Life 43 (May 22 - Aug 22)

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Transform Life Through Attention

The universe doesn’t need to feel like a cold place, indifferent to our presence.

As Dogen puts it in the Shobogenzo, “mountains belong to the people who love them.”

- Mike Gillis, “The Kindness of Joe Pera”

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Distinguishing Between Pain and Suffering

If you distinguish between pain and suffering, change is possible.

As the saying goes, “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.”

- Jon Kabat-Zinn, “At Home In Our Bodies”

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Patience Is Self Care

Anger, annoyance and impatience deplete energy.

Patient effort strengthens our resources.

- Allan Lokos, “Cooling Emotional Fires”

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What should we do to cultivate pure love and experience happiness?

True love is an expression of Divinity. Like the mariner's compass, it always points to the Divine wherever it may be present.

As oil makes a lamp burn, love illumines life itself.

What is termed love in ordinary worldly life is not real love at all. It is only some form of attachment based on human relationships in family or society.

True love is pure, selfless, free from pride and is full of bliss. Such love can be got only through love.

All worldly attachments are not real love; they are transient. Everlasting, pure love arises from the heart. In fact, it’s ever-existing and all-pervading.

How is it that man is unable to recognise such all-pervading love? It is because man's heart today has become barren and polluted.

The heart is filled with all kinds of desires and there is no room in it for pure, unsullied love to enter.

It is only when worldly attachments are expelled from the heart that there will be room for real love to abide in it and grow.

- Divine Discourse, Jul 27, 1996.

Love seeks no reward; Love is its own reward.

Source: radiosai.org

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Find the Middle Path of Anger

There is great potential for us to find a middle path with anger through mindfulness, not adding to our brutal self-judgments because of it, and not acting it out in ways that ultimately leave us isolated and regretful.

- Sharon Salzberg, “The Deluding Force”

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What is the modus operandi of meditation?

When you meditate on a table, your thoughts dwell on the wood, size, measurements, style, mode of manufacture, etc.

No other thought pertaining to anything else should be allowed. If the thought hovers around a cot, the idea of a table becomes hazy, and the cot is also imagined incompletely. Both the pictures are not unclear. The state of mind must be single-pointed.

So too, when the Divine’s form is meditated upon, the mind must dwell upon each part of the form and its beauty and splendour, and these ideas must be coordinated and combined into the complete picture. That is the modus operandi of meditation.

Persistent performance of this meditation will result in the emergence of a particular form. Contemplating on that form, looking at it and seeing it for days and days will finally lead you to a stage where the form will disappear and you will forget yourself. That is the super-conscious (samadhi) stage.

- Dhyana Vahini, Ch 13.

The wavering intelligence of man, that has lost its one-pointedness and purity is
responsible for all the conflicts that are prevalent today.

Source: radiosai.org

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Be Patient with Your Mind

Understanding comes from patiently reasoning with yourself.

You cannot force your mind or order it about.

- Gehlek Rinpoche, “An Interview with Gehlek Rinpoche”

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Why is it essential to intensify our spiritual sadhana (practices)? Where should the focus be?

You can gain victory only by rigorous Sadhana. Spiritual discipline is more arduous than physical discipline; imagine the tremendous amount of effort undergone by the lady who runs along a wire stretched across the ring, underneath the circus tent. After all, her gain is just a few rupees.

The same steadfastness and systematic effort aimed at a higher reward can endow you with mental balance and you can maintain your equilibrium under the most adverse or the most intoxicating circumstances.

The "organs of perception" are more important for this type of sadhana than the "organs of action" and the intellect (Buddhi) is more important than all the rest of the inner instruments given to man.

Make the intellect the master of your mind and you will not fail; you will fail only when the senses establish mastery over the mind.

- Divine Discourse, Feb 20, 1964.

Control of the senses and observance of the accepted code of discipline are the hallmarks of a cultured man.

Source: radiosai.org

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The First Step in Compassion

The first step in compassion, is to notice the other’s need.

It all begins with the simple act of attention.

- Daniel Goleman, “I Feel Your Brain”

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Why shouldn’t we, even for a split-second, mistake mind for the Soul?

While doing meditation, the mind shouldn’t be allowed to wander away from the target.

Whenever it flies off at a tangent, it must be led back to the form meditated upon.

Finally, if you so desire, all things can be subsumed in that form itself!

Nevertheless, only one form must be meditated upon in the beginning.

You shouldn’t change daily from one to another.

Again, during spiritual practice, you should not indulge in thoughts about things you don’t like which cause pain or shake your faith.

If any such peep in, learn gradually to welcome them as beneficial and seek to grasp the good in them, instead of the bad.

Of course, the mind is inert. Just as when water, inert matter, begins to shine when it’s placed in the Sun, the inert mind borrows effulgence from the Atma (Inner-Self) and appears as if it has consciousness.

Intellect (buddhi) gets reflected in the mind, so it looks as if the mind is also intelligent, that is all. The mind’s real nature is ignorance.

- Dhyana Vahini, Ch 13.

Adopt repetition of the name and meditation to overcome your own sorrow,
and to plunge in the cool waves of the sea of the grace of the Divine.

Source: radiosai.org