Category: Moksha

Be the god we are

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bliss, consciousness, Enlightenment, Happiness, Health, Leadership, Love, meditation, Moksha, Music and Poetry, Nature, Quantum Computing, self-development, spirituality, Sustainability, Transformation, Veda, Vedic Technology, world peace, yoga

Some day everyone will be able to see the god in themselves. Channels will open for god to act through them. Then they will become net exporters of happiness. Till then they will plod on in a desert view of life.  No one else can save anyone. Just turn on the light, and see that the riches of the kingdom are all within ourselves. A gu-ru helps drive away the darkness by turning of the light. Thus there is an infinite gratitude to them for providing the man-tra to roo the goo (make the darkness run away).  Thus also the saying: guru bin gyan kahan.  A most famous couplet says: whose feet should I touch if the guru and god are both standing on front of us? We should touch the feet of the guru because they help find the path to god. 

Read this over and over till the fever / fear breaks.  Western philosophy and psychology were born as reaction to the totalitarian vise of the Catholic Church on social and spiritual life. Throwing out Christ along with the church from western life has created a most devastating crisis of meaning in life.  The reduction ad infinitum to the ‘me and my’ as the sole domain of one’s Self is a mirage. Separation is a myth, says Ssdhguru. Western psychology is foundation-less, says Maharishi. 

Three quantum physicists won the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics for proving that there is no reality.  Some authors call Consciousness as the mother of all capital. That is an indirect compliment from the economic world to the real foundation of life. There is no ‘Me’.  Commercial forces will continue to do their magic of selling fool’s gold. Wisdom traditions of the East are a powerful antidote to the godless meaningless commercial world of the primacy of ‘individual’, realizing that the notion of an indivisible individual is a mirage that too will dissolve into a universal field just as the notion of an atom dissolved into a unitary Schrodinger’s quantum equation. Now there is another Nobel Prize for explicitly stating that there is no reality.

This is cause for celebration.  We have a serious responsibility to not take ourselves too seriously, quips Maharishi.  Just let the mind settle and it becomes consciousness. मन becomes आत्मन। Consciousness is everywhere, so it knows everything, and that makes it omnipotent and invincible. Its manifestation is unpredictable, uncertain and probabilistic.  Franklin quipped that the only two certainties as death and taxes. Let’s accept both equally. Let god flow freely through ourselves while we are still having this earthly manifestation.  We are just this moment. Have fun in this moment!

Thanks for reading. Comments are welcome 🙏

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I am Inspired ….

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Enlightenment, Friends, Happiness, Leadership, Love, Maharishi Vastu, Mahatma Gandhi, Moksha, MUM, Positive Psychology, Positivity, Sef-awareness, self-development, spirituality, Sustainability, Veda, Vedic Technology, Yoga Sutras

Inspiration is more important than motivation. The former pulls while the latter provides a reason. That is what set me thinking about who or what inspired me. So, I listed some of my major inspirations in life, and what they meant.

I was inspired … 

  • By my paternal uncle who was a terror and yet  jolly as President of our ethnic community in our native town in India, and who said that I could achieve anything 
  • By my maternal uncle who was an excellent teacher always suggesting do what you like 
  • By my father for his disciplined hard work, unshakable confidence, work ethic,  commitment to excellence and financial prowess 
  • By Mahatma Gandhi whose life inspired the whole country of India, and whose thoughts were lofty and  formed a central component of Indian Administrative service exams
  • By Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for his ability to see the unmanifest Vedas and make enlightenment accessible through a great movement and a Vedic university
  • By Swami Ramdev for the size of his ambition fearlessness and boldness in bringing well being at all levels 
  • By my friend and IITD / IIM classmate the perfect student and gentleman now at Harvard 
  • By my friend and IITD classmate the magical perfect student who did Ph.D. at Stanford 
  • By my friend and IITD / IIMA  classmate and free soul who did Ph.D. at MIT and is a great seeker and social reformer and entrepreneur 
  • By my mom for her deep investment in and ferocious defense of her children, and great tolerance 

