The Power Of Mind

In my life, I’m used to experiencing things in very intense, profound ways. While listening to The Power of Now, I was in a stress free, blissful place for two weeks despite the fact that I was in college, an extremely high stress environment. Another example is when I learned to apply the mindset switch of consciously providing value and sharing in social interactions. All of my social interactions changed for the better. These shifts were minor, in terms of personal effort exerted, yet profoundly impacted me as well as those around me, and it happened nearly instantaneously . Unfortunately, it fed into a work ethic devoid of grit and resilence . Because of this easy access to profundity, taking anything to a high level is something I am not familiar with. This has been a struggle in my spiritual, mental, emotional quest for peace. Most of the time, my life is low stress and loving. This makes it easy to be kind, loving, and patient. But when things get difficult...

The following is a reply to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Spiritual Laws” Ralph Waldo Emerson, the "Yankee Mystic" The basic idea is that we are vehicles acting from a place of pure spirit, a view which aligns with the Hindu idea of humans as fundamentally spiritual beings. Because we are spirit, we have the capacity to find the ultimate peace of spirit at any time. Unfortunately, society hides this paramount truth through institutions put in place to “help” us. School forces us to sit down and learn. Society makes us all perform a similar task and sacrifice our love for money. The similarity of nearly every task in this society, no matter how diverse in subject matter, is the perfunctory manner in which it is executed. No vital energy, no creativity, no curiosity, no space for the immortal child to blossom. How amazing if each being were allowed to follow their bliss? Following bliss is a multi step process that is no longer intuitive. As a first step towards this p...

Humans are interesting creatures. Abstract concepts can give us influence. Something as simple as a mindset change can completely change a life. On instagram, follow @kupkasana for more deep thoughts and insights It is commonly said that knowledge is power, but why? In my mind, knowledge is power because we can use it to change our beings on a fundamental level. The word k nowledge is derived from the greek word gnosis, meaning a personal experience of knowledge as opposed to an intellectual knowing. There is a spiritual aspect to the word as well. Because the greeks believed in gods and a divine truth, gnosis is the knowledge of the divine underpinning of reality. It can be argued that when one truly knows anything and it resonates on the deep personal level of understanding, it transcends the things of this world, pointing to the unspeakable truth. Hindus think of this unspeakable truth as the Self. You may find the self through any number of processes. Speaking to my Mua...

A Guide to Developing the Self-Discipline Habit (https://zenhabits.net/self-discipline/) BY  LEO BABAUTA One of the most important life skills to develop, for those just starting out in life (and everyone else!), is the skill of self-discipline. It’s like a superpower: when I developed some self-discipline, I started exercising and eating healthier and meditating and writing more, I quit smoking and ran marathons, I started a blog and wrote books, I read more and work earlier, I decluttered and transformed my finances. I’m far from perfect, but I’ve learned a lot. But if you don’t develop self-discipline, it causes problems: health problems, distraction, procrastination, financial problems, clutter, things piling up and overwhelming you, and much more. So it’s such an important skill to develop, but most people don’t know where to start. This guide is aimed at helping you get started. I’m writing it for my kids, and for anyone else who would like to develop a superpow...

Autobiography of a yogi response. This book heavily impacted my life. When you first hold the book, its spiritual power is palpable and I am always brought to a place of deep peace. Yogananda’s smiling face and gentle, holy glow on the cover is the very picture of compassion, beckoning one to dive deeper into oneself so that you too may find what he has found. During my time reading “Autobiography of a Yogi”, I treated it as a holy book, taking all of its words for fact, all of his proclamations as gospel. During my first period of time reading this book, there was no doubt in my mind that all which he said was true. I figured if one of his ethical vows was to only speak truth, then he may only write true events in this book. Upon reading of saints who teleport, fight tigers, see the future, and heal incurable diseases, I resolved to meditate for an hour on multiple occasions. Animating my mind with colorful images of what is possible in the spiritual world, my spiritual progr...

Nature demands harmony. Due to our individual, anthropocentric (human centered) points of view, we often have difficulty seeing this harmony. In Hinduism, it is believed that the truth of reality underlays this which we experience. The spirit (purusa in sanskrit) is beyond human comprehension, and interacts with the material world (prakriti in sanskrit) to create what we know as the universe. This is lila, divine play. The unfolding of the universe is it’s way of experiencing itself, increasing in complexity every step of the way yet maintaining a balance which is often beyond our view. Hindu iconography I think of there being many different orders of magnitude of time that correspond with changes in levels of consciousness. An order of magnitude is an exponential change of plus-or-minus 1 in the value of a quantity or unit. A change in level of consciousness is scaling up or down in size to find the next level of individual entities creating harmony. For example, one human...

M.D. John Sarno shows us just how important it can be to heal emotional and mental wounds for the sake of the body. In “The Mind Body Prescription,” he shares the concept of psychosomatic disorder/illnesses, their causes, effects, and prevalence. The basic idea is that, evolutionary, it is better to suffer individual pain than to let out uncontrolled emotions which could cause us to lose our pack and thus our lives. Counterintuitively, the pain created by the mind is our body’s survival mechanism. Most people live in a setting where they can express their emotions without horrific repercussions. He told a story of a woman who was severely abused as a child and suffered from chronic pain of which doctors could find no physical evidence. Within days of learning his method, she had a major emotional release and her pain began to subside. An interesting sidenote is that psychosomatic illnesses change from society to society and based on time period; whatever pain is most common will be t...

Embracing the Animal May 17, 2017     Humans are half animal, half god. Our minds have the ability to ponder the infinite, create devices that allow us to go into outer space and eradicate entire strains of disease. Our bodies still cling to evolutionary traits designed to help survive in, as Thomas Hobbes would call, a state of nature (this is when survival is of paramount importance and no moral compasses guide any actions. Life is constantly on the edge of death). We cling to negative memories much more easily than to positive memories because remembering the negative, our bodies believe, increase our chances of survival while the positive are superfluous. A tiger attack compared to a pretty sunset. A negative comment amidst a sea of praise.     Evolution is the gradual adaptation of a species for the sake of survival. Before humans, animals evolved on a body level, take Darwin’s birds in the Galapagos, the bird’s be...