Tuesday, November 27, 2012

We Make Our Life What We Will

My friend, your theory of humankind's insignificance is premised on the principles of Duality. This attitude is the root cause for much of the problems that the world faces today.


The great teachers of antiquity, on the other hand, have emphasized Oneness(Advait) and interdependence(Vasudhaiv Kutumbakam) as the organizing principles of Life.

This confusion is understandable. Our bodies give an illusion of Separateness. But the body is essentially made from the Breath, we are all equalized in the breath,derived from the same air and Aakash which envelops all life forms from here to infinity..If we look deeper, the body is nothing but a congeries of electro-magnetic energy. And this is derived by reducing Spirit to the lowest frequency. Conversely, the Spirit is nothing but matter raised to the highest frequency.

So there is a seamless interconnection, a unity and utter inter- dependance of all life forms. It is this interchangeability between matter and energy(or Spirit) that is missed by the materialists and the Dualists.

The tragedy of the human race is that it confuses itself to be a drop instead of the entire Ocean itself. As a drop of water it is, indeed, insignificant and powerless. But, as the Ocean, it has the entire power of the Cosmos working in him and with him.As essentially Energy, that we are,how can there be a Separateness of the drop from the Ocean.

Attitude is everything, my friend. We make our life what we will.And Aanapansati, being with the breath, that the Great Buddha taught, equalizes us with all life forms and teaches us the principles of oneness,love and the sheer effervescence of all life forms, principles so critically needed in this world of endless inequality and strife.



Trust the Mass Media at your Peril

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ReplyReply AllMove...importantMessages from LIFEMNYLQuest-NetSynced Messages Flag this messageFw: Who's Anti- Women, Modi or the Media?Thursday, November 22, 2012 9:01 PMFrom: This sender is DomainKeys verified"avinash sahay" View contact detailsTo: "Avinash K. Sahay" , "Atul Pranay" , "Devashish Roy Choudhury" , "Anuradha Mukherjee" , "Durga Charan Dash" , "Mahendra Singh" , "Jagtar Singh" , "Sridhar Karavadi" , "K. Nageshwar Rao" , "Sailendra Mamidi" , "Mohammad Wasimul Haque" , "Nitin Gupta" , "Rakesh Bhaskar" , "Pramod Kumar" , "P.K. Shrivastava" , "Bommareddy Gangadhara reddy" , "R. Bhama" , "Ruby Srivastava" , "Ramesh Kumar" , "Susie S. Varghese" , "Shyam Kumar" , "Smita Jhingran" , "S. Venkateswarlu" ... more















Friends,

I am no votary of any political party.In my view all political parties have ceased to lead the polity to provide any real well being to the great masses of our fellow men.I fervently hope and wish for another Chanakya, Gandhi or Mandela to rise and bring light and rationality to this beloved country of ours which was the richest country in the world, at least till AD 1800. Meanwhile many superpowers rose and fell while others took over. But for this great land there has been a steady decline thereafter.

This story, by a respected journalist, is forwarded only for the purpose of highlighting the utterly biased reporting of the TV channels of which our chattering classes, which includes us with a capital U, fall hook, line and sinker for.



Best regards,

Avinash

http://poshaning.blogspot.com











Date: Thursday, 15 November, 2012, 5:29 AMThe Indian ExpressThursday, November 15, 2012

Who’s anti-women, Modi or the media?













By Madhu Kishwar, Women's Right Activist & anEminent Editor



We know what Narendra Modi said about Sunanda Tharoor. But we weren’t told about the rest of that speech !!

Now that the pious outrage over Narendra Modi’s tasteless remark describing Sunanda Pushkar as a “50-crore rupee girlfriend” of Shashi Tharoor has subsided, I hope we can examine the issue in perspective.







I write this after viewing Modi’s entire speech on YouTube, delivered during the election campaign in Himachal Pradesh. It provides an illustrative example of how our media steadfastly avoids discussion on serious issues and picks up only sensational and titillating tidbits, especially with regard to women, even while pretending to be guardians of women’s rights and honour.







