Navarasas in Religious

Navarasas are listed both in Hinduism and Buddhism, as creating an atmosphere of unrest in the mind.  In this state, the mist of negative emotions, slows and confuses the mind. During meditative practices, the chemicals of peace and tranquility like serotonins and endorphins flow into the blood. Breathing, heart rate and pulse rate stabilize. The mind is able to function calmly and freely. An alert and relaxed attitude is required for the teamwork involved in building ideas and analyzing them. Self-awareness of your state of mind can help you get the most out of life and help others to do the same.

Each of the major rasas have a few stable sentiments and many passing, transient emotions. The permanent sentiments are pleasure, laughter, grief, anger, zeal, awe, disgust and surprise. All the major rasas will have elements of these feelings. In love, there will be the pleasure of union and the grief of parting. Many scholars add the nineth Rasa, Shantha rasa (or the rapture of peace).

The mutable sentiments are not present in all the rasas. A few are present in each of the rasas. They are like passing clouds and there are 33 of them. The Mutable Sentiments are: detachment, remorse, apprehension, envy, intoxication, fatigue, indolence, depression, anxiety, delusion, recollection, contentment, bashfulness, agility, joy, agitation, stupor, arrogance, dejection, eagerness, slumber, epilepsy, dream, awakening, indignation, dissimulation, violence, resolution, disorder, insanity, death, terror and deliberation.

Positive Emotions for Joy and Happiness

The positive emotions create a positive field, which fills your blood with the chemicals of happiness and well-being, which are conducive to the building or rebuilding of a healthy body and mind. The negative emotions create a negative field, which fills your blood with the chemicals of unrest and unhappiness. It is important to have a closer look at the nine rasas.

The eight major rasas have within them 49 sentiments or bhavas. Obviously, the positive emotions or states like love, humor, compassion, chivalry and wonder would put the mind in a happy and enthusiastic state of mind, which would nurture positive field. The negative rasas like anger, fear and abhorrence, would create a state of mind which is described in Daniel Goleman’s book as an ‛emotional hijack.’ The Big Five negative emotions are: Lust, Anger, Arrogance, Greed and Jealousy.

The Nava Rasas of the Positive Field

Emotions and the way you deal with them, create the positive field.  The Mind is a field, which is filled with positive and negative emotions. The nava rasas can be your guide to understanding the nine emotions. The nava rasas are a 2000 year old Indian concept on emotions. The nine emotions have been built into a system of dance called Natya Shastra by Sage Bharata. Rasa means rapture or relish and 37 chapters of the Natya Shastra are devoted to eight of them, as Bharatha does not consider ‘Shantha’ or peace a major rasa.  Bharata’s Natya Shastra even described each rasa with a different color.

The Nine Rasas are

1.    Love

2.    Humor

3.    Compassion

4.    Peace

5.    Chivalry

6.    Anger

7.    Fear

8.    Abhorrence

9.    Wonder

Power Of Communication

They say three apples changed the world: the apple with which Eve seduced Adam, the falling apple which inspired Newton’s theory of gravity and Steve Jobs elegant Apple devices. The year 2011 focused on the power of communication through another fruit, the BlackBerry. The internet and facebook, proved to be major players in the fall of totalitarian regimes in Libya and Egypt, besides making Anna Hazare a house hold name in a matter of weeks at home and ensuring that a song like Kola Veri went viral and had turned even the sober Japanese Prime Minister into a fan, who invited actor turned singer Dhanush for dinner with him and our Prime Minister Manmohan Singh when he visited New Delhi recently. This song has been now sung in many different languages and tongues with tunes made up to suit local needs that it seems to communicate, young people need no language, but just a song sounding good.

People can lament all they want that the world was a better place when Apple and BlackBerry were just fruits. The fact remains that instant communication is here to stay. So this year, let’s use the internet to spread viral messages of happiness, peace and love. Let us use it to keep large extended families bound together. Let us harness the power of the internet to make our friendships stronger. Let us use our i-pads to share beauty and build peace. Remember love alone is recession proof, to condemn the new technologies is like condemning water because we might drown in it. Last year Sai Baba left us, M. F. Hussain left us, Wangari Maathai who recreated the geography of Kenya by planting trees left us, genius Steve Jobs, of the radiant digital innovations left us. But their ideas have left an indelible foot print on time. Let them inspire us to lead our lives this year, so that people want our autographs and not our fingerprints.

