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’. Set the atmosphere for a session underpinned with a feeling of love and affection. Nice.
Of his birthday, Swamiji said that 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…. look at ways in which they block the natural unfolding of our realisation of conscious presence.
Then a question, one of the big ones…. ‘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
There’s a discussion regarding the way we’ve taken the description of Reality given via the materialistic paradigm taught to us as children, and the fact that now some branches of Science put consciousness at the centre of their paradigm (e.g. especially Quantum Physics).
Further to the discussion of Consciousness as the centre of our life, Swamiji also points out that we also have our Personalities which are expressions of our uniqueness as human beings, but we can get stuck in repetitive ways of acting and feeling, and that 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.
Mandala Yoga Ashram Blog 