Sadhguru's talk at TED India

Nothing much left to say - he owned the stage!

The blue planet

The earth is in a very precarious position. On the one side, on a universal scale, it amounts to nothingness in size. On the other end, it is amazingly resilient. Given the uncertainty, where if the sun decides tomorrow, it can gobble up the earth in no time, it has already lasted five million years or so.

What is more, it is at that exact spot away from the sun in distance that sustains conscious life. It is also said that the water inside the earth got unlocked with precise timing to form oceans*. While I am certain there is life outside earth - by sheer probability from the vastness of the universe, there is currently no known concrete proof of conscious life outside planet earth.

This blue planet is truly a wondrous miracle. It is living two realities at the same time - potential overnight annihilation, yet this incredible colorful dance - like tightrope walking*. Somewhere, somehow, I feel that life placed the wrong sort of guests on this planet. The thing that keeps me in peace is that, tomorrow, if one smart guy nukes the planet, the earth will still be fine -just the humans would be gone. Another five thousand or ten thousand years later, after the trees and oceans and rivers are replenished, she will start from scratch - may be with a sigh! I do feel sorry for the forests, rivers and animals though.

Sorry Ma - we're too big for our shoes, and you must be smiling looking at us!

*1 - Too early, it would have vaporized into space. Too late, it would have inundated the planet without any feasibility to create life.

*2 - It is said that, if the earth was created on Jan 1st, the first humans walked in during Dec 31st, 11:45 PM!

*3 - A few years ago, I wrote a story about this. More like a rambling about what we're doing and what we can do!

Global Warming: Time lapse proof of extreme ice loss into oceans

To add to the existing "debate" and "ambiguity". I will do my bit to muddle the already existing chaos. Unless we get clarity on what's going on, aren't these evidences cause for a little bit of concern at least?

Things that hit us eventually

Things that we were stupid about
Things that we did not care about
Things that we turned our back on (passed the responsibility on)

The biggie (and the seemingly most unfair one)
Things that we were ignorant about 

Learning from (others') mistakes!

I remember that night I was standing in the balcony many years ago, holding a cigarette in my hand. I was playing out a deep dilemma whether I wanted to take in my first cigarette or not. My friend walked into the balcony, and was shocked to see the cigarette in my hand.

"What are you doing with that cigarette?"

"I am just thinking if I should smoke this or not."

"Why would you want to smoke that?"

"Just experimenting"

"Take my advice. My addiction with cigarettes started with that first one, and I am still struggling. Don't take it."

I did take it - his advice that is! And I am glad I did. Given how I handle things in my life, I am sure I would at this point be "trying" or "planning" to quit smoking. But is there anything wrong in experimenting? No! But why would you want to experiment with something that his been tried already and a historical legacy of the results are available? One reason I think is that "experimenting" results in "experience" which engages multiple dimensions of yourself to register the results. The pleasure or the mistake (pain/suffering) is stored and can be accessed, perhaps, without even thinking. The way of intelligence is different. It involves short-circuiting to the end result without experience. Which means it needs insight - shallow or deep depending on the circumstance. The deeper the insight, more are the vistas that are available for making decisions without experience. While experience is a powerful communicator of results, it is a very slow process of creation and evolution. With intelligence, very rapid strides can be made in progress (any form of progress - learning, spiritual or decision making) because bypassing experience allows leaps in the journey.

It is quite intelligent to rely on intelligence!

Creating a protective atmosphere

I feel that a lot of restlessness in the world might be loosened if only we took away some silly constraints we have. I imagine there are people who might feel a lot better if they just let out one high pitched scream. What are the possibilities of doing that today without being judged or labeled? I think even bathroom singing is an outcome of this fear of judgement.

All of this started when we asked children jumping around in the house to shut up. For a better world, I think we need to reverse this. At least in our homes. There should be at least one place where people can be without their defenses.

Help me

I takes a lot of courage to say those words.

