Life 03 (Jun 09 - Jul 09)

[winston]

Patience, Tolerance, Fortitude, Equanimity, Fraternity ...these will prove invaluable equipments in the pilgrimage to the Divine.

Do not distinguish between one fellow pilgrim and another on the basis of caste, creed or color. Do not divide them into friends and foes.

Recognize the common traits, uniting efforts, and the basic divinity amongst all. Rich and poor, scholar and illiterate - these distinctions do not hold good for long, they are just outer frills.

A flower radiates fragrance and charm, whether held in the right hand or the left. It does not limit that gift to some and deny it to others. Everyone who comes near, receives the fragrance.

- Divine Discourse, Nov 23, 1975.

Source: radiosai.org

[winston]

Your Greatest Risk by Alexander Green, Spiritual Wealth

Ask someone what he or she wants out of life and you're likely to hear a familiar litany: a great job, a loving family, a nice home, a comfortable retirement and so on.

But what are you living for? Of all the things you might pursue in life, which is the most valuable?

"Most people have trouble naming this goal," writes William B. Irvine, Professor of Philosophy at Wright State University. "They know what they want minute by minute or even decade by decade during their life, but they have never paused to consider their grand goal in living.

It is perhaps understandable that they haven't. Our culture doesn't encourage people to think about such things; indeed, it provides them with an endless stream of distractions so they won't ever have to. But a grand goal in living is the first component of a philosophy of life. This means that if you lack a grand goal in living, you lack a coherent philosophy of life."

There was a time when great thinkers sought to answer these questions. But no longer.

Modern philosophy has evolved into a specialized academic discipline that pursues arcane questions of no real interest to the general public. When was the last time you read or heard anything from a living philosopher?

Yet the ancient Greek and Romans obsessed over these questions. They strove to learn what was most important and how to achieve it. In sum, they wanted to discover how best to live.

Their answers evolved into stoicism, a philosophy that is not widely understood today.

The word stoic is used to describe someone unmoved by joy or grief, someone without passion. Yet that is not the stoic philosophy.

Stoicism is about pursuing a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling. It's about healing the inevitable suffering in life - and achieving tranquility.

How is this done? Ancient stoic philosophers advised:
* Contemplating the transitory nature of the world around you
* Living in the present without fear of the future
* Banishing negative emotions
* Living according to your own nature
* Pursuing virtue
* Seeking courage and wisdom
* Living simply and frugally
* Mastering desire, to the extent that it is possible to do so

Sounds simple enough. But that's deceptive, really. These tenets require work.

Living in the present without fear of the future, for instance, may seem impossible when we consider all the sad and tragic news that surrounds us.

Yet the stoic philosopher Epictetus reminds us that most worldly events are beyond our control. What disturbs our minds then is not the events themselves but merely our judgments about them.

And we can change these.

After all, there is little you can do to stop nuclear proliferation, global warming, the specter of terrorism, or The Great Recession. Yes, you can speak your mind, cast your vote, organize.

But worry? That solves nothing.

Likewise, the stoic advice to live simply and frugally could have saved millions of Americans who overreached a ton of heartache in recent years.

Limiting your material desires and craving for luxury enables you to save and invest more of your after-tax income. Paradoxically, the shortest route to financial freedom is to fight the acquisitive instinct and the desire to appear wealthy.

Too many imagine that if they just earn enough they can finally fulfill - and ultimately eliminate - their desires.

Yet nothing ever does. New desires spring up to take the place of old ones.

Recognize this and at least you can make honest choices in your life.

This point was made more than two thousand years ago in a well-known dialogue between Alexander the Great and the Greek philosopher Diogenes:

Alexander: Diogenes, you are a man of great repute. Yet you spend your days untroubled, unperturbed, indulging in conversation and the pleasures of life.

Diogenes: Tell me what is so much better about the life of Alexander the Great?

Alexander: I am a conqueror of nations!

Diogenes: So, conqueror of nations, what are you going to do next?

Alexander: I will conquer Greece!

Diogenes: Yes... then what?

Alexander: I will conquer Asia Minor!

Diogenes: Alright... then what?

Alexander: I will conquer the rest of the world!

Diogenes: And then?

Alexander: Then... I plan to relax and enjoy life.

Diogenes: So why not relax and enjoy it now?

He must have made an impression. The great conqueror once remarked, "Were I not Alexander, I would be Diogenes."

Diogenes lived according to his own nature, caring little for reputation, luxury or material possessions. Few would subscribe to his brand of extreme asceticism. But at least he had philosophy of life - and lived it.

Most of us never take the time to consider our grand goal. Instead, we choose society's default position: the pursuit of affluence, social status and pleasure.

