Of my new found talent..

There always comes a time when one wants to break boundaries, do something new and reinvent themselves. I love what I do and am generally passionate of all the things I take under my wing. Well, for a while I have really had the urge of picking up the paintbrush...and finally I did. Can't say I did a fantastic job at it..but as I said, its only about reinventing..so I am happy the way it turned out.

Here's the first look at my masterpiece. :)

The Script : " Athato Brahma Jijnasa"

                  " Anavrittih Shabdadanavrittih Shabdat "

The Translation: " Now - Therefore the inquiry of the Brahma"

"Those who worship the Truth and travel the path of light shall never regenerate any new desires and once realizing the Truth and attaining salvation, never return to the worldly ways again. Thus, this is the end of the spiritual journey."

The Meaning:

The 2 lines are basically the first and last line of the Brahmasutras. The entire secret of the Universe lies in these 2 lines. The first Sutra means that the basic essence of human life is duty towards Liberation, or the realization of Brahma - the Absolute Truth.  Knowledge of Brahma is the most exalted knowledge and Its experience leads to instant Liberation.

When man through his knowledge and experience of the world realizes it to be mundane and transient, he embarks upon the quest for Truth.. The Truth behind this entire creation, the knowledge of which can give him everlasting peace and eternal joy. He embarks on a timeless journey for the final destination--- Brahma.

The knowledge of Brahma reveals the secret to the entire Universe- the master key that can unlock all the doors of time, place and causation. It is the Ultimate Knowledge, the unfolding of which does not leave anything else to be learnt.

The last Sutra tells us about the final destination which indicates that anybody who attains Brahma will end desire and never return to the worldly ways and thus, find Liberation. According to Vedanta, Brahma is the essential Principle of the Universe, the knowledge of which opens the door to the Soul, eliminates all doubts and fears, extinguishes the need to perform action. Brahma thus, represents the unifying principle behind creation. On realization of this, all ignorance in the form of fragile egos, false bonds with mundane existence and attachment to sentient objects get eliminated; this is Liberation from the cycles of life and death and thus, becoming one with the Paramatma (Universal Soul). 

The knowledge of Brahma is the only path to Liberation. In the context of my painting, anyone who understands these two lines and is ready to move beyond the mundane existence with the sole and explicit purpose of realization of the Truth becomes The Buddha. On the awakening of the spirit and the experience of Truth, all worldly and transient elements of life disappear and man is centered in himself completely.

By this he becomes whole- The Universe himself, as propagated in the Vedas as the greatest statements

 " Aham Brahmasmi" - "I am the Universe" 

Can’t help falling in Love...

“When one loves somebody everything is clear -- where to go, what to do -- it all takes care of itself and one doesn't have to ask anybody about anything.”

The air smells so fresh, the sky so blue and clear, leaves so green and moist and the day is so beautiful and I am in love.

Having shifted places recently I realize what I am missing and missed out on and now that I have the best I am in love with everything around me and it feels so nice. Love is the most beautiful thing to have happened to everyone and yet it is so undermined. Love reaches beyond romance and embraces us in all walks of life as we encounter one another and make choices about respecting and caring for each other. For each person love is unique and something that comes from deep within the heart and its each one’s thoughts on this matter. 

For me, love is only possible when one doesn't need others to define who you are or need others to confirm to your view of the world. It isn't a tool used for binding people to your side, it happens whenever your heart is open to receiving the beauty, wonder, awe of people, beings and happenings around you. Love happens when you embrace the wonderful awesomeness of life, as you acknowledge how incredible the world really is, how intricate and complex life is. 

I feel that we can only truly love someone else, when we love ourselves properly. But before we can love ourselves, we must know and understand ourselves profoundly. This understanding leads to an awareness of our divine essence and therefore of loving ourselves, and also every other being at that same moment because we will recognize that same divine essence in every other being. 

By loving ourselves, I don’t mean putting us before others, but loving ourselves is about having self-respect, discovering what really makes us, what we are and spending our life being true to our self. It is not about putting us down or comparing to others. Love makes us free from any sense of insecurity or threatened by other’s success. To love is not only about having the capacity to give love, but also gracefully opening our heart to receive love. To know that we deserve love.

We are worthy of love and the more we feel the love in our heart, the greater we are able to give more to others. Love is without attaching stipulations like expecting to be loved in equal measure in return. If the interest is not in the other person as such but rather in how the person can enhance our experience of life, then it is not unconditional. If we only love others for how they can ensure our well-being, we cannot know love. Love should be just for the sake of love. Realizing that someone may have another way of showing his or her love for us. Love doesn't compartmentalize but sees the person as a whole, it doesn't judge but tolerates the differences, accepting the person, their choices and everything about the person they love. Love will come only when we are willing to share love, to give it of it freely, and expect nothing in return.

 

We cannot love without accepting that there is always a chance of loss of the love or of being hurt. That is what makes love so powerful ––we risk much because the reward of love is so great. And in losing love at times in life, we learn to appreciate the love we have even more and we also learn that at times in life, it is better to let go than to force someone to love you. Most importantly, we have a choice. We have a choice to let a loss of love ruin us for all times, embittered for life, emotionally stuck at the time of the loss. Or, we can make the choice to learn from hurtful experiences, however difficult the lesson, and move on to discover the many other people who won't reject our love and who will give freely of theirs. The true expression of love is to just let people Be. 

Love is eternal. How can one stop loving someone whom they did and how can love just come by and go? 

