ContentsEditorial + A Golden Cage + Swami Says: Seek Within + Swami Replies + Understanding Each Other + Padahastasana + Expanding Understanding + Chalcedony + Understanding Energy + The Art of Leadership + Feature: Understanding Kali Ma + Where is God? + Off the Shelf + The Meaning of Hindu Rituals + I is for Intuition + Spirituality & Financial Freedom + Inspiration + Letters from heaven + GitaScendence + Reiki Part II: Eat Wisely + Science and + Power of Gayathri + Truth 4 Youth
Selected Articles
Editorial
Namasté all.
Winter is upon us and most of us would probably rather be under a blanket in front of the TV than anywhere else or, rather, under a blanket reading their favourite issues of Transcendence.
As usual, we have done our best to put together as many interesting articles as possible to stimulate your interest in attaining Liberation and to inspire you to put in the necessary effort.
Although, we have included a short article on Mother Kali in the past, we have chosen Her as our feature this month because there is so much misconception regarding Her True nature. Included is Her respective MasterCard. Other articles this month include ‘Where is God’ by Swami Murugesu, ‘Spirituality and Financial Freedom’ by Suren and a report back on the March Kavadi by Mahavishnu (late due to my oversight).
Swami Shankarananda is now teaching a Vedic Maths class on Sunday mornings after Yoga. This is well-worth learning as most of the methods teach how to calculate large numbers quickly in the mind - very helpful for adults in business and for students. Please let Swami know if you are interested in attending.
Also, the talk by Swami on the Law of Cause and Effect, was fairly well-attended and extremely informative. Thanks to Tracy White of the Energy Centre for her constant unconditional support and for making the venue available.
The Mind, Body and Soul Fair in Westville on Sunday the 27th May was a great success as more and more people are becoming interested in the value of crystals and gemstones. I just want to take this opportunity to say a very big THANK YOU to everyone who helped on the day and to the Yoga students for their demonstration and support. Swami’s crystal shop will officially open on the 16th June in Cowies Hill, with great discounts on the day, and with a talk on Crystal Healing by Swami. The purpose of Swami’s shop (Kailash Crystals) is primarily to create an awareness of the life-enhancing value of crystals. For more information on this, please contact me.
We have had a very weak response to the Swami’s Soduko Puzzle in the Transcendence. Remember, as with the previous Word Search, your solutions can be faxed to Swami on 086 648 3823 and you may be the fortunate recipient of a reward from Swami himself.
Finally, Swami Murugesu is still very ill and is currently undergoing chemotherapy treatment. Please be sure to include Him in your daily prayers.
In Love and Service always,
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Message from the Master
A Golden Cage
Imprisoned I am in the golden cage of this world. Every day I pray for the Divine mercy that I seek: I pray to be released from this cage, and fly back to my home near Thee. I pray I could escape from this cage of destiny, to dance before seekers. I am here, distressed, for here I relish nothing. I preach, I preach from Thy Holy Feet. No one here wants to listen. I am a prisoner in the dungeon of the weak and distracted human race. It is now that I need to be at your Holy Feet, O Master, O Master.
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My Beloved
by Deanadayalan
I speak from personal experience not from what I have read in books. Devotion is the surest path to God. Open your heart to God and you will experience an exquisite bliss in your heart and soul. This bliss has been in your heart and soul always. It simply needs to be awakened from its dormant state. Practice the presence of God and She will be with you always.
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Swami Says
Seek Within
Seek. Seek within
Hear. Hear the voice.
Dig. Dig deep.
Know thyself.
For the light has come to spread the radiance.
Oh, open thy eyes and experience
The brightness in our courtyard.
Oh devotees, forget everything.
Today this Divinity you should herald.
Om
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The Nature of Creation
by Paramahansa Yogananda
Matter does not exist in the way we usually conceive it; nevertheless, it does exist as a cosmic delusion. To dispel delusion requires a definite method. You cannot cure a drug addict in a moment. Material consciousness possesses man through a law of delusion, and he cannot banish it except by learning and following the opposite law, that of Truth.
Spirit, through a series of processes of materialization, became matter; hence matter proceeds from and cannot be different from its cause, Spirit. Matter is a partial expression of Spirit, the Infinite appearing as finite, the Unlimited as limited. But since matter is only Spirit in a delusive manifestation, matter per se is non existent. At the start of creation, the hitherto unmanifested Spirit projected two natures: one consciousness, and the other matter. They are Its two vibratory expressions.
