Perfect Book review of Flowing with Universal Laws by Margo Kirtikar, PHD

This book is the result of over 35 years of my research and study of hundreds of spiritual and ancient wisdom books.  These laws have been known and taught throughout the ages but the more humanity became materialistic the more we forgot the laws. I believe that it is now time, for us to rediscover these laws again, to remember them and to live by them. ‘Flowing with Universal Laws’ Cosmic Laws, Universal Laws, Subsidiary Laws detail 245 universal laws that govern life on earth and influence our present and future. When we flow in harmony with a law, we experience harmony and success in our life achievements. When we, however, go against the energy of universal law, we experience disharmony and pain. It behoves us, therefore, to study, to reflect on and to understand the way these laws work and to live by them, in order to minimize our suffering and to maximize the quality of our lives both personally and professionally, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

 Introduction

The Tales of the Arabian Nights, the ‘One Thousand and One Nights’ are revelations of Divine Laws and are much more than folklore for children and adults when the tales are truly and correctly understood. The inner implications of accomplishments are perfectly possible when one is sincere, worthy and humble enough to be trusted with the power and the truth that they reveal. The great master ‘ignorance’ and his close friends ‘pride, doubt, fear, ridicule, scepticism’ and many of such useless parasites, have fastened themselves upon the mentality and feeling of humans making them blind, holding them slaves within their own self imposed limitations. If it were not for these negative traits which act like vampires, humankind would be able to see and to know that within the light that animates the physical body, exists an intelligence and a power that can and will carry out perfectly whatever the mind directs. This can be done when harmony is maintained and all that is thought and aspired for is of a constructive nature.

‘In Him we live and move and have our being.’ The cosmic energy in which we bathe surrounds us, so we can say that we live in God’s energy, known as the Akasha, the ethereal substance that permeates everything. Cosmic Law rules everything in the cosmos and Universal Law rules everything on earth. Cosmic and Universal Laws are spiritual and, therefore, invisible, unchangeable and eternal. These laws make our world what it is. The laws manifest themselves through energy and we humans have been given the freedom, the intelligence and the willpower to activate these energies and to make them work for us. But in order to activate these laws, we need to be aware of them and we need to understand them.

The more we are able to integrate attributes of universal laws into our daily lives the more harmony we have in our lives and we experience what we refer to as ‘going with the flow.’ When we live against the energies of these laws of nature we experience a disharmony in our life where everything seems to go wrong for us. We have been given the freedom of choice, to do one or the other, to work with or against these invisible laws. We all know deep inside us of the existence of these spiritual laws, if we would only take a moment to listen in silence to the spirit within. It is never too late to study the universal laws, to contemplate and to understand them the best way we can. It is never too late to apply them in our daily life so that we can make things change for the better in our world. Any moment can be the right moment to begin. The universal laws assure us of that.

 Who We Are:

To truly know who we are we need to understand our complete human identity, our origin, our direction, our purpose and our duty as humans. Through self-knowledge, we can create a state of health in which our spiritual and physical resources are equally active in balance working in harmony towards a common goal.

We are created as multidimensional beings to experience life and to manifest our true nature and essence, the spirit, through a physical form. Our original home is in the spiritual dimension. Our purpose here on earth as we complete our human journey back to the spiritual dimension is to develop, strengthen and refine our human qualities. We are meant to evolve in the physical world because the conditions in the tangible world are non-existent in the spiritual realm. In other words, imagine the earth as being our stage and playground and through each of our earthly life, we are going through specific training in order to evolve. The challenge is for us to progress and to refine our character while being completely involved in the physical world, using our physical senses. Our challenge is that as we go through our earthly life, we are meant to remember our spiritual identity and origin.

Being the dominant species on earth, we are entrusted with the responsibility of being the guardians of the three lower kingdoms, the mineral, the plant and the animal worlds. Both our internal state of being and our external behaviour and actions affect all life on our planet. If our world is out of balance, as we are experiencing now, it is because something has gone wrong within us. We have created a crisis in our relationships with all forms of life on earth and no amount of science or technology can correct this imbalance. Both the problem and the solution relate to our individual and collective state of being. None of what we humans are experiencing now are acts of nature or done unto us by God. The destruction of our environment, our competitive and materialistic behaviour, poverty, social injustice, crime, wars, exploitation of natural resources, are all symptoms of the huge imbalance in our own human nature and our development. We humanity, collectively, have no one to blame for all of our misfortunes but ourselves. We are the cause of our misery.

The chaos and the suffering that we presently experience is the terrible price that we must pay for breaking the laws of nature and the universe and for neglecting our spiritual faculties causing a disparity within us. Granted we have made gigantic progress in scientific and technological knowledge in the past century but in the meantime, we have sadly also created a chaotic world. The only way to correct this is if we change our individual and collective state of consciousness. To the average human life are an enigma, a deep mystery, a complex and an incomprehensible puzzle. But the mystery is only another name for ignorance and everything that is unknown and not understood is a mystery. Once we understand, what once appeared to be mysterious is suddenly no mystery anymore. Therefore, it is knowledge plus the understanding that is the key to the puzzle and the mystery of life.

The human is a creature of constant growth living in a boundless ocean of progress to be discovered and conquered by developing and cultivating one’s inborn powers. The progress of the individual is mainly determined by the ruling mental powers that regulate one’s actions and direction of one’s faculties and powers, the sum total of which determine each one’s personal fate. The ruling state of mind that is adopted by the individual is in accordance with the experiences and perception of the events in one’s life. If one’s predominant state of mind and attitudes are broadminded, harmonious, aspiring and positive then all energy will be directed towards constructive channels. If, however, one’s disposition is negative, uncontrolled and disharmonious then all forces will be misdirected. Nature has no problems because she is orderly and disciplined and so when we have a problem, it is simply because we are not cooperating with a law of Nature or the Cosmos.

