Hell&related Stuff

Don’t let the train of life pass you by. You are meant to board it… even if it means having to run passionately just to get in. With passion, the obstacles, the challenges and the adversities only make the journey more exciting and accomplishments even more thrilling. God made the life eternal not because he wanted us to take it for granted or consider it without much value, or postpone it to tomorrow. He made it endless, so that we could dare to take risks, make mistakes to learn from, and live life to the hilt in the top gear. Life is not forever… there are no tomorrows in it…all that we have are this today…and more precisely, this moment! If you miss it, you miss it forever. Wake up… Allow yourself to be taken over by the storm called passion…and start tasting the joy of living!
With passion, blood finds new joy in circulation, mind receives more oxygen, alertness level touches a new high, each cell of body displays happiness and gives rise to a more tolerant and caring attitude.Genuine passion takes you out of the confines of your narrow personal achievements and inspires you to contribute more to the larger self. This kind of passion makes you feel that you are a humble servant but with a heroic mission. People who lack passion feel that if they could get this promotion, or get rid of that physical problem, they will be happy. But those whom they find extremely happy usually have similar problems, if not more serious ones.
Why passion?
Index of life: Whether you are an ordinary person or a celebrity, you can do without passion only if you can do without life because it is passion alone that determines the extent to which you are alive.
People say every cigarette reduces your life span by an hour. That could indeed be true. But truer is the fact that an hour spent doing something unwillingly has already subtracted an hour from your life. Life is not a collection of days you manage to live through, but of ‘todays’ that you live passionately to the hilt.
People who lack passion feel that if they could get this promotion, or that kind of a bank balance or get rid of some health problem, they will be happy. But the fact is that those whom they find extremely happy usually have similar problems, if not more serious ones. We human beings, like any piece of iron, can propose to finish ourselves in two ways: we may rust ourselves out or we may simply wear ourselves out. Rust looks ugly; wearing out brings shine!
Value of life: How valuable would diamonds be, if they were as common as pebbles on the road? Their value is only because they are rare and need the ceaseless effort required to mine and cut them to shape. Value of your own life, in a similar way, comes not from your achievements, but from the quality of passion with which you are still making ceaseless efforts today to make it shine further. Musicians, painters, scientists, inventors, authors and others who are creatively living their lives are cut off from thoughts of any monetary concerns, like “how much will this fetch me?” or “is it worth the royalty I am going to eventually earn?” The mind is instead focused on enjoying the excitement of responding to the challenge at hand.
Fuel for fulfillment: Anyone who finds circumstances unfavourable, has in fact only found what he has all along been looking for—even though only subconsciously. Those who find pursuing meaningful goals difficult, settle for the next best—they pursue nice and convincing excuses. And what you look for usually finds you before you can find it. If you focus on results, you achieve them; if you focus on having explanations for failures, that is precisely what you will find. However, people pursuing their goals rarely notice any ‘unfavourable circumstances’ on their way. The goals that burst forth from your soul, if noticed with intense feelings, pull you towards them the way a rubber band pulls a loose object towards the fixed end on being released.
Secret of physical and spiritual fitness: The word ‘inspiration’ means ‘to be one with the spirit’, and the word ‘enthusiasm’ composed of the two roots ‘en’ + ‘theos’, means ‘to be one with God’. Passion both stems from and causes spiritual fitness. Lack of passion therefore stems from spiritual poverty and can be overcome by placing everything you do in the wider context of meaning, values and ethics. And passion, in turn, helps you search for the deeper meaning in everything you do. It is a chain reaction that once triggered feeds on itself and goes on growing bigger and bigger progressively.
With passion, blood finds new joy in circulation, mind receives more oxygen, alertness level touches a new high, each cell of the body displays happiness and gives rise to a more tolerant and caring attitude. Sleep deepens, helping the body to repair its worn out cells, and diseases suddenly find themselves out of place in any part of the body. Passion is therefore the most precious and vital tonic that you alone can produce for your body, and that too free of cost!
Improves learning ability: ‘Learnacy’ is the initiative and ability to learn what is really required to be learnt, and consistency with which one applies the appropriate kind of knowledge to real life situations. Interestingly enough, it does not come with opportunities but with passion. People who have a big enough ‘why’ to achieve something, learn and do all that it takes to do so, anyhow. In contrast to this, all opportunities and facilities provided to someone who lacks passion shall go down the drain. As a corporate trainer, I always find that the resulting passion helps participants learn better when I help them connect to their own spiritual essence.
