(PORTUGUÊS) (NEDERLANDS)
Deep studies of ancient texts, I haven't done yet. I still find all kinds of other things apparently more important, such as taking care of my family, friends, our home, for good food and creating conviviality. Still, I use every spare moment to read and study though. And this is how I have been doing it for decades. When I add up all those separate hours, it's like a long-term study and I follow it simultaneously with living my earthly life. The latter, by the way, I experience as the greatest school of learning.
One of the texts I occasionally read are the Upanishads. They are the most famous philosophical-religious works in the world and also the oldest, they say. The earliest texts were probably written between 800-500 BC. They are philosophical dialogues on the concepts of the Vedas, the central scriptures of Hinduism.
I find most of these texts enduringly topical. When I look around me in 2024 and contemplate human beings, I know that there is still much work to be done until people realise how much greatness they carry within them. This sometimes preoccupies me. All those wise words are as old as the road to Ur and perhaps even older. And still - or maybe again - at least 50 per cent of the world population, are sleepwalkers. Despite the fact that the wise have always been there to show man the way, lazy people rarely listen to true wisdom, because that means there is work to do. Rather, the population allows itself to be put to sleep by consumerism that, like hypnosis, holds everyone under its spell. What is left is a hole in people's hearts that needs to be filled with more stuff and things all the time. If not, fear of not being able to get what your neighbour has or worse to lose what you have is the guiding principle. And where there is fear, there is no love, there is no equality, no peace.
After all these years of haphazard study and conscious living, I know that we humans are capable of more than being willing sleepwalkers in this totalitarian society that is consuming itself from the inside out.
That is why I continue to teach how to develop even more consciousness of the self. Because the changes in those around me are visible, which is joyful and hopeful! The world here is filled with goodness, beauty and truth.
And now for the Upanishad I mentioned:
Katha Upanishad (1:3, 3-4a)
Know: Atman is the lord of the chariot and the body is the chariot.
Know: Consciousness is the whip and the mind the reins.
The senses are called the horses and what they perceive, is the road.
Atman I translate here as the higher consciousness. This higher consciousness is from which all people can "drink", where all people can get their wisdom, where everything is known and where we all go back to.
When we ARE AWARE of our doings in our daily lives, we are the whip, the leader of our own lives. And when we know in those sporadic moments of AWARENESS that we ourselves hold the reins with our mind then we can harness the automatic reactions rising from the subconscious and evoked by our senses - the horses. Because everything that the senses register we experience in our bodies and those feelings often make us act unconsciously as if from an ingrained pattern. Then we are not driving the mind, but letting ourselves being driven by capriciousness. So, know your self!
Happy Easter!
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