On Thurs 7 Aug 08 @9PM I had a deeply moving and spiritual experience when I lit candles and deeyas for Tibet. This was in unison with everyone in my time zone and done globally. I'd like to explore this and share my experiences with you and hear yours as we participate in universal collective prayer events together. I hope to work together with all the universe's beings as we move toward the ideal of Universal Collective Prayer.
Come join me in Universal Collective Prayer!
May God Bless Us All!
UCP-Universal Collective Prayer is produced by Meady's Musings Production . Copyright 2006-2011
On Thursday, March 31st, at Noon, in each time zone, join Dr. Masuro Emoto's Prayer to Water by chanting the following simple prayer and invocation three times with your hands in the prayer position: "The water at Fukushima Nuclear Plant, we are sorry to make you suffer, please forgive us, we thank you and we love you."
This prayer event reminds us here at UCP of our participation in the candle4tibet event that inspired the inception of this blog. You will be collectively praying with everyone in your time zone and the prayers will be going with a domino effect as it starts off in Japan the land of the rising sun and spreads westward! Truly Universal Collective Prayer at its best! Please join us in UCP with Dr. Masuro Emoto's Prayer to Water.
For those of you needing some details to focus your prayers...the intent behind the prayers is to use the power of prayer to heal the water that is contaminated as a result of the damage done to nuclear plants in Japan by the impacts of the earthquake and tsunami earlier this month.
If you need to get a little bit more familiar with Mother Water also known as Ganga Mata in Hinduism/Hindi check out these blogs in the UCP archives:
As promised just a quick note to show you readers how the guys at the UCP desk looked before and after they stepped onto the maidan at festivities today! :)
Poster done by a friend of UCP from Mexico: Adriana Ochoa. She owns her own Advertising firm there.
Here on UCP things universe wide don't seem so bright and hardly light and/or playful after all with the events in Japan continuing to sadly unfold and civil wars upon civil wars in the Middle East and North Africa continuing and continuing...it can tire you out and bog you down. So today on UCP we felt citing the Hindu festival of Holi or Phagwa might be a bit trite...however we've reconciled that even in the saddest and uncertain of times a bit of play is perhaps still what the Universe points us to conspire to have...don't know if that makes sense to our readers or not but as a result our guys at the UCP desk have decided to turn off their computers and into the maidan (field) step for a bit of frolic and play...
Holi Hai!
We here at UCP have built up quite an archive of things Holi or Phagwa over the years so we review them here:
And check us out tomorrow for some before and after shots of us here at UCP as we are at colourful play!
In terms of music this year we can't help but to re-share the quintessential Amit Bachchan pitch but we also go way back to our roots and share a few bhojpuri tunes out of UP in India from whence our ancestors once upon a time came...enjoy! :)
And as we did for Diwali this year we share with you greetings from the Big B himself who although he often features in his films as a drunk is in reality and vegetarian and teetotaler.
UCP did not open the Lenten season as we normally do on Ash Wednesday...but better late than never...and so we here at UCP would like to join with the Catholic community and wish all a fruitful 40 days of fasting, meditation and prayer. Good luck guys!
However it is indeed a sad time on planet earth and indeed a time for prayer! The things in the Middle East that we here at UCP quite don't understand and then the tear making and heart breaking events that still continue to unfold in Japan.
Therefore in this time of Lent we've asked Deacon Greg Kirk our friend in UCP to share the below prayer:
"Divine One - In this holy season of Lent we remember the path of Your Blessed One, especially His suffering that united Him with Your people everywhere. It is a time to recall that in losing ourselves, we find ourselves, that in dying to our desires, we rise to new life, in You. As we journey through these forty days, help us to remember those who suffer among us, today, especially your children in Japan. Please embrace them with your healing and divine assistance, as we embrace them with our tears and desire to serve and assist them." Amen
Also UCP and friends have been giving out daily intentions of prayer for the people of Japan over at the Lynne Mc Taggart lady's Intention Experiment over here on Facebook!
Please join us in UCP:Universal Collective Prayer!
And it's finally here! And with it the festival of Shiv 2011 sadly comes to a close! :( But we here at UCP have come to a realization that we may be wishing to celebrate all the shiv ratris...the ones that come up each month...although they are not Maha ones...or the great big ones! We will keep you readers in the loop on how that goes...but for now here it is: Maha Shivratri 2011!
And we promised a friend to go into the meaning tonight of the rituals that many people Hindu world over perform through out this night and their symbolic meaning in all our quests to become more Shiv like or Shivoham! Shivoham!
Well when we offer water onto Shiv we are surrendering onto him and usually the things we surrender are things of nature...so we are already practising to become more Shiv like as to collect all the things for the poojas etc we have to interact with nature...pick flowers, collect leaves...and then we offer it up to Shiv so we are surrendering onto him as our guru.
Then we sit in meditation and pray...perhaps chanting Om Namah Shivay! As we spend time in quiet reflection...in this time we can perhaps think of all the qualities of Shiv we've been lisiting on UCP over the last few days and ask ourselves where we are and what we need to do to become more Shiv like...Shivoham! Shivoham!
We know we've sort of rushed this along but truth be told the UCP desks are pretty empty tonight as our writers are off to the temples or mandirs Universe over or some are simply sitting with Shiv on their own in a corner of the Production House while some have gone to sit with Shiv with their families!
So from all of us here at UCP....may you and your loved ones make the most of this auspicious night and reach one step further along that road of being Shivoham! Shivoham!
Har Har Mahadev! Om Namah Shivay! Shivoham! Shivoham!
