Existence is made out

Joy is the stuff existence is made of. So whenever you are moving towards becoming more existential, you will be becoming more and more full of joy and delight, for no reason at all. If you are moving into detachment, love will grow, joy will grow, only attachments will drop because attachments bring misery, attachments bring bondage, attachments destroy your freedom. Indifference is a pseudo-coin — it looks like detachment, but it only looks like detachment. Nothing will be growing in it. You will simply shrink and die.

Don’t try to achieve happiness

When you are trying to achieve happiness you will miss. The very effort to achieve happiness is absurd because happiness is here: you cannot achieve it. Nothing has to be done about it, you simply have to allow it. It is happening, it is all around you; within, without, only happiness is. Nothing else is real. Watch, look deep into the world, into trees, birds, rocks, rivers, into the stars, moon and sun, into people, animals — existence is made out of the stuff of happiness, joy. Relax and it fulfills you.

Love is not attachment

Love knows no attachment, and that which knows attachment is not love. That is possessiveness, domination, clinging, fear, greed — it may be a thousand and one things, but it is not love. In the name of love other things are parading, in the name of love other things are hiding behind, but on the container the label ‘love’ is stuck. Inside you will find many sorts of things but not love at all.

Are you afraid of aloneness?

Watch. If you are attached to a person, are you in love? Or are you afraid of your aloneness, so you cling? If the person dies or moves somewhere else or falls in love with someone else then you will kill this person or you may kill yourself and you will say, ‘I was so attached that I couldn’t live without her or without him’.

It is sheer foolishness. It is not love, it is something else. You are afraid of your aloneness, you are not capable of being with yourself. And you use the other person as a means for your own ends.

To use another person as a means is violence

Immanuel Kant has made it one of his fundamentals of moral life. He used to say that to treat a person as a means is the greatest immoral act there is. Because when you treat another person as a means — for your gratification, for your sexual desire, for your fear — you are reducing the other person to be a thing, you are destroying his or her freedom, you are killing his or her soul.

Courtesy Osho International Foundation/ www.osho.com

Love lessons from nature

To feel love and compassion for all, observe nature with totality of mind without letting it get affected by any previously constructed image,opinion or past knowledge.

Look around to observe things as if you are seeing them for the very first time. Become one with the object of observation.

The sun provides light and warmth irrespective of who benefits from it. It shines on all. The clouds, rivers, mountains and jungles follow the same example of universal love. Trees provide shade, fruits and flowers for healthy environment and food for hungry with the same unattached benevolence for all. They do not demand any favour in return. The earth matures the seeds into healthy plants irrespective of who planted the seeds or who will benefit from them. This truly is like mother's love which is equal and forgiving for all children even when some are the cause of hurt to her.

If one learns from nature, the world will be a much better place as the destructive tendencies like jealousy, envy, hatred and selfishness will be eliminated. A new era of mutual love and trust will dawn on earth. All differences of caste, colour, race, gender and age will melt away. Most of the modern age problems have arisen because we have stopped learning from nature and caring for it.

Imagine the blissful feeling one gets when listening to the chirping of birds at dawn, observing the river flowing its course, looking at the snow-clad peaks of mountains, taking a stroll in a forest with majestically standing tall trees and looking at the moon on a full-moon night or a star-studded sky on amavasya night. The divine feelings generated by such experiences compel one to ponder over the meaning of life, our place in the universe, and create an urge to become one with the Divine to experience eternal bliss. Live with nature, love nature, protect nature, learn from nature and you will soon rise above all parochial tendencies and become a votary of universal love.

Since long, we have been drawing spiritual inspiration from nature. According to Buddhist guru Daisaku Ikeda, who is also a keen photographer, response to nature's beauty is not merely aesthetic but reflects an ability to discern a deeper meaning and interconnectedness in things. With its universal language, the photographer of nature's beauty serves as a bridge connecting the hearts of people everywhere.

Osho in his discourse on 'Intuition' quotes the haiku of Basho the Zen mystic and master:

"When I look carefully I see nazunia blooming by the hedge!"

