Tag: Buddha

The eight-fold path of blissful living or Ananda Ashtanga!

.Reading time 34 minutes.

Living in bliss
– The eight-fold path of blissful living or Ananda Ashtanga

These are:

1.  Blissful Laughter
2.  Blissful Affirmation
3.  Blissful Cleansing
4.  Blissful Yoga
5.  Blissful Meditation
6.  Blissful Tools
7.  Blissful Energy
8.  Blissful Chant

Ananda Ashtanga or Blissful Living is a simple eight-fold pathway to Living Enlightenment. These are simple techniques that take you into the experience directly without the need to understand and absorb.

Blissful Laughter

Laughing meditation or Haasya Dhyana Meditation

As soon as you wake up in the morning, even before you get up from your bed, laugh for five minutes! Read More

H.D.H Paramahamsa Bhagawan Sri Nithyananda Paramashivam’s advent on planet earth is to create a new cycle of individual consciousness causing Collective Consciousness to enter the Superconscious zone

.Reading time 6 minutes.

Enlightened beings are untouched by the qualities, good or bad that they come in contact with. Their presence is so intense that everybody and everything is touched by the love and compassion that is their very nature.

A story from the life of enlightened master Buddha:

There was a bandit by the name of Angulimala. He used to live in a forest that many people had to cross. He used to ambush the people and rob them of their valuables. Then he would cut off the little finger of the person and make a garland of all the fingers. That is why he was called Angulimala or garland of fingers. Once when traveling, Buddha was about to cross the forest. People warned him about the terrifying Angulimala.

But Buddha was unperturbed and continued walking. Deep inside the forest, Angulimala jumped out of the bushes and shouted threateningly at Buddha, ‘Stand still!’ Buddha stopped and replied, ‘I am still. May you be still.’ Angulimala for the first time in his life was shaken to his very being. Something about Buddha touched him deeply. He could not even force himself to attack Buddha. His hands froze. He just fell at the feet of Buddha crying and begging for forgiveness! Read More

An individual’s inner satisfaction, increase in awareness, creativity, and intelligence will automatically lead to global peace, prosperity and harmony.

.Reading time 6 minutes.

A beautiful story from the life of Buddha:

Devadatta, a cousin of Buddha, joined Buddha’s order of monks. He was hungry for power and status. He wanted to become the head of the order of monks. But Buddha would not allow such an immature person, who was running after status instead of enlightenment, to lead his mission. So Devadatta harbored jealousy and ill feelings towards Buddha and even made several attempts to kill him.

Once Devadatta persuaded the royal elephant-keepers to release a fierce elephant on to Buddha’s path. The elephant was intoxicated and let loose on the streets where Buddha used to walk regularly. The mad elephant ran wildly. People panicked and fled in all directions. The elephant came upon Buddha.

Buddha kept walking, radiating the same peace and calm even in the face of this danger. His bliss and peace was not at all affected by the threat of the wild elephant. The elephant came rushing towards Buddha in a mad fury.

Once it reached Buddha, it immediately calmed down completely. Its wild nature simply dissolved in Buddha’s enlightened presence. Buddha touched the elephant’s forehead and stroked it gently. Calmed by the patting, the elephant bent on its knees and bowed down to Buddha. The people watching the whole scene were simply shocked! Read More

The difference between ordinary frustration and Buddha’s frustration was he was complete and intense in his frustration as well

.Reading time 4 minutes.

In Bengal, there is a particular group of people who believe that Krishna is the only man and those who follow him are all women no matter what gender they physically are. They look to Krishna as their beloved. They feel so intensely about this relation that even the men dress like women. The enlightened mystic from Bengal, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, followed this path also for six months. The hallmark of this great master, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, was that whatever he did, it was with totality and intensity. He used the same clothes as women not only at night, but also during the day because he felt he could not be one person during the day and another during the night. You may be shocked to hear this but he actually started becoming a woman. It was not being like a woman, it was being a woman. His voice changed, his gait and manner of walking changed. The intensity was such his breasts started growing. He even started having monthly periods! During the six months he was doing this practice, he just became a woman. It took almost six months after he stopped for the change to reverse and for him to become a man again. Read More

If you can do what you are doing with a totality and intensity that you are completely lost in the action, you have caught the thread of intensity!

.Reading time 2 minutes.

There are two ways of living.

One is living like a buffalo, just being alive and breathing but with no intensity and passion in life.

The other way is like a Buddha, living intensely in the present moment in the current action.

