Saturday, July 24, 2010

Love with wisdom is bliss. Love without knowledge or wisdom is pain

Posted: 24 Jul 2010 02:53 AM PDT

Continued from the last post..
Q: Please, please, please, please answer my question. Dear Sri Sri, when there is love, why suffering is also there in a relationship?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:
Love with wisdom is bliss. Love without knowledge or wisdom is pain. Why is there pain in love? That is what you are wondering or questioning about! It is not love which is giving you pain. If it is just purely love, that means you just care for someone, you want the best for them, and then there is no pain. But when you want something in return from them or you have demands from them, then there is pain. Small things like you love somebody and they didn’t smile at you, that is enough! You love somebody and they are interested in someone else, they flirt around or complement someone, good enough for you to burn the next 24 hours or days. Jealousy, hatred, greed, arrogance and attachment are all love’s distortions. Love by itself doesn’t bring a misery. That is why knowledge and centeredness are so important. If you centered, you can handle all these distortions, they come for a while and they disappear.
Doesn’t matter, I will handle! I can easily manage people from falling!

Q: Another question on love. When you were here last time, you said not to say ‘I love you’ too much for too much expression of love destroys it all. Now, my husband never says it. What to do?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:
Listen! I have no experience of all this and what husband and wife say to each other!
May be, you should ask your husband why does he love you so much. May be he is waiting for you to say. This is a chance when you can say and look at his face.

Q: Where do negative thoughts come from? If they come in me, does that mean I am negative or bad? I refocus on thoughts again and again, but they come back. I judge them, I don’t like them and I think about judgment, but I am not able to get rid of those? What should I do?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:
Now, there is a problem. You chase them and they come to you multiplied. Just give them a tight hug and you will suddenly find they have disappeared. They are scared of your hug, but they are fond of you chasing them. So, they come back again for you to chase them again, again and again.
If too many negative thoughts are coming, reason is lack of circulation in you. Do a lot of exercises. I think you have too much free time to sit and think. If you keep yourself busy, less of negative thoughts will come. If you are constipated, for sure you will have negative thoughts. So, set your bowel movements correct. That will also help you. If vatta, pitta or kapha imbalance comes, then also you will have too many negative thoughts. Ayurveda herbs will help for that. You can take 2-3 triphla tablets in night, and something to soothe your nervous system, like shatavari. These herbs calms and soothes the system.
The company you are in can also affect the mind. Company of people who are negative, can also affect the mind.
One last thing that affect is time. Certain times, certain planetary positions and certain cosmic energies can all affect your mind. But all this will pass. Don’t be paranoid about anything. Just know that time moves on.

Q: What is the relationship between seeker, guru and the Divine?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:
The beginning, middle and end of a same line. It is the seed, the plant and the tree.

Q: Beloved Guruji, I see you in my thoughts and my dreams. I am free and completely surrendered in my thoughts and dreams. But why is my experience different when I meet you here. Also why don’t I get to spend time with you in person?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:
You are spending time with me here. You take up some project and you will definitely get to spend time with me.

Q: Guruji, is there any particularly good direction to sit in to practice our spiritual practices, and also when you are sleeping?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:
Any direction is ok. Usually, you face the sun if the sun is there, east and west during sunrise and sunset respectively. When sun has already set and it’s dark, usually we face the north.
But that is not so important.
Why do we face the sun in the morning or evening? This is because force of energy is from one direction. So, if you are sitting facing one side and force is from the other side that means there is no balance on the other side. Suppose, you have one light here, and no light there, then there is an imbalance between the right and the left. So, sitting accordingly balances the right and the left. You are to balance right and left for meditation. So, it is said that way. But it is secondary, not even secondary, it is tertiary. It is not that important.

Friday, July 23, 2010

The aura of body is mind.

