Day of Atonement: Yom Kippur

Sep 25, 2004, 12.00am IST
Ezekiel Isaac Malekar.

Yom Kippur, eight days after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is observed as the Day of Atonement, of Divine Judgment, and of "affliction of souls" so that the individual may be cleansed of sins. The Bible terms fasting as mortification of the flesh, and intimate spiritual discipline must include abstention from food and drink.


In achieving atonement, nothing comes between the individual soul and God. The obligation rests inescapably on each one to cleanse his own soul through his own communing and his own inward struggle. While every Sabbath and every day is invested with religious character, the Day of Atonement stands out as Yoma, the day par excellence. The Bible calls it Shabbath Shabbathon, the Sabbath of Sabbaths.


Yom Kippur's appeal is uniquely strong because it responds to one of the profoundest longings of the human soul — to free oneself from all mundane exigencies and distractions, to shut out alike the engrossing call of work and the allure of pleasure and rising above physical appetites and the disturbing trivialities of the daily routine, to take refuge


within the sanctuary of God and penetrate into the Holy of Holies, into the secret places of the soul. Yom Kippur is consecrated to a fearless intros-pection and weighing of our habits, tendencies and manner of living. We scrutinise our record of the past year, and ask the help of the Divine to correct the flaws in the texture of our soul, and we lay on His Altar the suffering of remorse for the past and determine to achieve amendment in the future. With all its solemn consciousness of sin, Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement and underlying it is a philosophy of invincible optimism. The Jew looks out on the world with a wholesome conviction of man's ability by his own efforts to attain virtue. He believes profoundly in the possibilities of purity of the human soul.

Yom Kippur is the culmination of the entire High Holiday period. After this, the old year is ended and the new one begun. Before all holidays, it is good to give tzedakhah or charity, but it is particularly important to do so before Yom Kippur. Tzedakhah alongwith prayer and returning represents a central theme, and the moral/ spiritual quality for the day and by extension, throughout one's life. Yom Kippur like Rosh Hashanah, is universal in appeal. The Maariv Service, during which Kol Nidrei is chanted, is begun before sunset and tallit, a religious shawl, is worn. During Amidah service — prayer recited in silent devotion — the Jews confess their wrongdoings. Thereafter the Jews plead to Almighty to grant forgiveness by saying, "May it be Thy will, Lord Our God, God of our Fathers, to deal with us in mercy, forgive us all our wrong-doing, pardon and condone all our sins and help us atone for all our transgressions."


The final service of Yom Kippur concludes with a prolonged call on the shofar, the ram's horn: Tekiah Shevarim Teruah Tekiah Gedolah, which means the final sealing of the heavenly gates. At the end of the day, it is customary for one to greet the other. The greeting used during the day is "Gemar Hatimah Tovah" — May you be finally sealed for good in the Book of Life, that is, the sealing of the year just beginning. Every householder on his return home, repeats the greeting, after which he starts building the Succah, in order to begin the New Year with some pious deed. Everyone is in high spirits, confident that a happy year has been granted to him.

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Corporate Spirituality Encourages Inclusion

Sep 22, 2004, 12.00am IST
William and Debra Miller.

If you are a corporate leader and you would like to include spirituality in your organisation's culture, you are not alone. Business leaders we've met, and management students sometimes ask us if it's really possible to make spirituality an overt and explicit part of an organisational culture — without causing religious conflicts or being inappropriate to an otherwise secular way of operating.


We've interviewed spirituality-inspired leaders around the world, and have found that for some, leading by example and keeping spirituality implicit in their leadership, works best. A European corporate executive said: "The explicit part of business is the house-holding, or economic operation, and the implicit part of business is to support the employees' spiritual quest in opening up".


Others we've interviewed bring spirituality quite explicitly into their organisational culture. We've found that this is a popular trend. In the 1920s, Marion Wade founded ServiceMaster in Chicago, USA. Wade and the executives who followed him in building a Fortune 500 company made their Number One company objective to "Honour God in all we do".

