Silent Observer.....

New years with cows, camels and camp fire....

2011-12-31T22:04:00.000-05:00

Have a great 2012....
A

Part 2: Watch what you eat, as it becomes you!!

2011-12-17T09:05:00.000-05:00

*This article has been summarized from a talk by Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev - Founder of the ISHA FOUNDATION*

Here is the 2nd part of the previous post

One of the issues that has confused me for the last 5 -10 years is: Why should I be vegetarian? And to be honest I am still plagued by this question on and off. Here is my case as, why it is good to follow a veggie diet (as reasonably as possible). For comparison I have looked at the bodily constitution of animals - herbivores and carnivores and then made a hypothesis for humans.

If you look at the digestive system of animals, herbivores and carnivores have different digestive systems. For carnivores the length of alimentary canal (AC) is 3 times the body, since meat stays longer in the system it makes sense to have a small AC. Moreover, their teeth and jaws are meant only for cutting, no grinding occurs in the mouth so they do not chew food. Henceforth, the major digestion happens in the stomach. On the contrary for herbivores the teeth have 2 functions: 1. cutting and 2. grinding. And so the incisors and molars are developed but not the canines. Furthermore, the alimentary canal is 6 times the length of the body, vegetables travel through the system faster than meat thus the long length works fine.

Now if we compare the human system both the AC and teeth are structured as herbivores i.e. the AC is 6 times the length of the body and canines are not prominent. Thus, it makes more sense to follow a vegetarian diet as the system is geared towards that type of food. Secondly, too much of non - vegetarian food reduces the flexibility of the system (personal experimental observation). And last but not least whenever an animal is being slaughtered/killed it goes into a state of shock/nervousness this leads to an increase in the acidity content of the cells - consuming such meat will lead to inexplicable conditions of anxiety and tension in you.

It takes longer to digest meat and thus any food that remains in the system for a long time leads to bacterial growth and lethargy, unless one is physically very active. Thus, if you are not able to give-up meat 100 %, you can make some rules for example: eating meat only after intense physical activity like 10K etc.

If these reasons do not motivate you to be a vegetarian then think about the effects non vegetarian diet has on planet earth - I will not write about this stuff as there are sufficient number of resources online.

Now the question is, how to categorize the food, well the answer lies in the yogic culture where food is always looked in terms of pranic energy (life energy) i.e. certain foods have the capability to increase or decrease the energy and certain foods do not do anything they are just for taste. Here is a partial list:

Foods that Decrease Energy: Garlic, onion, asfoetida, chili, eggplant, coffe, tea and other neuro stimulants and intoxicants.
Note: Chili includes both green and red chili, though peppercorns are fine.

Foods that Increase Energy: Nuts, fruits, vegetables, sprouts

Foods with no effect: Potatoes, tomatoes

Moral of the story is: Exercise, watch your diet, do some pranayam/yogic kriya etc and the body will be like a breeze. If we watch our food habits and eat more consciously 50 - 60 % of major ailments will be gone. Why is it important, as only when the body is comfortable you will seek something higher.

Part 1: Watch what you eat, as it becomes you!!

2011-12-16T12:23:00.002-05:00

I am writing after a long time, no excuses, but the rough draft of this post was prepared 2 weeks ago and somehow I kept procrastinating to refine the article. So here it is:

Disclaimer: * This article has been summarized from a talk by Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev - Founder of the ISHA FOUNDATION*

Food if taken in the right amount and proper type serves to keep oneself healthy and alert, but if the required amount is not proper it can make you weak or lethargic. An analogy would be that if the body is like a car and if you put the correct fuel it will work great but if the proper fuel is not given it won't work to its highest efficiency. Thus, rather than being wishy - washy on what to eat it is important to think on this in a rational manner.

Food is the building block for the body as what we eat becomes us. Fundamentally, food is eaten to gain energy and for our well being. There is a lot of debate on what to eat and what not to eat. I have had discussions with a variety of people from different cultures, backgrounds and countries and my 2 observations are:

1. The way a person eats decides not only how the body will function but also the mental state.

2. What to eat or not eat is a subjective decision i.e. when you decide what to eat, you should consult your body not any one else.

Caveat: Taste should not decide what we eat, as we are sacrificing the body for a patch of tongue which is not a smart idea. Always eat what the stomach likes, not what the tongue likes as the stomach never asks for taste, stomach only wants food that is easily digestible. That does not mean that you do not eat anything tasty, but I assume you are smart enough to make a decision.

Which brings me to the question: what kind of food to eat?

The answer is simple, food that makes you alert, agile, energetic and calm is good to eat. Food that brings dullness, lethargy is not good as the system is having trouble digesting it. When the system gets dull you hype it up with stimulants (tea, coffe etc etc) which impact the body in a negative way. Ideally, the diet should consist of 50 % raw and 50 % cooked food. Moreover, the process digestion should begin in the mouth (50%), continue in the stomach (50%) and end at the anal outlet. But currently due to over cooked food majority of the digestion happens in the stomach. The reason for this is, over cooked food is not chewed properly, thus the enzymes in saliva are not used and the food travels to stomach and digestion occurs there. This results in less burden on mouth and more on stomach - now you know why you want to sleep in office after that lunch :).

Next post I will make a case for why it is important to be a vegeterian and foods that have high enegy content....

To be contd......

Is there anything called LUCK....

2011-10-30T22:57:00.000-04:00

This is an interesting article in the Saturday issue of NYT. Read it.

" BETTER to be lucky than good, the adage goes.

And maybe that’s true — if you just want to be merely good, not much better than average. But what if you want to build or do something great? And what if you want to do so in today’s unstable and unpredictable world?

Recently, we completed a nine-year research study of some of the most extreme business successes of modern times. We examined entrepreneurs who built small enterprises into companies that outperformed their industries by a factor of 10 in highly turbulent environments. We call them 10Xers, for “10 times success.”

The very nature of this study — how some people thrive in uncertainty, lead in chaos, deal with a world full of big, disruptive forces that we cannot predict or control — led us to smack into the question, “Just what is the role of luck?”

Could it be that leaders’ skills account for the difference between just meeting their industry’s average performance (1X success) and doubling it (2X)? But that luck accounts for all the difference between 2X and 10X?

Maybe, or maybe not.

But how on Earth could we go about quantifying something as elusive as “luck”? The breakthrough came in seeing luck as an event, not as some indefinable aura. We defined a “luck event” as one that meets three tests. First, some significant aspect of the event occurs largely or entirely independent of the actions of the enterprise’s main actors. Second, the event has a potentially significant consequence — good or bad. And, third, it has some element of unpredictability.

We systematically found 230 significant luck events across the history of our study’s subjects. We considered good luck, bad luck, the timing of luck and the size of “luck spikes.” Adding up the evidence, we found that the 10X cases weren’t generally “luckier” than the comparison cases. (We compared the 10X companies with a control group of companies that failed to become great in the same extreme environments.)

The 10X cases and the control group both had luck, good and bad, in comparable amounts, so the evidence leads us to conclude that luck doesn’t cause 10X success. The crucial question is not, “Are you lucky?” but “Do you get a high return on luck?”

Return on luck: We call it ROL.

SO why did Bill Gates become a 10Xer, building a great software company in the personal computer revolution? Through one lens, you might see Mr. Gates as incredibly lucky. He just happened to have been born into an upper-middle-class American family that had the resources to send him to a private school. His family happened to enroll him at Lakeside School in Seattle, which had a Teletype connection to a computer upon which he could learn to program — something that was unusual for schools in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

He also just happened to have been born at the right time, coming of age as the advancement of microelectronics made the PC inevitable. Had he been born 10 years later, or even just five years later, he would have missed the moment.

Mr. Gates’s friend Paul Allen just happened to see a cover article in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, titled “World’s First Microcomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models.” It was about the Altair, designed by a small company in Albuquerque. Mr. Gates and Mr. Allen had the idea to convert the programming language Basic into a product that could be used on the Altair, which would put them in position to be the first to sell such a product for a personal computer. Mr. Gates went to college at Harvard, which just happened to have a PDP-10 computer upon which he could develop and test his ideas.

Wow, Bill Gates was really lucky, right?

Yes, he was. But luck is not why Bill Gates became a 10Xer. Consider these questions:

• Was Bill Gates the only person of his era who grew up in an upper middle-class American family?

• Was he the only person born in the mid-1950s who attended a secondary school with access to computing?

• Was he the only person who went to a college with computer resources in the mid-’70s? The only one who read the Popular Electronics article? The only one who knew how to program in Basic?

No, no, no, no and no.

Lakeside may have been one of the first schools to have a computer that students could use during those years, but it wasn’t the only such school.

Mr. Gates may have been a math and computer whiz kid at a top college that had computers in 1975, but he wasn’t the only math and computer whiz kid at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, M.I.T., Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, U.C.L.A., the University of Chicago, Georgia Tech, Cornell, Dartmouth, Southern Cal, Columbia, Northwestern, Penn, Michigan or any number of other top colleges with comparable or even better computer resources.

Mr. Gates wasn’t the only person who knew how to program in Basic; the language was developed a decade earlier by Dartmouth professors, and it was widely known by 1975, used in academics and industry. And what about all the master’s and Ph.D. students in electrical engineering and computer science who had even more computer expertise than Mr. Gates on the day the Popular Electronics article appeared? Any could have decided to abandon their studies and start a personal computer software company. And computer experts already working in industry and academia could have done the same.

But how many of them changed their life plans — and cut their sleep to near zero, essentially inhaling food so as not to let eating interfere with work — to throw themselves into writing Basic for the Altair? How many defied their parents, dropped out of college and moved to Albuquerque to work with the Altair? How many had Basic for the Altair written, debugged and ready to ship before anyone else?

Thousands of people could have done the same thing that Mr. Gates did, at the same time. But they didn’t.

The difference between Mr. Gates and similarly advantaged people is not luck. Mr. Gates went further, taking a confluence of lucky circumstances and creating a huge return on his luck. And this is the important difference.

Luck, good and bad, happens to everyone, whether we like it or not. But when we look at the 10Xers, we see people like Mr. Gates who recognize luck and seize it, leaders who grab luck events and make much more of them.

This ability to achieve a high ROL at pivotal moments has a huge multiplicative effect for 10Xers. They zoom out to recognize when a luck event has happened and to consider whether they should let it disrupt their plans. Imagine if Mr. Gates had said to Paul Allen after seeing the Popular Electronics article: “Well, Paul, I’m kind of focused on my studies here at Harvard right now. Let’s wait a few years, and then I’ll be ready to start.”

When we examined less successful companies, we saw a generally poor overall return on luck. Some of the comparison cases had extraordinary sequences of good luck yet showed a spectacular ability to fritter that luck away. When the time came to execute on their good fortune, they stumbled. They didn’t fail for lack of good luck. They failed for lack of superb execution.

WHILE getting a high return on good luck is an essential skill for 10Xers, getting a high return on bad luck can be a truly defining moment. Consider the 10X case of Progressive Insurance.

On Nov. 8, 1988, Peter Lewis, the chief executive, received news that shocked the insurance industry. California voters had passed Proposition 103, a punitive attack on car insurance companies. Prop 103 required 20 percent price reductions and refunds to customers, plunging a huge auto insurance market into chaos. Progressive had significant exposure, with nearly a quarter of its entire business from that one state — bang! — severely damaged by a 51 percent vote on a single day.

Mr. Lewis zoomed out to ask, “What the heck is going on?” He placed a call to a former Princeton classmate, Ralph Nader. Mr. Nader had long been a consumer rights activist, at one point leading a sort of special forces unit nicknamed Nader’s Raiders, and he had championed Proposition 103. The message that Mr. Lewis heard: People hate you. Or, in other words, people simply hated dealing with insurance companies, so they revolted, screaming with their votes.

“People were saying, ‘We hate your guts. We’re going to kill you. And we don’t give a damn,’ ” Mr. Lewis said.

Chastened by what he had heard, he called his staff together and told everyone, “Our customers actually hate us.” He challenged his team to create a better company.

Mr. Lewis came to see Proposition 103 as a gift, and he used it to deepen the company’s core purpose and to reduce the economic cost and trauma caused by auto accidents. The company would create its “immediate response” claims service: No matter when you had an accident, Progressive would be available — 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Claims adjusters would work from a fleet of vans and S.U.V.’s dispatched to policy holders’ homes or even directly to an accident scene.

By 1995, Progressive could note this achievement: in 80 percent of cases, its adjusters would have visited the customer, ready to issue a check within 24 hours of an accident.

In 1987, the year before Proposition 103, Progressive ranked No. 13 in the American private-passenger auto insurance market. By 2002, it had reached No. 4. Years later, Mr. Lewis called Proposition 103 “the best thing that ever happened to this company.”

Progressive and Mr. Lewis illustrate how 10Xers shine when clobbered by setbacks and misfortune, turning bad luck into good results. They use difficulty as a catalyst to deepen purpose, recommit to values, increase discipline, respond with creativity and heighten productive paranoia — translating fear into extensive preparation and calm, clearheaded action. Resilience, not luck, is the signature of greatness.