Beware of Big Five emotions

Any of the big five emotions—Kama, Kroda, Madha, Lobha, Matsarya (lust, anger, arrogance, greed, jealousy, respectively) can flood the body with the chemicals of stress. Stress is destructive. Stress is ageing. Stress is a killer.

Work follows us everywhere. The blurring of work and leisure has intensified in this era of twenty-four-hour access, when the computer is just a fingertip away and the Blackberry and the cellphone are as intimate as a heartbeat. The delicate tissues of the body are constantly awash in the lethal chemical bath of chronic stress. Interactive electronic devices have made stress continuous. Home is no longer a refuge.

Because of these conflicts and intense pressure on an individual, both physical and mental, the most exciting breakthrough of the twenty-first century will occur not because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human in the expanding global market and the toxic workplace it has created.

The only way to break this pattern is to find a way to change the response to tough situations. There is of course no way to make the situations less tough. Meditation and pranayama, provide everyone with a way of reducing the automatic, violent reactions to stress. You can actually control autonomous systems like heart beat and pulse rate, which were thought to be outside the individual’s control. Knowing and practicing meditation can provide you with a silent space where you can retreat into peace: slow breathing, steady heartbeat, low pulse. This space is always available within a person who has learnt to meditate. While you cannot change your job, family or your life situation, you can certainly learn to breathe more peacefully, thus reversing the process of excitation and avoiding the emotional hijack.

Meditation to clean the mind

Meditation is the broom that sweeps out the negative emotions and pours in the honey of tranquility into the mind. There are many forms of meditation. Here are some examples:

Opening-Up Meditation with an Apple              

Often our senses are scrambled and numbed by the hurry of life. Each of the senses provides us with new adventures and helps us to live more fully.

Opening up consists of emphasizing the five senses of the body: seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling.  Anything may be used to emphasis the senses.  For the purpose of this example, an apple will be used to demonstrate all five senses of opening-up meditation.  The purpose of this is to relax the physical body and the mind.  Practise this meditation for ten minutes.    Explore each one of your senses and experience their immense potential for joy. Obviously, emphasizing the senses could be done on a walk in the park or around the house or at work in the morning.

1.  Seeing:  Enjoy the skill of the great architect of the universe.  Take an apple and closely examine the outer skin.  Look closely at the colour and texture.  Peel it and look closely at the edge of the peel. Look at the inside of the peel.  Look closely at the wedges.  Break open a wedge and look at the heart of the apple.  Examine the small pieces carefully.  It is even permissible to use a magnifying glass.

2.  Hearing: Squeeze an apple.  Is there a sound?  Peel the apple.  Listen.  Bend the peel and listen to the sounds.  What sound is it?  Close your eyes and break a wedge in half.  What sound is there?  Rub your fingers along the outside of the peel.  Is there a sound?  Rub your fingers along the inside of the peel.  What difference is there?

3.  Touching: Close your eyes and rub your fingers along the outside of an unpeeled apple.  Feel the texture.  Rub your hands all over the apple.  Spend five minutes examining the apple with the fingers before peeling it.  Peel it slowly, feeling each piece. Break the apple into wedges and explore each wedge.  Feel the inside of the peel.  Examine the edges.

4. Tasting: Close your eyes and place a wedge of the apple in your mouth.  Bite slowly into the wedge.  Bite a piece of the peel.  Taste the pulp.  How many different tastes are there in an apple?

5. Smelling: Sniff an unpeeled apple.  Peel the apple and smell the inside of the peel.  Smell a wedge of apple.  Bend an apple peel and smell the acid as it explodes from the peel.  Smell the pulp.  Smell a squeezed wedge.  How many different smells are there in an apple?

By extending the senses one can forget about present problems and relax.  By allowing in more than the ordinary amount of information from a single sense, other thoughts are blocked.  That is why it is called meditation.  It must be patently apparent that if one can extend the senses to examine an apple, those senses can be used in an even more extensive way during a walk in the park.  Or on a city road on the way on the way to work, or during lunch.  It is a handy, quick and efficient way to meditate.  It will even work with an apple!

Attitudes to achieve Positive Field

·        Unconditional positive regard

·        Appreciation

·        Expression of support

·        Loving eye contact

·        Respect

·        Non-violence

·        Win-win solutions

·        Trust and openness

·        Be interested

·        Eliminate status

·        Share responsibility