SLOKA 90 FROM DANCING WITH SIVA
\nWHAT IS THE HINDU OUTLOOK ON GIVING?
\nGenerous, selfless giving is among dharma’s central fulfillments. Hospitality, charity and support of God’s work on earth arises from the belief that the underlying purpose of life is spiritual, not material. Aum Namah Sivaya.<\/p>\n
BHASHYA
\nNowhere is giving better unfolded than in the ancient Tirukural, which says, ”Of all duties, benevolence is unequaled in this world, and even in celestial realms. It is to meet the needs of the deserving that the worthy labor arduously to acquire wealth.” Even the poorest Hindu practices charity according to his means. In this unselfish tradition, guests are treated as God. Friends, acquaintances, even strangers, are humbled by the overwhelming hospitality received. We share with the less fortunate. We care for the aged. We honor swamis with gifts of food, money and clothes. We encourage the spirit of helping and giving, called dana, within the family, between families and their monastic and priestly communities. Many devout Hindus take the dashama bhaga vrata, a vow to pay ten percent of their income each month to an institution of their choice to perpetuate Sanatana Dharma. This centuries-old tithing practice is called dashamamsha. The Vedas wisely warn, ”The powerful man should give to one in straits; let him consider the road that lies ahead! Riches revolve just like a chariot’s wheels, coming to one man now, then to another.” Aum Namah Sivaya.<\/p>\n
LESSON 90 FROM LIVING WITH SIVA
\nCONTROL OF THE PRANAS<\/p>\n
A great flow of prana is beginning to occur among the families of our congregation worldwide because each one has decided to discipline himself or herself and the children to perform sadhana. That brings the prana under control. If the prana is not under the control of the individual, it is controlled by other individuals. The negative control of prana is a control, and positive control of prana is a control. That’s why we say, ”Seek good company,” because if you can’t control your prana, other people who do control their pranas can help you. The group helps the individual and the individual helps the group. If you mix with bad company, then the pranas begin to get disturbed. Once that happens, your energies are like a team of horses out of control. It takes a lot of skill and strength on the part of the individual to get those pranas back under control.<\/p>\n
The control of prana is equally important on the inner planes. When you leave the physical body, you are in your astral body, your subtle body. It is not made of flesh and bones like your physical body–as the Buddhists say, ”thirty-two kinds of dirt wrapped up in skin.” The astral body is made of prana. It floats. It can fly. It’s guided by your mind, which is composed of more rarefied prana, actinic energy. Wherever you want to go, you’ll be there immediately. And, of course, you do this in your sleep, in your dreams and after death. Many of you have had astral experiences and can testify how quickly you can move here and there when your astral body is detached from the physical body However, if you don’t have control of your prana, you don’t have control of your astral body. Then where do you go when you drop off your physical body at death? You are magnetized to desires, uncontrollably magnetized to fulfilling unfulfilled desires. You are magnetized to groups of people who are fulfilling similar unfulfilled desires, and generally your consciousness goes down into lower chakras. Only in controlling your astral body do you have conscious control of your soul body, which is, of course, living within the astral body and resonating to the energy of the higher chakras.<\/p>\n
My satguru, Siva Yogaswami, spoke of Saivism as the sadhana marga, ”the path of striving,” explaining that it is a religion not only to be studied but also to be lived. ”See God everywhere. This is practice. First do it intellectually. Then you will know it.” He taught that much knowledge comes through learning to interpret and understand the experiences of life. To avoid the sadhana marga is to avoid understanding the challenges of life. We must not fail to realize that each challenge is brought to us by our own actions of the past. Yes, our actions in the past have generated our life’s experiences today. All Hindus accept karma and reincarnation intellectually, but the concepts are not active in their lives until they accept the responsibilities of their own actions and the experiences that follow. In doing so, no blame can fall upon another. It is all our own doing. This is the sadhana marga–the path to perfection.<\/p>\n
The sadhana marga leads us into the yoga pada quite naturally. But people don’t study yoga. They are not taught yoga. They are taught sadhana, and if they don’t perform it themselves–and no one can do it for them–they will never have a grip strong enough over their instinctive mind and intellectual mind to come onto the yoga marga, no matter how much they know about yoga. So, we don’t learn yoga. We mature into it. We don’t learn meditation. We awaken into it. You can teach meditation, you can teach yoga, but it’s all just words unless the individual is mature and awake on the inside.<\/p>\n
To be awake on the inside means waking up early in the morning. You woke up early this morning. That may have been difficult. But you got the body up, you got the emotions up, you got the mind up, and your instinctive mind did not want to do all that. Did it? No! Spiritual life is a twenty-four-hour-a-day vigil, as all my close devotees are realizing who have taken the vrata of 365 Nandinatha Sutras. It means going to bed at night early so you can get up in the morning early. It means studying the teachings before you go to bed so that you can go into the inner planes in absolute control. It means in the morning reading from my trilogy, Dancing with Siva, Living with Siva and Merging with Siva, to prepare yourself to face the day, to be a strong person and move the forces of the world.
