Here and Beyond: Eternal Happiness Through Self Evolution

By Rashmi Joshi

How do you deal with life's challenges?
What is the secret of living a simple and happy life?
How do you strike a balance in all your relationships – whether in love, in work or in life?
When and how can universal energies work for you?
How can you learn to analyse every situation correctly?
And ultimately, how can you attain soul realisation?

The book, Here and Beyond, articulates the answers to all your existential queries, helping you to learn and evolve as a spiritual being with each step. With easy and identifiable anecdotes from life – ranging from dealing with a neighbour who calls you names to witnessing a child dying of a life threatening disease – the book offers a comprehensive understanding of life's basic principles. The book, Here and Beyond, strives to help you secure a blissful life, free of disease and disquiet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jun 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9789387457928

Book preview

Learner

CHAPTER 1

The Journey That’s Simple Yet Complicated

It started its journey millions of years ago, travelling through innumerable eras, ravaged and bruised by the onslaught of time – at times emerging a winner and at times stranded in the dungeons of failure. It is all but a part of the game plan of ‘whether it got upgraded to the next level or not, and the bruising happens to be an integral, almost indispensable part of this code’. This ebb and flow through mountains and valleys, through hell or high water and through endless seas of stormy waves is a test that helps ascertain its emergence into light. By now you must wonder what the ‘it’ is.

The ‘it’ is all of us’: it is our souls. Our body is nothing but a medium through which our souls learn. This learning process is painstakingly difficult for our physical form, and we often hear ourselves hurl curses at the challenging situations we find ourselves in and bemoan our troubles with ‘what did I do wrong to deserve this’, or ‘when will my troubles end’, or ‘why does it always have to happen to me’, and so on. The answers to decoding life’s challenges are simple yet complicated because that is exactly how life is: simple yet complicated.

It had been raining for a few days and nature was at its greenest best. The birds, bees and butterflies, all seemed like emissaries of the universe, spreading words of peace. One such day, through the open door of her house, an unexpected guest, a grasshopper, disembarked itself on the window ledge, the greenness of it matching the lush greens of the outdoors. This guest found its way into the study room through the open window and soon started scouting around for a place to make itself comfortable. The TV seemed too loud, the colour of the curtains too plain and the floor too risky to be on. Eventually, the grasshopper decided to make the window grill its temporary abode. The wire mesh around the window ensured its safety from predators; at the same time, allowing it to enjoy the fresh air from the outdoors.

A day passed, but the grasshopper had not moved an inch, seeming to enjoy its newfound address. No one in her house seemed inclined to disturb the grasshopper’s meditative countenance, either. It looked as though it was in deep penance; motionless from the time it had settled there. What was it thinking? Was it communing with higher powers of the universe or was it just survival instinct that was keeping it there? Such questions passed through this little girl’s mind.

At the dawn of the second day, her guest had miraculously disappeared. The disappearance seemed like the universal powers, impressed by its penance had granted it, its long-standing wish – probably a wish of turning into a higher life form of being the predator and not the fearful prey. ‘Whatever the wish, it was, good for it,’ she thought.

The third day as she went into the study room to switch on the TV, lo and behold, there it was. Clearly, her imagination had been working overtime, and her theory of a universal power granting wishes turned out to be as mendacious as its disappearance and she thought to herself -how could this higher power/universe/god answer prayers so easily?’ She chided herself for being so naive. ‘The more logical assumption would have been that the grasshopper had just moved to another spot on the second day, hidden away from plain sight.’

This little creature should ideally be hopping around in the lush greens and not be locked away in some house to which it doesn’t belong; she ruminated, after discovering its presence. Determined to release the little hopper to its freedom she gently caught it by its hind legs and went to her fourth-floor balcony with noble intentions of doing the ‘right thing’. ‘After all, wasn’t a garden the ‘right’ place for this nature’s child,’ – a dense grassy home which would camouflage this tiny one from its predators, she reasoned. Perhaps she was right…perhaps not!

She released the grasshopper from her grip and watched it take flight into the openness. Just a couple of seconds into its journey from the balcony to the grass below, its fate was sealed. A bird nosedived out of nowhere and grabbed the grasshopper mid-air.

Before the bird could even settle down on the branch of a tree, the grasshopper was probably, already being digested in its belly.

The girl was stupefied as she watched this drama unfold before her eyes. She was overwhelmed by one of nature’s laws, thus learning among her first lessons as a nine-year-old: life is indeed simple yet complicated.

There were four characters in this drama: the grasshopper, the bird, the girl, and nature – the last character emerging as the supreme force controlling the actions of the other three. The girl tried to play the messiah by granting freedom to the grasshopper, which, in her estimation was its right, but nature had some other plan in store for it. The bird’s hunger turned out to be more important than the grasshopper’s life, at this conjunction of time and foreordination. The girl’s interference in this natural process seemed like a simple action, but it was more complicated than it appeared to be.

Was the girl wrong in interfering with nature?

Was the grasshopper meant to live?

Was the girl destined to interfere?

Did the grasshopper suffer because of the girl’s action?

Was the bird’s action wrong?

Finally, was the grasshopper safe inside the house after all?

This story of the grasshopper and the bird may appear simple, but on close examination, it is just a simulation of life situations that all of us find ourselves in, repeatedly. You could be any one of the characters of this story, (except the last one) and find yourself being put to the test with challenging circumstances that could be difficult to comprehend and you might end up making wrong decisions that in turn could lead to unfavourable outcomes.