Have you experienced a nightmare? During a nightmare you will experience that even if you want to open your eyes you cannot. You want to move your hands but you cannot. Then the nightmare becomes so intense. It may be that a lion is chasing you and has almost caught you or you are falling down a deep chasm or you are in some such life-threatening situation in your dream. When it comes to its maximum intensity, the very intensity wakes you up. If the nightmare is not that intense, you cannot wake yourself up and come out of it. If it is very intense then that very intensity wakes you up, and suddenly there is no nightmare. It was only a dream, but you thought that it was reality.

The moment you are lost in the action, you become like a flute on the lips of Existence itself. Read More

When you are really blissful, you work with higher intelligence!

.Reading time 6 minutes.

Intelligence is not to do with the information that you have or receive. That is only intellect. In other words, intelligence is not the totality of your experiences, but the lessons learned from those experiences.

Understanding happens only when you are open and spontaneous without prejudice. If you are with prejudice, the complete understanding does not penetrate you. If you are open, then the complete understanding penetrates you and you become intelligent.

For example, a person touches a burning matchstick and learns that it burns. Next, the person touches a gas flame and learns that it burns too. Next, he touches a blazing fire and finds that it also burns. If that person waits for learning this way, from experience, it will take him ages to learn the lesson that fire burns. And when he finally learns, it will be time for him to go to the burning cremation grounds! The intelligent person figures after touching the first fire of the matchstick, that any type of fire burns. But the even more intelligent person does not even wait to touch the fire of the matchstick, he learns even when he sees another person touching it! Read More

Acting out of your own intelligence is taking complete responsibility for what you do at all times!

.Reading time 4 minutes.

In life, because it is easy to place responsibility on others, you blindly follow other people’s directions instead of relying on your own intelligence. You say you are obedient, but you are actually shirking the responsibility of owning up to your actions. This is a dangerous and age old habit of following the rule book. It is dangerous because sometimes you are not even aware that you are missing responsibility and intelligence. You become a parrot, repeating the same thing for years together because someone told it to you. It is always easy to put the blame on the whole world for what happens in your life. But if you just look a little deeper, you can see how you are completely responsible for what is happening in your life! Because you do not live every moment with awareness and take responsibility for your words and actions, you do so many things unconsciously. Then, when the effects of these actions happen, you claim you don’t deserve the results! Acting out of your own intelligence is taking complete responsibility for what you do at all times.

For example, when you obey someone else you feel that you are being subservient to that person. But when you disobey that person, you feel guilty because a part of you feels that you should obey him or her but you are not obeying. The way out of this conflict is to follow your intelligence at that time with the clear understanding that you alone are responsible for your action. Then you will not hurt anyone including yourself. And you will be responding intelligently to the person you are disobeying as well. The answer depends on the person asking the question!

Moving with time, flowing with life, becoming a fluid process instead of being a solid ego is called intelligence

Read More

When you face death you see that it is nothing but life!

.Reading time 9 minutes.

Death is a deep relaxation. It is the ultimate ‘letting go’. It is the dropping of the old and starting with the new. When your being recognizes that it cannot achieve what it wants to through this body it decides to move on. This ‘moving on’, this ‘passing over’ is what is called death.

When your brand new house becomes old after the passage of years, you either try to repair it or if that is too inconvenient and frustrating, you decide to sell the house and move into a new one. When you do this, do you feel that you are missing something?

No!

In the same way when you feel that you have not lived your life totally in the way you wanted to, you leave this body to take a new one. You want to restart. Your choice to start all over again is what is called death.

In the same way when you feel that you have not lived your life totally in the way you wanted to, you leave this body to take a new one. You want to restart. Your choice to start all over again is what is called death.

When you die, all that happens is that you rejuvenate your body and your mind. You take a fresh set of memories, a new place, a different set of relatives, a new life. In other words you take up a new birth hoping to fulfill all your incomplete desires. Whatever you left unaccomplished you come down to finish. This choice given to you by god to start all over again is death. Read More

It is awareness that transforms pain to bliss which is the energy that exists no matter what the external situation may be!

.Reading time 6 minutes.

The root of pain and pleasure is the same.

It is the same sensation with two names. It is like two people receiving a body massage from the same person. One concludes that it was a beautiful rejuvenating process while the other decides that it hurt! The same massage will appear like pain or pleasure depending on the person receiving it.

Life has both of these opposites, pleasure and pain. Both pleasure and pain are from the mind. The mind always moves from one extreme to the other. It rarely falls into the middle path. From pleasure you move to pain, from pain you move to pleasure. As we saw earlier, pleasure and pain are completely dependent on the person feeling the pleasure or pain. Something may seem like pleasure to you, while the same experience may be pain to someone else.

