What a Day!

I've been waiting for this day for a while. It's:

* MahaSivaRatri
* 168th b'day of Sri Ramakrishna
* A Wednesday

all rolled into one. An awesome day, in my opinion. There's a Tamil saying that goes: "You might get gold, but not a Wednesday that easily".

During an invigorating pooja, I started reading Sri Vinayaka Sudha Lahari, a Telugu book on the speeches of Sri Satya Sai given on Vinayaka Chavithi. It started off with a bang. Swami compares Life to a lotus plant that blooms from the Formless expanse of water*. The individual jivas are like the individual drops of water on the leaves of the lotus and, when they drop off finally, they merge back in the water. The concept of the Tree of Life took on a totally different meaning after reading this allusion.

Next I went through Divine Journey, which details Swami's one-week trip to Delhi & Mumbai in MAR.1999. The portion I read referred to a 1968 speech by Swami which compared the major nations of the world to the Pandavas: Russia is like Bhima, America like Arjuna, and apna Bharat like the eldest (Dharmaraju)!

Later, I was curious to check how good the day was on regular everyday things;-) I checked the Times Tambola and found that I got three numbers out of the five given every day, missing the two others by one number. Ain't that something?!

* Sri Ramakrishna has indicated that the Formless is like water and with a dimension between one and two (like a fractal), but that's another story.

The Guru of Joy

Qk.ly: http://bit.ly/bsxGoJ

Was at Landmark the day it was inaugurated (on Friday the 13th!) at The Forum* mall.

Ended up buying The Guru of Joy, by François Gautier on Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.

Love that word Joy. To me, it signifies something that happens internally (like the joy of just being alive) while happiness is based on an external object/stimulus. Was really struck by the quotes on the back of the book: [my notes]

• God is not a toy for your security or a concept for your convenience. God is love. God is the substratum of this universe, the basis of this existence. God is the space in which all things happen. [As Sri Ramakrishna says: God is the container as well as the contained.]
• Spirituality nourishes the human values of compassion, love, caring, sharing, and acceptance.
• Spirituality means going deep into your prayers, irrespective of what prayer and which religion you follow. [Sri Sri has given the best comparison between religion and spirituality. He says that spirituality is the banana and religion the peel! My corollary to this is how fast the peel dries up when there is no banana inside.]
• Life is sacred. Celebrate life. Care for others and share whatever you have with those less fortunate than you. Broaden your vision for the whole world belongs to you.
• Enlightenment is the journey from head back to the heart, from words back to silence, to innocence in spite of your intelligence.
• The whole evolution of man is from being somebody to being nobody, and from being nobody to being everybody.
• When you follow knowledge, fun follows you. When you follow fun, misery follows. [Feynman is a great example of this. He gave up drinking because he didn't want to mess with his mind, which gave him so much fun! Incidentally, Feynman was born just two days (11.MAY in 1918) before Guruji (13.MAY in 1956).]
• Often innocent people are not intelligent and intelligent ones are often crooked. What is desirable is a rare combination of intelligence and innocence [Can we call it intellicence?]

* Adds up to 41, one of the great numbers in numerology; further, it has the same break-up as James Cameron (14 + 27). Interestingly, both Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and Art of Living add up to 41.

"You have to believe enough to see it"!

Last Thursday (12.FEB), I was going through the latest issue (FEB.2004) of Reader's Digest, which had an interview with Hrithik Roshan. The second-last paragraph (on page 95) grabbed me by the scruff of the neck:

If I have to choose the most important thing that I learnt from my experiences, it's that the answer to the question, 'Do you have to see something to believe it, or do you have to believe enough to see it?' is: You have to believe enough to see it.

That really made my day! Since my fond desire for this life is to see the Formless (even for a "second"), I thought this was a damn good funda to go with ;-)

Ah, the dichotomy of the Formless and the Universe of form! How does one "move" from the form to the Formless?

