A real education will not teach you to compete; it will teach you to cooperate. It will not teach you to fight and come first. It will teach you to be creative, to be loving, to be blissful, without comparing yourself to others. It will not teach you that you can be happy only when you are the first—that is sheer nonsense. You can’t be happy just by being first, and in trying to be first you go through such misery that by the time you become the first you are habituated to misery.

By the time you become the president or the prime minister of a country you have gone through such misery that now misery is your second nature. You don’t know now any other way to exist; you remain miserable. Tension has become ingrained; anxiety has become your way of life. You don’t know any other way; this is your very lifestyle. So even though you have become the first, you remain cautious, anxious, afraid. It does not change your inner quality at all.

A real education will not teach you to be the first. It will tell you to enjoy whatever you are doing, not for the result, but for the act itself. Just like a painter or a dancer or a musician…

There’s no virtue in competition

You can paint in two ways. You can paint to compete with other painters; you want to be the greatest painter in the world, you want to be a Picasso or a Van Gogh. Then your painting will be second-rate, because your mind is not interested in painting itself; it is interested in being the first, the greatest painter in the world. You are not going deep into the art of painting. You are not enjoying it, you are only using it as a stepping-stone.

You are on an ego trip, and the problem is that to really be a painter, you have to drop the ego completely. To really be a painter, the ego has to be put aside. Only then can existence flow through you. Only then can your hands and your fingers and your brush be used as vehicles. Only then can something of superb beauty be born.

Real beauty is never created by you but only through you. Existence flows; you become only a passage. You allow it to happen, that’s all; you don’t hinder it.

But if you are too interested in the result, the ultimate result—that you have to become famous, that you have to be the best painter in the world, that you have to defeat all other painters hitherto—then your interest is not in painting; painting is secondary. And of course, with a secondary interest in painting you can’t paint something original; it will be ordinary.

Ego cannot bring anything extraordinary into the world; the extraordinary comes only through egolessness. And so is the case with the musician and the dancer. So is the case with everybody.

Let go and be in the flow

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says: Don’t think of the result at all. It is a message of tremendous beauty and significance and truth. Don’t think of the result at all. Just do what you are doing with your totality. Get lost in it, lose the doer in the doing. Don’t “be”– let your creative energies flow unhindered. That’s why he said to Arjuna: “Don’t escape from the war… because I can see this escape is just an ego trip. The way you are talking simply shows that you are calculating, you are thinking that by escaping from the war you will become a great saint. Rather than surrendering to the whole, you are taking yourself too seriously– as if there will be no war if you are not there.”

Krishna says to Arjuna, “Just be in a state of let-go. Say to existence, ‘Use me in whatever way you want to use me. I am available, unconditionally available.’ Then whatsoever happens through you will have a great authenticity about it. It will have intensity, it will have depth. It will have the impact of the eternal on it.”

Jesus says: Remember, those who are first in this world will be the last in the kingdom of God, and those who are the last will be the first. He has given you the fundamental law– he has given you the inexhaustible, eternal law: Stop trying to be the first. But remember one thing, which is very much possible, because the mind is so cunning it can distort every truth. You can start trying to be the last– but then you miss the whole point. Then another competition starts: “I have to be the last”– and if somebody else says, “I am the last,” then the struggle, the conflict, begins again.

I have heard a Sufi parable:

A great emperor, Nadirshah, was praying. It was early morning; the sun had not yet risen, it was still dark. Nadirshah was about to start the conquest of a new country, and of course he was praying to God for his blessings, to be victorious. He was saying to God, “I am nobody. I am just a servant– a servant of your servants. Bless me. I am going on your behalf, this is your victory. But I am a nobody, remember. I am just a servant of your servants.”

A priest was also by his side, helping him in prayer, functioning as a mediator between him and God. And then suddenly they heard another voice in the darkness. A beggar of the town was also praying, and he was saying to God, “I am nobody, a servant of your servants.”

The king said, “Look at this beggar! He is a beggar and saying to God that he is nobody! Stop this nonsense! Who are you to say your are nobody? I am nobody, and nobody else can claim this. I am the servant of God’s servants– who are you to say that you are the servant of his servants?”

Now you see? The competition is still there, the same competition, the same stupidity. Nothing has changed. The same calculation: “I have to be the last. Nobody else can be allowed to be the last.” The mind can go on playing such games on you if you are not very understanding, if you are not very intelligent.

