Integrating Ancient Wisdom in Modern Life: Knowledge and Practice
- Our soul, truth, self-nature are always illuminated with self-knowledge. When a cloud of Ignorance comes between mind and truth, desire takes birth. These desires are darkness. Because of desires we confine ourselves with our limited identity. With our limited identity we feel insecurity, fear, anxiety etc. This will create a fluctuating mind. Which will be the cause of misery.
- Desire has not to be destroyed, it has to be purified. Desire has not to be dropped, it has to be transformed. Your very being is desire; to be against it is to be against yourself and against all. To be against it is to be against the flowers and the birds and the sun and the moon. To be against it is against all creativity. Desire is creativity.
- Combination of thought, feeling, words will create karma. Doing karma again and again becomes a habit. When habits have gone deep in us it becomes tendencies. As are our desires and tendencies, so are our thoughts. This is our thought cycle. To transcend this cycle requires repetitive, long continuous, uninterrupted practice of self-study and non-attachment to illuminate with self-knowledge.
- Knowledge without practice is useless. Practice without knowledge is dangerous. Knowledge and practice are two wings of the birds. When both of them will bring balance then you illuminate with self-knowledge.
- You become perfect at what you practise. If you do a particular practice constantly – just repeating it continuously by and by it drops from the conscious, reaches to the unconscious and becomes part of it. Once it becomes part of the unconscious, it starts functioning from that deep source. Focus, devotion and sincerity are three qualities for practise. You practise till time a moment of no return arrives.
- Life itself is Meditation. Meditation is not for a certain time but it’s a way of life. Meditation is not an act, it is a quality that naturally manifests if we cultivate the right kind of inner situation. Meditation is a quality of being that you bring to the act. It is not a particular act, it is not that you do this then it is meditation – that you sit in a certain posture, siddhasana, and you keep your spine erect, and you keep your eyes closed or you look at the tip of your nose or you watch your breath, then it is meditation – no, these are just devices. Once you have learned the quality, then you need not do any particular meditation, then the meditation has to spread all over your life. Only when you are meditative twenty-four hours a day then you can attain, then you have attained. Even sleeping is meditation.
