An Equal Life

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

We Are All Worthy of such Miracles

This brilliant piece is not just about hospitality.Its also about the possibilities that could lie in store for any of us, provided we rid ourselves of the tyranny, and the prison, of our logical,intellectual mind and embrace the Totality of the Consciousness that we actually are.
Our Spirit, the Totality of who we are, remains unexplored and untapped. Indeed, the "Rationalists" have dismissed it as bumkum, mere "faith" and they erroneously give to "Science" a very narrow field of operation. Science is wide enough to embrace the whole of Life, not only that revealed by the intellectual mind, as embodied in the Newtonian-Cartesian-Einsteinian paradigm. In this sense Science, if properly understood, is co-terminus with Spirit itself, the Totality of Consciousness, that creates this Cosmos.We don't need any Crusaders for Science.Its methodology is so firm that it can save itself.

Therefore,when the workings of the Spirit are now beginning to be understood,even a faint ray thereof,the time may just be ripe to free ourselves of our intellectual prisons and create a better Science. Indeed a miraculous life,not only for ourselves, but for the whole of humankind.And, thereby, breathe the air of freedom and exhilaration from the present travails that the humankind is stuck up with.

Those who Ask shall,undoubtedly, Receive from the same Source that creates everything.We are All worthy of such miracles.The point,however,is to Create these as our life's realities.

Best regards,
Avinash
http://poshaning.blogspot.com/

--- Forwarded by Krishan Kalra

Hi,
>
>
> Got to read this short bit sent by my friend and thought it apt to
> share with all – most of us would like to believe that we are a part
> of the Service Industry and that Customer is King and so on . . . if
> there was a good story to tell to emphasize on Customer Service, this
> might be it.
>
>
>
> One stormy night many years ago, an elderly man and his wife entered
> the lobby of a small hotel in Philadelphia. Trying to get out of the
> rain, the couple approached the front desk hoping to get some shelter
> for the night.
>
>
> "Could you possibly give us a room here?" the husband asked. The
> clerk, a friendly man with a winning smile, looked at the couple and
> explained that there were three conventions in town.
>
>
> "All of our rooms are taken," the clerk said. "But I can't send a nice
> couple like you out into the rain at one o'clock in the morning. Would
> you perhaps be willing to sleep in my room? It's not exactly a suite,
> but it will be good enough to make you folks comfortable for the
> night."
>
>
> When the couple declined, the young man pressed on. "Don't worry about
> me - I'll be just fine here in the office," the clerk told them. So
> the couple agreed.
>
>
> As he paid his bill the next morning, the elderly man said to the
> clerk, "You are the kind of manager who should be the boss of the best
> hotel in the United States. Maybe someday I'll build one for you."
>
>
> The clerk looked at them and smiled. The three of them had a good laugh.
>
>
> As they drove away, the elderly couple agreed that the helpful clerk
> was indeed exceptional, as finding people who are both friendly and
> helpful isn't easy.
>
>
> Two years passed. The clerk had almost forgotten the incident when he
> received a letter from the old man. It recalled that stormy night and
> enclosed a round-trip ticket to New York, asking him to pay them a
> visit.
>
>
> The old man met him in New York, and led him to the corner of Fifth
> Avenue and 34th Street. He then pointed to a great new building there,
> a palace of reddish stone, with turrets and watchtowers thrusting up
> to the sky.
>
>
> "That," said the older man, "is the hotel I have just built for you to manage."
>
>
> "You must be joking," the young man said.
>
> "I can assure you I am not," said the older man, a sly smile playing
> around his mouth.
>
>
> ............. The older man's name was William Waldorf Astor, and the
> magnificent structure was the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
>
>
> ...............The young clerk who became its first manager was George
> C. Boldt.
>
>
> This young clerk never foresaw the turn of events that would lead him
> to become the manager of one of the world's most glamorous hotels.
> This is a True Occurrence!
>
>
> Remember Always -- "We are not to turn our backs on those who are in
> need, for we might be entertaining angels".
>
>
> And ....... Life is more accurately measured by the lives you touch
> than the things you acquire.. !
>
>
>
>
>
>