Posted: 23 Jul 2010 05:41 AM PDT

Q: An ‘Art of Living’ teacher once said that God created us and He is perfect. So, we are perfect. That’s believable. We are perfect, so shouldn’t an engineer’s work be perfect? How come it is not?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: The question is perfect and the answer is even more perfect. Everything in the universe is moving from one level of perfection to another level. Milk is perfect and when it turns into yogurt, yogurt is perfect. You take out cream from yogurt, and that is perfect, and then you make butter, and that is also perfect. This is one way of looking at it. The other side of looking at it is, the milk got spoil and you make cheese out of it. When yogurt got spoil, it became imperfect and you took butter out of it. This is another way to look at it. It all depends on how you look at it. It’s imperfection that gives value to perfection. Isn’t it so? How can you call something perfect? Because there is something which is not perfect. So, the existence of something which is not perfect is absolutely essential to understand something that is perfect. So, the imperfect makes the perfect, perfect!

Q: I was wondering what exactly the mind is. Is it a little space in our brain or is it universal? And yes, I want to tell you that you rock.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Mind is energy which is all over the body. See, every cell in your body is emitting some energy and the totality of all that energy around you is what you call the mind. Mind is not present at some point in the brain, but mind is all over the body. There is so much deep knowledge about consciousness; we should sometime go much deeper into it. We will understand more. The more you understand, the more wonder-struck you are. Wow!

You know, people have phantom hand, that means they really don’t have a hand, but they feel they have a hand and they feel sensations like itching or paining in that hand. People who have lost their hand or leg in a war or accident, later sometimes, they feel they have a phantom hand or a leg. Though, they don’t have it physically. That explains or gives a clue that the mind is not just in one spot, it is all around the body. The aura of body is mind. We think that mind is inside the body, it is the other way around - Body is inside the mind. Body is like the wick of the candle and mind is like the glow all around.

Q: Dear Guruji, we have come here to appreciate silence more and more. I love it here but there are times when I would rather be alone and stay in silence. When I go to office or any social place like that, do you think too much silence is a bad thing?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Balance! Balance in life. Anything too much is no good. Too much talking is no good; too much silence is not for you now.

Q: I know that destiny plays an important role in life. Our failures and success in life are connected to destiny. But what role are we playing in our lives?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: You make the destiny. What you did yesterday is a tomorrow’s destiny, and what you do now is destiny day after.

Q: The history of ancient India is filled with the accounts of enlightenment, yogis taking on supernatural states of awareness and capabilities. Yet, to help me understand, how does one interpret such stories? Are these methodologies with allegorical significance, or they point to the untapped potential hidden in each one of us?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Do you know about the first airplane? Who flew the first airplane? (‘Right brothers’ came the answer). This is what we hear or read in the books. Absolutely wrong. 50 years before Right brothers, one man from Bangalore, Subray Shastry, he went into meditation, in silence and then he went to meet a yogi. The yogi took him to deeper meditation, and he started cognizing the engines, he downloaded all that! He wrote a book called ‘Vaimanik Shastra’ and then he flew the plane in 1800 with a parsi gentleman. Parsis are the migrants of Iran to India who follow Zoroastrian religion. The parsi gentleman funded him to make the first plane. They flew it on the chaupati beach in Mumbai (or Bombay). This appeared in the ‘London times’ newspaper also. These two were put in jail by Colonial power, and they took and confiscated all the diagrams that he had made. A documentary of this came on television recently, with the newspaper cutting from England and the diagrams that he had cognized. He had made five different diagrams and this is available even today in a book called ‘Bhardawaj Vaimanik Shastra’ – The science of plane by Rishi Bhardawaj. He explained what type of engine that a plane has which takes off straight like a helicopter, and one which goes running and then takes off.

You can find all the details in the website http://www.bharathgyan.com/

More from the same conversation in the next post..

“That which you cannot express is Love.
That which you cannot reject/renounce is Beauty.
That which you cannot avoid is the Truth.”
~ Sri Sri Ravishankar