It is a selfish world that we inhabit. It is nothing unusual because the whole world is pretty much that way. Service of any kind, often in return for no gratitude or appreciation, to anyone other than those who matter to us seems superfluous.

The barbaric December 16 gang rape of a student in a moving bus in Delhi by a pack of six perverted and inhuman men was not only heart rending and shocking, it was also a conundrum to me in the spiritual sense.

The barbaric December 16 gang rape of a student in a moving bus in Delhi by a pack of six perverted and inhuman men was not only heart rending and shocking, it was also a conundrum to me in the spiritual sense.

Generally speaking, you are more likely to succeed in life if you concentrate on what you understand the best. Success is more difficult to achieve if you are always approaching situations in which you have little or no experience.

Once in a while we all find ourselves saying, “I will never be able to forgive X, for what he or she did.” One is probably justified in thinking so. Perhaps one was wronged in a way that one shouldn’t have been. Perhaps one was backstabbed and betrayed or was a victim of petty politicking or a nasty conspiracy.

The letter “J” in the English alp-habet leads to words such as joy and judgment, but it also stands for other words such as jaundiced and jealousy. Jealousy or envy, the green-eyed monster, can breed a host of other negative emotions such as hatred, resentment and greed and if unchecked can send a person on the path to self-destruction.

Sometimes our worst nightmares happen. We find ourselves asking questions like, “Why me?” We wonder how we are going to survive the seemingly awful circumstances that appear in our lives.

Duality in life is a given. It is the very nature of life. Joy, sorrow, happiness, sadness, good fortune, misfortune, illness and wellness, birth and death — alternate with unrelenting regularity. Sometimes a run of bad luck comes after a long spell of good luck, sometimes one event follows another all too quickly before we can even catch our breath — like in the case of a close relative in whose family three people of various ages passed on in quick succession.

The Law of Opposites is the second of the five great Principles of Life and it works in perfect harmony with the Energy of Attraction. This principle states that no sooner will you call something into your reality then its exact opposite will also appear and always first.

As society we seem to exist on a shorter fuse these days. Fly-ing into a rage or blowing one’s top off, is all too commonplace — at home, in the office, in the gaze of the public eye, in places we are being served (when one is hungry and the food is taking time to serve.