Righ Attitude: Harnesing Life's Difficulties for Positive Achievements

Excerpts from a talk given by Sri Daya Mata, President & Sangha Mata of Self-Realization Fellowship/YSS of India. Today (Jan 31) is Sri Daya Mataji's birthday. Wish you a very happy birthday, Ma ! :)

Love and understanding, wisdom, health, security, lasting joy - these every person is seeking. Those of us on the spiritual path share the conviction that by communingwith God we will attain these goals.

When visited by hard times, our bad habit of believing we are mortal beings makes it easy to succumb to wrong thinking - "Why me? What did I do to deserve this?" - or to feel resentment or anger over the way life treats us. Cultivating right attitude helps us to see those circumstances, no matter how seemingly "unfair", as oppertunities - created by our own personal karma, yet blessed with the underlying grace of God for the specific purpose of hastening the unfoldment of our souls.

Progress is aligned to our understanding that our difficulties come not from other people, not fro outer conditions, not from any source but God through His cosmic laws. If we can but hold to the truth we can use what happens for our ultimate and highest good, we will feel God's ever-present hand of blessing and will find that our troubles cannot touch us inwardly.

This is why it is so important to have the right attitude toward the circumstances we encounter. I would even go so far as to say that attitude is the basis of everything on the spiritual path. How we face life, how we react to difficulties, how we respond to the inevitable challenges to our well-being and evenmindedness, how we engage in our spiritual practices - these determine how close we draw to the Divine, and how quickly.

So long as we exist on this material plane, there is one thing of which we can be of certain: the uncertainity of change. This we cannot avoid in a world of duality in which we are incessantly presented with the fluctutions of maya: light and darkness, health and ill health, life and death. Their inconstancy must not cow us down with fear or hopelessness - never! Their purpose is to teach us the lesson of our own transcendent, blissful nature. They are a prod to make us exert the effort to be free of these ceaseless ups and downs. The way to rise above the law of duality is by contacting God - the unchangeable Reality beyond the realm of changes.

Lakshmi Narasimhaswami Temple Near My Village

A beautiful, 11th century, Lakshmi Narasimhaswami Temple, 20 minutes (drive) away from my village.

An Evening @ The Gardens, KL

After having a delicious dinner with my friends at Gandhi's Restaurant in Brickfields, KL, we wanted to go for a walk in the new shopping mall "The Gardens".

A few snaps at the trendy mall.

Be Nourished by the Soul : Balancing, Simplifying, Making Time for God

Excerpts from an article by Sri Daya Mata, President of Self-Realization Fellowship/YSS of India.

Humanity today is suffering from spiritual malnutrition. People in parts of the world suffering from physical starvation, but millions in all nations are suffering from spiritual starvation. Science has given the means to feed everyone on this planet; it is man's spiritual poverty that makes him cling to selfishness and small-minded prejudices, thereby preventing him from eradicating hunger and other forms of deprivation.

The life anchored in truth, in wisdom, in God, is a balanced life. It starts with meditation. That is the emphasis of the routine established by Paramahansa Yogananda... The way of life he taught us consists of mediation in the morning, before we begin our duties, and at intervals through out the day; at noon, and again in the early evening when we have finished our daily work, and once more late at night ...before retiring.

It is the spiritually balanced individual who is truly successful. I am not referring monetary success; it has little meaning. That has been my(Daya Mata) experience, as it was Master's(Paramahansa Yogananda); I have met scores of materially successful human beings who have been emotional and spiritual failures - stressful; lacking inner peace and the ability to give and receive love; unable to relate harmoniously to their families, or to other human beings, or to God. A person's success cannot be measured by what he has, only by what he is and what he is able to give of himself to others.

Meditation helps us to align our outer life with inner values of the soul as nothing else in this world can.It does not take away from family life or relationships with others. On the contrary, it makes us more loving, more understanding - it makes us want to serve our husband, our wife, our children, our neighbours. Real spirituality begins when we include others in our wish for well-being, when we expand our thoughts beyond"I and me and mine."

Most shun meditation not because they truly have no time, but because they do not want to face themselves - a definite result of the interiorization of meditation. There is too much they do not like in themselves, so they would rather keep the mind on externals, never thinking too deeply about the self-improvements they need to make. Get away from such mental laziness.

How marvelously different and fulfilling is the balanced life in God shown us by Master: "Divine Mother, teach me to live with delight. May I enjoy my earthly duties and the countless beauties of creation. Help me to train my senses and appreciate Thy wondrous world of Nature. Let me savour with Thy zest all innocent pleasures. Save me from negation and unwarranted kill-joy attitudes."

