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Growth Online		 Equality of Being
 		Knowledge Base

by Roy Posner and MSS

 

Equality of Being

General

Equality of Being
-Equality is to remain unmoved within in all conditions. (Sri Aurobindo)

-To not be disturbed by the intensities of life -- whether positive or negative -- is equality.

-A great foundation for growth and accomplishment in life is Equality. Equality is the indifference of reaction to what appears enjoyable or unenjoyable, good or bad, fortune or problematic. It is a spiritual quality of the Infinite.

Sthithapragnya
Sthithapragnya is the word in Hindu mythology for a person who does not jump when there is success and do not break when there is failure rather he does the work and surrender the results to god and accept as it is. (Ramanan)

Equality of Being vs. Detachment
Equality of being is the same or similar to detachment. However, we could say that detachment is a general state of being unattached and needful or desirous when it comes to any act, undertaking, or aspect of life. Equality of Being is to remain calm in the face of difficult circumstance.

Also see Detachment

 

Equality of Being and Life Response

Negative Situation that is Harbinger of Many Positives
A calm response and action to a "negative" situation will reveal a plethora of positive events related to the original circumstance thereafter. It is a subtle miracle of life currently lost to our outer perceptions.

Not Troubled by Problems
When you are not troubled by a problem that arises, the problem begins to dissipate thereafter. It is because of one's equality of being.

Releasing Vital Reaction to Problem Solves It
Inattention to a problem by releasing one's corresponding vital concern, depression, attachment, etc. about it causes it to dissipate. It reverses the additional energy that our attention gave it.

Smile At All
Learn to smile always and in all circumstances; to smile at your sorrows as well as your joys. (The Mother)

Calm in Face of Negative Attracts Positive
A calm response and action to a "negative" situation will reveal a plethora of positive events related to the original circumstance thereafter. It is a subtle miracle of life currently lost to our outer perceptions.

Equality Cancels Difficulties
Calm in face of difficulties -- i.e. Equality --  cancels it; even brings opportunities.

Calm in the Face of Difficulty Attracts Marvelous Life Response
When you remain absolutely calm in the face of difficulties, life responds and cancels the difficulty soon thereafter. It often opens doors to vast opportunities.

Manager Remains Calm and Attracts Astonishing Results
A manager witnessed a great dispute and agitation between the workers and other managers with the owner. Instead of reacting the manager remained very calm. A bit later the owner had a great problem with a little child who was ill. The manager helped arrange financing for an operations, which had a successful result. That led to excellent relations among all the parties, and great gratitude by the owner for the manager.

Phileas Fogg's Perfection of Punctuality Gave Him Equality that Made Him Immune to Failure
Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days possesses an equality that is spiritual. That equality wins him the wager. He has taken punctuality and made it into an article of faith. His punctuality that was physical, taken to the extreme of perfection gave him the spiritual equality that rendered him immune against any failure in life. (MSS)

Around the World with Phileas Fogg
 There are many keys to accomplishment in life. Vision, organization, and drive are several.  Another is the capacity to be calm and equal in the face of difficult circumstances. One false step and one can fall down the latter to success. If however, we maintain the right balance in those situations, not only will we make the best of negative conditions, but life will tend to cooperate and, on its own right, the wrong. It is the phenomenon of life response in action. You remain steady when life threatens to spiral out of control, and life rights itself as if by magic. Though it seems miraculous-like, it actually happens all of the time, just out of our "field of vision." For one famous character in fiction, that inner poise of equality attracted overwhelming good fortune -- just at a time when all seemed hopeless and doomed to failure.

In his novel Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne describes the wonderful adventures of Phileas Fogg and his traveling companions. In the story, Fogg has placed a wager of 40,000 pounds that he can travel around the world in 80 days. Though his adventures will provide him with astonishing experiences that take him to distant and exotic land, his central focus and all-consuming effort is directed toward winning the wager. In addition to his single-mindedness of purpose, several other personal qualities will prove invaluable to Fogg in pursuing his lofty goal.