The bulk of Modi’s speech dealt with burning issues such as price rise and Centre-state relations. He focused in particular on the impact of inflation on poor households and addressed specific issues concerning women among the masses. For example, when talking about the effect of the quantum leap in the price of gas cylinders, he expressed concern that the unrealistic quota of six gas cylinders per household per year would affect people in the hill regions more adversely since the cold weather increases the consumption of gas.

He pointed out that it would force poorer households to revert to using firewood.That, in turn, would increase women’s drudgery, since they would have to spend hours cutting and gathering fuel wood from forests leading to further deforestation.







He then described how the Central government had torpedoed the piped gas supply programme of the Gujarat government, claiming that the state had already provided cooking gas pipelines in 300 villages covering seven lakh households. His plan was to have covered 20 lakh households by this year. Piped gas costs half as much as cylindered gas. But the UPA government passed a law stipulating that only the Central government can supply piped gas.







As per Modi’s claim, that project would have saved the Centre Rs 15,000 crore worth of cooking gas subsidy and spared three crore gas cylinders for use elsewhere, but it was sabotaged because the Congress felt threatened by the growing support for Modi among the women of Gujarat. He then declared that he had filed a petition in the Supreme Court to challenge this needless encroachment on the powers of the state government.







Modi also talked of perennial power shortages and blackouts in the rest of the country while Gujarat had succeeded in providing uninterrupted electricity to every single village and household.

Access to affordable and efficient forms of cooking is an issue of utmost importance for virtually every woman in India. It is a life and death issue for poorrural households where women have to spend hours walking miles on rough terrains scrounging for fuel wood, cutting thorny bushes and trees and carrying loads of firewood for cooking on smoky chulhas that further endanger their health. Deforestation is also a life and death issue for people who live in hilly regions, especially women, because with disappearing forests, fuel, water and fodder become scarce and landslides become a common occurrence.

Thus it is evident that the basic and fundamental essence of Modi's whole speech was his strong sense of concern towards the rural group of women ( who bear the major brunt of Congress policy) vis - a - vis the modern uber-rich upper strata women like "you know who" .

So where is the question of sexist or anti-feminine attitude ? On the contrary, if anything !!

Yes, the choice of words and pronouncement was rustic, inappropriate and could have been more subtle or diplomatic - but then, people like Digvijay Singh, Renuka Chowdhary ( hear her use unwomanly languageesp when reffering to Baba Ramdev ) and Manish Tiwary have been definitely much more Crass and downright rude & austic even when at their very best !!





Finally, Modi critiqued Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi for bragging in election rallies that the Congress party was the one facilitating development by giving money grants to state governments while state governments ignored or mismanaged development works. Modi echoed Nitish Kumar, saying that the Congress talks as if the money coming from the Centre is its personal wealth, which it is distributing as charity.







Neither print nor electronic media chose to investigate and discuss whether the claims made by Modi regarding the piped gas project and universal rural electrification in Gujarat are accurate or exaggerated. Similarly, the Congress party’s use of Central funds to arm-twist chief ministers undermines federalism and vitiates Centre-state relations, impairing the health of our democracy.

The Centre’s near-total monopoly over key sources of taxation leaves state governments at the mercy of the Delhi durbar, distorts state policies and development programmes. For example, most state governments end up pushing liquor sales because that is one of the few sources of revenue they can impose directly. Villages that lack clean drinking water have a plentiful supply of government-patronised liquor shops. This drains out incomes of poor households, leads to greater domestic violence and strengthens the hold of political goondas who own these liquor thekas in villages.







But the media did not spend a fraction of the time discussing these vital issues concerning women and democracy. Instead, for hours and days on end, we heard militant feminists and uppity journalistsbreathing fire and brimstone and TV anchors emoting profusely only over the insult levelled by Modi at Shashi Tharoor’s wife !







If Modi’s concern for reducing women’s drudgery is genuine, if he has actually delivered piped gas to seven lakh rural households and intends to cover all the rest, if every household in rural Gujarat is getting round the clock power supply,then his frivolous remark against Sunanda Tharoor is not enough to damn him for being anti-women. Mere lip sympathy for women won’t do. I prefer politicians who care for women’s well-being in concrete ways.







The purpose of writing this is neither to defend Modi, nor brush away his uncouth remark.

