Each individual on Earth is exploring in a physical body new ways of experiencing life. Through this process of discovery, each of us is developing a deeper level of understanding of life and a greater ability to express our divine essence. This divine essence is the fullest expression of each individual's soul, and most closely exemplifies the Divine's capabilities therein.
Divine essence is a level of divine awareness that was inherent in each soul when it was initially conceived by the Divine. It is also the natural state of the soul that has removed itself from the controlling aspects of hierarchical belief systems through the complete awakening of its sacred intentions. All souls are in various stages of transformation, and all people are destined to attain a level of conscious awareness of divine essence as their sacred intentions are fully awakened.
Profound personal transformation is initiated by the realization that you are capable of direct access to the Divine. This is the realization that the wisdom of the Divine is discovered deep within your own soul. In other words, your body, complete with its physical, mental, and emotional capabilities, is not the repository of your sacred intentions. Nor is your mind able to reach out and access this divine inner calling which tirelessly beckons, inviting you towards the glorious joy of ever deeper connection with All That Is. It is the soul that is the harbor of your divine essence. And it is the soul that is the vehicle of access to the awakening of your sacred intentions, which opens the door to profound transformation through the integration of your body, mind, heart, and soul.
Through opening to meaningful connection not only with your own divine essence, but with that of all living beings, the experience of profound personal transformation eventually triggers the realization that perceived reality is the Divine personified in the form of individual preferences. Thus when your sacred intentions are fully awakened, divine reality and your perception of reality become inseparable as the wind and the air. This confluence is only completely realized through the full transformation experience, which is unlike anything known within human experience.
There have been those upon Earth who have ventured into the shallows of this boundless ocean. Some have called it ascension; others have attributed names like illumination, enlightenment, nirvana, and cosmic consciousness. While these experiences are profound by human standards, they are only the initial stirrings of divine essence as it becomes increasingly adept at touching and awakening the remote edges of its existence. What most would define as the ultimate bliss is merely an impression of their divine essence whispering to its outposts of form and nudging them to look within to the roots of existence, and to unite with the formless and limitless divine intelligence that pervades all.
The full transformation experience is far beyond the scope of the human drama, much like the stars in the sky are beyond the touch of Earth. We can see the stars with our human eyes, but we will never touch them with our human hands. Similarly, we can dimly foresee the full transformation experience as humans, but we cannot experience it through being human. It is accessed through the wholeness of the soul, for it is only in wholeness that the soul's sacred intentions and their catalytic effect of divine perception can be fully experienced.
This level of wholeness is attained only when the individual consciousness has separated from time and is able to view its existence in timelessness. Nevertheless, the human stage of existence is essential in facilitating personal transformation and causing it to trigger—like a metamorphosis—the integration of your formful identities into divine essence.
Self-mastery through personal transformation is the next stage of perception and expression for your soul. It is initiated when you choose to design your life based upon principles that are symbolic of the Divine. As you become increasingly responsive to the Divine, you naturally gravitate towards life principles that symbolically express the formative principles of divine creation.
The below principles are divine templates of creation. They are designed to help you experience life from the perspective of divine essence. They are principles that construct opportunities for the integration of your formless and formful identities. They are bridges through which you can access the experience of wholeness by perceiving with your divine essence.
There is a wide range of means that can facilitate self-mastery through personal transformation and disengage the soul from external controls. Inasmuch as the means may vary, the intent behind the means is quite narrowly defined as the intent to expand into a state of integration whereby all aspects of your conscious self become increasingly aligned with your divine essence.
There are three particular life principles that help to align your perspective with the perspective of divine essence and thus inspire profound transformation.
They are:
1) Seeing the Divine in all
2) Nurturance of life
3) Gratitude
When you apply these principles, a deeper meaning will be revealed to the seemingly random events of your life experience—both in the personal and universal contexts.
Seeing the Divine in All
This is the principle that the Divine is present and can be seen everywhere and in all manifestations of life. It is interwoven in all things like an intricate mosaic whose pieces adhere to the same wall, and are thus unified. However, it is not the picture that unifies the mosaic, but the underlying wall upon which its pieces adhere. Similarly, the Divine paints a picture so diverse and seemingly unrelated that there appears to be no unification. Yet it is not the outward manifestations that unify. It is the inward center of divine energy upon which the pieces of diversity are layered that unifies all life.
This centerpiece of divine energy is the collective storehouse of all life within the universe. It is the full expression of the Divine, which invests itself in all forms through the projection of its divine intelligence into all manifestations of life. Thus, divine intelligence—acting as an extension of the Divine—is the unifying energy that is the "wall" upon which all the pieces of life's mosaic adhere.
Seeing the Divine in all is the principle that all manifestations of life convey an expression of All That Is. It does not matter how far the unifying energy has been distorted or corrupted; the Divine can be observed. It is the action of perceiving the unification of energy even when the outward manifestations appear random, distorted, or chaotic. It is the realization that all life flows from one divine energy source that links all to One and one to All.
When every manifestation of life can be genuinely perceived as a fragmentary expression of All That Is, the vibration of equality that underlies all life becomes perceptible to you. You realize that life initially emerges as an extension of the Divine, and then, as an individuated energy frequency invested within a form. This individuated energy vibrates, in its pure, timeless state, precisely the same for all manifestations of life. This is the common ground that all life shares. This is the tone or vibration of equality that can be observed within all life forms that unifies all expressions of diversity to the very foundation of existence. If you are able to look upon any and all forms of life with the outlook of equality, then you are seeing the Divine in all.
While this may seem like an abstract concept, it is actualized through the practice of looking for the outward and inward manifestations of the Divine. In a very real sense, you expect to observe the workings of divine intelligence in every facet of your experience.
The principle of seeing the Divine in all is the unassailable expectation that everything is in its rightful position, performing its rightful function, and serving its purpose to activate the fullest expression of its life in the present moment. It is the outlook that all life is in a state of optimal realization and experience regardless of condition or circumstance. It is the perception that life is perfect in its expression because it flows from perfection, and that no matter how divergent its manifestations are, all life is an extension of the Divine.
In light of the obvious turmoil and destruction that are apparent on Earth, this is an outlook or perception that may seem naive. How can life—in all its forms and expressions—be perceived as optimal or perfect? This is the great paradox of life, and it cannot be reconciled with your mental or emotional capabilities. It can only be understood in the context of the soul, which is deathless, timeless, and limitless. Paradoxes exist because the human drama is too limited in scope and scale to allow a perception of wholeness to illuminate how the pieces of the puzzle are unified in perfect relation.
The human drama is circumscribed by the dimensions of time and space and the elements of energy and matter. It is played out upon the stages of survival and dysfunctional behavior because of the methods of controlling information and manipulating conditions used by those operating within the hierarchical paradigm. The soul within the human body is largely unexpressed and underutilized in this human drama, and therefore, life's apparent perversions and imperfections are seen in isolation as impediments to perfection rather than perfection itself.
Life is perfect in its resolve to expand and express an intelligence that is limitless. This is the fundamental purpose of life in all its diverse manifestations.
The presence of the Divine expressing itself as a vibration of equality can be seen in all things. Sensory input derived from the human body is limited to frequencies in specific ranges that only convey an echo of this divine vibration. The divine resonance of all life is understood only through deliberate and focused contemplation of the equality inherent in all things, and through the ability to penetrate beyond the image of a thing to the origin of the image. Calling forth the divine perceptions of the soul within your own being is the ideal method to access lasting sensitivity to the divine vibration. This is how you develop the ability to see the Divine in all.
It is not only that the Divine is found within you and within every individual manifestation of life; it is also in itself the wholeness of all life. Thus, this principle calls for seeing the Divine in all its diverse forms of manifestation, as well as in the wholeness of life itself.
These insights stimulate a new sensory system beyond the five senses that rule the physical world.
These new senses are an outgrowth of the awakening of your sacred intentions. They are manifestations of the first stage of profound personal transformation. With this new perceptual ability, you will be capable of sensing not only the presence of the Divine, but also the timeless divine essence that exists at the core of every living being.
Nurturance of Life
Life, in this definition, is an individual's sovereign reality. It is subjective and impressionable. Life is the wholeness of experience flowing past the individual's field of perception in the present moment. There is never a closure to life, nor a final chapter written. It is eternal, not only in the abstract sense of never ending or beginning, but also in the real sense that life is ever expanding in order to express divine intelligence in all realities within the universe.
Nurturance of life is the principle whereby an individual is in alignment with the natural expansion of intelligence inherent within all life. This alignment enhances the life energy that flows past the individual with the clear intent of gentle support. It is the action of opening to the highest motive in all people and in all life and supporting the flow of this highest intention towards its ultimate expression. In so doing, the action is performed without judgment, analysis, or attachment to outcome. It involves simply nurturing the highest energy that flows from all people and all beings, and thus supporting the fullest expression of their deepest essence.
This is a departure from the normal perception that nurturing support can only be granted when others are in alignment with your personal will and desires. When, instead, you view everything in your life as an integrated energy flowing as an expression of ever-expanding divine intelligence, all life is honored as an extension of the Divine. In this context, there is no energy that is misdirected or unworthy of support and nurturance. While this may seem contrary to the evidence of abusive energy upon the Earth, even energy that is laden with "evil intent" is nevertheless energy that is flowing outward in search of a higher expression.
All people and all forms of life can be nurtured and supported to their highest expression. This is the fundamental purpose of this principle. It is greatly facilitated by the intention to perceive the original motive and ultimate expression of life energy as it passes through your field of awareness.
Energy is an element of life that is so subtly interwoven with form that it is one, in much the same manner as space and time are inextricably linked in union. Energy is a motive. It is intelligent beyond the mind's ability to reason. While it is a force that can be subject to applications that deny its highest expression, energy is always imbuing life with the motive to expand and evolve.
Life energy is always in a state of becoming. It is never static or regressive in its natural state. You are very capable of nurturing this natural expansion of energy to forge new channels of expression and experience. In fact, it is your primary purpose to expand the life energy that encircles your personal reality, and to transform it to new levels of expression that more clearly reflect the perspective of divine essence.
There are many specific actions that can be taken to nurture life. Each soul has the innate ability to transform energy through a tremendous variety of means. Working through your body, your soul is able to collect and store energy and redirect its purpose or application. This transformation of energy can occur on both personal and universal levels of expression. That is, within an individual's field of awareness, energy can be transformed to conform to a vision of personal welfare, or aligned with a vision of universal welfare and goodwill, or a combination of these two.
One of the best methods to transform energy is through one's belief system. All beliefs have energy systems that act like birthing chambers for the manifestation of your perceived reality. Within these energy systems are currents that direct life experience. Your soul is aware of these currents either consciously or unconsciously and allows them to carry you into the realm of experience that exemplifies your core belief system.
By cultivating beliefs that expand and transform energy, you are able to engage energy systems that are nurturing to life in all its myriad forms. When your beliefs are clearly defined as intentions—as preferred states of being—your life energy engages fully in the present moment. Your energy system becomes inseparable from your being and woven into your spirit like a thread of light. Clarity of intention is essential to engaging the energy system of your core beliefs, and to allowing the nurturance of life to prevail in all activities.
So again, the nurturance of life is essential to both personal and collective realities within the universe, which contains all realities that are interlinked like threads of an infinitely expanding fabric. Thus, as you awaken to your own creative power to transform life energy outside of yourself and enhance it with the clear intent of gentle support, you naturally experience ever-unfolding transformation within yourself as well. You become an increasingly clear beacon of the Divine and an architect of a new paradigm based upon the intention to nurture all life in the universe.
Gratitude
This principle is based on the understanding that the universe represents a collective intelligence that can be personalized as a single universal soul—a composite expression of the Divine. Thus, in this perspective, there are only two souls in the entire cosmos: the individual soul and the universal soul. Inasmuch as the individual is impressionable and constantly changing to adapt to new information, so is the universal soul, which is a dynamic, living template of collective energies and experiences that are coherent and as knowable as a friend's personality and behavior.
The universal soul is responsive to the individual soul and its beliefs and perceptions. It is like a composite omni-personality that is imbued with divine intelligence and responds to the perceptions and belief systems of the individual like a pool of water mirrors the image that overshadows it.
Everyone is indeed, at their innermost core, an enlightened soul that can transform themselves into an instrument of divine essence. However, this transformation is dependent on whether the individual chooses to project an image of divine essence upon the "mirror" of the universal soul, or to project a lesser image that is a distortion of its essential state of being.
The principle of gratitude is primarily concerned with consciously designing your self-image through an appreciation of the universal soul's supportive mirror. In other words, the universal soul is a partner in shaping reality's expression in your life. If you choose to project a transformed image upon the mirror of the universal soul, reality gradually becomes an internal process of creation that is increasingly free of external controls and conditions.
This process involves an interchange of supportive energy between the individual and the universal soul. This energy is best applied through an appreciation of how perfect and exacting this interchange occurs in every moment of life. If you are aware—or at least interested in having the awareness—of how perfectly the Divine, as expressed in the form of the universal soul, supports your sovereign reality, there is a powerful and natural sense of gratitude that flows from you to the Divine. It is this wellspring of gratitude that opens wide the channel of support from the Divine to the individual and establishes a collaboration of purpose to transform the individual soul into a pure expression of divine essence.
It is principally gratitude—which arises naturally through appreciation of how the relationship between the individual and the universal soul operates—that opens you to connection with your divine essence, and to your eventual transformation into the state of perception and expression of divine essence. The relationship of the individual with the universal soul is essential to cultivate and nurture, because this relationship, more than anything else, determines how accepting each individual is of life's myriad forms and manifestations.
When you accept changes in your sovereign reality as the shifting persona of the universal soul, you live in greater harmony with life itself. Life becomes an exchange of energy between you and the universal soul that is allowed to play out without judgment, and is experienced without fear. This is the underlying meaning of unconditional love: to experience life in all its manifestations as a single, unified intelligence that responds perfectly to the projected image of each soul.
It is for this reason that when you project gratitude, regardless of circumstance or condition, life becomes increasingly supportive in opening you to further awakening your sacred intentions. This feeling of gratitude coupled with the mental concept of appreciation is expressed like an invisible message in all directions and at all times. In this particular context, gratitude is the overarching motive behind all forms of expression to which humanity aspires.
Every breath, every word, every touch, every thought is centered on expressing this sense of gratitude; a gratitude that you are sovereign and supported by a universal soul that expresses itself through all forms and manifestations of life with the sole objective of creating the ideal reality to fully awaken your sacred intentions and transform your entire being into divine essence. It is this specific form of gratitude that accelerates the awakening of your sacred intentions and their inherent ability to integrate your body, mind, heart, and soul, and to transform your ability to perceive and express from the place of divine essence.
Time is the primary factor that distorts the otherwise clear connection between the individual and the Divine. Time establishes separation of experience. This creates doubt in the Divine's system of fairness and overarching purpose. This doubt, in turn, creates fear that the universe is not a mirror but rather a chaotic, whimsical energy. Time intervenes to create pockets of despair, hopelessness, and abandonment. However, it is these very "pockets" that often motivate awakening the sacred intentions of your soul, as they cause you to seek a more intimate and harmonious relationship with the Divine.
When you are aligned with divine essence and live from this perspective as part of an ever-unfolding reality, you attract a natural state of harmony. This does not necessarily mean that your life is without problems or discomforts; rather it signifies a perception that there is an integral purpose in what life reveals. In other words, life experience is meaningful to the extent that you choose to live in natural harmony with divine essence. When your personal reality flows in alignment with divine essence, you create lasting joy and inner peace.
Gratitude is an essential facet of love that opens you to acknowledge the role of the universal soul and to redefine your purpose as a supportive extension of the Divine, rather than the whimsical outreach of fate or the exacting reaction of a mechanical, detached universe. Establishing a relationship with the universe through the outflow of gratitude attracts life experience that is deeply transformative—experience that is richly devoted to uncovering life's deepest meaning and most formative purpose.
The Emergence of Divine Essence
Through the ongoing application of these principles of transformation, divine intelligence increasingly permeates your soul, and your soul becomes the identity of your entire being. Thus, identity is transformed, and in the wake of this transformation, divine essence unifies your entire being with your soul, and your soul with divine intelligence. It is this unification and shift of identity that is the explicit purpose of these life principles. If there is any other intention or objective, these principles will remain misunderstood and their catalytic powers will remain dormant.
It is the perspective of divine essence that all life is pure love in its fullest expression, and that in this single concept, all life is conceived and forever exists. This becomes the core belief from which all other beliefs arise. And as these beliefs expand outward, this core belief system emerges with a clear intent of supporting a fundamental perspective of seeing, nurturing, and appreciating the universe as the divine cradle from which all life is created and evolves.
These principles of transformation are merely symbols represented in words and served to you as a potential recipe to stir awake the embers of light that tirelessly burn within. There are no specific techniques or rituals that are required to invoke their power. They are simply perspectives. In a real sense, they are sacred intentions that attract experience that expands consciousness. They do not provide quick fixes or instant realizations.
They are amplifiers of personal will and intention that clarify how one lives. Their transformative power is contained exclusively in the intent of their application.
Through these principles, you can become a master of empowering your deeper self. In the past, boundaries were set, secrets were kept, and your light was subdued simply because your perception of external, hierarchical controls created in you fear of the unknown and of the mystical practices of transformed souls.
Now, if you choose to apply these life principles with clear intent, you have the tools to accelerate the emergence of divine essence. You can awaken the perspective, insights, and empowered abilities of your divine essence to create new realms of possibility and shape them as learning adventures that liberate and expand your consciousness. This is the underlying purpose of these principles, and perhaps the best reason to explore them.
This is the first of a two-part essay, for part two:http://www.weboflove.org/consciousnessparadigms
For a two-page summary of Principles of Transformation:http://www.weboflove.org/transformation
Saturday, December 29, 2007
The Principles of Reiki
JUST FOR TODAY
1. Do not anger
2. Do not worry
3. Earn your living honestly
4. Honor every living being
5. Live with the attitude of gratitude
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Just for today...
It expresses the importance of undertaking to do everyday things, without anxiety or hurry, concentrating on the moment's reality and intensely living it. Here and now are the coordinates of the present, what is past does not exist any longer and it slows down our way, what still has to happen does not really exist and it departs us from bringing all our energy in what we are doing. Past very often brings with it anger and grudge while future brings worry...
Do not anger and worry...
Do not anger and worry...
Anger rises from received wounds or from the sensation that someone is doing something bad to us. Renouncing anger means first of all to recognize and to express it, to express our feelings clearly and decidedly, to learn how to protect our space, our life and our relationships. Renouncing anger does not mean to forget or to remove it because doing that it would express itself through the body and through physical troubles such as: stomachache, ulcer, digestion problems, liver problems, irritability and inability to communicate. The meaning of this principle is to eliminate the causes of the anger, recognizing who or what hurts me and acting consequently, talking about and expressing what we think and what we feel. And even if we cannot do anything to change a situation, we can consider the possibility to get out of a vain pain in time. The ways to renounce anger are forgiveness, to let go and comprehension: these are the qualities we have to develop through Reiki.
Worry rises from unsureness, from the fear of what we are and of what is expecting us, from thinking about an event and its unpleasant consequences. Worry and anxiety denote lack of trust and abandonment; it is as if we should always keep everything under control in order to foresee every event. Renouncing worry means to enjoy life moment by moment, believing that everything happens for my best good, to let force and consciousness rise inside me together with the sensation that everything is going well, everything is going as it has to go and that I have simply to let me go and enjoy life.
Earn your living honestly...
