Art of Living — Advanced Course

Art of Living — Advanced Course is a 4 days residential course, held at Triveni Ashram, Pune. This course can be done after completing the happiness program of Art of Living. In this course, you experience silence, along with seva in different forms at the Ashram. You get time to spend with nature, cows, dogs. Strangely it feels good. Just sitting beside a riverbank, or seeing cows fighting/walking and doing their own stuff. Apart from this, the course is a heavy dose of Meditation. The calmness you experience, cannot be shared in words. You meet with many people, many stories similar to you, different but more suffering than you, and so on. But in the end, you leave the place with a smile and energy to lead a life with inner peace.

This course also teaches you to be in Silence and be with your own company. (One thing which is needed in this COVID-19 Pandemic). Not speaking a single word for 3 days is a completely different experience. Especially if you are a salesperson and speaking is what your duty is.

One of the most important learning for me during the course was, to be active outside and peaceful inside. Somehow I had missed this learning earlier. Discovered it during the course.

At this platform, along with talk about the Advanced course, I would like to take an opportunity to talk about a few of the myths about the following spirituality in general.

Many people say — “I don’t need this. This is for weak people. I am perfectly fine and spirituality is for those who are struggling with something in their life. Or it should be practiced by adults and not by youth.” For people with such a mindset, I would like to say, connecting with spirituality is preferred at every stage of life. Its benefits upgrade you. Let us say, you do not have any problem and you are the happiest person in the world. Then, it would be the best time to practice spirituality and upgrade your skills. Because, if you were struggling, the first step would be to solve your problems and then upgrade like you have to upgrade from minus to zero and then zero to 100. BUT if you are at stage zero, then spirituality will help you to achieve stage 100.

Another road blocking thought is, “Spirituality is a business and we do not believe in superstition.” For this, I would not defend, as I believe defending will only increase debate without a conclusion. Rather I would say, let it be a superstition. Who cares if it is giving you results? And once you follow it, you will get to know the truth. I would like to co-relate it with the thought behind “Not donating Blood because it is sold”. Understand one thing, if at all one bottle of blood donated by you is sold for INR 1Cr and saving someone’s life, it is still worth it. Because blood cannot be manufactured even if INR 10Cr is spent. It is produced from the human body only. And if everyone starts thinking in the same way, you will also not get blood in an emergency. In the same way, if someone is really caught in superstition and business, doesn’t mean you should not be faithful. Please note, faith can move the mountains. It is you, who need to differentiate between superstition and faith. You can keep your mind aware and implement accordingly or choose the mentor (Guru) wisely.

You know, I am in support of movies like OMG & PK. But, the bad part of it is, we only take what is convenient for us from the movie. In both the movies, it is nowhere conveyed that God does not exist or Spirituality is fake. But the importance of Faith is clearly mentioned, which we do not talk about. In my opinion, victims of Superstition is either the lower class who really are not educated and not exposed to real-world or the high-class people who are afraid of many things in their lives. And Victim of OMG & PK is middle-class people who really followed all traditions and practices with faith and not superstition. BUT it got educated and misguided with only the stories of superstition and forgot the power of faith and belief.

I request all my readers to be aware, understand, experience, and then take a wise decision. No one is a fool on this planet except the one who concludes without wisdom.

With this thought, I would also like to mention that every great man on the planet had been connected with spirit in some or other way. It is the eternal truth of life and we should follow the same as per our belief.