To be competitive is ugly, violent

Never try to be happy at the expense of another man’s happiness. That is ugly, inhuman. That is violence in the true sense. If you think you become a saint by condemning others as sinners, your saintliness is nothing but a new ego trip. If you think you are holy because you are trying to prove others unholy… That’s what your holy people are doing. They go on bragging about their holiness, saintliness. Go to your so-called saints and look into their eyes. They have such condemnation for you! They are saying that you are all bound for hell; they go on condemning everybody. Listen to their sermons; all their sermons are condemnatory.

And of course you listen silently to their condemnations because you know that you have made many mistakes in your life, errors in your life. And they have condemned everything– so it is impossible to feel that you can be good. You love food, you are a sinner. You don’t get up early in the morning, you are a sinner; you don’t go to bed early in the evening, you are a sinner. They have arranged everything in such a way that it is very difficult not to be a sinner.

Yes, they are not sinners. They go early to bed and they get up early in the morning… in fact, they have nothing else to do! They never commit any mistakes because they never do anything. They are just sitting there almost dead. But if you do something, of course, how can you be holy? Hence for centuries the holy man has been renouncing the world and escaping from the world, because to be in the world and be holy seems to be impossible.

My whole approach is that unless you are in the world, your holiness is of no value at all. Be in the world and be holy! We have to define holiness in a totally different way. Don’t live at the expense of others’ pleasures– that is holiness. Don’t destroy others’ happiness, help others to be happy– that is holiness. Create the climate in which everybody can have a little joy.

The post To be competitive is to be stupid, says Osho appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Fingerprint! Publishing
Release Date: 5 May 2018
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-9387779396
Cover price: INR 299

For every lover of Krishna

There are devotees and then there are lovers. Bhawana Somaaya is among the latter. She has a self-confessed “obsession” called Lord Krishna that led her to write Keshava, A Magnificent Obsession.

When we think about Lord Krishna, what comes to mind first is the majestic Bhagavad Gita, that 700-verse epic delivered as counsel to Arjuna on the battlefield of Mahabharat. But people are also fond of the magical stories of his vibrant childhood (Balagopala) and youth: his endearing pranks, his fondness for butter, his affinity for playing the bansuri (flute), his charming disposition that won hearts of all the gopis (milkmaids) and, of course, Radha, his eternal love. These are the broad narratives of his life, of which all his devotees are aware to a great extent.

But Krishna’s lovers are not content with knowing about the grand adventures of his life. Their devotion makes them want to know the Lord ever more intimately. They want to know every small nuance about him—his different shades, his quirks and proclivities, his humanness and his divinity—in all its glory. This book is for such lovers of Krishna written by another fervent lover of the supreme deity.

Each chapter expands on ancient Sanskrit slokas (verses) and goes on to reveal many interesting tidbits from the life of Krishna. In the first chapter, Krishna is portrayed as describing himself from the eyes of his devotees.

Sample this:

“We are all projections of other people’s perceptions. I am no exception. Some perceive me as a child avatar. For them I am Balagopala, Balakrishna. Some view me as an eternal traveller. For them I am Banke Bihari. I was always there and will continue to be there. When I renounce my body, the surviving part of me will prevail amongst the five ingredients of nature. The sixth will be the heart of human beings.”  

The following sections depict him from the vantage points of his most favourites things in the world—the peacock among birds, the lotus among flowers, the flute and the shankha (conch) among musical instruments, the Tulsi (holy basil) among plants, the Kadamba and the Peepala among trees, the Kamadhenu among cows. Each of them have a chapter dedicated to them, where they list their virtues and talk about the special place they enjoy in his heart, while also narrating enthralling legends of Krishna from their perspectives.

Tulsi, for instance, says:

“One day, when Lord Krishna’s youngest queen Satyabhama decided to weigh her husband in gold, all her wealth and ornaments could not tilt the scale. But then his older queen Rukmini Devi arrived with a plateful of my leaves. Older and wiser, she placed just a single leaf on the pan and the scale tilted—much to Satyabhama’s astonishment!

“Satyabhama question how could I be so precious and Rukmini Devi answered, ‘Because Lord Krishna so desired.’

“It is my Lord’s blessings that I am revered and every part of my being has a reason and a mission. My root, like every other plant, is for procreation but it is also symbolic for all the sacred places of pilgrimage. The centre of my stem is the dwelling place of all the deities and my upper branches are sacrosanct, for in them are embodied all the vedas.”