Kahlil Gibran writes that "Work is love made visible". This principle reminds us the importance to be right with our conscience, to be loyal and honest first of all with ourselves in any thing we do, it reminds us that the more important work is building our same life day by day. How could we have a healthy and strong body if our mind is full of deceits, lies and subterfuges? How can we think to be happy if we cause sufferings to others? It is written in the Gospel: "You will love your neighbour like yourself". And also "Do not do to others what you do not want to be done to you". These are the keys to open our life to light and to feel in peace with ourselves. Work is a marvellous opportunity to offer our contribution to life, to show our gratitude and thankfulness to the Spirit, to be proud of ourselves when we obtain a result.Without honesty and integrity which satisfaction would it be?
Kahlil Gibran writes that "Work is love made visible". This principle reminds us the importance to be right with our conscience, to be loyal and honest first of all with ourselves in any thing we do, it reminds us that the more important work is building our same life day by day. How could we have a healthy and strong body if our mind is full of deceits, lies and subterfuges? How can we think to be happy if we cause sufferings to others? It is written in the Gospel: "You will love your neighbour like yourself". And also "Do not do to others what you do not want to be done to you". These are the keys to open our life to light and to feel in peace with ourselves. Work is a marvellous opportunity to offer our contribution to life, to show our gratitude and thankfulness to the Spirit, to be proud of ourselves when we obtain a result.Without honesty and integrity which satisfaction would it be?
In order to maintain healthy and strong your body, you have to love it.In order to love it, you have to take care of it as if it was a child, to ask it often how it is, what it would like to do, where it would like to go and so on. In order to take care of someone, you have to respect him deeply and to have a deep comprehension for his needs. That's why you desire to thank him for all what he did and is doing for you. Love, care and gratitude put together form the verb "To Honour". Honouring our mother and father for giving us life means honouring ourselves and our choice of living. Honouring the teachers and the elders means to open humbly to the learning and the knowledge and to recognize the value of wisdom and of experience. Honouring every form of life means to celebrate praises to the Creator and to thank him for the great variety and magnificence of forms and colours and to thank ourselves to share all it. The world belongs to you but you have to nourish a deep sense of responsibility, you cannot kill and destroy without making this action backfiring against yourself.
Show gratitude...
Those who practice Reiki discover the importance to say "thank you". Thanking means to accept all what surrounds us and ourselves in an only embrace, thanking is a sweet moment of fragility and privacy which connects you to the universe. Every day we receive our daily bread, every day the Spirit generously gives us his gifts in form of air, water, love, sunsets, starry skies, seas and mountains, food and life energy. We sometimes forget to be alive, we forget about all the love we received, we get lost in the meanders of suffering and we forget about all the joy we felt in our life. We become hard and detached, cool and disappointed. Thanking for the received gifts makes us feel human again and let the life warmth enter inside us.
INTRODUCTION
Those who practice Reiki discover the importance to say "thank you". Thanking means to accept all what surrounds us and ourselves in an only embrace, thanking is a sweet moment of fragility and privacy which connects you to the universe. Every day we receive our daily bread, every day the Spirit generously gives us his gifts in form of air, water, love, sunsets, starry skies, seas and mountains, food and life energy. We sometimes forget to be alive, we forget about all the love we received, we get lost in the meanders of suffering and we forget about all the joy we felt in our life. We become hard and detached, cool and disappointed. Thanking for the received gifts makes us feel human again and let the life warmth enter inside us.
INTRODUCTION
Reiki is an old discipline of oriental origin which aim is to harmonize heart and mind using the spiritual endowments that the human beings are gifted with since their birth: love, compassion, bravery, sympathy, brotherhood, confidence... The purpose of Reiki is to help people to keep their body in good health and lead a peaceful life. All the activities of the Cultural Association "International Reiki Center" are addressed to both physically and psychically independent, self sufficient, mature and healthy people who are looking for a deep sense of their own life and who yearn for an interaction with other human beings or with nature in its every display. The word "healing", if one makes use of it, has to be considered as a synonym of happiness, accomplishment, and illumination. Reiki has no ideological or political purpose; it does not contrast either with any religious confession or claims to take the place of the western medicine or the medical sanitary therapy. The activities of the association are solely addressed to its members and the Reiki International Center does not take upon itself any responsibility for the activities which might have been undertaken by single operators or centers out of its institutional center.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Flow with Soul
An interview with Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
by Elizabeth Debold
Introduction
Creativity—his own, others', and that of life itself—has been the entry point into evolution for Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "chick-sent-me-high-ee"). Truly an international renaissance man, born in Hungary, a graduate of the classical gymnasium "Torquato Tasso" in Rome, and an artist, Csikszentmihalyi earned his Ph.D. in psychology in 1965 from the University of Chicago, where he would eventually teach.
Yet the bounds of psychology could contain neither his creativity nor his desire to find a greater order: "Somehow I always gravitated to the people in various disciplines—whether it's psychology, sociology, anthropology—who saw a certain unity in their field, who were not what later became known as postmodern reductionists," he explained, speaking on the telephone from his office at the Claremont Graduate University.
Influenced by Carl Jung and reading widely in religion, Csikszentmihalyi found himself intrigued by "people who kind of stepped back and tried to say, 'What is it that's going on in this messy and confusing pattern of human behavior over time?'
And I was influenced greatly, for instance, by Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit who developed this notion of evolution." Even his current position as a professor at Claremont's Drucker School of Management is a new evolutionary turn in a life lived with passion and curiosity.
Csikszentmihalyi is most well known for his bestselling 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. He defined and explored the concept of "flow"—as in "in the flow"—as our experience of optimal fulfillment and engagement. Flow, whether in creative arts, athletic competition, engaging work, or spiritual practice, is a deep and uniquely human motivation to excel, exceed, and triumph over limitation. Csikszentmihalyi describes his life's work as the effort "to study what makes people truly happy."
The emphasis here is on the word "truly"—because to him, happiness is not simply flow nor an emotional state nor even the experience of pleasure. The happiness he points to involves the continual challenge to go beyond oneself as part of something greater than one's own self-interest.
What compelled us to speak to Dr. Csikszentmihalyi was his constantly evolving understanding of individual human development in the context of evolution. Ever the empiricist, he has systematically explored what it means to bring the laws of material evolution into both human and cultural development.
In his books The Evolving Self and Finding Flow, he develops a moral and ethical perspective on flow as a force of evolution. Integrating the concept of flow with a contemporary understanding of ancient wisdom teachings, he offers a new paradigm for human living rooted in his recognition that human beings now have the unique opportunity—and obligation—to become conscious participants in evolution. In the following interview, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi invites us to join in creating an evolutionary psychology founded in a deeper understanding of human motivation and an attention to our inescapable interconnectedness.
interview
WIE: In your books The Evolving Self and Finding Flow, you speak about evolution, particularly about human evolution. Could you define what you mean by "evolution"?
MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI: At the most abstract level, what I mean by "evolution" is the increasing complexity of matter, which results in increasing possibility for consciousness. Here I'm differing from the view of [French Jesuit paleontologist] Teilhard de Chardin. He thought that rocks had a consciousness appropriate to their own material organization.
I don't know whether they do or not, but his view was that whenever there is matter organized in some system, there is a commensurate level of consciousness, which reaches its apogee in the human nervous system being as it is the most intricate system, where you can code and store information of all different kinds.
Smells, sights, inner feelings, and thoughts can all get stored because there is enough space, and the units are connected so that you can begin to draw parallels and see similarities and develop cause-and-effect relationships and so forth.
So you have this system that is very complexly organized, very intricately differentiated, and very integrated. Those are the two dimensions of complexity that you always see in evolution: differentiation and integration. Differentiation allows you to use different parts, for instance, different cells in your brain, different neurons to store information.
And at the same time, these differentiated cells are connected to each other, or integrated, so that they can talk to each other, so to speak. Okay? They can exchange information. This is one way to talk about evolution: the process by which matter becomes more complex, allowing for more complex consciousness.
Then, of course, we see the results of humans becoming conscious begin to extend outside the body. And that's where we begin to see the evolution of culture, where we are able to store information not just in the brain but also in cave paintings and buildings, and then books and computers, etcetera. That begins to enlarge the amount of information about the universe that we can, in principle, deal with.
But I don't think the direction of evolution is laid down in any sense. We, having become aware of what is going on, have to decide for ourselves to what end this information should be directed and where it should be going. And I think that from the abstract level, the signposts for those decisions are again differentiation and integration.
You want a future where people are free to develop whatever unique blueprints they carry in their genes, and you want that freedom to blossom as much as possible, but at the same time, you want each person to see that they are part of something much greater. That's where the integration comes in—it starts with feeling that you belong to a family, to an ethnic group, to a church and to a nation.
But unless you realize that you're also part of all the living systems and the planet—that there is something beyond all of this that we can sense—unless you're part of that, then evolution would not be very successful, as far as I can tell.
WIE: What kinds of things catalyze evolution?
MC: That's a good question. In the past, of course, there have been random changes like asteroids hitting the earth, which killed off a certain type of species and then allowed another one to take over. There's also an explanation that would say that it's really entropy that runs evolution, in the sense that all species try to get as much out of the ecosystem as they can, with the least amount of effort.
And that would fit with the second law of thermodynamics [that all systems tend to disorder over time]. If there was no entropy, in other words, if things did not tend to decay and dissolve in competition with other forms, then a better form would not necessarily stand out and become widespread. Okay?
You could claim, therefore, that it is because this constant competition for survival eliminates the worst forms that better forms are able to be recognized, endorsed, and developed.
For example, here comes someone who, instead of having to run after a deer, can go on a horse. They are expending much less energy getting their deer meat, so the horse becomes suddenly very popular. The Plains Indians in America adopted horses within a relatively short time of when the Spaniards introduced them.
They saw how useful they were, how much energy they could save. And the same with rifles. This principle, I think, applies mostly to technological evolution, to the evolution of tools, the evolution of technologies that are adopted because they defeat entropy to a certain extent. They save you energy; that's why you adopt them.
And then, if there is any species that can find a way of getting more energy out of the environment than others with less effort, then that is the species that will have an advantage for a certain period. This is probably the most reductionistic view—that evolution would be based on entropy itself.
I believe in Occam's razor* however, I'm not endorsing this view. I'm just saying this is one way that people have explained how evolution is catalyzed.
WIE: Are there other views that you endorse more?
MC: Well, I can see entropy as being the original impetus for adopting different things, but I think that when we come to humans, who have this consciousness, then a different set of rules begins to apply. And those are the rules that come out of actually reflecting on experience, reflecting on history, on what happens around humans. And that reflection tells you, "Wait a minute, this is not all we can be, this is not all we can do. There are better ways of doing it." And at that point, you have the possibility of getting beyond what you learned before. A lot of art, literature, religion, and philosophy is born out of this need to go beyond what you were before.
Some people say we have been able to reflect on our own thinking for only about three thousand years. Once that happened, the old rules of evolution began to change. We're no longer subject to the determining influence of the genes as much as we were. We are no longer subject to the determining influence of our social/cultural environment as much as we were before.
We are no longer determined by entropy as much as we were before. This is a fairly recent step in evolution. Very recent, considering how long it took us to get, let's say, from Lucy [our early Cro Magnon ancestor] to Homer's writing of The Odyssey—it was millions of years. Then suddenly, bingo. So this is a very new game. And there are lots of mistakes that we made, that our species is making, but I think it's a tremendous opportunity, too.
WIE: So this new catalyst for evolution is inherent in humans?
MC: I think it's inherent in this particular being that has this way of processing information, that has this very complex brain. And so yes, it is inherent in humans. I don't think anybody put it in us.
That's how I would differ from, let's say, a religious interpretation where the assumption is that we have been infused with some form of a soul from outside. Whereas I think what we call "soul" is generated by the complexification of our body, essentially our brain.
When you look at the pre-Christian version of "soul," you see that what they meant wasn't so much a soul that was a different substance infused or injected into the body. It referred to a quality in a person who was able to use surplus energy for the benefit of others, not needing to get it all for himself.
I came to the conclusion that "soul" is really our way of thinking about not devoting all of one's psychic energy to maximize oneself in any form, whether it's getting comfortable, rich, famous, or wealthy. Some of that energy is also devoted to somebody else's or something else's well-being, or advantage, or goal. So that kind of thing is "soul" as far as I'm concerned.
That's the leading edge of evolution, where you don't need to consume all your energy for your own purposes, but you can devote some of that energy for something that will benefit others, including the planet.
Flow for Evolution
WIE: In your research, you have explored what you call "flow," or optimal human experience, as having an important relationship to evolution. Could you explain this?
MC: My hunch is—and, of course, there is no proof of this—that if an organism, a species, learns to find a positive experience in doing something that stretches its ability; in other words, if you enjoy sticking your neck out and trying to operate at your best or even beyond your best, if you're lucky enough to get that combination, then you're more likely to learn new things, to become better at what you're doing, to invent new things, to discover new things.
We seem to be a species that has been blessed by this kind of thirst for pushing the envelope. Most other species seem to be very content when their basic needs are taken care of and their homeostatic level has been restored. They have eaten; they can rest now. That's it. But in our nervous system, maybe by chance or at random, an association has been made between pleasure and challenge, or looking for new challenges.
WIE: So we have a relationship between pleasure and the desire to be challenged further?
MC: Yes. Like most species, we have developed connections in our nervous system between eating and pleasure and between sex and pleasure. If we didn't have these connections, we probably wouldn't eat as much or reproduce as much. Survival to a certain extent depends on finding pleasure in those things that are necessary for survival.
But when you begin to enjoy things that go beyond survival, then there's more of a chance to transform yourself and to evolve. And since the state that I call "flow" depends on increasing skill and increasing challenge, then it leads toward complexification, which means greater differentiation and integration, of the organism.
WIE: Let's go back to "flow." Could you explain what it is?
MC: I did my doctoral dissertation, back in the early sixties, on young students at the Chicago Art Institute. One thing that I noticed—and I knew also from my own experience—is that when they started painting, they almost fell into a trance. They didn't seem to notice anything, and they just moved as if they were possessed by something inside themselves.
When they finished a painting, they would look at it, and they'd feel good for about five or ten minutes and then they'd put the painting away and not look at it much after that. What became important was the next canvas.
And so, obviously, there is something in the process of getting involved with the painting that is so attractive that it overrides almost everything else, except maybe the need to eat and sleep and go to the bathroom. So I tried to understand what psychologists have written about this kind of thing, this state of complete involvement.
And there really wasn't much. So I saw that this was something about human behavior that psychologists have largely neglected. And when they have studied it, they have essentially interpreted it as a means to an end, without looking at it as a motivation in itself.
In the early seventies, I spoke with chess players, rock climbers, musicians, and inner-city basketball players, asking them to describe their experience when what they were doing was really going well. I really expected quite different stories to emerge. But the interviews seemed in many important ways to focus on the same quality of the experience.
For instance, the fact that you were completely immersed in what you were doing, that the concentration was very high, that you knew what you had to do moment by moment, that you had very quick and precise feedback as to how well you were doing, and that you felt that your abilities were stretched but not overwhelmed by the opportunities for action.
In other words, the challenges were in balance with the skills. And when those conditions were present, you began to forget all the things that bothered you in everyday life, forget the self as an entity separate from what was going on—you felt you were a part of something greater and you were just moving along with the logic of the activity.
Everyone said that it was like being carried by a current, spontaneous, effortless like a flow. You also forget time and are not afraid of being out of control. You think you can control the situation if you need to. But it's hard because the challenges are hard.
It feels effortless and yet it's extremely dependent on concentration and skill. So it's a paradoxical kind of condition where you feel that you are on a nice edge, between anxiety on the one hand and boredom on the other. You're just operating on this fine line where you can barely do what needs to be done.
Since then, colleagues have interviewed by now ten thousand people around the world—women who weave tapestries in the highlands of Borneo, meditating monks in Europe, also Catholic Dominican monks, and so forth.
They all said these same things. So "flow" seems to be a phenomenological state that is the same across cultures. What people do to get into that state varies enormously, but the experience itself is described in very similar ways.
WIE: So do you see flow as a positive force for evolution?
MC: From the point of view of the individual, it's a very positive experience because it does provide the most memorable, intense enjoyment in life. But, it's not a simple story because there are two dangers with flow in terms of development or evolution. One is that at the individual level it can become addictive to the point that a person becomes increasingly dependent on one set of challenges, and when those challenges are exhausted, the person is left helpless.
For instance, one thing that has always struck me is how many of the great chess masters broke down into various forms of neurosis after they beat everybody else in the world and there was nowhere else to go. So that's one danger, at the individual level—that you stunt your development as a person.
At the social level, the danger is that you end up finding flow in challenges that are zero sum, that is, that somebody has to lose for you to win. For instance, war can produce flow if you are on the front line, and everything is clear, everything is focused, and you know exactly what you want to do, and so forth. So many people come back from war to find civilian life very boring and dull compared to their front line experience.
WIE: So how does flow work to further evolution?
MC: In a sense, flow is what drives this human need for going beyond what we have. In creativity or optimal experience, I have found that it is always a struggle, and the struggle has to do with essentially opening yourself up and yet delving deeply into yourself. Here are these two processes—differentiation and integration—which have to go hand in hand for complexity to evolve.
So I see flow as a very important dynamic in the evolution of complexity. It gives you the incentive, the motivation, the reward for going beyond what you have. But it does not give you an ethical direction, so I would say it has to be flow with soul.
*Occam's razor: The philosophical and scientific rule stating that the simplest of two or more competing theories or explanations is preferable.
Evolving Complexity
WIE: You speak about the goal of evolution as greater complexity. Can you say more about what that means?
MC: Yes. That's a very contested point because some people say, "Wait a minute. Yes, it's true that complexity does increase with time, but then so do a lot of simple things, and maybe in the next turn of the dice it will be cockroaches that will survive, because we will annihilate ourselves," and so forth.
WIE: Yes, that's the view presented by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and others—
MC: Right. I'll make two points. First, it's certainly not the case that complexity across the board is necessarily increasing because complexity is not like a tide that lifts everything up. But if you take a cross section of life on this earth, let's say every few hundred thousand years, the more recent the slice is, the more you will find some complex animals or organisms there.
So you ask: What is the pattern of change over time? Looking at these cross sections, the only thing that you can clearly say is that you find more complex organisms at each cross section. Not that every organism is more complex, not that every organism is always successful, but somehow, over time, you find that this type of complexity is evolving.
But there is a second point that is probably the more important one. Now that we are conscious of evolution, now that we are aware of what the heck is going on, and we know what entropy is like and we know what complexity of consciousness is like, then we naturally have to make a choice.
If we had to determine a goal for our evolution, I think that complexity would be the goal that we would endorse. And by virtue of this very fact, complexity would be the goal of evolution.
WIE: Why do you have faith in complexity as being the way to evolve?
MC: Because I like Mozart, I like Villard's sketches of Chartres, I like to understand what the scientists are finding out about the world, I like hot and cold running water. I may be wrong, but for whatever reason, through all experience, and through looking at the alternatives, this seems to me a more exciting way to go, more interesting, more satisfying—or maybe not more satisfying, but more enjoyable.
I spend four months a year in Montana. We don't have television; we don't have newspapers. It took us three weeks to find out that Princess Diana died. So I'm very aware of the beauty of simplicity, of being able to live with the bare minimum and with none of the excitements of living in the big city, of not being in the swim of information constantly. But at the same time, I don't think I would ever give up what humanity has accomplished.
I just want to make sure that it's going to be improving rather than falling. I mean, there is still brutality going on that is unprecedented, partly because our technology allows what, in the past, would have been just a scuffle among people to become a possibility of destroying thousands and thousands. So all of this is scary, but at the same time, if I had a choice, I don't think I would want to go back to anything less complex.
WIE: And what kinds of things impede evolution?
