From: sp2@cec1.wustl.edu (Sundara Pandian)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.newage
Subject: Some Reflections Of Vasishtha
Date: 27 Jul 1992 16:14:41 -0500
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu


[ Earlier posted in Soc.Religion.Eastern ]

            Some reflections of Vasishtha
          -------------------------------
     Have you ever gone for a walk alone in
 a park ? I have done so several times in
 the evenings.
     People take this `walking alone' concept
 literally. By walking alone, I really mean
 walking with a free mind. It is a different
 experience. If one adopts that, he could see
 a new meaning even in the short time he spends 
 in a park. Sound of birds, smell of flowers,
 whisper of breeze, there is a unifying factor
 in all of them. I have never worried myself
 to ask others or consult scriptures to figure   
 out that binding factor.
     It is easy to quote scriptures. It is easy
 to recite vedas. All it needs is memory and
 computers serve that job very well. There is
 nothing great or mysterious power in all these
 mantras. We add a power to otherwise empty
 words. Even this adding power only backfires.
 I call it business the things you do expecting
 results.
    I don't go for a park expecting any strange 
 encounters, like a spacecraft landing near the
 place I sit to ponder myself. I don't get any
 mysterious power if I circle the park five
 hundred times. I don't call it devotion. If you
 do it in a Hindu temple in India, you will be
 addressed as a sincere devotee. It is not just
 the act, where you perform it also matters in
 this material world.
   I saw a child asking her parents about the
 ghosts they told it once. This is something that
 I don't understand with people. They empty all
 their fears, beliefs, or tradition to their kids
 and like a recorder they also carry all these 
 irrational thoughts.
    When a plant drops its seed, it leaves it free.
 It doesn't move from its place asking the seed,
 "Do this, do that " or like that. I like that
 attitude of plants. They live in harmony. When a
 plant blocks the sunlight that a nearby plant is
 receiving, they don't fight with each other. Instead
 the affected plant bends itself to get sufficient
 light. If only mankind could learn this lesson
 from the plants, we will be relieved of some common
 problems leading to disasterous ones in this
 material world.
    It is an egoistical man who calls a plant as a
 "lower object". When a man uses the word "lower", it
 means that there is something "higher". There are
 even people who refer to God as something higher,
 something nobler or something subtler . If you think
 about it deeply, the difference exists only in your
 thoughts and not in reality. The best way to remove the
 difference is therefore not to remove the objects
 that you are thinking about, but instead your thoughts
 itself. This is one thing you can easily comprehend
 from the plants.
   A plant leads its life in its own way. A banyan tree
 doesn't imitate a mango tree. It remains as banyan
 tree till it dies. What about us ? One writer in this
 net itself tries his best to sound like Ramana Maharishi.
 One other writer tries to convince all of us his Perfect
 Master's teachings. I am not saying that they are wrong.
 These words "right" and "wrong" are differences that
 exist in one's mind and when one empties his thoughts,
 these two words drop away, like branches of a tree 
 falling down in a water-falls.
    The sun sets ; it empties all its beautiful
 colors in the already colorful park and  I walk to home
 thinking about the missing colors in our life...
                                          
                                         -- Vasishtha.
--------------------------------------------------------- 
 [ Posted by : S.Pandian ( sp2@cec1.WUSTL.edu )
---------------------------------------------------------