Sunday, June 22, 2014

Spirituality Is No Magic Pill


Self-realisation with spiritual growth is a profound goal to pursue. However, spirituality is not a panacea for all our challenges. While spiritual progress offers pathways to heal our varied wounds, we also need to work at resolving our emotional and mental baggage. Unless we simultaneously focus on that, some of our emotional issues keep surfacing, even during the journey of spiritual growth.

For example, if we have grown up with a reserved personality, we are likely to remain aloof in our spiritual practice; if our competitive streak has been our psychological copout for feeling inadequate, we will probably be drawn to constant comparison of our spiritual progress with others; and if chasing success was our defense mechanism for not feeling loved, we may pursue spirituality with the same obsession.

Similarly, if spirituality offers possibilities of leading a more meaningful life, we can readily develop aversion for other lifestyles and judge others based on that. If we increasingly value a life of austerity, we run the risk of looking down on extravagant spenders. If we have begun experiencing greater peace, we can easily find accepting anger of people around us challenging.

Moreover, spiritual practice can become an escape from our emotional demons – issues of anger, loneliness, envy, aversion and judgmental nature; instead, it needs to be a path to face them. Working out our emotional past and conditioned mental patterns, alongside pursuing spiritual insights, paves the way for a more wholesome growth. For example, consciously working with our judgmental nature and limiting mental beliefs, acquired during childhood, can be very supportive in our journey.

Each of us desires to be loved – it’s our primal instinct. However, during our formative years, we subconsciously develop personality traits that seemingly best fulfill this need. Depending upon what helps us gain our parents’ love during childhood, be it conformity, winning, diplomacy, aggression, perfectionism, playing a victim and so forth, we subliminally begin to cement those traits into our psyche. Over time, they become an integral part of our adult personality. Only when we are able to bring these traits into our active awareness, effectively neutralise them, and be our authentic selves, can we create healthy shifts in our limiting mental beliefs.

Further, being routinely judged by our parents, teachers and peers during our early years impacts our self-esteem. We feel inadequate within and grow up believing that it is desirable to be perfect. These beliefs get reinforced at our work place as well as in our personal relationships. These experiences guide our value system and we get accustomed to judging ourselves and others.

Instead of constantly seeking perfection in ourselves -- and in our colleagues, spouse and children -- we need to build appreciation for wholesomeness. Instead of judging ourselves, we need to learn to be compassionate towards our shortcomings and be comfortable with who we are. This supports our ability to unconditionally love ourselves. This does not mean we stop striving to get better – instead, it entails learning to love our current state and not postpone our contentment to achievement of a new and improved future state alone.

Our spiritual answers come more naturally when we stop seeking to be perfect and stay open to accepting all possibilities. We sense greater harmony with everything around us only when we overcome our limiting personality traits and start being our authentic selves. We are more present and better experience being in the flow when we get away from our conditioned judgmental responses. The writer is a life coach .

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Consciousness And Conscience



Q: What is the difference between Consciousness and conscience?
A: They can be termed as twin flames that enlighten life’s journey. A human being is not living without consciousness and is not human without conscience.
Consciousness in its basic wakeful state help us to respond and react to physical requirements arising from survival instinct loaded with ego, entrapped by illusions. This mind-driven entity can also elevate one to higher levels of consciousness or altered states of awareness, to sarveshwara or pure consciousness.
Seers tell us that consciousness in primary form is only outward awareness. In its stabilised condition it is knowledge and in pure structure it is our inner-world that reconnects us with the divinity that exists everywhere. This awakening, coming from core calmness, can cross the limiting parameters of the material world’s physical demands and daily struggle of maintaining balance in life.
According to Lao Tze, “The key to growth is introduction of high dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.” Aiding this deeper perception is conscience, the voice of the ever-vigilant spirit within us which tells us right from wrong. These two formless attributes are the passport and the visa to enter the universe of supreme bliss, the world of nothingness.
In its normal state, consciousness, confronted with numerous challenges, often buries conscience that deals with truth, honesty and integrity. Conscience has to be kept alive and active because in confrontation with trials and temptations, traumas and tragedies, consciousness often becomes a defence mechanism to justify unjustifiable acts. It requires true courage to encounter fathomless fears, irrational insecurities, abnormal angers, and lasting lusts.
Q: Then why we do not pay any attention to our conscience?
A: Basically, in moments of confusion and conflicts, decisions and dilemmas, our ego stands as barrier between conscience and consciousness. In our competitive life guided by ego we tend to see illusory images, fail to observe consequences, distracted by the external world, and we do not listen to our inner voice. It is better to have conscience as Sakha or friendly adviser, because there can be no witness so terrible, no accuser as powerful as our own conscience. Gandhiji said, “The court of conscience supersedes all other courts”. But before cracking the whip, conscience does issue warnings in the form of admonitions and condemnations. It is up to us to recognise these signals within.
Introspection is the only way to bring about deeper awareness and positive perception. Get baptised by sunlight. Infuse body and mind with the cosmic light and energy of the morning sun. This ignites the atmasoorya or inner sun. Light causes reflections and shadows. The rays of light in the atmosphere are imperceptible, but when they fall on any object it becomes visible by virtue of the reflection caused by light, which also causes shadows. Similarly, when we observe our self with this inner light we perceive reflections and shadows within. Intensify this light, breathe light, wash your thoughts and mind with light and study the shadows it casts. Once the symptoms and shortcomings are diagnosed, they can be faced, encountered and obliterated. Pure conscience is light; it is love.
Life’s experiences are meant to set in motion evolution of consciousness and conscience helps us to stay on the right track. Deep down in the darkness of coal mines, under tremendous heat and pressure, some carbons transform into diamonds. A clean conscience takes us closer to Supreme Consciousness.