MC: Well, I think the great religions were all pretty good at pointing this out, whether we're talking about the five precepts of Buddhism or the capital sins of Christianity.
You find that those are pretty much on target, in the sense that they all have to do with things like greed—whether it's gluttony or envy—with wanting things for yourself, trying to get things for free from others by stealing, robbing, cheating, or depriving others of their opportunity to lead a good life.
So all these things psychologically go against the development of the soul or the development of complexity because they reduce the person back to his or her biological needs or the conventions of the culture, and they don't allow growth.
WIE: In The Evolving Self, you introduce, in a contemporary context, what you called the "veils of Maya" as an impediment to our individual evolution because these "veils" distort our sense of reality. Could you speak about that?
MC: Well, we all tend to take our experience, the surface experience that's presented to consciousness, as essentially being ultimate reality. There's a good reason for that. I mean, we can't examine every experience we have and ask, "Is this right or wrong? Is this good or bad?"
But there has to be a certain ability to distance yourself, for instance, from your needs. If every time you're hungry you have to eat, if every time you feel sexual stimulation you want to act it out, if every time somebody tells you to do something you say, "Yes, sir" without thinking about it, then you live a tremendously restricted life.
Suppose you are a Nazi, and you're told to take Jews to camp or to do something else like that—and you say, "Yes, sir" because this is what you're told, and this is reality and you feel you cannot do anything about it. If that's how you live, you'll never break out from these conditions, these programs that genes set up over millions of years, or that the culture sets up for us before we were born, or before we grow up. We are born with certain instructions to act, and then we are told by the culture how to act.
And while we have to honor the reality of these things, at the same time, we have to reflect on the implications that carrying out these instructions would have.
There is the Hindu notion of karma, which should also be translated in modern terms, because it's true that everything you do, in a sense, has an impact on everything else. We are part of a system, and if we act in a certain way, it doesn't stop there. It will have an effect both now and through time.
It will have an effect. So once you realize both that you're part of a system and that you are all these instructions, then you recognize that you have the responsibility of either endorsing all these instructions or trying to break out from them. And that way, you have to begin to pull away these veils of Maya.
WIE: You also use the term "transcendence" in your work. What do you mean by that?
MC: Essentially I think it follows on from your prior question. I think transcendence basically means being able to pull aside these veils and say, "Okay. These are the conditions under which I am operating. These are my genetic instructions. These are my cultural instructions, programs.
Now, what do I do?" When someone comes out and says, "Yes, everything pushes me in these directions, but given that, I try to understand the consequences of my action to the whole system I live in, including animals, plants, water, air, and all that—and given all that, I'm not going to go along with this program. I'm going to try to take a stand," to me that's transcendence, because it goes beyond the determining forces that the person is seemingly controlled by.
The Cutting Edge
WIE: You seem to imply in what you write that we need to make an evolutionary shift, collectively and as individuals. Could you talk more about that shift?
MC: Yes. You know, I see parts of it. I can't see the whole thing. I don't know what will be there. I don't like top-down pronouncements like "Everyone should do this" or "Everyone should do that." I think we each should reflect on what we can do individually, what our responsibility may be for our community, for our family, or just for ourselves personally—all the way from personal responsibility to what we can do for the nation or the planet.
There are so many levels on which one could make a choice that would either enhance or derail evolution. And so my attempt is just to make people aware that they are responsible—they are at the cutting edge of evolution. We all are at the cutting edge of evolution. By our actions we are going to implement the future. And that is where your responsibility is.
And let's forget huge plans—let's each think of ourselves as being an instrument, or not an instrument but, in a sense, almost a pseudopod of evolution. We are the evolution to ourselves.
WIE: Can you say a little more about what it means to be on the cutting edge of evolution?
MC: Stretching back to this notion of karma, it means that your actions have repercussions all over. You can act in a way that makes evolution more likely to proceed toward complexity, whether by being nice to your spouse or to your children, by trying to teach people, by being a better worker, by getting people to see that good work is more important than what you get for it.
By essentially endorsing complexity—looking for ways to enhance differentiation or uniqueness and to encourage integration or connection with something greater—at each choice point that you encounter in your life, you become evolution. You are then the embodiment of complexity advancing into the future.
WIE: And all those things that you mentioned—taking responsibility for each other, for our work, for the earth—are very life-affirming. So, does evolution have a purpose?
MC: Evolution doesn't have a purpose in the human sense, as far as I know. But because we are human, we can give it a purpose. We are now in the position of being responsible for evolution, for life. It's no longer just a mindless universe. I mean, it is a mindless universe, which has generated through complexity a mind that now has to decide where we want to go.
So, in that sense, now it has a purpose, it seems to me. It's our purpose. And we have to decide what that purpose is. What I'm trying to claim is that complexity, which in the past was what evolution generated—whether intentionally or not—has given us the opportunity to say, "Yes. This is what we want to make happen, this is what we want to become the conscious agents of."
WIE: Two leading spiritual thinkers of the mid-twentieth century, Sri Aurobindo, the Indian spiritual master, philosopher, and poet, and Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist, spoke about the purpose of evolution from a spiritual perspective. Aurobindo saw evolution's purpose as divine, already "involved" in matter as well as in human consciousness. God is gradually realized or manifested through evolution. He wrote:
The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God? For if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realization of that which she secretly is. . . . If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the Divine in himself and the realization of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth.
MC: Yes. Yes, I think that is essentially very well said. I also like the fact that he seems to be putting most of this in a kind of questioning form—is it not? should it not? Because it's true that there is no reason not to look at things that way. In fact, maybe that is the best way to look at it.
I find my own responsibility at the edge of what can be known within the terms of my understanding at the moment. And I can posit that there is a lot more beyond that. But what may be there, and what is likely to be there, is not revealed to me. So I don't see positing that as my task.
If I were to do that, I would become a religious seer or a guru or something like that. And that's not what I am. So, I don't do that, even though I think it's probably true.
by Elizabeth Debold
Introduction
Creativity—his own, others', and that of life itself—has been the entry point into evolution for Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "chick-sent-me-high-ee"). Truly an international renaissance man, born in Hungary, a graduate of the classical gymnasium "Torquato Tasso" in Rome, and an artist, Csikszentmihalyi earned his Ph.D. in psychology in 1965 from the University of Chicago, where he would eventually teach.
Yet the bounds of psychology could contain neither his creativity nor his desire to find a greater order: "Somehow I always gravitated to the people in various disciplines—whether it's psychology, sociology, anthropology—who saw a certain unity in their field, who were not what later became known as postmodern reductionists," he explained, speaking on the telephone from his office at the Claremont Graduate University.
Influenced by Carl Jung and reading widely in religion, Csikszentmihalyi found himself intrigued by "people who kind of stepped back and tried to say, 'What is it that's going on in this messy and confusing pattern of human behavior over time?'
And I was influenced greatly, for instance, by Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit who developed this notion of evolution." Even his current position as a professor at Claremont's Drucker School of Management is a new evolutionary turn in a life lived with passion and curiosity.
Csikszentmihalyi is most well known for his bestselling 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. He defined and explored the concept of "flow"—as in "in the flow"—as our experience of optimal fulfillment and engagement. Flow, whether in creative arts, athletic competition, engaging work, or spiritual practice, is a deep and uniquely human motivation to excel, exceed, and triumph over limitation. Csikszentmihalyi describes his life's work as the effort "to study what makes people truly happy."
The emphasis here is on the word "truly"—because to him, happiness is not simply flow nor an emotional state nor even the experience of pleasure. The happiness he points to involves the continual challenge to go beyond oneself as part of something greater than one's own self-interest.
What compelled us to speak to Dr. Csikszentmihalyi was his constantly evolving understanding of individual human development in the context of evolution. Ever the empiricist, he has systematically explored what it means to bring the laws of material evolution into both human and cultural development.
In his books The Evolving Self and Finding Flow, he develops a moral and ethical perspective on flow as a force of evolution. Integrating the concept of flow with a contemporary understanding of ancient wisdom teachings, he offers a new paradigm for human living rooted in his recognition that human beings now have the unique opportunity—and obligation—to become conscious participants in evolution. In the following interview, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi invites us to join in creating an evolutionary psychology founded in a deeper understanding of human motivation and an attention to our inescapable interconnectedness.
interview
WIE: In your books The Evolving Self and Finding Flow, you speak about evolution, particularly about human evolution. Could you define what you mean by "evolution"?
MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI: At the most abstract level, what I mean by "evolution" is the increasing complexity of matter, which results in increasing possibility for consciousness. Here I'm differing from the view of [French Jesuit paleontologist] Teilhard de Chardin. He thought that rocks had a consciousness appropriate to their own material organization.
I don't know whether they do or not, but his view was that whenever there is matter organized in some system, there is a commensurate level of consciousness, which reaches its apogee in the human nervous system being as it is the most intricate system, where you can code and store information of all different kinds.
Smells, sights, inner feelings, and thoughts can all get stored because there is enough space, and the units are connected so that you can begin to draw parallels and see similarities and develop cause-and-effect relationships and so forth.
So you have this system that is very complexly organized, very intricately differentiated, and very integrated. Those are the two dimensions of complexity that you always see in evolution: differentiation and integration. Differentiation allows you to use different parts, for instance, different cells in your brain, different neurons to store information.
And at the same time, these differentiated cells are connected to each other, or integrated, so that they can talk to each other, so to speak. Okay? They can exchange information. This is one way to talk about evolution: the process by which matter becomes more complex, allowing for more complex consciousness.
Then, of course, we see the results of humans becoming conscious begin to extend outside the body. And that's where we begin to see the evolution of culture, where we are able to store information not just in the brain but also in cave paintings and buildings, and then books and computers, etcetera. That begins to enlarge the amount of information about the universe that we can, in principle, deal with.
But I don't think the direction of evolution is laid down in any sense. We, having become aware of what is going on, have to decide for ourselves to what end this information should be directed and where it should be going. And I think that from the abstract level, the signposts for those decisions are again differentiation and integration.
You want a future where people are free to develop whatever unique blueprints they carry in their genes, and you want that freedom to blossom as much as possible, but at the same time, you want each person to see that they are part of something much greater. That's where the integration comes in—it starts with feeling that you belong to a family, to an ethnic group, to a church and to a nation.
But unless you realize that you're also part of all the living systems and the planet—that there is something beyond all of this that we can sense—unless you're part of that, then evolution would not be very successful, as far as I can tell.
WIE: What kinds of things catalyze evolution?
MC: That's a good question. In the past, of course, there have been random changes like asteroids hitting the earth, which killed off a certain type of species and then allowed another one to take over. There's also an explanation that would say that it's really entropy that runs evolution, in the sense that all species try to get as much out of the ecosystem as they can, with the least amount of effort.
And that would fit with the second law of thermodynamics [that all systems tend to disorder over time]. If there was no entropy, in other words, if things did not tend to decay and dissolve in competition with other forms, then a better form would not necessarily stand out and become widespread. Okay?
You could claim, therefore, that it is because this constant competition for survival eliminates the worst forms that better forms are able to be recognized, endorsed, and developed.
For example, here comes someone who, instead of having to run after a deer, can go on a horse. They are expending much less energy getting their deer meat, so the horse becomes suddenly very popular. The Plains Indians in America adopted horses within a relatively short time of when the Spaniards introduced them.
They saw how useful they were, how much energy they could save. And the same with rifles. This principle, I think, applies mostly to technological evolution, to the evolution of tools, the evolution of technologies that are adopted because they defeat entropy to a certain extent. They save you energy; that's why you adopt them.
And then, if there is any species that can find a way of getting more energy out of the environment than others with less effort, then that is the species that will have an advantage for a certain period. This is probably the most reductionistic view—that evolution would be based on entropy itself.
I believe in Occam's razor* however, I'm not endorsing this view. I'm just saying this is one way that people have explained how evolution is catalyzed.
WIE: Are there other views that you endorse more?
MC: Well, I can see entropy as being the original impetus for adopting different things, but I think that when we come to humans, who have this consciousness, then a different set of rules begins to apply. And those are the rules that come out of actually reflecting on experience, reflecting on history, on what happens around humans. And that reflection tells you, "Wait a minute, this is not all we can be, this is not all we can do. There are better ways of doing it." And at that point, you have the possibility of getting beyond what you learned before. A lot of art, literature, religion, and philosophy is born out of this need to go beyond what you were before.
Some people say we have been able to reflect on our own thinking for only about three thousand years. Once that happened, the old rules of evolution began to change. We're no longer subject to the determining influence of the genes as much as we were. We are no longer subject to the determining influence of our social/cultural environment as much as we were before.
We are no longer determined by entropy as much as we were before. This is a fairly recent step in evolution. Very recent, considering how long it took us to get, let's say, from Lucy [our early Cro Magnon ancestor] to Homer's writing of The Odyssey—it was millions of years. Then suddenly, bingo. So this is a very new game. And there are lots of mistakes that we made, that our species is making, but I think it's a tremendous opportunity, too.
WIE: So this new catalyst for evolution is inherent in humans?
MC: I think it's inherent in this particular being that has this way of processing information, that has this very complex brain. And so yes, it is inherent in humans. I don't think anybody put it in us.
That's how I would differ from, let's say, a religious interpretation where the assumption is that we have been infused with some form of a soul from outside. Whereas I think what we call "soul" is generated by the complexification of our body, essentially our brain.
When you look at the pre-Christian version of "soul," you see that what they meant wasn't so much a soul that was a different substance infused or injected into the body. It referred to a quality in a person who was able to use surplus energy for the benefit of others, not needing to get it all for himself.
I came to the conclusion that "soul" is really our way of thinking about not devoting all of one's psychic energy to maximize oneself in any form, whether it's getting comfortable, rich, famous, or wealthy. Some of that energy is also devoted to somebody else's or something else's well-being, or advantage, or goal. So that kind of thing is "soul" as far as I'm concerned.
That's the leading edge of evolution, where you don't need to consume all your energy for your own purposes, but you can devote some of that energy for something that will benefit others, including the planet.
Flow for Evolution
WIE: In your research, you have explored what you call "flow," or optimal human experience, as having an important relationship to evolution. Could you explain this?
MC: My hunch is—and, of course, there is no proof of this—that if an organism, a species, learns to find a positive experience in doing something that stretches its ability; in other words, if you enjoy sticking your neck out and trying to operate at your best or even beyond your best, if you're lucky enough to get that combination, then you're more likely to learn new things, to become better at what you're doing, to invent new things, to discover new things.
We seem to be a species that has been blessed by this kind of thirst for pushing the envelope. Most other species seem to be very content when their basic needs are taken care of and their homeostatic level has been restored. They have eaten; they can rest now. That's it. But in our nervous system, maybe by chance or at random, an association has been made between pleasure and challenge, or looking for new challenges.
WIE: So we have a relationship between pleasure and the desire to be challenged further?
MC: Yes. Like most species, we have developed connections in our nervous system between eating and pleasure and between sex and pleasure. If we didn't have these connections, we probably wouldn't eat as much or reproduce as much. Survival to a certain extent depends on finding pleasure in those things that are necessary for survival.
But when you begin to enjoy things that go beyond survival, then there's more of a chance to transform yourself and to evolve. And since the state that I call "flow" depends on increasing skill and increasing challenge, then it leads toward complexification, which means greater differentiation and integration, of the organism.
WIE: Let's go back to "flow." Could you explain what it is?
MC: I did my doctoral dissertation, back in the early sixties, on young students at the Chicago Art Institute. One thing that I noticed—and I knew also from my own experience—is that when they started painting, they almost fell into a trance. They didn't seem to notice anything, and they just moved as if they were possessed by something inside themselves.
When they finished a painting, they would look at it, and they'd feel good for about five or ten minutes and then they'd put the painting away and not look at it much after that. What became important was the next canvas.
And so, obviously, there is something in the process of getting involved with the painting that is so attractive that it overrides almost everything else, except maybe the need to eat and sleep and go to the bathroom. So I tried to understand what psychologists have written about this kind of thing, this state of complete involvement.
And there really wasn't much. So I saw that this was something about human behavior that psychologists have largely neglected. And when they have studied it, they have essentially interpreted it as a means to an end, without looking at it as a motivation in itself.
In the early seventies, I spoke with chess players, rock climbers, musicians, and inner-city basketball players, asking them to describe their experience when what they were doing was really going well. I really expected quite different stories to emerge. But the interviews seemed in many important ways to focus on the same quality of the experience.
For instance, the fact that you were completely immersed in what you were doing, that the concentration was very high, that you knew what you had to do moment by moment, that you had very quick and precise feedback as to how well you were doing, and that you felt that your abilities were stretched but not overwhelmed by the opportunities for action.
In other words, the challenges were in balance with the skills. And when those conditions were present, you began to forget all the things that bothered you in everyday life, forget the self as an entity separate from what was going on—you felt you were a part of something greater and you were just moving along with the logic of the activity.
Everyone said that it was like being carried by a current, spontaneous, effortless like a flow. You also forget time and are not afraid of being out of control. You think you can control the situation if you need to. But it's hard because the challenges are hard.
It feels effortless and yet it's extremely dependent on concentration and skill. So it's a paradoxical kind of condition where you feel that you are on a nice edge, between anxiety on the one hand and boredom on the other. You're just operating on this fine line where you can barely do what needs to be done.
Since then, colleagues have interviewed by now ten thousand people around the world—women who weave tapestries in the highlands of Borneo, meditating monks in Europe, also Catholic Dominican monks, and so forth.
They all said these same things. So "flow" seems to be a phenomenological state that is the same across cultures. What people do to get into that state varies enormously, but the experience itself is described in very similar ways.
WIE: So do you see flow as a positive force for evolution?
MC: From the point of view of the individual, it's a very positive experience because it does provide the most memorable, intense enjoyment in life. But, it's not a simple story because there are two dangers with flow in terms of development or evolution. One is that at the individual level it can become addictive to the point that a person becomes increasingly dependent on one set of challenges, and when those challenges are exhausted, the person is left helpless.
For instance, one thing that has always struck me is how many of the great chess masters broke down into various forms of neurosis after they beat everybody else in the world and there was nowhere else to go. So that's one danger, at the individual level—that you stunt your development as a person.
At the social level, the danger is that you end up finding flow in challenges that are zero sum, that is, that somebody has to lose for you to win. For instance, war can produce flow if you are on the front line, and everything is clear, everything is focused, and you know exactly what you want to do, and so forth. So many people come back from war to find civilian life very boring and dull compared to their front line experience.
WIE: So how does flow work to further evolution?
MC: In a sense, flow is what drives this human need for going beyond what we have. In creativity or optimal experience, I have found that it is always a struggle, and the struggle has to do with essentially opening yourself up and yet delving deeply into yourself. Here are these two processes—differentiation and integration—which have to go hand in hand for complexity to evolve.
So I see flow as a very important dynamic in the evolution of complexity. It gives you the incentive, the motivation, the reward for going beyond what you have. But it does not give you an ethical direction, so I would say it has to be flow with soul.
*Occam's razor: The philosophical and scientific rule stating that the simplest of two or more competing theories or explanations is preferable.
Evolving Complexity
WIE: You speak about the goal of evolution as greater complexity. Can you say more about what that means?
MC: Yes. That's a very contested point because some people say, "Wait a minute. Yes, it's true that complexity does increase with time, but then so do a lot of simple things, and maybe in the next turn of the dice it will be cockroaches that will survive, because we will annihilate ourselves," and so forth.
WIE: Yes, that's the view presented by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and others—
MC: Right. I'll make two points. First, it's certainly not the case that complexity across the board is necessarily increasing because complexity is not like a tide that lifts everything up. But if you take a cross section of life on this earth, let's say every few hundred thousand years, the more recent the slice is, the more you will find some complex animals or organisms there.
