Ashvattha

from Dhamma by Sir Ravana

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Dhammpada - The Way Of The Budha

The legend goes that in the days of ancient Rome an officer called away to the wars locked his beautiful young wife in a chastity belt and gave the key to his best friend with the admonition, "If I don't return in a year, use this key. To you, my dear friend, I entrust it."
He then galloped off to the wars. Ten miles away from home he heard the clatter of hoofbeats behind him and he waited. His friend on horseback galloped up saying, "You gave me the wrong key!"

What have you been doing? Can you say you have lived your life with awareness? Can you say your actions have the quality of awareness? Somebody insults you: do you respond or do you react? If you react, you are asleep; if you respond, you are awake.

Man is so deeply unconscious!

One Friday night Bob came home earlier than usual and surprised his attractive wife in bed with another man. Becoming enraged, he seized a pistol he kept hidden in his dresser and shot the lovers to death.

A next-door neighbor, Jim, was discussing the tragedy with some friends a few days later. Jim said, "Well, after all, it is not the worst thing that could have happened."
The others jumped on him. "What do you mean? Two people dead, and Bob may be about to be executed!"

Jim replied, "Well, I still say it could have been worse. If Bob had come home early on Thursday night, I would be dead!"

Man lives in such unconsciousness. He goes on doing things motivated by the unconscious. He is not master of his own soul. He does not know where these desires arise from; they simply possess him. And when he is possessed by a desire, he is utterly helpless.

You always have to look back, for the simple reason that you are always partial, fragmentary. Only a part of your being gets involved, and you do everything in such a way that you are not totally in it, never wholly in it. Later on you start thinking, "I should have done that," or "I should have done this," or "maybe a better way of doing it was possible." You start repenting, you start feeling guilty. Your actions are so incomplete, that's why there is this hang-up. When some action is done with your totality, when you are entirely in it, then once you are out of it, you are entirely out of it.

Remember this fundamental law: if you are totally into something, you can be totally out of it. If you are not totally in it you will remain involved in it even when the time is past; even when its days are gone you will remain involved in it. Some part of you will go on clinging to the past, and you will always feel miserable. Whatsoever you choose,
misery is bound to follow, because sooner or later you will realize that you could have done better.

To be born is hard, because you could have been a dog or a tiger or an elephant or an ant or a rosebush. There are millions of forms; from all those planes you cannot enter into buddhahood. After millions and millions of births you have come to the crossroads. Man is a crossroad: from man all the dimensions are open. And it is up to you to move, up to you to choose, up to you to be whatsoever you want to be. In the whole of existence only man is a free being. It is a glory, a great gift of God.

HARD IT IS TO BE BORN, and HARD IT IS TO LIVE. Life is not easy. And a life of unconsciousness -- how can it be easy? You create your own problems. You dig ditches into which you yourself are going to fall, you create walls which become imprisonments for you. You are your worst enemy.

Life is hard, but the hardest thing is to hear of the way: to find a buddha, a master -- a Christ, a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu. It is very hard to find a buddha, and harder to hear him and to understand what he is saying. It is easier to misunderstand him, it is easier not to recognize him. You can find a thousand and one rationalizations and deny him. In fact you will try, because your ego is at stake. If you recognize somebody as a buddha, that means you have to surrender. Recognizing a buddha and not surrendering to him is impossible. Recognizing a buddha and surrendering to him is a natural phenomenon.

Once you recognize somebody as awakened, enlightened, there is no way to escape, you have to surrender. If you want to escape, then be alert. From the very beginning don't recognize, from the very beginning create barriers -- as many as you can. Distort everything, bring in all your prejudices. Don't see -- close your eyes. Don't listen, become deaf. Don't feel, and escape from the buddhafield, because who knows -- sometimes it happens in spite of you.

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from Dhamma, released February 1, 2018

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Sir Ravana New Delhi, India

In a Word: Mystical

In a sense, electronic music is a vacuum  - the entire damn genre started off as nothing more than a series of electrical inventions which gained popularity after composers applied them to their own cultures. New Delhi-based artist Ravana, named after the antagonist of Valmiki’s epic poem Ramayana, follows in these classics’ footsteps to re-imagine their music. ... more

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