OSHO SAID THAT

 

OSHO    SAID THAT

Life is not punishment. It is so valuable that it cannot be punishment. It is a reward. Chandra Mohan Jain by actual name, Osho was a great mystic.  His innumerable addresses cover many prominent mystics, saints, philosophers and their beliefs.   All of the addresses which are also published in the form of books and as extracts in journals are packed with novel ideas.  They not only enlighten the reader but also inspire and astonish him.

             Here is what he adds to “Life is not punishment.”

    You should be thankful to existence that it has chosen you  -  to breathe through you, to love through you, to sing through you, to dance through you. 

Osho believes that if one keeps growing up in maturity and understanding, one never becomes old.  one is always young because one is always learning. Learning keeps you young because you are not burdened with repressions. You are weightless. You feel as if you were just a child –a new comer to the beautiful earth.

          OSHO was born  in Kuchwada now in Madhya Pradesh on 11^th December 1931 and passed away on January 19, 1990. Known as a great mystic,  he is studied all over the world because of his astonishing ideas.

As a mystic and a critic of unscientific ideas, he is both respected and criticised  

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6^th February 2023                                              G.R.Kanwal  

NEHRU’s VIEWS ON SECULARISM

 

NEHRU’s VIEWS ON SECULARISM

In a speech at Madurai  on 5^th October 1961, free India’s first Prime Minister, Pt Jawaharlal Nehru (14 October 1889 – 27 May 1964) said: The conception of Bharat as one great land which the people considered a holy land has come down the ages and has joined us together, even though we have had different political kingdoms and even though we may speak different languages. This silken bond still keeps us together in many ways.  

             Throughout these thousands of years, this land has been ours , ours in mind, ours in heart, and ours in spiritual heritage. I who come from the north feel at home here, because I am in a part of my country, among friends, among colleagues and among people who have the same ideas, same thoughts and same urges.  Similarly, the north does not belong exclusively to those who live there, but belongs to you also, even though you live in the sough of India. The Himalayas are yours as much as they are mine, and Kanyakumari and Madurai are mine as much as yours. This land is a common heritage of ours, where we have been born and which we seek to serve.

             Throughout the ages geography has made us one great land, history has made us one land, the common culture has made us one land, and our common aspirations, our common hopes and fears, victories and defeats, have made us one. That is the past. In the present, by our common labours, common sacrifices and common struggles, we gained the freedom of India.   

                How then can we today, when we are at last politically united and when we are a free country, allow ourselves to destroy that unity which we have inherited and disturb that freedom which we have struggled to achieve? The past and present have provided a common ground to us. So also must the future be common to us, the future that we are striving to attain, the future of millions of our people, their welfare.  In whatever region we may live, this calls for unity of purpose, unity of endeavour and sacrifice.”

                   On another occasion almost at the same time :Our constitution lays down that we are a secular state, but it must be admitted that this is not wholly reflected in our mass living and thinking. We have not only to live up to the ideals proclaimed in our constitution, but make them a part our thinking and living and thus build up a really integerated nation.

                     Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru is no longer with us, but his views about the unity of India and her secularism are .  Let us continue to embrace them.  

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14^th November 2022                                                               G.R.Kanwal

 

GURU NANAK Said GOD IS ONE

                      GURU NANAK Said

                                   GOD IS ONE

 

There is ONE God’, all powerful.  Everything happens with His will. He is al-powerful.  The world is just a shadow, a mere pretext.

 

God raises him whom He pleases. With his pleasure the sea flows over the desert and the lotus blooms in the sky.

 

Nobody can find fault with God’s doing.

 

All things in the world are transient ; God alone is eternal. Even the sun and the earth will vanish.

God is  formless and immaterial. He is Truth. He belongs to everything and everything belongs  belongs  to Him.  He is the creator and the creation.

 

He  is the true and the  eternal.

He was true in the beginning is  perpetually true since then. Hs true today and will always  remain true.   

               

           

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8^th November 2022                                                                 G.R.Kanwal

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GOD CREATED ALL

 GOD CREATED ALL

In the sixth stanza (quatrain) of his book The Ramayana , the Indian poet Tulsidas (1532-1623) asks “Why enumerate the faults and defects of the bad and the virtues of the good? --- both are a boundless and unfathomable ocean. Hence occasionally virtue is reckoned as vice, improperly and from want of discrimination. For God hath created both, but is the Veda that has distinguished one from the other. The heroic legends and Puranas also, no less than the Veda, recognize every kind of good and evil as kind of good and evil as creatures of the Creator. pain and pleasure; sin and religious merit; night and day; saint and sinner; high caste and low caste; demons and gods; great and small; ambrosia and life; poison and death; visible world and the invisible God; life and the lord of life; rich and poor; the beggar and king; Kashi and Magadha; the Ganges and the Karmanya; the desert of  Marwar and the rich plain of Malwa; the Brahman and the butcher; heaven and hell; sensual passion and asceticism; the Vedas and the Tantaras, and every variety of good and evil.” (English version by F.C.Growse, Fellow Calcutta University). 