Every person — regardless of personal beliefs or differences — has been created in the image and likeness of God. We seek to recognise the dignity, worth and potential of each individual and believe that everyone has intrinsic worth and value. This is not an expression of a particular religious belief, or a basis for exclusion. Rather, it is a mandate for inclusion, and a constant reminder for us to do the right thing in the right way.

Kyocera, a Japanese company that makes cellphones, prominently displays these spiritual covenants on their website: Corporate Motto : Respect the Divine and Love People. Preserve the spirit to work fairly and honourably, respecting people, our work, our company and our global community. Management Philosophy : To coexist harmoniously with nature and society. Harmonious coexistence is the underlying foundation of all our business activities as we work to create a world of abundance and peace.
To encourage more leaders to have confidence in bringing spirituality explicitly into their organisations, four international business organisations began sponsoring the "International Spirit at Work" award in 2002. In honouring various organisations, the intention is to "bring to public recognition organisations whose spiritual-based practices, policies and procedures help to make the world a better place". The award honours organisations throughout the world that explicitly nurture spirituality inside their organisations.


One of this year's award winners is an Indian company that sees spirituality as "self-improvement and world service" with the Divine lighting the way, where every human can become the Divine light. Employees exercise this spirituality through a strong focus on social responsibility and sustainability — demonstrated by conscientious attention to concerns such as natural waste management.


Another awardee, a Philippines-based company, serves the financial needs of small and medium enterprises. Senior management regularly acknowledges the role of Divine Providence in the organisation's success, and the employees are committed to serving their customers with their "whole heart and mind".


There are many corporate leaders around the world who are blazing that spiritual path — albeit independently — providing examples to inspire and guide others to do the same. So, ask yourself: Do I feel called to bring spirituality more overtly and explicitly into my organisation's culture? What can I learn from other leaders and companies to help bring this about?

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Creating Miracles In Everyday Life

Sep 20, 2004, 12.00am IST

People become enlightened in three main ways: through suffering, outcome and purpose. Sudama's life is an example of enlightenment through suffering.


He was reluctant to go to Dwarka as he thought he might be misunderstood as wanting something in life. He believed that man gets what he deserves, not what he desires.

Living in poverty, he could enjoy bliss remembering the Lord. When he returned from Dwarka, seeing the prosperity showered on him, he lamented: "Oh Lord! You think that you can imprison me with this material prosperity, but you forget that you are imprisoned in my heart till eternity".

Enlightenment through outcome arises out of setting goals and ambitions. We are all taught to mask our true feelings. We are afraid of the unknown, our feelings, our intuitions, because the outcome is unknowable.

When we hold back our genuine feelings, we become frustrated and lose confidence in ourselves. We become a follower and not a leader.

But when we follow our intuition and the outcome is right, we get that special experience called enlightenment. The intuition comes from the unconscious mind.


The third way of enligh-tenment is through purpose. Abraham Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi lived deli-berately to achieve something noble and lofty.

Robert Bly in Iron John narrates the plight of a prince disguised as a knight riding first a red horse, then white and lastly a black one. These colours have a logical symbolic progression in relation to man's life.

The redness of his emotions relates to the younger years; the whiteness to work and living according to law and the blackness of maturity in which compassion and humanity have a chance to flower.

In the later years of his presidency Lincoln was a man in black. He had libe-rated the blacks and given them freedom. Emotions no longer ruled his temper.


He had ceased to blame anger and had developed a brilliant, philosophical sense of humour. There was nothing to hide and life was an open book.

Mahatma Gandhi experimented with non-violence and in his later years did penance and self-purification by going on fast for a cause.

Miracle is not materialising something from nowhere; it is living a fulfilled life everyday. The Dhammapada says that it is everyone's duty to get free of hate, disease and restlessness.

This can be done not by rejecting the world but by cultivating love, health and calmness within. The ideal state is to 'feed on joy'; joy that can be self- generated, flowing from the ever-reliable source within. Man becomes self-contained.