Albert Einstein observes the trickiness of this journey with his observation that startled me with its elegance:

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

Sri Ramakrishna corroborates this in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (TGoSR):

"God has covered all with His maya. He doesn't let us know anything. Maya is 'woman and gold'. He who puts maya aside to see God, can see Him. Once, when I was explaining God's actions to someone, God suddenly showed me the lake at Kamarpukur. I saw a man removing the green scum and drinking the water. The water was clear as crystal. God revealed to me that Satchidananda is covered by the scum of maya. He who puts the green scum aside can drink the water."
...
"The universe is conscious on account of the Consciousness of God. Sometimes I find that this Consciousness wriggles about, as it were, even in small fish."

Later that same night, I read Niels Bohr in ToI's Sacred Space:

The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may well be another profound truth.

In TGoSR, the Master mentions that when the Kundalini reaches the fourth (the Anahata) chakra, the spiritual seeker sees Light everywhere and never returns to the mundane existence of the lower three chakras [in Travels, his wonderful book of outer & inner travels, Michael Crichton makes the interesting observation that the third chakra (at the navel) is very highly developed for Westerners].

Of course, this needs the Grace of the Great Infinite Spirit. Again:

"Let me tell you a very secret experience. Once I had entered the wood near the pine-grove, and was sitting there, when I had a vision of something like a hidden door of a chamber. I couldn't see the inside of the chamber. I tried to bore a hole in the door with a nail-knife, but did not succeed. As I bored, the earth fell back into the hole and filled it. Then suddenly I made a very big opening."

My most detailed review in Amazon.com ;-)

Noticed that the most detailed of my reviews got published in Amazon.

It's for that wonderful book titled AFRICA — An Artist's Journal by Kim Donaldson.

Though I reviewed it on 03.FEB.2004, it took a while to get published. Wonder why. Was the reference to the 9.11 making the Amazon.com folks a bit chary?

CHEq, mate

A couple of days back, I was reading in the ToI Sacred Space that the most austere penance is no match to being cheerful :-) Due to some reason, that made a lot of sense to me.

So I was thinking of making a nice acronym to remember so that I can bootstrap myself out of any issue and was wondering what else to add to the mix when I was reminded of the following:

* Shirdi Sai Baba says that He represents humility and equanimity
* Satya Sai Baba says that He represents equanimity.

The acronym turned out to be CHEq. So, if I am anytime behaving in a weird way, request you to say: "CHEq, mate" ;-)

I was feeling good about this when I went to the Sai Baba Ashram (Brindavan) near our place last Thursday (05.FEB.2004) to buy a cassette called "Sarva Dharma Sai", which I find amazing.

The folks did not have it, but I got to talking to a couple of guys in the book-stall. One Army guy (RN Swami) told me a couple of incidents that saved his life:
~~~~~
* In 1996, he was with a Radar detachment and wearing a thick belt for the first time. A bullet hit him in the hip, and even though it was slowed down by the new belt, it still traveled 12" in his body. The doctors removed the (.77!) bullet, and said that it was a miracle that he survived.

* One night in DEC.2003, the chap was traveling on his scooter on Mysore Road, with his daughter riding pillion. Near the Gali Anjaneya temple, a lorry made a sudden 90-degree turn across his path. Our man applied brakes and, instead of being thrown forward, he was pushed back by a mysterious force. Though the scooter was a total write-off, nothing happened to him and his daughter, who fell on him.
~~~~~
Another guy (who spent some time in LA, USA) narrated an instance of a person being run over by a lorry on West of Chord Road, Bangalore. However, nothing happened to him. When the lorry passed over, they found that his body was covered with vibhuti. His house is now a bhajan hall.

I ended up buying a couple of books:
~~~~~
* Divine Journey, which is a narrative of the trip that Satya Sai Baba made to Delhi & Bombay in MAR.1999. Interestingly, it starts on 11.MAR.1999 (THU), the day Infy was launched on NASDAQ.
* A Telugu book on Ganesh & Baba.
~~~~~

The first book had an amazing take on the name Vinayaka: it stands for "without a leader, i.e., God".