The Challenge of Living Life from Self

Finding the inner self and operating from it continually is at the same time a very easy and a very difficult task.

Easy because, the person you are trying to be is actually you. You do not need to acquire anything new. On the other hand the bounty of nature becomes more available to you when you are yourself. Just think of the times like first time seeing your new born - the moment, feeling its magnitude, the miracle of having been part of creation and holding something whose potential future is a mystery ... All this can be felt by us with no effort from our side in terms of acquiring skill, planning. It is there for us to feel whenever we wish to. 

Even a young puppy can evoke love in us, strong enough to make us commit to take care of it through thick and thin, rain and sunshine, work and vacation!

The beauty of nature, the twilight sky, the flow of water  -- their capability to mesmerise  us is because we have the ability to fall in sync with our inner selves in their presence. 

By the time you come to this line of text, a portion of your mind, will be calling this idea bull s***. Birthing a baby is no easy task, neither is raising it. It does require a hell of a lot of work. Nature is fine, but getting to  a place of nature needs a lot of work! All that joy is only to be wished for, practical life is to work hard to make it even. Exactly! The impossibility in Living from the Self starts coming in the minute we use this critical mind to dismiss the possibility of living from the Self.  And this Critical Mind is also very much part of us, just like our Self. Our critical mind (you can use different names for this, our Ego mind is one ) can bring out hundreds of reasons why not to think of living like this. It says it is IMPOSSIBLE. Loose weight? IMPOSSIBLE! Find Love? IMPOSSIBLE! Be joyful all the time? IMPOSSIBLE!

Well without it life loses its point! There is no point to live life without these. There is no point in life if you dont live out in the external life the richness of the inner Self. It may be tough, but in the struggle for it, becuase if its toughness if you loose sight of this  Inner Self, you loose sight of the Beautiful picture that is your life's attempt to create. 

Thus the challenge always is to keep in touch with the Self within, even in the most depressing times, and then to keep alive the beautiful vision that the Self has given us even while we navigate through the business of Life  to manifest this vision.

This is the task we approach in our program  - Finding the Inner Compass in Bangalore from June 3rd to 6th 2013

Queendom.....

So what is Queendom ?

The dictionary may suggest a land ruled by a Queen.
But shall we envisage a people where the feminine in the form of inclusion, care and affection is part of the mainstream pursuit? Further it is not just the mainstream but the moving factor for growth rather than the current pursuit for profit.

This is my idea of Queendom. A nation - of man, women and all other manifestations of nature living in harmony playing the role that they understand is theirs to play, nothing more nothing less.
- There is no place for greed or profit as the perspective is always of  'us' and not of 'me'. That is inclusion.
- Growth is directed towards providing for, creating new methods for wholesomeness and happiness not pleasure. That is care and affection.
- Education and its pursuit is for wisdom not knowledge. That is wisdom.

Though it seems like an imaginary land, the emergence of this Queendom in our midst is underway. Just look around, you will see the old world crumbling away.
We dont have territorial wars any more, only with terrorists. And these terrorists are very often fanatics excluded from the mainstream. But then ways of including warring sides is not there.
Even territorial disputes are fought with publicity, arm twisting, politics rather than brute force , ex Tibet.
But they are being fought.
Economies and economics of old are crumbling, old bastions of power are destabilizing. New economies and new economics are  about to emerge. But they have not yet emerged.
Old norms of relationships are shaken and booted out. Norms of fidelity, responsibility to parents, marriage are challenged, norms of gender and sexual orientations are challenged. But newer norms are not yet established.
Old Religions and rituals are preaching loudly in a last failing bid to hold the emerging generation. And then there is the new age spiritualists asking them to come to spirituality rather than religion. But then again even that is private, not mainstream.

It seems that many ways of working of the previous time seems to be coming to an end, newer ones are on the threshold of emerging. The battle for Queendom is at these thresholds. It comes on the wings of hope, faith, trust, love for humanity. It is often seemingly led by women. Women who are more naturally tuned to it but also by the great numbers of men whose presence is more invisible, but action is firm and supportive of these women.

These are the knights of Queendom and at the forefront of bringing a new consciousness for all of us.

Invoking the Connection

We are a part of the Universe and this fact is either known to us only as Knowledge or as an Idea but not really as an experience to us.

This aspect, which is out of our experiential realm, does create great damage in our everyday life; we are totally living unconnected with the environment causing a great damage to it and thus causing damage back to us.

Many people talk to make us understand the dangers of our way of life, though such talks and writings causes some kind of awareness, it seems we are not in reality aware of it in toto and what to do to save us. We may perhaps know certain responses like reducing the use of vehicles which cause danger to atmosphere through its emission of carbon monoxide, reduced use of electricity, restriction in the use of water and so on. And we expect that such initiatives should lead to continued availability of the natural resources leading to a conducive environment for human existence. But, year after year, the deteriorations are only increasing despite our so called efforts. We have, of course reasons to defend. We can say that all such efforts are really insufficient to alter the state and we need to do more and so on.

What we really need is to understand that we are all at the moment considering our existence as something separate, individualistic and in fact inimically isolated to the environment and to the Universe. We have not yet fully realized that we are parties to the Universe and we have to partner to the universal processes. This is the process we need to take on immediately. Such an initiative from our side will create a total change in our way of living and alter our current turmoil with the environment. We will inherently know what we have to do and how we have to live which alone is the solution to the current problem we are facing. Any initiatives other than this will always be short of achieving the desired goal. If we have to do that our current belief that we are individuals, separate beings will have to change and a new belief that we are part of the Universe has to come in; and our primary task is to partner with the Universe.

Is this too far away from reality? An approach to this answer is in checking our own experiences to see if we have experienced this. We have, sometimes, in our life experienced this one-ness with the Universe.

When we have felt a kind of sadness which cannot be explained properly when we see other human beings suffer in life, when we felt indescribable joy and energy when we are in the midst of nature, when we cuddle with our pets without inhibition, when we felt the soft touch of grass and flowers, and so. All such occasions have felt for more than ourselves, we have perceived more than what the 5 objective sensed have sensed, we have felt we are a part of a larger whole. It has mildly communicated to us our reality of interconnectedness. But we have moved away from such feelings and experiences by thinking bringing rational thinking.

We are also crippled by our inducted belief that we are not one with the Universe but are one above the Universe. Evolutionally, we set out to use the environment around us for our benefit to survive and then to thrive. However, in the industrial era the heroism of humanity was thought to be in manufacturing dream machines to artificially regulate every aspect of our life. The image of the hero was the enterprising man to mine, manufacture, build sky scrapers, machines, cities, etc. With rise of our expertise in this area we have now come to see ourselves as masters of our environment; our environment existing for us to use it, people included. A reflection of this attitude is in the disdain we have for rituals for nature like worship of the rain gods. Our belief in our own ability to predict rain, get water from dams and canals has reduced our reverence for the power of nature in the form of rains. Rains are no longer to be prayed for, they are now to be forecasted. It has also changed our relationship from being connected to it and partnering with it, to using it.

So, we have to resurrect our belief of oneness, see the systemic connection, feel interconnectedness, relate with responsibility and move to an attitude called holism.

We have such connection with the Universe in us. It is natural in us. But without realizing it, we cut the links and loose the interconnectedness at several locations.