Consciousness is a finer, and matter a grosser, vibration of the one transcendental Spirit. Consciousness is the vibration of Its subjective aspect, and matter is the vibration of Its objective aspect. Spirit, as Cosmic Consciousness, is potentially imminent in objective vibratory matter, and manifests Itself subjectively as the consciousness present in all forms of creation, reaching Its highest expression in the human mind with its countless ramifications of thoughts, feelings, will and imagination.
The difference between matter and Spirit is in the rate of vibration - a difference of degree, not of kind. This point may be better understood by the following example: although all vibrations are qualitatively alike, vibrations from 16 to 20 000 cycles per second are audible to man’s sense of hearing, but vibrations below 16 or over 20 000 are generally inaudible. There is no essential difference between audible and inaudible vibrations, though a relative difference does exist. Through the power of maya, cosmic illusion, the Creator has caused the manifestations of matter to appear so distinct and specific that to the human mind they seem unrelated in any way to Spirit. Excerpt from Scientific Healing Affirmations
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Innate Wisdom of the Body
by Yvonne Jarvis
The body has an innate (inborn) ability to heal itself at all levels physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. This built in mechanism initiates the healing process in normal day to day living. If we cut a finger, the body sets in motion a process to begin to heal the wound. The body seems to fail to do its job when its communication systems have been compromised through the stresses of life and the interferences superimposed upon them. Once the communication systems between the parts of the body have been re-established, the body can heal, except in very serious and/or emergency situations.
The focus of most health care modalities has not been on the inborn communication system within the bodymind. The focus has been on repairing the parts that appear to be the problem, and hoping that the body can get those parts to resynchronize. This has oftentimes been a hit-and-miss affair! The new paradigm, acknowledged in The BodyTalk System (read more about this exciting energy medicine system in forthcoming articles in this series) focuses on enhancing the body's natural synchronization to enable it to repair itself more quickly. The resultant energy configuration allows the parts to quickly return to normal synchronized activity within the bodymind complex and its environment. This inner synchronization of the bodymind will manifest in a more harmonious interaction with the environment.
Despite accumulating knowledge and understanding much about the anatomical and physiological processes of the body, it is obvious that our knowledge is incomplete. Mankind's working knowledge of the body has been overestimated. The bodymind complex is an intricate system with an immense number of interrelationships between the components of the body at the physical level, within the energy systems, environmental factors, and mental and emotional components. For health problems, the type of help the body has been getting is not necessarily what it really wants or needs. Many healthcare practitioners have tended to approach clients with a rigid agenda and fixed ideas about session outcomes reflecting socially acceptable norms, disregarding the individual uniqueness of each bodymind and its circumstances. Only the innate wisdom of the body knows the right balance for that particular bodymind, therefore we should be consulting that wisdom before doing anything to effect changes.
Our life styles, cultures and technology have interfered with the body's natural processes and compromised the communication networks that enable it to coordinate the billions of synchronized activities per second necessary to maintain optimal health. BodyTalk respects the body's awesome innate knowledge of its own workings and uses that knowledge by working with it, rather than imposing our own limited knowledge upon it.
Reference: The BodyTalk System Module 1 textbook.
For more information, refer to http://www.bodytalksystem.com/
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Liberation, the Prime Object
by Swami Sri Yukteswar
When man understands even by way of inference, the true nature of this creation, the true relation existing between this creation and himself; and when he further understands that he is completely blinded by the influence of Darkness, Maya, and that it is the bondage of Darkness alone which makes him forget his real Self and brings about all his sufferings, he naturally wishes to be relieved form all these evils. This relief from evil, or liberation from the bondage of Maya, becomes the prime object of his life. When man raises himself above the idea creation of this Darkness, Maya, and passes completely out of its influence, he becomes liberated from bondage and is placed in his real Self, the Eternal Spirit. On attaining this liberation, man becomes saved from all his troubles, and all the desires of his heart are fulfilled, so the ultimate aim of his life is accomplished. So long, however, as man identifies himself with his material body and fails to find repose in his true Self, he feels his wants according to his heart’s desires remain unsatisfied. To satisfy them he has to appear often in flesh and blood on the stage of life, subject to the influence of Darkness, Maya, and has to suffer all the troubles of life and death not only in the present but in the future as well.
Extract from The Holy Science
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I is for Intuition
by Rod Briggs
When we think of intuition most people bring to mind images of mystics and psychics and pay little attention to their sixth sense during the day-to-day grind.
The truth, of course, is that we all have a latent intuitive component although in many it is underdeveloped or even ignored. No matter how skeptical, we have all, at some stage in our lives experienced intuition first hand; the phone rings and we know who is calling before answering, we are thinking of someone and they call us, we start to say the same thing as our partner at the same time or, most extreme of all we experience the ‘déjà vu’ moment the feeling of having experienced something before the event. It is ‘woman’s intuition’, the businessman’s ‘gut feel’, the Bible's ‘still small voice’ and the reason our Granny used to tell us to ‘sleep on it’ when we had a decision to make. It is the voice of our subconscious.
