#nalin

The Theory

2015-11-17T02:59:00.000-08:00

Swami started deteriorating after the 2004 tsunami disaster. I always believed that Swami took the brunt of the 9.1 earthquake and that it could have been worse. I thought the earth was going to slip her skin, the poles switch and Swami took much of the force onto himself to stop the poles switching.

But recently some new research has had me thinking more on this. Coronal Mass Ejections changed the very atmosphere of Earth over a thousand years ago - in the years 774 and 993. These CMEs were very powerful and created traces amounts of radioactive elements – chlorine-36, beryllium-10 and carbon-14 – when huge amounts of subatomic particles slammed into the atmosphere and terra firma.

This CMEs are regular occurrences - the Carrignton Event of 1859 created an aurora as far south as Mexicoa nd Hawaii. The electricity in the air was so dense that the telegraph worked even when the power was disconnected. A much smaller CME in 1989 caused widespread power failure and blackouts in Quebec.

More importantly, there was a coronal mass ejection in 2012, the year the Mayan said the world was to end. It was around the same size as the 1859 one but it went off in another direction and missed the Earth.

Now imagine this – Sathya Sai Baba is the Automatiku Light Suku Adi Peda Vaddu. He is charged with keeping the planetary orbits in check. What if He was aware that the 2012 CME would hit Earth? What if He decided to slightly adjust the orbit of the Earth around the Sun so as to ensure the CME would be a miss?

Did that adjustment include the 2004 earthquake – to slow down the spin, to speed it up? I don’t believe in coincidences and the ‘coincidence’ of the 2012 CME and the Mayan prophesy is a little too much to be a coincidence.

Know Thyself - Series on self analysis

2015-07-18T03:20:00.001-07:00

Know Thyself Series

#1 Who are you?

What of us is actually ours?

Our chromosomes are our parents.

Our very name is given by them.

Everyone around us, as we grow up, determines what we turn out to be – our parents, our relations, our relationships, our friends, our colleagues, our enemies.

Our qualifications are bestowed by educational institutes; our achievements by other institutes; our honours still by other institutes. We ‘earn’ them alright, but only in the light of them being given to us under certain circumstances.

Our lives are the attainments and goals that we stitch together to become us.

In the end we are nothing but a long list of things that we are or want to be.

And then we put our own spin on these things – our achievements, and hope when we die they will be remembered, even if only by our loved ones and friends. And if are we lucky, maybe they will be noted down by someone for prosperity. In most cases we make do if just our loved ones remember us with love.

Others give up on these ‘achievements’ and go their way – indulgences, decadence, selfishness, anti-social behaviour. The ‘misfits’. Or the most successful amongst us. Or the talented.

Or those who want to make a difference.

But what are we, in the end? A name to be remembered? Maybe to be honoured? Or remembered with disdain?

In the long run to the end of our lives, we may not even know who we are. We have been so busy living up to the expectations of those who make a difference in our lives that we do not know who we are, or have become.

So, who are we?

#nalin

2013-04-29T16:53:00.000-07:00

Papa Francis and grandpa Francis

We have a new Pope now. As a news junkie, my interest in the choice of the new Pope was intermittent at best, catching up with the election development on the web and on TV when I could, or when I wanted to. Didn’t even bother to check who the candidates were – just a bunch of cloaked father-figures, speaking in a variety of languages, who the media hounded to milk the papacy election event.

Given the sad state the Catholic church was in, my interest in the papal resignation and the election that followed was perfunctory at best – an organisation was seeking a head after its ill incumbent had resigned. It was not mystical or a particularly religious event as far as I was concerned.

Then the name was announced. And the fact that the new Pope was a Jesuit. The name Francis is dear to me – both personally and historically. My maternal grandfather’s name was Francis, named to honour Francis of Assisi, the saint of animals and the environment.

And thus my interest in both the papacy and the Roman Catholic Church – to which a chunk of my family belong – was piqued, again.

Of all the Christian saints, Francis is closest to my heart. It could possibility be that having a grandfather named Francis led me to delve more into the history and background of this particular saint more than others. Or it could be that I like to think Francis of Assisi as the paragon of the quintessential Christian – a follower of Christ, vowed to poverty and equality and compassion. With compassion heading the list – for compassion is not a forte of the Christian if the recipient is not a Christian.

So, are we actually going to see a different sort of papacy this time around? The past two predecessors were not so great, for the church at least. John Paul II did achieve celebrity status as a globe trotter and was popular while Benedict XVI endured a notoriety of sorts due his enforced conscription into the Hitler Youth and for sticking to the rule of the infallibility for the Church.

The Catholic Church has come under much attack and scrutiny under both these predecessors of Pope Francis. Lack of compassion for its followers, and for other branches of mankind, was one of its failings, with child abuse by the priesthood the most visible affront.

