relationships.....

when people relate colloquially, what do they bring to the table...their own legacy of conditionalities acquired from myriad sources...could be education processes, social processes, fundamental childhood decisions, past-life impressions( dunno if that is a reality to you; to me , it is...) etc.

What we are in essence is an emergence from a "pattern" - a kind of blueprint that determines our persona...

our lives today are guided by the mind....and its contents...to me, that is where the root cause of misery lies....the mind is a wonderful faculty, a wonderful tool, for say, creating a software programme or for making a table or for creating countries......so on and so forth...

but it is useless in inner world realms....like joy and love and bliss and so on....not condemning it...i see it as a fundamental incapacity...it just is not equipped ....

The mind cannot be the driver of our lives as it has become today..we should be able to drive the mind....it is essentially a hard disk..storage of memories...can be used...cannot be the processor....

do you remember the famous picture of the Bhagavad Gita, the 5 horses, Krishna and Arjuna...To me, the 5 horses represent the the world of the sense organs, the mind content sensors...when krishna is absent, the horses pull arjuna in different directions, chaotic, full of conflict, miserable....can only result in destruction...it is significant to note krishna's positioning; he comes in as a charioteer, to reign in the horses....

for me, krishna is symbolic of our spiritual cores; the witness within each of us which is different from the mind and its realms....the anchor within....

the mind cannot be controlled....this has been india's single greatest discovery in my opinion...mind , breath and kundalini( psychic energies) are inter-connected....neither mind nor kundalini can be controlled.....india's discovery is that "breath" can be controlled.....the seeds of yoga and pranayama....regulation of breath can regulate the mind....

hence , so many processes revolving around breathing patterns...

we "try" to relate in mind spaces....that can only be contextual, conditional....for the mind with its legacies comes with its own positionalities....which can only be managed in the context of relationships.....

to me, relationships occur from our cores, beyond mind spaces...it just is....not conditional....it is essentially a spiritual space....all -encompassing, all- embracing...to relate is to live...experiencing the oneness...

it is this core which has to guide....and the mind, directed....not the other way round, the mind directing....the mind can address issues such as financial security, opportunities etc....nothing wrong.....it is a sacred faculty.....but it is incapable of love, incapable of joy....there is always a residue....due to its functioning in domains of comparison...

will illustrate it with an eg in one of our scriptures...

a frog ran upto a man and pleaded with him...it wanted to be saved, a snake was pursuing it....the man's code of ethics "demanded" that he save the frog...."code of ethics" , here , represents a conceptual creation for social convenience. in a while, the snake comes upto him and demands that he release the frog as it has not eaten anything for the past 2 weeks.The man is in a dilemna...his "code" again demands that he should not keep the snake hungry....

conflict....

situation 1: he addresses it from his mind; tries to analyse it....ends up paralysed....can't do anything...any decision he takes will leave a residual conflict within....a degree of unsureness..

that is a fundamental attribute of the mind...the sense of fulfilment , completion is not there...always a lingering doubt, an uncertainty...a residue of discontent...

situation 2: he just takes a decision..for the moment..it could be either..there is no demand from within for consistency as the mind domain would demand....he can respond differently at different moments in time for identical situational triggers...

"management" is possible in the mind realms; resolution or dissolution is impossible..when an action is "completed", joy remains....and completion is possible only from the "heart"....

spirituality is a shifting of life guidances to the heart..does not mean the mind is not in the picture...the mind is guided rather than being the source of guidance...the witness consciousness is awakened...the dynamic spiritual dimension , whose natural attributes are joy and love...not a matter of effort as in the mind realms...spirituality is the "absence" of "conflict"....

great creations still happen...but in joy and love; not bereft of it....

the intrinsic nature of "experience" is bliss, love , joy ; irrespective of the content of experience....and to "experience", one has to be liberated of the mind filters....liberation is a freeing of the senses from the clutches of the mind...

and then we relate.....

in processes, i see our evolution in "relating" as the pathways to freedom and liberation...

-inspirations from my master