Nietzsche wrote, “What does not kill me, makes me stronger.” We all get bad luck. The question is how to use it to turn it into “one of the best things that ever happened,” to not let it become a psychological prison.

WE came across a remarkable moment at the very start of the history of Southwest Airlines, described by its first chief executive, Lamar Muse, in his book, “Southwest Passage.”

“The very first Sunday morning of Southwest’s life, we narrowly escaped a disaster,” Mr. Muse wrote. “During the takeoff run, the right thrust-reverser deployed. Only the captain’s instantaneous reaction allowed him to recover control and make a tight turn for an emergency landing on one engine.”

What if the jet had smashed into the ground in the first week of building the company? Would there even be a Southwest Airlines today? If we all have some combination of both heads (lucky flips) and tails (unlucky flips), and if the ratio of heads to tails tends to even out over time, we need to be skilled, strong, prepared and resilient to endure the bad luck long enough to eventually get good luck. The Southwest pilot had to be skilled and prepared before the thrust-reverser deployed.

There’s an interesting asymmetry between good and bad luck. A single stroke of good luck, no matter how big, cannot by itself make a great company. But a single stroke of extremely bad luck, or an extended sequence of bad-luck events that creates a catastrophic outcome, can terminate the quest.

The 10Xers exercise productive paranoia, combined with empirical creativity and fanatic discipline, to create huge margins of safety. If you stay in the game long enough, good luck tends to return, but if you get knocked out, you’ll never have the chance to be lucky again. Luck favors the persistent, but you can persist only if you survive.

After finishing our luck analysis for “Great by Choice,” we realized that getting a high ROL required a new mental muscle. There are smart decisions and wise decisions. And one form of wisdom is the ability to judge when to let luck disrupt our plans. Not all time in life is equal. The question is, when the unequal moment comes, do we recognize it, or just let it slip? But, just as important, do we have the fanatic, obsessive discipline to keep marching, to push the opportunity to the extreme, to make the most of the chances we’re given?

Getting a high ROL requires throwing yourself at the luck event with ferocious intensity, disrupting your life and not letting up. Bill Gates didn’t just get a lucky break and cash in his chips. He kept pushing, driving, working — and sustained that effort for more than two decades. That’s not luck — that’s return on luck ".

Random shots from my eye 02

2011-10-24T10:36:00.003-04:00

Perfect symmetry in nature's creation

Happy Halloween

Reading class in the park

Posing for the shutterbugs

Park's Angel

Enjoy...

Random shots from my eye 01

2011-10-23T09:39:00.001-04:00

Reagards

How to handle grief.....

2011-10-12T10:49:00.000-04:00

I think he has made a very clear point as to why people go in grief. Amazing clarity and the way to look at things.

Updated: With lots of love - to my boss...

2011-09-19T09:19:00.002-04:00

I have the best boss in the world - my thesis advisor. In short a rare combination of being humane, humble and at the same time extremely smart. The experience of writing my 1st paper with him is encapsulated in this cartoon.

So here is for the best boss.....

1/3

2/3

3/3

Wishes....
Anurag

Recipe - Goat Meat/Lal Maas/Spicy Goat curry - Rajasthani Style

2011-09-12T14:28:00.000-04:00

Hi,

Goat meat is something I have eaten since my childhood. It is only when I came to the US I realized it is a delicacy and not easily available. Recently, I was able to get my hands on goat meat and here is my tribute to all the cooks who have fed me goat meat. The recipe below will feed 3 people with an average diet.

Prep Time: 20 min

Cooking time ~ 70 min

You will need:

Olive oil or clarified butter

Goat meat: 1 pound (500 grams) - cut in small pieces and washed clean

Whole masala (100% optional): few bay leaves, pepper corns, cinnamon stick, cloves

Red onions: 2 - 3 (medium sized) - chopped fine

Haberno pepper: 1 (large) - chopped fine

Garlic Cloves: 4 - 5 (grated)

Ginger: medium sized piece (grated)

Ginger/garlic paste: 2 - 3 tablespoons

Tomatoes: 2 - 3 (medium - large) - chopped fine

Curd: 4 - 5 tablespoons - I prefer Fage brand (greek strained yogurt) you can use any

Spices:

Garam masala: 1.5 teaspoon

Red chili powder: 2 - 3 tablespoons

Turmeric powder: 1 tablespoon

Coriander powder: 1 teaspoon

Salt: as per taste

Steps:

1. Heat oil in pressure cooker - without the lid.

2. Once oil is heated add whole masala and cook for 1 min then add chopped onions.

3. Cook till onions are light golden brown in color.

4. Add chopped haberno, grated ginger and garlic and ginger garlic paste.

5. Cook for 1 min and add garam masala and cook for 1 min.

6. Add goat meat and cook on high heat until all the moisture evaporates - do not burn the meat in this step be careful.

7. Add tomatoes and cook on high heat till all the water dries up.

8. When the water is drying up in step 7, take the yogurt and put chili, turmeric and coriander powder and some water and mix well.

9. Put the mixture in the cooker.

10. Mix everything well and let it come to boil.

11. Reduce the heat to medium and cover the cooker with a plate and let it cook for 10 - 15 min. Stir every 5 min.

12. Now cover close the lid of the pressure cooker and put 2 whistles - if you want the meat to be medium rare, for well done ~ 3 whistles.

13. If the meat is cooked well all the oil you put will separate and come on the surface - as in the picture below.

14. Serve with hot rotis/naan/rice.

PS: If you want - garnish it with fresh cilantro and scallions.

PPS: If you want to be more fancy add - bay leaves, cinnamon, pepper corns before the chopped onions.

Let me know if you have any questions - I have almost perfected this recipe.

Bon appetit

See pictures below.....

Figure: Golden brown onions with whole spices, ginger, garlic and garam masala

Figure: Goat added and cooked till all the moisture evaporates

Figure: Add the tomatoes

Figure: Heat them and keep heating till all the water is gone

Figure: This is how it looks once all the water from tomatoes evaporates

Figure: Add the curd mixed with spices and bring to boil

Figure: Cooked meat - Love the color and the texture - note no artificial color has been added

Figure: Served with hot naan

See this plot - shocking inference

2011-08-30T10:34:00.002-04:00

Source: Lancet

Hi this a plot of various chemicals that are used to get a buzz......

Lesson: Cannabis (marijuana/pot)/LSD/Ectasy does less physical harm and is less addictive than alcohol.....

Question: So why dont they make it legal, if alcohol is legal?

Perhaps it is illegal that is the reason people want to pay a huge premium to get it.....

Think about it....

Hey, You! Mean People Earn More, Study Finds - Source: Wall Street Journal

2011-08-15T13:32:00.000-04:00

I found this article in WSJ today and I am putting it up here. My personal experience: Unfortunately it is true....

"It may not pay to be nice in the workplace.

A new study finds that agreeable workers earn significantly lower incomes than less agreeable ones. The gap is especially wide for men.

The researchers examined "agreeableness" using self-reported survey data and found that men who measured below average on agreeableness earned about 18% more—or $9,772 more annually in their sample—than nicer guys. Ruder women, meanwhile, earned about 5% or $1,828 more than their agreeable counterparts.

"Nice guys are getting the shaft," says study co-author Beth A. Livingston, an assistant professor of human resource studies at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

The study "Do Nice Guys—and Gals—Really Finish Last?" by Dr. Livingston, Timothy A. Judge of the University of Notre Dame and Charlice Hurst of the University of Western Ontario, is to be presented on Monday in San Antonio, Texas, at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, a professional organization for management scholars. The study is also forthcoming in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The researchers analyzed data collected over nearly 20 years from three different surveys, which sampled roughly 10,000 workers comprising a wide range of professions, salaries and ages. (The three surveys measured the notion of "agreeableness" in different ways.) They also conducted a separate study of 460 business students who were asked to act as human-resource managers for a fictional company and presented with short descriptions for candidates for a consultant position. Men who were described as highly agreeable were less likely to get the job.

For men being agreeable may not conform "to expectations of 'masculine behavior,'" the researchers write in the study. People who are more agreeable may also be less willing to assert themselves in salary negotiations, Dr. Livingston adds.

Other research shows that rudeness may not always benefit employees or their firms. A paper presented earlier this month at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association found that 86% of 289 workers at three Midwestern firms in the manufacturing and health-care industries reported incivility at work, including public reprimands and making demeaning comments. Incivility was bad for the organizations as a whole, though, increasing employee turnover, found the researchers, Jeannie Trudel, a business professor at Indiana Wesleyan University-Marion, and Thomas Reio, a professor at Florida International University.

"The problem is, many managers often don't realize they reward disagreeableness," says Dr. Livingston. "You can say this is what you value as a company, but your compensation system may not really reflect that, especially if you leave compensation decisions to individual managers."

Lockerz, a 65-person Seattle, Wash., social-commerce company, has what it calls a "no jerks and divas" policy that is stressed in its employee handbook and orientation, says Chief Executive and founder Kathy Savitt. She notes, though, that there is a difference between being respectful and being agreeable. "We are not about being 'nice' or 'agreeable' or 'civil,'" she says. "We have a lot of robust debates about all kinds of things. But we do stress the notion of being respectful."

Paul Purcell, chairman, president and chief executive of Robert W. Baird & Co., a Milwaukee financial-services firm, says that his 2,700-employee company "doesn't hire or tolerate jerks. That's frankly a large percentage of people in our business. They don't get through the interview process." The firm has fired at least 25 offenders of its "no-jerk" policy, he says.

Human-resources consulting firm Development Dimensions International, of Pittsburgh, offers courses in "Interaction Management," covering interpersonal skills such as teamwork, managing conflict and giving and receiving feedback. "They are very trainable skills," says Jim Davis, DDI's vice president of work force and service development, who says that its interaction-training business is up 20% so far this year."

Wishes,

Anurag

For all the Snobbish Connoisseur

2011-06-24T15:27:00.000-04:00

Have a gr8 weekend
A

Recipe - French Toast (Indian Style)

2011-06-09T09:08:00.002-04:00

Hi,
Egg is the ultimate comfort food!!! Cooks fast, is delicious and nutritious. Here is the my twist to the french toast i.e. cooking it with Indian Style.

1. Take 3 eggs (organice, cage free, vegetarian diet fed chicken please).
2. Add chili powder and salt to taste and beat them up so everything mixes well.

3. On the side finely chop some red onion and a green chili.
4. Add them (onion and chili) in the beaten up eggs and mix everything well.

5. Heat some EVOO in a non stick frying pan.

6. On the side take a slice of white bread and dip it in the eggs till the bread soaks up the mixture.

7. Put the soaked bread in the frying pan and on the side up put some onions and green chills from the egg mixture. Cook one side for 2 min on a medium heat.

8. Flip the bread, be careful not to break it. The way I do it is - I make sure the spatula I use has enough area so I can accomodate the entire bread slice.

9. Cook for 2 min on medium heat.

10. And voila, enjoy it with ketchup and a glass of fresh orange juice.

P.S:

If you like the toast to be sweet add some sugar and vanilla extract and get rid of the chillies and reduce the salt by 80%.
This recipe can feed well one average adult person (like it can be a brunch kinda thing).
To make the dish more fancy you can add cilantro, scallions as well.

Next will be my escapade with an exotic dish I cooked.

Bye
A

Thank you for showing me what I am not and what I could be.........

2011-05-06T00:24:00.002-04:00

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You are my perfect mirror, You show me what I'm not, In the endless pit of what once was me. Layer and layer you peel of me, the pain it is, but the joy it brings. Thank you for showing me what i'm not, For showing me what i could be. Thank you Endlessly. If I could only just be, You could show me all the things that i would be willing enough to see, Thank you endlessly!!

Speechless

Anurag

Difference between LOVE, SEX and GREED

2011-05-03T22:48:00.004-04:00

Q. What is the difference between Love, Sex and Greed?
Ans. Human intelligence getting hijacked by emotions - LOVE
Human intelligence getting hijacked by hormones - SEX
Human intelligence getting hijacked by ambition - GREED

Take it easy (if u can)...
A

With time, everything Physical turns into sorrow.....

2011-05-02T11:26:00.002-04:00

" Jananam Sukhadam Maranam Karunam

Milanam Madhuram Smaranam Karunam
Kalavashadiha Sakalam Karunam
Samyadhipateh Akhilam Karunam"

Translation:

Birth is joyful, death a sorrow
To consort is joyful, to be left with memories is sorrowful

In the inevitable flow of time, everything turns sorrowful, (for the
individual, not for the cosmic order)
In the kingdom of the Lord of time, the end is appropriately sorrowful.

Best Regards

Musings of a seeker.....

2011-04-25T23:27:00.004-04:00

It is hard for me to refuse the company of Yogis, mystics and true spiritual seekers. Without much effort I easily connect with these people, the primary reason being their approach to life and the situations that govern it. They make no assumptions about things and people, are straight with others and more importantly with themselves. In short these are the people who have the quest of truth as the summum bonum of life, a commodity too rare in todays world.