CHAPTER 2

Challenges: A Vehicle

to Emerge

The art of living an ideal life is a learnt one, and we are sent into this world to do so. No one is born knowing how to live the perfect life. Difficult situations are a part of the grand design and the powers of this Universe/God/Masters have it all planned out. Although deviations might occur, on account of our own failures in the master plan, but the underlying set of situations are what they present before us. It is dependent on us in its entirety to steer it to the place where it rightfully deserves to be – beside the fountain of growth and learning. If we learn the right lessons from our experiences, we move closer to this fountain. Likewise, if we do not, we are faced with more challenges to enable us to learn the same lessons – the ultimate aim is to push the soul towards enlightenment.

Let us assume for a moment that the soul is a train. It knows its journey from point A to point B, but it has to stop at each station and change the driver. This driver is the mind and body that we are awarded with, from one station to the other (one lifetime to another). The journey from one station to the other is then lead by this driver (the mind), who either leads the train to the next station via the righteous path or a path that is reprobate, depending on the thoughts it carries as fuel.

For greater lucidity, let us look at it from the perspective of rotation and revolution of the earth. Ours is a lateral existence – one lateral is a life that is lived in a single body, which I would compare with an oscillation of the earth around its axis, and the second lateral is the soul that changes bodies to attain eternal nirvana, which I would compare with the oscillations of the earth around the sun or the universal energies in case of the soul.

Each time we are introduced to a new physical body, we are awarded a set of predestined situations, as mentioned earlier, for example, the family we are born into, our economic or social conditions and so forth. As we grow older, our situations become more dynamic, and we learn to adapt and change. We go to school and learn to handle our peers, strive to achieve, and acquire behaviours that are conducive to live in the society. Our adult years are perceived as more trying, more burdensome because that is when we are establishing ourselves in our careers, relationships and thought processes. I will be comparing the body and the soul development simultaneously because you will uncover that it is much a replica of each another – the infancy of body, the infancy of soul, the adolescence of body and the adolescence of soul, maturity of the body and maturity of the soul are stages that both the soul and the body go through. Challenges or struggles are their drivers for development. As far as the body is concerned, challenges are age-specific, and as far as the soul is concerned, the challenges are soul-specific, that is, the age of the soul.

Age-specific: This only means that challenges are in accordance with the ability of the body and mind to handle them. You face more challenges as an adult because you are capable of handling them. An infant meets with the same level of difficulty when suffering from colic. Similarly, a schoolchild facing ridicule for not scoring well finds the situation profoundly challenging. The level of distress for an infant, adolescent or adult is commensurate with their ability to deal with it –bracketing it as equal in its intensity. For example, an adult feeling colicky is neither a problem nor a huge challenge or if an infant is ridiculed/scorned, it is incapable of understanding its ramifications and is beyond its realm of even remotely learning life’s lessons through ridicule.

Soul-specific: Principle is the same – the challenges that a young soul faces might appear insignificant in comparison to the difficulties that an adolescent or a mature soul might face, but given the threshold that each of them is on, their problems can safely be categorised as being equivalent in their intensity. For example, if a soul, in a certain lifetime, was meant to suffer mental turmoil as compared with physical turmoil, it will experience as much pain as a person who suffers physical challenges or basic challenges like poverty, disability, abuse, and so forth.

These challenges are an inseparable part of our being without which the light of knowledge and wisdom will always remain elusive. One can either emerge from these problems or sink deeper into them; the difference is in the efforts each one of us takes to emerge victorious from our challenges, and this is what this book is all about – How to ‘emerge’.

We are born with certain prerequisites that enable us to deal with our lives and a deep understanding of these help us overcome our problems/challenges. The more diligently we learn what we are supposed to, the better our life situations get. What we are meant to learn might take as little as a few years to as much as a few lifetimes.

These prerequisites (You will see these prerequisites in the form of sections in the book, but the chapters will go on chronologically) are:

A)The Soul

B)Previous karmas of the soul

C)The ability to equalise our karma

These age-old theories of the laws of karma of the indemnification of an incorrect action in this life or any other or savouring the rewards as compensation for good actions, are not just ancient theories but have been corroborated by new age metaphysical scientists, past life regression therapists and parapsychologists. Brian Weiss in his books has written about hundreds of his patients that he cured, not just of emotional scars but actual physical ailments. He has been able to penetrate the depths of the mysteries of the mind, the soul and the continuation of life after death. He came to the realisation that there is a greater force keeping a vigilant eye on our actions while we live; purifies our soul when we leave our body and sends us back to earth in a different setting each time, depending on whether we learnt the lessons ordained for us or not.

Among the most compelling examples in his book ‘Only Love is Real’ is, when he, to his utter astonishment, chanced upon similar stories of two of his ‘past life regression’ clients. These two kept repeating hauntingly similar stories from their lifetimes gone by. One was an extraordinarily handsome, 29-year-old Mexican man raised in an affluent family in America, who had come to Dr Weiss to seek answers for his inability to ever have any serious relationship. He was at the time also grieving his brother’s death, who he loved very dearly –sleeplessness, anxiety and fear of failure in relationships was gnawing at him deep inside. The other client was a tall, attractive woman with sad blue eyes who listed grief, anxiety and sleep disturbances as her major maladies. She was a 32-year-old successful businesswoman who grew up on a large farm with her parents. The man and the woman did not know each other and used to visit Dr Weiss’ clinic at different times in the week.