The Puzzle of Time

Atma Prakash utilized his time very well. The interactive sessions with the Baba every Thursday and his discussions with Mataji now and then were really enriching. They were ‘eye openers’ for him. He read widely on the related subjects. 

Mataji also took keen interest in his growth and studies. She often discussed ecological and environmental issues with him whenever he went to help her in the kitchen. He was very much impressed by her knowledge of various subjects and books. She was also trying to develop an integral spirituality, which she has termed ‘Eco-spirituality’. ‘It is a spirituality wherein ecology and spirituality are integrated’, she had told him.

Atma Prakash felt that days and weeks were flying real fast for him.

‘Guruji, the time seems to be moving very fast for me these days.’ He told the Baba one day.

‘The passage of time is a relative experience, my son. When we are happy time moves very fast for us. Months and days will appear like just hours and minutes. When we are sick, unhappy or troubled, time moves very slow. Hours and minutes will appear like months and days.’ The Baba told him.

‘Everything in life, in a way, will depend on our inner state. What we see, depends on where we stand. ‘A jaundiced man sees everything yellow’ is an old dictum. I had read somewhere a very interesting story about the manner in which Dr. Albert Einstein had explained his Theory of Relativity to a group of simple women’ the Baba added.

‘A group of simple women asked Albert Einstein what was this ‘Theory of Relativity’ that made him so famous, and about which there was so much discussion all over the world… 

‘In response, Einstein asked the youngest of them where her husband worked and how many days did he come home. She told him that her husband worked in a city far from home and he came home only on weekends for two days….

‘How do you feel when he is at home for two days with you on weekends?’ was his next question...

‘I feel it is just like two hours. Time flies very fast’… she said…

‘But, madam, suppose you are sitting on a hot stove for two hours, how will you feel?’ he asked her.

‘Two hours!… On a hot stove! Who can sit on a hot stove for two hours?’.. she asked back…

‘Well,.. madam, two days with your beloved husband feels like two hours.. Two hours on a hot stove will be unimaginably long…This is ‘Theory of Relativity’, madam’. He told her…

‘The ladies now understood the ‘Theory of Relativity’ very well… ‘It is so simple!’ one of them exclaimed…’

Excerpts from Integral Revolution’

Intentional Living

Our life needs to be simple, intense, and intentional that is lived very close to nature. When my wife and I wound up our handsome jobs in the USA, and came to spend most of the time in our life’s last stage - setting zone - in India, we felt we had a special inner call. I was born and brought up in India; she was born and brought up in the USA. This fact ideally suited our cherished goal of East-West Awakening, that integrates the very best from the East and the West. We always lived a simple life in the USA. Because we believe a simple life is the only one worth living. We currently live an intense life in the midst of persons coming from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and religions. Our purpose is to live an intense life in all its diversity as world citizens, while affirming each person that comes to our life as one is, and witnessing to the unity of humanity. We are grateful to the animals that enhance our life, especially our cows that give us wholesome milk, cooking gas, and fertilizer, and our dog, Tantran, with full of love, that alerts us to everything in the surroundings with his short and benign barks.

With regard to food, we have a vegetarian diet in the ashram though we make very limited accommodation for an inmate in the ashram who has difficulty. On the whole, we believe the vegetarian life is the way to go. We consider milk and eggs to be part of a vegetarian diet. The spirit of the ashram does not allow imposition of any view or ideology on anyone. I spend most of my time meditating, reading, reflecting, landscaping, gardening, or meeting with persons who come to see me. The atmosphere in and around the ashram is one that helps persons foster the kind of growth and development so they can become what they are capable of. On Wednesdays, I spend my time in silence and solitude in learning and experimenting on how to get closer and closer to the higher source of energy (God) and humanity, and what to write for the Thursday article for Indian Thoughts. Often I do not have a clue on what I am going to write. So I go to bed around 9 p. m., and spontaneously get up around 1 a. m. on Thursday and write on I think I need to write on hoping it will be beneficial for my readers. If I am satisfied with what I write, I think there is a greater chance for the readers to appreciate it. I am aware many of my well-wishers think that I am wasting my time and talents spending an enormous amount of time working on the land. They think that I take too seriously my vocation of being a bhoomiputran (son of earth). Little do they know that this endeavor of mine not only keeps my feet firmly planted in the earth with the overwhelming majority of persons who are farmers in the world but also affords me the opportunity to learn from nature that currently for me is the best better teacher in the universe.

So where are we? We are wherever we are. Because where we are is the very destination of the many thousands of miles of journey our life of pilgrimage consists of. For me it even not only figuratively but practically coincided as I began my journey from Kerala long ago and came back to Kerala, certainly one of the most beautiful landscapes of the world. And the only thing worthwhile doing is to spend every moment of our life in the way we think best not the way others think how we should impress this world whose attention span for even the greatest celebrity is very short-lived. So shall we store up our treasures, where certainly our hearts are, in a place where “neither moth and woodworms destroy them nor thieves can break in and steal”?