I have had the good fortune to meet a few Yogis/mystics up close and personal. Two of them, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, have and continue to inspire me in one way or the other. I am glad that I have some role models (other than my mother) in my life, who give me direction whenever I need it.

My personal encounters with them have made me conclude one thing for sure, which is, both of them are inspired dreamers, serenely - minded Yogis, practical men of the world and polished gentlemen. These are the people who have a character as clear as a crystal and courage that would shame a warrior, something every human aspires for. I must admit that my reverence for them is purely because I know and have experienced that they can really transform someone's life, which as per my standards is the most difficult task to achieve. So when a few of my acquaintances ask me if there is any danger of being manipulated by them? My answer is - If there is a chance of being manipulated by someone who really knows to run the business of life I am happy to be manipulated, but one has to tread the waters with caution when people around them tell/judge you with their mind and preferences. So have to be xtra careful on that note. One thing I can vouch for is that they bring in no supernatural power, demand no blind religious faith or reverence to them, and are in no way looking on how you can please them. Something that seekers like me who believe in critical obedience, appreciate and I can never see myself amongst the ranks of the perpetually rapturous, however hard I try. Part of it has to do with me not giving into easy adoration, having long suffered form an affliction that I term insubordination - a primal discomfort with authority figures and gate keepers of all kinds. And with this goes a dislike for all the mush and rhetoric that accompanies a guru based culture.

So what is the purpose of these beings? It seems to me that the presence of men like Sadhguru and Sri Sri, ensures the continuity down history of an esoteric message from regions/dimensions not easily accessible to us all. It seems to me, further, that one must accept the fact that such a sage comes to reveal something to us, not to argue/prove anything with us. As I have seen numerous instances where people unnecessarily will argue with them. Their sole purpose is to make a human realize that he/she is nothing but pure consciousness, untouched by events, people and situations.

At any rate their teachings make a strong appeal to me for their personal attitude and practical method, when understood, are quiet scientific in their way. The sublime spirituality of the atmosphere in their presence and thier strong push on the rational self - questioning on the spiritual path entices me a lot. The word "GOD" is never on their lips and they avoid the dark and debatable waters of wizardry/beliefs and anything not in one's experience, in which so many voyages have ended in shipwreck. They simply puts forward a way of self - analysis, which can be practiced irrespective of any ancient or modern theories and beliefs one may hold, a way that will finally lead man to true self understanding and to the truth.

After all that is what the ultimate purpose of life is, at-least for me. What about you?

Peace

This is sheer Art ........

2011-04-21T00:48:00.001-04:00

As soon as I saw this, my 1st reaction was - What the ....... (i.e. it completely blew me). It is titled "The School of Athens". Probably all the major western philosophers are depicted in this. It was made by Raphael around 1510. Every one is alive in this one.......

It makes a person like me with minimal knowledge of art wonder, so it actually is a great work :).

A nice romantic song...

2011-04-07T11:50:00.003-04:00

I heard this song once and just loved it. One of the few songs, you love instantly. Lyrics are great. See translation.

Ke tera zikr hai?
Is it just a mention of you
Ya itr hai?
Or is it your perfume

Jab jab karta hu...
Whenever I indulge in it,
Mehekta hu...Behekta hu...Chehekta hu...
I smell like u, I get intoxicated , I chirp in happiness
Ke tera, tera, tera zikr hai?
Is it your,your,your mention?
Ya itr hai?
or is it your perfume?

Jab jab karta hu...
whenever I indulge in it
Mehekta hu...Behekta hu...Chehekta hu...
I smell like u, I feel intoxicated , I get chirpy and happy
Sholon ki tarah
like fire sparks
Khusbuyon mein dehekta hu
I burn in your fragrance
Behekta hu, Mehekta hu
I get intoxicated, I smell like you
Ke tera zikr hai?
is it your mention ?
Ya itr hai?
or your perfume?

Teri Fikr hai?
Is it worry for you?
Ya fakr hai?
or Is it pride?
Ki Jab Jab karta hu,
that whenever I do it,
Machalta hu...
I feel helpless
Uchalta hu...
I jump
Fisalta hu
I slip
Pagal ki tarah
like a madman
Mastiyon mein
in my madness
Tehelta hu...
I stroll
Uchalta hu
I jump
Fisalta hu
I slip...

Love
A

When the Mind Says 'Tomorrow'

2011-04-07T10:40:00.001-04:00

Nice article. I copying and pasting it here. Sources - Huffington Post. Author - Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev.
Enjoy.

"There is a popular superstition in some villages in India. As soon as the sun sets, the villagers fear that ghosts and demons will come to their homes. So in order to save themselves, they have a sign painted in red at the door that reads "Naale Baa," meaning "Come Tomorrow." The idea is that, on seeing the message, the ghosts and demons will know that they are supposed to visit this house the next day. But as tomorrow never comes, neither do the demons! Isn't that wonderful?

But in your life, for all those things that are essential, you have put up a "Come Tomorrow" sign, too. Whether it is about working, exercising or even practicing yoga for inner peace, the sign will still say "Come Tomorrow." This "tomorrow" is a deep trick of the mind. In the morning, if your mind says, "I will not get up and do yoga," your ego will then say, "How can you not do it? You must do it." A feeling of guilt sets in, so the mind very cleverly says, "Let's do it tomorrow." Tomorrow is always a good day, isn't it? But when you say "tomorrow," everything is over, as tomorrow never comes.

Tomorrow is the biggest demon in your life; this is what the rural wisdom is trying to say. Most of your life and energies are spent on a tomorrow that never comes in your experience of life. Tomorrow is an idea for which we must plan, but we can never live it. Whatever you need to do and experience in your life, you can only experience it today. You never experience tomorrow; it is just your imagination, and yesterday is only your memory.

So exorcising this demon from your life is a spiritual process in that you begin to live your life, not just imagine your life. What happens tomorrow is essentially created today with the right kind of thought, emotions and actions. If you wish to do anything, whether it concerns your internal or external well-being, creating the necessary atmosphere is a must. Whether you want to run a business or lead a peaceful family life, maintain perfect health or a peaceful state of mind, unless you create the necessary atmosphere, there is no prospect of things happening well.

There were four friends who tried their hands at several businesses, but no matter what they did, their business ended up in failure. Then one of them suggested that they buy a car and start a taxi service. They somehow managed to buy an old cab and parked it at the train station, but no customers came. Then they moved to the bus stand, but still no customers. Then they drove all over the city, yet they couldn't find a single customer. Do you know why? Simply because all four were sitting in the car!

They had the desire to run a business, and they wished for the business to be successful, too. But with the way they went about it, would they ever be successful? In the same way, whatever you want in life, if you do not understand what is needed and do exactly that, you will only end up doing some work in the end, but there is little chance of reaping any fruit.

If you want to wake up early and do yoga, you have to understand what kind of atmosphere is needed. If you eat an entire pizza at 10:00 at night and plan to do yoga at dawn, your body will say, "Shut up and sleep!" But if you eat earlier and a little bit less, your body will awaken at dawn. And in the morning, if you take a cold shower, your body will say, "You can do yoga."

You have to create the necessary ambience to do what is needed. If you create the resolve in your mind and the necessary settings for the body, you will be eager to do any activity you set for yourself. If you continue doing it for a few days and start reaping the benefits, then there will be no need for anyone to remind you to do it. You will do it all by yourself.

A tomorrow does not fall upon you. Tomorrow is created today. If you exorcise this demon from your life, then your life will come alive in many ways".

India Wins Cricket World Cup - 2011

2011-04-03T11:30:00.001-04:00

Indians are the world champions of cricket. They won the world cup yesterday, under the leadership of MS Dhoni and mentorship Gary Kirstein. India reached the final in 2003 but lost to Australia and in was horrible in 2007 when it crashed out in the 1st round . But after 8 long yrs it has finally won. The hard work, sweat and tears have come through after a long time. Marc Benioff explains this "People overestimate what can be done in one year and underestimate what can be done in ten". The good thing here is we did it in just 8 yrs :).

The thing that stood out for me was the way Dhoni stepped up as a captain and decided to come out and bat first in a pressure cooker situation. No wonder why people say "The best way to lead is through example".

Here is how we celebrated the victory @ Columbia University.

Off 2 a celebration party...

How to make a lunch in 5 min

2011-03-31T08:41:00.001-04:00

Necessity is the mother of invention, and when the stomach is empty and time a scarce commodity you need to improvise.

So here is a 5 min recipe to satisfy the hunger pangs and you know what it is freakin healthy and delicious....

You will need (this can feed 1 person, for more people you do the math)

One ripe avocado.
One ripe, red, plum tomato.
White vinegar -- 3 to 4 tablespoons
Extra virgin olive oil (preferably 1st cold pressed and unfiltered) - 3 tablespoons
Salt and pepper - to taste

Procedure:

1. Peel the avocado and mash it - u can do it with your hands (sanitize/wash them before :)).

2. Dice the tomato in small pieces.

3. Add vinegar and olive oil.

4. Sprinkle with salt and pepper as per taste.

Enjoy it with whole grain baguette. This food is filling, healthy and quick.

I love it....

Anurag

To the brain, getting burned, getting dumped feel the same

2011-03-29T10:30:00.000-04:00

Found this article on CNN (health section). I believe majority of us can vouch for it, experientially:).

"Science has finally confirmed what anyone who's ever been in love already knows: Heartbreak really does hurt.

In a new study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers have found that the same brain networks that are activated when you're burned by hot coffee also light up when you think about a lover who has spurned you.

In other words, the brain doesn't appear to firmly distinguish between physical pain and intense emotional pain. Heartache and painful breakups are "more than just metaphors," says Ethan Kross, Ph.D., the lead researcher and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor.

The study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, illuminates the role that feelings of rejection and other emotional trauma can play in the development of chronic pain disorders such as fibromyalgia, Kross says. And, he adds, it raises interesting questions about whether treating physical pain can help to relieve emotional pain, and vice versa.

"What's exciting about these findings," he says, "is that they outline the direct way in which emotional experiences can be linked to the body.

"Kross and his colleagues recruited 21 women and 19 men who had no history of chronic pain or mental illness but who had all been dumped by a romantic partner within the previous six months. The volunteers underwent fMRI scans -- which measure brain activity by tracking changes in blood flow -- during two painful tasks.

In the first, a heat source strapped to each subject's left arm created physical pain akin to "holding a hot cup of coffee without the sleeve," Kross says. In the second, the volunteers were asked to look at photos of their lost loves and were prompted to remember specific experiences they shared with

that person.

Other fMRI research has examined how social rejection manifests in the brain, but this study was the first to show that rejection can elicit a response in two brain areas associated with physical pain: the secondary somatosensory cortex and the dorsal posterior insula. Those brain regions may have lit up in this study but not others because the rejection his volunteers experienced was unusually intense, Kross says.

Although Kross stresses that the study is "very much a first step" in understanding the connection between physical and emotional pain, the findings may help chronic pain patients grasp that emotions can affect their physical condition, says psychologist Judith Scheman, Ph.D., director of the chronic pain rehabilitation program at the Cleveland Clinic.

Past traumas can make people more sensitive to pain and thus more susceptible to disorders like fibromyalgia, which causes both chronic pain and fatigue, Scheman says. She and her staff encourage pain patients to "explore their emotional trauma and baggage," but many are reluctant to do so.

"As a clinician, I like studies like this because patients often don't understand why they have to do painful emotional work," Scheman continues. "Showing them something like this helps them understand that there is science behind what I am asking them to do."

My new friends.....

2011-03-27T15:23:00.003-04:00

This last trip to India was full of new discoveries, surprises and astounding experiences both in good/bad way :). I had the opportunity to spend sometime away from the city, in the wilderness. Getting close to nature and staying in the wild, makes you appreciate the beauty of nature. So, I decided to camp in one of mountains for some days and the experience I had was one of its kind; physically challenging, mentally rewarding and personally fulfilling. The good part of living there was that I had to be very alert in my activities (hiking, reading, star gazing etc), as if I was not alert that would have been the last thing I would do (you get the point :). This experience when the mind is focussed 100% on whatever it is doing always gives me a sense of deep satisfaction.

Someone told me there were snakes in the area, but fortunately I did not find any, though I was able to find a lot of monkeys, a few mongoose and deers here and there. Not only that I made some monkeys my friends, at-least as far I am concerned; I do not know what was going on in their mind. I fed them with stuff I used to eat and they used to freaking enjoy that, to an extent that after sometime some of them used to hold my hand and feed themselves. Out of the many things I watched about our ancestors/my friends one of them stood out; which was the way they used to peel banana. Their style is more efficient than humans. Briefly, instead of opening the banana from stem, they used to open it from the opposite side i.e. pinch the other side and peel off. It works guys!!!

Other than that I had a great time watching stars, , satellites (I think they were satellites, as they were moving) and planets during the night time, which unfortunately is impossible to do in the city. On one night I counted close to a 6000 stars after which I fell asleep/tired/confused.

Thats me @ twilight.

