Whatever is in your heart that is not clean, not true, will ultimately begin to act like a wall, obstructing the natural flow of love. People who say that there is no love in their life, are being blocked by this wall. Actually there is love, but they just can't accept it. Ego is the clearest example of this. Ego limits the flow of love by placing conditions on the love you give and receive. Ego uses love to satisfy its own needs and desires. It produces a love which is deceptive, one which brings only temporary satisfaction. Ego does not allow you to experience true love or share it. If fact, ego is capable of destroying your ability to feel love altogether.
Newness At Every Step Living a life of positivity and creativity makes life a beautiful journey which one loves completely and enjoys to the fullest extent. Different thoughts, words and actions full of newness and enthusiasm are the driving energy of your life. Life should not be a routine with the same type of thoughts, words and actions every day. On the other hand, life should be a journey full of happiness and variety with different types of events and not the same scenes and situations every day. Also making a lot of interactions with different types of people every day gives life a new touch of positivity and relaxation which would not be possible if we met the same people every day. So, make it a point to meet new people every day and give life a new meaning and purpose by doing different types of creative activities. Even in your job, look for different types of activities which give life a new purpose. Don’t become accustomed to a similar routine everyday which can make the job or even the house work a boring exercise. Be creative and bring newness at every step. Also, whenever you start your day, create a few positive thoughts or affirmations in your mind. Let them be full of success and energy and a lot of determination which will keep you full of positive energy in the entire day, so that actions can be performed without getting tired. This is what joyful living is. Also, after every couple of hours in the day, stop your work for 3 minutes and check the thoughts in your mind. If they are going in the wrong direction, give them a new direction by meditating and creating a lot of powerful thoughts or at times if you feel it more comfortable, experience silence. One is an expansion of thoughts and the other is packing up. Both are spiritual methods of empowering the mind. Both have their own benefits and are opposite type of methods but both help in mind control. Try either one depending on the situation. Also, at some points of time in the day, talk to God and make Him a part of your life as you would make a close relative or friend, in the same manner. In Spiritual Service, Brahma Kumaris Values are related to each other as if they were members of a great family. From peace and happiness emerges inner joy. From this state of wholeness love awakens and with is the desire to share and give. Two of its relatives are tolerance and respect. All values have a shared origin which unites them – the peace of spirituality. When you lose peace you begin to lose everything. Keeping The Watchman Of Attention Alert All the religions and spiritual groups place a lot of importance on the virtue of discipline. Without discipline you do not manage to transform negative habits and you do not create a new state of awareness where the self is nourished through the experience of spirituality. Every day you eat, you brush your teeth, bathe, drink water and breathe, and all of this you do not consider a discipline; you have adopted them as something natural in order for your body to continue working. On a spiritual level you also need to nourish yourself and to have a discipline that, with practice, a time comes when it becomes natural because you incorporate it into your life. In the process of change you need to discipline yourself in order not to let old habits come to the forefront. Until you have burnt them and they have died, you should keep the watchman of attention alert in order to maintain your self-control, given that each time you use a negative habit in action, you strengthen it. When you do not use it, you allow it to die. The path of the spiritual traveler is therefore one of waking (awareness of self as soul) and sleeping (under the illusion that we are our body), waking and sleeping. We tend to fluctuate between the two (like dawn and dusk) until we find stability in soul-consciousness. This is why it is important to awaken and stay awake, and why it's important to give our mind and intellect goodspiritual food (knowledge) and exercise (meditation) every day to keep them fresh and alert. Being conscious of the soul, acting from that consciousness, the scars (habits and tendencies) left by past actions based on illusions of bodily awareness are healed. Discipline is necessary for growth and personal transformation if you want to obtain satisfying and permanent results. If not, the old habits continue to rule in your life. The evidence that our discipline in the practice of meditation is working is mental lightness and an increasing easiness in our interactions with others. Message for the day To invest rightly is to increase savings. In Spiritual Service, Brahma Kumaris Sadhguru: How is color significant for human consciousness as such, or for any kind of spiritual process? It is significant in the sense that the color that you reflect will naturally add to the aura that you carry. People on the ascetic path don’t want to wear anything because they don’t want to add anything new to themselves. They just want to work with what they have. They don’t want to take on anything more. What you are right now, to work that out is quite substantial. Adding one more thing complicates it. So they walk naked. If walking naked is difficult socially, they put on a loincloth. But the idea is they don’t take on anything more than what they are. They know that what they are is itself substantial. There are other aspects to it but this is in terms of the color.