I am also inspired …

  • By my colleague and mentor at MIU who is here to pursue moksha and which made me get it 
  • By my colleague and mentor who is the foremost  researcher on collective consciousness and led me to organize international conference on consciousness based leadership and management 
  • By my students who said that they loved my data analytics course and for whom I wrote the data analytics book that is globally #1 recommended book 
  • By my student and colleague who is ultra-blissful and does soft thinking and is a trail blazer
  • By Vastu architecture for its ability to create de-stressing and high creativity 
  • By my bold and beautiful wife who is unafraid and a creative entrepreneur 
  • By my beautiful daughter who is a fanstastic English editor, and holistic health practitioner and communicator
  • By my other beautiful daughter who is a smart engineer and a great packer 
  • By my brother who knew about group dynamics, yoga, and Vipassana way before me and which all I spontaneously followed into. 
  • By my book club community especially its founder and coordinator who is a cool, creative and compassionate architect.

Question for you: What inspired you in life? What continues to inspire you?

Do you inspire yourself? Do you inspire others? Chances are that you are proud of some of your own accomplishments. And they probably inspire many people close to you!

Everything is perfect!

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bliss, consciousness, Enlightenment, Happiness, Health, meditation, Moksha, Positive Psychology, Sef-awareness, self-development, Transcendence, Transcendental Meditation, Veda, Vedic Technology, world peace, yoga, Yoga Sutras

Everything is perfect!

I believe that there is no purpose of evolution, except to get better at being ourselves, and escaping from the physical manifestation and its pains from contact with objects.

I have been off tea and coffee for the last almost 20 years since I first went to a Vipassana 10-day retreat, and the teacher asked us to eschew these and other intoxicants for the ten days and ideally forever. I think from there and my decade long practice of Vipassana brought me to the understanding that we are ourselves the ultimate reality. Then during the last decade, being in Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s University, brought for me the idea of unbounded unified consciousness as the Vedantic nondual reality. It made complete sense during progressively deeper and longer and advanced sessions of Transcendence. All this while we have been eating and drinking non-agitating foods to purify our nervous systems to experience the oneness within our own selves. I have been amused by the growth in these soft-toxin businesses such as coffee and tea. I heard about the Oxford Circle of scientists using Assamese tea and then creating the dominance of the Scientistic Revolution in the service of the British East India company. The poor tea-pickers from Darjeeling will be tickled to learn that their tea was instrumental in creating the scientistic paradigm as we know it.

Just a few days ago, I chanced upon a young Argentinian man named Mattias de Stefano, who speaks about the unbounded consciousness as being the ultimate dimension, and then goes on to describe up to 9 dimensions. The second dimension produces a duality, which is mostly a thought system. The third dimension provides a neutral level also, and physicality appears. Time appears when we rise to perceive the fourth dimensions. Our 3-4 dimensional (space-time) body is a projection of our high-dimensional self. This is like a small 2-dimensional picture is a projection of our 3-dimensional body. At the fifth and sixth dimension we are pure energy, and later on pure vibrations that are the creator of all reality. At the seventh dimension, there are seven laws of existence represented through the seven chakras. At the eighth dimension, existence is the field of infinite correlations, the unbounded universe that contains everything. We are not of the universe, or in the universe, … we are the universe. A the ninth dimension, we are pure void, like a black hole, which provides the context in which the universe appears. That resonates so much with Buddha’s teaching.  

Two things from here: The first thing is that I find Mattias’ message very similar to that of Maharishi’s. Maharishi also had the baffling ability of speaking about the dynamics of the unmanifest consciousness. ‘How did he know?’, the world wondered. But that did not stop people from following him and using his descriptions of reality, that was tested through thousands of experiments published in over 700 scientific publications. In particular, I am extremely interested in Maharishi’s theory of collective consciousness. This Super-Radiance effect, that can only be understood from a consciousness-as-a-field paradigm, has been statistically proven and published beyond reasonable doubt (over 50 journal publications).

