Bring God into Your Living Room
It is easier to visualise God in the starry heavens than in our own homes. The stars, so remote from our humdrum earthly existence, suggest to our minds infinite stillness, harmony, and wisdom. By contrast, our homes are often scenes of strife and rivalry. To the extent that we hold God aloof from our daily realities, we alienate Him from the life we know. We need a concept of God that will bring Him into our kitchens, our bedrooms, our living rooms - yes, even when those living rooms are crowded with guests. If God is everywhere, He must be quite as near as Hе is far away. We should make Him our immediate reality. We should seek His guidance and inspiration in our most intimate thoughts and feelings; relate to Him when the world is most demanding of our attention; seek His influence in every lightest undertaking. If we don't see our need for Him simply in order to exist, we reduce Him to a mental abstraсtion: useful in mathematics, perhaps, but without any closer, more personal significance. Ultimately, God alone can satisfy every personal need. In our dealings with other people, He is our conscience. In our labour, He is the satisfaction it gives us. When we read a good book, or listen to uplifting music, He is our inspiration. In everything we do from the performance of duty to the most trivial pursuit, He is there; watching, joining in if we invite Him to, and giving us our strength. To ignore Him means to go stumbling blindly through life, unaware that there are innumerable pitfalls before us. We need a concept of God that will motivate us to love Him. He is, whether we know it or not, our own nearest and dearest. How we relate to Him is crucial to our happiness. What is consciousness? It is not the product of brain activity; it is the fundamen tal reality without which thinking as a conscious activity could never take place. Consciousness works through the brain, but doesn't require a brain to exist. It was, indeed, consciousness that produced the brain, as it did everything else in existence- even the apparently insensate rocks. Consciousness requires a material medium, such as the brain, to bring it into material manifestation, but it requires no such medium, to exist. The outward manifestation of consciousness was a potential from the beginning of creation. The Bhagavad Gita states that essential consciousness exists everywhere, but is forever unaffected by anything. The universality of consciousness helps to explain a scientific anomaly. Telepathy continues to baffle researchers for the power of thought remains constant with increasing distance. Every other known force, including light, diminishes with distance, but a thought can be received as clearly on the other side of the earth as in the next room. The brain is only a filter for superconsciousness and so can serve as a window to it...but the brain can no more produce superconsciousness than a window can produce scenery The conscious mind cannot oblige superconsciousness to do its bidding, any more than Alice in Wonderland could oblige her croquet ball (a hedgehog), to remain wherever she placed it... The secret of meditation, then, lies not in affirming states that are foreign to us, but in reclaiming what we are. In that sense meditation is a returning to our centre within
DISCLAIMER:
The views expressed in the Article above are Swami Kriyananda views and kashmiribhatta.in is not in any way responsible for the opinions expressed in the above article. The article belongs to its respective owner or owners and this site does not claim any right over it.
Courtesy: Swami Kriyananda and Speaking Tree,Times of Indi
Bring God into Your Living Room
It is easier to visualise God in the starry heavens than in our own homes. The stars, so remote from our humdrum earthly existence, suggest to our minds infinite stillness, harmony, and wisdom. By contrast, our homes are often scenes of strife and rivalry. To the extent that we hold God aloof from our daily realities, we alienate Him from the life we know. We need a concept of God that will bring Him into our kitchens, our bedrooms, our living rooms - yes, even when those living rooms are crowded with guests. If God is everywhere, He must be quite as near as Hе is far away. We should make Him our immediate reality. We should seek His guidance and inspiration in our most intimate thoughts and feelings; relate to Him when the world is most demanding of our attention; seek His influence in every lightest undertaking. If we don't see our need for Him simply in order to exist, we reduce Him to a mental abstraсtion: useful in mathematics, perhaps, but without any closer, more personal significance. Ultimately, God alone can satisfy every personal need. In our dealings with other people, He is our conscience. In our labour, He is the satisfaction it gives us. When we read a good book, or listen to uplifting music, He is our inspiration. In everything we do from the performance of duty to the most trivial pursuit, He is there; watching, joining in if we invite Him to, and giving us our strength. To ignore Him means to go stumbling blindly through life, unaware that there are innumerable pitfalls before us. We need a concept of God that will motivate us to love Him. He is, whether we know it or not, our own nearest and dearest. How we relate to Him is crucial to our happiness. What is consciousness? It is not the product of brain activity; it is the fundamen tal reality without which thinking as a conscious activity could never take place. Consciousness works through the brain, but doesn't require a brain to exist. It was, indeed, consciousness that produced the brain, as it did everything else in existence- even the apparently insensate rocks. Consciousness requires a material medium, such as the brain, to bring it into material manifestation, but it requires no such medium, to exist. The outward manifestation of consciousness was a potential from the beginning of creation. The Bhagavad Gita states that essential consciousness exists everywhere, but is forever unaffected by anything. The universality of consciousness helps to explain a scientific anomaly. Telepathy continues to baffle researchers for the power of thought remains constant with increasing distance. Every other known force, including light, diminishes with distance, but a thought can be received as clearly on the other side of the earth as in the next room. The brain is only a filter for superconsciousness and so can serve as a window to it...but the brain can no more produce superconsciousness than a window can produce scenery The conscious mind cannot oblige superconsciousness to do its bidding, any more than Alice in Wonderland could oblige her croquet ball (a hedgehog), to remain wherever she placed it... The secret of meditation, then, lies not in affirming states that are foreign to us, but in reclaiming what we are. In that sense meditation is a returning to our centre within
DISCLAIMER:
The views expressed in the Article above are Swami Kriyananda views and kashmiribhatta.in is not in any way responsible for the opinions expressed in the above article. The article belongs to its respective owner or owners and this site does not claim any right over it.
Courtesy: Swami Kriyananda and Speaking Tree,Times of Indi