           

It is a wonderful stanza poetically, philosophically and religiously. It describes the world as a manifestation of opposites, both negative positive, condemnable and commendable. Surprisingly, both are God’s creation, but with a purpose.  Choose either of the two and reap the reward accordingly.  Both lead to some action with the appropriate reward. One has the freedom to choose either of the two  but not without the test of one’s good or bad nature. In some cases, may be, it is God’s will that works but by and large it is one’s own choice and thus his responsibility which illustrates the proverb: As you sow, so shall you reap.

 

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27^th October 2022                                                                   G. R. Kanwal               

 

 

 

 

                                                HATRED

HATRED

Some of the synonyms of hatred are : dislike, hostility, ill-will, enmity, grudge, antipathy and antagonism.

            None of these traits is desirable to be cherished by any human being.

            Hatred is poisonous.  It kills the joy of him who hates and of him who is hated.

            Saints do not permit hatred.  They recommend love even towards those who hate you, if you have any quality which they dislike for any religious or secular reason.

            Someone rightly said hate no one; hate their vices, not themselves.

According to French novelist Balzac (1799-1850) hatred is the vice of narrow  souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.

            English divine F.W. Robertson (1816-53) permits the  hatred of vices like hypocrisy, intolerance, oppression and  injustice,

            What is really  disallowed by the right-minded thinkers are ugly traits which make human beings disagreeable characters.  They disallow the hatred of fellow human beings for any reason whatsoever.  Hate the sin, not the sinner is their motto, and that is O.K.

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24^th October 2022                                                                         G.R.Kanwal

 

 

 

 

RETURNING GOOD FOR EVIL

 

RETURNING GOOD FOR EVIL

            It is almost impossible for a non-Buddha to return good for evil. The  whole world  is full of  persons who persistently nourish a spirit of revenge. 

              Crime, as a  result of vindictiveness, prevails everywhere  survives not only for days but even months and years  among individuals, as well as groups  and  nations.

           To forgive and return good for evil, one has to be a Buddha. Lord Gautam Buddha (over five hundred years before Lord Christ) is said to have told a  disciple “If a man foolishly does me wrong, I will return to him the protection of my ungrudging love; the more evil comes from him, the more good shall go from me; the fragrance of goodness always comes to me, and the harmful air of evil goes to him.”

  According to him a wicked man who reproaches a virtuous one is like one who looks up and spits at heaven; the spittle soils not the heaven, but comes back and defiles his own person.

The slanderer is like one who flings dust at another when the wind is contrary; the dust returns on him who threw it.

The moral of the story is that: the virtuous man cannot be hurt: the misery comes back on the slanderer. 

So don’t be a slanderer,  be a virtuous man and return good for evil.

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19^th October 2022                                         G.R.kANWAL                                                                                                                                                  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE REALITY OF RELIGION

In his essay “The Reality of Religion, Rabindra Nath Tagore  said “I do not mean to advocate a common church for mankind,  a universal pattern to which every act of worship and aspiration must conform.’’  This view was in fact the substance of an address given at the Sri Ramakrishna Centenary Parliament of Religions, 1936 and  was later published in a book entitled: “Vedanta for Modern Man” with 60 other essays contributed  by renowned spiritualists like Aldous Huxley, Alan W. Watts, Gerald Heard, Swami Prabhavananda, Anne Hamilton, and others.

            

            Tagore said in his address: The arrogant spirit of sectarianism which so often used either active or passive, violent or subtle , methods of persecution on the least provocation or without any , has to be reminded of the fact that religion like poetry, is not a mere idea ----- it is expression. The self-expression of God is in the variedness of creation; and our attitude toward the infinite must  in its expression also must have a variedness of individuality, ceaseless and unending.   

         

According to Tagore when a religion develops the ambition of imposing its doctrine on all mankind, it degrades itself into a tyranny and becomes a form of imperialism.

This  is why, says Tagore, we find ruthless methods of autocracy in religious matters prevailing in most parts of the world, trampling flat the expansion of the spirit of man under its insensitive heels.

The most important part of the  address mentioned  above reads like this; The attempts to make the one religion which is their own,  dominate all time and space, comes naturally to men addicted to sectarianism.

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14^th October 2022                                                                   G.R.Kanwal