Tattvas: The Universal Principles🔗

The Sanskrit word TATTVA (literally, 'thatness') represents an unchanging principle or an aspect of reality that forms the basis of our life experiences. Tattvas range from the purely material (eg. the principles of sight, sound, taste, etc.) to the purely metaphysical (eg. Advaita tattva, the principle of non-duality).

While some tattvas (like the material tattvas) are a part of the universal experience, others like the spiritual tattvas are experienced to the extent that we engage with them and allow them to govern our thoughts and actions.

In our context, a tattva is a set of words which can awaken a certain capability which is already in you, and make it into reality. When it becomes reality, it is known as satya. The words given to you by the master to awaken certain realities in you is a tattva (principle). When you use that word, and awaken certain realities, the tattva becomes a satya (truth) for you.

Listen: when a tattva is practiced sincerely, it becomes a part of your reality. Then the tattva is no longer just a tattva; it becomes a satya for you. You are established in it.

Each tattva is also the key to unlock the corresponding power in you.

So what is really stopping you from living your life at its peak? Where does this incompletion come from? It comes from the way you have lived your life so far – the way you understood life and responded to it.

The truth is, no matter what the unique experience each of us receives from Life, almost everyone has faced situations where we are left feeling powerless in the face of something larger and mightier than us.

Unfortunately, these are the very situations that gradually shape our beliefs about ourselves, our world and God - trapping us in self-fulfilling negative prophecies and an incomplete experience of Life.

Contrary to what we believe, we owe our life-experiences not as much to any external situation as to the unique way in which we choose to receive it and make it our internal cognition. Life is not just happening somewhere out there; it is happening to us inside us!

Each of us has blind spots - areas where we are ‘stuck’ in our relationship with Life. These blind spots (about which we are usually unaware), draw us again and again into making unconscious choices and creating a vicious a cycle of unfulfilled action, which we call karma.

As Life itself is ever-changing, any attempt to alter our life experience by altering our external circumstances is only bound to result in failure. But we can certainly be masters of the ways in which we choose to receive and engage with Life.

Life is continuously happening to you. As life happens to you, the experience of life is also happening in you! This is your personal experience of Life.

So there is Life that is continuously happening out there – let us call it THE WORLD. Then there is our unique experience of life – which is MY WORLD. My World is the filter that each of us applies to life as it happens to us, based on our past experiences, and which shapes our present and future experience of Life.

For example, suppose a snake suddenly enters this room! That happening would of course be in THE world. But each person’s unique individual response to it would be part of each one’s ‘MY world’! Your response will be based on your cognition, which is the complex result of your life experiences and responses. Your fears and your expectations are the filters through which you receive Life.

Understand, at all times, there are two things that are happening constantly in your life – 1) A happening 2) The perception you carry about what is happening. There is always something or the other happening in your life, and you have your own perception or cognition about whatever is happening.