Happy Friendship Day!

Imagine you are attending a party along with your friend! He plays all kind of foolish pranks and cracks stupid jokes. All along you are with him, quite enjoying his playing the fool. You come home with not a thought troubling you. Now imagine the same scenario with your brother! Even as the party progresses, you ask yourself a hundred times, “why is he behaving so silly? Why can’t he behave a bit more mature? What will my friends think of me now?”

Today is a day that celebrates friendship. So it is only proper that we contemplate a little bit on this most special relationship and what makes it so special? Among one thousand reasons the above mentioned scenario explains it the best.

“In friendship there is no place for judgment and labelling.”

Most often a problem in relationship comes only when you label somebody as your ‘husband’, ‘mother,’ ‘father’, ‘sister’ etc and once labelled you try to squeeze the individual to live according to the label. And then when they do not fit the label since they have their own characteristics we feel pained and somehow cheated. In friendship you do not label the person. He is given the freedom to be a fool, a good for nothing fellow, carefree, irresponsible and so on. You enjoy him and give him the space and freedom to be what he is. That is why while all of life is relationships; the best form of relationship is friendship.

The family in which the husband is a friend to the wife, the parent is friend to the child and vice versa, that family is heaven. Where there is no friendship in families, the story of that family will be written in tears.

So to celebrate friendship day in its true spirit would be to resolve to relate like a friend to all the members of your family. To give them freedom!

Happy friendship day!

Where did the Brilliant Indian Minds Go?

There was an interesting question during the last Intro Session for Unlimited Power. One of the participants who attended was surprised when Kirtanya listed out the methodology of the course. She mentioned NLP, Transactional Analysis, Silva Mind control and Life-Skills as ways to tap into the Unlimited Power each one of us has within us. He was stunned to see that none of the Indian sciences were listed and was curious to know if we (Indians) did not discover anything at all in the mind power arena.

The truth is, in the ancient days there was no parallel to the Indian Sciences when it came to addressing the human mind and life. Just think about it, we had everything, a nice climate, riches, wealth, forests, rivers; we were just too bountiful. On the other hand the western hemisphere at the same time was caught up in a turmoil of wars, harsh climates; their energy was so much focused on surviving the extreme weather. The Indians having no challenges to conquer in the external world turned their entire attention inward. The mind and consciousness and human life became very interesting research subjects for them.

And so there was an outpouring of greatest of works on the science of mind itself. The yoga sutras of Patanjali, The Vedas, Vedanta, Brahma sutras, Upanishads, Yogavasishta, every one of these is a miracle even to read through. In fact, it is said that the Mahabharatha is an ultimate thesis on the various human personalities and it contains 72000 characters each representing a personality type. So India had no dearth for wisdom. Some of its treasures still stay on.

However, the same cannot be said of the modern day India. Over a century now we have been harping on the past glories. With the advent of the British rule and subsequent poverty we have become increasingly preoccupied in solving the external challenges and are oblivious to the internal ones. The roles are in a sense reversing between the west and the east. With its high levels of sophistication, pleasure in the external world, and breaking families they are increasingly searching inward for answers and so research into the human mind has picked up momentum. With technological edge they are precisely able to study the human brain itself and so are paving way for some of the greatest discoveries in human history itself.

It is actually a pity that when technology is at its peak, the brilliant Indian minds are preoccupied with selfish miseries. In the modern era we seldom shine in our ancestor’s strong forte, our inborn talent – the mind. Of course there are the modern Gurus who teach on the mind but more often than not they are mouthed words than a direct personal discovery or an experience and always tainted with a religious bias. The need of the hour is brilliant young Indian minds dedicated to unraveling the mysteries of the human mind-brain organ. The aptitude for this is in our very genes. The result of such dedication will be mind boggling discoveries that will help the human species itself cross the last frontier – the mind.

Waiting for that day!