Osho says that the deep meaning of it cannot be understood intellectually but only intuitively. The idea Osho wants to convey is that one can draw deep spiritual inspiration even from simple things like looking at an ordinary flower and pondering over its beauty, its divine message, the mystery of creation.

The main cause of discontent of mind, heart and spirit is to spend too much time indoors and being away from the nurturing restorative powers of nature. So, try to get back to nature in some way. Give yourself some time in the woods, mountains, open meadows or walking barefoot on the beach. Drink in the beauty of nature as much as you can. Even if you live in the city, go and walk on the grass in a park. You will feel more complete, rejuvenated and blissful.

Live life joyfully!

If you are reading this, you have many more reasons to be joyful than you might think. You are alive, which is probably pretty basic, but all too often we don't realise that it is the most basic things that bring us the greatest joy.

We often forget to celebrate the things that are most important because they are so much with us. One of the few really wise people I have ever met once asked with great puzzlement, “Why isn't everyone dancing with the sheer joy of being alive?” Everything we do celebrate is a celebration of life, whether it is a birth, a wedding, or an anniversary. Religious festivals all celebrate some aspect of life as represented by the attributes of the deity, or the passage of some event of our lives. What we need to do is remind ourselves to consecrate every day, take time out at least once a day to quietly experience being alive. And the simplest way to that is to just pay attention to our breathing, which is another wonderful reason to be joyful.

Breath is the key to life and almost every spiritual discipline starts and ends with the breath, as does life itself. Every moment we are meditating. With every breath we are partaking of all the mysteries of the universe. Mathematically there are six molecules of Buddha in every square foot of air. A foolish friend of mine used to like to breathe in real deep to try and get some Buddha in him.

It seemed to work for him. Just for a few minutes pay attention to a gentle indrawn breath. Within that action is the key to sustaining our life. How does that happen? Whenever I think I need a miracle just to keep going, I stop and pay attention to one or two breaths. Each breath feeds the fire of the heart. Amazing.

Odds are that if you're reading this you have enough to eat. Most of us don’t eat gourmet food three times a day, but we are blessed with sufficient food, and I don’t just mean enough to provide the basic calory intake to keep us alive. We are blessed with all the associations of a loving mother that comes with the taste of some food, the memories of discovering new wonderful tastes every time we eat them again, and the love that we imbibe with food made by those who care enough about life to prepare good food, a spouse or a friend. I believe that food made by people who love to feed people has special nutritional properties.

If you think that nobody cares enough about you to prepare delicious food, let me invite you to go and get a banana, and pay attention to it. What a marvel of packaging, flavour and nutrition. I am not implying that that particular banana was grown just for you as an act of love, or may be I am. It grew, it made its way to you and it will sustain you. Now I can hear you arguing that it was provided by a chain of commerce.

What if that chain was forged to get that banana to you without any of the links being aware of the chain’s purpose? Might be, and even if it isn’t, the banana is still pretty amazing in its color, utility, taste and ability to keep us alive. I once knew a man named Rudy who only ate bananas, all different kinds and he was very healthy. And think about bread. I know that it is not much more than grain and salt and water but think about what that means. Bread, naan , chapatti, tortilla, pain, hobz, brot, or whatever you call it provides us with the elements of the earth. The process of growing, threshing and milling the grain transforms the earth into a form that we can use.
Sit in a comfortable chair with a large glass of water and take a small sip of water. Notice something about the water as you swallow. Feel it with you, feel the water’s presence. Take more small sips, noticing something different about the water each time until you drink one third of the water. Now take more small sips, this time noticing something about yourself each time. Keep sipping and noticing until two thirds of the water is gone. Now spend time with the remaining third of the water, notice its relationship with the glass, its relationship to you and your relationship to other things in the room.

So, there are a number of really elemental reasons to be joyful. Celebrate them everyday. Is this simple? Yes, but that doesn’t mean easy. We are all too often caught up in the drama of the day, our pain, the effort of work, the demands of family and friends to be full of joy. Yet, we each have a few minutes to celebrate the fire, earth and water and remind our selves to dance.