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Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Your Thinking, Egoistic Mind Keeps you Permanently Stressed

This can happen when you stop identifying yourself with your mind, writes ECKHART TOLLE

The greater part of most people’s thinking is involuntary, automatic, and repetitive. It is no more than a kind of mental static and fulfils no real purpose. Strictly speaking, you don’t think; thinking happens to you. The statement “I think” implies volition. It implies that you have a say in the matter, that there is choice involved on your part. For most people, this is not yet the case. “I think” is just as false a statement as “I digest” or “I circulate my blood.” Digestion happens, circulation happens, thinking happens.

The voice in the head has a life of its own. Most people are at the mercy of that voice; they are possessed by thought, by the mind. And since the mind is conditioned by the past, you are then forced to re-enact the past again and again. The Eastern term for this is karma. When you are identified with that voice, you don’t know this, of course. If you knew it, you would no longer be possessed because you are only truly possessed when you mistake the possessing entity for who you are, that is to say, when you become it.

For thousands of years, humanity has been increasingly mindpossessed, failing to recognise the possessing entity as “not self.” Through complete identification with the mind, a false sense of self — the ego — came into existence. The density of the ego depends on the degree to which you the consciousness — are identified with your mind, with thinking. Thinking is no more than a tiny aspect of the totality of consciousness, the totality of who you are.

The degree of identification with the mind differs from person to person. Some people enjoy periods of freedom from it, however brief, and the peace, joy, and aliveness they experience in those moments make life worth living. These are also the moments when creativity, love, and compassion arise. Others are constantly trapped in the egoic state. They are alienated from themselves, as well as from others and the world around them. When you look at them, you may see the tension in their face, perhaps the furrowed brow, or the absent or staring expression in their eyes. Most of their attention is absorbed by thinking, and so they don’t really see you, and they are not really listening to you. They are not present in any situation, their attention being either in the past or future which, of course, exist only in them as thought forms. Or they relate to you through some kind of role they play and so are not themselves. Most people are alienated from who they are, and some are alienated to such a degree that the way they behave and interact is recognised as “phony” by almost everyone, except those who are equally phony, equally alienated from who they are.

Alienation means you don’t feel at ease in any situation, any place, or with any person, not even with yourself. You are always trying to get ‘home’ but never feel at home. Some of the greatest writers of the 20th century, such as Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, T S Eliot, and James Joyce, recognised alienation as the universal dilemma of human existence, probably felt it deeply within themselves and so were able to express it brilliantly in their works. They don’t offer a solution. Their contribution is to show us a reflection of the human predicament so that we can see it more clearly. To see one’s predicament clearly is a first step toward going beyond it.

Extracted from A New Earth

By Echart Tolle

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Monday, August 20, 2012

Don't Turn Science into Another Religion

Its not a question of Absolutes or Diversity alone.Ofcourse, Life is full of diversity and there cannot be any Absolute in life. But there is a school of thought which thinks that the only thing worth accepting is that coming out of so called "scientific" experiments done in laboratories based on the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm. Everything else is dismissed as bumkum, based on faith.

This school of thought does grave disservice to science itself because science,in its essence, can never be a closed ended system. In that case it will turn into another Religion.Science, like Life itself, is open ended. The Newtonian paradigm was overturned by Einsteinian Relativity which may again be superceded when another particle travelling more than the speed of light is discovered.

The point is to move on and not accept whatever "found" in scientific labs as the gospel truth.Indeed, these are often motivated by pure commerce,than by a spirit of service to humanity.There cannot be a bigger laboratory than Life. Indeed the Yogis have found many secrets of Life through Contemplation, through exploration of the hidden recesses of the human brain, of which the normal human activities using just about 10% thereof. The time tested principles of Ayurveda serves many denizens of this Earth, including in the West, quite well and there is every reason for such people to swear by the miracles experienced in their lives through Patanjali's Ashtang Yoga and by Ayurveda.

