Prabhaker

How will you recognize Jesus? Dostoevsky of Russia, wrote a book: The Brothers Karamazov. In that he says that after eighteen hundred years since his death, Jesus thought that the time was ripe for him to re-visit the earth. There were churches erected in every village to preach his message; there were priests and monks with the cross dangling from their necks. Almost half the world had turned Christian! He was sure of a tumultuous welcome. So one Sunday, Jesus descended into a village and stood under a tree. People were returning from the village church; the morning mass was over. They were surprised to see a Christ-like figure standing under the tree. Who is this man dressed like Jesus? He must be an actor, they thought. They gathered round him, full of curiosity and began to question him: "Your acting is perfect. You look exactly like Christ." "But I AM Christ," said Jesus. They laughed aloud; one threw a stone, another a slipper and they all danced round him, calling him insane. One, out of pity, told him to go before the priest caught him. "Your priest? He is my priest. Don't you recognize me? I am the one to whom you pray every morning." "We shall worship you as you deserve, if you do not make yourself scarce quickly!" they told him. Jesus in his compassion forgave them; perhaps they really did not recognize him, but the priest was bound to, for he sang his praises all day. Then along came the padre. The noisy crowd became silent as he approached. Then one by one, they touched his feet - such is the world: it will stone God but it will prostrate before those who make business out of Him. "This is blasphemy!" exclaimed Jesus. "Keep quiet," said the people. "If the priest hears you, he will feel insulted." This drew the priest's attention. "Who is this rascal?" he asked, "Bring him to me." "You too do not recognize me?" Jesus asked the priest, "And you wear my cross around your neck!" But Jesus overlooked the fact that the cross he was hung on was made of wood, while the cross that hung round the priest's neck, was made of gold. Was ever a cross to hang a man by made of gold? And it is the man who is hung on the cross and not the cross on the man! "This man looks like Satan himself!" proclaimed the priest, "Our Jesus came to earth but once. There is no need for him to come again. Now we are here to look after his work." So Jesus was locked up in the attic of the church, He was shocked! This was the same kind of treatment he had received eighteen hundred years ago. "Will I be crucified again?" He wondered. The priest came to visit him in the middle of the night. He fell at his feet and begged forgiveness. "I recognized you alright, Oh Glorious One! But we are constrained to deny you in the market-place. You need not take the trouble of coming again. We are carrying out your work with all sincerity.

Just like the Christian trinity, Hindus also have a trinity (Trimurti, three faces of the God) - Brahma, the creator god; Vishnu, the god who maintains the world; and Shiva, who will destroy the world. This is a cycle. Then Brahma creates the world again, and for millions of years Vishnu maintains it; then one day Shiva destroys it. The Buddhist doctrine talks about - Buddhist trinity (Trikaya) - Buddha’s three bodies. The first body is called the body of truth, the universal body, the divine body. You can call it God. The second body is called the bliss body – the bridge between the first and the third. You can call it the soul. And the third body is the physical body.

Jesus said that, “I am the way, and I am the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." ◄ John 14:6 ► Catholic Church endorsed forced conversion of unbelievers into the Church. "And the lord said to the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled." ◄ Luke 14:23 ► Roman Emperor Theodosius prohibited all forms of Pagan worship and allowed the temples to be robbed, plundered, and ruthlessly destroyed by monks and other enterprising Christians. During the Saxon Wars, the Christian Frankish king Charlemagne waged war on the pagan Saxons for over 20 years, seeking to Christianize and rule the Saxons. During this period, the Saxons repeatedly refused Christianization . Olaf I of Norway, during his attempt to Christianize Norway during the Viking Age, had those under his rule that practiced their indigenous Norse Paganism and refused to Christianize tortured, maimed or executed, including seidmen, who were tied up and thrown to a skerry at low tide to slowly drown. The Christianization of the pagan Balts, Slavs and Finns was undertaken primarily during the 12th and 13th centuries, in a series of uncoordinated military campaigns by various German and Scandinavian kingdoms. Christianity is targeted by critics of colonialism because the tenets of the religion were used to justify the actions of the colonists. When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land. ~ Desmond Tutu "And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life." ◄ Matthew 19:29 ► Christianity goes on sending missionaries around the world to help the poor. In India, rich person are not converted to Christianity, only poor people. And they are converted to Christianity not because they love Christ but because they love bread and butter. The Christian missionaries can supply them with a little food, clothes, shelter, a school, a hospital. What will happen if poverty disappears? how will Christian missionaries be able to convert poor people to Christianity? There are 1.5 million homeless in America. Why are they homeless? Nobody is going to help them, because they are already Christian. Christians can send huge amount of money to convert people in poor countries, why can't they help their own homeless and poor people first ?

If you are seeking the result nothing will happen; meditation will be useless. If you think about what will happen you cannot meditate. The mind goes on thinking about the result; it cannot be here and now. Meditation is a lifestyle, not an activity. Whatsoever you do, do it with awareness; this is meditation. Walking, walk attentively, as if walking is everything; eating, eat with awareness, as if eating is everything; rising, rise with awareness; sitting, sit with awareness; all your actions become conscious, your mind does not travel beyond this moment, it remains in the moment, settles in the moment – this is meditation. If you are in a hurry, if you are in haste, you will never know the taste of meditation. The taste of meditation needs great patience.The more impatient you are for it, the less is the possibility, and if you are patient, it is bound to come. The more patient you are, the closer it is.

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?' ~ Sigmund Freud

Parents have some ambitions they would like to fulfill through their children. They would like their children to be rich, famous, respected; they would like their children to fulfill their unfulfilled egos. Conflict between parents and children arises because while children grow out of childhood, parents never grow out of parenthood. If you can love your parents, if you can live harmoniously with your parents, it indicates that you have achieved higher consciousness. Living with your parents harmoniously is the real test.

