What is living enlightenment?
“Living enlightenment is actualizing the limitless potential and experiencing the ultimate as every moment of life unfolds afresh. Living in this divine space is living the best life and doing the greatest service to society.” ~ His Divine Holiness Paramahamsa Nithyananda (fondly known as Swamiji)
Here are the 101 expressions of living enlightenment given by Swamiji in 2010 which we can imbibe: –
Have you ever wondered why children are always so blissful?
Do you notice their eyes radiate a certain emptiness?
As the saying goes – eyes are the window to the soul! If you watch children’s eyes, they will be clear and empty, that is why they are in bliss.
What happened to us in the so-called process of growing up?
As you grow up, your eyes become filled with knowledge. Then you may have sight, but not insight, because you see through your eyes that are already filled with opinions, judgments and beliefs. Your sight is no longer innocent like a child, it is filtered and clouded because you see through the filter of your beliefs, ideas and conditioned memories. That is when you begin a life of patterns, predictability and boredom. It is the poverty in your cognition that brings boredom in your life. There is nothing new to learn from what you see because it becomes a repetition of your past memories. The learning is missed and you stop your expansion in deepening the understanding of self, life, world and God.
Boredom is a very dangerous pattern that humanity is suffering from in the modern world. Living in boredom is tantamount to life imprisonment because one wastes his or her own life just by wandering aimlessly and eventually leading to self-destruction. Life becomes mundane and boring only because your eyes are clouded with the beliefs and conditioned memories.
This whole week I was reading the chapter on Sankhya Yoga in Bhagavad Gita. Interestingly, I discovered so many clicks from Lord Krishna, the Purnavatar (complete incarnation) when he started to address Arjuna’s fear in waging a war and the patterns he was stuck in.
Sankhya Yoga is the philosophy of reality – the ultimate existential reality from Vedic tradition which gives us the right cognitions about who we are and an understanding that there is no death in reality! What exists as reality is perceived by you without the interference, perversions created by your powerless patterns. I feel this true knowledge should be given as the powerful cognitions about self in all schools as it will fundamentally change the way the next generation make important decisions in their lives, the way it had shifted my entire understanding and my life!
Here are some of the key truths from Sankhya Yoga: