Gone in less than 60 Seconds

Most of us have been told: “Be aware. Increase your awareness. Awareness is such an important thing. It you are unaware, you will miss life. Only total awareness will bring you peace and happiness and will help you get rid of sorrow, misery, unhappiness, anxiety and stress.”

We are able to spot unawareness in others easily. We frequently say “He is so unaware. It’s obvious what he needs to do, but he just can’t see the point. If only he were more aware, life would be so easy for him and others.” And thought this sort of awareness about our environment and its components – people, their reactions and emotions, the weather, external events, one’s abundance or lack of assets and relationships are important, what is more crucial is internal or self awareness.

To be aware, one needs to be conscious or mindful of all things external and internal. The biggest deterrent to awareness is our own mind. We spend a large portion of our lives inside our minds. Give yourself five or 10 minutes to observe where you are. Try and see how long you are living in reality. You will soon realize that within a few seconds you are already gone from your present location into the deep recess of your mind. Into memory, into the past or future, into emotions, and into dramas that are being played in the theatre of mind.

To become aware is not easy. That is why the Buddha said “If you can watch your breath for 60 minutes, without a moment’s distraction, you are already enlightened. For most of us, six or 60 seconds seem impossible, what to say of 60 minutes?

Awareness begins by sitting quietly in one place and watching one’s thoughts. On an average, it has been said that about 60,000 thoughts arise in the human mind every day. So there is very limited space or time for many things that we need to do. As we watch our thoughts without getting attached to them or getting involved with them, thoughts tend to lose steam and disappear. It is attachment to thoughts that gives them energy to sustain and grow.

As we detach ourselves from our thoughts, the numbers of thoughts that keep coming also become less. And when the number of thoughts get reduced at the production stage itself, then there is space and time for us to focus on the external and internal environment and to become aware of those around us, and above all, to become more aware of ourselves. Certainly, all this requires tremendous effort and will.

Once we become aware of ourselves, our journey of self-discovery, for Truth for God and for bliss starts. Till such time we are only living in our minds, believing everything the mind tells us, following up on every small and big thought that hits us, arguing, rationalizing, justifying, imploring, hoping, wishing, worrying, agonizing, celebrating, while life is passing by, in the real world and we are not connected to it. We are far removed from it.

Start with a three or five minute awareness exercise today, and see where it leads you. And see how difficult it is, and see why awareness is such a difficult thing, not because of someone or something outside us, but because of our own selves.

God can be realized through all paths. All religions are true. The important thing is to reach the roof. You can reach it by stone stairs or by wooden stairs or by bamboo steps or by a rope. You can also climb up by a bamboo pole. ----- Ramakrishna Paramhamsa

Know that You are Unique

If you pause for a moment to consider that there never has been nor will there ever be anyone else exactly like you, you will know why being yourself is more important than anything else; and you will be able to sidestep the very commonly prevalent fear or pressure that traps us into blind conformity.

The opposite of courage in our society, psychologist Rollo May said, is not cowardice; it is conformity.

Being inspired by someone and learning from their example is wonderful; but if we were supposed to be exactly like that someone, we would have been created with all of her personal qualities, also circumstances, potential, and limitation too. Instead, each of us is born into a specific time and place, with a unique combination of a certain set of talents, and the potential to add or enhance all that in order to fulfill our individual mission in life.

We have all been taught to measure ourselves against the example of other, greater, more successful beings. We are inspired by them and want to follow their example…. But we can become so obsessed with the need to live like someone else, look, teach, grow successful and become rich like someone else, that before we know it we cease to be ourselves.

In the film The Legend of Bagger Vance, Bagger Vance Volunteers to be caddy for the has-been, written-off golfer Junuh in an important tournament. At a pivotal point in the movie, he tells the indifferent player, “Inside each and every one of us is our one true authentic swing. Something we were born with. Something that’s ours and ours alone. Something that can’t be learned. Something that’s got to be remembered.” It suggests finding our authentic self, our special place in the world, our special way of doing things, our special things to do, that absolutely no one else can.

Once, an old Hassidic story goes, the great teacher Zusia came to his followers, his eyes were red with tears, and his face was pale with fear.

“Zusia, what’s the matter? You look frightened!” The other day, I had a vision. In it, I learned of the question that the angels will ask me when I stand at the Gates of Heaven.”

The followers were puzzled. “Zusia, you are pious. You are scholarly and humble. You have helped so many of us. What question about your life could be so terrifying that you would be frightened to answer it?”

Zusia turned his gaze to heaven. “I have learned that the angels will not ask me, why weren’t you a Moses, leading your people out of slavery?” His followers persisted “So what will they ask you?”

“And I have learned, “Zusia sight, that the angels will not ask me, why weren’t you a Joshua, leading your people into the Promised Land?”

His worried followers demanded, “But what will they ask you?”

“They will say to me, ‘Zusia, there was only one thing that no power of heaven or earth could have prevented you from becoming.’ They will say, “Zusia, why weren’t you Zusia?”

Of course you should be inspired by the examples of others and let their lives motivate you to reach your fullest potential; but ultimately you must become the best place your own name here possible.

Or as Oscar Wilde quipped: Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

New Life for Vivekananda

New life for Vivekananda? It’s time. Ever since I was young there has been a halo around the name of Swami Vivekananda, as there was around his master’s Sri Ramakrishna. Recognition outside India meant a lot a hundred years ago; it was an enviable kind of validation. But to be candid, none of this reverence affected my life. Vedanta was just an arcane term, and the flight of modern Indians was towards science, upward social mobility and personal freedom. I imagine that anyone who took the step of joining the Indian Diaspora followed the same wave that carried me to America.

