Edward’s Diary Entry 5 - Life Plan?

I set to work on my Life Plan. I don’t know many people who have one. But my first idea was to set up an altar. We need all the help and inspiration we can get, so we have to arrange things accordingly. A long time ago in Germany, I once had a Meditation Room, a spare room with wooden floors I had to varnish and white walls, which I never decorated in any way, and it contained only a mat or cushion to sit on so I could look at a blank wall, or adopt a yoga position and try to keep my mind on one single theme, or kneel and combine physical with mental exercises. Tough job. It eventually petered out due to changing life circumstances, but it was a good experience. Now I don’t have a spare room, so I decided to set up a little corner in my bedchamber for meditational pursuits and mental exercises. That took a month to fix up, off and on, as the actual altar – a 3-shelf white bookcase from Ikea – with a few picture frames, candles and family mementos, had to be discretely hideable behind a curtain, and that required some doing. This is because one wise man said “meditation is a mad man’s business, so it is best to have a separate room for it.” But by the end of the month, everything started fitting into place – in my mind, in my room and with the various odds and ends I needed to realise my initial plan. I had my shelf, I made a poster with a series of pictures that, for me, represented the 26 Virtues described in Chapter XVI of the Bhagavad Gita, my flower vase, candles, pictures, and odds and ends, including a century-old Franciscan olive wood rosary, which I picked up at an antique dealers mostly for the cross, which I needed for another project, deciding to place the rest of the actual rosary on one of my altar shelves – you never know, maybe that friar was in communion with the Lord, and it would help me to realise Truth at some point. In any case, for the time being, I was to study the Virtues as given. Ah, sorry for being so antiquated. In today’s hyperconnected world, I have just seen that the Gita may have been written in what modern people like to envisage as those savage ancient times, as it is said that “Lord Krishna spoke the Bhagavad-Gita on the battlefield of Kuruksetra in 3102 B.C.; just prior to the commencement of the Mahabharata war. This date corresponds to 1700 years before Moses, 2500 years before Buddha, 3000 years before Jesus and 3800 years before Mohammed.” Or soon to be 5118 years ago! What was a 21st-century man like me doing with a text like that? Well, as a teenager, I had heard about the Gita, and my family knew a man who tried to put it into practise at that time. He was also a devotee of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, of which we heard quite a lot. But recently, my renewed source came from India, once again, from the teachings of the Shivapuri Baba. I’ll explain in forthcoming entries, if you want to stick with me… not without saying that, yes, wisdom from 5 millennia ago can be updated and used together with our “modern knowledge” quite comfortably, but that comes later…. have to close now.