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As we go through school and acquire knowledge, knowledge of facts, knowledge of ideas, knowledge of principles, knowledge of methodologies, knowledge of trained skills, we gain in our ability to act in the world and succeed in our external life. We learn how to employ the faculty of reasoning ... Views: 346
Mindfulness helps transform our life from one of stress, fear and uncertainty, and clogged up with thoughts, to one that is on the whole calmer and stable, full of positive and clear thinking and wholesome. Mindful living helps focus ourselves on the present, here and now, rather than worrying ... Views: 238
Every level of consciousness is limited by the frame within which it operates, as well as by the mechanism of its action within that frame. In its own field of action, with its own native operation, the mind can be a powerful tool and aid to the individual. Yet, when it tries to assert for ... Views: 378
Every day is a new opportunity, a new beginning, an opportunity to live the life you truly want to live. Spirituality uplifts the human spirit. It is governed by love, lovingkindness, compassion, and awareness.
When the mind and body and spirit are aligned, there is a flow from that infinite ... Views: 467
The primary functionality of the mind is to organize and classify, breaking down and fragmenting the reality into component parts. We see this easily in the classification systems for flora and fauna, in our detailed review of the genetic structure of life, gene sequencing, and in our ability to ... Views: 359
How does Mind evolve out of Matter? Some scientists will tell you that through random chance, chemicals and electrical forces and heat led to the development of beings capable of reflecting, thinking and contemplating deep thoughts, exploring the nature of life and the universe, etc. They do not ... Views: 388
Western medical researchers have invested a considerable amount of time and attention on gaining an understanding of the way the brain functions, mapping the regions of the brain responsible for various types of activities, and monitoring the function of neurotransmitter chemicals and nervous ... Views: 392
When Life emerges in Matter, there must, obviously, be some mechanism for the two principles to interact with one another. Matter must develop ways to sense, respond to and react to the action of the Life-Force. Similarly, when the Life-Force evolves and manifests in Matter, it must also become ... Views: 328
A life focused solely on meditation, inner development, growth of knowledge, or on prayer and devotion, tends to avoid the implications of the ongoing evolution of consciousness and the need for transformation and positive change to create the circumstances for that evolution of consciousness to ... Views: 342
Virtually everybody, at some point in their lives, has the experience of entering a room or a gathering of some sort and feeling the movement of some vital force rising up within them. It could be a room filled with the energy of greed, or sexual tension or anger. They feel like they are being ... Views: 364
After all the attempts to bring the vital being under some kind of control, it may seem like it is an impossible task! The vital has its fixed habits of fulfillment and satisfaction and tends generally to want to continue its normal modes of action. It is, however, not a thankless task and there ... Views: 336
In order to carry out the spiritual practices and work for the transformation of human nature, the vital being needs to agree to changes its habitual sources of satisfaction and fulfillment to an entirely different basis. The pursuit of pleasure, and the accompanying experience of pain, is ... Views: 317
We generally do not question the movements of the vital nature in our ordinary daily life. They are so much a part of what we consider to be human nature and human experience that we simply accept them and treat them as inevitable. It is true that human society has developed a framework within ... Views: 331
Each individual is rooted primarily in one of the major component aspects of our human individuality. Some are clearly rooted in the physical and their thoughts, actions and needs are those called for by the physical being. The vast majority of people are moved by their vital being, and are ... Views: 350
One of the most confusing issues for the spiritual seeker is the ‘care and feeding’ of the vital nature. We shift from one extreme to the other in our view of how to bring it under control, for it is virtually uniformly recognised that for spiritual development, the vital nature must be ... Views: 358
We can observe that there are times when the vital nature is energetic, enthused, active, and makes efforts. There are other times when it is dull, withdrawn, sullen, lacking energy and clearly is not taking interest in doing anything. The difference between these two states generally lies in ... Views: 343