Swami Snehananda Jyoti 

Time to improve my efficiency

Watch the title of this article again. Last four words are expansion of the first word. Yes, that's true. TIME can surely expand as "To Improve My Efficiency". The reason I am quoting this in this first article of New Year is that every year my new pledge is this itself. I always say to myself that it is time to improve my efficiency. What impact this pledge made on me is yet to be proven, but when I complete some work efficiently I do connect it to my pledge. Time as a fourth dimension is quite well accepted concept in general. I even consider time to be the sixth element we are made up of. It is said that time comes for everyone. It comes even for the most downtrodden. In fact time comes again and again and we loose it again and again. Time is like GOD who forgives our sins. Still we kill time. There are some other people who race against time. Some time we also place bids over time. We commercialize time. I had been a time-management speaker on various forums. In every such lecture I had been focusing on the power of planning, giving details of how one can prepare charts to plan time. Recently I came across an entirely new approach of planning. Instead of planning what is to be done on a day or in a week, a person started writing the list of things what he did in the whole day. He even wrote things like that he watched TV news for 2 hours. He gossiped on phone with his friend. He also listed that he went to temple to offer prayers even though he never believed in existence of GOD. His evening notes list kept on swelling and so was his interest in preparing them. Soon this person realised that only few things he wrote gave him the sense of achievement. And then time came for him too. This is called the time of transformation. He kept on writing the evening log for the purpose of entering more and more things he felt are giving him that special feeling of fulfillment. Now his diary had entries like - I helped my neighbour's child to solve the maths problem he was struggling with, I brought eye drops for my mother on her first request itself, I wrote an email to my daughter, reminding her of the story she always requested at the bed-time. Watch out! Something is changing inside you as well. Its time to say bye for now. 

Dr. Sunil Ji Garg

Safe in the Past

We are onto another unavoidable step in the time scale - 2016. Millions and millions of Wishes might have criss-crossed all along. Why are there so much of reminders? Mending touches are necessary, only where there are specks of weakness in relationships. Are relationships the same we experienced in our childhood? No! Sons are no more sons and wives are no more wives, as Osho says. Qualities of relationships have changed. If at one time we had a neighbour with whom we used to eat frequently with whom we used to chat a lot with whom we used to share all our pains, now the picture is different the character is different and we don’t have one such neighbor at all. There are long walls in between compounds. There are gates separating each one from the outer world. Usually there would be a signboard too tucked to the gates, saying: ‘Beware, dog inside’. Aren’t we in fear - fear of intimate interactions?

I think that people are afraid of facing the future. They are afraid of new experiences. They think that they may lose themselves in a pool of great knowledge or realization, which the future world keeps on opening. This happened to Jung; this happened to Freud - two great psycho-analysts of the past. It is said that both wanted to visit Rome and the great library there. Freud knew that it contains all the knowledge about all the religions and all the philosophies that have touched the globe. He also suspected that he might turn out to be a little worm in this great pool of knowledge once he visits the Vatican library. Rome was also religion for Freud. He thought that going to Rome means being pulled off into a sharp theology that leads to death and resurrection. He is said to have booked his tickets to Rome at least 4 times only to cancel them in the last hours. 

The case of Jung also was not different. He also knew that his little philosophy could almost be nothing before a great sea of universal knowledge that might open in Rome. Just like all of us they were afraid of death; they were afraid of change. They could not imagine their personalities being reduced to dusts. 

As we change our calendars, make sure that we accept the New Year without any doubt of losing anything but as a time span for attaining many things. Those who are afraid of losing something still may be relaxing in 2015. Leave them there; don’t ever wake them up. It is of no use!

Joseph Mattappally

Master Game

An old man who lived in a small side street in the city of Mumbai had to put up with the nuisance of having boys play cricket outside his house, at night. One evening when the boys were particularly noisy he went out to talk to them. He explained that he was a pensioner who was happiest when he could see or hear boys playing his favourite game, cricket. He said he would give them 25 rupees each week to play in the street at night. The boys were thrilled. They were being paid to do something they enjoyed! 

At the end of the first week they knocked at the old man's house and asked to be paid. He did so.

The second week when they asked for payment he said he had run out of money and sent them away with only 15 rupees. The third week the man said he had not yet received his pension and gave them only 10 rupees. The boys were very disappointed but there was not much they could do about it.

The fourth week the man said he could not afford to pay them 25 rupees as he had promised, but would give them 5 rupees each week without fail. This was too much for the boys.