So you ask: What is the pattern of change over time? Looking at these cross sections, the only thing that you can clearly say is that you find more complex organisms at each cross section. Not that every organism is more complex, not that every organism is always successful, but somehow, over time, you find that this type of complexity is evolving.
But there is a second point that is probably the more important one. Now that we are conscious of evolution, now that we are aware of what the heck is going on, and we know what entropy is like and we know what complexity of consciousness is like, then we naturally have to make a choice.
If we had to determine a goal for our evolution, I think that complexity would be the goal that we would endorse. And by virtue of this very fact, complexity would be the goal of evolution.
WIE: Why do you have faith in complexity as being the way to evolve?
MC: Because I like Mozart, I like Villard's sketches of Chartres, I like to understand what the scientists are finding out about the world, I like hot and cold running water. I may be wrong, but for whatever reason, through all experience, and through looking at the alternatives, this seems to me a more exciting way to go, more interesting, more satisfying—or maybe not more satisfying, but more enjoyable.
I spend four months a year in Montana. We don't have television; we don't have newspapers. It took us three weeks to find out that Princess Diana died. So I'm very aware of the beauty of simplicity, of being able to live with the bare minimum and with none of the excitements of living in the big city, of not being in the swim of information constantly. But at the same time, I don't think I would ever give up what humanity has accomplished.
I just want to make sure that it's going to be improving rather than falling. I mean, there is still brutality going on that is unprecedented, partly because our technology allows what, in the past, would have been just a scuffle among people to become a possibility of destroying thousands and thousands. So all of this is scary, but at the same time, if I had a choice, I don't think I would want to go back to anything less complex.
WIE: And what kinds of things impede evolution?
MC: Well, I think the great religions were all pretty good at pointing this out, whether we're talking about the five precepts of Buddhism or the capital sins of Christianity.
You find that those are pretty much on target, in the sense that they all have to do with things like greed—whether it's gluttony or envy—with wanting things for yourself, trying to get things for free from others by stealing, robbing, cheating, or depriving others of their opportunity to lead a good life.
So all these things psychologically go against the development of the soul or the development of complexity because they reduce the person back to his or her biological needs or the conventions of the culture, and they don't allow growth.
WIE: In The Evolving Self, you introduce, in a contemporary context, what you called the "veils of Maya" as an impediment to our individual evolution because these "veils" distort our sense of reality. Could you speak about that?
MC: Well, we all tend to take our experience, the surface experience that's presented to consciousness, as essentially being ultimate reality. There's a good reason for that. I mean, we can't examine every experience we have and ask, "Is this right or wrong? Is this good or bad?"
But there has to be a certain ability to distance yourself, for instance, from your needs. If every time you're hungry you have to eat, if every time you feel sexual stimulation you want to act it out, if every time somebody tells you to do something you say, "Yes, sir" without thinking about it, then you live a tremendously restricted life.
Suppose you are a Nazi, and you're told to take Jews to camp or to do something else like that—and you say, "Yes, sir" because this is what you're told, and this is reality and you feel you cannot do anything about it. If that's how you live, you'll never break out from these conditions, these programs that genes set up over millions of years, or that the culture sets up for us before we were born, or before we grow up. We are born with certain instructions to act, and then we are told by the culture how to act.
And while we have to honor the reality of these things, at the same time, we have to reflect on the implications that carrying out these instructions would have.
There is the Hindu notion of karma, which should also be translated in modern terms, because it's true that everything you do, in a sense, has an impact on everything else. We are part of a system, and if we act in a certain way, it doesn't stop there. It will have an effect both now and through time.
It will have an effect. So once you realize both that you're part of a system and that you are all these instructions, then you recognize that you have the responsibility of either endorsing all these instructions or trying to break out from them. And that way, you have to begin to pull away these veils of Maya.
WIE: You also use the term "transcendence" in your work. What do you mean by that?
MC: Essentially I think it follows on from your prior question. I think transcendence basically means being able to pull aside these veils and say, "Okay. These are the conditions under which I am operating. These are my genetic instructions. These are my cultural instructions, programs.
Now, what do I do?" When someone comes out and says, "Yes, everything pushes me in these directions, but given that, I try to understand the consequences of my action to the whole system I live in, including animals, plants, water, air, and all that—and given all that, I'm not going to go along with this program. I'm going to try to take a stand," to me that's transcendence, because it goes beyond the determining forces that the person is seemingly controlled by.
The Cutting Edge
WIE: You seem to imply in what you write that we need to make an evolutionary shift, collectively and as individuals. Could you talk more about that shift?
MC: Yes. You know, I see parts of it. I can't see the whole thing. I don't know what will be there. I don't like top-down pronouncements like "Everyone should do this" or "Everyone should do that." I think we each should reflect on what we can do individually, what our responsibility may be for our community, for our family, or just for ourselves personally—all the way from personal responsibility to what we can do for the nation or the planet.
There are so many levels on which one could make a choice that would either enhance or derail evolution. And so my attempt is just to make people aware that they are responsible—they are at the cutting edge of evolution. We all are at the cutting edge of evolution. By our actions we are going to implement the future. And that is where your responsibility is.
And let's forget huge plans—let's each think of ourselves as being an instrument, or not an instrument but, in a sense, almost a pseudopod of evolution. We are the evolution to ourselves.
WIE: Can you say a little more about what it means to be on the cutting edge of evolution?
MC: Stretching back to this notion of karma, it means that your actions have repercussions all over. You can act in a way that makes evolution more likely to proceed toward complexity, whether by being nice to your spouse or to your children, by trying to teach people, by being a better worker, by getting people to see that good work is more important than what you get for it.
By essentially endorsing complexity—looking for ways to enhance differentiation or uniqueness and to encourage integration or connection with something greater—at each choice point that you encounter in your life, you become evolution. You are then the embodiment of complexity advancing into the future.
WIE: And all those things that you mentioned—taking responsibility for each other, for our work, for the earth—are very life-affirming. So, does evolution have a purpose?
MC: Evolution doesn't have a purpose in the human sense, as far as I know. But because we are human, we can give it a purpose. We are now in the position of being responsible for evolution, for life. It's no longer just a mindless universe. I mean, it is a mindless universe, which has generated through complexity a mind that now has to decide where we want to go.
So, in that sense, now it has a purpose, it seems to me. It's our purpose. And we have to decide what that purpose is. What I'm trying to claim is that complexity, which in the past was what evolution generated—whether intentionally or not—has given us the opportunity to say, "Yes. This is what we want to make happen, this is what we want to become the conscious agents of."
WIE: Two leading spiritual thinkers of the mid-twentieth century, Sri Aurobindo, the Indian spiritual master, philosopher, and poet, and Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist, spoke about the purpose of evolution from a spiritual perspective. Aurobindo saw evolution's purpose as divine, already "involved" in matter as well as in human consciousness. God is gradually realized or manifested through evolution. He wrote:
The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God? For if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realization of that which she secretly is. . . . If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the Divine in himself and the realization of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth.
MC: Yes. Yes, I think that is essentially very well said. I also like the fact that he seems to be putting most of this in a kind of questioning form—is it not? should it not? Because it's true that there is no reason not to look at things that way. In fact, maybe that is the best way to look at it.
I find my own responsibility at the edge of what can be known within the terms of my understanding at the moment. And I can posit that there is a lot more beyond that. But what may be there, and what is likely to be there, is not revealed to me. So I don't see positing that as my task.
If I were to do that, I would become a religious seer or a guru or something like that. And that's not what I am. So, I don't do that, even though I think it's probably true.
The Secret of Happiness!
Flow: What's worth living for? - by :Rob Jellinghaus
In late 1994, I read a book named Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by one Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The book has had a lasting effect on me, and the concept of flow has worked itself deeply into my thinking. This page explains the basic idea of flow, and touches on some of the reasons it's a powerful concept. The page contains:
Flow, explained
Csikszentmihalyi is a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, who has been studying human enjoyment since 1963. The question he posed himself was simple: What is fun? What makes some experiences enjoyable, and other experiences not?
It is a surprisingly deep question, considering all the varieties of fun. Some people enjoy painting, others rock climbing. Some consider parenting one of life's most stimulating activities; others are galvanized by the corporate whirl. Some enjoy whittling, others hiking. Are there any common threads that tie these experiences together?
As it turns out, there indeed are. When Csikszentmihalyi interviewed all the kinds of people listed above, he discovered a common thread to their stories. The following is taken from his book The Evolving Self, pages xii-xiv, and is hopefully brief enough to be readable yet long enough to explain the key idea. Csikszentmihalyi is describing some of the painters he interviewed:
When a painting was beginning to get interesting they could not tear themselves away from it; they forgot hunger, social obligations, time, and fatigue so that they could keep moving it along. But this fascination lasted only as long as a picture remained unfinished; once it stopped changing and growing, the artist usually leaned it against a wall and turned his or her attention to the next blank canvas.
It seemed clear that what was so enthralling about painting was not the anticipation of a beautiful picture, but the process of painting itself. At first this seemed strange, because psychological theories usually assume that we are motivated either by the need to eliminate an unpleasant condition like hunger or fear, or by the expectation of some future reward such as money, status, or prestige.
The idea that a person could work around the clock for days on end, for no better reason than to keep on working, lacked credibility. But if one stops to reflect, this behavior is not as unusual as it may seem at first.
Artists are not the only ones who spend time and effort on an activity that has few rewards outside itself. In fact, everyone devotes large chunks of time doing things that are inexplicable unless we assume that the doing is enjoyed for its own sake. Children spend much of their lives playing.
Adults also play games like poker or chess, participate in sports, grow gardens, learn to play the guitar, read novels, go to parties, walk through woods--and do thousands of other things--for no good reason except that the activities are fun.
Of course, there is always the possibility that one will also get rich and famous by doing these things. The artist may get a lucky break and sell her canvas to a museum. The guitarist may learn to play so well that someone will offer him a recording contract.
We may justify doing sports to stay healthy, aand go to parties because of possible business contacts or sexual adventures. External goals are often present in the background, but they are seldom the main reason why we engage in such activities. The main reason for playing the guitear is that it is enjoyable, and so is talking with people at a party.
Not everyone likes to play the guitar or go to parties, but those who spend time on them usually do so because the quality of experience while invovled in these activities is intrinsically rewarding. In short, some things are just fun to do.
This conclusion, however, does not get us very far. The obvious question is, Why are these things fun? Strangely enough, when we try to answer that question, it turns out that contrary to what one would have expected, the enormous variety of enjoyable activities share some common characteristics.
If a tennis player is asked how it feels when a game is going well, she will describe a state of mind that is very similar to the description a chess player will give of a good tournament. So will be a description of how it feels to be absorbed in painting, or playing a difficulat piece of music.
Watching a good play or reading a stimulating book also seems to produce the same mental state. I called it "flow," because this was a metaphor several respondents gave for how it felt when their experience was most enjoyable--it was like being carried away by a current, everything moving smoothly without effort.
Contrary to expectation, "flow" usually happens not during relaxing moments of leisure and entertainment, but rather when we are actively involved in a difficult enterprise, in a task that stretches our mental and physical abilities.
Any activity can do it. Working on a challenging job, riding the crest of a tremendous wave, and teaching one's child the letters of the alphabet are the kinds of experiences that focus our whole being in a harmonious rush of energy, and lift us out of the anxieties and boredom that characterize so much of everyday life.
It turns out that when challenges are high and personal skills are used to the utmost, we experience this rare state of consciousness. The first symptom of flow is a narrowing of attention on a clearly defined goal. We feel involved, concentrated, absorbed. We know what must be done, and we get immediate feedback as to how well we are doing.
The tennis player knows after each shot whether the ball actually went where she wanted it to go; the pianist knows after each stroke of the keyboard whether the notes sound like they should. Even a usually boring job, once the challenges are brought into balance with the person's skills and the goals are clarified, can begin to be exciting and involving.
The depth of concentration required by the fine balance of challenges and skills precludes worrying about temporarily irrelevant issues. We forget ourselves and become lost in the activity. If the rock-climber were to worry about his job or his love life as he is hanging by his fingertips over the void, he would soon fall. The musician would hit a wrong note, the chess player would lose the game.
The well-matched use of skills provides a sense of control over our actions, yet because we are too busy to think of ourselves, it does not matter whether we are in control or not, whether we are winning or losing. Often we feel a sense of transcendence, as if the boundaries of the self had been expanded.
The sailor feels at one with the wind, the boat, and the sea; the singer feels amysterious sense of universal harmony. In those moments the awareness of time disappears, and hours seem to flash by without our noticing.
This state of consciousness... comes as close as anything can to what we call happiness....
That is flow. When I read this description, I knew immediately what he was talking about. Do you?
More about flow
- "People seem to get more flow from what they do on their jobs than from leisure activities in free time." It turns out that watching TV is not at all a flowful activity. People generally report higher levels of stress, depression, and tension after watching TV. It seems that TV's main virtue is that it occupies the mind undemandingly.
- Flow is hard to achieve without effort. Flow is not "wasting time".
Some activities lend themselves to flow. Immediate feedback, commensurate challenges and skills, and clear goals are all precursors to flow. Lack of these makes flow difficult to achieve.
- Some people are inclined to flow. They set goals even when apparently doing nothing, and are able to focus their attention easily. These sorts of people can experience flow even in difficult situations--prison camps and harsh jobs being two examples Csikszentmihalyi studied.
- Flow tends to result in personal growth. By engaging in flow, your skills develop, requiring greater challenges to maintain the balance needed for flow.
Flow and society
I always was convinced, for some reason, that it was more or less all right to do whatever you liked, as long as you truly loved doing it. I still believe that, but now I know why: if you love doing it, it's a way for you to achieve flow.
Perhaps it's coming of age in the 90's, but I've never had the impression I would have only one career. I have known for years that computer programming was a flow activity for me, and working on these pages is also turning out to be a considerable source of flow. Netsurfing can be flow, if directed and focused, but if you're idly drifting in channel-surf mode, it is as mind-addling as TV.
You can be happy without a million things. Mystics and saints have always known it; this is why. And what relief, to know that flow can potentially come from anywhere! Knowing it is not the same as creating it, of course, but I have found that just understanding the premises of flow has helped me achieve it more often.
I believe that TV is an inherently anti-flow device; it is almost impossible to produce a state of flow via TV. Computers are inherently more flexible, and can be used to achieve or enhance flow. Computer programming is a new form of flow. But computers can also be used for shallow, mind-stuffing content, which may produce momentary flow while bringing no lasting growth. Just because a computer game keeps you up all night doesn't mean you're really learning anything.
Not all flow is good. Some veterans have said that their war memories are dramatically more vivid than any of their other memories... those life-and-death experiences can be consummate flow episodes. Wartime in general is a demanding, challenging, flow-prone experience, which explains much of the appeal of gangs in inner cities. When you have nothing else to occupy you and no guidance in creating your own challenges, hunt-and-be-hunted is appealing. Likewise, being a corporate raider can be flowful, even if you are doing major damage in the process. Bereaucracies are not flowful. Startups are flowful.
Kids raised in a home where they are challenged yet secure will be more able to achieve flow. If home life is too erratic and unpredictable, kids can't focus their energy; if home life is too sedate and boring, with no challenges, kids will take the path of least resistance and veg out. Parents who push their kids, while setting firm boundaries and giving lots of support, will find their kids eager to flow.
Freedom--to speak, to write, to read, to live as one chooses--is not essential to flow. But a free society enables more different kinds of flow experiences, and more outlets for flow, than an unfree society.
Religion can be a powerful aid to flow. If you believe you know why the universe ticks, and if you believe that your actions somehow affect the balance or at least your own fate, then almost everything can become flow. This is the messianic urge which drove the Crusades... believing God is on your side can transform your consciousness completely. Conversely, without some core set of beliefs to make sense of the universe, flow can be difficult to achieve at all. Combine this with the point above about freedom, and you see why modern culture is currently struggling with these ideas.
Can you rank societies, and perhaps even religions, based on how much opportunity for flow they create among all segments of the population? What would such a ranking look like? Where would the U.S. fall?
It is crucial to remember that flow is about finding life enjoyable for its own sake, rather than about structuring life so there are more external rewards. This makes flow a very difficult thing to think about.in conventional terms. We are used to thinking of our lives in terms of how much income we have access to, or how many partners or children we have. It's hard to internalize that those are not the important parameters of how happy--how flowful--your life is... they are just the objective terms, the ones which can be independently measured. You cannot quantify flow--at least not yet.
Flow and the Future
The best of all possible worlds, I think, would be a world in which just about everyone could find a way to live in a state of genuine, sustainable, expansive flow.
This may well be the biggest challenge humanity has yet faced: how to create a world in which everyone can be challenged and involved?
Long ago, all life was a struggle to survive, continuously demanding. More recently, we learned to create some measure of security for ourselves, but still we were each responsible for providing for ourselves. Now, most of what we create is over and above what we need to survive, and we are increasingly distant from the (relatively few) people who provide for our needs. Briefly: we are creating a world where the few can produce all that the rest need to live. ***
In our modern world, the old patterns of occupations no longer apply. In the future, even fewer people will be "working" in the sense of producing goods needed for survival. What will this mean, when fewer people need to work, and hence when fewer people have an external context in which to feel challenged--in which to feel flow?
Will our highest flow responses always come from challenges to our survival? And if so, will we find that if our survival is no longer at stake, we experience less flow?
How can one help someone else experience flow, if it is so personal? How can even the preconditions for flow be disseminated through society? Flow is intrinsically enjoyable... how can we use this to promote flow universally?
The darkest scenario: humanity comes up with no good answer, and most of the humans on the planet wind up living off welfare and watching hyper-TV, amusing themselves to death, never experiencing flow. Or: most humans are so desperately struggling to survive that war becomes the most common type of flow in the world.
The brightest scenario: everyone in the world realizes that the challenge before us is to reduce our impact on the planet, and to create new possibilities for human expression (that don't involve more damage to the world). This becomes an endeavor that provides meaning and structure to everyone's life: this becomes the greatest opportunity for collective, global flow--and the best object of that flow--that has ever been. Humanity comes out the other side with a better sense of itself and its potential in the universe than it has ever had.
Which do you prefer?
In late 1994, I read a book named Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by one Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The book has had a lasting effect on me, and the concept of flow has worked itself deeply into my thinking. This page explains the basic idea of flow, and touches on some of the reasons it's a powerful concept. The page contains:
Flow, explained
Csikszentmihalyi is a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, who has been studying human enjoyment since 1963. The question he posed himself was simple: What is fun? What makes some experiences enjoyable, and other experiences not?
It is a surprisingly deep question, considering all the varieties of fun. Some people enjoy painting, others rock climbing. Some consider parenting one of life's most stimulating activities; others are galvanized by the corporate whirl. Some enjoy whittling, others hiking. Are there any common threads that tie these experiences together?
As it turns out, there indeed are. When Csikszentmihalyi interviewed all the kinds of people listed above, he discovered a common thread to their stories. The following is taken from his book The Evolving Self, pages xii-xiv, and is hopefully brief enough to be readable yet long enough to explain the key idea. Csikszentmihalyi is describing some of the painters he interviewed:
When a painting was beginning to get interesting they could not tear themselves away from it; they forgot hunger, social obligations, time, and fatigue so that they could keep moving it along. But this fascination lasted only as long as a picture remained unfinished; once it stopped changing and growing, the artist usually leaned it against a wall and turned his or her attention to the next blank canvas.
It seemed clear that what was so enthralling about painting was not the anticipation of a beautiful picture, but the process of painting itself. At first this seemed strange, because psychological theories usually assume that we are motivated either by the need to eliminate an unpleasant condition like hunger or fear, or by the expectation of some future reward such as money, status, or prestige.