Deepens relationships: When one dares to lay oneself bare spiritually, giving away all that one has, and making oneself totally vulnerable, most of the relationships lack this passion.
With passion, a relationship moves deeper from dealing merely in clichés, facts, distortions and opinions to the sharing of needs and feelings. Most of the relationships fail to go beyond the first four levels and find it difficult to reach the deeper two levels wherein both sides can express, understand and fulfill each other’s feelings and needs with concern, respect, fearlessness and honesty.
Inculcates value for time: What would you do with your time if you were passionate about life? Fritter it away? Kill it somehow? No. Time would become extremely precious for you. It will make you ceaselessly aware of how you spend each moment of yours—clearing away the fog of absent-mindedness. Passion is a powerful tool to inculcate mindfulness. And mindfulness will make you proactive, more centred and less stressful.
Cues for developing passion
Focus on today from the window of tomorrow: You need to look back at all the facets of your ‘today’, from the window of that tomorrow when the changed scenario in the respective areas would have pleased you to the hilt. See this gap between what you will be in that tomorrow and what you are today. Also see the journey involved to bridge this gap. Lethargy, fear of failure, low self-esteem and lack of trust in your self in the name of spirituality and fake contentment shall dissuade you from it.
Own responsibility: Between your potential and performance flows a river of hesitation. You can’t cross the river merely by staring at the water. You either need an inferno at your end to escape from, or a glimpse of the treasure awaiting across the river, or both. In other words, we need pain to run away from, a pleasure to go towards, or both. Nature ceaselessly provides us both intermittently, so as to ensure our ceaseless movement towards growth. However, it also provides us with the freedom to turn our backs on them. We usually settle for the latter because we at first imagine a threat and then, as our response to it, want to play safe.
Don’t you think we take life and ourselves too cheaply? Don’t we deserve more love, respect, commitment and care towards our lives? If you don’t care for yourself, who else will? Be a responsible gardener to your life.
Timely action is the key: There are two ways to manage your life; to cope with its problems and consequent stresses, or to work towards overcoming them. None of the two is sufficient in itself. We need the first while we are in the process of the second. But for some, the first may sometimes be tempting enough to get stuck in, which may allow the stresses to increase till they go beyond one’s coping abilities. For example, it may often be tempting to get stuck in your religious rituals to run away from the desired actions to avert an unpleasant happening. Though this may distract you from the problems in life and help you in protecting your inner peace from stressful thoughts of impending threat, but in the absence of the desired action, you are losing the opportunity to put into practice the wisdom of ‘a stitch in time saves nine’.
Review your dreams: There are only two emotions: pain and pleasure. And passion is an offspring stream that flows between the two. It feed-forwards into pleasure the lessons it learns from the pain. When we fail in either of these two constituent abilities—receiving and rightly interpreting the lessons from the pain, and persistently feeding them forward as an investment in intended pleasures—we fail to strike the fire of passion within. So being ceaselessly awake to the gap between one’s potential and intentions (the idea of a dream life complete in all its facets) and one’s performance and pains (the reality of one’s present life circumstances) is the key to strike passion. And striking passion is akin to striking gold. The only fundamental wealth we have is that of passion. You can create anything with it and also lose anything without it. However, an insecure man feels too secure with his present to allow himself to try any experiments with it.
Learn from sorrows: The real sorrow in life is not getting sick, old or having to die, for we often come across sick, old and dying people who are happy. The real sorrow of life is to lose the ability to feel the sorrows—and hence that of doing the needful. Pain is a message from Nature that you should pay attention to and address. If you put a frog in boiling water he will leap out immediately. However if you put him in water at room temperature but slowly heat it, he will get roasted in it and won’t come out. Most of humans do get roasted in their suffering, having lost their sensitivity to the pain they are going through. You need to develop awareness of the pain, track it down to the learning hidden in its roots and persevere to take appropriate action to leap out of it.
