Food for life

 Food is a basic necessity of life, and provides nourishment and energy for us to sustain in daily life. We are well aware of the nutritive properties of food as they are extensively researched. The psychological satisfaction of eating something we like is also known to us through personal experience. However there have been comparatively few studies about the effects of a common practice – that of making a prayer before meals.

In our fast paced lifestyle, for some of us, a prayer may seem like a redundant step in our meal routine for which we have little time or patience. For others, it may be an altogether unknown experience.To understand the effects of prayers before meals from a spiritual perspective, we conducted spiritual research using advanced sixth sense and compared what happens when we make a prayer before meals to what happens when food is eaten without praying beforehand. Have you all tried praying before meals and if so, did you notice any benefit???

http://www.spiritualresearchfoundation.org/prayer-before-meals

Make your life through Meditation

Make your life through Meditation:

The breath is so important in meditation and is THE way to anchor the mind. When you sit down to meditate, always begin by focusing on your breath...
Inhale deeply - allowing yourself to feel the air as you pull it in...

Feel your chest expand, and let your stomach expand as well... 

Allow the fullness of the breath completely expand in your body.
Hold for a couple of seconds, then exhale...

Again, concentrate on the sensations in your body as you slowly release your breath. Repeat 3-5 times and you are ready for your meditation!

Why we progress faster when we chant with faith?

Why we progress faster when we chant with faith?

The reason this happens is because when we chant with faith, we feel God’s presence more. This means an increase in our spiritual emotion (bhav), which is our ability to feel His presence all around us. This feeling of His presence reduces our focus on ourselves and therefore reduces our ego. Because of our reduced ego, we are better able to access the Divine Energy of the Deity (aspect of God) whose Name we chant. This helps result in spiritual progress.

For more on chanting with faith and the benefits we derive please visit:
http://www.spiritualresearchfoundation.org/articles/id/aboutspiritualresearch/chanting/chanting_without_faith

Guideline for Meditation

Guideline for Meditation:

#. First, the practice of meditation has to proceed with some one object before the mind. I used to concentrate my mind on some black point. Ultimately during those days, I could not see the point any more, nor notice that the point was before me at all -- the mind used to be no more -- no wave of functioning would arise, as if it were all an ocean without any breath of air. In that state I used to experience glimpses of supersensuous truth. 

#. ...it is true that the mind very easily attains calmness when one practises meditation with anything on which one's mind is most apt to settle down. This is the reason why we have in this country so much worship of the images of gods and goddesses. And what wonderful art developed from such worship!... 

#. ...the fact however is that the objects of meditation can never be the same in the case of all men. People have proclaimed and preached to others only those external objects to which they held on to become perfected in meditation. Oblivious of the fact, later on, that these objects were aids to the attainment of perfect mental calmness, men have extolled them beyond everything else.

#. You must keep the mind fixed on one object, like an unbroken stream of oil. The ordinary man's mind is scattered on different objcts, and at the time of meditation, too, the mind is at first apt to wander. But let any desire whatever arise in the mind, you must sit calmly and watch what sort of ideas are coming. By continuing to watch in that way, the mind becomes calm, and there are no thought waves in it. These waves represent the thought-activity of the mind. Those things that you have thought too deeply, have transformed themselves into a subconscious current, and therefore these come up in the mind in meditation. The rise of these waves, or thoughts, during meditation is an evidence that your mind is tending towards concentration. Sometimes the mind is concentrated on a set of ideas -- this is called meditation with Vikalpa or oscillation. But when the mind becomes almost free from all activities, it melts in the inner Self, which is the essence of infinite Knowledge, One and Itself Its own support.
#. Think and meditate that you are the omnipresent Atman. "I am neither the body, nor the mind, nor the Buddhi (determining faculty), neither the gross nor the subtle body," -- by this process of elimination, immerse your mind in the transcendant knowledge which is your real nature. Kill the mind by thus plunging it repeatedly in this. Then only you will realise the Essence of Inelligence, or be established in your real nature. Knower and known, meditator and object meditated upon, will then become one, and the cessation of all phenomenal superimpositions will follow....There is no relative or conditioned knowledge in this state. When the Atman is the only knower, by what means can you possibly know it? The Atman is knowledge, the Atman is Intelligence, the Atman is Sachchidanand.