Spiritual Pathways

Many wonderful things and some sad happened through my life as indeed it does for all humans. Observation and reflection revealed that these things happened with very little of my own doing. There were times I tried very hard for certain goals and did not succeed while there were other things that happened automatically, even great ones, with minimal effort that was easy and pleasant. My conclusion is that it all unfolded because of the force of Karma. We arrive in this life with a storehouse of karma from previous lives even as we add to it in this one. This governs our lives from where we are born to events that unfold in our journey. It is true that effort too brings results but such results are set against what is destined. If the event is a significant one, force of karma attached to it is such that our own effort may be unable to change it much. It is only in little thing, like what to have for dinner today, that our own effort is more fruitful. There is a common...

Love is the basis for life, hate the basis for its annihilation There are five kinds of love, First is the love between a parent and child. It includes love of a child for parents and of parents for a child including grandchildren. The second kind of love is for another human or humans. It includes romantic love in which lust is not the motivation for as Saint Kabir has said, where there is lust there is no love and where there is love there is no lust. A mind engaged in sensory pleasures gets distanced from the greater and more durable pleasures inherent in the soul The third kind of love is love for all life that includes not just humans but all animals and insects too. The fourth kind of love is for nature, all life that includes plant life and the inanimate side of nature too. Many a times, this kind of love is  a stepping stone to the last and final kind of love. The fifth kind of love is for the Universe, the Lord Almighty who created t...

Dear friend, we all take pride in our possessions. If we have other achievements such as educational degrees, name, fame, power, privilege etc. we are deeply pleased with that too. In reality, none of these things belong to us. Everything including our bodies belongs to the universe and has been granted to us temporarily, for limited periods, by the grace of the Universe. Everything we have is a temporary gift from the universe to assist us in our own unique journeys from life to life. What truly belongs to us is our soul that is everlasting. The wise yogi realizing this evolves to superior states. Patanjali in his text on yoga has described this as an essential step for evolution of the soul, terming it in Sanskrit as - Aparigrah We tend to grow deeply attached to our possessions and if they are taken away we fret and get miserable. The wise person however moves on peacefully when the time for a gift to be withdrawn comes. The human body grows from a child to youth ...