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Living in the Home-State – a Vedic formula of happiness- Part 2

“Illusion is the first of all pleasures” – Oscar Wilde

‘Home-state’ is a term that refers to an activity or a state of being
where you are internally anchored. You are at peace with yourself even
as troubles hit you day in day out. Our ability to bounce back, even
as life throws up unpleasant surprises, is dependent on how developed
is our Home-State- and how much time we spend there.

Many Hare Krishna devotees have chanting of God’s holy names as their
Home-State. I have friends who can spend hours dressing and
worshipping the deities. There are others who write journals and feel
respite from the plethora of miseries that attack unabatedly. And yet
others seek shelter in hearing devotional classes or sitting quietly
in the sacred temple premises. Whatever the differences in details may
be, each sincere spiritual practitioner has his Home-State- a place
where he knows he is safe and in union with the divine Lord. You know
it’s your Home-State when time doesn’t matter. You could stay there –
in your Home-State – for hours and feel deeply fulfilled.

Could binge watching on you tube be your Home-State?

No!

Because the electronic screen dishes out unreal images. There are
three realities in this world. The first is the unreal space- the
electronic screen. The rain you watch on your television screen
doesn’t exist. It can’t give your senses an experience of a real rain,
except a visual experience to the eyes. When you witness a real rain
outside your window, that’s real but temporary. It’s real because your
sense of touch, eyes, ears, nose, and smell can feel it. Besides, the
experience is deeper than when you see the rain on a dopamine inducing
screen.

Once while walking in a park, I saw a person pacing in the opposite
direction emitting a strong fragrance of a well-known, branded
perfume. It titillated my senses for a few moments. Minutes later, I
was at another section of the garden where beautiful and fragrant
flowers bloomed and the water mixed with the mud spread a smell that
nourished me at a lever deeper than the nose’s experience of the
perfume. In a span of five minutes I had both fragrances enter my
nostrils but the latter went deeper. Unfortunately most human beings
prefer to watch unreal images on a movie screen than experience the
real world; after all illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness
within!

A Home-State activity on the other hand touches us at a deeper level-
beyond the senses for sure.

To be continued…

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