Stress, Suffering and Sanity....Being Human Being...

 All human beings experience life only from two states of being: a suffering state or a no-suffering state. There is no third state of being. The most important decision you need to make every day of your life is from which state you want to live and act.

If your answer is a beautiful state- your life that day is on the right track. 

Suffering states are also called stressful states- these are anger related states, anxiety related states, sadness related states and doubt related states. 

And the non-suffering states are graded into 3 levels - beautiful states transcendental states  and enlightened states.

Most of u assume you know stress, because you can feel it. 

But let us enquire into it deeper. Stress is a pre-immersion, post-immersion, and often a re-immersion of a pressured situation. Remember, Stress is a pre-immersion, post-immersion, and often a re-immersion of a pressured situation. 

And this pre, post and re immersion leads to the build-up of unpleasant emotions such as anxiety, frustration, guilt, or anger in the mind and unpleasant sensations in the body.

So what is a pre-immersion? 

A pre-immersion is when you anticipate a problem or anticipate a pressured situation and continually play the negative scenario in your head again and again. You are playing the same song, same recording again and again. 

A post-immersion is when a problematic situation has been faced and is over. But inwardly, the situation does not end. You keep ruminating over the situation, giving rise to emotions such as anxiety and anger long after the event is over. 

Whether it is a pre-immersion or a post-immersion, both are repeated immersions  in a pressured situation leading to tremendous amounts of stress. Stress accumulates in various layers of consciousness, causing unforeseen challenges, troubles, and sickness.

As you detox stress from your consciousness, you will not only experience physical and emotional healing and health, but you will also connect with the greater intelligence of the universe. In this state of connection, miracles and synchronicities happen. Your understanding of life gets deeper and your response wise.

Art of relaxation:

Our life experiences have a direct impact on our bodies and the mind. 

In the body this impact is stored in your cells in the brain and the body. This stress accumulates as toxins floating in the blood.

Much of this toxin has to be cleansed with conscious attention. 

If you don’t purge this stress, it can lead to chronic ill-ness and inflammatory disorders.

If you want to heal your body, you have to bring attention to it. 

You have to activate the immense intelligence of the trillion cells of your body. 

The key to activate your body-intelligence is to live in a stress-free emotional state and an alpha brain state. 

Now Your brain functions in five electrical wave patterns, which are the 5 measurable brain-states. Some of you know this, but I want to show you the mysterious connections between the brain waves and your mind. 

Most people live in a state of distraction and agitation. This you all know very well. Even if you bring observation to yourselves you will see this.

When you are in this agitated stressed out state of mind, your brain is in the beta brainwave mode. 

In beta brainwave mode, your brain is vibrating at 13 to 30 or 40 cycles a second. In this state concentration, listening, focus, nothing is possible. You are internally in a state of noise and chaos. This state is literally called the monkey mind state.

Your body is restless. Your breath is unrhythmic or irregular. Your immunity is flawed. Neither healing nor sustenance is possible. Your body is prone to fall sick.  

The second brainwave state is alpha. In this state your brain vibrates at 8 to 13 cycles per second. In this state, 

You are attentive, focused; your memory is sharp. Your mind is calm promoting clear thinking and perception. You are naturally more efficient. 

Your breath is rhythmic and steady. Your body moves into natural healing zone promoting vitality and health. 

The 3 other brain states we will see later. Today’s meditation will shift you into alpha brain-state from beta brain-state. 

How do you move your body into alpha brain wave state? 

Know that the most powerful tool for this shift lies in your breath. Bringing attention to breath and learning the right practices  releases many latent potentials of your body-mind-consciousness. 

Art of forgiveness:

Relationships are the mirrors in which your state is reflected. 

Every human being deep down is a wounded person. Hurt by parents, hurt by siblings, criticized by teachers, let down by friends, betrayed in love, humiliated by peers or superiors, in so many ways your heart has been wounded by the way people have treated you.

Even though practically you might have moved on.  You might have even convinced yourself that you have grown up and have forgiven all the people who hurt you- the truth is you have not transcended your hurt.

These wounds linger in your consciousness. They have become impressions, a force within you.

Sadly, when we are hurt we cling onto them for years. 

Why do we not let go of our hurts?  

Let me narrate an experience with you, a real life experience.

About 8 to 9 years ago, a gentleman in his early 40’s came to me. One of his biggest problems was his terrible anger towards his father. He was often bullied by his step-brother in his childhood. His step brother even tried choking him to death once. His parents always either took the side of his step-brother or remained silent. 

