Bangalore Ashram, India
Q: What is intuition and how can one develop intuition?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Tuition that you get from inside is intuition. Only way to develop intuition is to become little quieter and listen inside.
Q: Can you please speak on success and failure?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Failure is a step towards success. Success is a measure of a part of your ability. You have expressed little bit of your potential and that is success.
Q: How to choose career?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Choice is yours, blessing is mine! It is tough time, and it is confusing to chose among engineering, medical, architecture, charted accountancy etc. especially when you are equally good in more than one subject. It is good to bake a little bit in that confusion. But it is important that you put in your 100 percent in anything you chose.
Many times it happens that you choose medical and later on you feel you should have opted for engineering, or you choose engineering and you feel you should have gone for charted accountancy. This is all illusion. Every profession is the same.
Q: Is every partner also the same? Does soul mate exist?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: First you meet your soul and then rest will follow. If you meet your soul, many will come and claim that they are your soul mates. Then you chose one of them.
Q: There is so many violence and natural disasters happening in the world. Why does God let this all happen? If God exists then why does all this happen?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: You chop off some leaves and branches of plants. Don’t you prune rose plant? Does it die by pruning? It grows up. Same way nature brings all this from a bigger picture.
It is not always ripe fruits that fall from a coconut tree. Sometimes even small coconut drops off. Baby fishes are also swollen by big fishes in an ocean. So, these natural calamities are all part of the nature. If we exploit nature too much, more natural calamities occur. We are putting dynamites in the Earth. We are blasting it every day. Imbalance gets created and so Earth starts shaking. Sustainable development is what is needed today. We need to care for the planet.
Nature moves with the law. God means a rule, a law. Everything goes by that. This planet Earth has to be protected and cared for.
One is natural calamity. Another is man-made calamity. Man-made calamities can always be avoided. People are not valuing human life for a little piece of gold. Human values need to be brought back into society.
Q: How to get God answer your prayers?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Have faith that he will answer and will do whatever is good for you.
Q: Sometimes my parents say that I am so young and why I meditate at this age. What to say when being confronted with such types of questions?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: I did not have this problem!
What can be said in such a situation? You tell them that they are not young, so why don’t they do it. Once they do it, they will know that it is for you also. People often regret when they start meditating. You know, why do they regret? They regret thinking that why did not they do it when they were of your age.
Q: What is spirituality?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: You are both matter and spirit. Are you only matter? Your body is made up of matter – carbohydrates, minerals, amino acids etc. Your spirit is made up of joy, peace, enthusiasm, intelligence and other distortions like anger.
Anything which enhances the spirit is spirituality.
Anything that brings energy in you is spirituality.
Anything that makes you intelligent is spirituality.
Anything that uplifts life force in you is spirituality.
Anything that brings care and compassion is spirituality.
Anything that connects you with the universal spirit is spirituality.
Q: Whatever you preach sounds very good. Bur at times I find it difficult to implement. What should I do?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: You do not do anything which is difficult. Easy go lucky. Spirituality makes everything easy. Everything in the ‘Art of Living’ makes life easy. There are certain things which are easy to begin with but later on turns to be difficult. There are certain other things which may appear to be difficult in the beginning but later on makes everything easy. Spirituality is the later one.
When you were kid, you were forced to brush your teeth. Suppose you had not undergone that, what would be the scenario of your mouth now? Half your teeth would have dropped. Like this you may find it difficult in the beginning but it makes things easy later on.
Q: Can you please talk on doubts?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Haven’t I talked about it earlier also? Doubt is just low energy. When you don’t have enough energy, this happens.
Your doubt is always on something that is positive. If somebody says, “I love you”, you doubt that. You never doubt anybody expressing hatred towards you. You doubt in love and not in anger. You doubt in your capabilities and not in your weaknesses. You are so sure of the things that you cannot do. You doubt in your own happiness. You don’t doubt in depression. You doubt in someone’s honesty. You never doubt in dishonesty of anyone.
So, like that if you see the nature of doubt, you always doubt the positive.
Q: Why to turn vegetarian to practice spirituality? Don’t I need proteins to follow spirituality?
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: There is more than one reason for the same. There are different animal groups. Some are scavengers which eat dead animals. Some kill and eat fresh flesh. Some animals eat only vegetarian food. The most powerful land animal, elephant, is vegetarian. Horse, cow, Gorilla, Hippopotamus are all vegetarians.
So, you find this nature. Our system is made for vegetarian food. There are many logical and scientific explanations. People world over are turning to be vegetarian. You don’t want to make your stomach a burial land? You can change your whole diet and you will find how intelligent and genius you turn out to be. Most scientists, especially the genius ones like Einstein were also vegetarian.
Find more in the next post..
“That which you cannot express is Love.
That which you cannot reject/renounce is Beauty.
That which you cannot avoid is the Truth.”
That which you cannot reject/renounce is Beauty.
That which you cannot avoid is the Truth.”
~ Sri Sri Ravishankar
© The Art of Living Foundation
