“When we love, we always strive to
become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are,
everything around us becomes better too.” ~ Paulo Coelho
“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has
gone through to achieve that beauty.” ~ Maya Angelou
“The religions of the world are like the separate fingers and are quite distinct from each other. But if you trace them to their
source, you see that they all come together in their depths to the palm of the hand. Thirteenth century mystic, Meister Eckhart put it another way, calling the Divine an underground river with many wells tapping into it. Just as a person isn't truly educated until they know more than one language, a person is not really fully educated; similarly unless they are intimately aware of all the other faiths more than their own faith and the way of a true universal prayer they are not religiously literate. I believe that if we can deepen and enrich our own journey of our life by gaining the knowledge and appreciation of the many forms of spiritual path of other’s faiths, we may even see ourselves as bees gathering honey from different flowers.
For me practicing spirituality includes teachings and practices from Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Sufism, Judaism, Taoism, and Native American spirituality. Our vision of a universal commonality should underlie all the religions and traditions of all the races of earth as the one that we can affirm and practice in our daily lives. I would rather say that it is the wisdom of the world's religions and the unadulterated traditions of the many races that has funneled into a more appropriate way for us to practice, as we go about our daily activities. It is the practice of friendliness and love, the cultivation of a mind, so saturated with goodwill that it responds uniformly to all situations with complete benevolence in words and deeds.
Few things in life are more important than goodwill and benevolence, not only toward others but also toward us. Goodwill and benevolence should start from within each one of ‘Us’. To spread the spirituality of benevolence the first recipient should definitely start with ‘Self’, and then only we would be relaxed from the mind’s alarmed state in order to pass it on to others. It is only through practice of meditation we will be able to abide good will toward friends, family members, colleagues, people we see on the street, in the stores, and in general the "difficult people" — people who have hurt us or simply rub us the wrong way. I think we all want to be able to love profoundly and respond to and engage fully with people and situations we find problematic on behalf of a more peaceful and just world. I’m positive we do that best when our minds are at ease and unconfused. I also believe that the inherent human quest for love and happiness is itself the greatest proof of God's existence within us. Raising ourselves to a higher spiritual plane is the Path of Heartfulness, the path of coming into a deep awareness of the love of God. . . …to see God presence in everything and everyone. . . to heed the call, to be transformed. . . and then to rely on God to enable us to pass on the mercy, forgiveness, compassion and love that we have received to all humanity in humility.
I have never come across anyone’s teachings as profound as that of the Mahatma’s whose life has influenced me the most next to Jesus, the greatest man who ever lived on earth. Jesus teachings, to a larger extent, did influence Mahatma Karamchand Gandhi, loving known as ‘Mahatma’ and more popularly known as the Father of the Nation, (1869-1948) a visionary whose spiritual maturity still shines like a beacon in our times. He drew inspiration from the various faith of the world and offered a well-rounded and expansive view of a universal human desire to love……………and to love well and etch deep into the sub-conscious mind. His life was a chock-full of timeless wisdom woven into his own, unique insights, and delightful experiences.
From the foundational practices of mindfulness and loving-kindness, he showed us how to pay attention to our world, express our compassion, break bad habits, recover from disappointments, and find more balance in our lives. He often emphasized the little virtues, which he did put under the thematic umbrella of kindness and love. His teachings on loving-kindness, compassion, generosity, gratitude, equanimity, peace, and love, as well as some of the more subversive spiritual activities of the heart, such as rejoicing in another's happiness and being compassionate toward those who cause pain was demonstrated all through his life. He is an inspiration to many of us and as a tribute to him, I still frequently visit a statue of him on the Mahatma Gandhi Road, in Bangalore, thanking him for preserving the truth and inspiring people from different parts of the world. His statue reveals the vulnerability of all the goodness in his frail body but I can also see his determination and perseverance in his stance, striding ahead with a walking stick. I am reminded of Gandhi's desire to give of himself completely in service of others. He slept only a few hours every night and would walk long distances even when in his seventies while living a simple life in an ashram.
I owe much of my transformation to him. Should I be grateful? Of course to a great extent for changing the course of my life and bringing me back from the living dead. I have learnt from Jesus’ teachings and the Mahatma’s life, to be true to myself in respect to love, kindness and compassion with utmost determination and never ending perseverance and I owe a lot to these Masters of mine.
Some of Gandhi’s experiences that inspired me to transform myself to what “I am now”, are outlined below.
1. To aflame myself with unconditional love.
"Gandhi was a pioneer in these new realms of consciousness. Everything he did was an experiment in expanding the human being's capacity to love, and as his capacity grew, the demands on his love grew more and more severe, as if to test what limits a human being can bear. But Gandhi had learned to find a fierce joy in these storms and trials. . . . By the end of his life he was aflame with love."
2. To expend all my energy in service of others.
Late in Gandhi's life a Western journalist asked, 'Mr. Gandhi, you've been working fifteen hours a day for fifty years. Don't you ever feel like taking a few weeks off and going for a vacation?' Gandhi laughed and said, 'Why? I am always on vacation.' Because he had no personal irons in the fire, no selfish concerns involved in his work, there was no conflict in his mind to drain his energy.
3. To give my mission my best shot.
" Full effort is full victory,' said Gandhi. You need not be troubled if you have made mistakes, or if your ideal has slipped away. Just continue to give your best. If you fall, pick yourself up and march on. If you cannot run, walk. If you cannot walk, crawl. Nothing in life is more joyful or more thrilling. The effort alone brings a continuing wave of joy in which every personal problem, every suffering and humiliation, is forgotten."