It is only to highlight the fact that when serious issues are shoved under the carpet and a highly disproportionate amount of time is spent on relatively frivolous issues like cricket and films by our national media, is it not fair to complain that large sections of our journalist biradari, especially our 24x7 news channels, are trivialising politics in general and women’s concerns in particular in their insatiable hunger for high-decibel cockfights over sensational sound bytes?

No politician dare marginalise the life concerns of the mass of our women as systematically as large sections of our media do, with their disproportionate attention to glamour dolls and the doings of the fashionable elite. It is easier to call monstrous politicians to account than media monsters.







I know that by writing this piece I will be damned forever by my “secular” and "feminist"friends.

To those who see Modi as evil incarnate and want to see him defeated, I can only request: Please have the courage to stay close to facts and fight him on his home ground. Taking potshots at a straw man or caricature will only weaken the case against him.

Give the Devil his due, viz be fair to a person in totality and not by picking on isolated or selective utterences.

Thewriter is professor, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, an active Feminist and founder editor ‘Manushi’.






Don't be Snooty about Politics and Politicians

Friends,


This story in the International Herald Tribune has been an eye opener in ways more than one. We, the chattering classes, are prone to demonize all and sundry at the drop of the hat. This demeans us much, much more than the things and people we rail against. More often our ire is borne out of pure envy than anything else. Our morals are pathetic and our so called "intellectualism" and "rationality" more so

This article highlights why we should be giving the devil more due than we have done so far.How the politicians have to tread the very difficult task of high moral visiona and low cunning.

Criticism is crass. As Gandhi so famously said, Be the Change You Want to See in the World.



Why We Love Politics

We live in an anti-political moment, when many people — young people especially — think politics is a low, nasty, corrupt and usually fruitless business. It’s much nobler to do community service or just avoid all that putrid noI hope everybody who shares this anti-political mood will go out to see “Lincoln,” directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Tony Kushner. The movie portrays the nobility of politics in exactly the right way.

It shows that you can do more good in politics than in any other sphere. You can end slavery, open opportunity and fight poverty. But you can achieve these things only if you are willing to stain your own character in order to serve others — if you are willing to bamboozle, trim, compromise and be slippery and hypocritical.

The challenge of politics lies precisely in the marriage of high vision and low cunning. Spielberg’s “Lincoln” gets this point. The hero has a high moral vision, but he also has the courage to take morally hazardous action in order to make that vision a reality.

To lead his country through a war, to finagle his ideas through Congress, Lincoln feels compelled to ignore court decisions, dole out patronage, play legalistic games, deceive his supporters and accept the fact that every time he addresses one problem he ends up creating others down the road.

Politics is noble because it involves personal compromise for the public good. This is a self-restrained movie that celebrates people who are prudent, self-disciplined, ambitious and tough enough to do that work.

The movie also illustrates another thing: that politics is the best place to develop the highest virtues. Politics involves such a perilous stream of character tests: how low can you stoop to conquer without destroying yourself; when should you be loyal to your team and when should you break from it; how do you wrestle with the temptations of fame — that the people who can practice it and remain intact, like Lincoln, Washington or Churchill, are incredibly impressive.

The movie shows a character-building trajectory, common among great politicians, which you might call the trajectory from the Gettysburg Address to the Second Inaugural.

In the Gettysburg phase, a leader expresses grand ideas. This, frankly, is relatively easy. Lots of people embrace grand ideals or all-explaining ideologies. But satisfied with that they become morally infantile. They refuse to compromise, insult their opponents and isolate themselves on the perch of their own solipsism.

But a politician like Lincoln takes the next step in the trajectory. He has to deal with other people. Spielberg’s “Lincoln” does a nice job celebrating an underappreciated art, the art of legislating.

The movie is about pushing the 13th Amendment through the House of Representatives. The political operatives Lincoln hires must pay acute attention to the individual congressmen in order to figure out which can be appealed to through the heart and which through the wallet.

Lincoln plays each potential convert like a musical instrument, appealing to one man’s sense of idealism, another’s fraternal loyalty. His toughest job is to get the true believers on his own side to suppress themselves, to say things they don’t believe in order not to offend the waverers who are needed to get the amendment passed.

