From Vara Prasad, Instructor, Sahaja Online

We hear a lot about road rage these days and recently I had my own experience with it. Driving in an area unfamiliar to me, I had to stop rather abruptly before merging on to the main road due to the cars on that road driving much faster than I was expecting. A driver on the main road, despite having been in no danger from me, stopped his car in front of me and proceeded to get out, come over to my car, kick my door, swear at me and then drive off again, whilst I thanked my good fortune for not ending up with a bloody nose.

Clearly, this was a massive over-reaction on the other driver’s part to what should have been a minor incident. It left me wondering about the role anger plays in our society. Everywhere we look there is a lot of anger and sometimes it seems as though these levels of anger are increasing.

So how do you deal with anger?

Each of us is inexorably shaped by the environment of which we are a part. Our language, culture, politics and belief systems are all influenced by where we are born and how we are brought up to view the world.  This process of relative conditioning affects all of us in varying degrees and is a major factor in the emergence of the Age of Division in which we find ourselves today.

Where does the solution lie?

While meditation has a number of benefits, we at Sahaja, are unique in bringing out some unusual benefits you may not commonly hear about with the scores of other forms of meditation in the market. That is because Sahaja is a very deep, holistic and intricate practice. It works at the deepest levels inside you – your subtle energy system of chakras – to produce multiple benefits.

A while ago, we explained how meditation can help avoid lethargy within you.

Today, we’d like to share another uncommon benefit – strategies on how to use meditation for becoming more balanced and grounded. What makes this discussion even more interesting is that most people have some sort of vague and generic understanding of what those two terms really mean or will feel like. And admittedly, it’s more cool these days to say “My meditation just blew away my stress” than tell someone “Meditation helps me stay grounded”.  The latter remark is sure to raise some eyebrows even though it is a much more sustainable and longer-term benefit and positive outcome.

We’d like to define them in a very practical way and how you can experience the benefits of being balanced and grounded on an everyday basis.

Earlier today, I was conducting a meditation session for a group at Youngstown Ohio when I tried to simplify and summarize top benefits of meditation. It occurred to me that sometimes life needs to be very simple.

While we all are looking for something out of it, at Sahaja Online we undertook an endeavor to unearth every possible benefit, the scientific backing behind it and shared it all with you.

But can we provide a simplistic view of the top 3 benefits? A simple upshot of what is possible with meditation? Here it is.

Intellectual and Spiritual Evolution are Not The Same

How does one measure spiritual evolution? If someone asked you “How spiritually evolved are you?”, what will your answer be? And how do you justify your answer?

Tough questions, hardly any doubt. More than that, these are very subtle and very much subject to an individual’s interpretation of their his or her goal in life and also interests and passion.

Those who think they are spiritually evolved and mature can very easily fall into the trap of confusing spiritual evolution with intellectual evolution. The latter is straightforward. Human civilization has made amazing advances in every area, especially in the last 100 years. Our lives and living standards have been transformed compared to our ancestors. It feels like technology modernization is running away from us, so fast that we cannot even catch up.

In many ways, the collective worldview is also a lot more mature. For the most part, people agree on many fundamental tenets without any dispute or disagreements – for instance, racism is not a good thing. Nor is sexual harassment. Peace and negotiations are always better than any kind of war. Basic human rights and freedom of speech should not be denied to anyone.

A few centuries ago, or even a few decades ago, all these weren’t a given. We were still trying to find a mature and acceptable view of these topics.

But could one say that we have spiritually evolved and are much better off than we were decades or centuries ago?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. In fact, the bad news is that we may even be worse off than we were decades or centuries ago. Why is it so?