One the one side, people might think it is a matter of finding the right person to say those words. Right person in terms of not exploiting or not looking down upon someone asking help.

But there is a larger obstacle beyond the first one - which is that of exposing one's vulnerability in asking help. This is nothing less than a stumbling block - because it involves putting all or a part of oneself aside in the process of asking help.

When you encounter such a person who can help you, the sooner you say those words, the better. And it need not be verbal.

a million shades of gray

the sky a giant canvas
on that cool dusk
a million shades of gray
splashed on it
as strokes of light and cloud
the mountain ranges afar
might have been silhouettes
the one with a peak perched on the peak
standing out on the sight
eerie to behold, 
an ominous tone it all struck
but a feeling of awe said otherwise
a thought it gave rise to
"only you can show off so much and yet be humble"

Note: I am glad I didn't have a camera then. Now it's all left to your imagination :)

Is Global Warming for real?

On the one end, we have people like Lewis Pugh swimming in the north pole, trying to gather the attention of world leaders to the momentum global warming is gathering. On the other hand, we have the people who can actually amass momentum towards the direction of reducing our emissions and in turn reduce the impact of (the hypothesized) global warming. But they are in very firm denial. Me, honestly, every cell in my body thinks GW is real. But I have no proof. I've seen people splitting their hairs arguing both sides of it. But there is a reality - and what it is, we will know in ten years from now. What if it is too late then? Seriously, either the deniers are sincerely convinced that the GW threat is a fad, or that is their pitch to maintain status quo. The latter would be such a crying shame!

The video below shows Lewis Pugh's talk at TED and a snippet of his north pole swim project. The footage that showed the polar bear and its cub brought tears to my eyes. This is such an amazing creation - and if we lose this from here, I will never be able to forgive myself. We have no capability to create an iota of this magnificence, so how come we are so irresponsible with the destruction!

Of love and righteousness

you have a thousand reasons to hate

but so few to love, oh silly human!

as leaves from the tree of life wither by

at the end of it all

"i was right" would be but just an empty shell

waiting to crumble into the sands of time!

Showing Appreciation

One of the biggest corporate mantras is to show appreciation. "Good job", "Keep it up" - these are ubiquitous phrases one encounters on a day to day basis. I am sure they mean well, but my feeling is that it inevitably degenerates to a process.

In life, it is said that everything proceeds from a be -> think -> say -> do paradigm. In other words, you "be" what you want to create, then you think about it, they say it (optionally) and then finally do. The "be" part is critical because it is vital energy for the action. I feel this "be" aspect is missing many times in the "showing appreciation" scenario. A vital connection between the appreciator and the appreciatee is missing as a result.

The fix is that all complements need to go through a "genuine feeling" quality check before they transcend into words.

* I made appreciatee up

Dhyanalinga, Death and the Andhra CM

My friend visited the Dhyanalinga yesterday, for the first time.

Inside the temple, the thought that crossed him was: this is a fleeting life and will be gone without a moment's notice. Why would that thought come to him? And when the news of the Andhra CM's demise came in, it only reinforced his thought, very strongly. He was almost teary eyed and was saying - "We do all these things in life. For what? It could all be gone in a moment!"

Very weird - the way the Dhyanalinga works. Unfortunately, I've been able to glimpse this only in fleeting moments. What does it take!

Note: It's unfortunate that the CM had to pass away like this. But we were talking about that as well in the office today. How could we not find him for 24 hours+? It looks like our technological skills are sorely lacking and reflects very badly on our state of affairs. And this is the CM! I hope and wish all that passed away in that incident passed on peacefully.

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Update - 5th Sep 2009: The next day, I saw the photograph of the Dhyanalinga on my friend's desk with fresh flowers in front of it. Whatever!

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When trouble strikes...

This is a rehash of my post in tamil:

When trouble strikes our personal lives - we have to take action. Life leaves us no other choice.