The idea that a person could work around the clock for days on end, for no better reason than to keep on working, lacked credibility. But if one stops to reflect, this behavior is not as unusual as it may seem at first.
Artists are not the only ones who spend time and effort on an activity that has few rewards outside itself. In fact, everyone devotes large chunks of time doing things that are inexplicable unless we assume that the doing is enjoyed for its own sake. Children spend much of their lives playing.
Adults also play games like poker or chess, participate in sports, grow gardens, learn to play the guitar, read novels, go to parties, walk through woods--and do thousands of other things--for no good reason except that the activities are fun.
Of course, there is always the possibility that one will also get rich and famous by doing these things. The artist may get a lucky break and sell her canvas to a museum. The guitarist may learn to play so well that someone will offer him a recording contract.
We may justify doing sports to stay healthy, aand go to parties because of possible business contacts or sexual adventures. External goals are often present in the background, but they are seldom the main reason why we engage in such activities. The main reason for playing the guitear is that it is enjoyable, and so is talking with people at a party.
Not everyone likes to play the guitar or go to parties, but those who spend time on them usually do so because the quality of experience while invovled in these activities is intrinsically rewarding. In short, some things are just fun to do.
This conclusion, however, does not get us very far. The obvious question is, Why are these things fun? Strangely enough, when we try to answer that question, it turns out that contrary to what one would have expected, the enormous variety of enjoyable activities share some common characteristics.
If a tennis player is asked how it feels when a game is going well, she will describe a state of mind that is very similar to the description a chess player will give of a good tournament. So will be a description of how it feels to be absorbed in painting, or playing a difficulat piece of music.
Watching a good play or reading a stimulating book also seems to produce the same mental state. I called it "flow," because this was a metaphor several respondents gave for how it felt when their experience was most enjoyable--it was like being carried away by a current, everything moving smoothly without effort.
Contrary to expectation, "flow" usually happens not during relaxing moments of leisure and entertainment, but rather when we are actively involved in a difficult enterprise, in a task that stretches our mental and physical abilities.
Any activity can do it. Working on a challenging job, riding the crest of a tremendous wave, and teaching one's child the letters of the alphabet are the kinds of experiences that focus our whole being in a harmonious rush of energy, and lift us out of the anxieties and boredom that characterize so much of everyday life.
It turns out that when challenges are high and personal skills are used to the utmost, we experience this rare state of consciousness. The first symptom of flow is a narrowing of attention on a clearly defined goal. We feel involved, concentrated, absorbed. We know what must be done, and we get immediate feedback as to how well we are doing.
The tennis player knows after each shot whether the ball actually went where she wanted it to go; the pianist knows after each stroke of the keyboard whether the notes sound like they should. Even a usually boring job, once the challenges are brought into balance with the person's skills and the goals are clarified, can begin to be exciting and involving.
The depth of concentration required by the fine balance of challenges and skills precludes worrying about temporarily irrelevant issues. We forget ourselves and become lost in the activity. If the rock-climber were to worry about his job or his love life as he is hanging by his fingertips over the void, he would soon fall. The musician would hit a wrong note, the chess player would lose the game.
The well-matched use of skills provides a sense of control over our actions, yet because we are too busy to think of ourselves, it does not matter whether we are in control or not, whether we are winning or losing. Often we feel a sense of transcendence, as if the boundaries of the self had been expanded.
The sailor feels at one with the wind, the boat, and the sea; the singer feels amysterious sense of universal harmony. In those moments the awareness of time disappears, and hours seem to flash by without our noticing.
This state of consciousness... comes as close as anything can to what we call happiness....
That is flow. When I read this description, I knew immediately what he was talking about. Do you?
More about flow
- "People seem to get more flow from what they do on their jobs than from leisure activities in free time." It turns out that watching TV is not at all a flowful activity. People generally report higher levels of stress, depression, and tension after watching TV. It seems that TV's main virtue is that it occupies the mind undemandingly.
- Flow is hard to achieve without effort. Flow is not "wasting time".
Some activities lend themselves to flow. Immediate feedback, commensurate challenges and skills, and clear goals are all precursors to flow. Lack of these makes flow difficult to achieve.
- Some people are inclined to flow. They set goals even when apparently doing nothing, and are able to focus their attention easily. These sorts of people can experience flow even in difficult situations--prison camps and harsh jobs being two examples Csikszentmihalyi studied.
- Flow tends to result in personal growth. By engaging in flow, your skills develop, requiring greater challenges to maintain the balance needed for flow.
Flow and society
I always was convinced, for some reason, that it was more or less all right to do whatever you liked, as long as you truly loved doing it. I still believe that, but now I know why: if you love doing it, it's a way for you to achieve flow.
Perhaps it's coming of age in the 90's, but I've never had the impression I would have only one career. I have known for years that computer programming was a flow activity for me, and working on these pages is also turning out to be a considerable source of flow. Netsurfing can be flow, if directed and focused, but if you're idly drifting in channel-surf mode, it is as mind-addling as TV.
You can be happy without a million things. Mystics and saints have always known it; this is why. And what relief, to know that flow can potentially come from anywhere! Knowing it is not the same as creating it, of course, but I have found that just understanding the premises of flow has helped me achieve it more often.
I believe that TV is an inherently anti-flow device; it is almost impossible to produce a state of flow via TV. Computers are inherently more flexible, and can be used to achieve or enhance flow. Computer programming is a new form of flow. But computers can also be used for shallow, mind-stuffing content, which may produce momentary flow while bringing no lasting growth. Just because a computer game keeps you up all night doesn't mean you're really learning anything.
Not all flow is good. Some veterans have said that their war memories are dramatically more vivid than any of their other memories... those life-and-death experiences can be consummate flow episodes. Wartime in general is a demanding, challenging, flow-prone experience, which explains much of the appeal of gangs in inner cities. When you have nothing else to occupy you and no guidance in creating your own challenges, hunt-and-be-hunted is appealing. Likewise, being a corporate raider can be flowful, even if you are doing major damage in the process. Bereaucracies are not flowful. Startups are flowful.
Kids raised in a home where they are challenged yet secure will be more able to achieve flow. If home life is too erratic and unpredictable, kids can't focus their energy; if home life is too sedate and boring, with no challenges, kids will take the path of least resistance and veg out. Parents who push their kids, while setting firm boundaries and giving lots of support, will find their kids eager to flow.
Freedom--to speak, to write, to read, to live as one chooses--is not essential to flow. But a free society enables more different kinds of flow experiences, and more outlets for flow, than an unfree society.
Religion can be a powerful aid to flow. If you believe you know why the universe ticks, and if you believe that your actions somehow affect the balance or at least your own fate, then almost everything can become flow. This is the messianic urge which drove the Crusades... believing God is on your side can transform your consciousness completely. Conversely, without some core set of beliefs to make sense of the universe, flow can be difficult to achieve at all. Combine this with the point above about freedom, and you see why modern culture is currently struggling with these ideas.
Can you rank societies, and perhaps even religions, based on how much opportunity for flow they create among all segments of the population? What would such a ranking look like? Where would the U.S. fall?
It is crucial to remember that flow is about finding life enjoyable for its own sake, rather than about structuring life so there are more external rewards. This makes flow a very difficult thing to think about.in conventional terms. We are used to thinking of our lives in terms of how much income we have access to, or how many partners or children we have. It's hard to internalize that those are not the important parameters of how happy--how flowful--your life is... they are just the objective terms, the ones which can be independently measured. You cannot quantify flow--at least not yet.
Flow and the Future
The best of all possible worlds, I think, would be a world in which just about everyone could find a way to live in a state of genuine, sustainable, expansive flow.
This may well be the biggest challenge humanity has yet faced: how to create a world in which everyone can be challenged and involved?
Long ago, all life was a struggle to survive, continuously demanding. More recently, we learned to create some measure of security for ourselves, but still we were each responsible for providing for ourselves. Now, most of what we create is over and above what we need to survive, and we are increasingly distant from the (relatively few) people who provide for our needs. Briefly: we are creating a world where the few can produce all that the rest need to live. ***
In our modern world, the old patterns of occupations no longer apply. In the future, even fewer people will be "working" in the sense of producing goods needed for survival. What will this mean, when fewer people need to work, and hence when fewer people have an external context in which to feel challenged--in which to feel flow?
Will our highest flow responses always come from challenges to our survival? And if so, will we find that if our survival is no longer at stake, we experience less flow?
How can one help someone else experience flow, if it is so personal? How can even the preconditions for flow be disseminated through society? Flow is intrinsically enjoyable... how can we use this to promote flow universally?
The darkest scenario: humanity comes up with no good answer, and most of the humans on the planet wind up living off welfare and watching hyper-TV, amusing themselves to death, never experiencing flow. Or: most humans are so desperately struggling to survive that war becomes the most common type of flow in the world.
The brightest scenario: everyone in the world realizes that the challenge before us is to reduce our impact on the planet, and to create new possibilities for human expression (that don't involve more damage to the world). This becomes an endeavor that provides meaning and structure to everyone's life: this becomes the greatest opportunity for collective, global flow--and the best object of that flow--that has ever been. Humanity comes out the other side with a better sense of itself and its potential in the universe than it has ever had.
Which do you prefer?
Research on Happiness
Academics at Gothenburg University in Sweden have come up with an interesting proposition: hard work is the only path to happiness. Their research, conducted over three years, shows that money, love and success bring only temporary joy, whereas the effort taken to achieve a goal provides lasting satisfaction. The researchers have pitted their finding against the claims of the tourism industry, which tells potential customers that a break from work is the best way to be happy.
You need not be an Einstein or a Max Weber to know that the Swedes have got it absolutely right. Happiness can't be bought with cash. Neither can the leisure industry sell it. Happiness has to be earned by pursuing it in meaningful ways, and what is meaningful varies from person to person. For a scientist, the engagement with a scientific problem is the most meaningful aspect of his existence. In the case of a writer, it is his struggle with words, plots, images and ideas that defines happiness. A musician discovers joy when he manages to express himself in his music. In each case, the journey is what matters and not the destination.
Work becomes tyranny for a person when it becomes a chore, forced by external factors and conditions. It then ceases to be a pursuit of happiness. In our times, the dialectic between work and happiness is very often misunderstood. When the link between the two is ruptured, we try to find a solution elsewhere. We try to heal the symptom while leaving the cause unattended.
The idea of holiday as a break from work refuses to recognize that happiness can be found in work. Tourism industry plays on this confusion and offers leisure as a solace to those in pursuit of happiness. Could Kalidasa have preferred an idle weekend in the Himalayas to chasing the cloud in his imagination while writing Megha Sandesa? Or would Michelangelo have traded his love for marble with sailing on the Adriatic?
You need not be an Einstein or a Max Weber to know that the Swedes have got it absolutely right. Happiness can't be bought with cash. Neither can the leisure industry sell it. Happiness has to be earned by pursuing it in meaningful ways, and what is meaningful varies from person to person. For a scientist, the engagement with a scientific problem is the most meaningful aspect of his existence. In the case of a writer, it is his struggle with words, plots, images and ideas that defines happiness. A musician discovers joy when he manages to express himself in his music. In each case, the journey is what matters and not the destination.
Work becomes tyranny for a person when it becomes a chore, forced by external factors and conditions. It then ceases to be a pursuit of happiness. In our times, the dialectic between work and happiness is very often misunderstood. When the link between the two is ruptured, we try to find a solution elsewhere. We try to heal the symptom while leaving the cause unattended.
The idea of holiday as a break from work refuses to recognize that happiness can be found in work. Tourism industry plays on this confusion and offers leisure as a solace to those in pursuit of happiness. Could Kalidasa have preferred an idle weekend in the Himalayas to chasing the cloud in his imagination while writing Megha Sandesa? Or would Michelangelo have traded his love for marble with sailing on the Adriatic?
The Story of Lord Hanuman - By Swami Sivananda
Sri Hanuman was born of Anjani from Pavana, the wind-god. He was named Hanuman after the name of the city of Hanumpur over which his maternal uncle Parti Surya ruled. Hanuman's body was hard as a stone. So Anjani named him Vajranga. He is also known by the names "Mahavir" or mightiest hero (because he exhibited several heroic feats), Balibima and Maruti.
The world has not yet seen and will not see in future also a mighty hero like Sri Hanuman. During his life he worked wonders and exhibited superhuman feats of strength and valor. He has left behind him a name which, as long as the world lasts, will continue wielding a great influence over the minds of millions of people.
He is one of the seven Chiranjivis. He was the only learned scholar who knew the nine Vyakaranas. He learnt the Sastras from the sun-god. He was the wisest of the wise, strongest of the strong and bravest of the brave. He was the Sakti of Rudra. He who meditates on him and repeats his name attains power, strength, glory, prosperity and success in life. He is worshipped in all parts of India, particularly in Maharashtra.
He was born at the most auspicious hour of the morning of the 8th of the Lunar month, Chaitra, at 4 o'clock on the most blessed day, Tuesday.
He had the power to assume any form he liked; to swell his body to an enormous extent and to reduce it to the length of a thumb. His strength was superhuman. He was the terror of Rakshasas. He was well versed in the four Vedas and other sacred books. His valor, wisdom, knowledge of the scriptures and superhuman strength attracted everybody who came near him. He had extraordinary skill in warfare.
He was the chosen messenger, warrior and servant of Sri Rama. He was the votary and devotee of Lord Rama. Rama was his all in all. He lived to serve Rama. He lived in Rama. He lived for Rama. He was a minister and intimate friend of Sugriva.
From his very birth he exhibited extraordinary physical strength and worked many miracles.
When he was a child he put the sun into his mouth. All the gods were very much troubled. They came with folded hands to the child and humbly entreated him to release the sun. The child set free the sun at their request.
Hanuman saw Sri Rama for the first time in Kishkindha. Sri Rama and Lakshmana came there in the course of their search of Sita whom Ravana had carried away.
A Rishi pronounced a curse on Hanuman for his wrong action, that he would remain unconscious of his great strength and prowess till he met Sri Rama and served him with devotion. As soon as Hanuman beheld Sri Rama he became conscious of his strength and power.
In Lanka, Hanuman exhibited his immense strength and extraordinary powers. He destroyed the beautiful grove which was a pleasure resort of Ravana. He uprooted many trees and killed many Rakshasas. Ravana was very much infuriated at this. He sent Jambumali to fight against Sri Hanuman who took the trunk of a tree and hurled it against Jambumali and killed him.Ravana sent his son Aksha to fight against Hanuman. He was also killed. Then he sent Indrajit. Hanuman threw a great tree upon Indrajit. Indrajit fell down senseless on the ground. After some time Indrajit recovered his consciousness. He threw the noose of Brahma on Hanuman. Hanuman allowed himself to be bound by the noose. He wanted to honor Brahma. Indrajit ordered the Rakshasas to carry the monkey to his father's court. Even a hundred Rakshasas were not able to lift Hanuman.
Hanuman made himself as light as possible. The Rakshasas then lifted him up. When they placed him over their shoulders he suddenly became heavy and crushed them to death. Then Hanuman asked the Rakshasas to remove the rope. They removed the rope and Hanuman proceeded to the council hall of Ravana.
Ravana said, "O mischievous monkey, what will you say in your defence? I will put you to death." Hanuman laughed and said, "O wicked Ravana, give back Sita to Lord Rama and ask his pardon; otherwise you will be ruined and the whole of Lanka will be destroyed." These words of Hanuman made Ravana very furious. He asked the Rakshasas to cut off the head of Hanuman.
Vibhishana intervened and said, "O brother, it is not lawful and righteous to kill a messenger. You can inflict some punishment only."
Ravana consented. He wanted to deprive Hanuman of his tail and make him ugly. He ordered the Rakshasas to wrap Hanuman's tail with cloths soaked in oil and ghee. Hanuman extended his tail to such length and size that all the cloths in Lanka would not cover it.Then he reduced his tail of his own accord. The Rakshasas wrapped the tail with cloths soaked in oil and ghee and lighted the cloths. Hanuman expanded his body to an enormous size and began to jump from place to place. The whole of Lanka caught on fire. All the palatial buildings were burnt down to ashes.
Hanuman then jumped into the sea in order to cool and refresh himself. A drop of his perspiration fell into the mouth of a great fish which gave birth to a mighty hero named Makara Dhvaja. Makara Dhvaja is considered the son of Hanuman. Thereupon Hanuman went to the Asoka grove and told Sita all that he had done.
Then he crossed the sea through the air and came to the place where his army was placed. He told them all that had happened. Thereupon they all marched quickly to carry the good news to Sri Rama and Sugriva. They reached the city of Kishkindha. Hanuman gave Sita's ring to Lord Rama. Sri Rama rejoiced heartily. He praised Hanuman and embraced him saying, "O mighty hero I cannot repay your debt."
When all the brothers and sons of Ravana were killed, Ravana sent for his brother Ahi Ravana who was the king of the nether world. Ahi Ravana came to Lanka. Ravana asked his help to fight against Sri Rama and Lakshmana.
Ahi Ravana consented to help his brother. At the dead of night he assumed the form of Vibhishana, the brother of Ravana and an ally and devotee of Sri Rama. He reached the place where Rama and Lakshmana were sleeping. Hanuman was keeping watch. He thought that it was Vibhishana who was coming. Therefore he allowed him to enter the camp. Ahi Ravana quietly took the two brothers upon his shoulders and repaired to his kingdom.
When the day dawned, Hanuman found out that Sri Rama and Lakshmana were missing. He found out that Ahi Ravana had carried them to his kingdom. At once he proceeded to the nether world and received information that Ahi Ravana had made arrangements to kill the two brothers in sacrifice. Hanuman assumed a tiny form, entered the temple and sat over the image of the goddess.The image went down into the earth. Hanuman took her seat. When Ahi Ravana was about to sacrifice the two brothers, Hanuman appeared in his own form and killed him. He installed Makara Dhvaja, his own son on the throne, took the brothers on his shoulders and brought them to Lanka.
Hanuman killed many heroes in the great war. Dhumar, Vajro, Roshat, Ankhan and several other great warriors were killed by him.
When the great war was over, Vibhishana was installed on the throne of Lanka. The time of banishment was about to be over. Sri Rama, Lakshmana, Sita and Sri Hanuman sat in the Pushpaka Vimana or aeroplane and reached Ayodhya in time.
The coronation ceremony of Lord Rama was celebrated with great eclat and pomp. Sita gave Hanuman a necklace of pearls of rare quality. Hanuman received it with great respect and began to break the pearls with his teeth. Sita and other ministers who were sitting in the council hall were quite astonished at this queer act of Hanuman.
Sita asked Hanuman, "O mighty hero, what are you doing? Why do you break the pearls?" Sri Hanuman said, "O venerable mother, it is the most valuable necklace indeed as it has come to me through thy holy hand. But I want to find out whether any of the pearls contain my beloved Lord Rama. I do not keep a thing devoid of him. I do not find him in any of the pearls."Sita asked, "Tell me whether you keep Lord Rama within you." Sri Hanuman immediately tore open his heart and showed it to Sri Rama, Sita and others. They all found Lord Rama accompanied by Sita in the heart of Sri Hanuman.
Lord Rama rejoiced heartily. He came down the throne and embraced Hanuman and blessed him. Sri Hanuman passed the rest of his life in the company of the Lord.
When Sri Rama ascended to his supreme abode, Sri Hanuman also wished to follow him. But the Lord asked him to remain in this world as his representative and attend all the assemblies of men where discourses on his deeds were held and heard, and help his devotees in cultivating devotion.
He is a Chiranjeevi. He is everywhere. He who has eyes and devotion beholds him and receives his blessing.