Tao Te Ching recommends that as you get in harmony with nature, your actions cease to seem like action. It can be called 'flow' or 'unfolding'. Where regular action involves effort of will to accomplish something, flow automati-cally takes you to your destination.


Tao says: "Flow around obstacles, don't confront them. Don't struggle to succeed, wait for the right moment".

Carol Pearson in The Hero Within refers to six archetypes we live by: the orphan, wanderer, warrior, altruist, innocent and magician. The magician sees life for Uto-pian possibilities and claims more power.

Magicians are willing to take a stand even if it is risky or revolutionary. Unlike the warrior, they give up the illusion of total control over themselves.
In doing so they generate the ability to recognise the flow and move with great effect. That is why they appear to do magical things. Famous magicians include Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.
The magician, instead of trying to be a winner in the existing less-than-perfect world, is willing to create a new world.
T G L Iyer

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Cosmic Trumpeting Of Lord Ganapati

Sep 18, 2004, 12.00am IST

The origin of the concept of Ganapati, the elephant-headed God, is related to the origin of the universe. What was the origin of the universe like?


The universe was not there in the beginning. Or, if it were there, what had then become of it? One view is that it had shrunk to a bindu. Bindu means point. The universe had contracted to a point. That is just its way. Now it contracts; now it expands.

It is a perpetual cycle stretched over billions of human years. Expansion is creation and contraction is dissolution.

In geometry, a point has position but no dimensions. The position of a thing is in relation to other things in space. Since bindu is the contraction of the whole universe, of the whole time-space-mind continuum, it can have no position.

Since it has no dimensions, and since it is the contraction of time-space-mind, the mind just cannot grasp it. For the three-dimensional mind to grasp a thing, that thing, too, has to be 3-D.

For the mind, a thing without dimensions doesn’t exist at all. That’s why the bindu is beyond comprehension and equal to nothing.


For the bindu to burst into being again, to stretch out its withdrawn dimensions and thus to expand again, it needs a bang-start. The spark for this bang-start comes in the form of desire.

The bindu desired to expand again, to burst into being again, to be manifest and to multiply. Desire heated it up to a fireball bursting with desire. At the extreme height of heat and pressure, it just exploded.


This explosion of bindu is called Bindu Visphota. The explosion stretched forth, well outside its withdrawn dimensions. It started to expand. It ceased to be nothing. It bounced back into being.

The present 3-D space is the volume expansion of bindu. This volume expansion is called Saguna (dimensioned) Brahmn. This Saguna Brahmn is the 3D-isation of Nirguna (dimensionless) Brahmn, that is, the original bindu.


Saguna Brahmn and Moola Prakriti (the original nature) are one and the same. Sankara has acknowledged their being synonymous.
All that occupies the 3-D space is its own local temporary warps. Warping or curvature of space-time is called vivarta. By warping itself, Nature creates all.


Space is prakriti; it is occupied by its own vikriti (deformity). This, in essence, is the cosmogony and cosmology of Vedanta.


The sound of the initial explosion, the bang-start of bindu, was likened to the trumpeting of an elephant.


Bindu trumpeted like a cosmic elephant in the beginning, and the universe is the 3-D expansion of the sound energy of that initial cosmic trumpeting.


In Sanskrit, the word for the trumpeting of an elephant is brimhita or brihatika.


The word Brahmn was originally derived from this brimhita. Bindu, the spacestuff, is Brahmn, and Brahmn is a cosmic elephant making a cosmic trumpeting to inaugurate Creation.


Since this cosmic elephant is the cause and Lord of all ganas - groups, bonds, assemblages - in the universe, it was called Ganapati. That is the origin of the concept of Ganapati or Ganesha.
We are familiar with Ganapati Mandala, a diagram consisting of two transverse equilateral tri-angles with a point in the middle. The point in the middle is bindu, the trumpeting elephant.


The two transverse triangles with their six vertices represent the volume expansion of bindu - the emergence of the 3-D space, of moola prakriti, of creation.


