- Bees
Study all the scriptures as a bee collects nectar from the different flowers and makes sweet honey.
But beware - do not manufacture poison.
The bee does not do it.
- Mental Penance
True mental penance is to deny the mind what it wants.
You must feel miserable for a time, otherwise you are cheating yourself.
But there it can become very tricky.
If you become happy that you are miserable, it is then not mental penance but boosting the ego.
- God
Even the descriptions of souls taking the paths of Light and Darkness may refer to Satva - purity and Tamas - inertia. The presence of fire is noticed by its own light - the Presence of God is realised in His own Light - Satva.
Though the Jiva is God, in Tamas it forgets God - smoke will make even the man who made fire close his eyes - electric shock will kill the inventor himself.
- Reincarnation
Take the case of a wristwatch - you replace the whole mechanism, part by part, over, say, over years.
Then you exchange the steel case for a golden one!
Now, it is not the watch you had six years ago - but you will not say so!
The idea is the same - even so the idea of the personality continues from childhood to old age and even when one body is exchanged for another.
I do not deny the genes - nor do I deny I am born of the sperm and the ova.
But what I assert is that I brought them together - they built a body for me.
If I did not do so, the particular sperm in company with millions of others would have been unlucky, and the ovum destroyed without fertilization.
They did not create me - nor did I create them and the body-life tabernacle.
They evolved for me to live and evolve.
- Upadhis
A small jar, within a bigger jar, bigger and bigger (four others).
Break the five to find out what is in them - but that very instance, the space in the jars becomes one with the space outside.
Like Atma - the Self) and Jiva - the individual soul.