and unafraid of the infirmities that it is subjected to like disease, old age and death. When one extends this to the entire creation one can see that this vast universe is absolutely ‘innocent’ for there is no fear or sorrow in it. It is the “I” which is affected by problems, fears and sorrows.

Just as when the body is not well one goes to a doctor for treating it, so also should the mind and emotions be set right whenever necessary.

The transformation that happens to the body can be discerned in six phases: existence, birth, growth, changes, decay and death. But the body does not resist this natural process. So also is the universe continuously changing but it is not possible to ‘hear’ the passage of the footsteps of time.

The human body is an instrument and the gateway to the universe. It has no demands on its own. For instance, its hunger can be appeased by any food. It is the person who has craving for particular dishes and indulges his fancies.

It is not possible to fix the problems in the world without fixing those of the individual first. Both have to be set right, each in its own sphere. Taking care of the body is paramount because it is the instrument for doing Sadhana (spiritual practice) to evolve spiritually. But one should not consider it to be the end and become a body worshipper. The mind must be similarly mastered instead of allowing oneself to become a slave to its dictates.

Source: The Hindu

LEADERSHIP is not a quality. It is an experience that an individual who has undergone personal growth and transformation radiates.
   This is the simple truth. There are so many books these days about leadership and how it is an important part of making an organisation successful. There are so many leadership gurus who teach and train people in organisations to ‘develop’ leadership. Yet when we look at all organisations, be it businesses, government services or in the area of social services, true leaders are rare. A true leader is a person who is ready to take responsibility consciously. He is ready to handle life consciously and he is not constantly dependent on the past. A true leader is a person who is able to respond spontaneously to situations. He is fresh in his ideas and continuously keeps himself alive.
   A small story: There was once a great war between two countries. On a hot afternoon, a man in civilian clothes was riding past a small group of tired soldiers digging a huge pit, doing a seemingly impossible task. The group leader was shouting orders and threatening punishment if the work was not completed within the hour.
   The man riding the horse stopped and asked, ‘Sir, why can’t you help them yourself?’ The group leader replied, ’I am the leader. The men do as I tell them. If you feel so strongly, go help them!’ The man worked with the soldiers till the job was finished! Before leaving, he congratulated the soldiers for their work, and approaching the group leader said, ‘The next time your status prevents you from supporting your people, inform your higher authorities and I will provide a more permanent solution.’
   The group leader was completely surprised. Only now he realised that the man was in fact the army general!
   Most of us achieve the status of a leader, but not the state. State is totally different from status. Status comes from society. When I use the word ‘state’ I mean our inner space. Our inner space should be mature enough to handle the responsibility, which we assume.
   Each one of us is a potential leader. The quality of leadership arises from one’s ability to take responsibility for a particular organisation, a situation or a particular group with tremendous awareness and maturity.
   Leadership is simply a conscious choice made by an individual to act out of deep sensitivity and awareness to one’s situation and surrounding. Then automatically, the inner space will start transforming and send out the right words and actions.

PARAMAHAMSA SRI NITHYANANDA

Source: The Economic Times

IN The Drunkard’s Walk, his meditation on the role randomness plays in our lives, physicist Leonard Mlodinow talks about chanciness. As a teenager, he watched the flames of the Sabbath candles flickering randomly. Could their shapes be predicted with the right kind of equation, he wondered. His father disagreed, citing his experience in the Buchenwald Nazi camp which illustrated life’s fundamental unpredictability.
Arrested by the Gestapo and send to the death camp during World War II, he starved for days on end, and stole a single loaf from the bakery inside the death camp. The baker got the prison guards to round up all those he thought might have taken the loaf and had the suspects lined up. Since no one confessed, the baker asked the guards to shoot them one by one until all were dead, or someone confessed.
That’s when Mlodinow Senior stepped forward to spare other inmates. But it wasn’t anything heroic, he clarified. He simply expected to be shot any way. But not only was his life spared, to his amazement the baker who looked like a villain moments ago, awarded a plum job in the bakery to the youth. That ensured his eventual survival. If that hadn’t happened, the father told the son, “You would never have been born!”
Of course, this does not diminish the awful horror of the Holocaust: Mlodinow Senior’s first wife and their two young children had been shot dead by the Germans. This explains how the young man immigrated to the US, and started afresh with another survivor. But for all the horrors he’d suffered, Mlodinow Senior was reticent about his experiences. It wasn’t denial but rather because he wanted to pass on a larger lesson. War was an extreme event, but the role of chance in our lives did not revolve around only such extreme events. “The outline of our lives is continuously coaxed in new directions by a variety of random events that, along with our responses to them, determine our fate,” he writes. “As a result, life is both hard to predict and hard to interpret.”
This insight is also echoed by the Gita: One does not create karma, nor induce others or create its fruit. Nature however manifests. Which also means “nobody is evil, even if they do evil things”, as rational emotive behavioural therapists say. Accept things, no matter how they are. This vibes well with the samatvam philosophy of the Gita: Don’t get stuck in the mud of the past, rise above it like a lotus.

VITHAL C NADKARNI

Source: The Economic Times