Daily practice of Sandhyavandhana is only a Sakthi worship

Soundarya Lahari – Daily practice of Sandhyavandhana is only a Sakthi worship From The Ocean of Beauty – Soundarya Lahari of Sri Samkara Bhagavatpada The votaries of the Sakti, the Kundalini, may be roughly divided into two classes: The Samayin-s or those who believe in the sameness of the Sakti and Siva. – They believe in …

Seeking Peace

Excerpted from FOR SEEKERS OF GOD - Spiritual Talks of Mahapurush Swami Shivananda  published by Advaita Ashrama, Kolkata, India The way to peace is very difficult -- full of thorns. ... Great effort is required to make progress in the realm of the Spirit. But if one sincerely wants to realize God, it is certainly true …

Joy and Pleasure

Pure love, sacred joy, poetic imagination, kindness, wisdom, peace, and happiness are felt inside first in the mind or the heart, and are then transmitted through the nervous system to the physical body. Understand and feel the superior joys of the inner life, and you will prefer them to the fleeting pleasures of the outer …

What is Karma ?

A king was touring his kingdom on his elephant. Suddenly he stopped in front of a shop in the market and said to his minister, "I don't know why, but I want to hang the owner of this shop." The minister was shocked. But before he could ask the king why, the king had moved …

Hidden Cause of Things

All that transpires on earth and all beyond Are parts of an illimitable plan The One keeps in his heart and knows alone. Our outward happenings have their seed within, And even this random Fate that imitates Chance, This mass of unintelligible results, Are the dumb graph of truths that work unseen: The laws of …

Modern Science and Indian Wisdom of yore

Modern science has come to the conclusion that all is one energy. Long ago, India’s wisdom came to the conclusion that all is one awareness/ consciousness, i.e. the one energy of science ‘knows itself’. It is not inert, not dead. So far, science either does not know about the claim of the Indian rishis or …

Formless Power or Powerful Forms ? – A Hindu view – 2

  He can be with form, without form and also beyond all that. Swami Shantatmananda writes in a column in the Sunday Guardian: "Sri Ramakrishna would often caution his devotees about the dangers of being rigid in one’s spiritual beliefs. He would ask the devotees whether they knew where those who speak of the formless God …

Formless Power or Powerful Forms ? – A Hindu view – 1

Dhyana shlokas of various forms of God are potent storehouses of the divine properties attributed to the respective form. There are worldwide records of people seeing the form when the bijamantra of the deity is recited with devotion after invoking the form by first reciting the dhyana sloka. People from the West who learnt mysticism …

Six Ways of Knowing as per Hindu philosophy

The five senses are doorkeepers which bring knowledge of the outer world to the mind. There are many things which we know indirectly without the direct aid of the senses. Hindu sages have classified the means of valid knowledge into six broad groups called pramānas. The knowledge that we gain through these means should be …