\nSUTRA 90 OF THE NANDINATHA SUTRAS
\nFAMILY TOGETHERNESS
\nEach of Siva’s devotees who is a husband spends time with his wife and children daily. Monday is a family evening at home. One night monthly is devoted to the wife alone in an activity of her choice. Aum Namah Sivaya.<\/p>\n
LESSON 90 FROM MERGING WITH SIVA
\nGOING IN AND COMING OUT<\/p>\n
The Self is so simple. You have to be so simple to realize the Self, not simple-minded, but so unattached. Awareness has to be able to move so nimbly through the mind, like a graceful deer going through the forest, so deftly through the mind, that none of the sticky substance of the mind, so to speak, sticks onto awareness and holds it steadfast for a period of time. And only with that agility can you move awareness in quickly to the Source, in on itself, until you come out having realized the Self. It is an experience you come out of more than go into.<\/p>\n
If you were to explain Self Realization in another way, look at it in this way. Right out here we have a swimming pool. Beneath the surface of the water, we will call that the Self. The surface of the water, just the surface of it, we will call that the depths of contemplation, that pure consciousness, that most super-rarefied area of the mind, the most refined area of the mind of pure consciousness. And we are going to dive through pure consciousness into the Self. We will call the physical body awareness. It’s a body of light, and it’s going to dive into the Self, into the depths of samadhi. But to do that, it has to break the surface, has to break pure consciousness.<\/p>\n
So, then, we make a preparation. Attention! We take all our clothes off. We put on a bathing suit and walk around the pool. We are getting ready for this great dive. Concentration! We pull our forces together, We don’t quite know what is going to happen to us. Meditation! We look over the swimming pool. We look over the whole thing. We are studying out the philosophy of just what we are going to do. We even try to measure the depth of the Self. We talk to people about it and ask, ”Have you jumped in there?” Some say, ”No, but I intend to one day,” and others will answer, ”Yes.” ”Well, can you tell me something about it?” They say, ”Uh-uh, no.” Then you go into contemplation. You just stand. And you are completely aware of just standing there, right on the brink of the Absolute, and you are standing–so, so, so much conscious that you’re there, you are just aware of being aware. And then you laugh, and then you jump in. As your hands and head go into the water, they disappear. As the body breaks the surface, it disappears. As the legs go in, they disappear. And we are all looking at the surface of the swimming pool and don’t see you there anymore. You just disappeared, the whole body.<\/p>\n
As you come out of that samadhi, first the hands and head come up and begin to appear again–then the chest, then the entire torso. Then, as you climb out from the pool, the legs reappear, and finally the feet appear again. You are just the same as you were before, but you are all clean on the inside. Awareness has a new center. The center is way down in the bottom of there, someplace that you can’t even talk about. You have realized, when you come out, that you have realized the Self.<\/p>\n
Before you went in, you knew all sorts of things about it. You could quote a thousand different things about the Self. You knew so much. And when you come out, you don’t know anything about it at all. You know you have had a tremendous experience. You have had an inner bath. Then you go back into just enjoying the experience–contemplation. Then you begin to meditate, coming out again on the experience. And there is a vastness in you that awareness can no longer penetrate. It’s a tremendous vastness; you just can’t penetrate it anymore. You go in and in and in, and then all of a sudden you realize that you have realized the Self again. And you go in and in and in, and then all of a sudden you realize that you have realized the Self again. And everything is different.<\/p>\n
You look at the world from the inside out. You look at people from the inside out. You look at a person, and immediately you see how they came along through life. You look at their face, and you see what their mother looks like. You look into their subconscious mind; you see what their home looked like. You see what they were like when they were ten years old, fourteen, twenty, twenty-five years old; now they are thirty. And at the same time you are seeing what they are going to look like when they are forty years old, and so forth. You see the whole sequence, all now. Then you really know, after that deep samadhi, that the mind, in all phases of manifestation, was all finished long ago. It’s already complete.<\/p>\n
Before that, you try to believe in that concept. And it’s a vast concept to believe in, because at certain times, when awareness is flowing in the external areas of the mind, it certainly doesn’t look that way at all. Our perspective is limited.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SLOKA 90 FROM DANCING WITH SIVA WHAT IS THE HINDU OUTLOOK ON GIVING? Generous, selfless giving is among dharma’s central fulfillments. Hospitality, charity and support of God’s work on earth arises from the belief that the underlying purpose of life is spiritual, not material. Aum Namah Sivaya. BHASHYA Nowhere is giving better unfolded than in the ancient Tirukural, which says, ”Of all duties, benevolence is unequaled in this world, and even in celestial realms. It is to meet the needs of the deserving that the worthy labor arduously to acquire wealth.” Even the poorest Hindu practices charity according to his <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5233,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-lesson-with-gurudeva","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revers-sun.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revers-sun.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revers-sun.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revers-sun.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revers-sun.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revers-sun.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5677\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revers-sun.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revers-sun.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revers-sun.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revers-sun.fi\/fi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}