 

One of those is the fact that Fogg is an eminently disciplined man -- both in his emotions and in his thoughts. He has the innate capacity to accept every difficulty and ordeal that comes his way in a calm and detached manner. No matter how problematic or even absurd the circumstances, Fogg's emotions are always tranquil and calm, as if he were detached from the intensity of every situation. And yet, interestingly his mind is always fully engaged in the issue at hand -- enabling him to rationally and most logically deal with any and all circumstance. In addition, his creative capacities border on genius, as he is able to meld a native intelligence and a broad knowledge of the physical workings of life with insights and intuitive-like inspirations that help him solve nearly every problem.

 

These qualities are further enhanced by his essential kind nature -- which can be seen in the goodwill that he consistently demonstrates toward his fellow travelers, as well as the people he meets along the way. That helps help him win the respect of others at critical moments on his journey, especially important when he and his comrades face imminent danger. He also exhibits other notable faculties -- including his ability to remain silent without speaking, unless situations dictate that he do so. Together with his utter punctuality and masterful planning and organizing capacities, Phileas Fogg is the very embodiment of stability, rationality, and equality -- making him the perfect candidate to accomplish his ambitious goals.

 

And yet, this is an adventure story that Verne is determined to infuse with a variety of life's exigencies. And so it turns out that at about the time Fogg first embarks on his journey, the Bank of England is robbed. Moreover, the robber himself steps forward and maliciously matches Fogg's physical description to the thief, which causes the high-level official, Mr. Fix, to believe that Fogg's wager is a pretense to elude authorities in Britain. Fix then attempts to arrest Fogg in England, but when he fails to do so is forced instead to follow him on his travels around the world.

 

Though Fogg has astonishing encounters in Brindisi, Suez, Bombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco, New York and Liverpool, he still has to arrive back in London before noon on the 80th day to win the wager. Though on his trip he discovers that he has been accused of thievery, he brushes it aside and instead focuses all of his energies towards winning the wager. Along the way, he utilizes his uncanny creativity, ingenuity, and scientific know-how to solve every problem that crosses his path.

 

However, when he finally arrives in Britain on the very last leg of the trip, he is arrested by the authorities for robbing the Bank of England. Though he manages to escape from prison, he soon realizes that he is 5 minutes too late to win the contest. However, life then responds in his favor when he discovers that he and his party have actually arrived in Britain one day early! Because he had traveled east from England in circling the globe, he and his party had actually gained a day when they returned 79, not 80 days later!

 

Phileas Fogg's utter calm and equality in the face of extremely difficult circumstances attracted a magnificent response from life that provided him with his greatest moment of glory and success. It is an indicator that life on the outside responds to one's inner efforts or capacities of higher consciousness. Maintaining a poise of inner calm and equality is one method that enables that miraculous-like dynamic. It is in essence a spiritual-like quality that tends to overcome the negative, while attracting the infinite potentials of life.

Dissolving Problem by Not Being Troubled by It
When your sensibilities are not troubled by a real or perceived difficult, negative, or otherwise troublesome situation, that problem area dissipates completely sooner or later.

Avoiding Negative Attention
When we move our intention away from negative circumstance, offer it to the Mother, and forget about it, life responds positively soon thereafter. Often, when it resolves this way, we will have forgotten the problem we had in the first place!

We enjoy the drama of life, including the negative. However, we can also learn to enjoy pure Being; i.e. absence of intensity, which will give us the confidence to overcome any difficulty if it should arise. From a deeper poise, a Witness Consciousness within, we will more readily "let the intensity go," i.e. overcome our negative attention. Life will then flow far more smoothly with endless positive outcomes.

Remaining Calm, Equal in Difficult Situation Attracts Positive Life Response
Often we have seen situations where people have been handed a difficult situation in their lives, and yet because they remained equal and calm, did not react intensely in the face of the situation, life overcame the problem by canceling it, or bringing a response in another areas, and or other great fortune and luck.
 
LIFE RESPONSE EXAMPLES
-"While going through a financial crisis, I was planning my budget very carefully. Certain people, one of them unreasonably, presented me with extra bills of Rs 35,000, a big blow to my shoestring budget. Some people also faced with these higher charges protested. I thought I would let it pass as these guys were basically good guys. When payment came due, one of my clients paid me exactly Rs 35,000 extra."
-A calm response and action to a "negative" situation will reveal a plethora of positive events related to the original circumstance thereafter. It is a subtle miracle of life currently lost to our outer perceptions.