In total, it was a nice experience as it always brings a silence (mental and vocal) to my senses, a state I find hard to resist.

Me - just an hour before leaving for the city. Friends bidding a goodbye.

Goodbye

IS there anything called MIRACLE........

2011-03-24T10:56:00.004-04:00

Hi,
"MIRACLE" - this word has always perplexed me to an extent that cannot be expressed here. I guess it is one of the few words that has been misused and misconstrued in every culture. When I was a kid (3 years ago :), I used to believe that yes there are miracles in life. Without actually understanding, without using my intellect; I used to believe what my parents and elders told me. But then over a period of time a lot of things happened which made me perform a swift volte - face. This new attitude and thinking has puzzled almost everyone in my family but trust me, if I have begun to think a little differently about these matters, rest assured that good cause has been given me. One of the reasons comes to my mind is that I could never have done this did I not develop within my complex nature the 2 elements of scientific skepticism and spiritual sensitivity, elements which usually range themselves in sharp conflict and flagrant opposition.

So coming to the question - is there anything such as a miracle? Lets build a case with an example lets say you do not know what a helicopter is and you have never seen one. Now one morning you wake up and see there is this weird object outside your house. When you come out; people tell you that the man inside the machine can fly this object. This will puzzle you, right? Because as humans there is a tendency of believing only that, which is in our limited experience. And then people tell you that the man flying the helicopter is a wizard and he can do any miracle that you can imagine. He is the miracle man of the town!! What will you do then? I guarantee 100% that you will believe it. Now this will be a miracle for you, but say if somehow you knew what a helicopter is and had a little knowledge of aerodynamics then this entire episode could be explained with very solid reasoning. Correct? So the name of the game is to increase our perception.

Yet quiet frankly as of now I do not believe in miracles. Neither do most men of my generation. But I do believe that our knowledge of nature's laws is incomplete and when the advance guard of scientists who are pushing forward into unexplored territory have found out a few more of those laws, we shall then be able to do things which are tantamount to miracles. This understanding did not came from a text book or someone telling me this or that but it was restored in the only way a skeptic could have restored it, not by argument, but by the witness of an overwhelming experience about 2 months ago.

These 2 guys were one of many factors responsible for my new attitude. They like questioning everything in short their motto is - "Question the unquestionable".

Thus, as a child who grew up in a conservative household where ceremonies and rituals are performed without knowing the reason behind them, I have changed to a person who relies on hard facts and cold reason, and which lacks enthusiasm for things like beliefs, morals or anything not in my experience and I regard it as quiet an achievement. Please note this does not mean that I doubt what others do nor do I condescend them. I just look it this way - may be it is working for them and they are happy with it, but as far as I am concerned I do not know what happens when they do these things. Also not believing in morals does not mean debauchery, what governs my life is LIFE SENSE i.e. seeing the other person as a life and not just an object or an accumulation of atoms. So when this realization happens you will never abuse/use/hurt other people for your own vested interest.

Bottom line is - Through the eye of a scientist nothing is a miracle, and through the eye of a mystic everything is a miracle ......

Who are you?
Somewhere in middle?
Yes.
Its okay, as confusion is better than a conclusion!!
So long
A

Just for laughter....

2011-03-15T19:48:00.000-04:00

Q. Why was the stadium cold?
Ans. Because it was full of fans :).

Teacher: "I told you to draw a cow eating some grass but you've only drawn the cow?"
Little Johnny: "Yes, the cow ate all the grass!"

After a long night of passion, the young guy rolled over, pulled out a cigarette from his jeans and searched for his lighter. Unable to find it, he asked the girl if she had one at hand.

"There might be some matches in the top drawer," she replied.

He opened the drawer of the bedside table and found a box of matches sitting neatly on top of a framed picture of another man. Naturally, the guy began to worry.

"Is this your husband?" he inquired nervously.

"No, silly," she replied, snuggling up to him.

"Your boyfriend then?" he asked.

"No, not at all," she said, nibbling away at his ear.

"Well, who is he then?" demanded the bewildered guy.

Calmly, Sally replied, "That's me before the operation." :)

Take it easy....
Am

An interesting read - Courtesy New York Times

2011-03-15T17:36:00.001-04:00

The Happynomics of Life

The Brits don’t go in much for happiness. Stiff upper lip is more the thing, and a good laugh if warranted. Trying to be happy just seems like piffle to a practical people. Undeterred, Prime Minister David Cameron has decided to create a national happiness index providing quarterly measures of how folks feel.

His foray into “happynomics” has prompted a deluge of criticism — “woolly-headed distraction” was a mild commentary — at a time when Brits face a year of cuts in everything from public-sector jobs to child benefits. The consensus seems to be that Cameron is going touchy-feely because in reality he’s wielding an ax.

That may be so. But the case for trying to measure the happiness of a society, rather than its growth and productivity alone, has become compelling. When Western industrialized societies started measuring gross domestic product, the issue for many was survival. Now most people have enough — or far more than enough by the standards of human history — but the question remains: “What’s going on inside their heads?”

Little that’s good, it seems. Stress has become the byword for a spreading anxiety. This anxiety’s personal, about jobs and money and health, but also general: that we can’t go on like this, running only to stand still, making things faster and faster, consuming more and more food (with consequent pressures on prices); that somehow a world of more than seven billion people is going to have to “downshift” to make it, revise its criteria of what constitutes well-being.

Just what goes into well-being is confounding. Many of the variables — like love and friendship and family relations — are hard to pin down. But British research has suggested that money itself does not confer happiness, although wealthier people tend to be happier; that employment is critical to self-esteem; that women tend to be happier than men; and that people need something beyond the material for fulfillment.

Starting next month, the government will pose the following questions and ask people to respond on a scale of zero to 10: How happy did you feel yesterday? How anxious did you feel yesterday? How satisfied are you with your life nowadays? To what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?

Scarcely extraordinary, but Andrew Oswald, a happiness economics expert at the University of Warwick, suggested the questions were a good start, although he would have added, “How well have you been sleeping?” — an important mental health indicator — and “How pressurized do you feel your time is?”

The important thing, he argues, it to shift “from the concept of financial prosperity to the idea of emotional prosperity.” Perhaps that’s the 21st-century indicator we need: gross emotional prosperity, or G.E.P.

The Office for National Statistics, which will do the survey, has been conducting an online debate. Answers suggest Brits link happiness to bird song, knowing themselves, the environment, responsible pet ownership, contributing to society, going out into the wild and reading Socrates.

Clearly, happynomics is no precise science, and how the happiness index will link to policy remains to be seen. But the idea is to put value on things that don’t have price tags. Open spaces, clear air, security, release from pressure — these are things of growing importance and scarcity. Then the question becomes: How do you promote them while at the same time creating the jobs needed in all Western societies? Growth is of course a large part of the answer, but it can’t be all the answer any longer.

I was thinking about some recent moments of happiness in my own life. One came walking across Regent’s Park, my skin tingling at the first brush of spring. Another came kissing my daughter goodnight as she slept and seeing how peaceful she was. A third came in Cairo seeing the powerful dignity of the Egyptian people coalescing to bring peaceful change.

These moments were linked to nature, to finding time, to feeling the transcendent power of the human spirit. Emotional prosperity is not the next e-mail in a relentless life.

So I’m ready to give Cameron the benefit of the doubt and even give a wary nod to his related “Big Society” project, also the source of much guffawing. The essence of this idea is that people can give more to one another — British A.T.M.s, for example, would automatically give customers an option of donating to charity. It’s a tough sell in a grim economy, but it captures a need among dislocated people to connect more.

That’s also true in the United States. Liberty is an inalienable right of Americans, along with the “pursuit of happiness.” Note the distinction here, evidence of the wisdom of the founding fathers. The Declaration of Independence guarantees freedom but, when it comes to happiness, only the quest for it is underwritten. Still, perhaps it’s time to measure just how that quest is going.

My take - Be happy now, dont postpone it.....

Later

Damn thats a Sexy Beat.....

2011-03-09T10:07:00.001-05:00

Just came across this song. See the video below made by MIT - 100k organizing board, the adapted version is nicely done by these folks....

And here is the original song by David Guetta and Akon (Listener discretion advised :)

Enjoy
A

A tribute to my Inspiration......

2011-03-05T23:37:00.000-05:00

Plz come here ASAP...
A

Spinach with Tomatoes, Goat Cheese, etc

2011-03-02T16:36:00.002-05:00

This is a quick, healthy and delicious recipe I conjured up yesterday. Not an ounce of oil goes into this and eating it feels so nice....

All the ingredients except salt and pepper.

The ingredients are:

Spinach 10 oz

Tomatoes 1 - big in size

Jalapeno 1/2 - depends on taste

Grated Ginger Little for flavor

Grated Garlic Little for flavor

Lemon 1/2

Goat Cheese Around 2 oz

Procedure:

1. Wash the spinach throughly with cold water. Boil spinach for 5 min. Food aficionados can get rid of the stems, I prefer eating it as it is so did not cut the stems.

2. Once boiled strain the hot water and give a cold water wash immediately this will ensure that spinach does not looses its green color. This is called blanching. Once done drain all the water and put the spinach in a bowl.

3. Dice 1 big tomato, jalapeno (as per taste), grate a garlic clove and ginger (same size as the clove).

4. Mix all these together.

5. Add lemon, some salt and pepper and then goat cheese.

6. Mix gently and leave for 5 - 10 min, this will melt the goat cheese and help in cooking of garlic and ginger!!!

See the freaking color of spinach - even after boiling it is so green. The white soup at bottom is dangerously delicious.

Note:

Goat cheese is very soft so add it in the end.
If you have problem eating raw garlic and ginger you can boil it with spinach.

Bye

A Typical Bachelor's Life in NYC

2011-03-02T10:26:00.000-05:00

Just for fun.....

2011-02-28T11:59:00.000-05:00

Later

Thought/Mind reading through the eyes of a scientist .....

2011-02-20T05:09:00.004-05:00

During my recent visit to India I took on a task to go and find people who claim to have the gift of clairvoyance. After a lot of failures I was able to meet a person, who impressed me by his simplicity,innocence and how easily he was able to read my mind (in a group of 20 people) and talk about the subject going inside me. Being a scientist, I thought on this matter and came up with a hypothesis, as to how can this phenomena be explained. I called him - "The Human Wireless".

These people who can read your thoughts and look into your future and past perfectly are perfect human wirelesses. As quantum physics has already said that everything is nothing but just vibrations of energy so are the thoughts in the mind. Thoughts are nothing but very gentle vibrations moving in the ether. Just as a tuned wireless picks up a desired frequency out of thousands of other programs from every direction, so do these people are able to catch the thoughts of people, out of the countless thoughts of broadcasting human wills in the world.

By their powerful will, these people are also a human broadcasting station, and can plant a desired thought in the mind (reminds me of Inception). The human mind, free from the static of restlessness, can perform through its antenna of intuition all the functions of complicated wireless mechanism sending and receiving thoughts, and tuning out undesirable ones. As the power of a electric wireless depends on the amount of electrical current it can utilize, so the human wireless is energized according to the power of will possessed by each individual.

All thoughts vibrate eternally in the cosmos. By deep concentration, such people is able to detect the thoughts of any mind, living or dead. Hard to believe me hmmmm....I can understand your sentiments. Below is an excerpt from the Nobel Lecture of Charles Robert Richet, read it and you will appreciate my thoughts...-:).

"Very strange, very wonderful, seemingly very improbable phenomena may yet appear which, when once established, will not astonish us more than we are now astonished at all that science has taught us during the last century," Charles Robert Richet, Nobel Prizeman in physiology, has declared. "It is assumed that the phenomena which we now accept without surprise, do not excite our astonishment because they are understood. But this is not the case. If they do not surprise us it is not because they are understood, it is because they are familiar; for if that which is not understood ought to surprise us, we should be surprised at everythingthe fall of a stone thrown into the air, the acorn which becomes an oak, mercury which expands when it is heated, iron attracted by a magnet, phosphorus which burns when it is rubbed. . . . The science of today is a light matter; the revolutions and evolutions which it will experience in a hundred thousand years will far exceed the most daring anticipations. The truthsthose surprising, amazing, unforeseen truthswhich our descendants will discover, are even now all around us, staring us in the eyes, so to speak, and yet we do not see them. But it is not enough to say that we do not see them; we do not wish to see them; for as soon as an unexpected and unfamiliar fact appears, we try to fit it into the framework of the commonplaces of acquired knowledge, and we are indignant that anyone should dare to experiment further."

Yours Truly,
Anurag

The best thing in the world!!!

