• On April 7, 2013 by

    Atmabuddhi

    March 4 - Swami having Thakorji's darshan in his room

    Recently Pramukh Swami Maharaj developed a slight infection and the whole satsang community started prayers for his health. I find myself so very conflicted with the news when I hear Swami’s developed a fever or tachycardia. On one hand we all love him and become concerned when we hear news like this. We’re meant to love the satpurush in the same way we love our own bodies.

    On the other hand we know of prasangs like this where he shows his health is completely in his hands:
    On October 21 at 9:05am we found out Bapa wouldn’t be coming out because he didn’t feel well. I was bummed. With only 3 days left I wanted to make the most of darshan time and if he’s not well that generally means the doctors keep him on bed rest for at least 48 hours.
    But Bapa must have wanted to give us all some more sukh and so he performed a straight-up miracle.
    By 9:15 they had called Bapa’s doctors to rush over and check him out. The problem was he had a really low blood pressure which his pacemaker had failed to control (at this point in the prasang, I got upset at his pacemaker because it seems useless since Bapa’s blood pressure keeps fluctuating so much. But the doctors looked at the log kept by the device and it has in fact saved Bapa’s blood pressure 70 times from fluctuating too much). The doctors tried everything they normally do. They had Bapa blow into a whistle, try to control his breathing, etc. There are 5-6 exercises they have which help normalize the blood pressure. But nothing worked. His pulse was still at 116. So the doctors and santo just sat there, perplexed., staring at the blood pressure monitor.
    It was around 12pm now and Bapa asked them, “Why are you all still here?” Dr. VP Saheb said, “Bapa we will only go when you feel better…” Bapa says, “But I feel fine… What do you mean?”
    Dr. VP Saheb and another doctor from outside explain to Bapa, “Swami your pulse is at 117 now, and that’s quite high.” At this point, P. Narayancharan Swami turns the monitor around and with his finger points to the digits 117. With his finger still pointing, P. Narayancharan Swami says, “Bapa, if this number comes down to 70, everyone in this room would be so happy and relieved.” P. Narayancharan Swami then takes his finger away and turns, to do something else.
    The doctor who had come from outside hysterically yells, “70!” Dr. VP Saheb, who is a hefty man, simply falls to the floor to do a dandvat when he sees.
    As P. Narayancharan Swami removed his finger, the monitor read 70 *instantly!* Straight from 117 to 70 in an instant… Bapa had performed a miracle in order to grant us darshan nu sukh…
    As soon as I hear Swami’s not doing well, I pray for his health to improve. But in the back of my mind, I am always thinking, if he really wanted to get better, he could. And I pray and hope that he does because if he didn’t, I wouldn’t know what to do.
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  • On April 6, 2013 by

    Do You (and enjoy it!)

    google_morality

    I’m reading about moral licensing right now and it’s a fascinating topic that I’m sure I’ll write umpteen blog posts about in the future. The basic premise undermines all that we think we know about the way willpower works: doing  or thinking something good gives us a moral license to then go and do something bad because we think we’ve earned that right.

    When you do something good, you feel good about yourself. This means you’re more likely to trust your impulses— which often means giving yourself permission to do something bad.

    The worst part of moral licensing is not just its questionable logic; the problem is how it tricks us into acting against our best interests. It convinces us that self-sabotaging behavior— whether breaking your diet, blowing your budget, or sneaking a smoke— is a “treat.” This is lunacy, but it’s an incredibly powerful trick of a mind that turns your wants into shoulds.

    - Kelly McGonigal

    The problem with moral licensing is right there: our impulses are pulling us away from our values. If we think of being a good person as something that others expect of us, we begin to think of reasons why we shouldn’t have to do those things. It’s human nature to resist rules imposed by others because there’s a part of us that doesn’t want to be controlled. So telling yourself that being a good person is the right thing to do is exactly the wrong approach. Telling yourself that being a good person is what you enjoy and something that lines up with your values and goals in life seems like it would have less of an impact but it’s exactly the correct approach.

    If you’re a leader, it’s even more difficult reminding ourselves of the fact that we enjoy being a good person and that we get fulfillment out of the work we do. Being a leader means often being alone and so we may not even always have others to remind us that this is something we enjoy. When we do get together with those people though, it’s important to explicitly state that doing this work and achieving these goals is truly something we want to do. Saying it aloud reminds us that we’re not doing this for someone else and nobody is forcing us to do this; it’s what we want to do. Because if it was something that we were being forced to do, moral licensing would kick in and we would allow ourselves to relax and slip after checking one small thing off our task list.

    The greatest cause of stress for anyone is living out of sync with who you are. But the catch is that you forget who you are from time to time and if you’re not oriented the right way to think of who you want to be as something you truly want instead of something that you should be because others expect it of you, you will never be happy living this duplicitous life. Reminding yourself to “do you” frees you from living inconsistently with your goals. The catch is making sure you’re regularly reminded that you enjoy doing you.

