Chanakya's Quotes - Worth reading a million times…

Chanakya's Quotes - Worth reading a million times… 

"A person should not be too honest. 
Straight trees are cut first 
and Honest people are victimized first." 

"Even if a snake is not poisonous, it should pretend to be venomous." 

"The biggest guru-mantra is: 
Never share your secrets with anybody. ! 

It will destroy you." 

"There is some self-interest behind every friendship. 
There is no Friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth." 

"Before you start some work, always ask yourself three questions –

 Why am I doing it, 
What the results might be and 
Will I be successful. 
Only when you think deeply and find satisfactory answers to these questions, go ahead." 

"As soon as the fear approaches near, attack and destroy it." 

"Once you start working on something, don't be afraid of failure and don't abandon it. 
People who work sincerely are the happiest." 

"The fragrance of flowers spreads only in the direction of the wind. 
But the goodness of a person spreads in all direction.." 

"A man is great by deeds, not by birth." 

"Treat your kid like a darling for the first five years. For the next five years, scold them. 
By the time they turn sixteen, treat them like a friend. Your grown up children are your best friends." 

"Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person." 

"Education is the best friend. 
An educated person is respected everywhere. 

Education beats the beauty and the youth." 

 

 Chanakya quotes (Indian politician, strategist and writer, 350 BC-275BC) 
 

GOD & YOU

GOD & YOU

-  When you pray for others, God listens to you and blesses them, and sometimes, when you are safe and happy, remember that someone has prayed for you.

 - Prayer is not a "spare wheel" that you pull out when in trouble,
 but it is a "steering wheel" that directs the right path throughout.

 - Do you know why a Car's WINDSHIELD is so large & the Rear view Mirror is so small?
 Because our PAST is not as important as our FUTURE.
 Look Ahead and Move on.

- Friendship is like a BOOK. It takes few seconds to burn, but it takes years to write.

- All things in life are temporary. If going well, enjoy it, they will not last forever.  If going wrong, don't worry, they can't last long either.

 - Old Friends are Gold! New Friends are Diamond! If you get a Diamond, don't forget the Gold! Because to hold a Diamond, you always need a Base of Gold!

 - Often when we lose hope and think this is the end, GOD smiles from above and says, "Relax, sweetheart, it's just a bend, not the end!

 - When GOD solves your problems, you have faith in HIS abilities; when GOD doesn't solve your problems HE has faith in your abilities.

 - A blind person asked Swami Vivekananda: "Can there be anything worse than losing eye sight?"
 He replied: "Yes, losing your vision!"
 
 - WORRYING does not take away tomorrows' TROUBLES, it takes away today's PEACE.
 
- Receive my simple gift of Good Morning wrapped with sincerity, tied with care and sealed with a prayer to keep you safe and happy all day long, all week long, all month long and all year long!

Divine understanding

Divine understanding

DEEPAK M RANADE

 

God was born out of the interface between man's intellect and its limitations, forcing the intellect to surrender to faith, says Deepak M Ranade. But can faith ever be challenged by intellect?

Ego is a sense of doer-ship. Every action is purported with a presumed control of the outcome. If the outcome is on expected lines, it gratifies the ego, and reinforces the sense of doer-ship . If the outcome is unfavourable, the ego gets slighted. The unfavourable outcome questions the scope or influence of the doer. The intellect cannot accept the arbitrary nature of outcomes or events. Failure to predict the outcome of any endeavour exposes the limitation of its control. This limitation is then assigned various nomenclatures such as destiny, luck, and karma. The futility of analytical thought also coerces the ego to seek recourse in an abstraction called God.

God was born out of the interface between man’s intellect and its limitations. History is also testimony to the then incomprehensible phenomena like lightning being interpreted as events orchestrated by celestial powers. The influence of God gradually invaded a wider perimeter of life. God became a convenient instrument of ensuring a code of ethics in the social fabric. The limitation of comprehension continued to remain the substrate of belief in God.

Belief began where intellect ended. So did the abstraction called God. Belief and intellect are strange bedfellows. Belief is necessarily ipso facto. It cannot forge an alliance with any rational thought. Each culture proclaimed its own messiah and advocated its own doctrines not always based on sanction or rationality. Rather, every unique interpretation of this abstraction cleaved society. The abstract caught the imagination of the intellect and forced it to surrender to faith. Faith could never be challenged by intellect.

