The Indian budget every year has always been an eagerly awaited event. For many decades, the best minds in economics, finance, tax, business and industry throng the media house to analyze the provisions shared by the Financial Minister.
Sometimes major events completely disconnected may be data points for the plans of the different powers around the world. The challenge is to discern what purpose they serve? More critically, what are we moving towards?
When the US Ambassador threatened India's "Strategic Autonomy" policy over India's friendship with Russia - much more than meets the eye was at stake. Let us unpack how the Ukraine war has fundamentally changed the US and the world. And why are we here anyway?
For those who may have missed our last issue, here is a podcast of the main introduction of that issue, that discusses how spent a lifetime to establish people into actual spiritual sadhana and work, as opposed to memorizing scriptures. But his legacy has been reduced to the exact opposite - a book being the Guru. Some thoughts.
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In an era of no flights, buses, or trains, a committed and intense young man left his wife and two sons in the village and traveled on foot or ponies to Mecca, Gujarat, Tashkent, Nepal, Assam, and Sri Lanka. His work - to wake people up. Fashioning god into a belief system and just memorizing books would not get one to full awareness. Sadhana, actual spiritual work in guidance of a Guru would. That was his life’s commitment.
No book on the planet could take one through the rigors of spiritual work. Doesn’t matter who wrote it and how deeply profound it is. For, every book is restricted by the curse of interpretation of the reader. It is as profound or useless as the reader is. If you are an unaware life, the book with the greatest exposition of truth will be rendered trite.
Nanak, the profound, intense, committed being that he was, left a spiritual legacy. A path that worked within the context of those times.
When spiritual legacies come down as a tradition and hearsay, as opposed to initiation by a Master, they become weapons of identity enforcement. Those who swore by Nanak also started swearing by a book being the Guru. Whatever Nanak had worked for was negated. The minds who twisted Nanak’s legacy to trash his spiritual work, have worked hard to join hands with anyone to establish an identity that no Guru ever shared. That has meant killings, bombings, murders, crimes, and lies.
But that is the lure of identity. It can cook up extremely pedestrian treatise and arguments to twist the most profound works at the cost of human life and well-being.
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