People often ask, “What is the logic of meditation? What is wrong with idol worship?”
many have clarified that there is nothing wrong, but it is a limitation. And if God is everywhere, it is a denial of that truth to have to go to a temple to find Him there. If He is in everything, surely He is in me as much as in that place of worship. Why not seek Him within?
An idol is a representation of the Divine. If a person is capable of understanding this, then there is nothing wrong in idol worship. When we are able to transfer our worship to the Ultimate, then where is the need to depend on a representation?
God is not confined in form or ritual, nor is He resident in scriptures. We have to seek Him in the innermost core of our heart. It is good to be born in a religion, but it is bad to die in a religion. It means that you start off with something — a capital, a heritage, a system of philosophy, but you have to grow out of it eventually.
It is felt that we prefer to worship Him outside us because it is possible then to isolate Him from ourselves. A God in the temple can be safely locked up until one needs Him again. A God within is perhaps a perpetual ‘nuisance’ for one whose intentions are not so genuine, whose aspirations are not so good, whose practices are not so ethical. He does not want a permanent witness. Idol worship has perhaps evolved out of this need to isolate God from our existence, to be accessed when we need Him, through prayer or offering so that we can come back thinking, “I have sacrificed, and surely I will get,” forgetting that what we have is also His.
In meditation the adoration is, therefore, directed to one’s own heart, to the divinity present therein, and by this act of transcendental worship, the divinisation of human beings is made possible, to culminate in the ultimate achievement of total divinisation of the individual.
The message of spirituality is: “Look within.” “I am in the heart of every creative being. Look for me there. I am you.”The ones who are aware of the divinity within would say, “Where religion ends, spirituality begins; where spirituality ends, reality begins; where reality ends, bliss begins.” The system must conform to the time in which we live, so that the situation in which we are placed in our temporal existence enables us to do these things satisfactorily, continuously, regularly, and effectively.
That in whom reside all beings and who reside in all beings, who is the giver of grace to all, the Supreme Soul of the universe, the limitless being--I am That.That which permeates all, which nothing transcends and which, like the universal space around us, fills everything completely from within and without,
ReplyDeletethat Supreme non-dual Brahman --that thou are
Before you can say "I am", you must be there to say it. Being need not be self-conscious. You need not know to be, but you must be to know.
To become free, your attention must be drawn to the "I am", the witness. Of course, the knower and the known are one, not two, but to break the spell of the known the knower must be brought to the forefront. Neither is primary, both are reflections in memory of the ineffable experience, ever new and ever now, untranslatable, quicker than the mind.
The world is an ocean of pain and fear, of anxiety and despair. Pleasures are like the fishes, few and swift, rarely come, quickly gone. A man of low intelligence believes, against all evidence, that he is an exception and that the world owes him happiness. But the world cannot give what it does not have; unreal to the core, it is of no use for real happiness. It cannot be otherwise. We seek the real because we are unhappy with the unreal. Happiness is our real nature and we shall never rest until we find it.
ReplyDeleteHappiness is of the heart, not a product of machines. Happiness can only rest on the foundation of empathy, mutual love and concern for all. Happiness is the ultimate Peace, it is the music of life for it is God manifested.Happiness is the essence of life. It is the symbol of nobility and greatness, strength of mind and source of all noble thoughts. Those who cannot experience happiness, also fail to realise bliss. Learn to imbibe peace within. Dive into the ocean of unabated peace.
Try doing this to attain happiness. Sit quietly, closing your eyes, in solitude. Keep out flickering thoughts and reflect and pray in the following manner: I have seen enough of this mundane world with eyes wide open. I have spent my life, running after pleasure and material attainments. But where is happiness? Oh, my Lord, have mercy on me! Will my life be thus wasted, without experiencing ultimate bliss? Now, only You can lead me towards your path. All my deeds are bondages. Make me perform such deeds that will cut off these bondages to taste the sweet nectar of Your love and happiness. Please accept my prayers. Help me plunge into the divine ocean of Your love and bless me with Your grace.
Bless me such that my life becomes meaningful. My wavering mind keeps me wandering forever... remaining attached to this mundane world, suffering pain in the pursuit of happiness. Bless me with strength, devotion and love. Take away my conceit. I seek your refuge. I do not pray for material attainments, but bless me with the divine wisdom.