2011-02-16T04:38:00.000-05:00

So, for a past few weeks I was pondering on what is the best thing in the world. After-all, all of us somehow want to do whatever that is best. We want to get the best job, the best girl/boy for marriage, the best companion for a relationship etc. Now the question is - What is the best thing in the world and how do you decide that this is the best thing. After much introspection and thinking I have concluded that there is no best thing in the world!!!! Yes, there is no such thing as the best thing. The reason fo this - best involves the entire world, and do something best we have to be better than every other person who is doing it. Practically this is impossible. You can do a great thing but not the best thing. Whatever you do, when you put your heart and soul into it, that is a great thing, but not the best. Me sitting in the mountains may not be the best thing but it is great thing, a scientist working 16 hours/day is not the best thing but a great thing. Trying to do the best thing is in itself a self defeating process. Adi Shankaracharya once said "Nischala Tattve Jeevan Muktih" translated it means - if a person does anything with total involvement he will get enlightened.

Now the problem with us is whatever we do we do not involve ourself completely. It is said that even if you sweep the floor with total involvement you will be enlightened. It is not a joke!! But the person who is sweeping the floor wants to do something else, that someone else wants to sweep the floor and so on. So no need to go for the best thing, any work done with our heart and total involvement is a great thing and that is a sure sure way for success. Trying to do the best thing is nothing but an endless waste of time and energy.

Good Day...

Tablets of the forgotten truth

2011-02-06T09:22:00.001-05:00

I came across these small but deep knowledge points. I hope you like it.

On seekers predicament

" He who looks within himself and perceives only discontent, frailty, darkness and fear, need not curl his lip in mocking doubt. Let him look deeper and longer, deeper and longer, until he presently becomes aware of faint tokens and breath - like indications which appear when the heart is still. Let him heed them well, for they will take life and grow into high thoughts that will cross the threshold of his mind like wandering angles, and these again shall become forerunners of a voice which will come later - the voice of a hidden, recondite and mysterious being who inhabits his center, who is his own ancient self ".

On human nature -
" The divine nature reveals itself anew in every human life, but if a man walk indifferently by, then the revelation is as seed on stony ground. No one is excluded from this divine consciousness; it is man who excludes himself. Men make formal and pretentious enquiry into the mystery and meaning of life, when all the while each bird perched upon a green bough, each child holding its fond mother's hand, has solved the riddle and carries the answer in its face. That life which brought you to birth, O Man ! is nobler and greater than your farthest thought ; believe in its beneficent intention towards you and obey its subtle injunctions whispered to your heart in half - felt intuitions ".

On acting with conscience.
" The man who thinks he may live as freely as his unconsidered desires prompt him and yet not carry the burden of an eventual reckoning, is binding his life to a hollow dream. Whoever sins against his fellows or against himself pronounces his own sentence thereby. He may hide his sins from the sight of others, but he cannot hide them from the all - recording eyes of the gods. Justice still rules the world with inexorable weight, though its operations are often unseen and though it is not always to be found in stone built courts of law. Whoever escapes from paying the legal penalties of earth can never escape from paying the just penalties which the gods impose. Nemesis - remorseless and implacable holds such a man in jeopardy every hour ".

Miscellaneous
" In shallow men the fish of little thoughts cause much commotion. In oceanic minds the whales of inspiration make hardly a ruffle ".

" You may control a mad elephant;
You may shut the mouth of the bear or the tiger;
Ride the lion and play with the cobra;
By alchemy you may earn your livelihood;
You may wander through the universe incognito;
Make vassals of the gods; be ever youthful;
You may walk on water and live in fire;
But control of the mind is better and more difficult ".

Please think on this one:
" Do not do what you want, then you may do what you like ".

Later
A

A Date with a Mystic......Part 2

2011-01-27T10:28:00.001-05:00

A steady stream of quietness seems to be flowing near me and a great peace was penetrating the inner reaches of my being and my over active thought/judgement tortured brain was arriving at some rest.........

There seems to be telepathic current that plays between us, and the 2 dimensions - time and space seems to vanish. I become aware that he is linking my own mind with his and he is taking my heart into a state of unperturbed calm which he seems perpetually to enjoy. In this extraordinary peace, I find a sense of exaltation and lightness. My heart is released from the all the burdens and disappointments. Never again, I feel, shall the bitterness of anger and melancholy of unsatisfied desire afflict me.

In this beautiful, entranced silence, when the clock stands still and the sorrows and errors of the past seem like trivialities, my mind is getting dissolved into the infinite consciousness that governs the planet. But some creature of the earth world breaks rudely into my heavenly dream by giving loud voice to the sanskrit hymns being sung and quickly I return to the potpourri of uncertain pleasures and unexpected sorrows which men call life.

On the way back accidentally I bumped into Sadhguru and asked him what he did to which he winked and answered " That's a secret "!!!

Initially, I was confused but later I realized that yes - All that is precious in life is a secret. Life is a secret, love is a secret, feelings, our emotions are a secret. We are the biggest secret. For the most precious things in life are not bruited in public. Human instinct is to keep them withdrawn in the innermost recessed accessibel to few - perhaps to none. No wonder the most sacred things in all lives will always be secret and only those who shall seek may find!!

Love you all,

Anurag

A Date with a Mystic......Part 1

2011-01-27T09:27:00.001-05:00

The land of tigers, elephants, innumerable languages, variety of cultures and above all mystical beings has a charm that is hard to resist. No wonder when Mark Twain visited this sacredly secret country said that " Whatever that can possibly be done by God or man has been done on this land ". India's most precious wealth is the rich culture and the great masters from Patanjali, Agastya Muni to Maharishi Ramanna and so on; that decided to take birth on this part of the globe. Emerging in every generation theses people have protected the land against the fate of ancient Egypt and Babylonia.

Accidentally, I happened to witness one of the Masters, in person. None other that Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev. Whenever I have been to his talks in other parts of world or listened to some his videos what I can say for sure is there is something in this man which holds my attention as iron is held by a magnet. A few weeks ago I was at one of the temples and suddenly the news came that Sadhguru will be coming for a darshan/blessing. I was very excited and meticulously prepared a list of questions that have been bugging me since a long time. There were some singers on the left side of stage, singing some sanskrit hymns. The whole gathering (~500 people), were in total silence and eagerly waiting for the mystic to come and talk about something and answer the questions.

30 min after we all sat down I see a dignified man walking in a white robe towards the stage; the vibration of his presence are palpable and I notice most of the people who are sitting going into a state of ecstasy. I too had the same sensations. Effortlessly he come and takes the seat and closes his eyes. I experience a strong surge of energy thorough my spine and for few moments I become unaware of the physical body. As I closed my eyes with him and one by one all the questions I had prepared drop away. For it does not now seem to matter whether they are asked or not and it does not seem to matter whether I sove the problems that have perplexed me. A steady stream of quietness seems to be flowing near me and a great peace was penetrating the inner reaches of my being and my over active thought/judgement tortured brain was arriving at some rest.

To be continued......

One of the places worth visiting.... MOUNT KAILASH - TIBET

2010-12-15T15:31:00.002-05:00

North Face - Mt Kailash

South Face - Mt Kailash

Great place see the the video....

Some nice, deep stuff from the heart......

2010-12-11T23:10:00.000-05:00

1. One smile enough to blow away years of misery
One smile and I melt in your arms
One smile and my heart bursts with fullness
One smile and I feel so near to you
One smile and all I can do is thank you
One smile
and I know I am taken care of
One smile...

2. In search for Me, I discovered Truth.
In search for Truth, I discovered Love.
In search for Love, I discovered Everything.
And in Everything, I found Myself -:)

Love
A

Killing your Dreams - (Reproduced from Paulo Coelho’s blog)

2010-11-26T22:01:00.009-05:00

Found this inspiring article on PC's blog......Enjoy!!!

"The first symptom of the process of our killing our dreams is the lack of time. The busiest people I have known in my life always have time enough to do everything. Those who do nothing are always tired and pay no attention to the little amount of work they are required to do. They complain constantly that the day is too short. The truth is, they are afraid to fight the Good Fight.

The second symptom of the death of our dreams lies in our certainties. Because we don’t want to see life as a grand adventure, we begin to think of ourselves as wise and fair and correct in asking so little of life. We look beyond the walls of our day-to-day existence, and we hear the sound of lances breaking, we smell the dust and the sweat, and we see the great defeats and the fire in the eyes of the warriors. But we never see the delight, the immense delight in the hearts of those who are engaged in the battle. For them, neither victory nor defeat is important; what’s important is only that they are fighting the Good Fight.

And, finally, the third symptom of the passing of our dreams is peace. Life becomes a Sunday afternoon; we ask for nothing grand, and we cease to demand anything more than we are willing to give. In that state, we think of ourselves as being mature; we put aside the fantasies of our youth, and we seek personal and professional achievement. We are surprised when people our age say that they still want this or that out of life. But really, deep in our hearts, we know that what has happened is that we have renounced the battle for our dreams – we have refused to fight the Good Fight.

When we renounce our dreams and find peace, we go through a short period of tranquility. But the dead dreams begin to rot within us and to infect our entire being.
We become cruel to those around us, and then we begin to direct this cruelty against ourselves. That’s when illnesses and psychoses arise. What we sought to avoid in combat – disappointment and defeat – come upon us because of our cowardice.

And one day, the dead, spoiled dreams make it difficult to breathe, and we actually seek death. It’s death that frees us from our certainties, from our work, and from that terrible peace of our Sunday afternoons ".

Life is Management !!!!

2010-11-23T20:58:00.002-05:00

Just stumbled on this great person (Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev), a mystic from Tamil Nadu - South India. He runs the ISHA FOUNDATION. Below is a 4 min video where he has explained beautifully how life is nothing but just management. Enjoy!!!

I will like to end by one of the poems he wrote long ago
"I was born like you,
I eat like you, sleep like you
and will die like you.
But the limited has not limited me,
life's bondages have not bound me.
As the dance of life progresses,
this unboundedness has become unbearably sweet.
Become love, reach out, become me"!!!!

I do not know what is so magnetic about these mystics.......

Ways to experiences Samadhi......

2010-11-23T14:19:00.000-05:00

Here are some of the methods to get a glimpse of Samadhi. Each one has its own merits and de merits.
These are:
1. Drugs (Psychedelics)
2. Mantra ( a sound, syllable, word, or group of words that are considered capable of "creating transformation").
3. Performing Austerities.

I will write about each of them someday. But as of now I will change gears and post some other stuff. This post I will complete later.

Anu

The Last/8th Limb - Samadhi -

2010-11-23T00:01:00.002-05:00

When the subject disappears in the object, when the object disappears in the subject, when there is nothing to look at and there is no looker-on, when simply the duality is not there, that is SAMADHI. In other words, SAMADHI is made from the combination of 2 words – SAMA (Equanimity) and Buddhi (Intellect). Thus, when the intellect becomes equanimous i.e. when it looses the discriminatory dimension and just becomes perception; one experiences Samadhi.

Remember, this is the possibility for all of human beings. But the tricky part is when we experience the world we get smeared with the events so much that we forget about the ultimate human potential. In collecting pebbles and shells on the seashore one may miss the utterly blissful treasure of the ocean. This does not mean we do not enjoy the world!!! But the skill is not to get lost in it. Enjoy everything, but don't make it your very life then one will miss it. And remember, wherever we pay our attention that becomes the reality of life. If you pay your attention to pebbles, they become diamonds -- because wherever is your attention, there is your treasure. Sometimes the attention can be focused on the unreal and we start believing it to be real.

So make sure that real has to be sought. And the only way to reach it is, first, drop too many objects, let there be one object: second, drop all distractions. Let consciousness fall on that object in an uninterrupted. And the third (Samadhi) happens by itself. In that stillness, one can attain to the goal of life.

Bye

The 7th Limb - Dhyana - Contemplation

2010-11-18T17:30:00.001-05:00

Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 4

DHYAN, CONTEMPLATION, is the uninterrupted flow of the mind to the object. This will happen after dharana. So the 1^st step i.e. 6^th limb - concentration when we have dropped the crowd of objects and chose one object. Once this is done now a person can retain one object in consciousness. Now the second step uninterrupted flow of consciousness towards the object. As if light is falling from a bulb, uninterrupted.

Dhyan, contemplation, mean the consciousness falling on the object in continuity, with no break -- because each break means a distraction. If you can attain the first, the second is not difficult. Remember 1^st step is concentration, then comes contemplation so essentially if you cannot attain the first, the second is impossible. Once you drop objects, you choose one object, then you drop all loopholes in your consciousness, all distractions in your consciousness, you simply pour yourself on one object.

Both steps are essential to any work we do. But remember, this is not the end. There is one last step, which is SAMADHI.

The 6th Limb - Dharana - Concentration

2010-10-25T11:38:00.000-04:00

Then comes dharana. After pratyahar, when a person has started coming back nearer home, coming nearer the innermost core. Pratyahar brings us near the gate; pranayam is the bridge from the out to the in. And then is the possibility of dharana, concentration. Now we can become capable of bringing the mind to one object. Note the logical flow of events here 1st, we gave direction to the body; then, direction to life energy -- now we give direction to our consciousness. Now the consciousness cannot be allowed to go anywhere and everywhere. Now it has to be brought to a goal. This goal is concentration, dharana: you fix your consciousness on one point it can be anything – your dream job, graduation, getting into medical school etc.