You Owe a Debt to the Unlucky

Princeton University's 2012 Baccalaureate Remarks

Posted June 3, 2012; 04:17 p.m.

Michael Lewis
June 3, 2012 — As Prepared

(NOTE: The video of Lewis' speech as delivered is available on the Princeton YouTube channel.)

Thank you. President Tilghman. Trustees and Friends. Parents of the Class of 2012. Above all, Members of the Princeton Class of 2012. Give yourself a round of applause. The next time you look around a church and see everyone dressed in black it'll be awkward to cheer. Enjoy the moment.

Thirty years ago I sat where you sat. I must have listened to some older person share his life experience. But I don't remember a word of it. I can't even tell you who spoke. What I do remember, vividly, is graduation. I'm told you're meant to be excited, perhaps even relieved, and maybe all of you are. I wasn't. I was totally outraged. Here I’d gone and given them four of the best years of my life and this is how they thanked me for it. By kicking me out.

At that moment I was sure of only one thing: I was of no possible economic value to the outside world. I'd majored in art history, for a start. Even then this was regarded as an act of insanity. I was almost certainly less prepared for the marketplace than most of you. Yet somehow I have wound up rich and famous. Well, sort of. I'm going to explain, briefly, how that happened. I want you to understand just how mysterious careers can be, before you go out and have one yourself.

I graduated from Princeton without ever having published a word of anything, anywhere. I didn't write for the Prince, or for anyone else. But at Princeton, studying art history, I felt the first twinge of literary ambition. It happened while working on my senior thesis. My adviser was a truly gifted professor, an archaeologist named William Childs. The thesis tried to explain how the Italian sculptor Donatello used Greek and Roman sculpture — which is actually totally beside the point, but I've always wanted to tell someone. God knows what Professor Childs actually thought of it, but he helped me to become engrossed. More than engrossed: obsessed. When I handed it in I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life: to write senior theses. Or, to put it differently: to write books.

Then I went to my thesis defense. It was just a few yards from here, in McCormick Hall. I listened and waited for Professor Childs to say how well written my thesis was. He didn't. And so after about 45 minutes I finally said, "So. What did you think of the writing?"

"Put it this way" he said. "Never try to make a living at it."

And I didn't — not really. I did what everyone does who has no idea what to do with themselves: I went to graduate school. I wrote at nights, without much effect, mainly because I hadn't the first clue what I should write about. One night I was invited to a dinner, where I sat next to the wife of a big shot at a giant Wall Street investment bank, called Salomon Brothers. She more or less forced her husband to give me a job. I knew next to nothing about Salomon Brothers. But Salomon Brothers happened to be where Wall Street was being reinvented—into the place we have all come to know and love. When I got there I was assigned, almost arbitrarily, to the very best job in which to observe the growing madness: they turned me into the house expert on derivatives. A year and a half later Salomon Brothers was handing me a check for hundreds of thousands of dollars to give advice about derivatives to professional investors.

Now I had something to write about: Salomon Brothers. Wall Street had become so unhinged that it was paying recent Princeton graduates who knew nothing about money small fortunes to pretend to be experts about money. I'd stumbled into my next senior thesis.

I called up my father. I told him I was going to quit this job that now promised me millions of dollars to write a book for an advance of 40 grand. There was a long pause on the other end of the line. "You might just want to think about that," he said.

"Why?"

"Stay at Salomon Brothers 10 years, make your fortune, and then write your books," he said.

I didn't need to think about it. I knew what intellectual passion felt like — because I'd felt it here, at Princeton — and I wanted to feel it again. I was 26 years old. Had I waited until I was 36, I would never have done it. I would have forgotten the feeling.

