The Search for a Higher Purpose

Listen to All 8 Parts in a podcast

Watch a brief video summary

All humans are driven by a desire to do better!

Whether it is to score a higher grade or earn a higher salary or woo a better looking partner or live in a bigger house or drive a more fancy car, people are driven to want to do better. What they do to get there is another matter.

How we behave is a consequence of the lessons we learned as we grew up. Some contend that there is also an innate nature of the person. Whatever the case, we largely emulate the influential persons in our society. This is what determines what a person sees as "doing better" and what the person does to become better.

For some, it is outdoing their siblings or cousins, their friends, their neighbours - whether in earnings or title or possessions. For others, it is being able to serve others and making people happy - in doing their paid work or volunteering in an organisation or whatever.

This next segment examines where that drive to do better comes from and discusses how to harness that drive to define purpose in our lives.

Read more

Cause and Consequence

Listen to All 8 Parts in a podcast

Watch a brief video summary

There is this eternal debate about fate versus freedom of choice. Humans need to feel that they are in charge of their lives. They cannot accept the possibility of their lives being defined by fate or karma. There is this feeling that, if people think their lives are fated and will just roll along as predetermined, then what's the point of making any effort? People will just give up and go about their daily activities listlessly.

There is one catch though. If there is no such thing as predetermination, how do accurate predictions happen? How can the future be known if it has not been determined yet?

More to the point, if Divinity is outside of time and can traverse the past, present and future, how is that possible if the future has not been determined yet?

The next segment addresses this vexing question.

Read more

The Cause-Consequence Matrix

The Divinity Within

Listen to All 8 Parts in a podcast

Watch a brief video summary

I started on this Post quite early but was not able to finish it because of something I needed to do. So I'm now rushing to finish it before the end of the day.

This next segment uses vedic revelations as the basis to examine the human body and mind as layers of reality. Seen as layers, the functions of the different parts becomes clear and improves our ability to manage them effectively.

While our bodies and brains are made of stuff of this world, there is an inner core which comes from another realm and which survives the death of the body to move along into an afterlife. Understanding the nature of out inner self and thereby, understanding the purpose of this life gives us guidance about how to conduct ourselves.

This is preparation for defining a moral code or guideline for ourselves. The Page I'm referring you to discusses the subject quite comprehensively so I won't go into more detail here. Just click on the link.

Read more

pancamayakosha - aananda>vignyana>prana>mano>anna

Four Paths of Yoga

Listen to All 8 Parts in a podcast

Watch a brief video summary

Unlike the other major religions which have one scripture each to build upon, what is popularly known as Hinduism has a plethora of scriptural sources. This is because of the antiquity of the revelations from which from which a huge host of religious practices have emerged. The oldest scripture, the rig veda, is believed to be perhaps 13,000 years old. The others, based on analysis of the shift in the linguistics therein, are believed to have been revealed/recorded some 2 to 3 millennia apart. Since then, there have been many more books, also taken to be scriptural, but the 4 vedas remain the mainstay.

Much wisdom was handed down from those scriptures but, as is always the case with humans, while rituals were adopted and even enforced, the wisdom was forgotten. By the time Jainism & Buddhism became popular in India, the Brahmins, who had been charged with preserving the ancient wisdom, had become corrupt and materialistic. With the people looking for better answers, the new religions swept across the nation.

Adi Shankara, who was already searching for his true self at the tender age of 8, went beyond the wisdom of the vedas. Seeing the need to unify the followers of the vedic traditions in the face of fierce competition, he codified the vast array of pathways to divinity that had evolved over the millennia into four primary paths of union with the Source. My next segment is about those four paths.

Read more

Divine origins

Listen to All 8 Parts in a podcast

Watch a brief video summary

Until now, I have made it a point to only create a new Blog entry once a day. But today, I am catching up. I want the Pages that I created previously to have Posts referencing them so that they are not missed by a visitor progressing through Blog entries. So I will do more than one per day. How many I can do today is left to be seen.

The origins of the vedic traditions are shrouded in mystery because, for a long time, the vedas were not written down but were carried orally. As a consequence, history based on the oldest discovered artifacts does not do justice to the antiquity to the traditions. A more indicative method of dating would be to use the incredibly accurate constellation charts of the ancient texts and correlate them to what is currently known about the movement of stars in the night sky. It is a trivial matter to project star movements backwards in time and gauge when the positions would have matched the vedic descriptions. The results are startling. But until the scientific community is ready to accept them, let them remain mysterious.

My recapture of what probably happened back then is based on what was carried forward orally and only captured in writing some six millennia ago. Anyone interested in studying these origin stories can easily perform an AI assisted search. For the less dedicated, my summary should be sufficient.

I explain how the seven rishis credited with spreading the dharma are believed to have been initiated into their knowledge.

Read more