It was years before I realized what I’d run away from and now Vedanta means a lot to me. It is the map to higher consciousness, never surpassed by later history yet frequently validated in fresh, new ways. Vivekananda did that a century ago. We honor his memory for it, but that’s incidental, for the spiritual path implies action, not salute to memory. Vedanta is either here and now or it is nowhere.

Which means that without new life Vivekananda’s legacy will be inert. The only viable memorial is to put his model of spirituality into practice. I’m avoiding the phrase “put his ideas into practice”, because Vedanta, once reduced to ideas, is equally lifeless. So what would Vivekananda ask us to do today, here and now?

First, to put into practice his famous adage. Jiva is Shiva. A lifetime can be richly devoted simply to these three words. They tell us that individual God-realization is possible; also that external deities exist only to point inward. Further, they imply that inner transcendence is the path to reach the Absolute. None of this is news, and it would be easy to gather countless aspirants who strive to put these words into practice in their daily lives. What is the secret of success, since so many of these aspirants fall short of the goal?

The secret is – there is no goal. The present moment is the home of Vedanta and also the home of self-realization. The present moment isn’t heading anywhere; it has no goal or end point. Seen as Vivekananda would see it, the now is eternal; it is the only time that renews things only; the rush of events, both physical and mental, and the background of consciousness which acts like the screen upon which experience is registered. Experience is passing scenery; consciousness is silent observer. For most, these two are jumbled together. Caught in the rush of experience, they’ve lost the silent observer and so cannot walk through the door that opens to the transcendent.

Vivekananda’s work was mainly occupied with revealing the transcendent. He left many inspiring reminders to point us in the right direction: You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.

You cannot believe in God until you believe in yourself. And the goal of mankind is knowledge… no knowledge comes from outside: It is all inside.

Reminders in this case are actually goads to action. The first duty of every person is to develop a true self. This cannot be done without the inner knowing that Vivekananda embodied, as did Vedic sages. The time is always right for transcendence. No worldly accomplishments are substitutes nor as worthy as the project of developing a true self. The best way to honor Vivekananda + begins at this very moment, with each of us.

River of Enlightenment

Long before the universities packaged the deeply spiritual science of Hindustani music into classroom textbooks, the masters used very little verbiage to communicate its essence.

They explained little, but when they did it was in the form of idioms, proverbs, hyperboles and adages. \but these would show you the world!

For instance, lesson one, they would say, ‘paanee karo’, asking you to repeat. Like the word simran or internal repetition in scriptures, you were to repeat the notes, phrases, scale and words, not just a few time, not for some time, but for hours – nay, for years, till your words and musical phrases flowed to perfection.

Renowned master Ustad Amir Khan Saheb woruld often not and hand over the so-called ‘simple’ prescription to his disciples: Human sapaat… karte raho: the word sapaat means ‘straight’, and he referred to the straight up and down movements of the scale or the raga, to be repeated at length till the gems of enlightenment about its inner nature began to flash through your mind in intuition and the raga shed its heaviness, flowing out of you like a river of enlightenment.

Once, when Khan Saheb had just finished singing a big raga seated among his disciples, Pandit Amarnathji smiled at him and said, “Khan Saheb, you have turned the singing into light music,” at which one of his gurubhais saw red, thinking it an affront. But Khan Saheb smiled at Panditji affectionately, saying, “I appreciate your understanding”. He knew what he meant to say. That the greatest of music ‘sound’ simple though an immense amount of hard labor had gone into reaching its state of lucidity.

On another occasion, after he performed the muhurat fo rGaram Coat, a film whose music was composed by Panditji, his disciple, Ustad Amir Khan Saheb, asked, “Son, how long did you take to compose this song?” It was the beautiful, ‘Jogia sepreet ki ye dukh hoye’ A Meera bhajan sung by Lata Mangeshkar. “About 15-20 days”, was the reply. To which Khan Saheb said, “If you were to take the same amount of time to compose your rendering of any raga before each concert, how would it be …?” It was the same lesson in ‘simplicity’.

Beyond the rational mind, it was repetition alone that took you to the highest peak in your sadhana – to Samadhi state, union with the supreme. The very words aalaap and taan in the Hindustani khayal refer to dhyana or concentration on the raga’s form till the point of its dissolution in the mind during singing, both slow and fast. Aalaap means to expand or ‘spread the notes wide’ during slow unfolding of the raga’s scale, and taan means to ‘stretch them taut’ in the faster portion in dhyana, forgetting all else. And in the process, taking along his listeners as well!

Pandit Amarnathji would say that the image of the rage’s scale in your mind should be horizontal, not vertical, taking of the raga’s inner direction during meditation, which is meant to take you to another kind of ‘high’ – and to ‘mental release’. Finally, as he said, “meditation means not to concentrate on anything when you sing”.

That is why, when Panditji sang it, the raga was no longer a ladder-like scale. It was an aural poem.

Speak Sweetly

One who talks sweet does not have an enemy and is blessed with plenty of wealth and good fortune. RigVed

Speak not harshly to anyone. Those thus addressed will retort. Painful, indeed, is vindictive speech. Blows in exchange may bruise you Dhammmopada 133

Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying that it may minister grace unto the hearers. Bible

You must speak softly and sweetly and give everyone the respect and attention due to them sincerely. Humility and tolerance must characterize your behavior as a devotee. When calm descends and the waters are still, the shadow of the sun within the lake is one full image. Satya Sai Baba

Not the fastest horse can catch a ward spoken in anger. Chinese Proverb

Flower Power

Bread feeds the baby, indeed, but flowers feed the soul. Prophet Muhammad

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change. Gautam Buddha

When the flower blooms, the bees come uninvited. Ramakrishna Paramahansa

If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom? Kahili Gibran

Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars, and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful ….. Look at the flowers for no reason.It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are. Osho