Hanuman ranks first amongst the heroes of the world. His heroic deeds, wonderful exploits and marvelous feats of strength and bravery cannot be adequately described. His sense of duty was extremely laudable. He had great skill in all military tactics and methods of warfare.His crossing the sea of thirty miles in one leap and lifting the crest of a mountain in the palm of the hand, his carrying of the brothers on his shoulders from the nether world to Lanka are all astounding, superhuman feats which baffle human description.
He conquered innumerable difficulties which cropped up in his way through his courage, patience and undaunted spirit. He made untiring search to find Sita. At the time of danger he exhibited marvelous courage and presence of mind. He was steady and firm in his actions. He was always successful in his attempts.
Failure was not known to him. He gave up his life in the service of the Lord. He had not a tinge of selfishness in his actions. All his actions were offerings unto Lord Rama. No one reached the peak in Dasya Bhava like Sri Hanuman. He was a rare jewel among devotees, the supreme head among Pundits, the king among celibates and the commander among heroes and warriors.
O mighty Hanuman, untiring and devoted Sevak of Sri Rama, joy of Anjana, king of Brahmacharins, show us the secrets of Brahmacharya and the ways to attain purity in thought, word and deed. May India have such heroes and Brahmacharins ever more!
Where Hanuman is, there are Sri Rama and Sri Sita and wherever Sri Rama and Sri Sita are praised and their deeds recited, there Hanuman is.
Glory to Hanuman, the blessed devotee of Lord Rama. Glory, glory to Sri Anjaneya, the mighty hero, undaunted warrior and learned Brahmacharin, the like of whom the world has not yet seen and will not see in time to come.
May his blessings be upon you all. Let us sing his glory now:
Jaya Siya Ram Jaya, Jaya Siya Ram
Jaya Hanuman Jaya, Jaya Hanuman.
Sri Hanuman Chalisa: Commentary By Sw. Tejomayananda
Introduction
Living in this world, it is almost impossible for any individual to load a life that is above criticism – just or unjust. If we study the great epic, Ramayana, we find that even Lord Rama and Mother Sita could not escape criticism, though unjust, from their own subjects. The only person in Ramayana who succeeded in accomplishing this difficult task is Sri Hanuman – the greatest devotee of the Lord. We do not find a single incident wherein Sri Hanuman has made any mistake and got blamed for it. He is the very embodiment of wisdom, devotion and service. This noble son of Wind God (vayu) has innumerable virtues.
We all very easily recognize the importance and the service of sun because it is not available in the night. But the wind remains with us all the 24 hours of the days, serving all beings without any desire for recognition and appreciation for its service. Thus we take its existence for granted, without paying much respect and attention to it. Sri Hanuman has imbibed from his father, Wind God this race and noble virtue of serving all without a trace of pride in his heart. He crossed the ocean, entered the formidable Lanka and burnt it. He discovered Mother Sita, killed the demonic forces of Ravana. He served Lord Rama in such numerous ways that the Lord Himself felt overwhelmed with extreme love and gratitude for Sri Hanuman and He gave expression to His feelings as well. But on hearing his own praise, Sri Hanuman, the true devotee of the Lord, fell at His feet with tears in his eyes, giving all credit for his achievements to Lord Rama alone. What a noble and inspiring ideal of service with utmost humility!
Generally we are advised that we should imbibe from Sri Hanuman's character, this rare quality of serving our master with unswerving faith and devotion. But little do we realize that before doing so, it is of extreme importance to know who should really be our Master. He who is the Lord of the total universe and in serving whom our potential divinity comes to shine forth; He alone can be our true Master. This truth is seen revealed in the life of Sri Hanuman. Before meeting Lord Rama he was serving Sugreeva but his powers remained dormant at the time and Sugreeva was not able to bring them out as Lord Rama did by His sheer grace. We see that Sugreeva himself was fraught with mortal fear of death at the hands of his own brother Vali, and was dependent on Sri Hanuman for his own protection. How could such a person ever be anyone's true Master?
On the other hand when Sri Hanuman saw Lord Rama for the very first time he recognized his Master immediately and, thereafter, not only himself became His loyal and devoted servant but also made Sugreeva follow his example. As soon as Sugreeva surrendered himself to the lotus feet of Lord Rama, he received the fruit of his devotion. In Lanka also, the she-demon Lankini and Vibheeshana were serving Ravana, the mighty but atrocious king. They were under the same notion that they should serve their Master, whoever he may be. It is only Sri Hanuman who made them realize their mistake. After recognizing this, they both became devotees of Lord Rama.
Thus, we see that neither a weakling like Sugreeva nor a mighty person like Ravana can ever be a true Master. Lord Rama alone can be that Master who is great, not because He keeps all beings under His control like Ravana but because He makes His devotees greater than Himself!
May we all come to recognize Lord Rama as our Master and serve Him in the attitude of His great devotee Sri Hanuman? May we ever revel in singing the holy name of the Lord – Sri Ram Jaya Ram Jaya Jaya Ram!
SWAMI TEJOMAYANANDA
Hanuman Calisa
om sri ganesaya namah
Hanuman Chalisa is the most popular composition of the great Saint Goswami Tulsidas, the author of Tulsi Ramayan. He composed Hanuman Chalisa when he was very sick. He sang the praise of Sri Hanuman and it is said that he recovered from his illness. The significance of singing the glories of the Lord is to purify your speech and mind. It is impossible to sing all His glories because they are infinite. You should chant those of His glories that are dear to you. In the Sundarakand of Tulsi Ramayan, Saint Tulsidas sings the glory of Sri Hanuman:
Atulita-baladhamam svarna-sailabhadeham
Danuja-vana-kusanum jnaninam-agra-ganyam /
Sakala-guna-nidhanam vanaranam-adhisam
Raghupati-priya-bhaktam vata-jatam namami //
I salute the son of Wind God, the abode of immeasurable strength, possessing a body shining like a mountain of gold, a fire to consume the forest of the demon race, the foremost among the wise, storehouse of every excellence, the chief of the monkeys, Lord Rama's noble devotee!
The first attractive attribute that you see in Sri Hanuman is that he is the abode of immeasurable and incomparable strength that is not merely physical but also has a splendor (tejas) in it. His splendor is like a golden mountain. It is a rare quality. He uses his strength not to scare ordinary of weak people but to destroy those who give trouble to saintly persons. He not only has the power but also is considered as a wise, noble soul (jnanin). His language as well as the feelings are pure.
The most admirable virtue of Sri Hanuman is his politeness. Ravana was strong but he had pride. Such a person does not really command any respect. Sri Hanuman is truly the king of all Vanaras. To him, Lord Rama is very dear. Also we can say that Sri Hanuman is the favorite devotee of Lord Rama. When one has love for the Lord, Lord embraces His devotee in thousand ways.
Sri Hanuman brought life to all. He helped Sugreeva get rid of his fear of Vali and he inspired Vibheeshana who came away from Ravana to surrender at the feet of the Lord. He saved the life of Mother Sita, by conveying the message of the Lord to her. He brought the sanjivani plant and saved the life of Lakshmana. He proceeded to Ayodhya, much before Lord Rama and conveyed the message of Lord's arrival to Bharata, who was ready to immolate himself then. It is the glory of Sri Hanuman in the form of Hanuman Chalisa.
Hanuman Chalisa is sung in various parts of India with great love and devotion. Some people chant it as their daily prayer. People believe that if they have illness or adversity, chanting of Hanuman Chalisa seven times or one hundred times will relieve them of their distress. There are others who consider Saturday or Tuesday to be dedicated to Sri Hanuman and they spend the day in thinking about the glories of Sri Hanuman, going to the temple and chanting Hanuman Chalisa. Thus, we see that this great composition of Saint Tulsidas has become a part of the culture and religious beliefs of a large number of people in India. The word Chalisa means forty. This composition has forty verses in praise of Sri Hanuman. Those who are familiar with the story of Ramayana know his greatness. As we read individual verses in detail, we shall appreciate his various qualities namely love, devotion, service, velour etc.
In life, it is almost impossible for a person to remain free from blemish. Whether right or wrong, criticisms and accusations are leveled against everyone, It is impossible to escape this and no one is immune from it. even Lord Rama and the divine Mother Sita are not spared. Lord Rama was an incarnation of righteousness and Mother Sita was the incarnation of purity. They also are unfairly blamed and criticized. But there is one character in Ramayana who is above all criticisms and that is Sri Hanuman. He is a great devotee and totally free from all faults and blemish. We shall see this in more detail as we study the text.
Dohas Chapter 1
sri guru carana saroja raja
nijamanu mukuru sudhari /
baranau raghubara bimala jasu
jo dayaku phala cari // 1 //
With a spotless (serene) mind, purified by the dust of the lotus feet of Guru, I now (proceed to) describe the unblemished glory of Sri Hanuman; the most exalted one of Raghu's family, who is capable of bestowing the four fruits (purusartha-s) on his devotees.
Hanuman Chalisa is composed in the Avadhi language, which is a dialect of Hindi and is spoken in Ayodhya (in Uttar Pradesh, India), where Lord Rama was born. Though an offshoot of Hindi, it has been modified over the years where even students of Hindi may have trouble in understanding a lot of the Avadhi words. The word baranau means – I am going to describe. It comes from the Sanskrit verb varnan 'to describe'. Saint Tulsidas says that in these verses he is going to describe the holy, pure noble glories (bimala jasu) of raghuvar. Lord Rama belonged to the dynasty of Raghu (raghuvamsa). Raghu was a great king and the entire dynasty was named after him. Raghuvar means the supreme, the best among the descendants of Raghu dynasty – Lord Rama. This particular verse is found in Ayodhyakand of Ramcharita Manas. There we understand that it refers to the glories of Lord Rama. In fact in the second part of Ayodhyakand, the glories of Bharata (younger brother of Lord Rama) are sung. So this verse could also refer to Bharata as raghuvar since he was a noble brother. Even though Hanuman Chalisa praises Lord Rama, it is essentially being sung in praise of Sri Hanuman. Why would then, Saint Tulsidas address Sri Hanuman as raghuvar? As we all know, he was not born in the Raghu dynasty. He was in the form of a monkey. But there is a beautiful interpretation for this. In Tulasi Ramayan, it is mentioned that he was the adopted son of lord Rama and Mother Sita. When Sri Hanuman went to Lanka to meet Mother Sita, she recognized him as the greatest devotee of Lord Rama and addressed him as Suta, my son. In turn, Sri Hanuman called her as Janani, mother (one who gives birth). And when Sri Hanuman returned from Lanka, Lord Rama also addressed him as 'son'. It is interesting that Sri Hanuman met Lord Rama first but Mother Sita was the one who addressed him first as son and developed that relationship with him. In human life also it is mother who gets close to the child first and the relationship of father develops later.
Thus, Lord Rama and Mother Sita's son becomes 'one who belongs to the dynasty of Raghu – raghuvamsl. And because of the noble, divine qualities of Sri Hanuman, he is referred to as raghuvar, the supreme and the best. However, Sri Hanuman gives all the credit for his success to Lord Rama. In fact the two are inseparable. Hence these verses describe the glories of the supreme descendants of Raghu.
Saint Tulsidas then goes on to say, "I am describing the glories of Sri Hanuman, because he was not an ordinary person. Don't take him to be like an ordinary king or divine minister or dictator. He is greater than all those. Singing his glories gives you all the four goals of life. The four goals are: Dharmah arthah, kamah and moksah.
Arthah refers to wealth and prosperity and kamah means worldly joy of sense pleasures. Some people may be very rich but are not able to enjoy their wealth. They may be so sick that they can't even eat. Their breakfast may be only medicines! What use is such wealth? Others may have wealth and joy, but do not perform any meritorious deeds, dharmah. They do not do things for others and such people suffer in life. Singing the glories of Sri Hanuman gives you dharmah and also punyah (merit) to enjoy heaven. But the most important goal of man's life is liberation from the sufferings of the cycle of birth and death, moksah Sri Hanuman can grant this great goal also to us.
How does one prepare oneself to sing the glories of Sri Hanuman? It is by purifying one's mind. A clean, pure mind will be able to relate with the Lord and fell His presence everywhere. Saint Tulsidas says. Sri guru carana saroja raja nijananu mukuru sudhari. The word sudhari signifies perfecting purifying and cleaning. nijamanu mukuru means 'the mirror of my mind.' I will clean the mirror of my mind so it will reflect the glories of the Lord. Only in a clean mirror the reflection is clear and in the mind-mirror, Sri Hanuman 's glories can shine. How will I clean this mind-mirror? guru carana saroja raja – with the dust of my teacher's lotus feet. By surrendering myself at the feet of my teacher and in service to him, I will be able to cleanse my mind of all impurities.
Doha
buddhihina tanu janike
sumirau pavana kumara /
bala buddhi bidya dehu mohi
harahu kalesa bikara // 2 //
Knowing that I am ignorant, I pray to you (Sri Hanuman) the son of Wind God, to bless me with strength, wisdom and discriminating knowledge. Banish (all) my afflictions
Sumirau is derived from the sanskrit word smarana – 'to remember'. In these local dialects, the difficult Sanskrit words become sweeter and easier to pronounce. The verse says, I remember pavana kumarah, son of the Wind-god. Bala buddhi bidya dehu mohi – bless me with strength that include physical, moral and strength of character. Vidya means knowledge and buddhi is the faculty with which we gain knowledge. If I do not have this faculty, how can I know anything or learn? A blind man has physical eyes, but does not have the faculty of seeing. To gain knowledge, I must have the faculty of knowing and understanding and also I must use it. In this world every man is blessed with intellect (buddhih), but not every one is intelligent (buddhiman). A wise man not only learns, but also uses that knowledge to help him others. One man was asked, 'Why do you always act so foolish, why don't you use your brains?' He said, 'God has given me a limited amount of intellect. I have to live for 70 years. If I use it all right now, it will finish by the time I get older. So, I have to conserve it and use it sparingly!'
People do not use their intellect and this is the reason for bondage. Even if they do use it, it is only at the worldly, superficial level. They do not think about themselves, the truth behind this life or this world. Saint Tulsidas says: 'Bless me with strength and knowledge.' What will this knowledge do? Harahu kalesa bikara – this knowledge alone can remove my sufferings. Vikara means change or modification which we are afraid of and do not want to accept. Kalesa (in samskrit, klesah) here refer to afflictions that cause misery, perversions and negative tendencies. Five kinds of afflictions are mentioned in the scriptures:
1. Avidya – ignorance
2. Asmita – ego (the product of ignorance)
3. Ragah – things I like
4. Dvesah – things I dislike, and
5. Abhinivesah – fear of death.
Everyone suffers from these five afflictions. The more likes and dislikes you have, the more unhappy you become if you get the things you like you are happy and if not or if you get things you dislike that make you unhappy. However, it is not always possible to have around you, the objects, people and places that you like. In this way we create more sorrows for ourselves. Even things that you like are not permanent and you worry about preserving and multiplying them. All these conditions bring increased sorrow and stress. Saint Tulsidas says that worship of Sri Hanuman frees the devotee from all these five afflictions buddhihina tanu janike – knowing myself to be ignorant. Tanu means body and buddhihina means ignorance, absence of wisdom. To consider oneself only as body is ignorance. The body is only inert matter, has no life and has no capabilities to do anything by itself. It is only when this body is permeated by Lord's grace, with His power it comes to life and functions. So people who consider this body to be most important are foolish.
To summarize, first clean your mind by rendering service to your teacher. Once your mind is clean, the glories of the Lord will shine clearly in your heart. With this attitude, you sing the glories of the Lord and you will get all that you seek, i.e. noble virtues (dharmah), prosperity (arthah), joy (kamah) and liberation (moksah). All you sorrows will disappear and your ignorance will vanish. Such is the prayer of Saint Tulsidas.
A simple meaning pavana kumarah is that he was the son of the Wind God. Wind keeps on blowing, and therefore it is a great purifier. For example, if you walk into a room that has all windows and doors shut for a while, it becomes very stuffy. The moment you open the windows, the air blows in and purifies the atmosphere. So the God of Wind is a great purifier. His son Sri Hanuman also moves around from place to place and wherever he goes, he purifies the atmosphere. People who come in contact with him also get purified. The second meaning is that the wind always serves us silently. The sun serves us during the day and the moon illumines the earth at night. We see them when they are present and notice their absence when they are not visible. One the other hand, the wind serves us constantly, day and night. Also it is within us in the form of vital air (pranah), without which we should be dead in a few minutes. However, the invisible wind serves us silently without ostentation. Hence, we often take it for granted. The wind does not have any ego or sense of 'I –ness.'
Similarly, his son Sri Hanuman's life is full of service to Lord Rama. He has no sense of pride, arrogance or false ego. His goal is to serve the Lord continuously with humility and devotion. These are the qualities that we need to imbibe in us. Let us always serve others, silently, without expecting praise or reward.
Caupai 1-7 Chapter 2
Caupai 1:
jaya hanuman jnana guna sagara /
jaya kapisa tihuloka ujagara // 1 //
Victory to you, O Hanuman, who is an ocean of knowledge and virtues. Victory to you. O Hanuman (Lord of the monkeys), who is well known in all the three worlds.
Hanu means chin. But anyone who has a chin be called as Sri Hanuman? His chin was cut, cleaved in the middle and the whole mouth is swollen. When he was born early in the morning, he was the rising sun and thought it was a fruit. He had the ability to fly and he flew to the sun and swallowed it. The whole world became dark. Nobody could understand who this little child was that had swallowed the sun?
At that time, Lord Indra, king of all gods came there with his thunderbolt. His thunderbolt is infallible and whoever is struck by it will be dead instantly. Lord Indra struck that little child with his thunderbolt to free the sun. The bolt struck Sri Hanuman on the chin. However, being all-powerful, he did not die but releasing the sun, he fell on the earth and became unconscious. When the Wind God came to know what had happened, he became very angry and stopped the flow air. Everyone was dying without air. They started praying to Wind God and all gods came and sought apology. The Wind God said, 'All of you will have to bless my son with all your powers and good qualities that you possess.' Thus Sri Hanuman came to be blessed with all might and strength.
Sri Hanuman is so strong that he could withstand a blow from the mighty thunderbolt of Lord Indra. Saint Tulsidas says that he is strong and he uses this strength in the service of the Lord and others. Many people who are also strong use their strength to subjugate others and become dictators. Sri Hanuman does not misuse his strength.
jnana guna sagara means, 'you are an ocean of knowledge and virtue'. Often people who have some knowledge or a degree from some university become very arrogant. They consider themselves superior to others. But Sri Hanuman is the best among all learned people (buddhimatam varistham) and also he has all the noble virtues. The greatest virtues are humility and nobility of character. He is the very embodiment of these virtues. And the greatest knowledge is Self-knowledge. Sri Hanuman has that too. He knew exactly who he was. Lord Rama once asked him, 'What is your relationship with me?' Sri Hanuman answered, 'As a body, I am your servant; as an individual soul, I am a part of you and you are the whole; as the Self, we both are one. This is my firm conviction!' – (deha-buddhya tu daso'smi jiva-buddhya tvadamsakah / atma-buddhya tvamevaham iti me niscita matih // Valmiki Ramayana)
Besides, Sri Hanuman is always good in his dealings with everyone and dealt with each person appropriately depending on his rank and stature. Valmiki Ramayan says that he was a scholar and knew 9 kinds of Sanskrit grammar (nava-vyakarana panditah). But at the same time, he is an epitome of humility (guna sagara). jaya kapisa means victory to the Lord of the monkeys. In Tulasi Ramayan, at first Bali was the king of the monkeys and then Sugreeva. They were kings, but Sri Hanuman was the Lord who was a kingmaker! When Sugreeva was running around, being afraid of his brother Bali, it was Sri Hanuman's courage and bravery that gave him strength. And who is a true king? Is it one who rules over a piece of land or a kingdom? Is it one who gets power because the majority of people voted for him? Or is it the one who rules over the hearts of all people? Crowned king is an appointed head of the state. But real Lordship is an uncrowned king who is worshipped and respected by all. Such a king is Sri Hanuman. He is Kapisah (kapi means monkey and isah Lord). Also the word kapi stands for one who drinks the joy of Brahman, which is the true happiness. (ka – joy (sukham) and pi (pipate) – one who drinks). The Chandogya Upanishad says, 'That which is infinite, that alone is happiness'. That which is finite is not happiness. So one who knows this and revels in the joy of Brahman is a kapi. Sri Hanuman is not an ordinary monkey and none should insult him by calling him a monkey-God. He is in the form of a monkey, but he is a brahmajnanin, one who has supreme knowledge.
tihuloka ujagara means, he who is well known in all the three worlds. The light of his fame spreads everywhere, everyone knows him and respects him.
