Excellent technique

When you purify your center, you become receptive to higher vibrations. Creativity happens in this space. Carnation music composer Thy agaraja discovered a new ranga by listening to a bee. A monk observing a snake and a crane fighting discovered the martial art, Tai Chi

When your center is full of impurities, your perspective and understanding are confused. This confusion tends to act as blockages and so there is no scope for the blossoming of creative ideas. Hence there is the need to set about clearing the obfuscation.

When purification happens, higher vibrations flow in. New ideas become understandable. We should thus insulate ourselves from negativity and keep our centers pure and receptive, so that the higher states of consciousness can guide us.

There’s a technique called the golden egg technique: Imagine that there is an egg and in it there exists gold. The gold is hidden inside the egg. Treat every problem you encounter as one such egg. Imagine that there is a golden opportunity hidden inside every problem. Whenever you are faced with a problem don’t lose hope. Instead of getting disheartened, try to understand that it is only an egg with precious gold tucked away deep inside. Delve deep into the problems and recognize golden opportunity. This attitude will invoke creativity in you.

There are many more ways of dealing positively with problems. Try this, when you come face to face with a problem, think of at least 20 ways of dealing with it. Play a game. Write down all the possible solutions. OK, now that you’ve written down 20 options, choose five out of the 20 and begin working on the,. With those five kinds of solutions find 20 ways of fulfilling them. Ask your friends to give ideas. The mother of creativity is the attempt to generate ideas. Play with it.

All these methods can be applied provided you remember not to view a problem as a pain. If you do so, then your hurt body will increase and you will pass on your pain to your children. Are you distressed that your son is lazy? Apply the golden egg technique. In the problem of your lazy son, there is gold hidden…. An opportunity hidden. Treat it as a why he is lazy. Be an anthropologist and study the causes of his laziness. By doing this you are in a proactive state and this state of your being will motivate your son.

Next apply the second method. See 20 ways to make your son active. Take help from friends, as this will help in expanding your ideas. Creativity opens up when there are ideas. Include your son in the game plan and make him your teammate. You will observe the inspiring energy that you create and as a result your family will have a meaningful goal. Use empowering language. There are no winners in an argument. Hence use words wisely. Try and understand others’ points of view instead of branding and labeling them as something or other. The moment you brand them, you will see only the labels. As a result you miss seeing the person.

Stop treating differences as conflicts. View them as points of view. Learn t appreciate variety. Appreciate differences rather than viewing them as pain. The moment you relate to differences as pain, you will experience them as pain. View differences as creative versions and you will feel positive energy flow through you.

Know your life

He who has faith and devotion in God as a result of his innate innocence, easily beholds God in everything, in every tree and animal, in every aspect of Nature. This attitude enables him to live in perfect harmony, in tune with Nature. The never-ending stream of love that flows from a true believer towards entire Creation will have a gentle, soothing effect on Nature. This love is the best protection of Nature.

The relationship between man and Nature is like the relationship between Pindanada, the microcosm and Brahmnananda, the macrocosm. Our ancestors understood this and so they included Nature worship in religious practices. The idea behind all religious practices was to closely associate human beings with Nature. By establishing a loving relationship between man and nature they insured both the balance of nature and the progress of the human-race.

Ancients loved and worshipped trees and plants such as the banyan tree, bilva and tulsi, not because the trees bore fruit and helped them to make a profit, but because ancients knew that they were connected.

Indic scriptures suggest that a householder should perform the pancha yajnas or five daily sacrifices… Bhuta yajna is the last sacrifice; it is to serve all living beings as embodiments of the Universal Being. This is done through the feeding of and caring for animals and plants. Earlier, family members never ate before feeding domestic birds and animals.

They would also water their plants and trees before eating. In those days worshipping Nature and natural phenomenon were part and parcel of human life. People were always eager to please Nature in gratitude for her kind gifts. Bhuta yajna brings about the consciousness of the unity of all life.

The will of separation between humans and Nature is created mainly by the selfish attitude of humans. They think that Nature has created only for them to use and exploit in order to fulfill their selfish desires. This attitude creates a wall, a separation and a distance.

