Open Hearts: Happy Diwali, Happy New Year, Seasons Greetings!

It seems people's hearts open more readily during the holidays.

Many say they wish people would act this way all year long, and that is an excellent goal.

We just weren't taught to come from our heart first.

The message of all the movies we watch give us this message: come from your heart! But we don't listen to that very well.

It's reflected in how we treat the least of us. When we solve world hunger and extreme poverty, then maybe we can claim victory of the mind.


So until then, keep sharing your flame!

We Are Not Our Body

Gautam Baiji did a satsang about not letting others' negative (or positive) words affect our inner peace:

"In our life, sometimes we are happy, sometimes sad. How does this happen?

Regardless of what happens, we should always be steady. Don't get depressed, and don't get too happy.

How can we maintain that?

If people say something bad about us, we feel bad. If they say something good, we feel good.

Try to practice being your true self. Know who you are.

Why do we feel sadness and happiness?

Because we think we are this body.

We don't know our real form. We should know we are just using this body as a vehicle.

The vehicle and the driver are not one. They are two. You will never say "I am the car." You will say, "Me and my car."

The car is mine; I am not it.
The body is mine; I am not it."

What We Leave at the Door

Gautam Baiji likes to say that when we enter the ashram, we need to "forget labels." 

Labels, meaning anything we attach to ourselves that gives shape to our identity that separates us from our True Self, our Divine Self.

Before God, we are not our profession, for instance, our any title or label we might attach to ourselves. 

There are other kinds of labels we should leave behind as well:

I remember reading years ago that when "We Are the World" was recorded with many great American musicians, the only requirement to participate was that they "must leave their egos at the door." 

Less distractions that way.

So there are things we can leave at the door - besides our shoes - that will enable the ashram to have the greatest effect. After all, that's why we came! 

Control the Breath, Control the Mind

I woke up this morning and sat down to meditate. I was in a little bit of a hurry, so I decided I would get right to "the good part."

So I said a few oms and proceeded to go to that state of being.

It started well. I started smiling a little...

But shortly after I'd begun, I realized I was in the middle of a thought. It was a good thought, but a thought nonetheless.

Realizing that, I let it go. After all, thoughts happen - it's a part of meditation.

Then another thought came which I found myself engaging with. My mind is active this morning! It took a few moments to disentangle myself from it, and then I entered back into meditation.

Then another and another came, all quite vibrant and with more frequency than normal. What was going on? Why was I so distractible this morning?

I realized the problem: I had skipped the deep breathing part of my meditation.

"Control the breath, control the mind." I had forgotten the importance of this, and thought I could just rush through my practice.

All the little rituals we do in our practice have good reasons, which we sometimes forget. Meditating at the same time every day for consistency, chanting om, doing cleansing breathing exercises, deep breathing, counting to help elongate the breaths, etc., are all important parts of a solid meditation practice.

Even with deep breathing, thoughts will come, but they are more manageable and easier to let go, along with the emotions that are sometimes attached to them.

Enjoy your practice.

Spoken Words Are Free - Should We Take Them For Granted, or Value Them?

Satsang by Gautam Baiji

"As humans, it's our responsibility to help other people.

But you might say, "I don't have enough money to give to too many things."

You don't need that - you have your voice.

If you have a nice voice, you can sing and other people will feel good. 

You can also say good words to give peace to others. 

Some words are like medicine, and some words give warmth.

Saints say, "Remember the Holy Name." But Swami Vivekananda was asked why he always said that. 
In reply, he said a bad word.
Some people got mad. "How can you say this word? You are a saint!" 
He said, "Sorry." Immediately they calmed down. 
"I said one bad word and your temper quickly flares high, then I said 'sorry' and you are quickly calming down."

This is the power of words.

Our saints say, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

So what is that word? Words can bring happiness, and words can bring sorrow and pain.

But we don't give them much value because they are free. Free things are not much valued by us. We don't see the value behind the gift.

Maybe we can try to do that."

Who is Working Overtime to Separate Us From God?

There are many names for God: the Supreme, the Creator, Spirit, Krishna, Christ, Allah, Love, Shiva, the All, Om, etc. We tend to favor one or two that empower us to live the most spiritual life possible.