So, he became an addict to drugs, alcohol, and a whole lot of things. With great difficulty he overcame those habits yet was caught in emotional addiction - addiction to anger.

I led him to freedom.

He saw that he continued to be angry with his father, because somewhere he was still hoping that someday his father will have a realization of all the wrongs he had done to him.

He was waiting for his father to repent, for the pain he had suffered. He was hoping his father would come and apologize to him.

I showed him the futility of that expectation. His father had not transformed at the age of 50, 60 and now his father was 70 years old. There was no hope ever that his father would change. His father would never change. And in the meanwhile, what he was doing was wasting his life expecting his father to change.

In that single conversation with me, this man could see what thinking process kept his suffering alive.

If you are hoping that someday your parents or someone who has hurt you will realize what they have done to you and they will come forward and apologize to you, your hurt will continue to stay alive. That expectation will keep your hurt alive.

You have to see the futility of holding on to such an expectation. In fact, you have to see the destruction that will happen within you if you held on to that expectation.

Only in that realisation can your emotionally hurt mind be silenced.

Art of joyful living:

I want you to know - Life can be lived in two ordinary ways & one extraordinary way. The first ordinary way to live is to be pleasure driven.

When you are pleasure driven the background experience of your life is mechanical, boring and uninteresting. And when life feels like a chore, you give into pleasure driven life. 

You become a seeker of thrill or entertainment. Incapable of steady focus or committed relationships, you keep hopping from person to person/another and job to another.

You do not know the fullness of life at all. 

The second way of living is to be aggression driven.

You are driven by the need to be seen, to be aggressive, to be more than others. 

At the background of all your efforts is comparison and hence a deep dissatisfaction. 

You are never present to the task in front of you, because you are constantly imagining the reward you will receive versus someone else. 

You are never present to the person in front of you, because you are either measuring yourself against them or are measuring their love for you.

You some how want to be more than the other. 

But there is an extraordinary way of living. And that is the third way of living.

The third way of living is a life of awareness. 

Living a life of awareness, there is attention to action. There is attention to activity.  There is attention to thought as it arises.  

This intense awareness is magical. It frees you from the clutches of incessant thought. You experience a deep joyful ness in living. 

It is this deep joy, this bliss, this ananda that is the nature of existence. 

When you dwell more and more in this joy, every experience feels complete and joyful. Life feels more beautiful. There is a deep inner silence from which to experience life. 

You experience the falling of the autumn leaves from the tree. You experience the innocence in the eyes of your child, the warmth of your partner, and the affection of a parent. You experience the beauty of walk taken in solitude. You live life fully. 

This is the bliss of which the sages have sung since the dawn of history. 

You can make your beginning into this realm of bliss starting today by being more present. This will be your first baby step. 

UNIVERSAL INTELLIGENCE

What if I told you that plants also have senses? They sense when you pluck a leaf or break a branch. Because the smell that emerges from one leaf kind of gets smelt by the other plant. They sense danger. 

When you stand near a tree it knows you are standing near it. There is a knowing. There is an intelligence in the universe.

The prey in the forests know when the lion is hungry, know when it is satiated as well. They accordingly get close or maintain a distance. 

Ants when attacked spray chemicals to keep their predator at a distance. The chemicals that ants release are often pheromones that signal danger to other members of the colony, and can also discourage predators from pursuing them.

Farmers watch the migratory birds before deciding the crop for the season? If the birds build their nest on the lake at a higher altitude, it means there will much rain that season and they plant rice paddies. If the nests are closer to the ground, they plant peanuts that require less rain. And the birds have not been wrong for centuries. 

Everywhere you see around you, you recognise a communication. A communication, a mutual understanding, an intelligence and interdependence.

Be it within the species or inter-species communication.. there is communication seems to happen throughout nature. 

Do you wonder how they know each other’s requirements to fill the gap To render the necessary support? 

They seem to perfectly fall in place like puzzle pieces. 

All life seems to flow as one. All living things are connected in the web of relationships, and this web of relationships help to sustain and support life on our planet. 

This is because there is one intelligence that flows through all life. We are in a filed of intelligence. 

I call it Universal Intelligence. 

This intelligence responds, communicates, supports and nurtures. 