However, in the common lives we share (societal and environmental), any common issue is promptly ignored (in India this is 100% true). Throw into the mix incompetent or careless officials, you have a truly vegetating atmosphere. Normally, we do one of the things

- We learn to live tolerating the mess
- We seethe with anger, then move on with our lives
- We rot with the rotting mess

You can see this in multiple facets - traffic signals, irresponsible police work and what not. A negligible few (not so negligible in impact, as I learnt recently) learn to live without worsening the problems and do their bit to clean up. But this will work only if a sustainable mass takes this approach, and is the true long term solution. The rare few go down to the roots and clean up a problem completely.

I witnessed an example recently of Ramesh. The water in his mansion stay area was contaminated with fecal matter to the tune of 36%. I still cannot believe this percentage and the fact that the owner did nothing to address this. His account of how he faced so many hurdles over the past ten months overcoming abuse from police, the owner and finally rectified the issue is present in the following blog posts of his. He has even posted recordings of "police inquiry" and "water inspector inquiry" in his blog.

In spite of reading all this, I am in doubt if we can pursue the same course of action with the same courage and determination that he has. Perhaps, that is what separates people in quality!

1) The true face of Tamil Nadu police
2) A success from the side of Dharma

Sublimation of Sensitivity

I remember a scene from the Tamil movie Bheema.

The hero is a brute, who grows up fighting. Until, as usual, he falls in love. So he calls his roommate one morning and points to a flower.

He tells him - "See that?"
His room mate shrugs - "A flower has blossomed"
He tells his room mate - "A flower has blossomed" (hope you got the emphasis and the change in context)

Essentially, he has been living his live in one way. Until the feeling of love changes the way he looks at things that appeared mundane earlier.

At scale zero - a person butchers through life. Everything and everyone is a means to his end. Driving forces are power, food and sex.
Some where in the middle - the threshold changes. The person appreciates somethings for what they really are, but a lot of other things still remain out of grasp. Here, still the goal is to fulfill his end of things, but through subtler means - knowledge, ambition.
At scale infinity - a person is blissed out just by the sheer perception of his existence.

Unless we are at scale zero, which is very low probability, we should be able to realize that these sensitivities can be sublimated. And higher up we go, more work needs to be done and more fulfilling the experiences are.

In general, our effort should be to grasp the highest sensitivity we can imagine - or have experienced once and have fallen back for whatever reasons. The higher we go, the more vistas that open up. I don't think there is any other meaningful way to live!

Building a climate of trust

I was travelling on my 2-wheeler last night (~3AM), when a man asked me for a lift. I didn't stop.

There was no thinking involved. It was an impulse decision. But the impulse is a by product of so much that happened before. Especially, stories I heard about muggings that happened in Bangalore. Systematically, they had broken down a simple act of helping another person by making use of the feeling in itself*.

Anyway, my post was not to provide an excuse of why I did not stop my vehicle. Accounting for 80-20 probability (80 being, the man really needed a lift), I could have stopped the vehicle. But after I passed on, I felt very sad at what transpired.

So my question is, what can we do to rebuild this trust between two human beings. Especially when it costs close to nothing to help another? If I review the kind of things that are doubt prone today, it is mind boggling:

- If someone asks to watch over their bags where they step out for a moment
- If someone offers some food or snacks on the bus or train out of genuine friendliness
- If someone asks for a lift on the road
- If someone asks for five rupees to get a bus ticket back home

Can we undo the damage and bring back a trusting environment? Or beyond repair?

* - In Bangalore, they used to mug people by posing as a desperate bystander needing help. The courteous ones who stopped got mugged. Then as news spread, people started to not stop. So, the muggers enlisted a woman to stop the car. It is much harder to not stop when a desperate woman is asking for help in the night. Then, the courteous ones got mugged again. Today, no one stops. So, a really needy person owing to whatever circumstances is bound to be ignored at night.

