09.07.2015 Dolphins at Monkey Mia, Australia Gentleness Gentleness is not a lack of strength but a great power that doesn't force or disturb. The one who keeps their destination in focus will be successful. As we travel toward our destination, its easy to get distracted. We sometimes become so busy thinking about little things that affect our lives that we lose focus and stop moving forward. First I need to clarify my goal, then think about how Im going to work toward it. When situations arise to distract me I need to remind myself that they are only sideshows; they are not important. Instead, to find success, I need to keep my energies focused on my destination. Resolving The Inner Identity Crisis At the present moment in human history, almost every individual has lost the awareness of its real or true self. This has happened very gradually as each individual has progressed in its journey of birth-rebirth and has kept on attaching itself to various different things and as a result losing its sense of self in things that it is not i.e. identifying with things that it is not. In a way it can be said that this took the self far away from itself. This personal, internal identity crisis has led to a universal, external identity crisis, which has resulted in an emotional crisis resulting in peacelessness and sorrow in our inner world as well as in the outer world. This inner identity crisis is the root cause of the multitude of deformed emotions that exist inside us like anger, ego, lust, fear, comparison with others, greed, hatred, low self esteem, dependencies etc. all of which have brought us and keep on bringing us pain. We explain this with an example - suppose you have just constructed a new apartment. While making it and once its ready and you are using it, you have become excessively attached to it i.e. you have started identifying with it. Due to this false identification, the first emotion that gets created inside you is ego. If someone were to criticize the apartment even slightly, you would react immediately with anger. You constantly fear any sort of harm to the apartment. You even compare it with apartments that others possess. You also start looking down at people whose apartment is not as good as yours i.e. you create emotions of hatred for them. If something negative were to happen it, it affects your mental state immediately i.e. your happiness has become dependent on the material possession. Your temporary success along with the recognition that it brings you from others leads to the desire of more success of a similar type i.e. possess some more things - bigger and better, which is nothing but greed etc. The seed of all these incorrect emotions is my over-identification with this newly acquired possession. All of these wouldn't exist inside me, if my relationship with was one of detachment with it. In this way, we identify with various objects and people in the whole day, which leads to the creation of such emotions inside us. (To be continued tomorrow ...) Soul Sustenance Injustices And Suffering In The World Applying The Law of Karma (Part 1) We are presently living in a closely connected world where everyone knows what everyone else is doing, as they are doing it. Each day brings scenes and images, through the media, in front of us, of many apparent injustices and suffering of individuals or groups of individuals. Whether it's in the office, or in the market or on the television news, we hear and see reports of people suffering tremendous pain and sorrow at the hands of others. At these moments, our sense of injustice is stimulated and it becomes easy to rise in outrage against the sinners. In the process we ourselves suffer from our own self-created anger and perhaps hate. This process then becomes a habit and an inner pattern we begin to repeat, not only when we encounter scenes of global peacelessness, but the moment someone in the family or at office does something similar. A panic button is pressed and we react with the same pattern. What we forget in both global and local contexts, is the history and geography of karma. Every scene and situation has a variety of related causes in both time (history) and space (geography) e.g. emotions of hatred and revenge amongst various countries and religions (in different parts of the world) and the actions connected with these emotions has underlying hidden causes, related to the Law of Karma (Law of Cause and Effect) which go back sometimes to hundreds of years X is doing something with Y because Y had done something similar with X sometime in the past, but in different physical costumes, sometimes quite some time back in history this is the reason, we often fail to take these causes into consideration when viewing these negative scenes and situations, because we see the situations with a limited perspective of present physical costumes and circumstances. (To be continued tomorrow ) Message for the day The one who is constantly a giver experiences constant happiness. Projection: Happiness is usually associated with acquiring. When I get something I am happy and when I am deprived of something I lose my happiness. So happiness is always short-lived depending totally on what I get. Solution: True joy lies in recognising and giving what people want. I constantly need to have one aim, let no one go away from me empty-handed. When I have this aim I'll able to give something which will give me long lasting happiness.