Wednesday, July 14, 2010, written by Divya Kishore
“Finding common ground among faiths can help us bridge needless divides at a time when unified action is more crucial than ever. As a species, we must embrace the oneness of humanity as we face global issues like pandemics, economic crises and ecological disaster. At that scale, our response must be as one.
Harmony among the major faiths has become an essential ingredient of peaceful coexistence in our world. From this perspective, mutual understanding among these traditions is not merely the business of religious believers — it matters for the welfare of humanity as a whole.”
—http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/opinion/25gyatso.html?src=me&ref=general
Sunday, July 11, 2010, written by Divya Kishore
Greetings, Swadharma readers! Hopefully summer is treating everyone well, and that the hiatus from the stress of school has proven to be a good opportunity for examining your faith.
I wanted to write a quick note about a couple of different things. First, on happiness: I think that happiness and spirituality are largely interconnected. Put simply, your relationship with God affects your outlook on life, and a generally positive outlook can be all that happiness means. If there’s anything (relevant to this blogpost) that I’ve learned so far this summer, it’s that we are quite in control of our lives and our outlooks. For some people, casting off the “the grass is always greener on the other side” comes naturally – for others, it takes work. Either way, I personally think that appreciating the circumstances God has placed me in and believing that I have a future, a fate, a destiny – that “everything happens for a reason” – significantly improves my own outlook on life and in effect, my overall happiness and well-being. I think this is a useful thing to keep in mind as the school year approaches, where “making lemonade out of lemons” isn’t always the easiest thing to do.
Another thing I’ve come to believe is that God not only comes to different people in different ways, but seems to even reside or resonate within different people in different ways. I’m thinking of some good friends who are extremely religious, and of others who are barely so, at all. I’m starting to think that God works for everyone in such a way that reciprocates how they allow Him to enter their lives. This borders on the abstract and non-sensical, but think of a time in your life when your spirituality was at a much different place than what it is now (if it has ever changed at all): chances are, when your approach to God was different, the way you approached every-day things in your life was different as well.
These insights are coming alongside a flurry of cleaning and organization, a day of introspection and a newfound commitment to self-improvement. I’m somewhat of a procrastinator and stress-ball – and call me weak-minded - but for me, changing these habits seems like a much less daunting task when I think of the support I can sustain from spirituality.
Finally, I’ll end on a nice Swami Vivekananda quote I ran across the other day: “Never think there is anything impossible for the soul. It is the greatest heresy to think so. If there is sin, this is the only sin – to say that you are weak, or others are weak.”
Tuesday, June 1, 2010, written by Divya Kishore
My last section of one of my classes met outside, on the grass and in the sun. We weren’t learning any new material, but were reviewing and talking about what things in the class we’d remember and take away with us. As the teaching fellow talked for a bit about the format of the final exam, my mind wandered and I thought about Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” a collection of poems that starts out as the narrator examines individual blades of grass that come together to form a larger sea of green. The poems in the anthology move from this particular instance of reckoning to larger observations of Americans and people as a whole. Basically, Whitman acknowledges the beauty of the smaller things in life (blades of grass) and builds up to put many of these small things together.
This in itself is a fairly abstract concept, but I thought about how we we can apply this idea of building larger things from small units, to the idea of time. Classical Hindu cosmology views time in terms of the gods Brahma and Vishnu, with Vishnu reclining in the cosmic sea, and Brahma sitting upon a lotus that stems from Vishnu’s navel. Time is measured in various terms: a nimesha is an atom of time, described by the analogy of a blink of an eye, whereas a kalpa is a large amount of time - described as the amount of time it takes for a large mountain, the size of Mt. Everest, to be eroded if a bird were to sweep across the top with a silk scarf once a day. One day for Brahma is one kalpa.
There are even more units of time and outlined eras — both infinitesimal and infinitely large — that I won’t go into; but I found it interesting that the Hindu concept of time acknowledges both the significance and insignificance of how we perceive time. A nimesha can be a pivotal moment in someone’s life, while our entire lifespan can be construed as a less than significant nimesha for Brahma, or in the larger scope of the universe. While I don’t think we can deem insignificant and cast away the small events and emotions of each day, I do think a healthy balance of acknowledging both the small things in our lives (or Whitman’s blades of grass) and the larger reality (what all these small units come together to form) is essential to both appreciating life and living it fruitfully. After all, during trying times, it’s comforting to know that time passes and life continues.