Reflecting on such thoughts, be at peace within. Keep other mundane thoughts at bay. Slowly but steadily, you will be filled with divine ecstasy. Your mind will be at peace. God is within you; you need not seek for him elsewhere. We tend to be in constant stress and hence, fail to realise that peace resides within us.
Don't rush off for your daily chores as soon as you wake up. Try out the above method, closing your eyes, while still in bed. It will prove beneficial. Being fresh at this hour of the day, the mind is at peace.
Take advantage of this state of mind.Wherever you may be at office, at home take some time to contemplate. Prayer is not a time-bound process. Let it be a perpetual state. Let you life blossom. Let your every deed be guided by His thoughts. You are just the means. The Lord is the doer. So, do not do any work in haste. Ensure that you carry out your work with a calm and selfless attitude. Work done with patience proves to be more efficient.
In the beginning, as we are used to leading a restless life, peace continues to evade us. To retain peace within try out the above methods again and again. By doing so, you will feel the Lord's benediction in the form of peace. You will feel one with the Almighty. You mental agitation, perplexity and fickleness will disappear. You will lead a peaceful and happy life.
AFTER John Locke published his Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690, he sent copies to various savants of his acquaintance, asking for comments and in particular for advice on whether he had left out anything essential - for if so, he could add it to a second edition. His correspondent William Molyneaux of Dublin replied that Locke needed to say something about personal identity: that is, what makes a person the same person throughout their life.
ReplyDeleteBelief in the idea of a substantial soul - a "you" that is separate from your body - was waning. In the absence of this metaphysical entity as a convenience for underpinning personal identity, what, asked Molyneaux, makes the retired general continuous with the eager subaltern of 40 years before, and he with the red-cheeked baby in his nurse's arms 20 years before that? In response, Locke added a chapter to his second edition which instantly caused a storm of controversy and has been famous ever since in the annals of philosophy.
In that chapter Locke argued that a person's identity over time resides in their consciousness (he coined this term, and here introduced it to the English language) of being the same self at a later time as at an earlier, and that the mechanism that makes this possible is memory. Whereas a stone is the same stone over time because it is the very same lump of matter - or almost, allowing for erosion - and an oak tree is identical with its originating acorn because it is the same continuous organisation of matter, a person is only the same through time if he or she is self-aware of being so. Memory loss interrupts identity, and complete loss of memory is therefore loss of the self.
The divines, represented by Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, took umbrage and attacked Locke for ignoring the immortal soul. In 1712 The Spectator magazine ran a front-cover demand that "the wits of Kingdom" should get together in conference to settle the matter of personal identity and selfhood, because the controversy was getting out of control. In 1739, when David Hume published the first volume of his Treatise on Human Nature, he stated that there is no such thing as the self, for if one conducts the empirical inquiry of introspecting - looking within oneself - to see what there is apart from current sensations, feelings, desires and thoughts, one does not find an extra something, a "self", over and above these things, which owns them and endures beyond them.
Thus in 50 years the unreflective idea that each individual has an immortal soul as the basis of their selfhood had changed utterly. For millennia before Locke, no one had so much as raised the question. But it was no surprise that the question should suddenly become urgent as the EnlightenmentMovie Camera dawned, with its central idea of the autonomous individual who is a bearer of rights and responsible for his or her own moral outlook; such an idea needs a robust idea of selfhood, and the philosophers eagerly tried to make sense of it.
Hume's sceptical view did not prevail. Kant argued that logic requires a concept-imposing self to make experience possible, and the Romantics made the self the centre of each individual's universe: "I am that which began," wrote Swinburne in Hertha, "Out of me the years roll, out of me God and Man." Without a deep idea of the self there could be no Freud or psychoanalysis.
So fundamental is the idea of the self to modern human consciousness that one would expect developments in neuroscience to have a direct bearing on it. And as Thomas Metzinger argues in his stimulating new book The Ego Tunnel, reviewed on page 44 of this issue, that is exactly what is happening - with surprising and often disconcerting results.
One would expect developments in neuroscience to have a direct bearing on the idea of self.