Faith became a cornerstone to make the vagaries of life palatable. It also provided a resting ground for the intellectual juggernaut. Faith surreptitiously clouded rational intellect to a point of self-destruction . It transformed abstraction to aberration. The gaps in our understanding apparently decreased with the advent and progress of science. But scientific progress never eliminated the gaps completely. Rather, it made the conundrum of Creation even more bizarre. The phenomenon of lightning was explained by modern science. But this puzzle was replaced by the dilemma over the nature of light which still remains unexplained. Is light a particle or wave? The deficiency in intellectual comprehension only modified itself, from the macro to the nano.

The unpredictable nature of the subatomic world continues to perplex even the sharpest of intellectuals. Belief, nonetheless, could not restrain the intellect to seek answers. Ironically, the intellect continued seeking answers for what it had earlier relegated to the realm of incomprehensibility. The intellect started seeking answers for what had been its nemesis, namely, God. What symbolised its own failure became a subject of its study. Before attempting to comprehend God, it was vital to first comprehend the Self.

A student of science could study any subject but would be incapable of making the Self a subject of its own study. Experiment can never investigate the Self, which is an experience of awareness. Experience transcended intelligence. A paradigm shift is needed to be able to comprehend the abstraction that we call God. This could be made possible when we move from the ambit of experiment to experience. It will require sublimation of intellectual faculties to a point of heightened awareness, elevating awareness to become all-encompassing and all-inclusive that would end the subject-object dichotomy. The only way to understand God would be to become one.

(The writer is a consultant neuro-surgeon)

 

 

Mind Set: Overcoming life's hurdles

Mind Set: Overcoming life's hurdles

 

Getting stuck is not only a necessary part of spirituality, it is a prerequisite to spiritual growth, says Mike Yaconelli

If I were to diagram my spiritual life, it would look something like this: A continual series of ups and downs, through all of my life, moving in a slow upward direction, although some of the lows would seem lower than before and some of the highs would seem higher than before.

When I picture this graph, it is not encouraging at first, because the longer I live, the further away the end of the graph appears. It is very much like the elusive end of the rainbow - the closer I get, the further away it seems.

And yet there is something you cannot see on a one-dimensional diagram, something you cannot express with lines and words. There is a hidden excitement that begins to surface, a tingling of the soul that quickens my consciousness as I gaze at this trail of God in my life. I suddenly realise a great truth-the up-and-down syndrome of my life is the fingerprint of God on my soul! It is the remains of my struggle of faith, the ups and downs of my ongoing dialogue with the God. It is the way growth looks.

I am beginning to realise that the spiritual life is not so much progress as it is process. It is not a continuous climb upwards as much as it is a continuous climb. It is not the victories that matter so much as the going on after the defeats. The longer the erratic dance of faith goes on, the less you care about what God is doing, and the more you want to know about God. Spirituality is, after all, about intimacy with God.

Look at the graph for a minute. Notice the low spots-flat, long at times, surrounded by highs. Whatever the low spots are, they appear to be negative. If the high spots represent the good or positive in my spiritual life and the low spots represent the bad or negative in my relationship with God, then obviously the high spots are to be sought after and the lows are to be avoided.

But what if we do something radical? What if we remove those kind of value judgments from this graph? What if, in place of concepts like good and bad, positive and negative, high and low, we replace our value judgments with words like stalled and moving, or listening and acting, or stopping and starting, or waiting and not waiting?

What does that do to our understanding of the spiritual life? Maybe waiting is good and not waiting is bad. Maybe stopping is better than starting, listening better than acting, and stalling better than moving. Maybe one cannot happen without the other. Maybe stopping is necessary to starting, maybe acting cannot happen without listening first.

Of course, I do not believe there is many ‘maybe’ about it. I believe that our understanding of spirituality has been distorted and ruined by our artificial judgments and our one-dimensional understanding of our relationship with God.

