----------------------------------------------------------
Soul Sustenance 02-01-2013
----------------------------------------------------------
Keeping The Watchman Of Attention Alert
All the religions and spiritual groups place a lot of importance on the virtue of
discipline. Without discipline you do not manage to transform negative habits
and you do not create a new state of awareness where the self is nourished through
the experience of spirituality. Every day you eat, you brush your teeth, bathe,
drink water and breathe, and all of this you do not consider a discipline; you have
adopted them as something natural in order for your body to continue working. On
a spiritual level you also need to nourish yourself and to have a discipline that,
with practice, a time comes when it becomes natural because you incorporate it into
your life. In the process of change you need to discipline yourself in order not
to let old habits come to the forefront. Until you have burnt them and they
have died, you should keep the watchman of attention alert in order to maintain
your self-control, given that each time you use a negative habit in action, you
strengthen it. When you do not use it, you allow it to die.
The path of the spiritual traveler is therefore one of waking (awareness of self
as soul) and sleeping (under the illusion that we are our body), waking and sleeping.
We tend to fluctuate between the two (like dawn and dusk) until we find stability
in soul-consciousness. This is why it is important to awaken and stay awake, and
why it's important to give our mind and intellect good spiritual food (knowledge)
and exercise (meditation) every day to keep them fresh and alert. Being conscious
of the soul, acting from that consciousness, the scars (habits and tendencies) left
by past actions based on illusions of bodily awareness are healed. Discipline is
necessary for growth and personal transformation if you want to obtain satisfying
and permanent results. If not, the old habits continue to rule in your life. The
evidence that our discipline in the practice of meditation is working is mental
lightness and an increasing easiness in our interactions with others.
----------------------------------------------------------
Message for the day 02-01-2013
----------------------------------------------------------
To have knowledge in the intellect is to be constantly cheerful.
Expression: When something negative happens, we find that there are only
negative or waste thoughts about the situation or people. We try hard not to think
about it but we find only those thoughts coming to our mind. With such thoughts
the situation seems worse than it is and we find it difficult to remain cheerful.
Experience: In such situations instead of trying to cut out waste we need
to give ourselves something positive to think about. When the intellect is busy
thinking about the positive, there'll be no room for negativity. In this way we
will be able to remain constantly cheerful even in the most negative situations.
In Spiritual Service,
Brahma Kumaris