Our Spiritual Ancestry

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ancestry, inheritance, remembrance, spirituality

The two week period between the full moon in September and the next new moon (October 9) are observed as Mahalaya (the great wave or rhythm) – the fortnight which honors the gifts of our ancestors and our ancestry at large. I was scarcely aware of my ancestors until my father passed away and I spent some time traveling to the Ganges for the visarjan – the final letting-go of the physical remains.

The current family priest, whose generation was the holder of our family records, unrolled the biggest handwritten book I had ever seen, full of double-sized legal sheets of paper with names of our antecedents – records that must have gone back tens of generations. It was a humbling awareness, to realize that my name would become a part of that record some day.

Beyond our physical ancestry, whose records are often susceptible to be lost to our awareness, there is our spiritual ancestry. Like the DNA that is given to us, the record of our spiritual ancestry is less susceptible to be lost over time. In Indian culture, spiritual inheritance comes in two forms – smriti (oral word) and shruti (written word). Both forms have their significance, but the former is less susceptible to being lost (or destroyed) as it is preserved in the heart’s and minds of families of the preservers.

In honoring our spiritual ancestry, the first step is to remember that we actually do have one. The books, the music, the art, the festivals, the traditions, are all the physical manifestations of our spiritual ancestry. But, it goes beyond that. The greater manifestation is the pull towards self-realization through spiritual practice. Whether it be through the path of selfless, loving action, through deep inner contemplation (yoga), through deep devotion evolving through purity, or through seeking of knowledge – all the paths eventually honor our spiritual ancestry when we walk them with a spirit of open-heartedness and joy.

On the final day of the fortnight of Mahalaya, the day before the new moon, a simple offering of water (tarpan) is made to honor all our ancestors. In making an offering of water, we honor life itself. We honor our spiritual ancestry by re-aligning our heartbeat with the great rhythm – the very rhythm that we feel in the silence and the stillness of sitting on the great ocean-shore of love.

Kumud @AjmaniK

What is your spiritual ancestry? Are you aware of it? How does it influence your daily life, and the lives of those who connect with you? Share with us in our weekly twitter chat, Sunday Oct 8 at 9amET / 630pm India in #SpiritChat. Namaste.

Spiritual Ancestry through shruti

Spiritual Ancestry serves as a bridge…

On Developing Forgetfulness

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forgetfulness, habits, lightness, remembrance

Forgetfulness can be a funny thing. We often joke and laugh about our forgetfulness as we grow older. What did I walk into this room for? Where did I put my keys? What did I eat for lunch yesterday? And so on. There are also things (events) that we would like to forget. However, that is easier said than done. The things we want to forget tend to stick to us like algae on rocks. The river of time flows over the rocks, trying to dislodge the algae, but often to no avail. The harder the river tries, the faster the algae seems to want to cling. Such can be the nature of our attempts at developing “voluntary” forgetfulness.

From a mental health perspective, forgetfulness isn’t funny at all. The growth of memory related diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and dementia, poses serious challenges to our health systems, to families and to communities as a whole. The financial costs related to the treatments of these disease is conservatively estimated in the billions of dollars in the USA alone. The nature of “involuntary” forgetfulness is that it leads to memory and cognitive loss, which, in most cases, is irreversible.

The classification of forgetfulness as “voluntary” and “involuntary” is perhaps arbitrary. From a spiritual health perspective, what is perhaps important to ask is – how skilled are we at forgetting what we need to forget? Once we have learnt what we needed to learn from a particular event, how long do we keep it around in our awareness? In many instances, our brain helps us out by deciding what to immediately discard. The rest of the ‘life-stuff’ then gets filed into short-term, medium-term or long-term storage. The challenge is that we forget what got filed where.

When I moved into my previous home, I brought boxes full of stuff with me that ended up in the basement. There must have been at least two or three dozen of them, of various sizes. I had attempted to label them as best I could, so that I would know what was in them without having to open them. Fourteen years later, at least half of those unopened boxes ended up in a storage unit, in preparation for my next move. I had forgotten that I had filed away my “life-stuff”. My rationale was – maybe, someday, I may need what’s in them.

Some memories are like that. Their impression on us, our clinging to them, runs deep. The deeper the impressions, whether from pain or happiness, the harder it is for us to forget. Their depths become our comfort spaces, the valleys in which we go to hide from the world. And the more we (re)visit those spaces, the deeper they become with our fresh treads. So, how do we break the cycle? How do we make sure that the unopened boxes don’t make it into the basement of our next home?

We may have to make a decision to lighten our load, to develop voluntary forgetfulness towards certain ‘things’. Our decision may create room for other ‘things’, preferably those which leave a lighter imprint than the ones they replace. How may we do this? Any current practice, which is ‘working’ for us, can help us. For example, in meditation, we can decide to ‘forget’ the outer world and our river of ‘problems’. If we can commit to this for even for a few (tens of) minutes a day, we can create space — for remembrance in our inner world.

One unopened box at a time, we can choose to develop forgetfulness and empty our storage unit. Our new home’s basement will be grateful.