The book I wrote was called "Liar’s Poker." It sold a million copies. I was 28 years old. I had a career, a little fame, a small fortune and a new life narrative. All of a sudden people were telling me I was born to be a writer. This was absurd. Even I could see there was another, truer narrative, with luck as its theme. What were the odds of being seated at that dinner next to that Salomon Brothers lady? Of landing inside the best Wall Street firm from which to write the story of an age? Of landing in the seat with the best view of the business? Of having parents who didn't disinherit me but instead sighed and said "do it if you must?" Of having had that sense of must kindled inside me by a professor of art history at Princeton? Of having been let into Princeton in the first place?

This isn't just false humility. It's false humility with a point. My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don't want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either.

I wrote a book about this, called "Moneyball." It was ostensibly about baseball but was in fact about something else. There are poor teams and rich teams in professional baseball, and they spend radically different sums of money on their players. When I wrote my book the richest team in professional baseball, the New York Yankees, was then spending about $120 million on its 25 players. The poorest team, the Oakland A's, was spending about $30 million. And yet the Oakland team was winning as many games as the Yankees — and more than all the other richer teams.

This isn't supposed to happen. In theory, the rich teams should buy the best players and win all the time. But the Oakland team had figured something out: the rich teams didn't really understand who the best baseball players were. The players were misvalued. And the biggest single reason they were misvalued was that the experts did not pay sufficient attention to the role of luck in baseball success. Players got given credit for things they did that depended on the performance of others: pitchers got paid for winning games, hitters got paid for knocking in runners on base. Players got blamed and credited for events beyond their control. Where balls that got hit happened to land on the field, for example.

Forget baseball, forget sports. Here you had these corporate employees, paid millions of dollars a year. They were doing exactly the same job that people in their business had been doing forever. In front of millions of people, who evaluate their every move. They had statistics attached to everything they did. And yet they were misvalued — because the wider world was blind to their luck.

This had been going on for a century. Right under all of our noses. And no one noticed — until it paid a poor team so well to notice that they could not afford not to notice. And you have to ask: if a professional athlete paid millions of dollars can be misvalued who can't be? If the supposedly pure meritocracy of professional sports can't distinguish between lucky and good, who can?

The "Moneyball" story has practical implications. If you use better data, you can find better values; there are always market inefficiencies to exploit, and so on. But it has a broader and less practical message: don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.

I make this point because — along with this speech — it is something that will be easy for you to forget.

I now live in Berkeley, California. A few years ago, just a few blocks from my home, a pair of researchers in the Cal psychology department staged an experiment. They began by grabbing students, as lab rats. Then they broke the students into teams, segregated by sex. Three men, or three women, per team. Then they put these teams of three into a room, and arbitrarily assigned one of the three to act as leader. Then they gave them some complicated moral problem to solve: say what should be done about academic cheating, or how to regulate drinking on campus.

Exactly 30 minutes into the problem-solving the researchers interrupted each group. They entered the room bearing a plate of cookies. Four cookies. The team consisted of three people, but there were these four cookies. Every team member obviously got one cookie, but that left a fourth cookie, just sitting there. It should have been awkward. But it wasn't. With incredible consistency the person arbitrarily appointed leader of the group grabbed the fourth cookie, and ate it. Not only ate it, but ate it with gusto: lips smacking, mouth open, drool at the corners of their mouths. In the end all that was left of the extra cookie were crumbs on the leader's shirt.

This leader had performed no special task. He had no special virtue. He'd been chosen at random, 30 minutes earlier. His status was nothing but luck. But it still left him with the sense that the cookie should be his.

This experiment helps to explain Wall Street bonuses and CEO pay, and I'm sure lots of other human behavior. But it also is relevant to new graduates of Princeton University. In a general sort of way you have been appointed the leader of the group. Your appointment may not be entirely arbitrary. But you must sense its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything.

All of you have been faced with the extra cookie. All of you will be faced with many more of them. In time you will find it easy to assume that you deserve the extra cookie. For all I know, you may. But you'll be happier, and the world will be better off, if you at least pretend that you don't.

Never forget: In the nation's service. In the service of all nations.

Thank you.

And good luck.

__._,_.___

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