Today in Western civilization people do not know how to enjoy simple things.They have become so jaded in their tastes that nothing satisfies: overstimulated outwardly, starved and empty inwardly, they take to drink or drugs to escape.

Let us go back to the simple pleasures of life. Have you ever on your day off, for example, taken a drive up into the mountains, or out into the desert or some other quiet place, had a picnic, sat quietly, and thought about God? These are real pleasures. What joy they bring once you have cultivated the sensitivity of appreciating the Lord's presence in the beauty of nature.

You might say, "Well, it would be terribly boring." But just try it once instead of going to a movie, from which you usually return restless and moody. You wanted to enjoy it, but it did not make you happy. Instead, seek natural places of beauty and solitude and listen to the still voice of God speaking through His creation. What peace it will bring to you!

One who is seeking God must practice more stillness in his life - for at least a short time each day in meditation; for a few hours on the weekend, perhaps when you get out in nature; and for several days or a week every so often.

The Science of Near-Death Experiences

"Consciousness can be experienced in some alternative dimension without our body-linked concepts of time and space. The brain is not producing consciousness, but it enables us to experience our consciousness."

A near-death experience (NDE) is a profound psychological experience, typically occurring in about 10% of people during a physical or emotional trauma, a life-threatening health crisis, or actual clinical death.

Browse the link below to read more in this TIME magazine article.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1657919-1,00.html

The Sound of Music and Plants

Article from Self-Realization Fellowship Magazine. Issue: Spring 1979

If plants could talk, one can not help but wonder what they would tell us about their likes and dislikes. In The Sound of Music and Plants, Mrs.Retallack gives the reader an insight into the emotional reaction of plants to music. Jazz, pop, country, rock, ragas, Berg, Bernstein, or Bach - which type do they most enjoy? To find out, the author, a professional musician and wife of a medical doctor, conducted scientific experiments while working on her B.A. degree at Tempel Buell College(now Colorado Women's College).

The results were so interesting that her work received worldwide recognition through the news media - articles appeared in over 500 news papers and magazines, including the New york Times, Harper's Science Digest, and Reader's Digest. In addition CBS television filmed the experiments on time-lapse camera for a special feature on Cronkite News.

What is so novel about these experiments? It is not that this type of research is new; experimentation with the effect of music on plants has been going on for years.

The experimentation of the author has unique twist. She writes: "Although others have done experiments for reasons of better production, bigger flowers, and so on, apparently I was the first in US to do scientifically controlled experiments purely to see how plants react to different types of music." By carefully setting up controlled music chambers with all factors constant except the music, placing a speaker at one end of each sound chamber and various types of vegetable, flowering, and leafy plants in the middle, she set the stage for observing the plants' reaction to the sound of music.

She watched in dismay as one group drooped, faded, and turned away from the sound source. What is more, after eighteen days, they died. Only six feet away, in another sound chamber, the drama was strikingly different: "At the 14th day, the plants nearest speaker were leaning at 60-degree angle so as to almost embrace the speaker. The growth was noticeably lush and abundant, as were the roots." The difference? The first group has been listening to "acid rock" ( the term used to define a highly percussive, heavily rhythmic kind of rock music), and the second to East Indian devotional music. The evidence gathered from this experiment led to an intriguing theory.

"Of all the various kinds of music used," the author explains, "there were three kinds, apparently different in every way, that the plants responded to most favourably: East Indian devotional, Bach's 'Orgelbuchlein(Preludes based on Hymn Tunes of the Church Year), and jazz.

The author appeals to mankind to listen to what plants are trying to say and to consciously develop music as means of inspiration and upliftment of all forms of life - as a "bridge to Infinite."

The highest mission of music is to serve as a bridge between man and God.

Click the link below for more information on the experiments:

http://www.dovesong.com/positive_music/plant_experiments.asp

Christmas Tree Deco @ Midvalley Megamall, KL

Physalis Flowers in a magical forest

Physalis is a genus of plants in the nightshade family (Solanaceae), native to warm temperate and subtropical regions throughout the world. The genus is characterised by the small orangey fruit similar in size, shape and structure to a small tomato, but partly or fully enclosed in a large papery husk derived from the calyx. Collectively, they are referred to as groundcherries but many species are well-known to humans and have more fanciful names.

They are herbaceous plants growing to 0.4-3 m tall, similar to the common tomato - a relative - but usually with a stiffer, more upright stem; they can be either annual or perennial. Most require full sun and fairly warm to hot temperatures. Some species are sensitive to frost, though others such as P. alkekengi (Chinese Lantern) tolerate severe cold when dormant in winter.