Tulsi continues:

“I am antibiotic. I offer antiviral and antifungal protection and I am useful in localised infections as well. I decrease the likelihood of strokes.

“I am nutritious. I contain Vitamin C and A, minerals calcium, zinc and iron, and chlorophyll and many other phytonutrients. I am also an allopathic medicine complement. I resolve dental and periodontal health, diminish bad breath and speed healing of bone fractures, reduce nausea and cramping, and repel insects, including mosquitoes and lice.”

While the style is a sweet blend of prose and poetry, and content is a mixture of myth and fact. The book is easy enough to read but profound in substance for those who are really paying attention.

This isn’t a book that you want to read from start to end, with the objective to finishing it. It’s a book to be savoured at a leisurely pace. Besides, it’s more fun to pick it up spontaneously and open a random chapter—doing so often answers a question you had been nurturing at a subconscious level.

To conclude, my sense is that whether you are a fervent lover of Keshava or his ardent devotee, or even simply fascinated by the divine nature of the supreme deity, this book is sure to delight you.

The post Keshava, A Magnificent Obsession by Bhawana Somaaya appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

If we look up the dictionary, it defines peace as “freedom from disturbance” or, “quiet and tranquillity”. If we look at our life, there are so many things that disturb us. If we attempt to draw up a list, we are likely to run out of paper in no time, because life is filled with so many disturbances.

Many people think of peace as the absence of war. That is also a valid definition. But war or armed conflict is only one type of grave disturbance.

We can think of disturbance in relation to other issues as well, one example would be economic calamities, just as we experienced in 2008. The world economy took a massive nose dive and it still has not fully recovered. It created a great deal of disturbance within society; it became much more difficult for people to find work. People’s asset bases, their homes, their bank accounts, all eroded, and this was very disturbing for them, particularly for those approaching retirement.

But this lack of peace also manifests in a myriad of other ways. For instance, on a more personal level, with the idea of personal friends and betrayals. It’s tremendously disturbing when someone we thought of as a close friend, someone who was trusted and relied upon, and after some turn of events, that person betrays us. Even being “unfriended” freaks us out or causes huge disturbance for some of us.

Body Image

Studies show that the use of social media tends to result in a greater lack of peace than of peacefulness. People are searching for something, but they don’t realise that what they’re searching for is peace and happiness. They’ve got their phones and they’re swiping and swiping away. What is it that they are looking for? People say, “I’m trying to see what my friends are doing.” But they’ve been constantly following what their friends are doing for the past four or five years and it hasn’t stopped. Because they’re actually searching for something else, something deeper.

Today, body image reigns supreme. It’s the age of selfies. Selfie is pretence. You have to get the right look on and the right angle, and get the selfie stick out, take a picture of yourself enjoying the moment—it’s all so fake. Nobody wants real video or real pictures. They don’t want a picture of themselves brushing their teeth, using the toilet, eating and dropping food on their clothes. They don’t want to be caught asleep on the sofa with saliva coming out of their mouth.

It’s not just youngsters, older people are into it too. Some people have had so many facelifts and so much body modification that they look stunningly youthful. “Oh, you look so great!” — but then they have to stand up and start walking and you suddenly become aware that “wow this person is actually 80 years old!”

How we want people to see us and relate to us, leads to becoming troubled by thoughts of how acceptable we are. This also leads to self-doubt, about whether others can actually accept us, and whether we are truly lovable. People end up in so much self-doubt and pain.

Unfulfilled Desires

Another thing that brings disturbance into people’s life is the thought of not having something that they desire, or not having enough of it. They become agitated and disturbed: “I’m not getting enough of this sort of activity. I’m not getting enough out of that relationship. I’m not able to afford a certain new toy. I’m not able to afford something else. I’m just not getting enough stuff.” They’re feeling both distracted and disturbed, and looking for more. But no matter how much stuff, money or anything else you get, it will never satisfy you. You will continue be disturbed.

So, with unfulfilled desires, the things that we desire or want and are just wishing and hoping for, there is this false idea that the disturbance I’m feeling within my heart will be erased if I can get these things—if I could just get the perfect body, if I could get more possessions. I think that if I could just get these things, then everything is going to be great and I’m going to exist in a peaceful and happy condition. But that is the opposite of truth. If you lead a life of material pursuits, it’s absolutely not true that by getting all these different things you will find relief from your emptiness and suffering, that you will come to a state of happiness, fulfilment and peace.