But there are more than elemental reasons to be joyful. You’re reading this in the my blog, which means you know English and most likely at least one other language. Every language is the key to wisdom that only that key can open. Whole worlds are yours to explore, and I don’t just mean Shakespeare or the Vedas, you also have the keys to the Marx brothers and humour in Hindi, Marathi, Kanada, French or whatever language you might know. Laughing can cure more things than you think.

How happy are you?

Are you the happiest person you know? Not necessarily the luckiest, richest, or most successful, just the happiest?

If not, why not? Most people will reel off their current worries — the job, the kids, the car, the price of fish. I don’t mean to sweep these aside: problems need to be solved, if you can, or waited out until they disappear . But as far as living happily is concerned you have to face a crucial fact. If you can only live happily after all your problems are solved, you are never going to live happily, because when today’s problems are gone and forgotten, others will take their place. So either living happily is just impossible, or you have to do it in spite of your problems.

Being happy depends not so much on external circumstances as on your inner life. This means all your thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, emotions, desires, dreams — your entire mental and emotional scene. Happiness is about how you react inwardly to events, what you think and believe, how you feel, how problems affect you. It may sound obvious, but like many obvious things it’s something that is often forgotten when it matters most. We focus almost exclusively on our external lives, on getting and spending and having fun, and then wonder why we are not happy. But it’s when our inner lives are tranquil that we are happiest and we call this inner peace.

So how is inner peace to be achieved? Is it a question of religion, perhaps, or yoga? These can certainly help but only if they have a positive effect on your inner life. The difficulty is that inner life is based on patterns and habits — some you were born with, most you have acquired . You don’t choose, occasion by occasion, how you respond inside when something happens. This happens and you feel angry; that happens you feel sad; you pass the patisserie and you feel hungry; you hear a tune or smell a certain scent and it reminds you of a particular time or person? Things produce a response without you thinking about it or choosing how you feel, and they don’t necessarily leave you with inner peace. So the trick is to break the pattern.

You can’t completely avoid problems, but you can change how you react to them by acquiring new habits that provoke peaceful inner responses. Training your inner life into different habits requires learning skills of thinking, feeling, and managing your beliefs and desires. These are very like the virtues many religions and philosophies advocate, but if you think of them as skills rather than virtues, you benefit from an important and liberating shift. Instead of “I must become a better person” you can think “I would live more happily if i worked on my skills” , so the change in attitude becomes a choice, not a duty. And to these remedial skills i’ve added an extra set of enjoyment skills, otherwise getting happier could turn out a very depressing affair.

This process is not something you can do overnight, it’s a whole new way of life, but the reward is what we all want most — happiness. There are five main skills you need to cultivate.

Mindfulness:

Borrowed from Buddhism , this involves developing your ability to focus your thoughts in the present. The problem most of us have with thought is having too much of it — the worrying and nonstop mental chattering our minds are prone to. Mindfulness is a key inner skill because, as it gets stronger, it lets you focus on your own inner life and catch your habits in the act. Once you can see how you are ruled by them, the change you are seeking often happens of its own accord.
Compassion:

Most religions rightly stress compassion. As well as being a virtue in its own right it is a practical skill that counteracts negative emotions like anger and hatred, which are terrible wreckers of happiness. Try it the next time someone annoys you: put yourself in their place and ask yourself what they might they be thinking or feeling to behave like that. Even bad people, let alone people who just mildly annoy you, often have a warped or mistaken view of the world which makes them do what they do. Wars are started and atrocities committed, for example, because someone decides that this is what their God wants. It doesn’t mean they should get away with their actions, in fact it may be necessary to take strong action to defend yourself.