The second fascinating thing from this Argentinian young man is to hear what else he says. He speaks about his past lives, going back thousands of years, in great detail, with specific locations and names and what happened. He reports living in civilizations from across the various galaxies, tens of thousands of years ago. He is reporting solar systems with 2 or 3 suns with planets facing a night-time of only 2 or 3 hours. That means a lot of what we see and do could be biologically different in a different solar system. Many civilizations arise and die, and this one too will die, he says. The important thing from us is to raise our perceptions to the highest levels. If we die of consciousness (nothing left to do) then we do not return to the lower dimensional existence. Instead if we die of time, we will be back. One particular metaphor caught my attention: We are the spider that creates the web. We are not the web. We certainly are not an object caught in the web. The day we realize that we are totally liberated. We are the creator.

He says, that everything is perfect as it is. There is no purpose to existence. The path is the way. Have fun!

We are more than we think

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bliss, consciousness, Enlightenment, Happiness, Health, Leadership, Love, meditation, Moksha, Music and Poetry, Nature, Positive Psychology, Positivity, Sef-awareness, self-development, Sustainability, Transcendental Meditation, Transformation, Veda, Vedic Technology, world peace, yoga, Yoga Sutras

Our thinking is limited to things one can think about. Some of those things are sense objects and some are mental objects. Our perceptions and feelings are difficult to think about. Our being is beyond thinking. 

We know more than we can tell. That is tacit knowledge. Our words have more power than we think. These could be words spoken with others or with oneself. This is our latent power. 

We exist in more ways than we can tell: The body, the mind, the intellect, the spirit, the soul. We are the unbounded Brahman.  At some level of thinking all these things vanish. We become no-thing. No-thing is actually everything. But there is no way to think about everything.

We have more than we know. We have all the laws of nature within us. We exist in conformance with, and are the manifestation, of all the laws of nature. We permeate every part of every galaxy. 

We are beyond qualities, beyond names, beyond words, beyond language. We transcend and include all of those. We are silence in dynamism, wholeness in motion. We are naturally blissful, like the earth is grassfull and the sky is starfull. 

We are naturally full, or fullness, or wholeness. We just need to be aware of it at every moment. We are a wave flowing and rising and falling. Particle wise, we are at best a little boat that rises and ebbs with the waves. The life force naturally flows through us in its own rhythm.

As Pascal said, the Heart has its reasons, that Reason has no knowledge of. Nurture your own heart. Be with those that nurture your heart. Let your heart swell with joy. Share the joy with the others. And you will get 10x in return. And the whole world will be one big happy family!

Life is a donut!

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Ayurveda, Bliss, consciousness, Enlightenment, Happiness, Health, meditation, Moksha, Positive Psychology, Positivity, Sef-awareness, self-development, spirituality, Transformation, Vedic Technology, world peace, yoga, Yoga Sutras

Life is a donut. 🍩 (or doughnut).

We are donuts. Our bodies are donuts. Bodies have a hollow tube running through them. When the hollow tube remains flowing and clean, our bodies are healthy. The moment it clogs, diseases appear. Our life is also like a donut with a hollow hollow tube through it.  The upper side of the donut is the absolute, the unbounded cosmos. The bottom part of the donut is the relative, bounded by resting on the earth. Both sides are essential. So long as the hole in this donut connects the absolute with the relative, the mind functions well and remains healthy. Life gets into unbounded flow at some times, while remains engaged in specific chores at other times. 

When we eat too much or eat junk stuff, our body’s hollow tube begins to clog. When we don’t flush it down it with enough water the tube clogs. Similarly if we take in too much data and information we need time and energy to digest it. Undigested information clogs the hollow tube. The connection between the top and the bottom of the donut gets clogged. The donut becomes more like a pancake. At that point, the view is mostly of the relative side of life, the bottom of the pancake, and the view of the top is totally obscured.  Yogic techniques such as pratyaahara are ways to unclog our mind. Meditation helps to reopen the hollow tube of the mind and makes the pancake back into a donut. Attention of the mind goes round and round in the donut in a self-referral manner, even as it connects with the infinity above and the minuscule stuff below.  

