A New Year and more of prosperity and peace

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Each New Year, we wish others happiness and prosperity. What really is the sign of prosperity? There are several - a smile, contentment, freedom, the willingness to share, fearlessness and the trust and confidence that you will get what you need in life.

Welcome the New Year with a genuine smile. As you flip the calendar, keep flipping your mind as well. Don’t fill your future dates with past events. Learn and unlearn from the past, and move on.

You want to be free of greed, hatred, jealousy and all such imperfections. Understand that negative emotions are due to the past. Do not let the past affect your life in the present. If you cannot forgive the past, then your future will be miserable. This New Year make up with someone with whom you are not on good terms. Start life afresh.

In the New Year, wish peace and prosperity for all. Do selfless service. Live your life well. Realise that your priority is to check violence in the world, free of domestic and societal violence. Make a resolution to do more good, help people in need and bring solace to those suffering.

Whenever you are useful to people, merit will never be lost. Any good gesture or action of yours will always come back to you. Today you have the whole world for a family. That’s what you need to feel, that everybody is part of your own family. Take responsibility. Then there is no suffering.

The spiritual dimension of life brings a great sense of belongingness, responsibility, compassion and caring for the whole world, for all life. In its truest form spirituality helps us overcome narrow boundaries of caste, creed, religion and nationality and give you a broader awareness of life everywhere.

• Open your eyes and see how much you have been given. 
• Focus on what you have rather than what you don’t have. 
• The more grateful you are, the more will be given to you. 

Conversely, the more you complain, the more will be taken away from you. This is what Jesus Christ meant when he said, “Those who have will be given more; those who don’t give, and even what they have will be taken away from them.”
With gratitude, reach out and help those who are less endowed. You will get much contentment when you serve selflessly. Then you realise that your problems aren’t so big after all. The biggest reason for mental depression is the constant refrain of the mind that says, “What about me?” This is a sign of lack of prosperity.

Become free like a bird. Open your wings and learn to fly. This is something you have to experience within yourself. If you think you are in bondage, you will remain bound here. Be free. When will you experience freedom? After you die? Become free right now. Sit down and become contented. Spend some time in meditation and satsang. This not only calms your mind, your inner self becomes strong enough to deal with challenges.

When the mind relaxes, the intellect becomes sharp. When the mind is loaded with ambitions and feverish desires, then the intellect loses its keenness. When intellect and observation are not sharp, life does not express itself fully. Ideas don’t flow properly and abilities diminish day by day. With this understanding, you step out of your narrow confines and that will solve many of the problems in your life. When you are centred, there is happiness always. With this calmness, talents arise naturally. Intuition comes, beauty comes, peace comes; Love springs up. Prosperity comes.

by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar                                                                                                               source here

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• the Precious Gift

You've got it right and others are on a 'wrong' path

I am ready for my quiet sitting time in the morning. This is the time when ideas, impressions, new possibilities, even pieces of dreams from unknown sources come visiting. Today though, they seem to fit together, creating a cohesive story that unrolls itself before me. 

We are about a hundred or so in number, sitting together and ready for the satsang of this clean-shaven white-clad teacher.

He began: Try to say 'complimentary religion' rather than comparative religion. Compare is often followed by the word contrast; there is nothing to compare or contrast. Do not study other traditions to find holes in their belief systems. Honour the strengths of your own tradition. And if you notice similarities with others, be gracious enough to acknowledge and appreciate the gifts of other traditions. Cure yourself of thinking that you've got it right and others are on a 'wrong' path.

Familiarise yourself with the mystics of all spiritual paths; Kabir, Rumi, Tukaram, Julian of Nowrich, Hassids, Sufis. Be conversant with the Bible and see how Jesus tries to spread love, and cut across discriminative barriers; reflect on the Bhagavad Gita and the call to a life of sattva and selfless action; explore the intricate web of the Quran and recognise invitations to mercy and justice; appreciate the stress on self-work and enlightenment in the Dhammapada.

Consider all these as intimations of a larger implicit order; parts of an unseen wholeness. At all times look for 'invitations' ^ what are the divine messengers inviting us humans to think, to be, to do?

No traditions, if you've studied them with sensitivity and understanding, incite their followers to violence. Abstain from defiling any tradition by placing its name before such words as terrorism or bomb.

