Ramblings

Today I went sledding for the first time in a few years with two close friends. We only went for an hour, but it was incredibly fun. It was a frigid and cloudless day, and by the time we had reached the top of the hill at Arrowhead Park my face was already frozen and Annika and Tammy were suffering from icy extremities. Annika's first descent down the hill clocked at least twenty seconds because of the fresh snow on the less steep side that she chose to go down. I was too scared to go down standing up on the sled, but once I went face-first down the steep side, which was exhilarating. On my returns up the hill, I held the foamy red sled as if it were a surfboard and I was a coastguard on Baywatch. Tammy and Annika laughed quite a bit and the three of us returned to that joke quite a few times. Annika and Tammy went down a couple times together, wiping out in the process, and once when their aim was true and they mounted the ramp, they flew and it was hilarious.

It was so much fun, and it was so simple, and it was so easily and spontaneously planned. I love it when life is like that.

Yesterday was fabulous. Shane, Sneha, Tammy and Kiaran & I spent most of the afternoon together. How delightful it was to merge both worlds! I brought my recently created world with Kiaran to unite with my classic NNHS world with Shane, Sneha and Tamstuh. I was so happy that we were all together and happy on that cold day of snowstorms. We played Apples to Apples, also known as the game that we always play at Shane's but never remember how to play. We watched and listened to Disney music videos in various languages. We watched the multilanguage version of "When You Believe". We all sighed in appreciation when the song was in Hebrew because the vocals were beautifully appropriate...and just when we agreed upon that, the song switched to the awfully random Japanese vocals and we laughed so hard. At Shane's we also danced for awhile. Tammy's been doing lots of ballroom, so she was helping us remember the steps. And we talked, and randomly went on facebook, and I ate my burrito from Chipotle...and we had a good time.

Well, I want to gush on how much I adore him and think he's amazing...but in the interest of my readers I'll just do this the following:

♥♥♥ *Adores Kiaran* ♥♥♥

I was reading a yoga book earlier while at work (currently at the five-hour mark, half an hour to go) and came across a comparison of Advaita Vedanta and Tantra philosophies. I'd considered my own take on the universe to fall under the category of Advaita Vedanta on the monist premise that all of being is united and that all division between the lives and objects of the universe are an illusion. However, to me, the computer I'm looking at exists. It is a real object. On a fundamental level, the computer and I are composed of star stuff and are only parts of the whole. According to Advaita Vedanta as proposed by Shankara, the computer is an illusion. It's not real at all.

Well, I'm looking at it.

So then I read the paragraph on Tantra, which I don't know much about. Apparently Tantra espouses an Advaita Vedanta outlook that all of reality is unified, but unlike Advaita Vedanta, it deems that both the material world and the spiritual world exist, and that the material world is an expression of the spiritual world, not just something to be avoided, discarded or abhored.

I think that's pretty cool.

I prefer to give my spiritual thoughts as few labels as possible, so this is what I think, and then you can decide what philosophy I am most similar to, or just think I'm wasting my time and promptly return to facebook.

I think that everything that exists is divine. Nothing exists except for Divinity. All of the suffering that we encounter in life is real and it sucks, but it's necessary to take a step back to realize that it's all part of a grand panorama that we don't have the capability to see clearly. I think that one can make a conscious decision when faced with bad news whether or not to suffer--to think that our little lives running around for college money and outstanding grades is all that matters, or to think that there's no reason to suffer because everything is an expression of Divinity and that if we think beyond and over ourselves, everything is actually quite alright.. Also: these chairs, bookshelves and this computer that I'm at are real objects. There is Divinity in their atoms, but while those atoms are in the shape of an HP PC, they are an HP PC.

So, I'm saying that the computer in front of me is a divine object.

Bad things happen when people ignore their unity with Divinity and confuse their minute world with the supreme reality (Paramatman). If a criminal realized that he was hurting himself by hurting another manifestation of Divinity, he wouldn't commit the crime.

I also think that you yourself are divine. That holiness in me bows to the holiness in you. Namasté.

It's 9:30 and I've got to go. Here's a mantra I like:

Loka samasta sukhino bhavantu.

May all beings know happiness.