A donut can be fresh thick soft and sweet. It can be glazed and have toppings, and be of different sizes. Similarly our life can be fresh expansive smiling joyful and grateful. It can have its idiosyncracies and passions and wisdom. OR else life can be short brutal nasty dour fearful stale and putrefying. 

Be a fresh donut 🍩everyday.  

Being vs Doing

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bliss, Happiness, Health, Love, meditation, Moksha, Positivity, Sef-awareness, self-development, spirituality, Transcendental Meditation, Veda, Vedic Technology, world peace, yoga

No matter what we do, there is always a feeling of exhaustion and boredom after some time. Whether we are talking or walking, eating or reading, there is an exhaustion of sense organs and physical limbs. The only thing that does not bring an exhaustion, but brings in new energy, is to just Be. What is Being, and how is it different from Doing?  

Being is to just Be what one truly is. We are pure consciousness. When we witness our Self, there is a great effortless feeling of lightness and joy. Freedom from boundaries of space-time releases us into a light, open unbounded space where all is one, and it feels invincible and awe-inspiring. This awareness of our unbounded self brings us closer to knowing the truly limitless nature of our capabilities – be it creativity, imagination, ideas, knowledge, energy, or anything else.

How does one just Be? It is by first understanding that to be is not to see our physical body or to even to see our mind or feelings. These can be paths to Become, but Being ultimately transcends all these manifestations of body and mind. There are many paths to Being. Maharishi Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras provides an eight-limbed path to Be. One can begin to Be by following the behavioral principles of non-violence and truth. One can begin to Be using physical asanas or the breathing practices of pranayama. One can begin with withdrawing the sense organs inward through pratyahara. One can also turn ones attention totally inwards through dharana, dhyana and samadhi. The last three techniques are totally internal activities that are done b turning the attention inward, after the body and mind have been stilled. Just as one can see a clear reflection of unbounded sky in a clear lake, so also one can see our unbounded consciousness reflected within ourselves when the mind has been stilled.

Doing vs Being vs Having thus becomes a matter of politics of goals. There are many goals competing for our attention. Being joyful and healthy is usually an obvious primary goal. However, the goals of having superior means (such as wealth) tend to have their own charm. The goals of personal development (such as widening one’s knowledge and experience base) have their own charm. Thus, there is a plethora of goals in the relative domain. While those goals remain useful to the extent we are an embodied Being, we should also not ignore the fact that the body is good only to the extent it houses our Being, our Life force itself. It would be good just Be, at least some of the time!

What is Ultimate Reality and how do we know it

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in consciousness, Enlightenment, Happiness, Health, meditation, Moksha, Music and Poetry, Nature, Sef-awareness, spirituality, Transcendence, Veda, Vedic Technology, world peace, yoga

The ultimate reality is that there is no separate Me. We are It; or as Vedas say, Tat Tvam Asi (Thou Are That, the all-encompassing Totality)! How do we know that? We can begin with accepting it as a conjecture from the ancient scriptures, written by ancient seers and the numerous seekers that have come before us, when they say that Tat Tvam Asi or Aham Brahmasmi (I am Totality). We then verify this truth for ourselves by experiencing in our own subjective lives.

Why should we trust the cognitions of ancient seers? Why should we trust our fallible subjective experiences? Why should we trust an objective truth about our subjective selves? These are three primary ways of verifying truth claims, also called darshanas in Vedas. These are also very good questions. All logical chains must with some axiom(s).

We can start with the axiom that Consciousness is primary. Consciousness is simply conscious of itself. It is all-pervasive, like a quantum field of intelligence. It is matter and energy in an interchangeable manner. Consciousness is the unified field of all the laws of nature and all those laws can be experienced in one’s own subjective awareness. It is the knower, the known, and the process of knowing, all rolled into one. Thus ‘we’ can know ‘ourselves’ by ‘ourselves’. The way to know one’s self is by stilling one’s mind and refining one’s perceptual ability to directly see the subtler reality, just as one sees the depth and clarity of a lake when it is calm. Newton inductively discovered the laws of gravity within his own consciousness when his attention fell on the falling apples.

