Skip to main content

Christmas Meditation

Every festival be it Christmas, Janmashtami or Diwali should simultaneously be a day of celebration and a day of contemplation. Christmas is as much about celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ as it is about remembering his life, his sacrifices and his teachings.



I thought of sharing a few teachings of Jesus Christ which when contemplated, practised and applied can truly make our lives meaningful.

What shall it profit a man, if he  gains the whole world and suffers the loss of his own soul?
  1. If God is all you have, you have all you need. 
  2. The kingdom of God is within your own hearts. 
  3. Knock and the door shall open, seek and you shall find.
  4. Don't build your treasures in this world - for it will be stolen by thieves, corroded by rust and rotten by time 
  5. If you have faith as much as a mustard seed and you tell a mountain to move - it will move.
  6. The meek and humble inherit the kingdom of God.
  7. Love God with all your heart and soul
  8. Love your neighbors as yourself.
  9. Those among you who is sinless can cast the first stone.
When Srila Prabhupada went to the West, one reporter asked him if he had come to America to convert Christians into Hindus. Prabhupada answered "No, I have come to make them better Christians". Whatever our religion may be, the true purpose of every religion is to help us develop our love for God.

So, on this joyous occasion of Christmas let us follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ and try to mould our lives in such a way that we can deepen our connection with God, develop genuine integrity and be an instrument of God's compassion and love in this world.

Wishing you a Merry Christmas.

- Achyut Gopal Das

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

FINDING RELEVANCE IN TIMES OF IRRELEVANCE

"The world will value us as long as we are valid. As soon as we become invalid, the world stops valuing us."  In the epic of Mahabharata, one of the most important and powerful leaders was Bhismadev. As long as he was active, fit and fine, everyone came to him for consultation and dependent on his performance, skill and valour but as soon as he became incapacitated and incapable of performing and delivering results being fatally wounded by the arrows of Arjuna, he sort of became irrelevant. No one depended on him, no one came to him for consultation. One who was visited by everyone and was the center of attraction, now hardly got visitors and became sidelined. The most crucial war of Kurukshetra continued on without Bhismadev, the most critical person. Life is such that everyone has to become outdated and irrelevant at some point or the other. No one, however powerful he or she may be can be in the limelight forever. History ultimately shows that how ever...

SPEEDING UP BY SLOWING DOWN

If you want to increase the speed of your success in life then learn to slow down. One may argue, either you speed up or slow down, how can one speed up and slow down simultaneously. It looks like a contradiction. But often life is about reconciling opposites, finding the mid-point, the balance between two extremes. I would like to explain two meanings of ‘ slowing down ’. The first meaning of slowing down is to regularly take time to analyse, introspect and recheck our direction in life. Somehow in today's high-tech world where so much value and stress is given on speed, we many times overlook the direction of our life. As Stephen Covey, the famous author aptly put it by saying - ' The difference between a leader and manager is that, a manager is one who knows how to efficiently climb the ladder, but a leader is one who knows if the ladder is on the right wall. ' Most people spend their entire life in efficiently climbing the ' so called ' ladder of success only ...

THE POWER OF QUESTIONS

The quality of answers in our life depends on quality of questions we ask. Special prerogative of the human mind is that it can think and ask questions. Given a problem, we have the ability to find solutions. The ability for making inquiries is in-built in us. That's why one of the most important medium of knowledge comes through questions and answers. It's not astonishing then to understand why both the most important Vedic scriptures - the Bhagvat-Gita and the Srimad-Bhagvatam are in a question-answer format. But not everyone is interested to ask questions and find solutions to problems that they face. Most people prefer to embrace a life of unthinking - "of playing dead", they prefer to run away from problems rather than find solutions to them. Why? For the simple fact that the answers - the truth may not always be palatable and the more difficult part is that, it may be demanding of us. We may have to leave our comfort zone and tread an unknown path. The e...