That leads to the next step in the character-building trajectory, what you might call the loneliness of command. Toward the end of the civil war, Lincoln had to choose between two rival goods, immediate peace and the definitive end of slavery. He had to scuttle a peace process that would have saved thousands of lives in order to achieve a larger objective.

He had to discern the core good, legal equality, among a flurry of other issues. He had to use a constant stream of words, stories, allusions and arguments to cajole people. He had to live with a crowd of supplicants forever wanting things at the door without feeling haughty or superior to them.

If anything, the movie understates how hard politics can be. The moral issue here is a relatively clean one: slavery or no slavery. Most issues are not that simple. The bill in question here is a constitutional amendment. There’s no question of changing this or that subsection and then wondering how much you’ve destroyed the whole package.

Politicians who can navigate such challenges really do emerge with the sort of impressive weight expressed in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. It’s a speech that acknowledges that there is moral ambiguity on both sides. It’s a speech in which Lincoln, in the midst of the fray, is able to take a vantage point above it, embodying a tragic and biblical perspective on human affairs. Lincoln’s wisdom emerges precisely from the fact that he’s damaged goods.

Politics doesn’t produce many Lincolns, but it does produce some impressive people, and sometimes, great results. Take a few hours from the mall. See the movie.



Our Brain is the Greatest SuperComputer Ever Built





Super Brain Beyond BoundariesBy: Deepak Chopra on Nov 23, 2012
2973 Views
32 ResponsesCategoryScience of SpiritualityADD TO SPIRITUAL DIARYTags : God, Mind, Consciousness, Buddha, Jesus, Brain, BoundariesToday we walk around assuming that each of us has a mind, holding on to a prized piece of consciousness the way sailors once held on to lodestones. But the truth is that we participate in One mind, which hasn’t lost its infinite status by existing in the small packages of individual human beings.







We are so attached to our own thoughts and desires that we easily say “my mind.” But consciousness could be a field like electromagnetism, extending throughout the universe. Electrical signals permeate the brain, but we don’t say “my electricity,” and it’s dubious that we should say “my mind.”







…The brains of the Buddha, Jesus, and rishis reached a level that has inspired us for centuries, but as a biological creation, their brains were no different from that of any healthy adult today. The Buddha’s brain followed where his mind led, which is why all the great spiritual teachers declared that anyone could make the same journey that they did. It’s only a matter of setting your foot on the path and paying attention to the subtle signals picked up by your brain. Since it is attuned to the quantum level, your brain can receive anything that creation has to offer. In that sense, the great saints, sages and seers weren’t more favoured by God than you and I are; they were braver about following a trail of clues that led them to the very source of their awareness…







The barriers that keep us earthbound are of our own making. They include the barrier that divides the world “in here” from the world “out there.” Another barrier isolates the human mind as a unique product in the universe, which is otherwise devoid of intelligence – or so the prevailing theories of cosmology assert. In pockets of speculative thinking, however, a growing number of cosmologists have found the courage to look in a different direction, toward a universe teeming with intelligence, creativity, and Self-awareness. Such a universe would indeed know that we were coming…







Reality-making is every person’s task. There is no real look to the world, no anchor we can drop once and for all. Reality keeps evolving (thank goodness), and the biggest clue to this lies inside your brain. One reality after another is packed into it. The reality of the reptilian brain is still in there, but it has been incorporated through evolution into higher realities, each one matched by a new physical structure.







The brain mirrors the reality that each person is making at this very moment. Your mind is the rider; your brain is the horse. Anyone who has ridden horses knows that they can balk, fight the bridle, become frightened, stop to munch grass by the wayside, or bolt for home. The rider hangs on, yet most of the time he is in command. We all relate to our brains by hanging on during the episodes when hardwired imprints, impulses drives, and habits are in control. No horse has ever bolted as wildly as a brain gone awry…







Most of the time, however, the mind is in the saddle. Conscious control is ours and always has been. There is no limit to what we can inspire the brain to achieve. It would be ironic if anyone turned away from super brain for being too unbelievable, because if you could only see your untapped potential, you would realize that you already own a super brain. From the epilogue to the new bestseller, ‘Super Brain,’ by Deepak Chopra & Rudolph E Tanzi, professor of neurology, Harvard Medical School. (Rider, Random House).