“Whenever you lose, at least do not lose the lesson involved,” says His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Sorrow and pain must be accepted with grace but not as a punishment meted out to us for our past deeds that we cannot even remember. It should be seen as a signal towards the necessity of looking within to discover and correct where we are continuing to flaunt any of the laws of nature. You and I, as a parent, would not like to keep an account of our children’s wrongs and punish them for mistakes that they have forgotten and corrected since. God is surely wiser than us and kinder too. So don’t believe if you ever hear: “Suffering is the nectar that washes away our sins”. The nectar is in learning, not in suffering.
You deserve it!: The universe has only one purpose—to plant desires in our mind and help us fulfill them. It helps us progressively recover our divinity in the process. Paula Horan, the well-known reiki master, says: “It is indeed not the ocean’s fault if we approach it with a teaspoon.” There is only one thing that you can do to be able to ask—redefine your goals in terms of giving and connect yourself to whatever kind of ‘giving’ inspires you. Convince yourself that you deserve to ‘give’ and be ‘given’ whatever you ask for. Have a role model in your life—a person who has already arrived in an area of your interest both in terms of contribution and achievement. And you will be surprised that he could reach where he has, on the strength of only those qualities that you possess or can develop even today. The secret of the existence of a gap that exists between your role model and you is that he ceaselessly believed even in times of adversity that he deserved and hence was highly willing to make efforts to hone his talents.
Heal your self-esteem: One reason why a common man has difficulty in believing that he deserves or can achieve what he wants to is that his self-esteem is usually damaged. The good news is that it can be revived.
The baby elephant is tied with a strong steel chain, which it ceaselessly attempts to break away from, but fails. The result? The elephant owner doesn’t need to use the metallic chain to tie it any longer when it grows into a powerful adult. Why? Because as a result of the thousands of unsuccessful attempts it made as an infant, the elephant developed an unshakeable conviction about its inability to break away from whatever it is tied with. Unfortunately, parents and teachers, though only unknowingly, let a similar process run through our own children as well. A person with low self-esteem cannot think beyond mere survival. His ability to dream has already been forfeited by the society. And since he cannot dream, he doesn’t feel challenged. In the absence of challenges, he cannot feel the need to mobilise his dormant inner resources.
In reply to a teacher’s advice, “Hard work never kills”, a student replied: “But why take a chance?” Jesus said: “Knock and it shall be opened unto you”. But we, like this student, ask ourselves: “Why try, when I am not sure that it will.”
Grow step by step: The tree is complete and perfect at every stage of its growth so that it can allow and enjoy its growth every moment. A baby tree may compare itself with another that is fully-grown and feel incomplete, not realising that it is already that if only it allows itself to grow as per the information programmed in its seed. So realise that your role model too was once a baby tree but he realised that Mount Everest can only be climbed step by step. It cannot be reached in one go just as you cannot eat the whole chapati in one go. Your role model systematically divided the whole journey into baby steps that he could take every day with 100 per cent attention and stayed alert towards the best possible use of the coming moments.
Examine your subconscious vision: There is no one among us without a vision; though consciously we may not be aware of it. You arrive in life where your vision takes you. And where you are now can help you discover the subconscious vision that you had been carrying all this while. And if this is true, you can easily determine where you would find yourself tomorrow, if you ruthlessly examine your hidden vision.
There are three kinds of vision. Examine which one is yours:
• V1 vision that stems from the fear of losing what one has acquired already, and hence is more concerned about maintaining a status quo.
• V2 vision, that stems from the fear of failure, and hence weighs up what is possible and what is not on the basis of past evidence.
• V3 vision, that stems from not fear but from love that seeks to fulfill one’s dreams about how the world should be. A person with V3 vision is committed to giving whatever it takes to fulfill his/her vision. It requires a quantum leap of faith, courage, and passion for one to shift to a V3 vision. But it is possible.
Balance ‘being’ and ‘doing’: ‘Being’ and ‘doing’ are inseparable parts of the whole we call Nature. We do not need to drop action in order to ‘just be’, for both ‘being’ and ‘doing’ constitute an inseparable whole just as mango and sweetness do. If you are truly in your ‘being’, you cannot live without ‘doing’. The more you are with your being, the more clarity you will have about what you are. And the more clarity you develop about who you are, the more conviction you will grow about ‘why’ you are here, and what you ought to be doing with your life.
