The Chosen Ones

We are all God’s chosen people, its just that God doesn’t choose us all at the same time.

For me, being “chosen” means to be able to connect with the Divine, to be able to be one with the other world. And that connection is something that we are born with, but fades away as we blend into the ways of the material world. The opportunity to reconnect with the Divine beckons us again, but not when we want it to, rather, when the Divine wishes. It is at that moment that we become the “Chosen Ones”. For some people this reconnection may be momentary, while for others it may last for several years.

And more often than not, the connection is reinstated when times of prosperity have passed us by. It is in periods of hopelessness and despair that the human ego is crushed and this heightens our spiritual senses, making way for the divine contact.

So embrace the difficult periods of life with gratitude. Connect with the Divine. You have been Chosen.

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What Makes You Smile Before Going To Bed? Part 2

It saddens me, to see people over-complicate their lives and entrap themselves in a self woven web of sorrow and distress. Keywords here: “over-complicate” and “self woven“.

I sympathize with fellow human beings whose sufferings are beyond their control and a consequence of external circumstances that are not of their doing. But there are others, and many, who complicate normal circumstances to create an illusory state of hardships. They then drown themselves in their self imagined sorrows and soon enough start blaming others around them.

While at times I have the liberty to ignore such behavior, it becomes extremely hard to deal with when people displaying it are closely related to you or are ones you care for. More often than not, at the end of such melodramatic acts, it is I who ends up being labeled a villain. And that hurts.

So in order to avoid being hurt myself, I have decided to “Mind my own business“. Even when the person who is going through one of the above attacks is closely related to me, I will just let them be. I will not try to speak sense into anyone’s head. I will not try to awaken anyone’s mind. I am not going to try to be a savior. To be one, requires a level of spiritual accomplishment that I have not attained. And until I attain that, I shall “Mind my own business”.

I don’t think I’m the only one who experiences such tough situations. Any similar stories out there?

I just wish more people would just Simplify their lives and be Thankful to the Divine for all the things we have. For those of us lucky enough to be awakened to the possibilities of our lives, here’s an extract from one of my early posts.

Was pondering upon parameters of happiness when I thought of this: When you hit the sack at night do you smile and feel happy about seeing the next day in the blink of an eye? What is it about the next morning that makes you wanna sleep and travel through night at the speed of light?

Here are a few things that put a smile on my face when I think of waking up the next day:

• the morning newspaper crossword 🙂
• the morning cup of tea 🙂
• the period of solitude and self reflection that I spend in the toilet 🙂
• the good morning greeting to my folks and hearing their response 🙂
• the comic strip in the newspaper 🙂

With a little more effort, this could translate into an effective scale for measuring happiness and work/life balance. So what puts a smile on your face?

 

 

 

I experienced a Moment of Bliss today…

This evening I had the good fortune of witnessing a Japanese Tea ceremony. The event was held as part of the Auroville Festival that has been on in New Delhi this week.

It was my first glimpse of the tradition and am certain it will not be the last. The 40 minutes that the host performed the ritual movements, elevated me to a dimension where space and time disappeared altogether. What remained was an unexplainable oneness, of mind, body and soul. Repetition of precise movements created an energy waveform that was therapeutic. In minutes, my senses shed all the fatigue that the day’s long drive and heat had given rise to.

I believe that a stone idol, worshiped for centuries by millions of people, develops powers that seem divine. The cumulative energy transferred from devotees to the idol bestows on it divine abilities. Similarly, the movements that I saw the host perform, signified for me the oneness between the creator and the creation. The host seemed in union with every object that he handled. Every ingredient of the ceremony seemed to have become an extension of his, and the tea seemed blessed with divine energies that the host channeled through every movement and every object.

If the sight was so spiritually uplifting, I can only wonder what a blissful effect it must have for the performer of the ritual.  The ceremony was a beautiful representation of the oneness that can be realized between humans and their tasks. If only we could immerse ourselves so completely into what we do, miracles would happen, right here, right now.

Have you experienced a tea ceremony?

 

 

 

Unfulfilled Wants Beget Lust For Power

“Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.”

– Bertrand Russell in “The New York Herald-Tribune Magazine” (1938).

What effect does suppression and control have on a form of energy that governs everything within us and without?

It would be a mistake to equate suppression with elimination. A want, desire or any other manifestation of human energy can only be temporarily restrained, it cannot be eliminated. Over time, the bottled up energy transforms its nature and eventually finds a way out in forms that are more malignant than its original existence.

A pure desire borne out of the human heart is as innocent as a new born baby. And every desire has an energy driving it, an energy which itself is divine.

However, external repression corrupts the very benign nature of this energy and the result is the birth of a desire that is evil and  wicked.