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly twitter chat in #SpiritChat – Sunday, July 8th at 9amET / 630pm India. I will make sure not to forget the tea and snacks, and questions. Looking forward to ‘seeing’ you. Namaste.

The hydrangea finally blooms… when it has (perhaps) finally forgotten about what winter was like…

Power of Remembrance

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empowerment, memory, remembrance

One of the lasting memories that I have of my Dad is when he returned home from an out-of-town assignment, exhausted and totally worn out. I asked him – Dad, why did you go when you didn’t really have to? His reply was – “I signed up to do the job, so I wasn’t go to quit halfway and come back even though I wasn’t well”. That one conversation, which barely lasted a minute, has remained lodged in my mind, thirty years on.

There are certain remembrances, that have the power to keep influencing our heart for a very long time like a warm, gentle summer rain. Then, there are others, which we would much rather divert, or even dam, for the pain and the angst that they bring back like the flash flood created by a spring thunderstorm. What distinguishes our “warm rain” remembrances from the “flash flood” kind?

Is it that the mind filters and amplifies different memories differently? Is it that we teach ourselves to “play favorites” with certain remembrances as compared to others? Is it that time and distance from the actual event change our perception of it?

Regardless of our original experience, it often happens that our own inner growth, our spiritual journey can effect a change in our heart’s attitude towards some memories. This can particularly happen with our “flash floods”. In India’s gangetic plains, flooded fields can often be the recipients of rich deposits of minerals, once the waters recede.

Those very memories, which had the power to create pain and angst among us (farmers), with patience, become the fertile grounds for new growth in our hearts. We learn to create better filters, better perspectives through which we accumulate new memories. We begin to trust ourselves more, and build better reservoirs for their preservation. We empower ourselves to let some memories go – yes, even the “warm rain” ones – if we need to lighten our load as we go up higher on the mountain.

One way that we can lighten our “memory load”, is to discover the power of “constant remembrance”. How may we discover this power? We can ask ourselves. What is the “constant” in our lives- That which is beyond the influence of time, space, and the weather of our emotions? Once we answer That question, we can create a practice of “constant remembrance”.

Let us empower ourselves to ask. It is perhaps the best way to remember the “warm rain” of all those who sacrificed their all, so that we still have the power to ask.

Kumud

P.S. Join us Sunday, May 27th at 9amET / 630pm India for our weekly twitter chat. Share some of your favorite memories in #SpiritChat – particularly those ones that empower you towards “constant remembrance”. Namaste.

On Remembrance – Do You Remember?

Tags

remembrance, spiritual practice, spirituality

The topic of the first of two lectures that our local team hosted with our invited speaker on Mother’s Day weekend a few weeks agao was – “Do you Remember?” Swami Tyagananda posed this question in a spiritual context, and led us on a conversational journey that explored “what do we rememeber”, “what do we forget”, “why do we forget” and “how do we strengthen our memory” so that we may remember That which is most important to us. On this “Memorial Day” weekend in the USA, it is perhaps appropriate to share some notes from that lecture – “Do You Remember?”

Many of us our aware of the functioning of our mind, and we often use the phrase “peace of mind” to denote or long for a state that our spiritual practice(s) may lead us towards. However, many of us may not be aware that the mind is the entry point where forgetfulness begins. If we adults try and remember our earliest memories, we can perhaps recall very few from our first five, seven or even ten years of life. The older we became, the more ‘engaged’ we became with the world around us, the more susceptible we became to the influence and the ‘dust of the world’. As we moved in and out of different physical surroundings (schools, localities, jobs and more), the content and complexity of the dust we accumulated kept changing, and often increased.

So here we are today, trying to “remember”, trying to “seek”, who we truly are – beyond what our mind is trying to inform us about us. We are trying to peel back the layers of our “personality”, get beneath our own “skin”, and hope to wash away some of the accumulated dust of forgetfulness. And when we do take the time to pause, to remember who we truly are, we have an opportunity to rediscover purpose. Remembrance of our truth can happen in a flash of insight, but it often may takes years of practice, of retraining our minds, to get to that point.

What may this practice be? The Swami suggested that it may be as simple as taking a few minutes at the beginning and the end of every day to sit, reflect, introspect. Silence helps us strengthen our spiritual memory. So does “food” that is healthy, nutritious and pure. We pay so much attention these days to our physical “food” intake, but do we pause to consider what we are feeding our minds? How much of our “inner peace” are we trading to be “better informed”? And is all that mental clutter not going to weaken our power of remembrance as we overload our capacity to remember so many diverse, transient pieces of information?

In summary, the big question is – how do we keep strengthen our memory muscles so that we can move from instances of momentary remembrance to a state of constant remembrance of truth? And what is this truth anyway? For me, it is the remembrance that I am a being made of love, from love, as evidenced by the eternal flame that glows steadily in my heart. How about you? What “Do YOU Remember”?

Kumud @AjmaniK

I invite you to join our weekly chat on Sunday May 28th, 2017 with the #SpiritChat community on twitter. We will exchange some good memories, and share memory-strengthening practices. I will remember to bring some questions. Remember to bring some answers! Namaste.

Flowers and Rain Strengthen Remembrance…