Subjective personal experiences are usually the most powerful ways of knowing at a personal level. This can be just as empirical and personal data based as the scientific method. If doing some action, such as waking up early or doing a certain meditation regularly, makes one feel healthy or blissful, one would want to do it again and again. One’s personal experiences can override the received wisdom as well as scientific research and develop into personally useful habits.

Scientific method also relies of an axiom, that of materialism, i.e. material reality is primary. There is no such thing as subjective consciousness except as an ephemeral emergent property of materials. Thus, scientific inquiry precludes the existence of any such thing as an independent self that has a body and a mind? The organizing logic is that of self-preservation. What is the self that is being preserved? There is no cogent scientific theory of life beyond physical existence. There is no realizing the self, only a process of actualizing the ‘hidden true potential of the self‘ without objectively defining that potential.

It is best when all three modes of knowing reinforce each other. It is good to read the scriptures, undergo scientific education, and then verify the received truths in one’s own experience.

 

 

 

 

Yoga and World Peace

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bliss, consciousness, Enlightenment, meditation, Moksha, MUM, Music and Poetry, spirituality, Transcendence, Veda, Vedic Technology, yoga

Last week on International Yoga Day (June 21st), I was invited to participate in the First International Yoga Conference organized by the Consulate General of India, in New York. There were about 30 speakers in all – about 10 from the US and 20 from India, Singapore and Hong Kong.  The conference went very well. There was a wonderful group dinner too! On the 21st morning we headed out for yoga practice / demonstration in Central Park. Congratulations to the organizers! Here are a couple of pictures!

 

 

The gist of my own presentation was that Yoga is central to effective social transformation and world peace! Yoga has eight limbs, from the grosser limbs of Yama and Niyama, to the subtler limbs of Dhyana and Samadhi. The practice of transcendence or Dhyana, according to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s interpretation of Yoga Sutra is called Transcendental Meditation (TM). Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s yoga-inspired, quantum-mechanics-compatible theory called the “Maharishi Effect” posits that small groups of trained TM meditators can create enough collective coherence to counter hostile and negative tendencies and generate peace and prosperity around the world. Tat Sannidhau Vaira Tyagah (Yoga Sutra: 2:35) has been translated by Maharishi as: “In the vicinity of Yoga (or unity) negative tendencies are diminished.” Over 50 research publications in top scientific journals over the last four decades have established the efficacy of Maharishi Effect beyond doubt. I presented a few of those studies from around the world, on how group practice of TM and TM-Siddhis led to higher coherence and lower crime and higher prosperity. It is incumbent upon governments and organizations to take advantage of this technology and solve the grand challenges such as climate change and social inequality, through a small investment in training their peoples in Maharishi’s technologies of transcendence.

There were no objections or major questions from the attentive audience.  One senior researcher from Mumbai said that they had always thought of yoga only from an individual perspective. She and her team want to learn more about this collective perspective. Another researcher from Mumbai said that they learned from my and other MUM presentations that one should always work from and present hard data. There is potentially an opportunity to present this research in more detail to them in India. Another professor from Uttarakhand asked in a reverent and friendly manner how to measure the performance on what I had called out as the subtle limbs of yoga … Dhyana and Samadhi. I said these are self-referral activities. Measuring them will change the nature of activity itself, citing quantum theory. However, its correlates can be measure through EEG etc. One has to become self-aware and self-referral, and radiate that energy to help others become so too!! That is the true import of Gandhi’s message of being the change.

Maharishi Effect is a paradigm change. The new paradigm is self-referral. Maharishi Effect perhaps hits at the very core, the dualistic core, of the Cartesian Enlightenment paradigm!  It does not go well with the powers-that-are in society today. Passionate young people feel that unless something is done proactively, the new generation too will sleepwalk into the existing dualistic paradigm.   Instead of looking around for other people who have transitioned to new paradigm, one should become self-referral oineself. And then look for other self-referral people. And more importantly, radiate to other people so they too can become self-referral. That was the import of Gandhi’s Be the Change message. This is easier said than done for those still caught in career and marriage and family narrative.

