THE SOUL STORY 1

I can’t recollect which event or person or idea has sparked my interest in the subject of Higher Energy or The One, though I've always been interested in the bigger picture of things. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I studied in a convent school. Convent schools lay a lot of importance on prayer, ethics and morality, which is ultimately what your curiosity stems from. What is morally sound and what is not? Who decides? Maybe it has to do with the kind of family you come from. My grandfather was a very knowledgeable person of this subject. Even as a small girl, I used to relish our conversations. He introduced me to the larger-than-life dimension of our existence. Over time it gets uncomfortable not knowing the whole thing and you can’t expect knowledge to just come to you, especially given our way of life today, with barely enough time to sleep a decent seven hours a day and all the other time spent amidst a generation of self-proclaimed forward youth. Gone are the Value-Education classes and gone is my grandfather. I decided to help myself.

Understanding Spirituality and Religion in totality is the work of a lifetime or the work of many lifetimes. It helps to have a clear idea of the possibilities at the very least. No one can say with conviction what really happens. Too many conflicting theories exist. The way I look at it, all you have to do is choose a belief that agrees with your mindset and then live by it. The rest will take care of itself.

If you’re not inclined this way, skip this post instead of reading it in the rejection mode. What comes next is what I believe of spirituality based on how much I know of the same, my teachers being my own life experiences, dad, granddad, friends, cousins, TV shows, books (special mention to ‘One Soul Many Bodies’, Dr. Brian Weiss). Here goes.

Our mind functions on different levels. There is a conscious mind and an unconscious mind/ subconscious mind/ super conscious mind or simply, the soul. The subconscious mind is where our past experiences are stored and it is because of the subconscious mind that we feel, think and act the way we do. There are processes going on in the subconscious mind that the conscious mind is not aware of. The thoughts, creative ideas, intuition that you get are a result of the transfer of some of these processes to the conscious mind.

The subconscious mind or the soul is nothing but energy existing on a higher plane. The purpose of the soul is to heal or attain the state of love. The soul always advances spiritually and never regresses. Each life that the soul takes is to learn some more and evolve spiritually towards the state of healing. When the soul has healed completely, it reaches the highest level of energy, some call it Love, some call it God. This state of the soul of merging with The One is what we call Nirvana or Heaven.

When you die physically, the soul moves out and reviews the life it has just lived - the classic out-of body experience. The soul reviews the actions and deeds of its life and reincarnates to correct the wrong or rather make the right choices. This is Karma. When you choose good over bad, peace over violence, love over hatred, your soul spiritually evolves and heals without postponing for a future life. Unhealed souls or bad people have made and may continue making the wrong choices. Their souls will be reborn to suffer the consequences of their choices, to be faced with the same choices again till they resist the temptation of wrongdoing and make the right choices. I think that’s why in every life we interact with essentially the same set of souls, maybe related differently each time. They are called our Soul Family. Sometimes we just don’t get certain people. Maybe it’s because they are on a much lower/higher evolutionary level than us. Maybe it’s for the same reason that we instantly hit it off with certain others. Inspite of all the bickering and arguing, somehow we connect.

You never die. Your body dies and you are not what your body is. You are what your soul is and your soul is immortal. You can learn about your past lives ( hypnotism) because it’s the same soul. The problem areas of your present could have been influenced by a particular event of a past life. This understanding leads to faster healing of the soul. The earth exists to facilitate this process of learning. It’s one huge classroom.

The big question is: Where does religion and its associated practices fit in this scheme of things? Does the theory of spirituality render our culture of over 1000 years invalid?

To be continued.

THINK AGAIN.

I cleared my Oracle exam; scored an 81% neat. Yay!! The Structured Query Language has left my brain completely unstructured though. I need to return to some language that I understand (and enjoy) more. Speaking of languages, my perception of the English language has changed drastically in the last 2 months, since T.I.M.E happened (T.I.M.E is a popular coaching class that helps you prepare for the MBA entrance exams). I used to be a complete English grammar freak, a thorough perfectionist. There was no rule in grammar that I didn’t know about blah blah! All the while I was blissfully unaware of the most important rule: There are no rules in the English language. Can’t blame me though, they never said this in school.

A language is governed by the rules of its grammar say our English teachers. What is grammar if I may ask?

Wikipedia describes grammar as the ‘field of linguistics that covers the conventions governing the use of any given natural language. It includes morphology and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics. English grammar is a body of rules (grammar) specifying how phrases and sentences are constructed in the English language.’

Going by these definitions, a sentence does not qualify as correct if it does not abide by the rules of grammar. But then again, what is a language? Isn’t it a mere means of communication? Any means of communication succeeds if it can convey correctly. So then is grammar as important as we have been taught to think it is? Let's find out.

We’ve been told since the day we learnt to break a twig that a proper noun (name given to a person, place or thing) cannot be preceeded by an article. But you do agree that the Ganga is considered sacred in India. I read in the papers today that Indian artwork is scoring really well in the United States of America. (Apparently a stainless steel mirror sculpture by Indian artist Anish Kapoor sold for a sum of Rs. 6.8 crore at Sotheby’s sale of contemporary art in London.) I would myself love to own a Jiaur Rahman. (He is a brilliant young Indian artist. What you see in this post is a watercolour by him titled ‘Rainwashed’. You can check out more of his works at http://www.jiaurrahman.com/). The joys brought by fine art are something else; and they say abstract nouns (names given to physical entities that we cannot see, hear, touch, taste or smell) cannot be used in plural. Yeah right!

What about Mc. Donald’s very famous tagline, “I’m Loving It!” It’s grammatically incorrect. Do we question it? No. Do we use it? Yes, because it speaks to us. It’s become a trend! There’s another rule stating that words indicating indefinite quantity (some, few, many, much, more) have to be followed by plural forms but we never say ‘some breads’, do we? They also say that collective nouns are always followed by verbs in the singular form but the committee was never seated around the Round Table. The committee were seated around the Round Table. The simple present tense, as a rule, is used to indicate facts, habits, opinions and routine activities. But we use it more frequently to predict future events!

There are a hundred other such exceptions that you will come across if you pay a little attention and this is only about spoken English. Written English is another story altogether! So how can rules be called rules if there are more exceptions to them than normal occurences?

Grammar, in practical terms, is just a set of guidelines agreed upon by the world to standardize the language. Without grammar, what an Indian perceives of a verbal communication may be completely different from what the American intended to say. The Wren & Martin is not the Bible. Of course, there are a few basics we can’t argue about, but that’s about it. After all, the language came first, not the Wren & Martin.