Caupai 2:
Ramaduta atulita baladhama /
Anjani-putra pavana-suta nama // 2 //
You are the envoy of Lord Rama, an abode of incomparable strength, the son of Anjana (popularly) known with the name Pavana-suta (son of the Wind God).
Sri Hanuman is a messenger of Lord Rama. Being a messenger is a difficult job. One has to make sure that one delivers the message promptly and correctly. In Sri Hanuma's case, the job was more difficult because he had to deliver a message to the enemy, King Ravana of Lanka. The messenger even can get killed in this endeavor! Prior to this, he had to secretly deliver Lord Rama's message to Mother Sita, concealing himself from all the demon guards. But Sri Hanuman's greatness is that whatever he undertakes, he does well, with complete devotion and courage.
He is the very epitome of immeasurable strength, strength that you cannot compare with anything (atulita). Saint Tulsidas says, 'The first thing that one notices is Sri Hanuman 's superhuman powers. His mother's name was Anjani (also, Anjana), which means pure intellect. So. he was born of pure intellect, the son of a pure hearted mother. Anjana also stands for the beautifying paste that you put in your eyes. Guru's grace (gurukrpa) is also called Anjana, by which one realizes the whole world to be Lord Rama. Putra means a son who saves his parents from going to hell. Various kinds of heaven and hell are described in our scriptures. One of these is called pum.
A true son is one who saves his parents from suffering and Misery (punnamno narakadyasmat-trayate pitaram sutah. Tasmat putra iti proktah). Such a son was Sri Hanuman. Also he brought so much fame to his parents. If not for him, who would know Anjani?
Caupai 3:
mahabira bikrama bajarangi /
kumati nivara sumati ke sangi // 3 //
You, with the body as hard (strong) as diamond, are a great warrior of incomparable valor; you are the remover of wicked thoughts, and (you) grant me the company of the wise.
Virah is a man of courage, strength, and valour. But he is a mahabira, greatest warrior. Lord Rama Himself sang his glories. Some poet or author would glorify an ordinary warrior. But when the Lord Himself honors and praises a person, that person cannot be an ordinary one.
Generally when one hears the word virah one considers him having heroism and courage in the battlefield. But there are five kinds of heroism (virata) are mentioned in the scriptures:
1. Tyagavirah or dharmavirah – Hero in renunciation and sacrifice. For the sake of righteous living, one often has to sacrifice a lot. One who does this to live a life of dharma is called tyagavirah.
2. Dayavirah – Hero in compassion. One who is great even in compassion, cannot stand the sorrows of others, and will do anything to alleviate them is a dayavirah.
3. Vidyavirah – Hero in knowledge and learning.
4. Danavirah – Hero in charity. Sri Hanuman gives you anything you seek (dharmah, arthah, kamah and moksah). But his greatest gift is that he gives you –devotion to Lord Rama (rama-bhaktih).
5. Ranavirah – Brave warrior in the battlefield.
In the world, we may find people who have one kind of heroism. They may be brave in battle, but lacking knowledge (vidya) or compassion (daya). Sri Hanuman is such a hero who has all five kinds of valour, hence he is called mahabira. If all the five are used in the service of the Lord, there can be nothing greater. Such a person is called a Supreme Hero (paramavirah). Lord Rama said to Sri Hanuman, 'I am forever indebted to you. I will never be able to repay you debt'.
bikrama – A mighty person, one who has great valour. Sri Hanuman is also known as bajarangi. The original Sanskrit word is vajra-angi. Sri hanuman has a body made up of a steel-like frame, strong enough to withstand the thunderbolt of Lord Indra. So, the word vajra-angi became bajarangi in avadhi language, which is easier to pronounce.
kumati nivara sumati ke sangi – You eliminate all illusions of the mind. kumati means all vicious, negative tendencies of the mind. nivara means, to get rid of. sumati ke sangi – you gave us bright intellect or you are the friend of a person of good intellect. Sri Hanuman gives us good thoughts and eliminates evil thoughts. These words can also mean that Sri Hanuman punishes people who are evil and he supports those who are good.
Caupai 4:
kancana barana biraja subesa /
anana kundala kuncita kesa // 4 //
Your golden complexion shines more in attractive clothes (which you are wearing) and with the glittering earrings and (your) curly hair.
Caupai 5:
hatha bajra au dhvaja biraja /
kandhe munja janeu sajai // 5 //
You have the thunderbolt (in one hand) and the flag (in another), and the sacred thread across your shoulder made of munja grass decorates you.
Sri Hanuman carries a mace (gada) in his hand that is strong like Lord Indra's thunderbolt and kills whoever it is used on. The word gada also means 'to speak'. This weapon is used in the battlefield to eliminate enemies and the other, to flatten and destroy ignorance and ego with the help of words (true knowledge). dhvaja birajai – He carries the flag of Lord Rama in his hand which symbolically shows that he always honors and remembers Lord Rama. Dhvaja also stands for victory to Lord Rama. Usually flags were flown on warrior's chariots to identify them to a friend or a foe. But Sri Hanuman's body itself is like a chariot as he flies from place to place. Thus, he has to carry Lord Rama's flag in his hand. Saint Tulsidas says that Sri Hanuman carries the flag of truthfulness, good character and faith in God's name.
kandhe munja janeu sajai – janeu is the sacred thread made of cotton that is worn around the neck when one is initiated into gayatri-mantrah. Originally it was made of munja grass and therefore known as munja janeu. This thread ceremony is carried out when a boy is between 5 and 10 years old to inform him that his playful days are over. Thereafter, he has to begin a life of Study and discipline. The knot in the thread represents Brahman – the Supreme Consciousness. The three threads woven together represent the three qualities (sattva, rajas and tamas) and that they are centered on Brahman. Traditionally, people are advised to hold on to the knot of Brahman while chanting the gayatri-mantrah. Sri Hanuman wears the sacred thread made of munja grass on his shoulder and his attention is always on Brahman.
Caupai 6:
sankara-suvana kesari-nandana /
teja pratapa maha jaga-bandana // 6 //
You are an incarnation of Shiva and son of Kesari. Everyone in the world respects you because of your luster and great valor.
Sankara-suvana kesari-nandana – Son of lord Shiva and also son of Kesari. One may wonder as to how many people is he the son of? Wind god, Lord Shiva and Kesari? When Ravana's atrocities were increasing and he was playing havoc in the world, all the gods and ascetics prayed to Lord Vishnu. They appealed to Him that the earth cannot take much more of this misery and requested the Lord to come and save everyone. Lord said, 'I will take birth as Rama, to free the earth the evil grip of Ravana.' Lord Brahma said to all gods, 'Since Lord Vishnu is coming on this earth; we must all serve him there. As He is assuming the form of human (narah), we should all assume the lower form of monkeys (vanarah). So all the monkeys that served Lord Rama were none other than the gods themselves. Vali was the son of Indra, Sugreeva was the son of Surya, etc. Vayu blessed Anjani and Kesari (parents of Sri Hanuman) with his glow (tejas). This power he placed in Sri Hanuman when he was born. Therefore he is called as son of Wind.
Lord Shiva and Lord Vishnu are good friends. When one takes birth, the other wants to serve him. Lord Shiva thought, 'I wish to serve Lord Vishnu when he comes as Lord Rama. If I comes as a member of his family, he may hesitate to take service from me and may want to serve me back. But if I come in a lower (monkey) form there will be no such problem!' Thinking thus, he placed his tejas in Sri Hanuman to serve Lord Rama Therefore, Sri Hanuman is called as son of Lord Shiva (sankara suvana) and also known as an incarnation of lord Shiva (rudra-avatarah).
His father's name was Kesari, which also means 'lion'. Therefore, Sri Hanuman is born of a lion-like monkey who is fearless, brave and strong. Sri Hanuman purifies everybody that he comes in contact with, like Wind-God He has the purity of intellect. He blesses everyone, like Lord Shiva.
teja pratapa maha jaga-bandana – His glow or fame is very bright and is praised by the entire world. Everyone glorifies the name of Sri Hanuman.
Caupai 7:
bidyavana guni ati catura /
rama kaja karibe ko atura // 7 //
You are well versed in all the lores: you are fully of virtues: you are highly intelligent. You are ever ready to carry out the missions of Lord Rama.
bidyavana – Man of great knowledge and guni a person of great virtue. ati catura – Extremely wise. There are many people in this world who are very energetic and wise but all their energy is directed into worldly matters. If you ask them to do anything for God, or to go to the temple, they suddenly find all kinds of excuses. They will wake up early in the morning to play tennis, but not for meditation. But Sri Hanuman is ever ready to do the Lord's work. When Lakshmana was struck by the arrow of Indrajit (Ravana's son), he fell unconscious. The life saving sanjivani plant (a kind of elixir) had to be brought right away to save his life. Sri Hanuman said, 'Put mustard seed in boiling oil. In the time that it takes the seed to cook, I will be back with the plant.' When he went to the Himalayan Mountains, he could not find the plant so he brought the entire mountain. His service for the lord is constant, with full of love and devotion (rama kaja karibe ko atura).
Caupai 8-25 Chapter 3
Caupai 8:
prabhu caritra sunibe ko rasiya /
ramalakhana sita mana basiya // 8 //
You (always take) delight in listening to the glories of Prabhu (Ramachandra) and you have Lord Rama, Lakshmana and Mother Sita residing (permanently) in your heart.
He takes great delight (rasiya) in listening to the glories of the Lord. Usually, this is not our nature. When a man becomes famous, he wants people to talk about his glory; he does not want to listen to the glories of others. He does not even want to talk about the Lord's glories. But Sri Hanuman always revels in this joy and he is eager to hear people describe the character and valor of lord Rama. In Sri Hanuman's heart, Lord Rama, Lakshmana and Mother Sita are ever established. They always dwell in his heart. It also means that Sri Hanuman lives in their heart too! Lord Rama represents Self-knowledge, Mother Sita represents devotion (bhaktih) and Lakshmana stands for sacrifice and dispassion (vairagya). In Sri Hanuman there is knowledge, devotion and dispassion, all of them in great measure!
Caupai 9:
suksma rupadhari siyahin dikhava /
bikata rupadhari lanka jarava // 9 //
You assumed the minutest form (subtle form as small as an atom) when you revealed yourself to Mother Sita, and by assuming a fierce form, you burnt down (the city of) Lanka.
Sri Hanuman had the power to become small or big. When he went to meet Mother Sita, he became as small as a mosquito so he could approach her without being detected by the guards. In general, people who are big do not want to become small. They are too proud to do anything below their false 'dignity'. But Sri Hanuman has no such ego. He does whatever is required to accomplish the Lord's work. For him, the work is more important.
He assumed a huge form and destroyed and burnt Ravana's Lanka. This has several meanings. One is that he destroyed Ravana's places and forts. Lanka also represents the land of sense pleasures, material possessions, etc. during that time the people who lived there were mostly demons (asurah), i.e. those who think they are only the body. They do everything for the body's comforts, sense pleasures, etc. so he destroyed the land of sensuality. He also had the right knowledge that, 'I am not this body, I do not have to spend all my time taking care of this body's pleasures and comforts.' So, Sri Hanuman's grace gives us true knowledge. This fire of Self-knowledge removes our body' identification and attachment. Another fire is the fire of Mother Sita's sorrow. It is said that when a noble person is tortured, the fire of his or her sorrow that arises cannot be quenched. The fire of Mother Sita's sorrow burnt Lanka to ashes.
Caupai 10:
bhima rupa dhari asura samhare /
ramacandra ke kaja samvare // 10 //
Assuming a dreadful form to destroy the demons, you accomplished the mission of Lord Rama.
Caupai 11:
laya sanjivana lakhana jiyaye /
sri raghubira harasi ura laye // 11 //
You fetched sanjivani to revive Lakshmana (who had fainted on the battlefield) and made Lord Rama happily embrace you.
The arrow of Indrajit struck Lakshmana and Sri Hanuman brought the life-saving sanjivani plant that brought him back to life. Lord Rama was so delighted by this act that he embraced Sri Hanuman to His heart. It is evident that when the Lord embraces His devotee, He places His heart in the devotee's heart. So if you want to find the Lord, you have to search for Him in the heart of a true devotee.
Caupai 12:
raghupati kinhi bahuta badai /
tuma mama priya bharatahi sama bahi // 12 //
Lord Rama praised (you) very highly (and said), "You are as dear to me as my brother Bharata".
Caupai 13:
sahasa badana tumharo jasa gavan /
asa kahi sripati kantha lagavai // 13 //
Embracing you, Lord Rama Said, "Even Shesha, the thousand headed serpent sings your glory"
It is believed that everyone meditates on Lord Rama, but He meditates on Bharat, His younger brother. Bharata was so dear to Him. Lord Rama says, 'I love you as much as my dear brother Bharata, whom I remember at all times with great love.' asa kahi sripati kantha lagavai – sripatih or lakshmipatih refers to Lord Rama (Lakshmi's consort being Lord Vishnu). He embraced Sri Hanuman to His heart and praised him.
Saint Tulsidas says, - sahasa badana tumharo jasa gavai – 'The thousand-headed snake (sesah) is singing your glories and even a thousand mouths are not enough to sing your glories.' Secondly sesah himself incarnated as Lakhmana and he always sang Sri Hanuman's glories.
Caupai 14:
sanakadika brahmadi munisa /
narada sarada sahita ahisa // 14 //
The (great) sages like Sanaka, etc., and gods like Brahma, Shesha (the King of Serpents) and Narada and goddess Sharada.
Caupai 15:
jama kubera digapala jaha te /
kabi kobida kahi sake kaha te // 15 //
Yama – the god of death, Kubera – the god of wealth, the eight regents (of the directions), poets and scholars have not been able to praise you adequately.
The Sanat Kumars, Brahma, Indra, Vayu, Kubera (all the gods) and Sages also praise you. The great sages like Nrada, Sharada (sarasvati – goddess of Knowledge) all sing your glories. Yama, God of Death, Kubera, treasurer of gods, dik-palakah, guardian of all the directions, great poets, scholars, pundits – all praise you and sing your glories! These are inexhaustible, how can I enumerate them?
Caupai 16:
tuma upakara sugrivahi kinha /
rama milaya rajapada dinha // 16 //
You helped Sugreeva in regaining his (lost) kingdom by making him meet Lord Rama.
Sugreeva was a monkey king. His brother Vali (also known as Bali) drove him out of the kingdom and became king. Sugreeva lived in Rishyamukh Mountain, fearing for his life. When Sugreeva saw Lord Rama and Lakshmana approaching, he was afraid and thought that they were sent by Bali to kill him. They looked so brave and brilliant. He started running away. At that time Sri Hanuman said, 'Why don't you find out who they are, before running away? Don't asume that these mighty warriors are your enemies!' Thus giving him courage, Sri Hanuman brought Lord Rama to Sugreeva and established friendship between them. Lord Rama then killed Bali and Sugreeva was crowned as the king of Kishkinda. Also by introducing Lord Rama to him, Hanuman gave the knowledge of Supreme Truth to Sugreeva, since the Absolute Reality is the Lord Himself! Sri Hanuman expects nothing for himself and he always remains as a servant of the Lord. This is the greatness of Sri Hanuman.
Caupai 17:
tumaharo mantra bibhisana mana /
lankesvara bhaye saba jaga jana // 17 //
Vibheeshana heeded your advice. The entire world knows that he became the king of Lanka.
In this context, mantra means advice (mantrana). Sri Hanuman asked Vibheeshana (Ravana's brother) to surrender to Lord Rama. No sooner Vibheeshana did that, Lord Rama appointed him as the king of Lanka. Lord Rama never asked Sugreeva or Vibheeshana to fulfil his task for crowning them as kings. All they had to do was surrender to the Lord and all glory was theirs. This shows that, by surrendering to Lord Rama, you get secular powers and liberation (moksah) too!
Caupai 18:
juga sahasra jojana para bhanu /
lilyo tahi madhura phala janu // 18 //
You leaped quite easily at the Sun (who is) thousands of miles away thinking him to be a sweet fruit.
When Sri Hanuman was born, he saw the sun in the sky Thinking it to be a fruit, he flew towards it and swallowed it! Some people say that this is impossible. But he is the son of Wind God. The sun is fire and wind (vayuh) is the cause of fire. After all, fire merges into the air. So, why can't air swallow the fire? This is a Vedantic principle. Further, Sri Hanuman is not an ordinary monkey. So why do we doubt his power? He had all the powers that ascetics (yogi-s) and gods have i.e., eight-fold powers and nine types of wealth (astasiddhi and navanidhi), which we shall see in a later verse. One more explanation for this is that a child's mind is always pure and a child's imagination runs very high. It always asks questions about the sun, the moon and the stars. How does it rain? Where did I come from? It does not ask questions about dollar and monkey until so, a child's imagination runs as high as the sun. But as adults, we don't want to answer his question and ask him to shut up. Similarly Lord Indra struck Sri Hanuman with his thunderbolt so that he would not fly high. That is why according to the story, the world became dark until Sri Hanuman released the sun.
Caupai 19:
prabhu mudrika meli mukha mahi /
jaladhi lamghi gaye acaraja nahi // 19 //
Holding the Lord's (Rama's) ring in your mouth, you flew over (crossed) the ocean, which is no wonder (as you are capable of any achievement).
When all the monkeys went in search of Mother Sita they came to the vast ocean. On the other side was Lanka. They were not able to cross this ocean. Sri Hanuman put Lord Rama's ring in his own mouth. With that, he was able to cross that vast ocean and reach Lanka. That is the power of the Lord's name. Another spiritual meaning is that Mother Sita represents devotion (bhaktih) and to reach devotion or liberation (moksah) you have to cross this ocean. What is this ocean? The feeling that 'I am this body (dehatmabhavah)'. This feeling is as difficult to get over as crossing an ocean. But chanting the lord's name, we understand that we are not this body, and this way we cross this ocean of samsara (world). There is no doubt (acaraja nahi), that one can accomplish anything by chanting the Lord's name and acting with full faith and devotion. Such people are not afraid of anything in this world.
Caupai 20:
durgama kaja jagata ke jete /
sugama anugraha tumhare tete // 20 //
By your grace even the most difficult of tasks become easy to accomplish.
Whatever difficulties or obstacles you encounter in life, are overcome by the grace of Sri Hanuman. There are three kinds of people in this world.
1. Those who do not start any new project for fear of obstacles. They keep on imagining all kinds of problems and obstacles, hence they never get started.
2. Those who start a lot of projects, but the moment they encounter difficulty or resistance, they at once quit and move to another project.
3. Those who, when they encounter more obstacles, gain more enthusiasm and courage. Such people do not quit until their work is finished.