Louis Pasteur and the Power of Inner Equality
There is a wonderful moment in the 1935 film The Story of Louis Pasteur that I doubt hardly a critic would notice. It is an expression of the miraculous-like phenomenon of ''life response" -- i.e. the spontaneous arrival of sudden good fortune. In particular, it is an example of how taking to calm and equality in the face of great difficulty can elicit powerful positive response from the world around us.

In the incident in the film, the famous scientist Louis Pasteur has been trying to discover a cure for hydrophobia -- i.e. rabies -- that ordinarily comes through a bite or contact from a rapid infected animal. It is Pasteur's belief that if he gives a mild dose of the disease to an animal, it will build up a resistance to it when it actually does have the illness. This is the approach Pasteur develops to cure rabies and other infectious diseases. I.e. give the sick patient a mild form of the disease, and the body will spontaneously generate a resistance to it, which will push out the illness when it enters the system.

In this particular episode in the story, Pasteur believes he has a cure for hydrophobia/rabies, but many are skeptical. In fact, one key member of the scientific establishment, Dr. Charbonnet of the French Academy, is so sure that his cure is wrong that when in Pasteur's lab he grabs a syringe filled with a dense concentration of the virus and injects it into his arm! Pasteur is mortified, as he believes that Charbonnet has sealed his own fate. Not only was it not intended in such concentrated doses, but it was meant only for sickly individuals.

As it turns out, Charbonnet not only survives the inoculation, but the next day seems perfectly fine! In fact, after 30 days he shows no signs of the disease. While Pasteur is baffled by this outcome, Charbonnet flaunts the fact by parading around the Parisian scientific community, as well as high society circles, proudly pointing out how healthy he is. At one point, he boasts that that the more he takes of the allegedly lethal serum, the healthier he feels! As a result of his public posturing, Pasteur's image is greatly tarnished in both scientific circles and amongst the general public.

One day an associate friend of his rushes into Pasteur's home to notify the great chemist that he has been made a mockery of throughout the country. Pasteur however does not react at all to this news. A moment later, however, his wife Marie has the thought that perhaps the dosage the doctor took was of an old batch, and therefore had no potency to affect him. Pasteur then rushes into his office to test out the hypothesis, which he then verifies to be true. A second later, it occurs to him that that he could give infected animals with the disease a low dosage of the serum and then gradually increases the dosage, thereby creating immunity without killing them. The idea has sprung into his mind like a revelation.

What does this story then teach us? From the point of view of life response -- i.e. the onset of sudden good fortune due to changes in our consciousness -- it is rather straightforward. Because Pasteur did not respond emotionally to word of his public humiliation, his wife Marie came forward and made her statement about the old serum, which set in motion events that led one of medicine's greatest discoveries. It is an illustration of how inner calm and equality in the face of negative circumstance attracts powerful positive conditions from the world around us.

If we think about it, we will see that being calm and equal is more than an inner psychological technique, but a spiritual one as well, reflecting the universal spiritual principles of Peace and Silence. Other principles, like Love, Oneness, Truth, and Goodness have their psychological equivalents as well, such as self-givingness, willingness to embrace the other person's point of view, generosity, gratitude, and others. Each time we take to any of these, we release powerful positive energies that tend to attract life response results.

Practically then we can do the following: when difficulties descend on us, we can try to move to a state of absolute stillness and calm. When we do, the difficulties will tend to quickly evaporate, and unexpected positive conditions will also tend to take their place.

But then a question arises. How can we turn ourselves on and off like a spigot as such situations arise -- i.e. readily shift from our normal psychological state to this poise of inner calm? One answer is that we can simply remember to put aside our emotions and take to that state when these intense situations arise. It does work for those who have trained themselves to do so. And yet this may not be enough, since we tend to be overwhelmed by life's outer conditions to have the wherewithal to move to this higher status on demand.