I am astonished at how few people in India practice meditation or other transcendental techniques. TM is perhaps the best, but I may be biased. Vipassana is Buddha’s own technique of enlightenment. There could be others too!! Grand challenges will be overcome only by people coming together from a transcendental level!! I also feel that the current rage of Mindfulness is a wonderful start for individual level benefit. However, it has no solution for grand challenges.

I will present this research again at the Academy of Management in Chicago in August, and will describe my experiences and the audience feedback later! I heard that India’s AYUSH ministry is interested in setting up centers of excellence in yoga at elite academic institutions in the US. I wonder if they would support a Yoga Research center at MUM, where our colleagues do research at the absolutely cutting edge. We want to organize a 2-day conference on ‘Collective Consciousness and World Peace’ on our campus in Fairfield next Spring.  The agenda would have a few big sub-themes, with a total of about 15-20 speakers. Half the presenters could be from Maharishi University of Management , and the other half would represent other organizations and traditions! More on that later!!

Have a Blissful Day!!

 

Quantum Mechanics and Bliss

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bliss, consciousness, Enlightenment, Happiness, Moksha, Music and Poetry, spirituality, Transcendence, Transcendental Meditation, Transformation, Veda, Vedic Technology

QuantumMechanicsConference1927

Here is one of the most high-IQ photographs ever taken. It is of the participants of the 5th Solvay Conference on Quantum Mechanics in 1927. They include, among others, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Niels Bohr. 17 of the 29 attendees were or became Nobel laureates. This picture has obviously been around. However, I find it amazing that almost a century later, the world (us) still does not understand the significance of quantum mechanics.  We still live mostly by the ‘billiard ball’ classical Newtonian mechanics level of understanding, where every one of us is a discrete solid ball.

For me the first step in understanding Quantum Mechanics is to accept the ‘weird’ non-intuitive proposition that a thing can have two values of the same property at the same time, with each value having a certain probability.  The observed value depends upon the observer’s act of observation. It is almost like the game of having two different things in two fists: the value  one gets depends upon which fist the person chooses to open.  Imagine that the two fists are actually the same fist, at two different points in space-time. Quantum Mechanics uses the term ‘wave function’ for the distribution of probability of observing any one among a range of values. It calls ‘collapse of the wave function’ at the point of observation, for the fact an observation will reveal a certain discreet ‘particle’ value to the observer. This wave-particle duality, and its resolution by a sentiment being observing, is at the heart of consciousness and universal connectivity!

This means that we are all interconnected, just One! At the same time, we are also separate beings living our own separate lives. Both the values of the Self – unity and diversity – are simultaneously true.  What we see depends upon our consciousness!  Thus, the non-dual postulates such as Aham Brahmasmi (I am Totality) laid out in the Vedas are completely aligned with quantum mechanics. The rishis (seers) wrote Vedic treatises based on their deep perception of their own transcendent Self. The rishis meditated deeply and reached a pure physiology leading to the perception of these subtle and fine quantum laws of nature. They proved that all the laws of nature reside within one’s own consciousness, but it would take the finest level of self-awareness to perceive them!! We should honor their intelligence and believe in the great heritage they bequeathed upon humanity!!

What if one has no knowledge or interest in understanding quantum mechanics or the Vedas. Just remember that the more one can be in non-judgmental observational mode, the more this non-intuitive fact would become intuitive. The more we are able to get into a silent witnessing mode, the more this diverse world would look like a beautiful integrated whole. Meditation techniques such as Transcendental Meditation (TM) enable us to become a silent witness to the wholeness of our own infinite and invincible Self. And that wholeness is Blissful! From wholeness arises more wholeness, and the world gets ever more blissful!! Wish you an eternally Blissful Life!!!

