MY SECRET GARDEN !

When I was in school, i used to dream about having my own garden which, i suppose, was perceived on the kind of movies i used to watch during those times. There were no TV tubes that time to tax and over burden our basic senses - eyes and ears ( and brains too !).

Although the quality, technique and technology, themes, fashion, culture etc. have changed considerably, and will continue to change, in making films, the gardens have not changed at all. After all, what can you change in your garden, except for the type of flowers, lawns, type of grass fencing, landscaping ( or, more aptly, gardenscaping). What is natural in cosmos cannot be changed.

In harmony with natural cosmic laws and principles, you can plant seeds of your choice and bring new life to the garden. As the roots are warmed and the garden cultivated, you bring about a dramatic transformation within one season or in the coming seasons. What is applicable to garden is applicable to us as well.

As all of us know, we all live three lives - public, private and secret. In public life, we interact with people around us - colleagues/peers, friends and associates. In private life, we interact with our betterhalves, close acquaintances, family members and children more intimately. The secret life is all yours; where your 'mind' is and feels bit better due to the 'feeling of liberation in isolation' in the assumed secrecy !

The secret life is like your best kept secret garden. This garden, you can have it the way you want to and cultivate it the way you desire. You can have your secret garden on the mountains, on top of trees, make it sail on waters, or float it in the sky, or do it amazingly and innovatively different, if your brainbuds permit you to do so with acceptance. The choice has to be yours out of conviction. This secret garden is the one you need to visit to meditate, calm and quietly, in the serene and conducive surroundings created by you only by your choice. This is the place where you can explore secret life and examine motives and desires to give a direction.

As per Stephen R. Covey ( SRC for short ), the well known author:

Quote:

• The secret life is the key to a quality life and that is the key to culture, products, and services.
  
• The public and private lives are essentially scripted by who and what precedes and surrounds us or by the pressures of the environment. And so we never exercise that unique endowment of self-awareness the key to the secret life where you can stand apart from yourself and observe our own involvement.
  
• Courage is required to explore our secret life because we must first withdraw from the social mirror, where we are fed positive and negative feedback continuously. As we get used to this social feedback, it becomes a comfort zone. And we may opt to avoid self-examination and idle away our time in a vacuum of reverie and rationalization. In that frame of mind, we have little sense of identity, safety, or security.
  
• The most critical junctures in my life take place when I visit my secret life and ask, "What do I think? What do I believe is right? What should my motives be?" These are times when I choose my motives. One such time occurred when I first heard Dag Hammarskjold say, "It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual, than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses." That statement had such a profound effect on me that I started to say to myself in regard to my relationships with other people.
  
• One of the exciting fruits of the "secret garden" is an ability to consciously choose your own motives. Until you choose your own motives, you really can't choose to live your own life. Everything flows out of motive and motivation that is the root of our deepest desires.
  
• Most of us spend our busy days privately doing our thing, never pausing long enough to enter the secret life, the secret garden, where we can create masterpieces, discover great truths
  
• People who regularly explore their secret life and examine their motives are better able to see into the hearts of others, practice real empathy, bestow real empowerment and affirm worth and identity.

Unquote

Create your own secret garden, knowingly very well that there is no secrecy existing in the cosmos ! Visit this sacred place of your own creation and choice, as many times as possible, to realise our own self.

-Mohan Pujar

WHETHER MONEY MATTERS.... ?

My daughter Shreya was in a big dilemma when her teacher left her with no other alternative but to speak against " Money Matters" subject in the inter college debate competition. She was initially not happy as her batch mate was asked to speak 'for' on the topic.
It was difficult for her to reconcile (even now also she is not) to the fact that she has to speak on 'Money Doesn't Matter’, when she is not at all convenienced.
I tried to prevail upon her that in a debate whether you speak ‘for’ or ‘against’ is not so important than the content and how you convey across the same to the audience by proper posturing and body language.
Appended below is her version on the subject, after getting inputs from different sources. I do not know whether she spoke in the spirit of debate competition or out of her conviction or just for the heck it!

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WHETHER MONEY MATTERS OR NOT?

In today's highly materialistic world, if you ask any Tom, Dick or Harry that ‘Money doesn't matter’? Be rest assured, everyone will start laughing at you: What? Money doesn’t matter? Of course, it does. It can buy me anything and everything I want to buy to make me happy.

It is only an ignorant, immature and arrogant mind that worships money as God, ignoring the basic fact that money is only a sort of resource or a via media to carry out transactions. In ancient times, people lived without money and without currency, for the simple reason that they did not need it as they had everything in abundant that they wanted. When there is abundance and plenty of everything all around to meet the needs of all creatures on this planet, you realise that money really doesn't matter.

Yes, money makes many things but certainly not all. Yes:

You can buy bed but not sleep.
It gives wealth but not natural health - hale and heartiness
You can buy food but not appetite
It gives you fame but not satisfaction
It can buy worldly pleasures but not happiness.

Money can't buy friends but it can get you better class of enemies!

Can money buy for me, my own parents, sisters and brothers? Our kith and kins, friends and and dedicated teachers with commitment to groom students to make them as good citizens of the country; who are a rare gifts of God to us. Can we buy God's gifts in the market, from money, to say that money really matters?