What expands bindu into volume is its big brimhita bang, represented by the space enclosed by the transverse triangles and surrounding bindu.
K M Gupta

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Christian Meditation: Power of Silence

Sep 14, 2004, 12.00am IST
Christopher Mendonca.

Silence is much more than the absence of sound; it is the autonomous pre-existing entity in which God creates. It is the source to which all words return to attain true meaning. Silence is the womb of the tangible world. In the Christian Biblical version of Creation, God 'spoke' and the world came into being. With the pronouncing of the Word, speech became primary, but silence remained primordial.


The heart of Christian meditation is to return to this primordial state of being. It is a journey from words into the creative word of God; this Word is enveloped by silence. By its very nature, silence is unexploitable, often purposeless and for that reason very frightening.
The power of silence is its ability to mediate the irreconcilable. Differences can coexist without tension because silence is non-judgmental. In an all-absorbing silence, differences travel towards one another with no need to swallow or disintegrate or demolish each other. Silence frees us from expectations so that we can understand and resolve a myriad irreconcilable elements.
Silence has also the power to help us realise how unrealistic our sense of self-importance is. Words are often inadequate to express what we want to say. It is silence that puts an end to our self-delusion, to our belief that we could drown the voices of dissent by our logic and "explanations".
Most of all, silence opens the door to forgiveness. Spoken words determine relationships for good or for ill, for love or for hate. But words once spoken sink into the oblivion from which they came. This 'forgetting' opens the door to forgiveness. It is not, however, as if the word simply disappears into the general hubbub only to pop up again at some unexpected and unbidden moment. Rather, by choosing to 'let go' we allow the suppleness of silence to reshape the word's sharp edges. Forgiveness is thus a 'letting go' of what has been 'determined' by our speech. Silence is the deep expanse in which this letting go takes place. Meditation allows us to make new beginnings.
Ironical as it may seem, silence is the foundation of all interpersonal communication. When we communicate with each other, we are often unaware that silence sits in at every conversation. Silence is the third speaker in a conversation. That is why the listener receives more that just the words that the speaker has given. The more we are aware of this, the more we will speak from this silence. What transpires then in a conversation is between the silence of 'the one' and the silence of 'the other'. What moves back and forth between people is not words but silence. When this happens, we no longer notice any opposition between ourselves and the community and instead of standing against each other, we face the silence together. The journey into silence strengthens community bonding.


The repetition of a word, an apparently 'useless' activity — Ma-ra-na-tha in the tradition of Christian Meditation — allows journeying back into the word. It is a journey from word to silence. The 'daily practice' of Christian Meditation allows us to experience these qualities of silence first hand. Silence is not the same as not talking. Rather, it is a deep presence within a person, a presence that shapes not only every word but also every movement and every gesture. Such an abiding presence guides a person to a life that is beyond the word and ultimately beyond himself. Truly the journey into silence through meditation is one that fosters non-violence and helps build community togetherness.
 
(website: www.wccm.org)

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The Whys and Hows Of Life on Earth

Sep 9, 2004, 12.00am IST
Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev.

When it comes to creation, you never ask why, because you are just a tiny speck in this creation. In the arrangements that you have made as a human being — in terms of family, your social structures, your financial securities, education, qualifications and positions that you have taken in the society, I know you slowly started assuming that, in many ways, you are the centre of the universe. But that is not the truth.



You might have created so many comforts, so much security, but still the inherent struggle of it, the inherent pain of it, the day-to-day tensions, remain. You fill yourself with enthusiasm; you find new reasons for yourself to do this and that. But somewhere inside there is something which constantly struggles in every human being unless he attains a certain inner grace. Till then, the struggle continues. Some people have become aware of it; most people haven't. They just keep themselves busy, never to face the inner struggle.

The reason why people are keeping themselves so busy, so entangled with life is not because they have fallen in love with life. It is just to avoid the inner struggle. Many of them, if they don't get married and produce children, if they don't start businesses and don't get into all the mess that they are getting into on a day-to-day basis, they would be simply lost within themselves.