In fact, just thinking of the (nameless) Holy Name can instantly connect us to God and our own divinity (as do blessings like "Namaste - the Divine within me honors the Divine within you").

But what about the names for things that separate us from God? Isn't it just ego, or are there more? Can spiritual seekers avoid their traps?

Here are their most popular names:

Mind/Ego/I/Identity/Me*/self

These "God-separators" each show a different aspect how duality (us/them, feminine/masculine, follower/leader) keeps are distance from God. 

In reality there is no "split," but this illusion is so convincing, we allow it to occur many times a day (despite the fact that it's the cause of all suffering!). 

Take "Mind" (please!). Its distracting thoughts pop up frequently and tell us what reality supposedly is.  

Most of us weren't taught that we can control not only our thoughts but also our responses to them. Until we learn this, we just get pelted by these thoughts like a car in a hail storm, which leave large dents in our psyche as well. 

What kind of thoughts? Usually worries of imagined events in the future, or fears that painful events from the past will revisit us. Not healthy at all.

The problems can really pile up without a spiritual practice in place that includes yoga and meditation, both of which help us to stay out of the past and the future, right here in the present.

Being present it our truest state, but the Mind fights that by constantly trying to get us to forget who we truly are (Divine) so we will only take care of it (the Mind), usually through the senses. 

It's consistently successful at getting this kind of care because most of us don't know we are not our thoughts. (We are the ones noticing the thoughts.)

Identity is also a strong God-separator by creating a convincing (phony) beingness that makes being separate from God a plausible reality. With such vivid colors, no less, like painful (or pleasurable) memories of past experiences; the temptation to dwell in the emotional meaning we give those experiences (which affects how we react to life moving forward); our societal conditioning; the story of Me, and who I think I am. 

Identity appears as a consistent phenomenon, and that sameness gives us a comfort we're unwilling to give up, at least without great motivation. 

It's very popular to refer to all of this as Ego because it feels detached; scientific even. Here, it's handy to use what Gautam Baiji teaches, that the ego is a tool which can only be dangerous when handled improperly, much like how fire is very useful for cooking, but you wouldn't want to turn your back on it for long. 

Finally, when one refers to their self, they may wish to pause and ask, "Am I addressing the little self who lives inside me, or the Self?" It's easy to see that we default to our ego-mind-self. We can reverse by entering into an inquiry every now and then to re-member Who We Are again and put the Self back in control (which causes the little self to disappear). 

That is, until we're distracted again. But the back-and-forth is part of our spiritual journey.

*They all have capitals because they are always straining for importance or significance. This is their attempt to replicate the true Self to attempt to fool us, but in the end they are all imposters. 

**One of the mind's greatest distractions (for people on a spiritual path) is the desire to accumulate more spiritual information at the expense of simply experiencing our True Self, or having self-realization. Sri Mooji says, "It cannot be learned, it can only be recognized in ourselves," and yet we frequently find ourselves pursuing more information for "answers." This is one of the mind's final tricks to delay our re-membering/oneness. (Another mind diversion: telling us we are "too tired" or sleepy as we start to meditate, causing us to stop.) 

***Which is ironically like focussing on the dot in the middle of the blank page, while ignoring the vastness of the white paper and who we really are.

Turn Over the Paper; What Do You See?

Dr. Madhu Patel told this story at Satsang:

"There was a professor who was giving his class a test. 

He handed each of them a sheet of paper face down and told them not to turn it over until he tells them to.

Then he told them to turn the paper over and write about what they saw...

So the students turned over the paper and they all saw the same thing: a black spot in the middle of the page. 

After they had time to write what they saw, he collected the papers and read them. Most of them described the dot, where it was positioned on the paper, what color it was, and not much more than that. 

The professor told them that what they wrote is similar to how they look at life: no one described all the white on the paper at all, they all focused on the spot. 

We have a lot of these "spots" in our life - which can be conflicts with family, the workplace, anything we are not happy with - and we tend to concentrate only on that. 

The white on the paper represents the wonderful life God has given us. We would do well to concentrate on the white part and not the spots. Perhaps our anxiety and worries would greatly decrease.

This is a beautiful quote I always see at my work: