The Wisdom Park

One of the greatest power a human mind has is the power of absorption. Absorption means to fully give ourselves to the task at hand, doing things wholeheartedly, with focus and attention. In fact a high sense of absorption means complete immersion - a kind of loosing oneself. Absorption is the key to true experience of life. What is the subject matter of our absorption? For children it may be a favorite cartoon serial or an engaging video game. For teenagers it may be cricket or the latest blockbuster movie. For some the topic for absorption may be a new romantic relationship building in their life. Irrespective of the subject, this sense of absorption makes one feel exhilarated, the senses come fully alive and there seems a sense of purpose to live. For many the subject of absorption is not the physical plane - the level of the senses but their own minds. People tend to be wrapped in their mental stories, their mental movies. Problem with absorption in matter - in the life o...

Bhagvat-gita 2.71 vihaya kaman yah sarvan, pumans carati nihsprhah nirmamo nirahankarah, sa santim adhigacchati "A person who has given up all desires for sense gratification, who lives free from desires, who has given up all sense of proprietorship and is devoid of false ego - he alone can attain real peace." This is one of those verses of Gita that is very deep and profound. In fact, every verse of Gita is a storehouse of wisdom. In this verse Lord Krishna mentions three enemies of peace. These are three mentalities that destroy peace. 'Want' mentality "Wants" is one of the primary reasons for our peace to be destroyed. If our mind is considered to be like pond, desires can be compared to be stones which when thrown into the pond of our mind, agitate it. The problem with desire is there seems to be no end to them. One is fulfilled another arises. In fact the mind has countless unfulfilled desires stored in it. How many can we be fulfille...

We all have areas in life that we need to work on. These are our weak points in life. Many times we unintentionally believe that our strong points will substitute for the weak ones. But it doesn't work that way. As the saying goes - A chain is as strong as it's weakest link . We need to face our weaknesses, work on it, not run away from it. We don't want to face our faults because we feel it will require a lot of hard work to rectify them. And sometimes we summon all our courage and start to work on them by changing our behavior but we seem to keep failing and lapsing back to our old habits. We finally resign to thinking "I have tried, it doesn't work, this is the way I am." If we want to alter our behavior for good then we need to alter the attitude behind the behavior. What years of struggle and effort can't do, can be done by a small flip in attitude.   One such attitude that is responsible for us holding on to our weaknesses is called the ...

One of the main pastimes of the mind is to label. It loves labeling, in fact it thrives and exits on labeling . Labeling is a wonderful tool to learn concepts by making it simple, but when it comes to experiencing life, it doesn't work so well for us especially if our labels of life are negative. Simple words, labels affect us in ways beyond our wildest imagination. They shape our views, color our lives with different perspectives. These mental labels affect practically every aspect of our life - be it personal, relationships or our experience of life in general. The mental labels start right from our birth. We identify ourselves as our body, our name, our gender. Then as we grow older, so many other labels add up to our identity. Our education, our profession, our economic status. What others tell about who we are slowly become important to us, our new labels. If someone repeatedly calls us ' useless ', slowly that turns into a label. It's not that only others ...

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 ...