Let me point out a couple of interesting characteristics of this graph. Every high is followed by a low and every high is preceded by a low. Maybe what the graph means is that you cannot achieve a high without first achieving a low. Maybe lows are not low at all, but just part of the highs. I would like to abandon the high or low model and rename these parts as ‘stuck’ and ‘unstuck.’ Maybe, getting stuck is necessary before we can get unstuck, which means that getting stuck is actually a wonderful place to be.

When you look at it like this, then getting stuck is not only a necessary part of spirituality, it is a prerequisite to spiritual growth.

Most people consider being stuck a negative, a sin of failure or burn-out, an indication that a person isn’t working hard enough on their spiritual life. It’s a report card on personal prayer. If you feel stuck in your spiritual life, then you aren’t doing something right because no one should be stuck with God.

Nothing could be more untrue. The truth is that everyone should get stuck with God many times because it is the prerequisite to being unstuck.

Being stuck is a great moment. It may be characterised by frustration, loneliness, or detachment, but those things are only the vocabulary of our souls telling us we are in danger. It is the cry of our souls craving for more. It is our longings and yearnings trying to get our attention. It is a summons, a call from within. It is the glorious music of disaffection and dissatisfaction with where we are now. It is the anguish of our interior life pleading with us not to give up, but to give in.

It is the Holy Spirit stopping us dead in our tracks so we can read the words that God has written on our hearts-surrender. Surrender. Put your arms around your soul, embrace your anguish, respond to your summons from God. Get ready for the adventure of growing on to the next part of your life.

Getting stuck is worth whatever anguish you must go through just so you can hear God say to you, “hang on, you are about to get unstuck.”

 

Explore the path to spiritual living

Explore the path to spiritual living

SUKHABODHANANDA, Jun 6, 2010, 12.00am IST

 

Is spiritual practice a must for everyone?

You have to insulate yourself from the effects of worldly living. The environment has its strong impact. The external world is in a rat race for greed, glamour and respectability. It does not bother about real joy and purity. Naturally, external influence affects an individual. In this rat race even if one wins one continues to be a rat. Glamour gives you an illusory joy but your soul needs to grow.

'Why does a fish in an ocean try to jump out?' asked a Zen student.

'The fish is trying to explore a world beyond the ocean,' answered the Master.

Consciousness in each one of us is like a fish that wants to explore the unknown, to evolve and grow. If you do not insulate yourself from negative forces, there will be a leakage of energies and that would hamper your growth. So it is necessary not to struggle in life and not allow negativity to control your life. One has to learn to float in life, to let go, let in the essentials and negate unessential feelings.

How can I insulate myself from negative influences?

People live life in fear. It is out of fear that they worship; out of fear they get married; out of fear of insecurity they beget children. Whenever fear emerges, there is a leakage of energy. Fear creates a hurt body and it then tries to survive by quoting philosophy and logic.

We try to protect ourselves from fear through the influences of worldly life...by acquiring more money and more power. But spiritually we can insulate ourselves from fear, only if we have trust.

We were secure in our mother's womb. At term when we were pushed out into the world, it was as though we were facing death. We experienced tremendous fear.

After being born, is it death or birth that marks our lives?

Trust that when one door closes, another door opens. Such trust insulates us from fear. The spiritual way of seeing is, if there is an impression or a negative impression of fear in the mind, one has to de-identify with it. This detachment or de-identification is the insulation that i am talking of. In yoga, it is called atma smaranam, self-remembrance.

What happens when we insulate ourselves from negative impressions?

Worldly influences do not touch us. Instead, we would be in touch with higher vibrations and open ourselves for higher influences. The higher centres in us are constantly communicating something profound to us, but we close ourselves to them. It is like a cup turned upside down. No amount of rainwater can fill the cup. The moment we are available for higher vibrations, we attract nobler aspects of life. Lower states attract lower aspects of life while the higher states attract higher aspects of life. This is the law of attraction.

Why is devotion necessary?

Devotion activates our higher centres. Devotion purifies our emotions. Devotion allows the finer vibrations to flow into our lives. With devotion, your third eye or intuitive eye opens, and you would see many meaningful coincidences occurring in your life. You will see the mysterious hand of God blessing you.

Two-hour interactive sessions and modules of meditation will be conducted by trained teachers every Sunday. Contact: Noida: 9312939812, 9810472906. Dabri-Palam road: 9868503034. For details visit: www.prasannatrust.org