The vital has a natural tendency to seek for the fulfillment of its being in some form of enjoyment. In the external surface being, this enjoyment takes the form of a seeking after pleasure. With this seeking after pleasure, however, comes also the experience of pain. Pleasure and pain alternate ... Views: 338
The vital desire-soul animates the external being. When it enters the physical frame, we say that there is life in the body. When it departs, we say that the person has died. This is distinguishable from the true soul, the psychic being, which is not dependent on either the life or death of a ... Views: 375
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother make a distinction between the ‘desire soul’ of the vital nature and the ‘true soul’ which expresses the inmost being that is a direct spark of the Divine. They differ in their focus, orientation, and basis of action. The desire soul incorporates the drives of the ... Views: 356
When the vital nature is involved, which individual has the power to control its impulsions and demands and keep it focused on the higher aims of life? The vital nature is a powerful and essential component of life on earth. It animates material nature and functions through the force of desire. ... Views: 346
Through long habit, spiritual seekers tend to look at the question of how to attain spiritual liberation involving abandonment of the external life in the world. Not only spiritual seekers raise this question in some form or another. Anyone involved in aesthetic, mental, artistic, or emotional ... Views: 355
While the mind does not generally recognise the consciousness of the body, it remains true that the body has its own ability to respond to circumstances. For those who have a highly developed mental or vital being, these powers frequently override the natural responsiveness of the body. When we ... Views: 345
There is a conservative bias in earthly existence that seeks to preserve established ways of life as a means of providing an element of stability. This principle helps to avoid the chaotic implications of unrestricted change, thereby providing a basis and a certain amount of certainty. This ... Views: 369
The body has its own consciousness and much of its operation takes place without active mental intervention. However, there is also a serious interaction that takes place so that the mental power can influence, guide, train, direct and otherwise gain at least some control over certain aspects of ... Views: 375
Have you ever seen a talking and walking toy that runs on battery? According to what it is fed, it says, ‘I am hungry, I am happy’, and so on. It works as long as there is a battery in it. And, when the battery is discharged, it is dead. Similarly, a dead body doesn’t have any energy or power to ... Views: 276
If we reflect on how many actions or operations of the physical body take place without our mental intervention, it becomes clear that the body has its own highly developed, and essential, form of consciousness that operates independently of the mind. One common example is widely experienced. An ... Views: 383
An accident avoided. An individual related the following incident. He was driving with a passenger through Yellowstone National Park in the USA some years ago during the summer season in a van late in the afternoon. He had a sense or feeling of an impending accident involving a bison, although ... Views: 436
In the book, ‘Brahmacharya – Celibacy Attained with Understanding’, Param Pujya Dada Bhagwan, an Enlightened being, has shown the beneficial effects of brahmacharya with scientific exactness.
Let’s look at the following excerpts from this book:
Param Pujya Dadashri, herein, says:
“So ... Views: 304
For most people, acute illness is an event of the body, which is subject to attack by various malign types of germs, bacteria and viruses. We tend to envision the body as a battlefield and the attacking germs aggressively target the cells and organs and the body fights back with an immune ... Views: 459
There are many ideas about the causes of illness, as well as ways to prevent or cure illness. In the West, the prevalent idea is related to what may be called the “germ invasion” theory, namely, that illness is caused by specific physical ‘germs’ (bacteria or viruses) which invade and overpower ... Views: 496
When we observe the nerves and their role in our actions, we see that they carry vital sensations within a physical frame to connect our senses and responses to external pressures to the brain, and then, carry impulses back to the organs of action. Most people do not recognise the essential role ... Views: 348
When a particular power of consciousness is intended to participate in the evolution in the external world, it utilizes the physical body as the foundation or anchor of its action. This fixes its action in the world, while at the same time, imposes limits on the power due to the watering-down ... Views: 368
