Sunday, June 18, 2006

EGO = "Edge God out"

I had the fortune to attend two lectures this week by Swami Sukhabodhananda, on the topic of , Bhagvadh Gita's relavence in our lives. I was rather sceptical in my expectations of enjoying the lecture, but to my surprise, I enjoyed the first one so much that, I didnt want to miss the second.

Swamiji has the ability to add right doses of humour in his talk that make his lecture entertaining in addition to being enlightening. His speaking skills are excellent and he connects with the audience and grabs their attention very quickly. He puts in a lot of effort to make the audience understand the difference between knowledge and wisdom. In his own style, he says, undigested knowledge is the obesity of mind. Though this talk was meant to give the aroma of Gita (in swamiji's words), he uses apt references from Buddhism, poems of Kabir das, to drive home the point of living consciously while being calm and alert.

He says, if we make an effort to understand the answer to the question, "Who am I", most of the miseries we go through in day to day life seem to be the result of fallacies created by our mind. He goes on to answer this question saying, we are not the body that represents us physically, neither are we our emotions , nor the intellect, but we are the conscious sense of being. One punch line if I want to remember from this lecture is the definition of ego being "Edge God out".

Heres the url for his website
http://www.swamisukhabodhananda.net/