For those interested: here is the wholeness mantra from the Vedas (in Sanskrit language and its English translation):

पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदं पूर्णात्पूर्णमुदच्यते |
पूर्णस्य पूर्णमादाय पूर्णमेवावशिष्यते ||
“That (‘Brahma’) is infinite, and this (‘universe’) is infinite; the infinite proceeds from the infinite. (Then) taking the infinitude of the infinite (‘universe’), it remains as the infinite (‘Brahma’) alone.” – (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad V.i.1)

 

Blissful Living!!

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bliss, consciousness, Enlightenment, Happiness, Moksha, Nature, self-development, spirituality, Technology, Transcendence, Veda, Vedic Technology

Who are We? And how can we live blissfully?

  • If we think we are a collection … of assets, memories, impressions etc, then that is our small self.
  • If we think that we are everything … the sun, the earth, the wind, the birds, insects and people, … then we are the big Self.
  • When we are the small self, we are like a well, proud of what we have. It is ‘our’ stuff.
  • When we are the big Self, we are like the ocean, all encompassing, and not having anything our own, but being an integral part of an undivided infinite whole.
  • To grow we can push out the boundaries, re-lay-out our fences at a greater distance, and make a greater circle with more space to store more stuff. … concepts, memories, and assets. We can become BIG in our own eyes, and of society.
  • To really wake up to our unbounded Self, however, we can simply burn or remove or dissolve the boundaries at all. Then the entire infinite space and everything everywhere is our own. We are not defined by finite anything. We are infinite and blissful.

If I am infinite, then by the same logic, so are you and everyone else infinite. And not only that, we are the same infinite existence. If you are infinity, and I am infinity, then what is the difference between you and me? Why do we even have names for you and me? How do I converse or engage with you?  Is all separation and then trying to connect with each other, some sort of a game? Is it useful at all?

‘Good fences make good neighbors’ begins with the premise of separation of people into small individual bounded selves. Fences help contain the amount of violence that one would do on the other in a world of numerous separations.

So long as we define ourselves by our own interests first, we will be afraid, and our thinking will be corrupted. By thinking of safety for ourselves alone, we will do immeasurable cruelty on others from whom we are afraid. Then we will give bribes, trade favors, and care for our own pleasures. How can we be happy when we are selfish?

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said the purpose of life is the expansion of happiness. When we are all the same infinity, then we are like a joint family. Everything good that one person does, gives benefit to everyone. One person’s happiness becomes the happiness of all the others. That is how Vedas, the ultimate knowledge about the universe, says: ‘Vasudhaiva kutumbakam’, meaning the world is one family.

Measurements help with reducing everything down to measurable particles and energy. Technology helps measure and create things that are considered pleasurable and useful for the individual selves. Technology thus helps to maximize achievement of safety and power as defined by money and assets.

Even as there are inexorable forces of separation of things into smaller and smaller particles, there are forces of choreographing delicate dances of apparent oneness. Technology also helps to do things that help people temporarily forget their false boundedness. Social occasions such as Mardi Gras or sports matches, and chemical means such as alcohol and opoids, help people temporarily forget their bodily identification, and create some larger units of identity, such as a team, a city, a country, or a culture. The tradition of romantic and sexual love, and marriage to become a family, is another such ancient integrative practice. A regular exercise of the practice of spiritual transcendence, of ‘seeing’ one’s seamless union with everything else, helps creates the joy and charm of that undivided infinite existence.

Overall, though, the forces of separation are winning over, and creating enormous angst among certain segments of people. They may not care too much about the physical existence, but their existential angst is boiling over. The old-fashioned-values people are taking opium, and dying in record numbers with a kiss-of-God.

The solution lies in unlearning our boundaries, and many of the concepts of separation. These boundaries were created by Reason, and can be dissolved by the Heart. A regular process of transcending will help dip into that unbounded unified field of all the laws of nature, and experience the bliss of the awareness of that unbounded existence. No wonder, Emotional Intelligence, has been displacing Traditional Logical Intelligence as the more important skill to live joyfully and productively in the world. There is increasing focus on Spiritual Intelligence, which is a totally different kind of intelligence … less measurable and more blissful!