A small story:
There was a monastery where Lord Siva was worshipped.
The Master had a cat and it was so close to him that he allowed it to jump on him during worship and disturb the daily worship.
When the cat became too playful, the Master would instruct his disciples to place the cat inside a basket during worship.
This became a daily routine.
One day the Master passed away. The cat ran away that night.
The next morning, the successor to the Master took over the proceedings, the daily routines etc. Before starting the daily worship, he asked where the cat was.
On finding that the cat was missing, he declared, 'We cannot do the worship without the cat'. The disciples tried to catch other cats but did not succeed and eventually, they stopped performing the worship!
They were under the impression that the cat was part of the rituals in the worship! This is how most of us blindly follow tradition and norms without understanding the underlying reasons why thev came about.
Once caught in the web of religion, we don't want to miss out on anything related to it. We don't want to leave out anything for fear of doing something wrong, for fear of being the odd one out. Such is the control religion wields over us.
A Vicar in a particular church was concluding his sermon for the Sunday.
He announced, 'Next week, my sermon will be on Truthfulness. On getting back home, I want all of you to read the twenty-ninth chapter of Leviticus which is on truthfulness.'
The following week, the vicar started his sermon. But before that he asked, 'Last week I had requested all of you to read the twenty-ninth chapter of Leviticus. How many of you read it?' Almost all the hands went up.
The Vicar said, 'Just as I had expected. And this is why today's sermon is on truthfulness. Leviticus has only twenty-seven chapters in it!'
How many godheads and priests are willing to deal with the truth in such a jovial way? They only want to stuff their ideologies down our throat and they don't care how much we have assimilated and how much has the potential to turn into our own experience. The preachers should put religion in the right perspective to people. That is what they are meant to do.
Vivekananda says beautifully, 'May you flood your religion with logic and reasoning. Whatever withstands these, let it stay; let the others be washed away. The sooner it is washed away, the better it is for mankind.'
Do not worry about what people think of you. Drop preconceived notions about time and place like 'office is hell', 'beach is fun', 'mornings are tough', 'evenings are cool' and what not. Then, you will be happy wherever you are, whenever it is. Live and enjoy life as it is. Drop all your prejudices of people including vourself, events, time and places. As long as happiness is bound by time and space, it is not real happiness.
The whole problem is that we bind our happiness to either some time or place or event or person. Can you ever recall being happy without a reason? I tell you: When you know how to be happy without a reason, there will be no question of even recalling! Try to understand this. As long as you tag your happiness with an event, place, person or time, you can recall specific instances of happiness and that too with a yearning that the past was happier.
When vou feel happiness when you are around that person, you will start wanting to possess the person and there the problem starts. It becomes revengeful when you want to possess. Wanting to possess is actually a way of revenge.
Also, you will find that when you try to bring back the time you felt happiness in order to experience the same happiness, somehow it is no longer the same. The joy is lacking. After a few unsuccessful attempts, you feel depressed and sick. You don't feel the energy of happiness.
Once you taste happiness as a permanent state within you irrespective of time, place, event or person, every moment is happy. Where then is the question of recalling anything? You will recall when you want to relive happy moments, when you unconsciously feel the present is not so happy as the past was. Recalling so-called past happiness is like an energy booster.
When you recall past happiness, you cerebrally enjoy it once more. But if you feel happiness in your being all the time, there will be no need to recall any past joy. Even if you recall, there will be no yearning in it. It will purely be one more sharing, that's all.
Every 11 days, your emotions go through a complete cycle; that is why the Hindu tradition of Ekadasi vrata of fasting on the eleventh day of the waxing moon was introduced. It is to purify yourselves emotionally. For the next eleven days, think only good things about your body and see how it changes your perception. Just be aware of the greatness of your body. Tell yourself what a beautiful body you have. Feel it while you say it. At the end of it you will see that your body is really beautiful.
It is our perceptions that limit us or liberate us. And this is based on whether we perceive them as they are or as we want them to be. In Tibet, there are communities where a man who is aged a hundred and thirty years is considered young! A 200-year-old man is this community considers himself only middle aged! People live up to three hundred years in that community because of the way they live. They live with limited wants and basic needs. They take nature as it is. Their perceptions of accepting what is given, define their expectations; their expectations in turn make their long life a reality. It is that simple.
It is time to move from the ephemeral to eternal; all we need to do is to deal with things as they are, as we find them and not try changing them. We need to change ourselves, not others or what is around us. What we need is an internal cognitive shift: from seeing things as we want them to be to seeing things as they are and enjoying life as it is. To bring about this transformation, we need to be aware. Meditation will create this awareness in us.
And let me tell you one thing: When you feel inner happiness, or bliss, your mind relaxes and allows your energy to fill your body and mind. When the energy fills you, you get healed and recharged. That is why we say bliss heals.
We have seven energy centers called chakras and this has been accepted by many cultures. Sufis, Chinese, early Christians. Their presence has been proven by Kirlian photography as well. These chakras or energy centers, when kept in an energized condition, cause overall well being at the physical and mental levels. It has been studied that these energy centers expand 60 to 70 times and are highly energized with positive emotions.
On the other hand, these chakras diminish in size and cause ill health when infused with negative emotions. We can predict diseases through just the diminished aura of the chakras. There are also seven glands in our body that are closely associated with these seven charkas. And these glands regulate the general well being of a person. When chakras are disturbed or locked through negative emotions, they give rise to disease.
What are the negative emotions we are talking about? We are referring to emotions such as fantasy, fear, worry, etc. Fantasies lock the Muladhara chakra located at the base of the spine; fears lock the Swadhishtana chakra which is located just below the navel; worries lock the Manipuraka chakra which is located just above the navel; the Anahata chakra in the heart region is related to love and attention-need; jealousy locks the Vishuddhi chakra in the throat region; ego blocks the ajna chakra which is between the eyebrows and discontentment blocks the Sahasrara chakra on top of the head.
When you are blissful, when you have found happiness irrespective of the outer world, then you cannot come under the sway of these emotions. Then your chakras remain in a healthy and energized condition. So again, bliss heals!
And bliss provides us the energy to face and solve our problems. Firstly, when you are not blissful, your energy is used to create more problems. When you are blissful, you disconnect from worries and also use the available energy to solve problems. It has been scientifically proven that when dopamine, the chemical associated with bliss is released, the frontal lobe of the brain, which is responsible for decisions, is activated. When this happens, you find that wisdom just flows.
I have worked with two hundred thousand people over the last two years and seen this to be so. You will see a new understanding come up within you. You have never given a chance for bliss to enter your life.
Bliss attracts fortune says Tantra. When you are really blissful you work intuitively, with higher intelligence. Simply decide that you are not going to think about your problems or work on solving your problems, and you will see that a higher intelligence comes into play. Just do this for the next 48 hours. One lesson you will learn: Without your awareness, Existence comes in to take over and help you. You will take a quantum leap in your awareness that you do not need to work on your problems to dissolve your problems.
We always question this, based on the assumption that we do not have enough intelligence to solve our problems spontaneously, that we do not have the capacity to produce that spontaneity. But let me tell you: However much you try with your intellect instead of intuition vou will only struggle. So move towards bliss and watch your intellect drop!
Listening to Nature's Intelligence