The problem with doing what everyone else is doing, however, is that you may mislive.

Instead of pursuing and enjoying what matters most, you could wake up one day to find that confusion and distraction have caused you to squander your one precious life.

And who really wants to take that risk?

[winston]

Attachment and death

You are attached to your property, to your wife. That is a fact. I am not talking about detachment. You are attached to your opinions, to your ways of thinking.

Now, can you not come to the end of that attachment? Why are you attached?—that is the question, not how to be detached.

If you try to be detached, you merely cultivate the opposite, and therefore contradiction continues. But the moment your mind is free of attachment, it is also free from the sense of continuity through attachment, is it not?

So why are you attached? Because you are afraid that without attachment you will be nothing; therefore you are your house, you are your wife, you are your bank account, you are your job. You are all these things.

And if there is an ending to this sense of continuity through attachment, a total ending, then you will know what death is.

The Collected Works vol XI, p 241

Source: jkrishnamurthi.com

[winston]

You are always molding yourselves into a better feeling place. And you will never get it done. It will never be completely finished. It will never be absolutely right.

You will always have some dominant thoughts that are not a vibrational match to the newfound desire. But that is always what your work is. And it's time for you to just begin relaxing about it, and not make it a personal issue of your own valor, or your own value, or your own integrity. In other words, it's just, how many times have I thought this thought?

--- Abraham

Excerpted from the workshop in San Rafael, CA on Friday, March 9th, 2001

Source: abraham-hicks.com

[winston]

You must be ever engaged in the process of purifying the mind and clarifying the intellect.

You have to free yourself from all prejudices and misunderstandings. You must speak softly and sweetly and give everyone the respect and attention due to them sincerely. Humility and tolerance must characterize your behaviour as a devotee.

When the wind agitates the serene waters of a lake, wavelets dance all over its face and a thousand Suns sparkle. When calm descends and the waters are still, the shadow of the Sun within the lake is one full image.

- Divine Discourse, 29 March 1976

Source: radiosai.org

[helios]

When the wind agitates the serene waters of a lake, wavelets dance all over its face and a thousand Suns sparkle. When calm descends and the waters are still, the shadow of the Sun within the lake is one full image.

such wonders exist.

[winston]

Life and death are one

To you, death is something separate from life. Death is over there, while you are here, occupied with living—driving a car, having sex, feeling hunger, worrying, going to the office, accumulating knowledge, and so on.

You don’t want to die because you haven’t finished writing your book, or you don’t yet know how to play the violin very beautifully. So you separate death from life, and you say, “I will understand life now, and presently I will understand death.”

But the two are not separate—and that is the first thing to understand. Life and death are one, they are intimately related, and you cannot isolate one of them and try to understand it apart from the other.

The Collected Works vol XIV, p 212

Source: jkrishnamurthi.com

[winston]

Life is a total thing

We may rationalize death. Seeing old age coming upon us—gradual senility, losing our memory, and so on—we may say, “Well, life is a process of birth, growth, and decay, and the ending of the physical mechanism is inevitable.”

But that doesn’t bring deep understanding of what death is. Death must be something extraordinary, as life is. Life is a total thing. Sorrow, pain, anguish, joy, absurd idea, possession, envy, love, the aching misery of loneliness—all that is life.

And to understand death, we must understand the whole of life, not take one fragment of it and live with that fragment, as most of us do. In the very understanding of life there is the understanding of death, because the two are not separate.

The Collected Works vol XIII, p 185

Source: jkrishnamurti.com

[winston]

The bumble bee can bore a hole in the hardest of the wood. But, when dusk intervenes while it is sipping the nectar from the lotus flower and as a result when the open petals close in on the bee, it finds itself imprisoned with no hope of escape.

It does not know how to deal with softness. So too, the mind can play its tricks and jump about on any arena. When placed on the Feet of the Divine, it becomes inactive and harmless. To offer the mind entirely to the Divine, deep detachment from worldly desires is needed. Superficial devotion or shallow steadfastness cannot succeed.

- Divine Discourse, Dec 24, 1980

Source: radiosai.org

[winston]

Recognize this truth. The Divine is in all. When you hate another, you are hating the Divine. When you hate the Divine, you are hating yourself. When you inflict pain on another name, remember that the other is yourself, in another form with another name....

Envy causes pain on those who are envied. When another's fortune is green, why should your eyes be red? Why get wild when another eats his fill?... Give up this vice of envy. Be happy when another is happy. That is more pleasing to the Divine than all the prayers you recite, all the flowers you heap on His picture or image, or even the hours you spend in silent meditation.

- Divine Discourse, Dec 24, 1980.

Source: radiosai.org