In the Bhagavad Gita, the great scripture that teaches the various paths to Self-realization, the enlightened master Krishna says beautifully, ‘He who regards alike pleasure and pain, and looks on a lump of earth, a stone, and a piece of gold with an equal eye, who is wise and holds praise and blame to be the same, who is unchanged in honor and dishonor, and who treats friend and foe alike, is said to have gone beyond the modes of nature. Pleasure and pain are the same to him and he is ready for enlightenment.’ Read More

Declaration of Will, Science of Will

.Reading time 1 minute.

Paramahamsa Nithyananda intercepts into the first part of Shanti Mantra, which is chanted before the Kena Upanishad, in this Nithya Satsang as on 29th June 2016, live from Varanasi. This glorious declaration by the Upanishadic Rishis is the ‘declaration of WILL”” forming the science of WILL. His Holiness reveals that the one core truth that the whole Hindu tradition accepts indisputably, be they from the Shakta, Shaiva, Kaumara, Ganapatya, Saurya, Jain, Buddha traditions or any of the 6 Darshanas of Hinduism is the sacred sound – AUM, the cosmic vibration and the sacredness of ‘cows’. This Shanti Mantra or peace invocation begins with AUM, and makes a declaration of WILL, which fully integrates us and enriches (āpyāyantu) with MATURITY, STRENGTH, ENERGY. Paramahamsa Nithyananda enters into the deeper meanings of this verse with the essence of MATURITY. He defines: Maturity means being integrated to your WILL. Maturity does not mean you become handicapped; you become filled with strength and energy. Revealing the sacred moments from his childhood, He narrates how He had tuned Himself to the Sannyasa life at age 6 by declaring to His Guru and integrating his whole system which became matured to the decision of Sannyasa.

May my limbs, speech, vital life-energy, eyes, ears, and all the senses be fully matured and be enriched with strength and energy!

.Reading time 2 minutes.

Paramahamsa Nithyananda intercepts into the first part of Shanti Mantra, which is chanted before the Kena Upanishad, in this Nithya Satsang as on 29th June 2016, live from Varanasi. This glorious declaration by the Upanishadic Rishis is the ‘declaration of WILL”” forming the science of WILL. His Holiness reveals that the one core truth that the whole Hindu tradition accepts indisputably, be they from the Shakta, Shaiva, Kaumara, Ganapatya, Saurya, Jain, Buddha traditions or any of the 6 Darshanas of Hinduism is the sacred sound – AUM, the cosmic vibration and the sacredness of ‘cows’. This Shanti Mantra or peace invocation begins with AUM, and makes a declaration of WILL, which fully integrates us and enriches (āpyāyantu) with MATURITY, STRENGTH, ENERGY.

Swamiji enters into the deeper meanings of this verse with the essence of MATURITY.

HE defines: Maturity means being integrated to your WILL.

Maturity does not mean you become handicapped; you become filled with strength and energy. Revealing the sacred moments from his childhood, He narrates how He had tuned Himself to the Sannyasa life at age 6 by declaring to His Guru and integrating his whole system which became matured to the decision of Sannyasa. Shanti Mantra

aum āpyāyantu mamāṇgāni vākprāṇaścakśuḥ śrotram-athobalam-indriyāṇi ca sarvāṇi |

Aum. May my limbs, speech, vital life-energy (prāṇa), eyes, ears, and all the senses be fully matured and be enriched with strength and energy

What you think as your goal, as the essence of your life, towards which you are moving in your life, you are worshiping that!

.Reading time 5 minutes.

 

sambḥutiṁ ca vināśaṁ ca yastad vedobhayaṁ saha |

vināśena mṛtyuṁ tīrtvā sambhūtyāmṛtam aśnute || 14 ||

 Just recite. It’s the 14th verse of Isavasya Upanishad. I will give you the translation.

One who cognizes the pure essence of these both—the imperishable consciousness, the cause of manifestation and the destructible, the perishable, manifested entities, simultaneously—such a person completes with the fear of death and transcends death by worshipping or by knowledge of the perishable entities; and reaches the imperishable consciousness; celebrates the nectar of immortality and bliss, the eternal space of oneness.

Now listen. It’s the literal translation I have read out. The key word in this whole Upanishad, you need to understand. What Upanishad is trying to convey it to you. Listen.

Listen intensely what Upanishads are trying to convey through this to you. The first thing, the key word — what you are worshiping in you life. Please understand, here worshiping does not just mean in front of whom you bow down, in front of what you bow down. What you think as goal of your life. What you remember again and again. Please understand., you may be bowing down in front of Shiva deity for money, then you are worshiping money. Whether it is right or wrong, don’t bother now, first let us diagnose, understand –

what you are worshiping in your life?

You may bow down in front of any God, Goddess, Guru, but what you think as the essence of your life, what you think as the lakshya (goal) of your life, that is what you are worshiping. Read More