Category: interesting
selected posts because its interesting
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Inner presence of the Guru
Today Swami Kaivalyananda answered a number of questions from the brahmacharis on the topic of the Guru, as we recently celebrated Guru Purnima. Here was one question; ‘what is the importance of the physical closeness to the Guru, or living with the Guru?’ Swami said, ‘if one has gained the necessary samskara from previous births and is able to be firm on the path of spirituality, then there is no importance to the physical closeness or distance of the Guru. What is important there is the inner presence of the Guru. Some people stay in the physical presence of the…
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The Creation of Amritapuri.org
The month of April marks two special anniversaries for all of Amritapuri.org’s dedicated fans. It was on Vishu Day of the year 2000 (15th April) that your favorite website was launched. Two weeks earlier, the first issue of Amritavani, E-newsletter was emailed to addresses that had been collected from previous e-mails. It was during a lunch stop with Mother during North India Tour 2000 (February-March) that Dhyanamrita came to find me with a biggest smile on his face and proudly announced: “Cheerful!” I smiled back and thought he was referring to that precious quality that spiritual aspirants should maintain. “Cheerful…”…
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200 crores
we left pune as soon as the darshan was over. in fact amma walked to her camper right from the stage. i had to grab my camera bag and run through the crowds to the car to follow Amma. my shirt and dothi were full with butter and milk. some curd was still there on my beard – i saw it on the mirror of the car- which spilled when amma put in my mouth. we entered into the express highway. in four places it passes through the tunnels – through the mountain. main one is more than one kilometer…
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Return to Nagapattinam
When the dates and cities were first announced for the South Indian Tour, I was silently thrilled. The tour included two cities I had hoped to visit – Rameshwaram and Kanyakumari. It also included Nagapattanam – the epicenter of Amma’s tsunami relief efforts – where almost 2000 homes have been built. Amma had been here twice before – less than two months after the tsunami struck, and again about a year later – for a public programme. In the first visit, I saw first-hand, the devastation that struck a small fishing village. During the second visit, I went to see…
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Amma’s Babies
This afternoon, a young Indian couple came up to Amma for Darshan holding their new-born twins. They wanted to Amma to give them names. These babies (a boy and a girl) weren’t just any newborns. They were representative of the immense love and compassion that Amma has blessed the tsunami-affected people of India and Sri Lanka. Sreejit and Liji had lost both their young children in the tsunami and could not re-conceive because Liji had had her tubes tied. Amma offered Liji the opportunity to have the surgery reversed, and to pay for all the costs, including seeing her through…
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avalanche of devotion
Today when Amma came out for Q & A, somebody wanted to clarify a doubt about what Amma said yesterday during bhajans. The question was: “Why is it that Amma has sometimes before said that there should also be reason in devotion, that bhakti should be tempered with jnana, but yesterday She said that there is no reason in devotion?” Amma replied that we should always look at the context in which She says any given thing. For some people who worship blindly and have the attitude that God resides only in an idol for example, Amma stresses the importance…
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Devotees help Hurricane Rita victim
We drove down to southern Louisiana to help Vidya try to salvage what she could from her home that got hit with the storm surge from Hurricane Rita. The town she lives in – Abbeville, Louisiana – is approximately 15 miles inland and about 50 miles east of where the eye of the storm hit. As we traveled further south and west, getting closer to where the eye of the storm hit, the landscape looked more and more like a tsunami had struck. Homes were pushed many feet from their foundations – others were completely gone. Huge trees were uprooted…