Just to keep a certain semblance of sanity, they keep all this activity going. If they just sit quietly for two days in one place, they will become aware of the inner struggle that is there in every being trapped in this limited body. It is always there. Some become aware.

Once they become aware, they start looking. That is when we say somebody is on the spiritual path, because he has become aware of the inner struggle. No matter what you do, something is struggling within all the time. But others are still too busy.

So the question comes up because there is an inner struggle. Maybe you are not 100% aware of the struggle, but here and there it touches you. So now, the more intelligent question for you would be: How do I get beyond this struggling state? If you ask how, I have a way. If you ask why, then I have to tell you a story. One day, Shiva had nothing to do and he was playing marbles all by himself. And one marble fell this way and it became planet Earth.

Another one shot up and it became the Sun; I can go on like this. Now you won't believe this ridiculous story. But if I make the story more elaborate, and if the story is not told today, but was said 1,000 years ago, you would believe it. You have a problem about this, isn't it? You don't believe anything that happens today, but you will believe it after 1,000 years. It doesn't matter what it is.

So, if it was said 1,000 years ago... you would believe the story. But stories don't liberate you. Stories just equip you to speak with some sense of authority at the next dinner party you are invited to. But it won't liberate you in any way. So when it comes to existence, don't waste your life asking the question, "Why?" Because if you sit here for the rest of your life and go on thinking why, or consult every other man on this planet, all you will get is more and more fairy tales; you will not get a solution. Different cultures will tell different stories; different religions will tell different stories; every individual can create his own story. Stories will not liberate you. But if you ask "How", then we open up the Path, we give you the method. Don't ask "Why?"

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Science of Life: Soham or Hamsa

Sep 3, 2004, 12.00am IST
Malay Mishra.

Soham is a combination of the two syllables so and ham. When we inhale, the sound produced is 'ham'; when we exhale, it is 'so'. Thus Soham is a combination of these two vibrations as breath comes in and goes out of the body. Soham or Hamsa mean the same.


Soham is derived from a text, Vigyana Bhairava, a science related by the primordial transcendental principle, Shiva or Bhai-rava. It is in the form of a dialogue between Shiva and his consort Shakti. A combination of consciousness which is absolute and energy which is creative is what makes the life breath for us. That gives us the force which sustains the physical body. Each one of us is constantly going through this process of Soham which translates in Sanskrit to "that I am" — Soham, or "I am that" — Hamsa.

It is believed that the entire creation was manifested with the sound of Om, the Nada Brahman. Om is a combination of So and Ham. This sound vibrates every moment of our life till there is life in our body, till life continues to flow through the Kundalini. The force which produces that sound, which moves the breath through the respiratory system, is the force which is consciousness, that which makes us aware that we are a part of the entire cosmic consciousness — Aham Vimarsa. I am awareness, the awareness of the Absolute 'I'.


When the sound travels through the various bodies it gets refined and the vibration ultimately merges in Om. It is constantly chanted within us and is thus called the highest mantra, the Mantra Maheshwara. Ham beejam, says the Guru Gita, which means the sound of Ham is the seed of the entire consciousness which pervades us.

In the Vigyana Bhairava, Shakti asks a series of questions of Shiva. Questions such as what is life are treated as part of a lar- ger quest for living and thence discovering the fundamental process, the core being the importance of breath or subtle energy for life. IBM POWER7 Processors - Highest Performance Per Core. Learn More!


The spiritual aspirant focuses on the space between the eyebrows, agna chakra, and with eyes closed watches the breath as it comes in and goes out. In observing the breath he becomes a part of the process of breathing itself.
The space between the incoming breath and the outgoing breath is called madhya dasa. While breathing in and out, there is a split second gap between the two. In retaining the breath we expand that gap. That space is the time when the mind is absolutely stilled. The more we prolong the duration of the space, the greater our mind develops to concentrate and purify the body through the breath and in the process we enable ourselves to reach the state of self- realisation.
The ultimate goal of human life is to realise the self, the most exalted state which is within each one of us. We draw from the same source of energy, the same breath which comes in and goes out. It is estimated that on an average day we take 21,600 breaths in all. In a lifespan of 80 years, this would amount to 62 million breaths.