A more certain approach is to establish a more permanent inner poise of stillness and calm, which will spontaneously refrain from reacting to life's intensities. We can begin to produce this affect by moving our center of awareness back away from surface of life to an inner poise, marked by inner concentration marked by stillness, and silence. Through this approach, we develop an inner orientation, a ''witness consciousness" that silently, calmly, and patiently looks out onto the world. Then when severe conditions cross our path -- whether as intense negatives, or even intense positives -- we will not be disturbed, as they will fall off us like the proverbial water from a duck's back. In other words, life will respond, and those severe external circumstance will tend to quickly subside on their own. In addition, an entirely new development might arise, outside the current situation, as a further positive response. Such unexpected developments can be so powerful that it can change our lives, as it did for Mr. Pasteur and the world.

Obstacles Turned into Growth and Opportunities
When we encounter an external obstacle in life, we can look within ourselves and discover an opportunity for inner growth. When we take the effort to make that growth, outer problems dissolve and new opportunities open up for us. 

Overcoming a Perceived Problem
When you perceive problems as difficulties, you suffer. If instead you remain silent and defer to the Divine, all goes well.

 

Basis of Equality of Being

Poises of Equality of Being
One can move to equality of being in a given situation. Or even better one can develop a more permanent poise of inner calm, which naturally becomes a background and condition for being calm and equal in the face of intense (positive or negative) circumstance.

Basis for Equality
A poise of stillness and inner calm enables equality of being in the face of life's intensities. Moving to the depths, away front the surface of life, enables stillness and inner calm.

Power of Calm
To be calm is the best status for living one's life. It enables right perception, being undisturbed by the unfoldings of life, and allows for right decision making that leads to successful actions and outcomes. It allows for better health, finer interaction with others, more attunement to the unfoldings in the atmosphere, the grasping of opportunities, possibilities, etc. One comes to know the flow of life, and move to the pinnacles of success and happiness in life.

Smiling in All Circumstances
I don't think that one can ever smile too much. Someone who knows how to smile in all circumstances is very close to true equality of soul. (The Mother)

Cultivating Calm, Stillness, and Mental Silence
Cultivate absolute calm and stillness and mental silence when you have the wherewithal to be conscious of your status.

Impartiality of Spiritual Individual that Leads to Wondrous Results
-One who is centered in the Spirit cannot be partial, but to the whole. His full attention will be there on all fronts, though the results will be seen only in one area.
-One indication of his paying attention to the whole is those who leave him for other pastures - not those who try to ruin him by opposition from inside - will always flourish far beyond their wildest expectations. (MSS, somewhat modified)


Equality of Being and Spirit

Equality of Being and Witness Consciousness
The first condition of the Divine in the Unmanifest is that of silent witness. We too can manifest that condition in our own lives. Then when intensity comes to us, we will be able to observe it dispassionately for what it is. That will help move the act to a higher status as life responds to our stillness.

Silent Witness of the Being and Equality of Being
Silent Witness is the state of Being of the Unmanifest. Next came the Conscious-force out of the Being. We too can rise from attachment in the Becoming to equality and detachment of Being.

Detached Observer
The spiritual way is to be the detached beholder of life, which enables many sided knowledge, truth, and right action. Our normal lives are the opposite of this.

Equality of Being as Spiritual Condition
Equality of being is a spiritual condition. As one moves to the depths of one's being culminating in soul connection, one lives more in the equal state of detached observer of life's conditions, and is therefore not disturbed by the positives or negatives outcomes that arrive.

Impartiality of Spiritual Individual that Leads to Wondrous Results
-One who is centered in the Spirit cannot be partial, but to the whole. His full attention will be there on all fronts, though the results will be seen only in one area.
-One indication of his paying attention to the whole is those who leave him for other pastures - not those who try to ruin him by opposition from inside - will always flourish far beyond their wildest expectations. (MSS, somewhat modified)  

 

Non-Reaction

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Detachment

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TO BE CATEGORIZED
 

Equality of Being

Equality in the Face of a Challenge

Not to feel the challenge is one trait of equality. (Sri Karmayogi)

Comment: When a challenge arises, various emotions, energies, and attitudes can well up inside. To be calm and equal, i.e. practice "Non-reaction," is to bring the power of stillness to the occasion, attracting the right positive conditions.

 

 

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