Now a Jesuit is the Pope, for the first ever. What does this entail for the

Vatican

, the Church and for the world?

The Society of Jesus (Jesuits) is the ‘enlightened’ arm of the Roman Catholic Church. Set up as a near-military order by Ignatius of Loyola after a battlefield conversion in 1534, the order is evangelical and see education as the basis of doing greater good in society.

And they have been at loggerheads with the Vatican for generations over deep-seated issues like homosexuality, abortion, women deacons and the liberation theory (with some calling the last, Christian Marxism).

From the start the Jesuits saw the Church as being in need of reform, and were kept at arms length by the Vatican for centuries due to concern for their creedal opposition and reformative fervour. Now this bunch have come into the limelight. And Pope Francis is said to be bringing with him all accoutrements of the Jesuit brotherhood to the Papacy – extreme vows of chastity, poverty and righteousness.

And he is not alone. There are several cardinals of Jesuit background around him: they had been appointed by his two predecessors during their terms in office. A veritable coup is one way of looking at it. The vindication of righteousness and truth is another way.

While the Vatican, throughout its history, has had the ear of those in power, the Jesuits were generally seen by these rulers as interfering busybodies with a social agenda. Many a times in history, it was only the Jesuits who stood between colonial powers hell bent of taking over countries in the ‘new’ world and the slavery of the natives of those countries.

Not to say they did it completely out of the goodness of their hearts, for the Jesuits have had a chequered history as well. They were responsible for the Inquisition in Portugese Goa (

India

) and have done a sterling job of garnering animosity for the Catholic Church in almost every places in the world. They are elitists of the highest order – in the “if I see something white, and the Church says it is black, we will deem it black’” kind of way.

As an evangelical order, taking the message to and converting the natives to Christianity is always the main agenda and they have done well in this area for centuries. They set up bases of operations around the world, running missions profitably and influencing the locals to a great extent, both through education and political influence. Sometimes their work has been suppressed and sometimes they have been exiled, losing everything they had built in the bargain. But they have been, and continue to be, an order of social and political importance around the world.

And they knew when to draw the line when it came to the things that mattered – compassion for all, education to break the stranglehold of Church doctrines on the masses, and “to prevent greed for money or power invading Jesuit circles”. The Nazi regime considered the Jesuits one of their most dangerous enemies (at a time when the Catholic Church was accused of not doing enough/remaining silent during the Holocaust). The Jesuits saved as many Jews and other ‘undesirables’ as they could during WWII.

Historically, some of their greatest struggles were against corruption, venality, and spiritual lassitude within the Roman Catholic Church.

So, is a Jesuit as the Pope exactly what the Catholic Church needs in this modern world? If Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI were termed traditionalists, could Pope Francis be called ‘liberal’?

The man I knew personally as Francis, my grandfather, will always be remembered with honour by me for one thing he did – he fought to get my mother educated. In a time (40s and the 50s) in Fiji when most rural Indian girls were raised only to raise a family, my grandfather fought this prevailing thought (and my grandmother, to boot) to get my mother educated. He sold a mattress and slept on the hard bed to pay the school fees to get my mother’s education going. Is the term liberal aligned with the name Francis? I personally think so. St Francis of Assisi was definitely liberal, possibly in ways to make our modern day liberals feel like right-wing bigots.

Accordingly, seeing a Pope Francis on the papal throne (though he appears to shun such trappings) I envisage some positive changes coming through his tenure. Maybe it will be through benevolent tyranny, for that is how the Jesuits roll.

Maybe it will be through some hard dialogue, some intensive communication, but largely it will be through great action.

How the Church fares in the future will depend on how readily the hierarchy accept the Jesuit way of doing things – down the line, no quarters given, just follow in the footsteps of Jesus. It is not for fun that the Jesuits call themselves Friends of Jesus, and see the Church only as His bride.

It will be hardcore. With a lot of compassion thrown in.

Indian Weekender link to article

Is the end near?