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  • On April 5, 2013 by

    Smruti is a privilege and a gift

     
     

    August 2008 India Trip Smruti

    August 2008 India Trip Smruti

    August 2008 India Trip Smruti

    August 2008 India Trip Smruti

    August 2008 India Trip Smruti

     
    I was doing arti one day and as is usual when the line Nitya nitya nautam leela karta comes, I think back to my favorite smruti/leela. On this particular occasion, the line came and I wasn’t focused. My brain has associated that line with going and recalling a memory though so it tried really hard to think back to July 2008 when we went on our India Trip and we said to Bapa that a lot of pilgrims performing their pilgrimages in these holy tirths made it difficult for us to visit the mandirs there, but we knew the whole time that the 68 holy places are at your feet. For the life of me, nothing was coming up. I have a few fallback thoughts as well like when the 68 holy pilgrimage places came in the form of small children to have darshan of Parvatbhai of Agatrai, or a leela of Maharaj doing seva as Nilkanth Varni in Loj. But none of them would come to me. At this point, I knew I had forgotten something in my routine right away but couldn’t remember what. I tried to focus and recall it as well but it just wouldn’t come to me. Then an entire stanza later, this prasang came to me finally.
     
    It was then that I realized what P. Santo say is true: even our minds cannot be trusted to always be on our side. They work randomly and have their own interests. We are usually on the same wavelength as our minds so it’s hard to differentiate our true selves from the mind but when we get old it will be easier to see that our minds aren’t on our sides. When we want them to be thinking a certain thing, they’ll be off on a random tangent thinking or doing something entirely different. And here even in youth, we have these incidents where we can see this taking place. 
     
    So in short what I learned from this incident is that being able to recall smruti and leela is a gift and a privilege. We should be thankful that Bhagwan lets us remember these smrutis. There are people whose memories fail them and they can’t remember them at all, and we will all be in that boat one day, at one point, at some level. Just as we thank Maharaj and Swami for waking us each day because that is a gift only they can give, this too is a gift they have given us for which we should be thankful. And all of a sudden the Vachanamrut where Maharaj says satsangis should appreciate maya because it allows them to do satsang begins to make a lot more sense.
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  • On April 4, 2013 by

    Company of the Truth

    March 17 - Swami's Darshan

    March 17 – Swami’s Darshan

     
    For the past two weeks I have been in Amdavad with my spiritual guru, Pramukh Swami Maharaj. Whenever I go on a trip, I’ve been taught to reflect after it’s over to figure out what I have learned, how I’ve changed, what I enjoyed, and just synthesize the entire experience. This reflection transforms these trips from vacations into personal development accelerators. I travel once a month but after my recent 2 trips to India to spend time with my guru, I’ve decided that these opportunities accelerate my personal growth so much that they’re worth doing every 6 months in order to sustain my long-term goals in life. 
     
    I’m going to start a series of blog posts here that shares this synthesis of my experiences and thoughts during these trips in small portions. This will allow (read: force) me to write my thoughts out more completely.
     
    While discussing our favorite incidents with Pramukh Swami Maharaj, a few of us stumbled across an interesting revelation. The way we had all felt in all these incidents was not corny. For every single thing each person said, we were each thinking, “Hey, that’s just like when this incident happened with Swami and me…I felt the same way!”
     
    We’ve all felt the whole range of emotions, from the “I love you, man…” to the tears to the “wow, how did I get so lucky?” to the “he’s truly always there for me” to the “how can he care so much about me?” to the “how does he know me better than I even know myself?” to the “oh my God, I can’t keep up with him even though he’s 92 years old” to the “oh awesome, I got to do some seva in front of him” to the glance where you know he’s happy with you to the few seconds your eyes lock and you just know you were meant to be there in that very moment with him to the endless, infinite conversations you can have with him inside your head as you’re doing darshan or mansi to the tingle down your spine when you know he’s with you. 
     
    I wondered how the satsang experience was for other people, meaning if we all felt satsang in the same way or not…because face it, we’re VERY different people when you just compare our personalities or likes/dislikes. None of us would probably be friends in any other setting except satsang. We probably would have never met.  But to see that the satsang experience is universal in this regard is pretty cool. We all had different prasangs and different moments but what was the same was the way they made us feel. And I think that is crazy; truly and utterly incomprehensible…only Pramukh Swami Maharaj could do that. Because you feel the same way now that senior devotees felt back when “laabh was plentiful” (if you can even say that after hearing all these incidents people share nowadays and thinking back on your own). You can truly see the mode or method changes but the feelings that Swami wants you to experience are exactly the same.
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  • On January 2, 2013 by

    I will always be with you

    THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY

    Galadriel: Mithrandir, why the halfling?
    Gandalf: Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay… small acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps it’s because I’m afraid and he gives me courage.
    Galadriel: Do not be afraid, Mithrandir, you are not alone, If you ever need aid, I will come.

    When I saw this scene in The Hobbit, I immediately remembered the promise Swamishri made to us in 2004. Before I didn’t really connect with Swamishri saying “I will always be with you” because I was involved in that program and we had prepped him and so that kind of ruined the whole experience. But after visiting India and seeing how Swamishri was constantly caring for me while I was there and then to come back and see this scene was just so immensely moving. These words that Swamishri said hold so much more meaning to me now:

    “I will always be with you.”

    orlandojuly06eve009-f

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