In Yoke

A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger~ Proverbs 15:1 In the past few years there was a movie with Jack Nicholson as a therapist who helped folks with their anger issues by provoking them to be more angry, and then using that as an object lesson. Actually, in real life--not the life portrayed by movies, our inner life is the "controller" of our own anger issues. When you feel angry towards someone and want to say something unkind(or for me--the response is usually sarcastic ), that is all the more reason to speak kindly. If someone provokes you and you respond with anger, you are reinforcing anger as a part of your personality. Through much life experience, I know this to be true, always. Our best response to angry behavior is to relaize that by controlling our anger, we are benefitting ourselves. So returning kindness for unkindness is not simply being kind to that particular person. You're being kinder to yourself, because you are undoing a co...

Each of us sees the Unseen in proportion to the clarity of our heart, and that depends upon how much we have polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more - more Unseen forms become manifest. -Jalaluddin Rumi As your meditation deepens, there will still be occasions when you get upset, but you will be able to watch what goes on in the lab of your mind. It's like getting into a glass-bottomed boat, where you venture out onto the ocean and watch all the deep-sea creatures lurking beneath the surface: resentment sharks, stingrays of greed, scurrying schools of fear. You slowly gain a certain amount of detachment from your mind, so you can observe what is going on, collect data, and then set things right. Some of the chronic problems that millions of people suffer from today might be solved by gaining a little detachment from their minds and emotions, so they can stand back a little when the mind is agitated and see the ways in which it makes mountains out of mole...

"Thoughts of themselves have no substance; let them arise and pass away unheeded.Thoughts will not take form of themselves, unless they are grasped by the attention; if they are ignored, there will be no appearing and no disappearing." -Ashvaghosha Eswaran uses an analogy of actors on a stage to explain how our thoughts can be managed using the direction of our attention: "Life is a kind of play in which we are called upon to play our part with skill. But in meditation we are sometimes more like the audience, while our thoughts are the actors. If we could go backstage, we could see all the actor-thoughts getting made up. Anger is there putting on his long fangs. Fear is rattling his chains. Jealousy is admiring herself in the mirror and smearing on green mascara. Now, these thought-actors are like actors and actresses everywhere: they thrive on a responsive audience. When Jealousy comes out on stage and we sit forward on our seats, she really puts on a show. But...

When we get tense, it is easiest to vent our frustration by making cracks at our children, our wife, or our husband- it is a simple matter of geographic proximity. When we attack other people, when we become a source of trouble to others, it is not because we want to add to their trouble; we have just become an object of trouble to ourselves. When we are agitated, when we are ready to burst out in anger against others, the immediate solution is to go for a long walk repeating the mantram. In the ultimate analysis, our resentments and hostilities are not against others. They are against our own alienation from our native state, which is cosmic consciousness/Christ-consciousness. All the time we are being nudged by some latent force within us, trying to remind us what our native state is. Eswaran