When consciousness is fixed on one point thoughts cease, because thoughts are possible only when your consciousness goes on wavering -- from here to there, from there to somewhere else. When the consciousness is continuously jumping like a monkey, then there are many thoughts and the whole mind is just filled with crowds -- a marketplace.

Dharana means the capacity to contain. Concentration is part of it. If you can remain with one idea for long, you become capable of the higher possibility of remaining one and the same for a long period -- because if you cannot remain one and the same for a long period, you will be distracted by the objects. A mind, which can remain in deep patience, can remain unmoving, only that mind can come to know one's own divinity. Plz note that it does not mean you become lazy…-:).

Bottom-line is – “ Successful people have one intention for a long period of time and people who are not successful have many intentions for short period of time”. Choose wisely…

The 5th Limb - Pratyahara - Withdrawal of Senses

2010-10-21T10:26:00.001-04:00

After pranayam, breath regulation is pratyahar, abstraction. Pratyahar is returning back, coming back -- coming in, turning inwards, returning home. Pratyahar works as a bridge between the four, the yoga of the outside, and the last three, the yoga of the inside. The process of return is when the energy is no longer moving outwardly. It is turning inwards. Ordinarily, the energy is moving outward. We waste so much of precious energy in useless things like gossip, worry, random thoughts etc. Now in pratyahar the energy is to be conserved and build up as we will need it in the last 3 limbs. Energy is sapped because we have given the senses too much power over mind. Do not waste the precious energy in senseless situations at any cost, as in the end you will regret it.

This has to be deeply understood: that senses by themselves are impotent -- unless you cooperate. That's the whole art of yoga. If you don't cooperate senses close. If you don't cooperate conversion starts. If you don't cooperate pratyahar comes in. That's what people who are sitting silently for hours, for years, are doing -- they are trying to drop the cooperation between themselves and their senses. When the energy is not obsessed to see, to hear, to touch; the energy starts moving inwards. That is pratyahar: movement towards the source, movement towards the place from where you have come, movement to the center. Now you are no longer moving to the periphery.

C ya

The 4th Limb - Pranayama - Regulated Breathing

2010-10-20T10:57:00.000-04:00

Regulated breathing -- is pranayam. Breath is a very important tool all of us have but it is the most under utilized of all. Every rhythm of the breath has a corresponding emotion in the mind when we are angry there is a diff rhythm, when anxious the pattern is different etc. And the opposite is true too. That is, whenever the mind changes, the rhythm of the breath immediately changes. Therefore, if -- if you change that rhythm of the breath -- the mind has to change immediately.

It is always a nice idea to learn the technique properly as incorrect method may be harmful for the body. Pranayam is one of the greatest discoveries that has ever happened. Pranayam is an inner journey. And pranayam is the fourth step on the yogic path -- and there are only eight steps. Half the journey is completed on pranayam. Pranayam never means breath control. It simply means the expansion of the vital energy. Prana-ayam: prana means the vital energy hidden in breathe, and ayam means infinite expansion.

The 3rd Limb - Asana/Posture

2010-10-18T23:49:00.000-04:00

The third limb is posture. Asan/Posture means a relaxed posture i.e. so restful, that there is no need to move the body at all. Do not confuse with the extreme Yoga postures that people do. True asana/posture is when one learns the grace of the body. The body is just like a guitar. It has to be rightly tuned; only then will the correct music arise out of it. If the very instrument is somehow not in right shape and order, then in no way can great harmony arise out of it? Patanjali says "STHIR SUKHAM ASANAM" -- the posture should be steady and should be very, very blissful, comfortable. So never try to distort the body, and never try to achieve postures that are uncomfortable. If you can be steady and comfortable in a chair, it is perfectly okay -- no need to try a lotus posture and force your body unnecessarily. A posture should be such that one can forget the body.

How to attain to this posture? How to attain this steadiness? Look at the comfort. If body is exactly in deep comfort, in deep rest, feeling good, that should be the criterion with which to judge.

Good Night

The 2nd Limb - Fixed Observance

2010-10-17T17:13:00.000-04:00

Niyam, fixed observance: a life that has a discipline, a life that has regularity about it. Because unless there is regularity in life, a discipline, we will be a slave of our instincts. That is not freedom. Only a person who has regularity about him can become the master someday.

Now the various subcomponents of Niyam.

First is "purity," shauch. Means purity on 3 fronts - food, body and mind One has to watch one's food. Whatsoever you eat, it is no ordinary matter. You should be careful because your body is constituted of whatsoever you have eaten in the past. Be careful what you eat, be careful what you drink -- be careful how you keep and care for your body. Small things do matter. For an ordinary man they don't matter because he is not going anywhere. Once you start on the spiritual path, everything matters; even the slightest disturbance matters. It is like if you are driving a car to work vis a vis driving on an F-1 track. On the F- 1 track everything matters -J. Food – vegetarian food that is light on the system and fresh. Body can be purified by drinking lots of water, eating healthy and exercising regularly. And mind can be purified through meditation.

The second step of niyam is "contentment," santosh. Contentment means: whatsoever is, is beautiful, the feeling that whatsoever is, is the best that can be. A feeling of deep acceptance is santosh, contentment, a feeling of saying yes to the whole existence -- as it is. Or in other words not being cynical of things, not being negative and stop complaining all the time. Remember that contentment is not consolation. When we console ourselves we are not contented. In fact, there is a very deep discontent inside -- but seeing that discontent creates worry, seeing that discontent creates anxiety, seeing that discontent leads nowhere, so logically, we persuade ourselves that "this is not the way." Finding that you cannot reach, do not rationalize that the goal is not worth reaching. Contentment is a positive state of being; consolation is suppression.

After contentment, is "austerity," tapa. One can be austere before contentment but then the austerity will be through desire. When a person is content then austerity is not a means; it is just a simple, beautiful way of living. Then it is not a question of having a few things or more -- that is not the problem then. Austerity is simplicity: to live a simple life. What is a simple life? It is like that of a child -- enjoy everything, but don't cling. As LDV said “"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."

And then comes "self-study," swadhyaya. A man who has attained to purity, contentment, austerity, only he can study self because now all the garbage is thrown. If there is too much garbage (judgments, prejudices, grudges etc) in the person self cannot be studied, as it will not be self-study, because first all that rubbish will have to be studied. These are very logical steps. After austerity, when you have become very simple, no rubbish accumulates, when you have become so contented, when you have become so innocent and pure, you have become like fragrance, weightless, on the wings, in the air, riding on the air -- then self-study. Now, you can study the self.

The last step in the second stage i.e. surrender to Divine." When you have studied the self, only then can you surrender. Because what will you surrender otherwise? The self is to be surrendered. If you know it well, only then you can surrender. Otherwise how will you surrender?

"Purity, contentment, austerity, self-study, and surrender are the laws to be observed." These are laws for growth. They do not prohibit; they help. They are not restrictive; they are creative.

Cheers

The 1st Limb - Self Restraint

2010-10-15T14:51:00.001-04:00

Yam means self-restraint. -- In English self-restraint looks like suppressing, repressing. Self-restraint is not repression. Here self-restraint does not mean to repress oneself. It simply means to direct one's life -- not to repress the energies, but to direct, to give them a direction. These energies can be used in such a way that they can become the door for the unlimited. Because you can live such a life, which goes on moving in opposite directions, in many directions -- then you will never reach anywhere. It is just like a car: the driver goes a few miles to the north, then changes the mind; goes a few miles to the south, then changes the mind; then goes a few miles to the west, then changes the mind; and goes on this way. He will never reach anywhere. He will never have the feeling of fulfillment. You can go on moving in many ways, but unless you have a direction you are moving uselessly. You will feel more and more frustrated and nothing else.

So self-restraint simply means: to give a direction to life and be a little more centered. Direction creates the center; then the center gives direction. And they are mutually fulfilling.

Nonviolence simply means loving life in all its manifestations. Love life so much that you would not like to hurt anybody, that's all. Remember only one thing not to hurt anyone willfully. To be nonviolent means to be beneficial, to be helpful to everybody -- to yourself and to others also.

Truthfulness means authenticity, to be true -- not to use masks: to be natural and at ease anywhere be truthful to yourself. How to remain true? By not being a football of other peoples opinions, what they say for you to be: always listen to your inner voice, what you would like to be. Don't allow others to manipulate and control you.

The third is asteya nonstealing, honesty. Knowledge, things -- nothing should be stolen.

Brahmacharya. It has been translated as "sexual continence," celibacy. But sexual celibacy is a very narrow thing; it is one part of it, but not the whole of it. Brahmacharya is not against sex. It means transmutation of the energy: it is not being against sex, rather it is changing the whole energy from the sex center to the higher centers. This means: trying to understand sex energy, trying to understand how it moves in the body, trying to understand why it gives pleasure, from where pleasure really comes. When the same energy moves upwards you become a dam of energy. That is brahmacharya. You go on accumulating energy. The more you accumulate, the higher it rises.

Nonpossessiveness. For example, if you love a person: if you try to possess the person, then you don't love. And you are not certain about his love also; that's why you create all safety measures, surround him by every trick, cunningness, cleverness, so that he cannot leave you. If you really love, there is no need to possess. Sharing is the meaning of nonpossessiveness.

Limbs/Steps of YOGA

2010-10-13T17:51:00.001-04:00

Steps and limbs both, they are both. Steps they are because one has to be followed by another and they are in a deep relationship. The second cannot come before the first -- the first has to be first and the second has to be second.

And limbs because they have an internal unity. For example, an automobile, it has various parts and all of them have to function together for a successful trip. Everything is joined together. And has to function with organic unity, otherwise things won't happen how we want them to happen; internally.

1. Yam – Self Restraint

Ø Ahimsa – Non Violence

Ø Satya - Truthfulness

Ø Asteya - Honesty

Ø Brahmacharya – Sexual Continence

Ø Aparigraha – Non Possesiveness

2. Niyam – Fixed Observance

Ø Shaucha - Purity

Ø Santosha -Contentment

Ø Tapas - Austerity

Ø Swadhyaya – Self Study

Ø Ishvarapranidhana – Surrender to the divine

3. Asana - Posture

4. Pranayama – Breath Regulation

5. Pratyahaar – Withdrawl of senses

6. Dharana – Maintaining Mental Focus

7. Dhyana - Meditation

8. Samadhi – Deep state of equanimity

Each of them has to be interpreted properly as if you go by the English translation it is very easy to distort the actual meaning. Next posts we will dissect the 8 limbs one at a time.

Love

What is Yoga - 1

2010-10-10T13:41:00.014-04:00

Yoga is a technology to bring the mind to the moment. Yoga means now you are ready not to move into the future. Yoga means you are ready now not to hope and encounter the reality as it is. Unless this moment comes..... we can go on doing asanas, postures; that is not yoga. The postures are just one part. Yoga is an inward turning, you start moving within – because your being is here and now, it is not in the future and you have all possible resources now to live to the fullest.

Yoga is very scientific as it has nothing as far as belief is concerned; yoga doesn’t say to believe in anything. Yoga says experience. Just like science says experiment, yoga says experience. Experience is an inside experiment. No belief is required, no faith is needed –You will come to the truth, but not through belief, but through your own experience, through your own realization.

Because right now as we are, it is nothing but - Chaos. Yoga is a discipline, means yoga wants to create a crystallized center in us. As we are, we are a mob within us. I have been observing for the last few weeks.

I decide to get up early in the morning. And when the alarm sounds somebody in me says, ”Don’t bother. It is cold outside, it is overcast, it is early. And why are you in such a hurry? Lets do it tomorrow.” And I fall asleep again. When I get up I feel bad. And I think, ”This is not good. I should have done it.” I decide again that ”Tomorrow I will do;” and the same thing happens tomorrow because early morning the one who promised is no more there, somebody else is there.

This is a live example of living life as chaos, a crowd. Yoga means now you will have to be a harmony,

you will have to become one. A crystallization is needed; a centering is needed. Everybody wants it, but you cannot ask. You have to earn it! That is why to achieve it a certain discipline is needed. A disciple is a great achievement. All discipline of yoga is an effort to make a person a master of him/herself. As we are slave of many, many desires. Many, many masters are there, and we are just a slave – and pulled in many directions.

Yoga is discipline, a discipline to change oneself.

What are the various components of Yoga, I will discuss in the next post. And I will wake up early tomorrow (6 am - DONE DEAL...-:)
Good Day
Anurag

A commentary, as I understand it.....

2010-10-08T09:24:00.002-04:00

So after thinking a lot on what should the next posts be like, I came to a conclusion on why not write a terse commentary on Yoga. Mainly about what exactly it is, what are the different stages on the path of Yoga etc. The time is suitable for such posts as from tomorrow start the NAVARATRIS (9 auspicious nights). You can read about them here.

Here is the deal every day I will put a post about Yoga for the coming 9 days, starting tomorrow. But even before I start let me 1st share a wonderful analogy between Yoga/Spirituality and Sexuality. One of my friends talked about this and he made a lot of sense. Here is a gist of the discussion we had.

