Organise your thoughts, emotions and energies

Sadhguru

Everything we have created on this planet was essentially first created in our minds. All that you see which is human work on this planet first found expression in the mind, then it got manifested in the outside world.

A well established mind, a mind which is in a state of samyukthi, is referred to as a Kalpavriksha or wishing tree. If you organise your mind to a certain level, it, in turn, organises the whole system. Your body, your emotions, your energies, everything gets organised in that direction. If you do this you are a Kalpavriksha yourself. Anything that you wish will happen.

Once we are empowered with a potential like this, it is very important that our physical, emotional, mental and energy actions are controlled and properly directed. If it is not so, we become destructive, self-destructive.

Right now, that is our problem. The technology which is supposed to make our life beautiful and easy has become the source of several problems. What should have been a boon is turning out to be a curse. If life has to happen the way you think it should happen, first of all how you think and with how much focus you think, how much stability is there in your thought and how much reverberance is there in the thought process - all these will determine if your thought will become a reality or not.

Today, modern science is proving that the whole of existence is just a reverberation of energy. It is a vibration. Similarly, your thought is also a vibration. If you generate a powerful thought and let it out, it will always manifest itself.
To create what you really care for, first, what you want must be well manifested in your mind. Once you can maintain a steady stream of thought without changing direction, definitely this is going to happen in your life. It will definitely manifest as a reality in your life.

So, either you make this human form into a Kalpavriksha or you make it into one big mess. You must be clear as to what is it that you really want. If you do not know what you want, the question of creating it doesn't arise.

What every human being wants is to live joyfully, he wants to live peacefully, in terms of its relationship he wants to be loving and affectionate. All that any human being is seeking for is pleasantness within himself, pleasantness around him.

Once your mind gets organised, the way you think is the way you feel: your emotions will get organised. Once your thought and emotion are organised, your energies will go the same way. Then your very body will get organised. Once all these four are organised in one direction, your ability to create and manifest what you want is phenomenal.

You have the power to create, you are the Creator, in so many ways. The whole technology of Isha Yoga is just about this - transforming yourself from being just a piece of creation to the Creator himself. This is not in search of God, this is in search of becoming a God. This is not in search of Divine, this is in search of becoming Divine.

Detach your Service from expectation

Avatar Meher Baba

The karma yogi avoids the chaotic activity of selfish desires; he also avoids the apparent inaction of total non-wanting. He leads a life of selfless service, in which there is not the slightest alloy of any personal motive and which furthers the release of divinity in all phases of life.

Service, even when it is utterly selfless, ought to be guided by spiritual understanding; for selfless service, when unintelligently handled, often creates chaos and complications. It could even be the opposite of the desired effect.

The real danger in service lies more in the possibility of your rendering it from a false motive than in making a mistake about the spiritual demands of the situation. If you render service in order to oblige a person and if you feel proud of doing it, you are not only doing spiritual harm to the recipient of your service but also to yourself.

The consciousness that 'I am obliging someone' is the first to occur during the process of serving; but it can be annulled by the contrary thought, 'I am obliged by being given this opportunity of serving'. This latter thought facilitates the attitude of detachment and secures freedom from the bondage of good actions.
Service based upon comprehensive understanding is not only selfless and adjusted to the spiritual demands of the recipient but is rendered with complete detachment. Such service takes the aspirant to the goal most rapidly.

For most people the idea of service is inextricably bound with securing certain definite results in the objective world. For them service consists of removal of human suffering or illiteracy or other difficulties and handicaps that thwart the flourishing of individual or social life. This is the type of service rendered by aspirants, politicians, social reformers and other good people. Though this type of service is of immense spiritual importance, it is in its very nature unending. Therefore, as long as the idea of service is tied to the idea of results, it is inevitably fraught with a sense of incompleteness.

There can be no realisation of Infinity through the pursuit of a never-ending series of consequences. On the other hand, service that comes after truth realisation is spontaneous expression of spiritual understanding of the true nature of the Self. And though it also brings about important results in the objective world, it is in no way complicated by any longing for them.

The sun shines and the rain falls. In the same way the God-realised person also lives a life of self-offering because of the basic structure of divine life that is at the heart of Reality and not because he longs to achieve anything. His life is not a reaching out towards something with the hope of some kind of attainment. He is already established in the fullness of the realisation of the Infinite. The overflow of the God-realised being is a blessing to life in other forms and actually brings about their uplift from the material as well as spiritual point of view. There is a vast gulf between service before truth realisation and service after realising it.

Path to Self-awareness

by Lois Grant

Knowing what is right and what is wrong in your own inner consciousness is insufficient. It is not the knowing of truth that transforms a person; it is the doing of truth that has an impact on you and on the other people that you interact with. You may know that it is inappropriate to think selfishly and look out for your own best interests first, but your inner emotions may drive you to be blinded to the needs of others.

You may know that it is against your basic truth to judge another individual, but your inner emotions may cause you to look at that person and make a judgment because of the effect you are allowing them to have on your life. You may understand that all of God's creatures were created equal, but that doesn't stop you, on an emotional level, from feeling that the human race is the most important life form on the planet.

The discrepancy lies not in a lack of information, for the information is available on a world-wide basis for those who would seek it, evaluate it, and accept it as their own; the discrepancy lies in the ability to integrate Universal Law into your lifestyle. Awareness of the self does not just focus into the positive aspects of a personality, or the positive aspects of skills and talents that you brought with you into this lifetime, but into the negative as well; it is only when the positive is weighed against the negative, and the balanced perspective is used as a guidepost in integrating higher consciousness into the self that the influence becomes apparent in your relationships and in your lifestyle.

Self-actualisation can be translated to mean, making the self actual. It means there is no difference between what you think and what you do. There is no contradiction between what you tell others and how you respond yourself. It is manifesting who you are and what you believe in on a day-to-day, consistent basis. The path is a long and solitary one, and many individuals give up. It is difficult to accept what our conscious choices in the course of a specific existence have driven us to do to other people. It is hard for us to accept that we have been selfish, or resentful, or spiteful. It is hard for us to see where we have deliberately manipulated our lives so that we have control over the people and the situations and the events within it.

It is not easy to admit that we are not the positive, smiling, loving person that we prefer to see ourselves as; when, in the course of personal growth, it becomes necessary for an individual to truly, honestly evaluate how they have interacted with their fellow human beings, the drop-out rate skyrockets.

This is unfortunate, because personal growth cannot proceed — self-awareness and self-actualisation cannot be accomplished — without a true and open acknowledgement of who we used to be and how we used to live our lives, no matter how unpleasant that panorama may be. This does not mean that we need to spend years of our lives suffering regret and remorse for the wrong we have done in their lives to other people. It does mean that we need to take a reasonable amount of time to look back and to evaluate honestly what was really at play in any particular situation, where the two parties were really coming from, and where each conducted themselves with less than universal love.

We cannot change the past; we cannot undo the influence that we have upon other people by our thoughts and our feelings and our reactions, but we can learn from that experience and make a personal commitment never to treat anyone with that lack of respect again. If that person is still in our life, we can have the grace to apologise, and share our learning experience, and say, "I'm sorry that i used to be like that. I want to be like this, now, and i hope that you will help."

It is only by acknowledging our past weaknesses, and sharing our future aspirations, that we can experience the support and encouragement of others on our journey to self-actualisation. If we are not willing to admit that we have ever made a mistake, ever reacted inappropriately, ever deliberately hurt someone, then we cannot admit that we need to change, or that we need other people's help in doing so. It is, from a soul evolution perspective, self-defeating behaviour to remain in situations made from the lower consciousness that create less than fulfiling situations and relationships in our lives.