Soham, therefore, is the science of life, a study through self-awareness. As the sun cannot be detached from light, so also we who possess light and energy cannot detach that from the self which is the illumination of our being. We may not be conscious of that at our birth but during the course of the evolution of our consciousness, we become aware of the basic principles and then the whole game becomes simple.

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Eleventh & Eternal Guru Granth Sahib

Sep 1, 2004, 12.00am IST
Pranav Khullar.


A striking feature of the Adi Granth — popularly called the Guru Granth Sahib — is its distinctly lilting literary flavour, eloquently described as the "musicalisation of thought". Even as one pays homage to Guru Granth Sahib, on the 400th anniversary of its being established as the Holy Book and as the eternal Guru of the Sikh faith, one is struck by the rich literary underpinnings of this compilation and the systematic manner in which each part has been set to music.



Besides, Guru Arjan Dev, while enshrining the Guru Granth Sahib at the Har Mandir in 1604, was also encapsulating the religious, mystical and philosophical currents of almost four centuries.

The Adi Granth is unique in having compositions of sage-poets and mystics of different faiths, including those of Kabir, Baba Farid, Namdev, Jaidev, Dhanna Bhagat and Ravidas. Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth guru, later enshrined the Holy Book as the eleventh Guru, a living testament to the bani or sayings of the Gurus.

Meticulously compiled and arranged into 5,894 hymns, the Adi Granth is set equally meticulously to 31 ragas of the classical music tradition, a "powerful appeal to the heart as much as the mind", as writer Pearl Buck once pointed out. This setting to music forms the underlying basis of the classification of hymns into Ashtapadas or hymns of eight verses, Chhands or verses of six lines, Chaupadas or hymns of four verses. This intricate division of the Adi Granth according to ragas, the metre of the poem, the author of the poem and its ghar in which the raga is to be sung, has a fascinating raga-mala towards the end of the Holy Text, an index of musical measures.


The Adi Granth has another interesting feature, the Bhatt bani or hymns of the bards. In the latter half of the Adi Granth are incorporated hymns by eleven Bhatts, who were ballad singers composing martial and war poetry — Var or heroic ballads — in the vernacular of the times in a particular form called Swaiyya Chhand, verses of praise, where they would employ a narrative style to describe war, exhorting warriors to action. Genealogically tracing their lineage to the ancient Saraswat Brahmins, they were themselves called Saraswat or learned ones, who saw all the Gurus as personifying one Light — the basic tenet of the faith today — and articulated their poetry in praise of the spiritual grandeur of Guru Nanak and all the Gurus.
Its unique catholicity and prosody apart, the Guru Granth Sahib also engendered the Gurmukhi script, which Guru Angad Dev developed to reach out to people in their vernacular dia-lect, refining and shaping it by use of 10 vowels. The development of the script and language reflected the casteless and creedless socio-economic vision of society that the Sikh Gurus envisioned. This vision also incorporated gender equality, as both genders are free to read from the Guru Granth Sahib.


Guru Gobind Singh invested the title of the Guru to the Adi Granth at Nanded in 1708, after preparing a new edition and including some hymns of Guru Tegh Bahadur. He said, "... let him who wishes to speak to the Guru, read and reflect on what the Granth says..." The Adi Granth is a powerful rendering of the oneness of God, free of rituals and observances, but spelt out in hauntingly beautiful poetry and melodies; not an abstruse work of philosophy for the few, but something that endears itself to everyone with its musical appeal. In fact, the musical-emotive appeal of the Guru Granth Sahib is a potent spiritual tool to draw the faithful nearer to the cosmic Oneness of Godhead.

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