We were a deeply silent crowd a mix of young and old, ordinarily dressed, as well as saffron-clad, robed, bearded, turbaned; of priests, nuns, intellectuals of various shades. Yet the teacher addressed us as if individually, with integrity, intensity, and uncommon humility. As we let it all sink in, we smiled at each other in confirmed fellowship.

Enigmatically, he lifted a pair of scissors and a paper punch in each hand: Strive not to cut asunder nor punch holes. Placing them down, he picked a paper clip and stapler and added: Try rather to be a connector, a uniter. 

Steer clear of a worldview of distancing, division and dominance. Do not subscribe to any ideology of hate. If you set up TV channels, do so not to malign others with voices that sound fierce and uncompromising or worse reasonable-sounding yet slyly malicious. Use the power of the media to spread the message of peace and real community.

All spiritual traditions care as much for the soul as for the soil and the social, because both agriculture and culture have their common root in the Latin cultus meaning worship.

If your benefactors or flock are ready to raise funds, use the money, time or attention not simply for proselytising but for building schools, hospitals, homes for the aged, and hospices.

In your prayers, while wishing happiness, health and prosperity for your family, friends and colleagues, raise the bar higher to include the rest of the six billion of the earth who breathe the same air, and whose blood runs the same colour as yours.

He ended: Think at all times how to remain centered, sane and intelligent. One's efforts should be directed towards acquiring enlightenment, refining desire and will by purging them of selfishness, by learning to endure pain, getting rid of hate, cultivating love.

Turn to the side where the light is. 

Source: here

Take charge of your life

Image via WikipediaWhenever things don't happen the way you want them to, there is a temptation to name it destiny. This is how you deal with failure; you are consoling yourself. Whatever situations you are living in, to be human means that you can mould situations the way you want them.

But today, most people in the world are moulded by the situations in which they exist. That is simply because they exist in reaction to the situations they are placed in.

So their question will be, "Why was I placed in such a situation? Is it my bad luck, is it my destiny?" Everything that you know now as "myself" is just an accumulation. Your body is just an accumulation of food. What you call "my mind" is an accumulation of impressions that you have gathered through the five senses. What you accumulate can be yours; it can never be you. What is you is yet to come into your experience; it is in an unconscious state.

You are not even 100 per cent conscious of what you have accumulated. You are trying to live your life through what you have gathered, not through who you are.

You have acquired certain tendencies depending upon the type of impressions you have gathered. This can be changed. Irrespective of your current tendencies, your past experience of life, your genetics, irrespective of who your parents were, where you were born, where you grew up, if you do certain things with yourself, you can change this.

You can completely rewire yourself in 24 hours' time. A century ago, many things that people believed to be destiny or God's will, like diseases, infections and death are today in our hands because we have taken charge of certain things. What we call technology today is just this: Within the laws of nature, everything on the outside that can be taken charge of, we will take charge of someday.

As there is an outer technology, there is an inner technology or inner engineering. Everything that this life is, is naturally happening to a certain law. If you know what the nature of life within you is, you can completely take charge of the way it happens. Then would you let any unpleasantness happen to you?

Unpleasantness is happening to you in the form of anger, fear, anxiety and stress because your basic faculties — your body, mind, emotions and your life energies — are doing their own thing as if they don't belong to you.

It doesn't matter who you are. Life doesn't work for you unless you do the right things. Existence is not judgmental. Good, bad, all these judgments are essentially human and socially conditioned. Every society has its own idea of what is good and bad, but existence is treating all of us the same way. Who-ever is receptive right now gets the bounty of life. The whole aspect of yoga is to make you receptive.

If your experience of life trans-cends the limitations of the physi-cal, you become available to Grace. Suddenly you function like magic. Other people may think you are magic but you know you are just beginning to become receptive to a different dimension of life. And for everybody, this possibility is wide open.

When it comes to outside realities, all of us are differently capable. What you can do, somebody else cannot do; what someone else can do, you cannot do. But when it comes to inner possibilities, every human being is equally capable. You are not any less capable than a Buddha or a Jesus or anybody for that matter. All of us have the same inner capabilities, unfortunately never explored, never accessed.

by SADHGURU @ http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Lifestyle/Spirituality/Take_charge_of_your_life/articleshow/3510241.cms

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