2012-12-09T00:55:00.000-08:00

On 21 December, 2012 the world is going to end. Or not. A somewhat large chunk of the online community worldwide has latched on to the ‘end of the world’ based on the Mayan calendar stopping on this date.
If the Mayans, sez them people, could extrapolate their calendar out to CE 2012 three thousand years ago, they must have known something. And that something is the end of the world, of that they are adamant.
Who are the Mayans? More importantly, why should any one place any importance on their calendar collated circa 3000 BC?
The Mayans are an ancient race in South America noted for their pyramids and ancient city ruins. Some say they may be the remnants of an even older race, the Olmecs, who may, or may not, have been the architects of several cities with pyramids in South America. The ruins of these cities offers glimpses of high technology and science that existed in a time before present memory – whether during the Olmecs or the Mayan dynasties is still in questions.
What do the people think will happen on, around, or after 21 December?
1. The planet will slip its skin. This includes pole shift (or reversal) ; rise of new continents/islands; submerging of existing landmass - either all or some. Could lead to gigantic tsunamis or super volcanoes happening all over the planet.
2. Cosmic collision – while NASA has ruled out any heavenly body heading towards Earth, it has not stopped some of coming up with bizarre theories. These include Planet X or Niburu offloading its inhabitants or offloading all of itself on Earth. Or the earth veering from its designated path around the Sun, leading to great climate calamities – a new mini ice age, or a barren, hot planet.
3. Cosmic bombardment – the Earth will lose its magnetic shield. This could happen if the planet’s rotation either speeds up or slows down (or the planet stops rotating altogether), cutting into its ability to generate the magnetic shield that keeps at bay the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays. Some people are actually looking forward to getting this huge dose of radiation so that mankind can ‘evolve’ on to its next stage.
4. Natural disasters galore. In a bid to correct the imbalances imposed by the human population, the Earth will seek out to balance itself and in doing so, will ‘adjust’ its climate accordingly.
On the more thoughtful side, there are people who think some great cosmic change will befall earthlings – a greater understand of their situation and their purpose in the cosmic web of life. Too many doubt that will happen as we no longer believe in the spirit, and thus, logically, this would be impossible.
If we are inclined to believe the Mayan calendar stating 21 December 2012 as the time of end of the world, let’s just keep one thing in mind: the Mayan civilisation ended hundreds of years ago and they had little or no inkling of their demise. If they had, they would have stated it somewhere in stone. They put everything else of importance in stone – which is how we know of their calendar.
So, why are we pinning our understanding on a calendar made by people long dead, who may be just a surviving off shoot of a still more ancient civilisation, and who were left scattered into primitive tribes after the collapse of their civilisation (aided by invaders)? One thought is that history repeats itself and repeated history, though boring, is a teaching device for the intelligent. And we must learn this history to find out what happened to these people so we can be prepared for whatever killed their civilisation.
What caused the end of this extraordinary civilisation – mentioned even in the epics of ancient India? Uloopi of the Arjuna saga was of the serpent nation, similar to the feathered serpent legend of the Mayans and Toltecs. In most cases, the South American nations were at loggerheads with ancient Indian civilisation and sometimes went all out to destroy each other.
Most believe climate change was one cause of their demise. Just as the great Saraswati civilisation on the Indian peninsula disappeared almost into nothing after the course of the river was diverted/disappeared, so something calamitous happened with the South American civilisation. Planetry upheavals left seaside cities 3000 metres up in the mountain, sunk some of them without a trace, and left others without resources to sustain itself. It was the end of that civilisation as they knew it.
The geology of the Earth is full of evidence of great terrestrial upheavals since from before the time of the dinosaurs. The Earth remakes itself as and when it feels the need. And its inhabitants are either wiped out, or learn to adapt, or go on to flourish in the new climate. Scientists say one such great upheaval is long-overdue.
As to their calendar, could it just be that the astrologers who were compiling that calendar one day decided they had bean-counted enough into the future and left the rest to be completed by someone else? And then disaster struck and no-one could or wanted to carry on – they would just be trying to survive. Let’s not put so much importance to the Mayan calendar and the sudden end of days it seemingly states. Rather, seek to find out what the history of that civilisation has to teach us. And start taking climate change seriously.
Meanwhile, Christmas is around the corner and probably no-one cares about the end of the world – not with so much happening. People have been saying “The end is nigh” since the beginning of the Christian era. The Book of Revelations has been quoted, misquoted and quoted again, and the second coming has been happening for 2000 years. And we have been going from strength to strength in our ‘achievement’ as the crowing glory of life on Earth. We are good.
What is there to worry about? So, Merry Christmas - if we do reach that date.

Why does God incarnate?

2012-10-24T00:06:00.000-07:00

We love the avatars of God, but, really, how much do we understand why they happen?

An avatar is a particular coalescing of the all pervasive spirit/soul called Brahman (for the non-dualist), or Vishnu or Shiva or Shakti (Devi) (for the dualist as per whether they believe whether Vishnu or Shiva or Devi to be the supreme expression of a personal godhead)

An avatar is said to be called into Being by the heartfelt cries of agony of the sadhus, the pious among us. The sadhus plead for an incarnation or manifestation to take place because of the grave danger mankind has placed itself into.

And then the avatar happens: a set of parents are selected, the form of the avatar enters the womb of the mother, the birthing of the avatar happens. The rest is what we read about in the scriptures – about Rama, Krishna and other major avatars, as well as the minor avatars. (Please note: an avatar is the descent of spirit into matter, while an enlightened godman is the raising of a human into the realm of the spirit.)