"You expect us to play seven days a week for a measly 5 rupees!" they yelled. "Go to blazes."

They stormed away and never played on the street again.

The Work-Life Balance Issue

          There seems to be a perpetual dichotomy in our lives. It is known as the work-life balance problem. In the pursuit of happiness, man is rushing to make money so that he and his family can enjoy. But the more he rushes to earn the less time he has to enjoy. And the more he enjoys, the less time he has to earn. So it seems that the two are in eternal discordance. How is it possible to balance these two opposing forces?

   

  The great Einstein has said that a problem cannot be solved by the same type of thinking that created it. So let’s try to look at the problem differently.

   

  One way of doing so is: why separate work from enjoyment. Why consider work as a mere source of money, which will then buy enjoyment. Why not enjoy work itself? That may well be true but then comes the question, how? How does one enjoy work, which is not always enjoyable. Let us take recourse to literature — The Elixir by George Herbert:

   

  Teach me, my God and King, 

     In all things Thee to see, 

  And what I do in anything, 

     To do it as for Thee.

  A servant with this clause,

     Makes drudgerie divine: 

  Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws, 

     Makes that and th’ action fine.

   

  Put less poetically, it talks of the having an higher ideal or higher vision in one’s work If there is no ideal in the action, the work becomes mechanical, dull, routine, boring. But even is there is an ideal in the work, if one is able to work for something beyond the money, status, etc. There still remains the question of time. A person needs time to spend with his family and other interests. If all time is spent at work what about the rest of life?

   

  Is there a way to spend less time at work and yet achieve more? Yes, there is such a way. It is known as clearer thinking. The more clear the thinking the more the work accomplished in the given time. Fuzzy thinking makes a job take longer. It is the difference between working hard and working right. A handcart puller is working very hard but what he will achieve may not be much.

   

  Sharpening the axe is better than chopping away with great effort with a blunt one. Some people make in one day what is a year ‘s salary for others. Clearer thinking gives a quantum leap in output. Like inventing the wheel raised life onto another level.

   

  The way to develop clearer thinking is through reflection. The more the thinking one does, specially on philosophical literature, the more clear a thinker does a person become.

Indian Thoughts Archives

Feeding the Earth

After the meal, Mataji took leave of them and went to her cottage. 

The guru and his disciple sat alone on the veranda of Bhojanalaya for some more time.

The Baba told Atma Prakash…….. ‘Take care of what you eat and drink, my son, and take care of what and how you think and feel……. Your health will take care of itself. Control your thought and food. Be careful about what occupies your mind and what occupies your stomach…..

‘Fruits and nuts, roots and leaves…these are all that we need. The jungle is full of them... Eat fresh fruits and raw vegetables for better health. Only we humans cook our food. All other living beings eat without cooking. And only we humans suffer from all kinds of sicknesses……

‘Mother Earth is very generous to all her children. Only we humans eat more than required, hoard and destroy. All other living beings eat what they need from time to time… no hoarding… no destroying… 

‘We human beings are meant to be pure vegetarians. But we eat all kinds of dead bodies, believing that such dead bodies will give us better health and greater strength!... There was a time when some human beings used to kill and eat other human beings. This was known as ‘cannibalism’. Today we kill and eat animals. This can be termed ‘annibalism’…. Just as we today find it difficult to believe in ‘cannibalism’, centuries from now people will find it difficult to believe that there existed ‘annibalism’ on earth!........ 

‘So be very careful about what you eat, how you eat, when you eat, and how much you eat…..

‘Similarly, be careful about your thoughts and feelings. We are responsible for what we think and how we feel. Let positive thoughts fill your mind and loving emotions fill you heart’…..

The Baba stopped and glanced at Atma Prakash. He then added:

 ‘I brought the sweet potato stems from my guru’s ashram in the Himalayas. It was more than 40 years ago. In fact, he had given them to me to be planted along the riverbed. I did so….

‘Over the years they have grown and spread so much…all over the jungle…Wild pigs, rabbits, rats and the monkeys … and many tribals in this jungle have been enjoying them… My guru was very happy when he visited me three years later in this forest…’

‘How many times had he visited you in this forest, guruji?’ Atma Prakash asked.

‘In his physical form only once. But in his spiritual form many times..’ the Baba said.

‘In spiritual form?’ Atma Prakash looked at the Baba questioningly.

‘After our physical death, we exist as spiritual beings beyond time and space limitations…. As spiritual being, we can appear to our disciples and loved ones with divine providence through dreams and visions or in our psychic bodies ’ the Baba said and got up.

He walked towards his cottage. ‘Sleep well, Atma Prakash…. Good night’ he turned and wished his disciple before disappearing into the darkness.

Excerpts from Integral revolution