Sri Hanuman blesses the third type of people and makes their job easier. Even the most difficult task becomes easy to accomplish.
Caupai 21:
rama duare tuma rakhavare /
hota no ajna binu paisare // 21 //
You guard the door (entry) to Lord Rama's palace where none dare to enter (or go out) without your permission.
Caupai 22:
Saba sukha lahai tumhari sarana /
Tuma racchaka kahu ko dara na // 22 //
All those who seek refuge in you enjoy every kind of happiness. Why should one be afraid of anything when you are there to protect?
Sri Hanuman is the ever-vigilant guard at the door of Shri Rama. That does not mean that he will prevent you from entering. On the contrary, he pulls people towards Lord Rama. That is his job. Due to this very reason, Sri Hanuman is dearer to Lord Rama, than even Lakshmana. Lord Rama said, 'By his devotion Sri Hanuman inspires other people to love me and come towards me.'
Remember: tuma upakara sugrivahi kinha, tumharo mantra bibhisanamana – With the help of Sri Hanuman, Sugreeva regained his kingdom and Vibheeshana listened to his advice and took refuge in Lord Rama's feet.
Any person can accomplish anything by chanting Sri Hanuman's name that will make one brave and fearless, full of devotion, faith and powerful. Surrender to Sri Hanuman and you will get all his qualities. Also, Sri Hanuman will take you to Lord Rama (the Lord himself) which is the greatest goal of all human beings.
Caupai 23:
apana teja samharo apai /
tino loka haka te kapai // 23 //
You alone are capable of controlling your power. All the three worlds tremble when you roar.
Caupai 24:
buta pisaca nikata nahi avai /
mahabira jaba nama sunavai // 24 //
Evil spirits dare not go near a person on hearing the name of the great warrior (i.e., Sri Hanuman) being repeated.
Sri Hanuman's power is so great that no one can control it except himself. When his mighty roar is heard, all the three worlds (heaven, earth and the lower worlds – nether worlds) tremble in fear. His power and strength know no limits. Chanting the name of Sri Hanuman transfers the same power and courage to his devotee. Ghosts and demons do not come near such a person. What are ghosts? It is believed that if a person suffers an untimely death (due to murder or suicide) then his spirit haunts that place. Normally after death, the soul takes up another body. But if for some reason, it does not happen immediately, then that spirit stays around for a while and that is called ghost. Chanting Sri Hanuman's name will keep all such ghosts and evil spirits away from you.
Caupai 25:
nasai roga harai saba pira /
japata nirantara hanumata bira // 25 //
All the ailments and diseases and afflictions vanish when your name is repeated continuously.
One who constantly chants the name of Sri Hanuman, such a person's diseases are cured and his pains are taken away. Even incurable diseases can be cured. So someone may ask, 'If I have cancer, will it be cured?' Yes. If you have complete faith, that is possible! But the real explanation is, all diseases we suffer from are diseases of the body and the mind. Diseases of the body are known in Sanskrit as vyadhih and of the mind, adhih. These diseases cause suffering if only we think that we are this body. But if we lose this body-identification and attachment, then we will not be afraid even to die. We accept diseases of the body and mind with more grace and courage and they do not affect us. Sri Hanuman takes us to Lord Rama; he makes us realize that the nature of the Lord is our very Self. To such a person, bodily afflictions no longer exist.
Caupai 26-40 Chapter 4
Caupai 26:
sankata te hanumana chudavai /
mana krama bacana dhyana jo lavai // 26 //
Sri Hanuman helps those who worship Him with sincerity and faith (i.e. by thought, action, speech and prayer) in overcoming difficulties.
If you worship Sri Hanuman in thought word and deed, he will release you from all difficulties. Mana is mind; krama (karma) is deed and bacana (vacana) is words. So all your thoughts, words and actions should be a worship of the Lord. Then no actions will bind you, or cause any sorrow.
Caupai 27:
saba para rama tapasvi raja /
tinake kaja sakala tuma saja // 27 //
You carried out all the missions of Lord Rama, who is a supreme yogi ruling over everyone.
Caupai 28:
aura manoratha jo koi lavai /
soi amita jivana phala pavai // 28 //
You bless everyone who seeks your grace and growth him in large measure all he wants and also grant him the full fruit of life.
If you worship Sri Hanuman, all your jobs will be accomplished and you will never be unsuccessful. What is the guarantee? Think of it. Sri Hanuman was able to accomplish all the tasks assigned to him by the Lord Rama Himself. So, if he can carry out the Lord's tasks, why can't he accomplish yours? And whatever you desire in life, Sri Hanuman will grant you. He will do anything for you. However, you should see that your desires are noble.
Caupai 29:
caro juga paratapa tumhara /
hai parasiddha jagata ujiyara // 29 //
Your glory radiates through all the four yuga-s and your fame shines everywhere in the universe.
Caupai 30:
sadhu santa ke tuma rakhavare /
asura nikandana rama dulare // 30 //
You are the protector of the righteous and destroyer of the wicked. You are very dear to Lord Rama.
Your fame is prevalent in all four ages (yug-s krta or satya, treta, dvapara and kalih). Sri Hanuman was here on this earth only in tretayuga. Then how could his glory, be present in all four ages? Lord's glory is eternal and his devotee's glory is eternal too! Secondly, the four ages follow each other in a cycle. Kaliyuga is followed again by satyayuga So, Sri Hanuman's glory will be remembered for ages. And besides that, the Wind God is always present and without him life is not possible. So his son Sri Hanuman is also (ciranjivi), one who lives forever!
He is protector of the saints and sages and destroyer of demons. So, if a person is mighty, he should use his strength to help good people and combat wicked ones. Sri Hanuman is dear to Lord Rama.
Caupai 31:
atasiddhi nau nidhi ke data /
asa bara dinha janaki mata // 31 //
Janakimata (Mother Sita) bestowed on you the boon that you may grant the eight siddhis (supernatural powers) and the nine forms of wealth (on anyone you like).
When Sri Hanuman went to Lanka to meet Mother Sita, he saw her and gave her the news of Lord Rama and described His glories. Prior to this, Mother Sita was very unhappy, but as soon as she heard that Lord Rama was coming to her, her joy knew no bounds. She immediately blessed Sri Hanuman, saying, 'You will be the giver of eight-fold supernatural powers of Yogis (astasiddhi) and nine kinds of wealth of Kubera (navanidhih).
These eight eight-fold supernatural powers are described in the scriptures:
1. Anima – the power to assume a very small form (like an atomic particle) or to become so subtle that one can pervade even the smallest particle in the universe.
2. Mahima – the power to become large, to pervade everything from the smallest to the largest. We know from Sri Hanuman's visit to Lanka, that he became as small as a mosquito to meet Mother Sita and became a huge giant to confront the demons.
3. Garima – the power to make oneself heavy. Even a limb of the body becomes so heavy that no one can lift it. There is a story of the mighty warrior Bhima of Mahabharata, walking in the forest when he encounters Sri Hanuman lying on his side with his long tail in the way. Bhima asked Sri Hanuman to move his tail (not realizing whom he was talking to). Sri Hanuman said, 'I am old, why don't you lift my tail and move it? Bhima tried to lift it, but despite all his strength, he was unable to move it even an inch. That was when he realized that it was no ordinary monkey, and prostrated before him in humility. Sri Hanuman had Garima siddhih too!
4. Laghima – the power to lighten oneself like a feather. When he was in Lanka Sri Hanuman was huge, taller than the tallest palace. But still, he was able to lightly from rooftop to rooftop, without crushing the buildings – this is due to Laghima siddhih.
5. Praptih – the power to attain whatever one wants. With this power one is able to sit in one place and watch everything that is going on not only on this earth, but also in other worlds like Brahmalokah. With television and satellites one is able to see only this universe, (mrtyulokah) but not other worlds.
6. Prakamyam or Prakasyam – Prakamyam is the ability to go anywhere in the three worlds, earth, heavens and netherworlds. Prakasyam is to have a self-illuminating, shining body. Sri Krishna's body was like that. When the Gopi-s hide the butter in a dark place, he would come at night with his friends. Because of Sri Krishna's luminous body, they were able to find the butter easily and eat it.
7. Isitvam – the power to rule over all the worlds. Sri Hanuman rules over everybody's hearts by his good deeds and character, and not by his mighty power.
8. Vasitvam – the power to control everybody, to make them follow you. Sri Hanuma's magnetic personality made everyone love him and obey him. Similarly, Lord Rama had this ability. When he went to the forest, the entire city of Ayodhya was empty as all people wanted to follow him to the forest. When Sri Krishna played his flute, not only the Gopis but even the cows and birds also came to him. Nine kinds of wealth and precious stones of Kubers are: Mahapadma, Padma, Shankha, Makara, Kachapa, Mukunda, Kunda, Neela and Kharva (mahapadmasca padmasca sankho-makara-kacchapau I mukunda –kunda-nilasca kharvasca nidhayo nava //). However, the greatest wealth that Sri Hanuman gives us is love for Ram (ramarasah). Once you have that, you don't need any other wealth.
Caupai 32:
rama rasayana tumhare pasa /
sada raho raghupati ke dasa // 32 //
The elixir of devotion to Lord Rama is with you, who always stays at the feet of Lord Rama as his servant (with utmost humility).
Caupai 33:
tumhare bhajana ramako pavai /
janama janama ke dukha bisaravai // 33 //
Singing your praise makes Lord Rama bless (that person) and makes one forget (relieves of) one's miseries of all (previous) births.
Caupai 34:
Anta kala raghubara pura jai /
Jaha janma haribhakta kahai // 34 //
At the end of one's life when one goes to the abode of Rama, such a person will be deemed as having been born as a devotee of Hari (Lord Rama).
Mother Sita said, 'May you always serve Lord Rama with great love and devotion – may you always be his dear servant. If anyone worships you, he automatically obtains Lord Rama'. Another interpretation is that Lord Rama is happy if people praise Sri Hanuman. So this is the best way to please Lord Rama. One who worships you will have no sorrow. He will forget sorrows not only of this life but all past lives too. Such a person at the time of death will go to the abode of Lord Rama. This is also called vaikunthalokah or saketalokah, where being born, they become devotees of the Lord. And what do these devotees do? Just sit and watch the Lord and nothing else. Some say that it is unproductive to just watch the Lord do nothing else. But these same people spend hours, watching Television! True devotees never brow tired of watching the lord, who is the very embodiment of all beauty, kindness and compassion. In fact, devotees wish to be born again on this earth when the Lord manifests as an incarnation, so that they can be with Him and watch his glories.
Caupai 35:
aura devata catta na dharai /
hanumata sei sarba sukha karai // 35 //
Even though a devotee does not bring to his memory (worship) any other deity but Hanuman, he will (surely) enjoy all happiness.
Caupai 36:
samkata katai mitai saba pira /
jo sumirai hanumata bala bira // 36 //
All miseries and torments vanish when one remembers the brave Hanuman.
Saint Tulsida says, you do not need to remember any other god. Just remember Sri Hanuman, you will get all happiness from him. What does this means? One should have full faith in whoever one worships, have single pointed devotion. If you choose to worship Sri Hanuman with full faith, all your prayers will be answered. Another meaning of this verse is that some people worship other gods or deities like Lord Indra etc. asking for worldly pleasures or success etc. but these deities are themselves full of desire. Lord Indra is always afraid that some one who carries out great penance may take over the throne of his heavenly kingdom. So such deities may forget to answer your prayer. But Sri Hanuman's devotion is without any selfish desire. He is always engaged in the service of others. So he will never forget to answer your prayer. Therefore worship him. All your problems, pains and sorrows will be eliminated.
Caupai 37:
jai jai jai hanumana gosai /
krpa karahu gurudeva ki nai // 37 //
Victory to You! Victory to You! Victory to You! O God Hanumanji! Bless us with your grace as our preceptor.
Victory to Sri Hanuman, who is a Gosvami (gosai – in Avadhi dialect). Gosvami in Sanskrit means one who has control over his senses. (go – sense organs; svamin – master). Sri Hanuman can face any challenge and emerge victorious because he has full control over his body and mind. Any person, who is in full control of one's senses and worships Sri Hanuman with full devotion, will emerge victorious. No challenge is too great for such a person. Most of us have no control over our mind; we let it run here and there. Let us make it single pointed towards Sri Hanuman. nai means 'like' similar to'. Sri Hanuman is like a guru, a compassionate teacher. As we read earlier, Sri Hanuman is an incarnation of Lord Shiva, who is worshipped as the universal teacher (guruh). Sri Hanuman is also a compassionate guru and one should learn from him. Another meaning of guru is one who swallows the weaknesses of his students. Even if the student is foolish, or makes mistakes, a true guru will overlook it. He will help his students overcome their faults. So, worship of Sri Hanuman will help you to overcome all your errors and omissions.
Caupai 38:
jo sata bara patha kara koi /
cchutahi bandi maha sukha hai // 38 //
One who recites this (Hanuman Chalisa) a hundred times, is released from bondage (i.e., the cycle of death and rebirth) and enjoys (absolute) bliss.
Caupai 39:
jo yaha padhai hanumana calisa /
hoya siddhi sakhi gaurisa // 39 //
One who reads the Hanuman Chalisa (regularly) will accomplish his goals to which Lord Shiva is witness.
One who reads this Hanuman Chalisa one hundred times will be released from all bondage and sorrows. Many people recite the Hanuman Chalisa one hundred times on Tuesday or Saturday, it often takes 6-7 hours. Or they may recite this continuously when they have problems or stress in their lives. Chanting of his will lead to relief from sorrow. One who reads Hanuman Chalisa will attain perfection without blemish. Someone might say, that is a tall claim. How do we know such a thing will happen? Saint Tulsidas says that Lord Shiva (husband of Gauri – Parvati) Himself is the witness. He will guarantee that you will attain perfection. If you look at it logically, if you chant Hanuman Chalisa everyday, it will create noble thoughts in you. Then you will want to know its real meaning. It will help purify your mind. Once you start your search in this direction, all your energies are directed to this goal, and you will attain liberation. So you have to make a beginning somewhere. With diligence and effort, you will succeed.
Caupai 40:
tulasidasa sada hari cera /
kijai natha hrdaya maham dera // 40 //
O Hanumanji, I (Tulsidas) am always the servant of the Lord (Lord Rama), and pray that make your (permanent) residence in my heart.
Saint Tulsidas – who wrote this, is always a servant of Lord Hari, Lord Rama. Hari means one who removes all sufferings. Saint Tulsidas is his servant. He says, 'Oh Lord, please camp in my heart and reside there always. Do not ever leave me.'
Doha
pavanatanaya samkata harana mamgala murti rupa /
rama lakhana sita sahita hradaya basahu sura bhupa //
Oh! Son of Wind, destroyer of all miseries, you are a symbol of auspiciousness. Along with Lord Rama, Lakshmana and Sita reside in my heart. Oh king of gods!
May Sri Hanuman dwell in my heart. The son of Wind God, who is the remover of all difficulties and whose very form is so auspicious, is the king of all gods. May he always dwell in my heart. Sri Hanuman will not be alone. May Lord Rama, Lakshmana and Mother Sita also be with him! The Lord is there where his devotee is. So, Lord Rama will surely be in your heart with Sri Hanuman. Secondly, as we learnt earlier, Lord Rama represent knowledge, Mother Sita represents devotion and Lakshmana represent dispassion. Sri Hanuman embodies all these three qualities in him. Worship of Sri Hanuman will inculcate these qualities in us too.
This is the glory (mahima) of Hanuman Chalisa. Though it appears simple at first reading, recitation of it with understanding and devotion will result in great benefit. One should chant it at least once every day. That will help you to purify your mind and lead you on the path of liberation.
Om Tat Sat
Only doha/caupai Chapter 5
doha:
sri guru carana saroja raja nijamanu mukuru sudhari /
baranau raghubara bimala jasu jo dayaku phala cari // 1 //
buddhihina tanu janike, sumirau pavana kumara /
bala buddhi bidya dehu mohi, harahu kalesa bikara // 2 //
Caupai :
jaya hanuman jnana guna sagara /
jaya kapisa tihuloka ujagara // 1 //
ramaduta atulita baladhama /
anjani-putra pavana-suta nama // 2 //
mahabira bikrama bajarangi /
kumati nivara sumati ke sangi // 3 //
kancana barana biraja subesa /
anana kundala kuncita kesa // 4 //
hatha bajra au dhvaja birajai /
kandhe munja janeu sajai // 5 //
sankara-suvana kesari-nandana /
teja pratapa maha jaga-bandana // 6 //
bidyavana guni ati catura /
rama kaja karibe ko atura // 7 //
prabhu caritra sunibe ko rasiya /
ramalakhana sita mana basiya // 8 //
suksma rupadhari siyahin dikhava /
bikata rupadhari lanka jarava // 9 //
bhima rupa dhari asura samhare /
ramacandra ke kaja samvare // 10 //
laya sanjivana lakhana jiyaye /
sri raghubira harasi ura laye // 11 //
raghupati kinhi bahuta badai /
tuma mama priya bharatahi sama bhai // 12 //
sahasa badana tumharo jasa gavai /
asa kahi sripati kantha lagavai // 13 //
sanakadika brahmadi munisa /
narada sarada sahita ahisa // 14 //
jama kubera digapala jaha te /
kabi kobida kahi sake kaha te // 15 //
tuma upakara sugrivahi kinha /
rama milaya rajapada dinha // 16 //
tumharo mantra bibhisana mana /
lankesvara bhaye saba jaga jana // 17 //
juga sahasra jojana para bhanu /
lilyo tahi madhura phala janu // 18 //
prabhu mudrika meli mukha mahi /
jaladhi lamghi gaye acaraja nahi // 19 //
durgama kaja jagata ke jete /
sugama anugraha tumhare tete // 20 //
rama duare tuma rakhavare /
hota no ajna binu paisare // 21 //
saba sukha lahai tumhari sarana /
tuma racchaka kahu ko dara na // 22 //
apana teja samharo apai /
tino loka haka te kapai // 23 //
bhuta pisaca nikata nahi avai /
mahabira jaba nama sunavai // 24 //
nasai roga harai saba pira /
japata nirantara hanumata bira // 25 //
sankata te hanumana chudavai /
mana krama bacana dhyana jo lavai // 26 //
saba para rama tapasvi raja /
tinake kaja sakala tuma saja // 27 //
aura manoratha jo kai lavai /
soi amita jivana phala pavai // 28 //
caro juga paratapa tumhara /
hai parasiddha jagata ujiyara // 29 //
sadhu santa ke tuma rakhavare /
asura nikandana rama dulare // 30 //
astasiddhi nau nidhi ke data /
asa bara dinha janaki mata // 31 //
rama rasayana tumhare pasa /
sada raho raghupati ke dasa // 32 //
tumhare bhajana ramako pavai /
janama janama ke dukha bisaravai // 33 //
anta kala raghubara pura jai /
jaha janma haribhakta kahai // 34 //
aura devata catta na dharai /
hanumata sei sarba sukha karai // 35 //
samkata katai mitai saba pira /
jo sumirai hanumata bala bira // 36 //
jai jai jai hanumana gosai /
krpa karahu gurudeva ki nai // 37 //
jo sata bara patha kara koi /
cchutahi bandi maha sukha hoi // 38 //
jo yaha padhai hanumana calisa /
hoya siddhi sakhi gaurisa // 39 //
tulasidasa sada hari cera /
kijai natha hrdaya maham dera // 40 //
Doha:
pavanatanaya samkata harana mamgala murti rupa /
rama lakhana sita sahita hradaya basahu sura bhupa //
Jai Shri Ram, Long Live Sanatan Dharam
February 2003
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