Inside Job

A scene in Training Day:
A few thugs hold the barrel of a gun on Ethan Hawke's face. This is the kind of gun, if used on the fingers, would rip them off completely. Needless to say, Ethan Hawke is terrified to the core. But as twist of fate would have it, or his good karma (he earlier saves one of the thugs' cousin sister from danger), he comes out of it.

But the episode changes his stance totally. He walks into a very hostile neighborhood with a new found calm and does what he is supposed to do. That NDE (near death experience) mutates him completely into a new plane. However, technically, nothing much changed on the outside (a few thugs pointed a gun at him and let him go). It is just that, the incident broke some limitation inside him.

In spirituality, they say everything is an inside job. So much to the extent that it includes everything we perceive through the senses, that we think is outside, down to what we experience and how we respond. So, can we make whatever changes we need to make within us without outside help?

Eventually, the change will happen only on the inside. But we certainly can make good use of available outside help - which is essentially every life situation we face everyday!

Happiness

Happiness is a decision. In our conquest of the world, we often hand it over to the object of our conquest.

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Note: The image in this post is licensed with creative commons.

The copyright for this image belongs to deepakkt. Click on the image or here to view the image on deepakkt's website.

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Soliloquy

Over the last week, I met (came across) at least two folks who were talking to themselves. One of them was clearly distressed. I couldn't help overhearing (because he was quite loud) - and it appeared either his wife, or someone he knew well and cared about was having an affair. He wasn't aware he was talking out aloud though.

The strange thing is, there is not much difference between them and us. Most of us are soliloquists. It is just that, for some of us, the degree just crosses the bar where it moves from within one's mind to aloud for everyone to hear. But that is only of social relevance. On the existential scale, all of us are in the same boat.

What is relevant here is how much in the grip of the mind we are all in. There doesn't have to be a problem per se. The mind likes to mull over just about anything. Yesterday's match, today's movie or about tomorrow's big party! Just how fast and how needlessly the machine is spinning can be understood if we sit down and watch it for just one hour even.

So three things:

1) Judging others is meaningless. It is just that watching oneself is harder than watching others

2) Take a pause, once a while, for reflection!

3) Finally, it is action like this (in unawareness) that is said to cause karma [residual imprint of actions] - as if what is already in store isn't enough! We can do very well to not build on what we already have in store.

Match Scratch Fever

I originally posted this as a comment on Rams' blog, then realized that this is too good to stay on a comment. No substantiation required; watch this, it would be worthwhile! This is too charming [and deep] to be unnoticed!

While you're at it, you can also link back to the original post on Rams' blog and watch that as well. That would have been better as a video instead of a series of HTML pages.

This is an abundant creation

Some time back, it was mildly drizzling in Coimbatore. A friend had come to visit me at home after visiting the Isha Yoga Center, which is about 35 kms away from my place. He told me there was a torrential downpour there all through the weekend. That time, I just remarked to him - "It's funny. With the forest there, that's the place that least needs the rain."

Suddenly, it struck me, it is always that way. During one Satsang, Saduguru laughed and said*, "It's funny. The people who have a lot of need for relationships do not get them. The person who has no needs, all the people want to be around him."

This is an abundant creation. Abundance attracts abundance. The creation, just on the physical plane is so abundant. Some years back, I was reading that there are over 1500 species of catfish. Not fish, just catfish. I thought to myself at that time, "This guy is a total nut case.". The sun is so extremely powerful that it sustains the earth effortlessly. Just assuming that there were five or six more planets on the earth's orbit, it would sustain them just as easily. Yet, the sun is not even a speck on the universal scale.

It is almost as if the Universe is trying to show us through its physical immensity what lies behind that. But if you choose not to live abundantly, existence still blesses you and leaves you to live as per your wish. Most of humanity seems to have said "Yes, thank you" and have taken that option.

* - I am quoting this out of context, but it still stands on its own. It also may not be verbatim