Identify genuine passion: A sure sign of genuine passion is the fact that it takes you out of the confines of your narrow personal achievements and inspires you to contribute more to the larger self. This kind of passion fills you with a feeling that you are a humble servant but with a heroic mission. Your goals are in terms of ‘giving’, not ‘getting’, ‘grasping’ or ‘achieving’. Lord Mahavira said: “The end of all desires is the end of all sorrows.” Follow this great teaching when you arrive at it (with your emotional and spiritual maturity), not before (with your intellect alone), otherwise you will be trying to pluck the flower without reaching close enough to it. Desires indeed have no end—more so when we do not dare to acknowledge them honestly and do not seek their fulfillment.
Let inner peace prevail: There are three kinds of people. One, who are so deeply satisfied with themselves and sing glories of the virtue of contentment that they stop growing; two, who are so discontented that they see no point doing anything; and three, who are so obsessed with speedy results that their impatience consumes them. All these three kinds of people immobilise themselves and instead of growing, begin to decay. Contentment or frustration of the kind that makes us stagnate in life can hardly be spiritual.
You cannot focus on your work whole-heartedly unless there is peace in your mind and contentment in your heart. You cannot look at frustration and draw the necessary passion to dream and do what is possible if you allow yourself to become it, i.e., allow it to consume you or get consumed by it. Keep distance from it—the way you keep distance from fire—so that you use it without getting burnt.
Make a habit of returning to evaluate your day’s actions and performance and to refuel yourself every night with frustration and passion for the next day.
You should not only be contented but grateful too for what God has given you and where it has helped you arrive. However, you should have enough frustration to keep you from stagnating where you have arrived. And this frustration becomes even more powerful when its focus progressively shifts from narrow personal achievements to a purpose of contributing to a cause much bigger than yourself.
Be here and now: The solution of life does not lie in finding a permanent end to it, imaginary or real. It lies in learning to live it correctly, joyously and ceaselessly with passion. In order to be happy, you need to feel happiness. If you are living in a sea of happiness but don’t know how to feel what you are in touch with, I am sure there will be no happiness for you. Nirvana or moksha, like happiness, are no different. The road to moksha, nirvana or God, therefore, is an inward journey of progressively deeper awareness of what you already are. It is strewn with carrots of intentions planted within you by Nature, as milestones, in order to inspire and guide you further on the path. When you don’t trust your ability to learn how to live correctly or to live without creating progressively more and more problems, then with your wishful thinking you invent a distant moksha, or distant nirvana and such escapist stuff! Who knows nirvana or moksha is your today’s reality you may be turning your back on?
Flow with life mindfully: One of the greatest spiritual qualities is that of being aware of what and why one is doing what one is doing at any moment. Lack of goals or passion in achieving them is certainly what would not necessitate or help one develop this quality. Most of the people don’t realise that flowing with life is not the same as living irresponsibly, absentmindedly, passively and purposelessly. However, we fail to take these simple steps.
• We often don’t notice our wishes. Often our attention is not on our dreams but on something else or on just getting by. If at all we notice what we want, we often simply don’t acknowledge and honour our wishes or dreams.
• If at all we acknowledge it as a wish, we don’t begin our journey towards it because we doubt whether it is worth doing so—we either secretly fear the hard work involved and/or doubt our ability and luck to be able to do so. What we find easier is to disown our responsibility, and instead expect what we want from others and/or criticise and blame others for not giving us what we want.
• We don’t keep at it even if we care to begin. And among those who do begin and manage to walk towards it, many don’t care to see whether their efforts will be enough to make them reach the goal.
• We stretch our hand to pluck the flower before arriving at it. Often people don’t show persistence and lose patience and abandon their efforts when they, in fact, may only be just a few steps away. Or they may become too complacent thinking that they have almost arrived and relax their efforts. We ignore the feedback we are getting from the universe in terms of thoughts and feelings from within, and the circumstances from without.
Accelerate growth: Growth comes from making yourself progressively more and more passionate and competent, and by stepping up your contribution to society. Life is indeed meant for ‘giving’ and enjoying that too. It has absolutely no other purpose because whatever we try to take from it will have to be given back some day. It will not stick to us. Everything is bound to be given back; but when we give it willingly we do not miss the joy of doing so. Paradoxically, whenever we wish to hold on to life we lose it and when we tend to give it away to others, we live on. Whatever and whenever we give, we, in fact, give to no one else but to ourselves only.
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