Murti of Shiv, Rishikesh, INDIA copyright Meady's Musings Production 2008.
Today as we are on our final installation in the three part series on being Shiv Like we will get straight to it and tomorrow we will share with you some of the meaningful aspects of Mahashivratri as it is the big day tomorrow!
So here we go with some more of the things that makes us want to be Shiv Like!:
He Leads a Simple Life: We here at UCP emulate Baba Shiv's lifestyle as he lives in the forest here and there and he is content with just enough clothing to cover him. And he eats simple foods collected in the forest. When he does eat that is...because he seems to never be eating anyway as he is mostly meditating! You can just imagine how low Baba Shiv's carbon footprint must be! :)After all as a friend of UCP reminded us...Shiv is also known as Ashutosh...one who is pleased easily! And indeed he is! And if we could all be as Shiv like as him...well we for sure would be drawing down way less on the earth's limited resources!
He is the Supreme Yogi!: We here at UCP are always ranting about Baba Shiv being the supreme yogi. You can recall our first admittance to this during Maha Shivratri 2009 by clicking on this link. And we are also always talking about how we often visualise Baba Shiv doing yogic stretches along the banks of our favourite Shiv place: The Mosquito Creek in Trinidad. Additionally yogis and yoginis from far and wide travel to Rishikesh to be part of yoga festivals where Baba Shiv is the keynote speaker! (in a metaphorical sense at least) :) Usually the festival coincides with Maha Shivratri infact there is one going on all now as we write just check this link for details. And of course we here at UCP wish we could be a yogi or yogini like Baba Shiv because the benefits of it are multifold when it comes to one's mental, physical and spiritual state! :)
He conquers death or is fearless to it: Baba Shiv is obviously not afraid of things related to death and dying or destruction. After all he destroys the Universe every once in a while and hangs out with bhoots (ghosts) of all forms and fashions. He also tends to hang out at cremation sites and even smears his body in the ash of the dead. Hey we at UCP wish we could all be so comfortable with death...acknowledging that...to everything there is always an end...including our mortal coils and those of our loved ones. To face the fear of death is often man's greatest challenge yet...so we look to Baba Shiv for some tips there!
He transcends time: We at UCP always get the feeling that Baba Shiv is not bounded by time...we get the idea that he could exist in the past, present and future at all times. We don't have any empirical evidence of this nor any relgious scripture can we cite. But we are students of metaphysics here at the Meady's Musings Production House...and somehow everytime we look at murtis of Baba Shiv or read about him in religious scriptures we just get that feeling about him...and of course wouldn't it be cool if you could no longer be bounded by time! Perhaps if one became Shivoham! Shivoham! on that spiritual level...time does not exist?! And so it cannot bind us! :)
And in closing as we talk about Baba Shiv and conquering our fear of death we play the Maha Mrityunjaya Mantra...let's have the guys at the UCP desk cue it up now...OK play away! :)
Photo taken of Shiv doing the dance of destruction outside CERN from this site
As we draw nearer to Maha Shivratri on the festival of Shiv we figured we'd stick to the theme of being Shiv like until the Maha Shivratri because we are simply having so much fun with the theme but also because there is so much we like about Shiv that it couldn't fit in just one blog! He inspires us to want to be like him so much that...if like Shiv if we could only be like Shiv we'd be enthused and if we achieved it we'd be filled with bliss even! And we have a sneaking suspicion that not only us on UCP feel like this! After all for centuries and centuries ascetics, scholars, sanyasis, pundits, brahmins, non-brahmins, believers, repenters and just plain ole folks have been searching for Shiv so that they can be more like him! Infact this search is so ancient and well known that it already has it's own term in Sanskrit:
Shivoham, Shivoham!
I am Shiv! I am Shiv!
is the exclamation as we realise that we could indeed be like Shiv and in that realization we become:
Chid ananda rupah i.e. we achieve consciousness and bliss! :)
But as we continue to admire Baba Shiv so that we can be shivoham, shivoham! Let's again today talk about some of the Shiv like things we admire here at UCP. -His love for animals and nature as a whole: This no doubt overlaps with what we wrote on yesterday's blog i.e. that we admire his love and compassion. But we just felt we'd be more specific here to say that Baba Shiv doesn't just show love and compassion for human beings he shows it for all of the beings in the Universe...beasts, birds and bees, trees, the ocean, the rivers and everything included! Baba Shiv is like a protector of all animals and the elements for sure! After all he even lets poisonous snakes drape him and he holds the moon and the great river Ganga in his hair! In fact he so loves animals and is such a protector of them that he is often known as Pashupati which in Sanskrit means 'The Lord of Animals'. Baba Shiv sits atop the snowy caps of Mount Kailash in the Himalayas prevading over all of nature and its animals! Jai Bhole Nath!
-His Dancing Skills!: It is often said that Baba Shiv is the dancer and we the dance! UCP so gets this after all we are all just at the whim of the Universe blowing here and blowing there in the wake of its dance! But we at UCP believe through meditation, experimentation, soul searching, studying the universal dance itself we can all understand the dance so well that we can one day even dancers be! Just try it! Chant Shivoham! Shivoham! and meditate and start stripping all the things that keep you from your true nature...feel the freeness as you become one with you...Shivoham! Shivoham! Appreciate the nature around you...switch off this blog...your cell phone and just let it sink in and we say you'll be one step closer to being Shivoham! Shivoham! One step closer to not just being the dance but having the ability to be the dancer because you will be so attuned with the dancer that you will know and not resist his steps!
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