Our mind - the true culprit

"Everything in Nature is in perfect harmony with each other, except we humans...", I came across this statement and I thought how true this statement is. It is because of us humans that the Nature has entered in an inequilibrium. Everywhere, people are talking about global warming, ice-sheets melting, sea-levels rising, glaciers receding etc. etc.

If there is anyone who is responsible for these things, it is us - humans. For over billions of years till the human being happened on planet earth, everything had a natural rate. If there was an ice-age, there was melt-down too. Even when man happened, he lived peacefully with the Nature and everything was green and rosy.

But the problem started when we humans started interfering with the natural state of stability. It is said that the rate of rise in global temperature over the last few decades has been higher than all the thousands of years put together before that.

Our greed and fear has led to this sad state. The Nature has always blessed us with whatever we wanted but the problem is our list of wants is so loooooooooooooooong that She has no answer now. Our greed has taken over so much that once we get something, we immediately look for the next thing and we call this modernization.

Earlier, man killed animals but for his livlihood only. He cut trees only to get enough space for him to grow crops and survive. He made machines and looked for comforts but only those that would ease his physical strain at the end of a hard day out.

Now, we are cutting trees to build resorts, casinos and shopping malls. Most of the times, a shopping mall is totally unwarranted given there are hundreds of malls around but still we are building them.

I have nothing against modernization. It is because of that I am writing this post. But what we are doing is not fulfilling our needs. All we are doing is pleasing our senses. It is a mental problem that we have. It is the negativity that we are constantly building which causes us that irritation, which make us live on greed and fear. Paramahamsa Nithyananda repeatedly says, "Fear and greed drive the modern man."

That is true. Our greed to get more and more, if not others will take it and our fear to hold on to what we have is the real problem. We are simply exploiting the Nature to fulfill our mental pleasures only. And the most important thing we miss in this whole process is, how much ever we try to fulfill our mental pleasures, they can never be fulfilled because they are non-existent in the first place.

Time and again, enlightened masters have said our mind is an illusion. Intellectual science also is slowly converging to this conclusion. When the mind itself is an illusion, our so-called problems created by our mind should also be a mirage.

We are constantly torturing Mother Nature in an attempt catch the mirage but is the mirage there?

The only solution to this question is for us to ask ourselves what we really want. All this running around is because of our belief in the quest for eternal joy in the outside world. All this running is doing is to stamp Mother Nature again and again. Once we realize that eternal bliss within us, our running stops, we fall in tune with Mother Nature; we fall in total harmony like everything else in Nature. Meditation is a way to realize that eternal bliss, that nithyananda.

Feeding our senses - a favorite passtime

Yesterday I went for an Indian movie titled Jodha Akbar, which shows the life of a famous Moghul emperor - Akbar and his wife Jodha. Just a few lines about Akbar and Jodha before entering the subject :) Akbar is considered one of the greatest Moghul emperors to rule India in the sixteenth century. He consolidated most of India under one administration and came up with innovative styles of governance. Akbar was a Muslim but his wife Jodha was a Hindu by religion who was a devout Krishna follower.

Now let me come to the point... Let me describe peoples' reactions to different scences in the movie theater.

Scene 1 - Battle of Panipat: There were armies fighting, clashing against each other, bloody fights, swords, sounds, screams, blood, death ...
Audience Reaction: Pin-drop silence, glued to the screen ...

Scene 2 - Sufi saints singing: Akbar was a follower of a great enlightened Sufi saint called Moinuddin Christi. Sufi saints sing a song and enter into a whirling meditation.
Audience Reaction: Loud laughter at the people dancing, mockery at the way they look, they dress up and dance...

Scene 3 - Another fight: A close aid of Akbar attacks him... a short sword fight
Audience Reaction: Pin-drop silence, glued to the screen ...

Scene 4 - Devotion of Jodha: Jodha goes and kneels down before the idol of Krishna and prays for recovery of Akbar when he gets wounded.
Audience Reaction: Loud laughter and mockery...

Scene 5 - Final battle between Akbar and his rival, shot almost like the final fight sequence in the Hollywood movie Troy.
Audience Reaction: Pin-drop silence, glued to the screen, not even blinking their eyes...

This is the state of human consciousness. We are thrilled to see a bloody battle, a fight sequence but we cannot sit for five minutes to watch heart touching devotional scene. Believe me, the Sufi song especially is heart touching rendering.

When we watch a fight sequence, our adrenaline levels start rising. We are glued when either an action scene or a lustful scene comes up on screen. These are the commercial elements of a movie or a program and we enjoy such commercial scenes. Such scenes give us sensory pleasure. When we watch an action scene, we actually start feeling so much for the protagonist that we ourselves sometimes feel like getting up and hitting the bad guy :) ... Such is the way we get involved in such scenes.

On the other hand, heartful rendition of a beautiful Sufi song or a scene showing the power of devotion, we dismiss it immediately. Simply because such scenes most often than not do not give the kind of kick that an action scene gives. Since we do not get the sensory pleasure, we do not appreciate something which comes from a deeper layer.

Paramahamsa Nithyananda says, 'we are continuously bombarded with violence and negativities throughout the day that we can now relate to such kinds of things only.'

This is true. Be it movies or television serials, everything is based on violence. If humans are not enough people invent robots, aliens, predators, big sharks, crocodiles and even cockroaches to show violence, blood and death. What is even more dangerous is how children, hardly 5 or 6 years old are glued to their playstations, X-boxes or hand held gaming consoles killing the bad guys, bombing the enemies etc.

We are simply filling ourselves with garbage. If we really see, we do not need all that. We do not need that violence. But our senses crave for it and we feed our senses obediently.

Our Master says, 'all the mass calamities like tsunamis etc. are a result of collective negativities.' Our own negativities are accumulating to an extent that such incidents occur.

Its a pity that we are becoming the cause of our own destruction. We can decide now to pull ourselves out of it, only if we wish to...

P.S: One of the meditations in the programs conducted by Paramahamsa Nithyananda includes the Sufi whirling meditation for 42 minutes.