While each power of consciousness, physical, vital, mental (and others) operates in its native mode and strength in its own plane or sphere of action, it projects itself into the world we inhabit by tying itself to the foundation of the basic physical principle. This involves a ‘watering down’ ... Views: 367
We recognise the electro-magnetic spectrum, the color spectrum, the sound wave spectrum and others, each as representing a continuum of wave forms with varying characteristics. There are shorter, more intense waves and longer wave frequencies. Some conduct tremendous amounts of physical heat, ... Views: 341
We have a strong bias in favor of accepting things that we can perceive with our physical senses, and we tend to disbelieve or discount anything that is not directly, physically available to our experience. Yet if we reflect on the totality of our life experience, it becomes clear that there are ... Views: 399
We see pattens repeating from the macro-level to the micro-level. The study of fractals shows us that there are indeed certain patterns and relationships that repeat themselves in every smaller configurations as we drill down toward the micro-level. The macrocosm and the microcosm reflect the ... Views: 392
We reflect on the evolution of consciousness, how Life evolves out of Matter and Mind evolves out of Life in Matter. Nothing can evolve that has not been previously involved, just as a tree can develop out of an acorn, because the genetic coding is 'involved' in that seed and under the proper ... Views: 378
In the Taittiriya Upanishad, the seeker discovers, through intensive tapasya that there are multiple layers, or sheaths, of consciousness that make up the human being. His seeking first discovers the material body, or ‘food sheath’. As he continues he recognises the vital body, or ‘prana ... Views: 370
The evolution of consciousness involves an increasing level of complexity as successive levels of consciousness are layered and then interact with each other, with each layer attempting to not only express its own native way of seeing and acting, but also needing to accommodate the demands and ... Views: 369
One of the things that spiritual seekers experience is that regardless of how strong the central aspiration of the soul happens to be within them, they experience fluctuations based on the various parts of the external nature coming to the front and asserting their own priorities. This leads to ... Views: 399
It is practically a universal experience among religious and spiritual seekers, and even among people who are simply developing some kind of an inner life, that they have an aspiration, a desire to consecrate themselves to some goal, principle or idea, and yet, they struggle with opposing ... Views: 367
A spiritual seeker identifies with his aspiration and the focus and actions that come about as a result of that aspiration. It may be acts of prayer, acts of giving, acts of consecration, acts of meditation, or dedicated works. During the moments that he is engaged in these acts, he feels like ... Views: 395
As long as an individual is locked within a framework of understanding, he is unable to truly recognise or exceed the limits of that framework. The ego-consciousness is such a frame of awareness. It creates the sense of a separate individual, apart and having his own autonomy in ... Views: 406
As the seeker attempts to follow a spiritual path, he frequently finds that he struggles with old habits, desires, feelings, cravings, emotions and ideas. He believes these are part of ‘who he is’ and he thus cannot find a way to overcome them, In some cases, he is deeply attached to some of ... Views: 345
Almost everyone has the experience, from time to time, of acting out a different personality. We may say that someone “got out of bed on the wrong side this morning” when we see a normally cheerful and upbeat individual responding in a totally uncharacteristic way. We chalk this up to some mood ... Views: 415
Most people look at what they consider to be their personality in a very simple and straightforward manner. The mixture of ideas, thought-process, emotional responses, vital reactions, desires and physical needs and cravings is simply ‘who they are’. When they conclude that something needs to ... Views: 386
When an individual takes up the spiritual path, there is considerable focus on the idea that the life of the external world is an ‘illusion’ and needs to be abandoned in order to achieve spiritual liberation. He sees that a focus on the external personality, its needs, desires, satisfactions, ... Views: 376
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Let’s assume there is pitch darkness in your house, such that you cannot see anything ahead of you. What happens to you ... Views: 298
As long as we remain rooted in the awareness of mind-life-body, we see the world and our existence as a fragmented collection of separate objects, beings and forces and we act as if we are separate and distinct from everything else. The spiritual transformation of consciousness involves a shift ... Views: 369