What does the Bhagavad-Gita say?

The Bhagavad-Gita is probably the best known of all the Hindu or Vedic scriptures and is used as a reference or a guide for any serious practitioner of yoga. It teaches us many life lessons including the subject of peace and peacefulness.

The Bhagavad-Gita literally means the ‘Song of God’ and it was a dialogue between Lord Sri Krishna and a very great warrior prince named Arjuna about 5,000 years ago on a battlefield. It is quite different, in many ways, from other scriptures and it contains profound knowledge about the nature and purpose of life. It examines the basic question of identity: who am I? what is my life’s purpose? where can I find happiness and perfection in life?

There is a beautiful verse in the Bhagavad-Gita:

One who is not connected with the Supreme can have neither transcendental intelligence nor a steady mind, without which there is no possibility of peace. And how can there be any happiness without peace?  [Bhagavad-Gita 2:66]

If we reflect upon this verse, it is saying that material life, chasing all these material things and experiences, instead of providing peace, leads to more agitation, more painful experiences. And this results in a dimming of whatever intelligence we have. If we are to actually come to the position of being fulfilled and peaceful, to have a spiritual life, and if we are to see things with clarity, then it’s necessary for us to have transcendental intelligence.

In another two verses, the Bhagavad-Gita describes this situation:

As a strong wind sweeps away a boat on the water, even one of the roaming senses on which the mind focuses can carry away a man’s intelligence.

Therefore, O mighty-armed Arjuna, one whose senses are restrained from their objects is certainly of steady intelligence. [Bhagavad-Gita 2.67-68]

If we want to be able to achieve happiness, fulfilment, and peace, having steady intelligence is necessary. It’s also necessary to curb this endless chasing of the demands of the senses and of our minds.

A couple of verses later, the Bhagavad-Gita it states:

A person who is not disturbed by the incessant flow of desires—that enter like rivers into the ocean which is ever being filled but is always still—can alone achieve peace, and not the man who strives to satisfy such desires. [Bhagavad-Gita 2.70]

If we are going to dedicate our life to simply following our minds and our senses, focusing our minds on all the different desires of the senses, we will not be able to come to the position of experiencing peace, to be free from disturbance. The chasing of desire is the same as putting gasoline on a fire. If I want to put a fire out and I add gasoline, although it’s a liquid it doesn’t put the fire out. It makes the fire burn brighter.

So, if my life is spent trying to fulfil the desires that manifest in my senses and mind, without any consideration of whether this will actually bring me happiness, and whether this is a wise choice, then I will simply be experiencing an ever-increasing agitation instead of going the other way. In order to experience happiness, one must cultivate spiritual intelligence.

A faithful man who is dedicated to transcendental knowledge and who subdues his senses is eligible to achieve such knowledge, and having achieved it he quickly attains the supreme spiritual peace. [Bhagavad-Gita 4.39]

What is the Solution?

We are embodied—we have a material body. We are living in this world. The important thing for us to do is come to understand and appreciate what is the actual goal and purpose of our life. And that is to find this fulfilment we hope for, to experience the actual happiness that we desire in our heart of hearts, to awaken the natural condition of spiritual love and to have this very extraordinary and completely fulfilling experience of spiritual love and happiness.

If we follow the path of materialism, founded on the idea that I am the material body and that I will experience fulfilment by constantly bombarding my body and mind with sensual experiences, then this is actually a display of a lack of transcendental intelligence.

The intelligent path, as it is pointed out in the Bhagavad-Gita, is when we engage in the activities of life, but focus them as an offering to the Supreme Soul, to dovetail our life in the service of the Supreme Soul and of other living beings. If we live our life in this way instead of greedily trying to grab things and suck the juice out of all this fruit that we get, hoping it will fulfil us; if we instead redirect our life and make it one of being connected with the Supreme Soul and with others in a mood of humility and service, then we will have another experience. We will actually find that condition of unlimited peacefulness, of tremendous spiritual happiness and love.

The principle spiritual process to bring about this change is to engage in meditation, and particularly kirtan meditation, under the guidance of a genuine spiritual teacher, which brings about a purification of the heart and the mind.

The post Peace: Life Lessons From the Bhagavad-Gita appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.