Everything is pervaded by consciousness. It is consciousness which sustains the world and all creatures in it. To worship everything, seeing God in all, is what religion advises. Such an attitude teaches us to love Nature. None of us would consciously injure our own body, because we know it would be painful. Similarly, we will feel the pain of other people to be our own when the realization dawns in us that everything is pervaded by the same consciousness. Compassion will arise, and we will sincerely wish to help and protect all. In that state, we won’t feel like plucking even a leaf unnecessarily.

Looking at Nature and observing its selfless way of giving, we can become aware of our own limitations. That will help to develop devotion and self surrender to God. Thus, Nature helps us to become closer to God and teaches us to truly worship Him. In reality, Nature is nothing but God’s visible form which we can behold and experience through our senses. Indeed, by loving and serving Nature we are worshipping none other than God Himself.

Deposite some Karma for Future

Just as matter cannot be created or destroyed but merely transformed into another form, our body after our passing away from this life is transformed into another form. There is no end, no finality to our lives. There is just transformation.

It is proven in Buddhist tantric experiments that the natural elements of nature, earth, wind, fire, water and space – have qualities of the mind and also support vital systems of our body functions. It is also proven that there is continuity of our mind from one birth to another. There have been reports of instances where a child quite naturally yet vividly remembers the place of birth and some of the critical happenings of her past life. Therefore, there could be direct linkage of elements to our psychophysical state.

If we conclude that there is afterlife, the question arise “What kind of births could we take?”

According to Buddhist teachings there are six realms in which we can reborn - As hungry ghosts, animals, humans, demigods and god realms. It is not to say that there are different worlds that we are born in or anything like that. All these counties rebirths are the direct effect of our affected emotions. The reason for being born in these realms is driven by the resulting karmic accumulations. Being born in the hell realm is due to our affected emotions of hatred, being born as hungry ghosts is due to greed; envy and jealousy leads us to birth in the asura realm, pride into the god realm, confusion as animals and ignorance as human beings. Even for those born in god realm, there is intense suffering as the good effect that has given them this birth will be born out someday and they will have to be reborn in lower realms. This is because they are not in a position to neither accumulate anymore good karma nor clean their accumulated bad ones, being in a state of mental blankness.

Now the good news -It Is birth only in the human realm – with its freedoms and advantages of being born with sense faculties at a place where dharma teachings can be obtained (perhaps obsolete in this interest era) and with the right intent and faith – that  spiritual trajectory and, therefore, possibility of good rebirth is possible.

All this simply means that if we wish to be born in higher realms we can undertake practices in this life to achieve the end we want. We can tweak the stacked up causes before us to our advantage to have the desired good effect. And these practices essentially lead us to doing good deeds of body, speech and mind, in the process accumulating deposits of good karma in our spiritual bank account.

Accumulate good karma by doing good deeds without an ulterior motive of personal gain or gratification or to show off. However, the true fruit of this merit is deposited into your account only after such deeds are dedicated to the wellness and Buddhahood of every sentient being. While it is good to increase the ‘bank balance’ in this way and add to credit, it is important to keep an eye on the debit side of the entries as well!

What better investment can we think of in this materially driven world than investing in the mother of all investments, where accomplishment and returns are guaranteed – the investment in good karmic deposits?

Know your internal values

Every choice we make has consequences, whatever obvious or not. What seems a great choice at the moment may perhaps have negative consequences later on? A holistic way to approach choices and consequences is to examine our personal value system.

There once was mountaineering team that had prepared for three years for a competitive clime. When they finally began, somewhere after the second camp they came across a seriously injured climber in need of medical assistance. Those were the days of no cell phones. One of the members of the team, seeing the dire situation, and obviously out of a strong value system, decided to drop out of the climb and help to bring down the injured person. No amount of pleading from his team convinced him to do otherwise. And their argument was that “we have our own agenda and this case is of no concern to us”.

If you have been brought up to be caring as soon as a situation presents itself, you are prompted to action. Take the example of someone with a hundred-rupee note on a busy street corner looking desperately for change today for an auto rickshaw and getting refused by people around/ As  soon as you see this you know you have the required change as well as the willingness to relieve another person from difficulty and anxiety. You also know that you might one day be in the same situation. “Do unto others what you would like them the Golden Rule, because it is an eternal value.