Different traditions and thoughts realised this universal intelligence in many ways. Some attribute a form and a personality, while some see it as a field of consciousness. They called it God, angels, spirits. 

And how do we connect to this greater field of intelligence? 

This is important for every one of you to know.

We humans communicate through our state of consciousness with this field of consciousness. When you are in a suffering state , when you are stressed, you cannot intuit the messages and you are out of sync with the universe. Chaos sets in. When you are in a beautiful state, you are in tune with the universe. You body, mind and consciousness flow as one with life drawing synchronicities and miracles. Order sets in. 

Awakening to Universal intelligence is an extraordinary spiritual experience for everyone.

PARENT RELATIONSHIP:

Your thinking is very old. If you have nurtured a thinking of blame, faultfinding and anger as children, you tend to grow up into adults with that thinking even though your circumstances have changed. 

If you grew up with a thinking of loneliness and seeking approval as children, you will grow up with the same thinking as adults even though you may be surrounded by friends. 

If you have grown up as a child with anxiety over losing love, you will grow up into adults who will live with insecurity.  You mechanically re-enact the same thinking patterns with your partner, your children and your careers. Your thinking spills over into your conversations, your gestures and your actions. 

Unless there is an awareness of your thinking, there cannot be a transformation in the quality of your life.

In hurt, you oscillate between being arrogant at your superiority or dissatisfaction when you see you are less. You become human beings who are unhappy. Your thinking, decisions and responses come from a place of agitation and not peace. You define yourself in terms of the people with whom you compare. You become insecure. 

Is it possible that such a mind can make intelligent decisions? Is it possible that  such a mind so driven by hurt, a mind that is so driven by insufficiency can make the right decisions?

Think about it.

6 KOSHAS:

Who do you think you are?

Your most common association is with your physical body. That is why you say, I am fair or dark, I am this race or that. I am this age or that. 

While it is true. It is only partial true.

The truth is that you are way bigger than your body. 

Just as we have our physical body we also have the energy body.  In this energy body are 72,000 nerve currents, called naadis carrying various kinds of spiritual energies. 

There are 7 points in the body where certain key psychic nerve cluster happen. These nerve clusters are called chakras. The moment you hear the word chakra, please do not come to any conclusions. Continue to stay in a state of listening. 

Before we go into chakras, let us get back top this. You are 6 bodies not one body. 

Annamaya, prana maya, Manomaya, karma maya, Vijnanamaya, and anandamaya. 

Annamaya kosha or the physical body, the one that is made of food is the smallest. And to explore this physical body alone modern science has taken nearly 300 years of research. 

The next is the Pranamaya Kosha or the energy body. It is almost 3 feet around your physical body. It is a much bigger universe. In this body, the Kundalini, the great serpentine spiritual energy is there. It is the position of your kundalini  that differentiates between the ordinary and the genius. Higher the kundalini, greater the genius. And this genius could be in terms of your skills, Your capacity to love or greater insight into situations, greater ability to flow with life and all of that.

The Pranamaya Kosha also has 72000 nadis or energy channels,  5 kinds of breath energies and so on- it is the whole universe. In the Prana Maya kosha are 7 major chakras and many minor ones. These chakras are energy vortices  that is located along the central energy channel of your body called Sushumna. This energy channel is like your spiritual spine located in the middle of your body. And each of these chakras hold a very powerful potential. 

Manomaya Kosha or your mind body- consists of your conscious mind, your sub conscious mind and the unconscious mind which is deeper…in the unconscious mind are your past life vasanas and this life Samskaras are  stored. And finallythe collective unconscious of entire humanity are stored- all of these is the Manomaya Kosha.

The next is Karma Maya kosha is the karmik repository- the karmik energy bank of yourself, your soul circle, your community and collective humanity’s karma- it is a huge dynamic that keeps playing out as energy patterns. It keeps playing out as chaos or order in your life. 

The next is Vijnanamaya Kosha is the pure wisdom body- the body that stretches into other lokaas or worlds.  When you awaken to this dimension, you realise you are not living on this plane alone. You are simultaneously living in many realities. It is these realities you some times see in dreams. Realizations you have in this world would flow to other worlds. And realisations you have in other worlds flow into this one. 

Finally you have the anandamaya kosha or the bliss body- which is as huge as the universe itself. When you wake up to this dimension of yourself, you realise you are the universe. You are the all. There is no separation between you and anything in this flow of life. Realising these dimensions, I would say is the greatest adventure you can have in your life.