Love means endless forgiveness, a willingness to give people second chances and a commitment to moving humanity forward, ever striving for greater harmony. In giving of the best of who we really are to others in the name of love, we transcend selfish motives and introspection, and truly seek to appreciate others. Love is a means by which we can start to see things more clearly together, to reach compromises or to collaborate, and to make room for finding a way forward that includes others, not just our ego. 

People become beautiful to you because you love them. In a society obsessed with appearance, it can often seem the other way around but the reality is that love makes a person beautiful and the imperfect perfect. 

I have seen some lovers torment themselves with groundless suspicions. If you look for trouble, you will find it every time. It surprises me why can’t we look forward to our relationships with other people growing more meaningful and precious over time. Hope, is an attitude that happily anticipates the good. It isn't being blind and denying that there are problems, but it does look beyond the problems. People who truly love others do not allow their problems to rob them of their happiness. 

Remember there is no failure in love, because once you tell somebody that you love them, then you have already succeeded in love. 

" A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge"

Of Emotions

"Life would be unbearably bland if we had no enemies on whom to waste our efforts and energy"

Do you remember the time when we were younger, how parents reprimanded us for misbehaving? Well even now we have people telling us how to behave. I mean, don't we already know how to behave? Yes, we do. Its actually the execution which is the problem, not absence of knowledge. 

My husband is very verbal with his emotions, be it complimenting someone or criticizing something. Most of the time when he gets upset he reacts irrationally sometimes a bit too aggressively. I keep telling him to relax and take his mind off it but that rarely happens. But to reflect upon it, that is the way he is designed. I am sure he knows and never intends to be disrespectful. 

Emotions are necessary to formulate ideas and get the energy to execute them. None of us are reasonable enough not to get angry or upset when something discourteous happens around or to us. Small daily emotions are not rational but we need them to function properly. We are designed to respond to hostility with hostility. 

Nature developed our emotions over millions of years of evolution and as a result, our emotions have the potential to serve us today as a delicate and sophisticated internal guidance system. Our emotions alert us when natural human need is not being met.  

So every time we get high on our emotions, it should be free of guilt, as the system is meant to divert our energies in the required direction. So what if someone else gets the brunt of it!

SantaClaus is coming along...

"Christmas is love in action. Every time we love, every time we give, its Christmas."

Santa arrived early this year! But I am not complaining. Of all the gifts and all the love that comes along with him, is always to look forward to. Last year was a dull Christmas so he made it up for us as soon as he could. Thats why we all love him so much. This year he got along with him a hope and a gift for a new beginning. More on that later. As of now its just the joy of seeing him and cuddling up with him, of the late night conversations and fun and laughter HO!HO!HO!

Honor Yourself

" A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles"

My last blog I thanked a lot of people for waiting for my blogs. Here are some people whom you don’t know and they benefit from what you have to say. But then there are also some people whom you may have a close association with and they neither care nor bother about you. 

Something of similar to this happened when what was supposed to be an old friend called up a few days back. We had a fall out because we didn’t see eye to eye about each others’ moral values and had polar opposite views about principles of life. So I was surprised to receive this call and while he chatted about his new job and new life, I had the urgency to hang up. Two days ago I receive a background verification call about this same person from a company and this time I was not so surprised to find out that he had given fake documents. The whole reason about the call just flashed by and more than hurt it is disgust to know that I had at one time called him my friend. 

People close to me know that I live by some moral principles and ethics which I don't compromise with. He knew that about me too considering the number of times I had reprimanded him for a number of activities and yet the audacity to create phony documents knowing well enough that they would eventually come to me for verification and then calling me to butter me up.. Man!! How shallow can you get! Anyway, I am done with such people.

On a different note, people who read this, please have a decent set of values and principles to lead your life. Lying and cheating should not be a standard code of conduct. A job is too petty a thing to compromise your values for it and moreover the chances are that if you are honest about yourself you need not live with the fear of losing your job once the truth comes out. 

Thank You

"Act like what you do makes a difference. It does"

Well, Its been a while since I have written and for no particular reason. Once in a while I get into a phase where I want to be alone. I don't communicate and I usually tend to go off the radar so that phase just ended and for future reference any silence from me means I am in transit. :)

I visited a bookstore yesterday and randomly picked up a book of no relevance, but flipped a page and something caught my eye. What I read was this: If you were the last person alive on earth and you were a painter, would you still paint?
For all of us ingrained is a need to be appreciated, acknowledged and recognized. So most of the time no matter how much we say that we are doing things for ourselves, we still want someone else to acknowledge it. When I started writing, I thought I was doing it for myself but over time as my stats said otherwise, I started keeping the posts to myself and soon after just stopped posting.
Few days back I logged into a popular social network after months of being off it and  from some 30 odd messages which I thought would be from friends was (pleasantly) surprised to see that most of them were actually from strangers wanting to know why I stopped writing and requesting me to start again. There was a mail with the subject "for my role model". I didn't know I could be of that high importance. I was just expressing myself through my writings and to be called a role model is something I hadn't really expected. It meant the world to me and the whole day was spent with a smiley stuck to my face.
I am humbled and gratified by this encouragement and it made something clear to me that it doesn't really matter who and how one reciprocates but even if there is one person who is listening that itself is the reason not to stop.
To all of you who have diligently followed even my absence a BIG THANK YOU. It gives me the sense of responsibility for what I write and express my sincere gratitude for bringing my confidence back..

Love and gratitude,
Tithee