Day 23

~ Gossip is the Devil's radio. ~ George Harrison


Take no participation in gossip. Gossip is an act of violence and it hurts the soul. Let us honestly at gossiping, Awarness is key. Proverbs 12, verse 18 says"Thoughtless words can wound as deeply as a sword, but wisely spoken words can heal." Let us use our words to heal, not to harm....

"Just certain things happened in my life which left me thinking 'What's it all about, Alfie?' and I remembered Jesus said somewhere 'Knock and the door shall be opened' and I said (knock, knock) 'Hellooo!' It's very difficult. From the Hindu point of view each soul is potentially divine, the goal is to manifest the divinity. The word yoga means union and the union is supposedly between the mind, the body, and the spirit, and yoga isn't lying on nails or standing on your head. I mean, there's various forms of yoga and they're all branches on one big tree. The Lord, or God, has got a million names, whatever you want to call him, it doesn't matter as long as you call him, Jesus is on the mainline, tell him what you want. Going back to self-realization, one guru said he found no separation between man and God, saving man's spiritual unadventurousness, and that's the catch, everybody's so unadventurous. We're all conditioned, our consciousness has been so polluted by the material energy it's hard to try and pull it all ways in order to really discover our true nature. Every one of us has within us a drop of that ocean and we have the same qualities as God, just like a drop of the ocean has the same qualities as the whole ocean. Everybody's looking for something and we are it. We don't have to look anywhere--it's right there within ourselves."
George Harrison --Press Conference, Los Angeles, 1974

In The Beatles Anthology (Chronicle Books, 2000), we learn that while on location in the Bahamas for their 1965 film Help!, the band was approached by a "swami in orange robes" who gave each of the Fab Four a signed copy of The Illustrated Book of Yoga. The author turned out to be Swami Vishnu-Devananda, founder of Sivananda Yoga, and this encounter began Harrison's lifelong fascination with Eastern philosophy. Soon the musician became a vegetarian and studied sitar in India with Ravi Shankar, who gifted Harrison with Paramahansa Yogananda¹s Autobiography of a Yogi. He eventually composed numerous songs, including "My Sweet Lord," which express Eastern mysticism more keenly than perhaps any other work by a popular Western artist. "In many ways he was more Indian than many Indians," said Shankar. But it was his special genius to fuse East and West, philosophy and music, for which we are all the richer. - Yoga Journal