What is color, first of all? The color of any substance is not because of what it is, it is what it rejects or what it gives away or reflects. Something looks red not because it is red, but because it holds back everything that white light contains and reflects red. So red does not mean it is red. Red means it is not red! Whatever you give away, that will be your quality in the world also. Ego is not just having a big head. Ego is present every time you feel any kind of fear, or hear yourself saying "That's mine". The truth tells us that nothing is 'mine' or 'yours', we are all trustees, and fear is only present where there is the voice of attachment. Detach from everything, and you will banish ego, fear will be no more, and only then can true love return.
At Peace with Time – The Key To Relaxed Living To live in freedom you have to live at peace (harmony) with time; live the dimension of time as a creator of time and not a slave of time; live without being either a prisoner or victim of time. To live at peace with time is to live in harmony with nature, beginning with your inner nature. When you plant a sapling today, you cannot accelerate the process so that the next day you have a tree. When it is summer, you cannot make the earth revolve around the sun quicker or slower for winter to arrive before or later. Everything has its rhythm in nature. We have distanced ourselves from the natural rhythm and our accelerated mind exercises pressure, creates stress and causes anxiety. We plan the future, we are stuck in the past and the present escapes us. Many worries have to do with how we live time: the past, the present and the future.Worrying about what might happen (future), when the moment has not yet come for it to happen, takes away from us the necessary energy to deal with it when it finally arrives. Living in memories drains our energy; the past already happened and no longer exists, except in our memory. We feed memories, not realizing that emerging the memory in our mind distracts us from the present and weakens us. It is like being a plug that connects to a socket with no current passing through. We lose our energy. We want to relive an experience that already happened, and in the end we feel disappointed, feeling a mental and emotional waste. To give regard to all is to have control. I usually want to control people and want regard from all. In the process I show my authority to those around me and try to get things done. Yet I find that when I do this I am not able to have any control others or their behaviour. The best way to get things done is by giving regard to all. When I have true regard for them, I am also able to receive regard from them. It is this regard that will make others understand and behave according to my needs. Message for the day The more I sow seeds of effort, the more I reap the fruits of result. In Spiritual Service, Brahma Kumaris If you think you can do something alone, either because you don’t trust others to do it or because you feel you are the most qualified…
* you will always be busy doing everything * you will be unhappy with others because they are not doing what you want * you will be dissatisfied It is more effective to invest your time in training and developing others. There is greater success in cooperation. The Role Play Of Thoughts In Relationships Husband-wife relationships, sometimes, are like castles of sand, extremely pleasing to the eye, but based on weak foundations and susceptible to destruction when challenged by negative tides of clash of opinions, personalities or lifestyles. In such relationships, the castles look good from outside because of energies like acceptance, trust, understanding and letting go existing on the surface i.e. these energies are displayed by both partners to each other in the form of words, gestures and actions but these castles can easily collapse because the foundations of these castles i.e. thoughts and feelings carried by the partners in their minds are filled with expectations, rejection, mistrust, misunderstandings, possessiveness and suspicion at times along with the positive emotions which are displayed in actions. Also both partners feel they have made their respective positive contributions in the relationship and so the same is expected from the other side, which is not fulfilled at times, further increasing the problems in the relationship. At the same time both partners are oblivious (not aware) of the negative emotional, much more powerful forces that exist inside them, which go against the positive contribution and are silently working on the castle of the relationship from below, ready to bring it down anytime. Another e.g. - in corporate circles, apart from the external objective of profit making and generation of revenue and jobs, an important internal objective of any good corporate organization is creating a peace, love and happiness filled as well as obstacle free atmosphere in the company, which will be conducive (helpful) to the external objective. One spiritual principle states that the leader or CEO or Managing Director of the organization is like a seed of the organization, whose every thought reaches out to and influences every person of the organization as well as the organization as a whole. A second spiritual principle states that the internal ruling and controlling power of a leader of an organization is directly proportional to the handling (of the people of the organization) power of the leader. If in the inner confines (boundaries) of the leader’s mind, obstacles of waste and negative thoughts exist i.e. the inner atmosphere of the leader’s mind is not full of peace, love and joy, then as per the first spiritual principle, this gets transmitted to the people under the leader and as per the second spiritual principle, such a leader who is lacking in mind ruling power and mind controlling power is automatically lacking in handling power of people under him. Such a leader, due to the application of both these principles, is ineffective in creating a positive environment in the organization. When things go wrong or not as planned, think 'maybe'! Maybe it's not meant to happen now. Maybe there's something better to come. Maybe there's a benefit or something to learn here. Maybe I could have done things differently. Think 'maybe' and you're not caught up in disappointment or labelling things as good or bad. Instead you're able to maintain your peace of mind, readjust, improvise and look at alternatives. Message for the day To change means to experience progress. In Spiritual Service, Brahma Kumaris In life you will meet many people. All are significant. They deserve your attention and care, even if all you do is smile and say "hello".