Recent studies at North Western University in the USA showed how this subconscious input works.
A group of volunteers were prepared by wiring up to stress monitors, pupil dilation, blood sugar, blood pressure and skin tone, connected to computers onto the screens of which various kinds of photographs were shown. These pictures contained randomly dispersed images of car crashes and horrific injuries and traumas and all of the volunteers responded by displaying stress responses to the ‘horror’ images. The interesting part of the experiment, though, was that these responses were exhibited five seconds before the images were shown on screen. The ‘subconscious’ component of the volunteers minds was preparing them for ‘flight, fight or freeze’ before the event. Their ‘intuition’ came to the volunteers’ aid by picking up precursors of things in the future. It seems, in our subconscious at least, we can time-travel.
The reason that our subconscious seems to be ‘all knowing’ has to do with the way our brains are compartmentalised; we are subliminally receiving 400 billion bits of information every second but our reticular activating system (RAS) filters that down to the 200 bits per second that we are consciously are aware off. If this were not so we would suffer from complete sensory overload. Intuition is what we call it when we become aware of information normally filtered out by our RAS. This explains why the data comes through when we are asleep or at other times when our normally frantic thought pattern is interrupted or slowed down.
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Spirituality and Financial Freedom
by Suren Pillay
When most people think of money, they often exhibit strong emotions about it. For those who are not on the path, money is usually seen as a source of power and influence. For many who are on the spiritual path it is regarded as a temptation, and they are afraid of losing their spirituality if this desire starts to dominate their everyday thinking. The result is that we often have two different ideas that have different results on individuals.
The gross materialist desires money and even when he attains money, is really never satisfied for his greed has taken over his conscious thinking processes. So the corresponding emotion for these type of individuals is greed. ‘If I earn this amount of money I can buy even two more luxury cars. After that I can buy a house, mansion, a hotel . . .’ and the list goes on and on forever. This type of thinking will never give any individual real mental peace for it is focused on objects that do not really provide any lasting pleasure.
For many spiritual aspirants it is the emotion of fear that dominates their thinking when it comes to money. ‘How much is enough? What if I earn too much money? What will other people think of my spirituality if I earn and express this level of income?’ These questions often confuse the aspirant in his perception of this complex subject.
The primary goal of human birth is to know and attain God. All reliable sources of truth have confirmed this fact, yet if one chooses to live in the world, and not renounce life to a monastery or hermitage, sustenance becomes a primary concern. For that, one needs to generate enough income to support at least all of ones basic needs. Food, shelter, clothing and means of transport are usually considered the basic necessities in the modern world. If one struggles in the attainment of these basic necessities then it goes without saying that his spiritual journey will suffer to some degree.
So the first concern for the spiritual aspirant is whether he can satisfy his most basic needs. Once he is able to do this, the next question is what does he do with the surplus cash over and above his basic needs. It is at this point that the gross materialist and the spiritually mature individual differ. The gross materialist uses all surplus cash to acquire possessions that he strongly desires. The teachings of the sages is never to live beyond your means. One saint emphasized saving whatever money you can and living of the interest.
This statement is really the substance of financial freedom. In a world where so many are in the so called rat-race, few ever take a minute to introspect at what is really important in life. One can be considered wealthy in his life when his monthly expenses can be completely met by income that is earned without even working. This income represents income from investments such as interest, dividends, royalties and rent. One can be considered rich when one earns income from investments that exceed his basic monthly expenses to a degree that he can create more wealth by reinvesting such money. The trick to financial freedom thus becomes twofold: one is to identify how much income one needs to live in the world to satisfy your basic needs and to earn enough income to exceed that level of basic income; the second is to determine how to invest surplus funds in order to generate a basic level of income without working. The key to making these decisions is to become detached from money and rather focus on where you want to be with regard to your finances in a certain time period. For the spiritual aspirant financial freedom offers him a world of opportunity. By sustaining himself without working, he can spend more time in spiritual practices and undertake a greater degree of selfless action. He has the option to renounce life completely or assist others in diverse ways.
I pray that all children of God find their way to financial freedom, spiritual joy and perfection.
Gods at every moment
by Suren
At dawn, the wise shall wake and eat their bread in God. In the day they shall live in his splendour, and at night again they shall feast in his Divine Love. If in sleep we are considered Gods then surely those who are wise should be considered Gods at every moment!