See, when you are hungry, the only way to satisfy hunger is to eat. If you say, “I am thirsty”, there is just one solution to quench the thirst, you need to drink liquids. But what type of liquid you should drink? I say you have many choices. From water to juice to milk, anything can quench your thirst. But liquid is what can quench the thirst. Similarly to enrich your life, you need spirituality.
What does spirituality really mean?
All that the spirit represents, i.e., love, peace, happiness, compassion, commitment and understanding. These are all the qualities of the spirit.
You need to nurture your mind, you need to nurture your emotions, you need to sharpen your intellect, and you need to do whatever is needed to make your behavior better. So anything that nurtures the spirit is spirituality. Proper rest, some knowledge, an expanding your vision, all this is part of spirituality. And all of this is needed for a civilized happy life.
See, anything you do in life, it is all directed towards being happy. Why do you even do some service to somebody? It is because it gives some happiness to you. When you serve someone it gives you joy. So anything we do in our life is directed towards happiness, and greater happiness, and greater happiness. That’s how the mind goes. And the greatest happiness is reposing in the being. It is when you feel that everyone is a part of you and you are a part of everyone.
So to be successful in life you need values, you need integrity, you need a vision, you need energy, and you need dynamism. And spirituality is the one thing that gives it all of you.
If you are healthy, you can see better, you can eat better, you can speak better , you can hear better and you can run better. All this depends on just one thing. Similarly that which enriches your spirit is so essential to enrich all other aspects of life.
Your connection to yourself has no expiry date. If you are friendly then anyone who comes in front of you, you become friendly with them. You exuberate friendliness and that has no expiry date. Nor does it have any manufacturing date.
That you have to figure out.
I would say 3 C’s would help.
1. Context to life. When you see your life in a bigger context, you will be so amazed that things will shift naturally inside you. In this huge universe with billions of stars, there is one little solar system which is not even like a dot. And in this, there is a little planet called Earth with 7 billion people. You are one among all of them, and you are so insignificant in this place.
When your vision expands you feel you are nothing; you are like a grain of sand or not even that. When you realize your insignificance in this planet; a shift happens within you. This context will keep you so centered that a little bit of achievement here and there will not excite you, or throw you off balance.
2. Compassion. There are so many people who have contributed towards your achievements. When you are grateful towards them, then also you remain centered.
If one person has to win the race then there is indirect cooperation by many around. This is important.
3. Commitment. When your commitment is very strong then your achievement does not excite you or throw you off balance. You will see it as one stepping stone in your path.
Correct! Religion has its place. I am not a communist or an atheist who would say religion should be done away with. But what is the point of having a skin if there is no banana inside? If there is no substance, no human values, no compassion, no love, no sense of belongingness; holding onto the rituals and just the outer identity of religion which has become the cause of more and more conflicts in the world today, is useless. This is what I was talking about.
Religion has a place, let it be there. Your weddings are done according to your religion. Your naming ceremony is done according to religion. Your cremation is done according to religion. But do not let religion swallow or eat up the basics of spirituality - love, compassion, a sense of belongingness and humility. These values are what we call spirituality.
You must always see the context. If you talk about Buddha and what he said, then you should not forget to whom he spoke and what was the state of affairs at that time in the society he was in. Similarly if you want to talk about Jesus, or Mohammed, or any other prophet, you should not forget the context — where what was said, and to whom it was said.
During Buddha’s time, India was at its pinnacle. It had the wealth of the world. It was the most developed country at that time. People had everything; material riches were in abundance.
Just 200 years ago, Lord Macaulay, when he went to London, he wrote to Queen Elizabeth saying, 'I have travelled the length and breadth of India, and I have not see one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such caliber that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage'.
Buddha’s time was such a golden period where people had everything materialistic in abundance, and they were so steeply immersed into it. So he said, ”Come on, wake up. There is something more than material comfort and material wealth”.
At that time people were fighting with each other and there were small feudal wars over foolish things. So Buddha said, “Come on, drop this. There is something greater in life”.
People also thought they knew, without any real experience. They had all the philosophy and they would talk about God without knowing what it is.
Lord Buddha said, ”Come, I have a simple thing to tell you”.
He took people step by step into meditation, which people had forgotten.
Buddha never started a new religion and lived as a Hindu sanyasi (monk). He followed all the rules of a monk and died as a monk. It was after Buddha that all his teachings became a separate religion. Virtually, Buddha said almost everything which is in the Upanishads, just with one difference, i.e., Anatmavad (the atman does not exist).
He said, "There is no Self. I searched and searched for the Self, but I couldn’t get that Self. All that exists is emptiness".
Buddha spoke more about the emptiness in everything. He said, “Everything is nothing”.
There were eleven questions which Buddha never answered. One of which was on God. He would never answer if anybody asked whether God exists or not. He never denied it, but he did not want to get into it either. There were so many concepts that people had at that time. Everyone thought they know it without even knowing it. So he thought it is better not to get into this debate and he said, “I have come here to give a simple technique to get rid of sorrow in your life.”
He talked about meditation and nirvana (liberation).
Nyaya implies — the means of knowing; weather your knowledge and the means by which you gained the knowledge is correct or not. Again, it’s a great intellectual debate.
There are sixteen principles of Nyaya and there are so many types of Nyaya to see whether your perception is correct. This is what Nyaya Shastra is all about.
We have been given to understand that Galileo first said that — the Earth goes round the Sun. But since thousands of years, people in India believed that the Sun is the centre and all the planets go around it. You go to any temple and you will find that they keep the Sun in the middle and all the 9 planets around it.
The fact that Earth is spherical was known to ancient India long time ago. That is why even today the Panchang (Indian calendar based on placements of planets in zodiac) is highly accurate of the movement of the stars and the planets. The calculation which was done hundreds of years ago about when the eclipse will happen, when Jupiter will transit, etc., was all calculated to the minutest detail.
Yes, in the west it was Galileo who discovered it and he was persecuted also. But here (in India), people knew it. They always said Khagola (astronomy). Gola means spherical. They said that the universe is spherical and all the planets are spherical. They always knew about the spherical movement of the planets. History needs to be rewritten.
You see the Sun setting or rising. But it is neither setting nor rising. It is a perceptual error. Similarly, some things happen by accident. Like a crow sat on a tree and a mango fell. Mango was already ripe and it was about to fall anyway. But a crow came and sat on the tree, so you relate them and think that the crow made the mango fall. This is called Kakataliya Nyaya (one of the principles of Nyaya Shastra).
Similarly there are many such modes of understanding and judging whether one’s perception is correct or not.