God can't be conclusion of any logical process. God is never arrived at by reasoning.

God is creativity. Wherever and whenever creativity happens, it is always through Him.

God is a hypothesis to support another hypothesis - the creation.

Indian classical music is a sadhana , a spiritual discipline. In the East, music has been always accepted as a spiritual phenomenon.

omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent ...

Walk meditatively, eat meditatively, sit meditatively. Let meditation be spread all over your life.

Understanding is enough. If you don't understand, then you have to meditate. This is the path of knowledge, knowing , Gyana yoga. It is very difficult to verbalize, to say something about meditation. Even if only a fragmentary, partial understanding arises out of theory, that is more than one can expect. Even that partial understanding of meditation can become a seed. Even if a little understanding arises in you it is more than enough, because understanding has its own way of growing.

@Temo You don't ask, has love any meaning? You know love is itself meaningful, it is not a means to some end.

A doing with a doer, in which one thinks himself as a doer, is action. As long as I remain a doer, whatever I do is action. Even if I become a monk, it is an act, an action. Even renunciation becomes an action if a doer is present in the act. You do something good, and you think it is done by you, you are the doer, then ego is there. For a karma yogi every action is egoless, and therefore it is inaction. Even when he is doing something, he is really in inaction. Karma Yoga is the effort to go directly from doing to witnessing.

in the first place you expect some meaning to be there. You will find meaning only if you create it. Life in itself has no meaning.

Everybody is running away from loneliness. It is like a wound; it hurts. You can escape from it, the only way is to be in a crowd, to become part of a society, to have friends, to create a family. People are playing cards, chess; people are watching television for hours. For all these activities, the only reason is , not to be left alone, it is very fearful. And this idea is taken from others. A great deal of meditative effort is needed to transform, loneliness into peace and blissfulness. Meditation means to be fulfilled in oneself. More you run from yourself the more you will have to run , the more you will get scared of loneliness.

When you begin to meditate, when you begin to feel a certain silence, you begin to feel the disturbance more. Against that silence, the disturbance is felt more keenly. Before you were simply disturbed, without any silence inside. Now you have something to judge against, to compare against. So whenever someone begins meditation, he will become aware of many things of which he was not previously aware, and because of that awareness he will suffer. This is how things are, and one has to pass through them. If you want to escape, then you will have to leave awareness. There are many methods to escape, alcohol is the easiest. You can go and listen to music and become absorbed in it. Divert your mind in anything and become unconscious. It is the easy way. If you do not escape, if you remain there with your suffering, one day suffering will disappear and you will have grown into more awareness.

Pleasure means being unconscious. Consciousness brings non-attachment to pleasures. One person may find pleasure in eating non-vegetarian food, other may vomit at the sight of it. Pleasure is psychological.

Causality is materialism. You seek food because hunger is there. It forces you; there is no choice. Spirituality is beyond causality. It is not caused by anything; it is your inner choice. No one can create any situation in which you can become enlightened. You may choose, you may not choose. No one can be spiritualistic if his or her children are dying of hunger. Indulge yourself in some materialism feed your family and only then you can move towards spirituality.

It won’t help much For you, Hoo will be more helpful. Hoo is a Sufi mantra. Hoo was developed by Sufis for a very aggressive, violent country and race. Your energy is near the sex center, and the sex center has to be hit directly so the energy rises upwards. A beautiful woman passes and you simply take a note that “Yes, a woman has passed,” but nothing arises within, you; your sex center is not hit, no energy moves in you , then you can start Aum. When you start feeling that now you exist near the heart, not near the sex center, only then can you use Aum.

Work on concentration. Concentration means focusing of the mind, narrowing of the mind on one point. Meditation is not concentration. For example 'tratak for concentration' - staring at a fixed object. Chanting Mantra. When you chant a mantra, all the energy used in your thoughts is released to flow into the mantra. Only the mantra remains in your mind; all other avenues of thought are closed, all other outlets for your mental energy are shut off; there is nowhere else for it to flow. Mantras bestow power. Through chanting a mantra one gathers power; there is no doubt about this.

You want power to create magic which is a product of willpower. First gain some willpower.

It you christian conditioning that you see things in this way. The Christian is conditioned in one way, the Hindu is conditioned in another way, but they are all conditioned. Life needs transformation, and transformation is a great work upon oneself. It is not a child's play, that: "Just believe in Jesus Christ, go on reading the Bible again and again, and you are saved." Saved from what? Saved from transformation! Jews never accepted Jesus, not even today. There was a reason why they crucified him: if on the cross he can manage to provoke God to help him, then they will be able to see whether he is the messiah or not , God will save him. If God is not even bothering about saving His own son on the cross, then what to say about others? And if Jesus cannot provoke God to save him, how can he provoke God to save others? The crucifixion was going to be a criterion. They had forced him to carry his own cross. Three times he fell on the way; the cross was too heavy. Jesus said that "those who have such faith can move mountains". He could not carry his own cross and he was trying to carry the crosses of the whole of humanity. On the cross he himself feels shaken up. He cries to God,"Have you forsaken me?" , because he sees that the crucifixion is happening and there is no miracle. And when he says, "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will." that is surrender, but not true , with reluctance, just a face-saving device. Nothing is happening, all is finished. After this, Jesus, knowing that all things were now accomplished, said, “I thirst!” Now, this is the man who used to walk on water. This is the man who used to turn water into wine. He cannot even manage a glass of water , and he was able to change stones into bread! Why can't he change the air into water? Christians go on, all over the world, saving people. They don't even understand what it means to save. In the East, no religion has ever proclaimed that anybody can save you except yourself.