Hearing The Voice Of Inner Wisdom Clearly In a way we already know all that we need to know and all that is required to bring about transformation in the self – after all originally, we were a perfect being, and the experience of that stage as well as the knowledge of the path to reach back to that original, perfect stage is embedded inside us. Then why take up spirituality? Why can't we just listen to our intuition – the voice of inner wisdom? Listening to our intuition would be great but unfortunately most of us are not able to hear the voice of our own inner wisdom, which lies submerged in the sub-conscious because the noise of our thoughts, feelings and attitudes drowns the voice out. We have been gathering, slowly and steadily, thousands of beliefs since we have been a part of the cycle of birth and rebirth and these beliefs, in turn, create a flood of incorrect and unwanted thoughts and feelings, today, which distort the true inner voice so that when we think our intuition is telling us something that is true, it is really a wrong belief that we learned sometime in the past. Over a period of time, as the soul gets purified through the practice of meditation and as it starts listening to and understanding true spiritual knowledge, false beliefs based on body consciousness get displaced by true ones based on spiritual consciousness and this inner voice starts speaking absolutely clearly and accurately without any wrong judgments or distortion. That is why, in the beginning, when we are still learning to connect with God, it is extremely important, to have the guidance of someone more experienced when learning meditation, who can guide us with his/her wisdom and experience, so that we can differentiate between what is actually our intuition and our own belief influenced viewpoint. Faith brings determination. When we are trying for something we find ourselves losing hope and giving up. Although we feel that we are trying till the end, it is usually not so. Sometimes we find ourselves giving up just before we could have succeeded. Determination to succeed comes with faith - faith in myself and the faith that things will work out fine. This faith doesn't let me give up mid-way but gives me determination that makes me put in efforts till I achieve success. Message for the day To understand the power of positivity is to finish negativity. In Spiritual Service, Brahma Kumaris Don’t give sorrow, don’t take sorrow! The qualities that stop me giving sorrow are mercy, love and honesty. If someone has these, they will never even think of giving sorrow. I need to be merciful not to give sorrow and I need to be strong in order not to take sorrow. In fact, the moment you stop taking sorrow, you days of happiness have begun. These are your eyes, ears and lips – it is up to you whether to take sorrow or not. The Search For Happiness And A Beautiful Relationship Throughout history, human beings have desired and searched for two things, happiness and a perfect loveful and beautiful relationship. It is interesting to realize that you cannot search for what, you have not already had or known. In other words, we search for these two things because inside us we have a deep subconscious memory of the original, perfect and eternal relationship with our Friend, Guide and Parent, the One remembered as God, Allah, Ishwar, etc. It is only when we restore our relationship with this Being is that we can experience true happiness or bliss. Bliss is the highest form of spiritual happiness we can experience. It is experienced only when we are free of all attachment, when we no longer identify wrongly with anything physical and when our inner mental state is not dependent on anything or anyone. At its highest level and in its purest state, our relationship with God is non-dependent and unconditional, and therefore blissful. Deep within the soul, there is a memory of the bliss of this perfect union and it is this memory that inspires us to search for the perfect relationship, for the perfect happiness. However, instead of seeking it at the spiritual level, we seek at the level of personality and body. We search in those around us for the perfect partner - our soul mate. It is not incorrect to have worldly relationships, but there needs to be a deep realization inside each one of us that our true soul mate, is the One with whom we can have an ever-lasting, eternal relationship, the One with whom we have the deepest eternal bond (over a period of many births), the One from whom we will experience everlasting, eternal, unconditional attainments. What happens when your anger button gets pushed? Do you get all heated up? Do you let your emotions erupt on someone else? As anger increases, perspective & reasoning decreases; rather than adding fuel to the fire, often the best thing we can do is give ourselves a moment to recuperate, even if it's just briefly. Take a deep breath, & then several more deep breaths. Come back to calm, & consider how you want to respond. When you have a moment, reflect on how you want to handle things, the next time your anger buttons get pushed. Message for the day Every change is a means to take one forward for those who are positive. In Spiritual Service, Brahma Kumaris |
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April 2017
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