Story skills:

These are very useful for problems with your inner belief system, as they let you stand back and explore alternative versions of reality. Beliefs have great power over your life because a belief is something you take as fact. Start to think of your beliefs as stories, and it is easier to accept that other things might be true as well, or even instead . Even true stories only select the little bit of reality we are focusing on at the moment: no one story is the whole truth about any situation. From a different point of view we would see a different story, sometimes a whole different world. This is not about make believe, it’s about reframing situations to look at them from a different perspective.

Letting-go techniques:

These are particularly helpful when we are unhappy not getting what we want. Generally, we are encouraged to keep wanting and to think that more will make us happier, whether it’s clothes or cars or even love. But wanting is a treadmill: as long as you have unsatisfied wants and desires you won’t be at peace, so to be happy you either have to satisfy all your desires, or let go of some of them. Letting-go skills also include forgiveness, which helps hugely if one of the things you think you want is revenge.

Enjoyment skills:

This last group includes skills such as patience , humour and, especially, gratitude . You don’t have to be grateful to someone, it’s enough to cultivate gratitude for things. Our minds naturally scan the environment for dangers and resources, a useful mechanism when we were hunter-gatherers . But it can make us unnecessarily pessimistic — focusing on the 10% we lack rather than the 90% we have. Cultivating enjoyment skills will help redress the balance.
Acquiring all these skills takes time and effort. The important thing is to practise them until they operate without you thinking about them. Your practice routine will be very individual , because everyone needs to prioritise different skills depending on the specific issues that are holding them back from being happy, but keep the skills in mind and you will constantly find new ways to try them out.

Your auras reveal more about the real you

The world of the spirit begins where logic ends. Logic is limited by the boundaries of reason, which is further limited by the limitations of the individual's buddhi.

However, since most speak and comprehend only the tongue of logic, we can try to understand the aura which is of the spiritual realm.

All bodies emit heat radiation or vibrations. With non-living bodies, since there is no immediate change in their structure, this emission remains constant. In living bodies cells are constantly being destroyed and created; the rate of vibrations are continuously changing. This is the superficial or logical explanation of what auras are and why they are constant or changing.

A lot of 'scientific' study of physical auras has been done in the West in recent years. Researchers have variously called it the human atmosphere, force field, and bio-energy. The fundamental substance of aura is best described by the Sanskrit term, prana. For our present purposes we could understand it as the vital essence or force, which is the basis of all manifested life. It is the steam that runs the physical and mental machinery of life. The colours of our mental states are manifested in the pranic substance of our auras.

Logically, these colours are regulated at seven energy centres of the body called the chakras. Each of the chakras, mooladhar, swadhishthan, manipoorak, anahat, vishuddhi, ajna and sahastrar vibrate at a particular colour frequency. It is like software for each chakra. When the software malfunctions or the wrong software goes into the wrong chakra, imbalance and malfunctioning occurs. Any imbalance that stays for too long becomes chronic and manifests as an ailment in the physical body.

What the clairvoyant can see are the aura or chakra imbalances in the shade of the colour being too dark or heavy or colours other than the chakra's own colour manifesting. Considerations like what shade is mixing with the natural colour, in what proportion, the positioning, the luminosity. All determine the state of the being. Only an enlightened person would be able to interpret the infinite permutations and combinations correctly.

The real person stands revealed once you have the correct interpretation of the auras. You can hide your face by applying make-up or you may hide your true body by wearing loose fitting clothes, you may even lie about your character and intention but it is impossible to hide your true self from the eyes of a clairvoyant, for aura is something you cannot hide.

The entire spectrum of colour and light are in human auras. Different colours belong to different areas around the body. Lower centres or chakras of the body are associated with darker and heavier colours like reds and browns. The higher centres have light pink, violet and blue. Again, more evolved souls have much more luminescence in their auras than the average individual.

What does your aura tell you? Your aura indicates your state of health to come, specific diseases that are manifested or are going to manifest in your body, your mental and emotional state, your level of intelligence, and how evolved you are as an individual. Assigning meanings to specific colours is of no use to the novice. The positioning, thickness, luminescence, shade and changeability are some of the factors that are taken into account in interpretation. The interpretation is always left to the guru.