Have you ever noticed that most of the sulking, complaining, criticising, condemning and miserable people you meet in everyday life are rich people? The unnecessary misery these people go through and heap upon themselves, which is their own making, is not because they do not have enough money. They have enough money but they do not have what they essentially need to have - character, integrity, compassion, empathy and humanness, which money cannot buy, as these things are not available for sale in the market.

An exhaustive research study conducted by the University of Illinois has very clearly indicated that majority of the richest people in America are not as happy as 'have nots'. In reality, the glossy picture of the so called 'happy rich person' that most people hold in their minds is simply an illusion - a myth. Money can buy sense gratification, but certainly not actual happiness.

As per Peter Ubel, a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan, the relationship between money and everlasting happiness, is not existent at all. You can buy sense and physical pleasures, you can buy short lived happiness, but not everlasting happiness known as total bliss.

To you a person, who is lost in the desert and is suffering under the scorching sun and on the verge of collapse; if you offer him a choice of sweets, diamond, wad of notes and a glass of water; what would he prefer ? The common sense tells us that for his survival, of course, he will grab the glass of water without ever caring for other things that are there for free ! Once you survive, you start ‘acquiring’ and this ‘acquiring’ is nothing but a shade of greed that changes from person to person, situation to situation and from place to place, depending on the kind of society we live in.

Yes, we all of us need money to meet our basic needs for survival and healthy existent on this planet and, beyond this, if you want money, it is called greed. A greedy person becomes corrupt and corruption leads to contamination of mind, body and soul.

The everlasting peace, happiness and bliss is what we all human beings are aspiring for, which cannot be purchased by exchange of money.

While concluding, i would like to say that “Money can buy you a fine and well bred dog but only pure love can make it’s wag tail.

Friends, pure love and total bliss, which you need to have to share with others to have everlasting peace and happiness is not a commodity that is available in the market for purchase. It is in you, within you. Please explore.

-- Shrooti Pujar

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MP

WHETHER MONEY MATTERS.. ?

The Truth

Truth cannot be fully and clearely explained and/or expressed through the medium of sheer words but you need to go through words and more words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, books and scriptures ( which are all full of words) ; and interactions with 'knowledgeable' people, seers and jnanis; to go nearer to the truth.
Can you differentiate various shades of truth - absolute truth, ultimate truth, pure truth, eternal truth, supreme truth, infinite truth, permanent truth, perfect truth, universal truth ? You cannot, for the simple reason that the truth does not have any shades, colours or contamination. Truth cannot be explained or described, imagined or even comprehended as IT is beyond all sounds, words and langauges.

The mind is an absolute idiot and it cannot grasp the truth, as it is crowded and heavily congested with millions and billions of accumulated thoghts and continues to get bombarded with continuous and nonstop flow of thoughts. The intellect has its limitations and can explain effectively only up to the ultimate reach of the mind, which is already handicapped and conditioned with accumulated thoughts (not experience !) of the past. Beyond certain limit and level, mind becomes powerless and insipid and hence unable to realise the truth.
Although the truth cannot be fully expressed or understood, a road map is necessary to arrive at the truth and for that you need words and sentences. One can stretch to try to understand what lies between the lines/sentences and words. As words and sentences have limitations, it becomes only a perception of understanding which we call as truth. The perceptions keep changing from person to person but the truth cannot change from person to person, except to have a perception as per his choice based on his past experience, associaition, situational existence and, ofcourse, his mind play.
We all of us lead a life of duality - dual personality - bad/good, knowledgeable/ignorant, honest/dishonest, love/hate, likes/dislikes, understanding/misunderstang etc. Only and only when we rise above these dualities - dual perceptions- may we then become eligible to know the 'understanding'.

The concept of total understanding - the truth - is a mystery. How can there be a total understanding when thoughts cannot reach there. Mind is an absolute complex entity as it has a remarkable capacity to imagine what it cannot perceive or experience and this power of the mind differs from person to person and from time to time( may be for the same individual !). It clearly means the power of understanding is at different levels for different people, though the TRUTH is far beyond all these so called 'understanding'.
Getting back to words and sentences, it is the stillness that is there and exists; behind and between words and sentences ; and the nanosecond silence that surely exists in the gaps between words and sentences , takes us nearer to explain far more effectively, in detail and indepth, than what mere words and sentences can !
To understand the truth, the false notions and the untruths that already exists in the mental space need to be emptied out altogether. It is only when false notions are knocked out from the mental space, will there be any space to be able to be filled with the understanding of reality. As per the Cosmic Law, two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time( What is applicable to furnitures and house holds is also applicable to our own mind as well !)
It is here and now that we need to make a choice of empting out untruths, false notions, conditioned mind from mind itself. Either you choose the ego with all its contents which keeps on corrupting and contaminating us all the time or the 'truth', in our quest for the ultimate truth. By Cosmic Law again, you cannot have both.

Posted by zencosmicveda-up at 4:08 AM 0 comments

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The Truth

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Mohan Pujar

Bangalore, Karnataka, India

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