4. To reframe greed.
"There is a story told about Mahatma Gandhi. On his train trips he used to get off at every stop and collect money for the poor. A friend said of him, 'If you want to see somebody consumed by greed, look no further.' Of course, instead of being greedy for himself, he was greedy for the poor."
5. To practice compassion in creative ways.
"One day Gandhi stepped aboard a train as it started to move, and one of his shoes slipped off and dropped on the tracks. Unable to retrieve it, he calmly took off his other shoe and threw it back along the track to land close to the first. When an amazed passenger asked why he had done that, Gandhi smiled and said, 'The poor man who finds the shoe lying on the track will now have a pair he can use.' With the eyes of his imagination, Gandhi saw a man with bare feet, saw him coming across a lone shoe and desperately searching for the other, and saw the disappointment on his face when he didn't find it, seeing these things, Gandhi did what he could to help."
6. To redefined success.
Without realizing it, Gandhi had found the secret of success. He began to look on every difficulty as an opportunity for service, a challenge which could draw out of him greater resources of intelligence and imagination from the universe.
7. To emphasize the privilege of giving.
Gandhi reminded us that it was everyone's privilege to give. We should thank the poor for giving us the opportunity to undo some of our karma.
8. To use prayer as often as possible and make it my staff of life.
"Rama” the chant of the Hindus, was the often repeated Gandhi's , formula which he held close to his heart, for abiding in joy. Gandhi used to walk for miles every day repeating the mantra, (prayer) until the rhythm of the mantra and his footsteps simultaneously began to stabilize with the rhythm of his breathing, which is closely connected with the rhythm of the mind. When fear or anger threatened him, clinging to the ‘Rama’ mantra, he used the power of these emotions to drive this formula for joy, deep into his mind. Gandhi said: ‘the mantra or one’s prayer becomes one's staff of life and carries one through every ordeal.' That’s the immense power of one's prayer to the Divine which I routinely conduct without fail.
9. To essentially practice nonviolence.
"In its positive form, nonviolence means the largest love, the greatest charity. If I am a follower of nonviolence, I must love my enemy. I must apply the same rules to the wrong-doer who is my enemy or a stranger to me, as I would to my wrong-doing father or son. This active nonviolence do necessarily include truth and fearlessness. The practice of nonviolence towards all beings calls forth the greatest courage" and that is how Gandhi advocated non-violence.
10. To pass the spiritual legacy I gain to all others.
“I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort, and cultivate the same hope and faith”, he often reiterated. Gandhi, who always claimed he had no more than ordinary capacities, is proof that these spiritual laws do work, and that by obeying them we can transform our character and consciousness and share it with others. Gandhi belongs to our own century and faced many of the problems we ourselves are facing today, and even though physically dead, he still continues to give new direction for love and peace to our civilization.
You see, the outside world is a reflection of who we all are on the inside, and all this madness that is taking place around us, is a result of our collective consciousness, and unfortunately it’s a very adulterated and polluted consciousness. It’s not just them there; it’s us, I mean all of us. If we want the world to change, we have to start with ourselves, and trust me; there is something wrong with many of us. With you, with me, with them not taking any effort to alter the wrong course that we all have been doing these last few hundred years…….and the best recourse to bring love, compassion, kindness, happiness and peace to ourselves is to take to heart, practice it and enforce fully these teachings of this great Mahatma as our own.
We are always resisting change, we’re resisting our problems, resisting our love, resisting our compassion, resisting gratefulness, resisting kindness to overflow, resisting friends and family, resisting our responsibilities, our job, our boss… our lives. There are so many things we are resisting, not realizing that resistance will only make things worse. Carl Jung talks about this, warning us that what we resist not only will persist but will also grow in size and cause problems and chaos in our lives. A lot of times we get so caught up in what we want to achieve, in that perfect picture, in that end result, that we tend to forget to live and really enjoy life with harming others. Now, you may want to take a deep cleansing your breath, and I beseech you to allow yourself to be present in everything you do; allow yourself to enjoy each second of your life; to observe the world around you; to observe the people that are present in your life and the beauty that is present within you and all around you, life in general. Always remember not to expect others see gold where you only see dust.
The law of attraction works in all that is good and also in all that is bad, and it’s only up to us whether we choose to focus our attention on the negative or on the positive. Focus your attention on the many great things you have and you are grateful for and you will see that the more you do that, the more reasons you will have to express your gratitude for. If you don’t believe in yourself, if you don’t believe that you are a capable, a worthy human being, chances are that nobody will. You will have to act on that positive belief and I promise, people will treat you well based on what you think about yourself, based on how you treat yourself and based on how you act and behave in the world, but when it comes to inspiration (in- true spirit) I would say that we all have a deficit of it. The problem is that we focus too much on the outside and not enough on the inside. We can’t seem to understand that it all starts from within. If the inside is a mess, the outside will also be a mess.
Listen
to your heart, listen to your intuition and know that: “The only real valuable
thing is your intuition”, please listen to it, meditate upon it, change your
greedy and selfish attitude if any, become magnanimous to self and bring in the
change that we all deserve in this world."
Sending love, lights, peace and warm hugs to you, my dear friends!
Anthony Sunny Kunneth.
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