Thursday, June 11, 2009

Finding inner peace

Prof Menon at IIT Madras, author of Stop sleep walking through life, conducts a meeting once every two weeks on the above topic. To describe it briefly, the meeting can be called Spirituality 101. I attended it today for the first time and a lot of thoughts came to my mind. Some of them are almost exactly what he said, some inspired by what he said and some not instaneously inspired him:

1. The most important thing in this world is one thing. That thing is a question and that question is Who? Who are you?

2. Can you just sit simply and feel extremely wonderful? At least as wonderful as on orgasm? If not, isnt there something wrong?

3. If you have a problem with someone and are angry with them, beware. For, they are also god in disguise. Just like you.

4. If you want to contribute to social change, the most important thing that you have to do is to radiate joy. Unconditionally. As often as possible

5. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar says pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. An explanation came to mind to explain this. Consider the situation where you hit the pinky toe of your leg very hard on the base of an iron table. It hurts. It really does hurt. Consider an alternative situation where someone else pushes you and then you hit yourself. It hurts too. But then, something else also happens. There are many more emotions. The former is pain and the additional emotions in the latter is suffering. The above example is an analogy. In emotional cases, the latter situation causes a lot of damage. For a long time. That can be totally avoided by someone who lets go of ego. The more the better.

6. The more one progresses in the direction of freeing oneself from ego, any insults to us will be felt like an insult to our shadow. You just do not care about it anymore.

7. The idea of who you really are is the most important lesson one has to learn. Even before one learns to play cricket!

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