In a way the sexual path and spiritual path and are very similar. Remember when we hit teen age, the usual things do not interest us anymore. The toys, dolls, teddy bears are no longer exciting and we want to explore more. Here the game is played by the chemicals in body. Certain hormones are released and they change our perception and the way of looking at the world in toto.

Similarly on the spiritual/yogic path when all that other stuff that you thought will make you happy looses its charm we can start -:). You got into relationships, marriage, got the dream job, house, car, etc but still there is some emptiness. When you realize that one can derive transitory happiness from these means then begins the spiritual journey. A journey to put your happiness on self start not the one that will need crutches...-:). THis should not come from a state of denial but rather from a state of abundance and dispassion. As it is very easy to say I do not want that thing, a true seeker is the one who has everything but still does not get caught up in the charm.

Unbelievable, right!!! Not quiet though. The reason is, I stumbled upon the oldest text on Yoga (Patanjali Yogsutras) and the 1st line is - "AND NOW BEGINS THE DISCIPLINE OF YOGA". Just think on this, Patanjali such a great Yogi, started his commentary with the words - AND NOW. The only rational here is that you have tried all the other means and come to a conclusion experientially that none of them are making you happy. So now you can start with YOGA...-:). Smart Guy right.

Only difference is on this path instead of hormones it will be your awareness that will come into use. More the level of awareness more is the progress.

With this I will end the post and start the next one tomorrow.

Happy Navratri....
Anurag

Jokes....

2010-10-05T17:13:00.001-04:00

Just to lighten the day...

1. Husband: "Everytime I hit you, you never fight back. How do you manage your anger?"

Wife: "I clean the toilet seat!"

Husband: "How does it help?"

Wife: "I use your toothbrush!" -:).

2. An old man visits his doctor and after thorough examination the doctor tells him: "I have good news and bad news, what would you like to hear first?"

Patient: "Well, give me the bad news first."

Doctor: "You have cancer, I estimate that you have about two years left."

Patient: "Ooh No! That's awefull! In two years my life will be over! What kind of good news could you probably tell me, after this?"

Doctor: "You also have Alzheimer's. In about three months you are going to forget everything I told you."

3. John hoisted his beer and said: "Here's to spending the rest of my life, between the legs of my wife!"

That won him the top prize at the pub for the best toast of the night! He went home and told his wife, Mary, "I won the prize for the best toast of the night."

She said, "What was your toast?"

John said: "Here's to spending the rest of my life, sitting in church beside my wife."

"Oh, that is very nice indeed, John!" Mary said.

The next day, Mary ran into one of John's drinking buddies on the street corner. The man chuckled leeringly and said, "John won the prize the other night at the pub with a toast about you, Mary."

She said, "He told me, and I was a bit surprised myself. You know, he's only been there twice in the last four years. Once he fell asleep, and the other time I had to pull him by the ears to make him come!"

Bye

A case for Marrying Older Women !!

2010-09-22T13:39:00.011-04:00

Ever wondered why in a marriage the girl is younger (99% time). I tried to think on this with some reasoning, but it did not make any sense. In fact if you do the opposite i.e. girl is older than the boy it all fits in so well. The reason is because women live longer than men, on an average 3 - 5 yrs more. So for marriage the age of the girl should be more than the age of the boy.

Boys are less strong than girls. Men live for less years than women. That’s why, there are more old women than old men, more widows than widowers. If the average age for a woman is eighty, then the average for men is seventy-five. It is five years more. But why, why do women live more? The reason is a woman is capable of accepting more than a man. If a man dies first, the woman will cry, weep, suffer, but will be able to accept the fact and regain balance. But if a woman dies than it is difficult for man to regain balance and come out of it. Additionally, just think about carrying a child in the womb for 9 months and then delivering the baby is a lot of stress and requires strength; both physical and mental. Thus, nature has designed women to be more resilient and stronger than men.

Therefore, every man should marry a woman who is at least 3 - 5 years older than him. Then the balance will be perfect. Then they will die almost within six months of one another. But why has this not happened? Part of it has to do with the man's ego as a man feels a little weak if he is going to marry a woman who is older, more experienced, more knowledgeable than him. If the woman is older it also makes sense on other fronts as well because the woman needs to be more experienced as she is going to become the mother and take care of the house and raising the child.

What do u say? Time to reinvent the wheel.....^-^

LAter

On the subject of Love and Relationships

2010-09-02T10:21:00.018-04:00

It has always intrigued me as to why there is such a strong urge to be in a relationship or to get a partner (both short term and long term -:)). This made me probe into 2 questions:

1. Can a person live by him/her self.

2. Why as humans companionship is so important.

Why is it so difficult to live alone? Living alone, can lead to meditation or depression. Meditation when the hands are busy and mind is full i.e. lot of work to be done and a purpose in life, depression when you have enough time to think about lot of irrelevant stuff i.e. time coming at a premium. But still it does not solve the mystery 100%, there are people who have plenty of stuff to do, but still seek others. Why?

This made me realize that it is the oneness or boundlessness that we are seeking, there is something in us that feels insufficient the way we are right now. And so we want to make the other a part of ourself and expand. When this desire finds a physical expression it is SEX, when it finds an emotional expression it is LOVE and when it finds a mental expression it is GREED/AMBITION. But then again if boundlessness is what we seek for then is there a way to work for it directly; than use pseudo means which give a sense of pleasure but are not enough to give us what we want. One of the great mystics has put it in the right way " Trying t reach boundlessness through physical realities is like trying to catch the mirage in a desert".

The methods of union or experiencing boundlessness are many. Like - love, heightened awareness, yoga practises etc. Loving other person is one of the most pleasant ways at the same time very risky as with involvement comes entanglement. The reason why we love someone is because it gives a certain sense of happiness. But that feeling is transitory, sometimes we will be happy and at times angry and miserable. Same goes with SEX. So in short all these methods allow us to become temporarily blissful. Kindly, note nowhere I am saying that they are good or bad or right or wrong, the point I want to make here is that there should be a way to be blissful 24*7. Yoga and meditation are a step in that direction. Not that they will take you to this state but are a vehicle for the journey.

Bottom-line is " If unbounded expansion is what you are seeking in life, then why not pursue it consciously. As if you seek it without awareness your life will go waste as you will do many stupid things that won't mean anything to you towards the end". What methods you choose will determine where you reach!!

C u later

How will you measure YOUR LiFE.......

2010-08-04T18:25:00.009-04:00

Hi,

I came across this beautiful article by Prof. Clayton M Christensen in Harvard Business Review. I am copying it here, read it and you will be amazed to see the parameters of success in life.

"Before I published The Innovator’s Dilemma, I got a call from Andrew Grove, then the chairman of Intel. He had read one of my early papers about disruptive technology, and he asked if I could talk to his direct reports and explain my research and what it implied for Intel. Excited, I flew to Silicon Valley and showed up at the appointed time, only to have Grove say, “Look, stuff has happened. We have only 10 minutes for you. Tell us what your model of disruption means for Intel.” I said that I couldn’t—that I needed a full 30 minutes to explain the model, because only with it as context would any comments about Intel make sense. Ten minutes into my explanation, Grove interrupted: “Look, I’ve got your model. Just tell us what it means for Intel.”

I insisted that I needed 10 more minutes to describe how the process of disruption had worked its way through a very different industry, steel, so that he and his team could understand how disruption worked. I told the story of how Nucor and other steel minimills had begun by attacking the lowest end of the market—steel reinforcing bars, or rebar—and later moved up toward the high end, undercutting the traditional steel mills.

When I finished the minimill story, Grove said, “OK, I get it. What it means for Intel is...,” and then went on to articulate what would become the company’s strategy for going to the bottom of the market to launch the Celeron processor.

I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.

That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.

My class at HBS is structured to help my students understand what good management theory is and how it is built. To that backbone I attach different models or theories that help students think about the various dimensions of a general manager’s job in stimulating innovation and growth. In each session we look at one company through the lenses of those theories—using them to explain how the company got into its situation and to examine what managerial actions will yield the needed results.

On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.

As the students discuss the answers to these questions, I open my own life to them as a case study of sorts, to illustrate how they can use the theories from our course to guide their life decisions.

One of the theories that gives great insight on the first question—how to be sure we find happiness in our careers—is from Frederick Herzberg, who asserts that the powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements. I tell the students about a vision of sorts I had while I was running the company I founded before becoming an academic. In my mind’s eye I saw one of my managers leave for work one morning with a relatively strong level of self-esteem. Then I pictured her driving home to her family 10 hours later, feeling unappreciated, frustrated, underutilized, and demeaned. I imagined how profoundly her lowered self-esteem affected the way she interacted with her children. The vision in my mind then fast-forwarded to another day, when she drove home with greater self-esteem—feeling that she had learned a lot, been recognized for achieving valuable things, and played a significant role in the success of some important initiatives. I then imagined how positively that affected her as a spouse and a parent. My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.

I want students to leave my classroom knowing that.

Create a Strategy for Your Life

A theory that is helpful in answering the second question—How can I ensure that my relationship with my family proves to be an enduring source of happiness?—concerns how strategy is defined and implemented. Its primary insight is that a company’s strategy is determined by the types of initiatives that management invests in. If a company’s resource allocation process is not managed masterfully, what emerges from it can be very different from what management intended. Because companies’ decision-making systems are designed to steer investments to initiatives that offer the most tangible and immediate returns, companies shortchange investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies.

Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.

It’s quite startling that a significant fraction of the 900 students that HBS draws each year from the world’s best have given little thought to the purpose of their lives. I tell the students that HBS might be one of their last chances to reflect deeply on that question. If they think that they’ll have more time and energy to reflect later, they’re nuts, because life only gets more demanding: You take on a mortgage; you’re working 70 hours a week; you have a spouse and children.

For me, having a clear purpose in my life has been essential. But it was something I had to think long and hard about before I understood it. When I was a Rhodes scholar, I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.

Had I instead spent that hour each day learning the latest techniques for mastering the problems of autocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. I apply the tools of econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge of the purpose of my life every day. It’s the single most useful thing I’ve ever learned. I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life purpose, they’ll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered at HBS. If they don’t figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life. Clarity about their purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, and the five forces.

My purpose grew out of my religious faith, but faith isn’t the only thing that gives people direction. For example, one of my former students decided that his purpose was to bring honesty and economic prosperity to his country and to raise children who were as capably committed to this cause, and to each other, as he was. His purpose is focused on family and others—as mine is.

The choice and successful pursuit of a profession is but one tool for achieving your purpose. But without a purpose, life can become hollow.

Allocate Your Resources

Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy.

I have a bunch of “businesses” that compete for these resources: I’m trying to have a rewarding relationship with my wife, raise great kids, contribute to my community, succeed in my career, contribute to my church, and so on. And I have exactly the same problem that a corporation does. I have a limited amount of time and energy and talent. How much do I devote to each of these pursuits?

Allocation choices can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended. Sometimes that’s good: Opportunities that you never planned for emerge. But if you misinvest your resources, the outcome can be bad. As I think about my former classmates who inadvertently invested for lives of hollow unhappiness, I can’t help believing that their troubles relate right back to a short-term perspective.

When people who have a high need for achievement—and that includes all Harvard Business School graduates—have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.

If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.

Create a Culture

There’s an important model in our class called the Tools of Cooperation, which basically says that being a visionary manager isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s one thing to see into the foggy future with acuity and chart the course corrections that the company must make. But it’s quite another to persuade employees who might not see the changes ahead to line up and work cooperatively to take the company in that new direction. Knowing what tools to wield to elicit the needed cooperation is a critical managerial skill.

The theory arrays these tools along two dimensions—the extent to which members of the organization agree on what they want from their participation in the enterprise, and the extent to which they agree on what actions will produce the desired results. When there is little agreement on both axes, you have to use “power tools”—coercion, threats, punishment, and so on—to secure cooperation. Many companies start in this quadrant, which is why the founding executive team must play such an assertive role in defining what must be done and how. If employees’ ways of working together to address those tasks succeed over and over, consensus begins to form. MIT’s Edgar Schein has described this process as the mechanism by which a culture is built. Ultimately, people don’t even think about whether their way of doing things yields success. They embrace priorities and follow procedures by instinct and assumption rather than by explicit decision—which means that they’ve created a culture. Culture, in compelling but unspoken ways, dictates the proven, acceptable methods by which members of the group address recurrent problems. And culture defines the priority given to different types of problems. It can be a powerful management tool.

In using this model to address the question, How can I be sure that my family becomes an enduring source of happiness?, my students quickly see that the simplest tools that parents can wield to elicit cooperation from children are power tools. But there comes a point during the teen years when power tools no longer work. At that point parents start wishing that they had begun working with their children at a very young age to build a culture at home in which children instinctively behave respectfully toward one another, obey their parents, and choose the right thing to do. Families have cultures, just as companies do. Those cultures can be built consciously or evolve inadvertently.

If you want your kids to have strong self-esteem and confidence that they can solve hard problems, those qualities won’t magically materialize in high school. You have to design them into your family’s culture—and you have to think about this very early on. Like employees, children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.