Many of us today in the more ‘civilized’ part of the world suffer from a particular disease, namely an overdeveloped intellect. Our mental activity dominates our inner feelings. While thinking is necessary and valuable to organize, plan and structure our life, it is an incomplete way to experience our life because we experience only a part and not the whole. Our thoughts must be coordinated with our inner feelings because it is through our feelings that we identify our human needs and those of other life forms. The other ‘Malheur’ that many of us suffer from is our neglect of the spirit within and this has created a vacuum within our very being. We have managed to fill this vacuum with an overstimulated intellect and we have the tendency to think rather than feel our way through life. Unless we can balance our thinking with our feelings, intellect and heart, to be sensitive to our needs and to the needs of others, we reduce ourselves to being materialists, competitive, inconsiderate and egoistic. It is this vacuum that is now actually experienced as a deep empty hole in the chest area. It is this ache that we now desperately try to rid ourselves of, as we turn our attention to find solace in spirituality. We have finally realized that the material world is not the answer to everything and we are beginning to think that there might just be something else out there beyond our physical world.

Universal Laws transcend all Religions

The nature of spirit is an individual philosophy for each and every one of us. No matter how diverse our beliefs or philosophies are, we in the physical world are all bound together by our thoughts, feelings, dreams, aspirations and actions. Universal laws are the basic principles of life, which transcend the diversity of individual beliefs. These laws apply to whatever our belief system or philosophy is. When applied correctly the universal laws allow us to reach our maximum spiritual potential and greatly enhance the experience of our manifestation in the material world. Understanding, universal laws enables us to review and see why our life is the way it is, if and where we might have gone wrong and how we can amend things.

Various Prophets appeared throughout the ages to all corners of the world to spread God’s teachings to people of different cultures and tongues. Each of the Prophets and their disciples, some well-known others less known and long forgotten, carried a particular message from the Higher Powers, the Source, God, suitable to that particular time and in accordance to the needs of the masses. These teachings eventually developed into the many religions and beliefs that are existent today. If we make an in-depth study of the essence of each of these original teachings, however, we would find a great similarity and a common thread running through all the disciplines. In fact, we find all religions to be basically the same in essence. The theme of loving and honouring one another is the foundation of all alike. Any differences of opinions found in religions are usually misinterpretations of the truth, and these distortions have been largely imposed and forced upon the minds of the people by ignorant, power-hungry or misguided men with one intention only in mind: to keep the masses under their control through fear.

The essence in all religions talks of non-violence and ethical values, truth and purity, justice, control of the senses, honouring our parents and treating all other living beings as we would treat ourselves. Following are some examples:

‘A man should wander about treating all creatures as he himself would be treated.’ Jainism. Stutrakritanga 1.11.33.

‘Not one of you is a believer until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.’ Islam. Forty Hadith of an-Nawawi 13.

‘You shall love thy neighbour as thyself.’ Judaism and Christianity Bible, Leviticus 19.18.

‘The heart of the person before you is a mirror. See there your own form.’ Shintoism from Japan.

‘Whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.’ Christianity. Bible, Matthew 7.12.

‘One should not behave towards others in a way which is disagreeable to oneself. This is the essence of morality. All other activities are due to selfish desire.’ Hinduism, Mahabharata, Anusasana                         Parva,   113.8.

‘Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself, and you will find that this the shortest way to benevolence.’ Chinese. Confucianism. Mencius VII.A.4.

‘One who takes a pointed stick to kill a bird should first try it on himself to feel how it hurts.’ African Traditional Religion. Proverb Nigeria.

‘Whatever affliction may visit you is for what your own hands have earned.’ Islam. Qur’an 42.30.

‘Suffering is the offspring of violence. Realize this and be watchful.’ Jainism. Acarangasutra 3.13.

‘Our body in Kali Yuga is a field of action, as man sows, so is his reward. Nothing is determined by empty talk. Anyone swallowing poison must die. Brother, behold the Creator’s justice, as are a man’s                actions, so is his recompense.’ Sikhism, Adi Granth, Guri Var, M.4, p.308.

‘All who take the sword will perish by the sword.’ Christianity, Bible, Matthew 26.52.

‘Benevolence, humaneness towards others, honesty, love, trustworthiness’ are the highest virtues in Confucianism, China.

‘Ashes fly back in the face of him who throws them.’ African Traditional Religions. Yoruba Proverb Nigeria.

‘Unrighteousness practised in this world, does not once produce its fruit, but like a cow, advancing slowly, it cuts off the roots of him who committed it.’ Hinduism, Law of Manu. 4.172.

‘Men who acquire wealth by evil deeds, by adhering to principles which are wrong, fall into the trap of their own passions and fettered with karma they sink further down.’ Jainism, Uttaradyayana Sutra                  4.2. ‘As you plan for somebody so God plans for you.’ African Traditional Religions, Igbo Proverb Nigeria.

The following passage is perhaps the most significant because it refers clearly to the energies of Cosmic and Universal Laws that one cannot escape.

‘Not in the sky, nor in mid-ocean, nor in a mountain cave, is found that place on earth where abiding one may escape from the consequences of one’s evil deed.’ Buddhism. Dhammapada 127.

The God Almighty is referred to as the all-seeing that one cannot hide from. Today we have the intelligence and understanding to realize that the ‘All Seeing God’ and the ‘Cosmic and Universal Laws or              Energies’ are one and the same.