‘Actually… the day before. On a Friday evening the day before Swami Nishchalananda’s birthday we again got together with people from around Europe and the UK courtesy of online videoconferencing platform Zoom. We started with a rousing, and raucous, rendition of ‘Happy Birthday to you’ which set the atmosphere for a session underpinned with a feeling of love and affection.’
Anyone’s birthday is an opportunity to re-affirm the mystery of our life…. to come back to the basics with regard to our way of thinking, feeling, doing…. to look at ways in which they block the natural unfolding of our realisation of conscious presence.
A fundamental question…. ‘Is there a conscious presence even when there is no-one to perceive it?’
As individuals, we are expressions which come out of Conscious Presence.
Swami Nishchalananda
Our Life is far stranger than our conceptual understanding
Later in this excerpt, there’s a discussion regarding how we’ve taken the materialistic paradigm, taught to us as children, as the description of Reality. But more and more these days, some branches of Science put consciousness at the centre of their particular paradigm (e.g. especially Quantum Physics).
Further to the discussion of Consciousness as the centre of our life, the important point was made that we also have personalities. A Personality is a given fact of being alive as a human being, and each one is an expression of our uniqueness, but we can get stuck in repetitive ways of acting and feeling, and that stuckness in reactive patterns can cause us problems.
Spirituality, Yoga, doesn’t mean we have to reject our personality. It just means that we have to get a feeling for that which underlies that personality.
Swami Nishchalananda 