Avoid the “Marginal Costs” Mistake

We’re taught in finance and economics that in evaluating alternative investments, we should ignore sunk and fixed costs, and instead base decisions on the marginal costs and marginal revenues that each alternative entails. We learn in our course that this doctrine biases companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed in the past, instead of guiding them to create the capabilities they’ll need in the future. If we knew the future would be exactly the same as the past, that approach would be fine. But if the future’s different—and it almost always is—then it’s the wrong thing to do.

This theory addresses the third question I discuss with my students—how to live a life of integrity (stay out of jail). Unconsciously, we often employ the marginal cost doctrine in our personal lives when we choose between right and wrong. A voice in our head says, “Look, I know that as a general rule, most people shouldn’t do this. But in this particular extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s OK.” The marginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems alluringly low. It suckers you in, and you don’t ever look at where that path ultimately is headed and at the full costs that the choice entails. Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of “just this once.”

I’d like to share a story about how I came to understand the potential damage of “just this once” in my own life. I played on the Oxford University varsity basketball team. We worked our tails off and finished the season undefeated. The guys on the team were the best friends I’ve ever had in my life. We got to the British equivalent of the NCAA tournament—and made it to the final four. It turned out the championship game was scheduled to be played on a Sunday. I had made a personal commitment to God at age 16 that I would never play ball on Sunday. So I went to the coach and explained my problem. He was incredulous. My teammates were, too, because I was the starting center. Every one of the guys on the team came to me and said, “You’ve got to play. Can’t you break the rule just this one time?”

I’m a deeply religious man, so I went away and prayed about what I should do. I got a very clear feeling that I shouldn’t break my commitment—so I didn’t play in the championship game.

In many ways that was a small decision—involving one of several thousand Sundays in my life. In theory, surely I could have crossed over the line just that one time and then not done it again. But looking back on it, resisting the temptation whose logic was “In this extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s OK” has proven to be one of the most important decisions of my life. Why? My life has been one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over in the years that followed.

The lesson I learned from this is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.

Remember the Importance of Humility

I got this insight when I was asked to teach a class on humility at Harvard College. I asked all the students to describe the most humble person they knew. One characteristic of these humble people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt good about who they were. We also decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others. Good behavior flows naturally from that kind of humility. For example, you would never steal from someone, because you respect that person too much. You’d never lie to someone, either.

It’s crucial to take a sense of humility into the world. By the time you make it to a top graduate school, almost all your learning has come from people who are smarter and more experienced than you: parents, teachers, bosses. But once you’ve finished at Harvard Business School or any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you’ll interact with on a day-to-day basis may not be smarter than you. And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited. Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself—and you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves, too. When we see people acting in an abusive, arrogant, or demeaning manner toward others, their behavior almost always is a symptom of their lack of self-esteem. They need to put someone else down to feel good about themselves.

Choose the Right Yardstick

This past year I was diagnosed with cancer and faced the possibility that my life would end sooner than I’d planned. Thankfully, it now looks as if I’ll be spared. But the experience has given me important insight into my life.

I have a pretty clear idea of how my ideas have generated enormous revenue for companies that have used my research; I know I’ve had a substantial impact. But as I’ve confronted this disease, it’s been interesting to see how unimportant that impact is to me now. I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched.

I think that’s the way it will work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success."

Enjoy

Guru Poornima

2010-07-26T21:36:00.022-04:00

Yesterday - 25th July 2010 was Guru Purnima. On this day, disciples offer gratitude or pay respect to their Guru (Spiritual Guide). Before I go any further lets be clear on a few questions:

1. What does the word Guru mean?

2. Why does a person needs Guru and

3. What happens when you get a Guru?

In sanskrit Gu means darkness and Ru means light. Guru is someone who dispels the darkness, darkness here is due to ignorance. So the job of a Guru is to bring you out of ignorance into the realm of knowledge and make you realize that there is so much more to life then the small cocoonish world we all live in. It is like a frog in a well who thinks that there is no world beyond this small space. Similarly, when there is ignorance the vision gets narrow and we are not able to see things in their totality. So in short, Guru is like a coach. The players in a soccer team have tremendous talent individually but it is the coach that brings the best out of the team. Similarly, when you get a Guru he makes you realize that there is so much to life than getting angry, holding grudges and taking revenge. You know your happiness is much more precious than all these things. Guru's job is to channelize the life force in us, just as water without banks is flood. But if the same water is flowed between banks it can be used to generate electricity. Similarly, when life force gets channelized all the other dimensions physical, mental, emotional and social are drastically improved. As at the end of the day life is nothing but a play of emotions, energies and outlook.

This year the Guru Poornima celebrations were in Hartford, Connecticut. We rented a car and drove from NYC to Hartford. The journey was pretty awesome and fun filled, we discussed a variety issues like operations of Armani Exchange to Karma and reincarnation. The event was in a Convention Center which was HUGE HUGE and very beautiful. The music, food, people were all great and I had a very good time. It was nice to see 5000 people from 50 different countries and different backgrounds come together in the spirit of celebration.

One of the few events not to be missed.......

Later

Structure of Life - Concluding PArt

2010-07-19T09:59:00.007-04:00

Building on the Tree of Life from the lastpost. There are 2 worlds in which all of live -

1. Internal World

2. External World

The internal world consists of 7 layers of existence - body, breath, mind, intellect, memory, ego, self/soul. Where as the external world consists of 3 entities - people, situations, things. We may be with the best of people, in the most favorable situations and with nicest things; but if we are not happy from inside then all these are of no use. The point here is that the quality of our life is determined by the internal world not the external. I am not saying that you should dismiss the external world, I totally agree that they have their importance. But if they become the axis of life then it will be a problem.

Our mind has been conditioned to believe that life will be better only if I fix the outside (external). It is this misconception that is making you give so much attention to the outside and not pay attention to inside. But if you want to live life exuberantly, fully or change the way you live you should pay attention to inside i.e. attending to the source not the consequence, attending to the root not the flowers or fruits. As if the roots/source are taken care of the fruits/results will happen the way you want them to happen.

How do you define internal well being:

Disease free body,

Quiver free breath,

Confusion free mind,

Inhibition free intellect,

Trauma free memory,

Ego that encompasses everyone,

Sorrow free self/soul**.

Bye

** - Taken from a talk by Sri Sri Ravishankar in Wahington D.C, 2006.

The STRUCTURE of Life

2010-07-01T16:55:00.005-04:00

Hi.

Yesterday night, I came with a nice tree - structure identifying the important things that govern/effect the life of all of us.

I will go in more detail in the upcoming posts.

Love

Vegeterian Indian Curry

2010-06-27T17:23:00.002-04:00

Here is a cool recipe for Indian Curry .....enjoy....

Summer Season and Bike Ride Across Hudson......

2010-06-11T11:16:00.021-04:00

The George Washington Bridge - Connecting NY and NJ

Summers are always a welcome change in a city that sees harsh winters with gusty winds. The air is light and vibrant, people relatively less grumpy and nature at its full bloom with trees getting back to their true colors and flowers coming out. Apparently, the campus (Columbia University) is dull during this time as most of the students head back home.

View of New York City from GWB

During summers I usually pick up a couple of outdoor activities like biking, swimming, hiking, playing firs-bee, or sometimes just sitting in central park with the weekend edition of New York Times. A week ago I was invited by one of my friends for a bike ride across the Hudson, to which I graciously agreed. We plannned on crossing the George Washington Bridge (GWB) to New Jersy, heading to a state park and then coming back to New York. Interestingly I found that GWB has the greatest capacity of any bridge in the world, carrying approximately 106 million vehicles per year, making it the world's busiest motor vehicle bridge.

Me (left) and Nils at the State Park

My partner for the ride was Nils - a cool french guy in our lab. He is one of those people who are so social that they can get along with anyone and everyone. One of his other quality is that he can make some of the most offensive jokes without offending you. He is an avid biker. The ride was pretty intense as at times I had to push really really hard to keep him in sight, and he was riding quite fast. Some of the roads were so steep that I almost thought my organs will come out if I put in more effort. But also there was a sweet satisfaction of completing the stretch and then enjoying the ride downwards where you just feel the cool air on the body and let go of everything.

Intense physical exercises like biking and running give a certain kind of pleasantness to the mood, the same is the experience of a deep meditation. After a while all the thoughts are gone and you are just in the moment, there is a certain kind of stillness in the air as though time has frozen, the body feels light, the mind is alert and relaxed at the same time. I got the same feeling and lost the track of time while gazing the sunset, marveling the beauty of nature and having a deep sense of gratitude towards life and its gifts....

So Long
....A

Lesson of a life....Concluding part

2010-05-11T19:37:00.009-04:00

Contd. from the last post.....

I went to one of the desk and started working on my stuff. After some time this dude comes and tells me " I did not want you to take a picture while I am working". I replied " Yes, I know and I am sorry about that, I already deleted that pic. And FYI you were nowhere in the picture". He listen and replies " But that isn't the reason I am telling you this". Then WHAT I shouted in a slightly rude voice.

He looks a bit surprised and tells me" The reason I gestured you to stop was because the chemicals in that room are sensitive to white light, and I had a bottle that was open. Since the flash of the camera was on it would have been bad for my experiments". As soon as I heard this I was dumbfounded for 2 reasons. First, I was annoyed at my stupidity, as I had been using that room for over 2 years and second, I was cursing my mind as to how quickly I made a judgement about that person. Without, knowing the facts or the actual situation my mind had drawn a conclusion.

This lead me to some introspection about my mind, and emotions. And how easily it is for each one of us to make judgements about people, their nature, behavior or in extreme cases character itself. Though some of you may say that - Good judgement comes from experience and experience comes form bad judgement. Agreed, but the catch here is - as long as we are aware that we have made an error and have the humility to rectify the thinking. Eventually, after observing the mind over a period of mind we see that there is no point in having prejudiced against people just because someone told something about them or you saw them in an awkward situation. As everything in the world changes with time. The key is to approach everything in life - people, situations, with an open and receptive mind.

Later...

Lesson of a life.....Part1

2010-05-04T16:11:00.025-04:00

Fig. Inside view of a clean room.

Many a times even small events can teach a BIG lesson. Learning depends on the level of personal awareness, alertness, attitude and adaptability. I had an opportunity to apply this to my outlook.
For my research work I have to shuttle between Columbia U and Cornell on a regular basis. I work at the Nanofabrication Facility (one of the best in the U.S - for research purpose) at Cornell. Now for those of you who do not know what a nanofab lab is. In short all of the nano/micro fabrication is done in a clean room which is space with a special environment like controlled amount of particles in air, controlled humidity and temperature etc. Even the lighting in some rooms is different as there are chemical that are sensitive to white light, so we have esp. rooms (Yellow Rooms) within the clean room.

Coming to the point, a few months back I was at Cornell and working my a** off in the clean room, at one point I got so inundated with work that it was time to do something different. Incidentally, I had bought my camera in the facility, so I thought why not do some photography.

Fig. Me preparing to use chemicals (Note the fake smile - just for the camera..-:)).

Taking some pics here and there and getting myself clicked in different poses, I went outside one of the yellow rooms and started clicking. Apparently, there was a dude who was working in the room. As soon I clicked the picture, he looked at me and made gestures with his hand indicating to stop this photographic adventure. I was taken aback and though to myself come-on I am not even clicking your picture, you were nowhere in the pic. With sadness and dejection I left the spot and thought why this person is so ANAL, whats wrong with him, he must be a real - PISSY dude.

I went to one of the desk and started working on my stuff. After some time this dude comes and tells me......

What did he tell me, and what was my reaction and the lesson that came home ....will be concluded in the next post.

Bye
..A

Advantages/Disadvantages of B.S (Bull Shit)

2010-04-26T16:41:00.019-04:00

Once upon a time there was a bird who was BFF with a bull. It was a symbiotic relationship, where the bird took out ticks from the bull hair and in return the bull allowed the bird to sit on it. A time passed by the bird got old and fat. One day with dejection she said " If only I could once climb the top of that tree and marvel at the beauty of nature, I will be so happy. Gone are the days when I used to reach the top in minutes. Now my body is too old and fat to fly that far." The bull thought for a moment and replied " You can still do it, if you eat a little of my dung everyday for 2 weeks by the end I guarantee you will be able to reach the top of the tree". The bird was furious and with discernible anger she started arguing with the bull. Finally, the bull was able to persuade the bird to eat the shit for 2 weeks.

After 2 weeks the bird tries to fly to reach the top, and AHA!! it is able to fly high and high and reach the top. Once at the top, it is lost in the beauty of nature and gazes at the pulchritude of nature in absolute awe.

At some distance from the tree a farmer was relaxing in his old rock chair with some coffee and cake. Suddenly, he notices this big, fat bird sitting on top of the tree. He gets his shot gun and shoots the bird and it comes crashing on the

ground - DEAD.

Moral of the story is -- "Sometimes, even BULLSHIT can take you to the top, but it won't let you stay there for long".

Peace...
....A