March 2024 Chitra Puja

Om Namah Sivaya

Recently we celebrated our monthly padapuja to Sivaya Subramuniyaswami during the timing of the Chitra nakshatra. Sannyasin Tillainathaswami and Sadhaka Vatshalanatha performed the puja while other mathavasis chanted Sri Rudram. Local members and devotees brought an abundance of beautiful flowers and enjoyed the peaceful darshan of Gurudeva.

"It is the interplay between our experience and how we respond to it that makes karma devastating or helpfully invigorating" - Sivaya Subramuniyaswami

\"Commitment is a big word and a very scary word to many people nowadays. The word commitment means responsibility...\" - Gurudeva

The word commitment brings up our willpower. Many people think the word commitment is too limiting. We can sum up commitment in one word, dharma.

The path of dharma is the path of one commitment after another commitment. In between the commitments is fulfillment of the commitment, which is another word for duty. We are here to realize God Siva within ourself. We are here to resolve all the karmas we put in motion in past lives. We are here to manage our affairs so properly that eventually we do not have to come back into a physical body anymore.

This takes tremendous commitment, and our great Hindu religion gives us the knowledge of how to be committed.

If your religion is not manifesting daily in your life, then basically you don\

t have a religion. You just have some sort of Indian culture which will eventually go away and be replaced with another kind of a culture, because it doesn\'t really matter to you. Someone asked me recently, How do I know what to be committed to?'

The answer: \"What do you believe in?\" Belief is a magical thing. It\

s like a vitamin; it permeates your whole system. A belief can be taken away and another belief can replace it, or the belief can be strengthened through commitment. Be committed to your beliefs, or find beliefs that you can be committed to, then build on them. Then you will leave your footprints on the San Marga of time. Otherwise, you are just sitting in one place, making no progress. Nothing is happening in your life. The karmas aren\'t working right, and you are not able to face life.'

If you feel, day after day, that you are in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing, then I would say you are a being who is fully committed to the spiritual path.

If, day after day, you feel you dont know whether you are in the right place or not, and things are always happening to you, that you are like a little boat on the great ocean of life being tossed around, here and there, then you should look within yourself and find out where you stand on the scale of life itself. What are your basic beliefs? What are your basic commitments? Ask yourself.

Commitment and dharma are just about the same.

Dharma brings law and order into life, gives us rules to follow and guides us along.

Where does commitment come from?

Commitment comes from the soul.

The intellectual mind is going this way and that way all the time, controlled or antagonized by other peoples opinions most of the time and by how society is thinking.

Commitment comes from the soul.

It is a quality of the soul which you can teach to the next generation.

Another quality of the soul is observation. Still another intuitive quality of the soul is creativity, which should be encouraged in every child.

Through commitment, the soul dominates the intellect

and the intellect dominates the instinctive mind.

This is religion in action.

This is living with Siva.

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