So you approach the person, respond to the need and walk away. You feel good about yourself because there was congruence between your value system and the choice you made.

What is this ‘congruence?’ It is a match between value and action. Sometimes we are faced with choices that are not congruent with our value system; extreme ones are like having to perhaps pay a bribe for something that is our legitimate right.

How we respond to a situation depends on how strongly we wish to uphold our personal value system. It helps if you take time to write down a set of values that you believe in. Then comes the real test, of living the value. The strange thing is that, whenever we make a commitment to ourselves, all sorts of situations pot up to test us.

Making a good living, being peaceful, helpful, sharing resources – these are all values. Out of these values we make choices and take action. Interestingly, every choice we make has a price. In the case of the mountaineer he paid the price of not reaching the summit, with all the successes that could have followed; perhaps also of having let down his team. He let all that go for saving a life.

Values determine our action preferences and priorities. When asked why he had done this, the young mountaineer’s response was, “If I had let that young man die, no matter what success I achieved, I could not have lived with the thought for the rest of my life.” A rabbinic text encourages us: “in places where there are no human beings, be one.”

The yogic scheme of yamas talks about values that are connected with interactions with others. Another is the four-fold maîtri –karuna –mudita -upeksha or universal friendship, compassion; joy in others’ happiness and consideration for others. If you add these two sets you get a comprehensive value system that can stand the test of time and you will notice that all spiritual traditions are in conformity with these.

Liberation from personhood

The brain’s various centers are each designated for a specific function. The senses take cognition of the environment. The anthropological basis of the nervous system was to facilitate an interaction with the environment, based on the individual’s awareness of being separate from the environment. All senses sub-serve the function of underlining a sense of discreteness. Touch, taste, sound, smell and vision are instruments of discrimination. The entity that integrates these inputs and collectively coordinates them as a subject is the assumed ‘identity. The coordinated output of separateness that the senses keep generating is ego.

The brain helps fragment awareness into the subjective ‘self’ and objective ‘non-self’ are vital for each other’s symbiotic existence. Our own identity relies on our ability to perceive our self as uniquely different and distanced from the environment. Various detrimental states of consciousness, such as feeling drowsy, deep sleep, semi consciousness or even an unconsciousness state are familiar. Therefore, it is only logical to believe in states where there is an incremental increase in the level of consciousness.

If identity was base merely on a deep rooted sense of discreteness that the senses generate, would a person, alone in a dark, quiet room – whose brain is not being fed with sensory inputs – consider himself as non-existent? N unconscious person doesn’t interact with the environment but might be assumed to possess an ‘am-ness’ that is partial and aware of only the ‘self’ without comprehending or interacting with the environment. It’s a state of partial awareness.

A seizure that arises in the portions of the limbic system – phylogenetically one of the oldest groups of neurons – could give rise to profound spiritual experiences. Repeated bursts of abnormal electrical activity can facilitate a new pathway within the compels network of neurons. This is called ‘kindling’ – where consciousness may be getting defragmenter leading to an un-split awareness.

All sense organs route their inputs through the limbic system and to various designated areas. The sensation of extreme bliss generated by un-split awareness gets triggered by the limbic system and not in the frontal lobes, the seats of intelligence and logical analysis. Such experiences are hence states of altered awareness rather than conclusions arising as a result of intellectual through processing of the brain. The experience or realization that the am-ness of subject and object are of the same essence could be that final frontier of consciousness evolution, the attainment of state of super consciousness. Faith and devotion as ways to salvation rely on the dismantling of the worshipper’s identity and becoming one with the worshipped. That is, perhaps inputs that serve to generate and maintain a separateness of the self are modulated or filtered within the limbic system – a state of comprehensive, un-resurrected oneness.

It’s a paradoxical situation of the observer becoming the observed without the meditation of sense3 organs, by expanding awareness to a supra sensory level. Realization may well be a modulation and ‘kindling’ of the neural pathways leading to a perception of oneness with the entire cosmos. It would  then really be more a liberation from the person rather than of the person.