GOK,

  Your question          >about things which are ACTUALLY positive and beneficial in your life<

raises a fundamental question about the philosphy that most premies have about Rawat and Knowledge.

What lies at the heart of it, is an absolute belief that the personal experience of life  'should' be positive and beneficial. IMO once this imperitive 'should' has been adopted, the individual's outlook becomes arrid and narrow - it is a kind of fundamentalism which defines all attitudes to all experience.

Human experience can not, if it is to be treated in a complete - (I'd like to say holostic but the term is so bastardised it hardly has meaning any more) way, be described in terms of what is positive or beneficial.

Positivism without Negativism is an absurdity, a childish fantasy of 'happy land' where the individual is free of care - and free of seeing the suffering of others. The positivism myth is of course not exclusive to premiedom, it is a major constituent of many of the 'bliss' cults (not least the very scary US evangelicals) - but where ever it arises it provides a substantial block to the development both of the individual, and of human culture.

 So, sorry GOK, I can't answer your question in any meaningful way - I don't have a substitute or alternative for Rawat/Knowledge - my view is that to be grown up - we have to live without such petty crutches. That isn't a criticism of religious practice or belief, or on the practice of mediation or yoga or on any srtiving an individual may make for the development of skill or understanding - just my view that any one aspect of life is necessarilly limited in scope and that to be truely engaged with our human experience we have to place value on all the things we do - not just on one 'key turning' activity.

N