For the avatar, this descent into matter cannot be a good thing. Pure spirit confines itself into flesh, becoming subject to its limitations and its inherent problems. Granted, the avatar comes with a particularly divine set of his tools of trade – omniscience, great doses of power and prowess and an understanding of things beyond the ken of man. But, he is ‘born’, and he ‘dies’ and is assailed by all those things we mere humans are assailed by, except he appears to handle them with aplomb and dignity, while we weep and wail our fate.

We who benefit from the avatar’s descent cannot imagine the pain of this descent, although some of more enlightened among us have tried to put them in words for our benefit.

These beautiful lines from Sri Aurobindo’s poem A God’s Labour gives a hint to the predicament of an avatar:

He who would bring the heavens here

Must descend himself into clay

And the burden of earthly nature bear

And tread the dolorous way.

We generally give praise for an avatar taking ‘birth’ among us and feel ever so grateful that we have breathed the same air as Him. But we give little, if any, thought to what the avatar would be going through – and we are not talking about any apparent distress caused by physical ailment.

Day in, day out the Avatar has to endure a body of flesh, fluid and frailties – eating, excreting, keeping it clean, stop it from dropping dead. He, the pure spirit, has to encompass that spirit in a limited form called as body and suffer the indignities of that same body.

There is another beautiful telling of a devotee of Krishna who wanted to kill Draupadi, Arjun and several others who were close to Krishna. After reading the Mahabharata, he sat sharpening a wicked looking knife and when asked why he was doing it so intently, he answered he wanted to seek out Arjuna, Draupadi and others and kill them.

He said he wanted to kill them because they had caused so much pain to his Lord: Arjuna for making a charioteer out of Krishna and forcing him into the battlefield in that lowly role and Draupadi for calling on Krishna and forcing him to provide great lengths of cloth to cover her when she was being stripped naked in the court.

He goes on to tell of the other ‘indignities’ other people had heaped on Krishna and how he would hunt them down and kill them.

At first reading this appears to be the ravings of sentimental fool, especially since he was from an era in which Krishna, Arjuna and others were long-gone. But the sentiments behind the raving is something to think about. Here was a man who felt deeply for the Avatar, who felt that we should have treated Him as something very precious, to be treasured and loved, and not taken advantage of, which is what he believed Arjuna and Draupadi had done. And he felt these sentiments as if Krishna, Arjuna and Draupadi existed for him at that time – not as if they were just tales in a book.

We take it for granted that the avatar is happy to be with us and we take for granted that He will ‘be there for us’. We hardly think of the great sacrifice undertaken in the ‘birthing’ of an avatar – the taking of a form on Mrityu Loka – the world of death; the limiting of the spirit into a vessel of matter and the bombardment of negativity that he has to suffer during his sojourn on Earth.

Yes, the avatar’s physical form is put together to take on this negativity. Ramakrishna Paramhansa is said to have taken on the negative forces (illness, mental and physical) of those who came to him, so much so that he was a physical wreck by the time he passed away. Shirdi Sai Baba was took on boils, burns, wounds and sickness from those he chose to save, as did Satya Sai Baba.

Again these lines from A God’s Labour (the full poem can be found here http://intyoga.online.fr/labour.htm):

Coercing my godhead I have come down

Here on the sordid earth,

Ignorant, labouring, human grown

Twixt the gates of death and birth.

I have been digging deep and long

Mid a horror of filth and mire

A bed for the golden river’s song,

A home for the deathless fire.

I have laboured and suffered in Matter’s night

To bring the fire to man;

But the hate of hell and human spite

Are my meed since the world began.

Given that we have the law of karma governing the universe, is there a need for God to incarnate on Earth? The above gives us a hint of why an incarnation takes place.

An avatar is a catalyst of change – each time one comes, the world changes significantly. We, who only read about their exploits, take in only a fraction of the full scope of their doings. We are privy only to their recorded exploits.

Rama took up a war of attrition that devastated a whole civilisation. And Ravan is now a household name equated with wickedness, pride and arrogance, and the futility of great learning without understanding and compassion.
Krishna brought about a fratricidal war that decimated entire clans, including his own. His exploits range from killing his own uncle to turning his cousins against each other that sees the end of the Dwapar Yuga, and the beginning of the least benevolent of all yugas for mankind (yet, a yuga which is said to be the best placed for as higher understanding of godhead).
Parashurama cut down the ranks of the kshatriyas 21 times to cool his vengeance. Sometimes he is seen as an example of the wrath of the Brahmin caste – of what they are capable of if they are not treated with respect and awe. It is a tale of the curbing of unbridled arrogance and malpractices associated with the ruling classes.
The other avatars undertook epic battles against opponents of great courage and strength, sometimes in battles that ranged over time and space, other times using wit to outwit (to stop Bali’s expansion plans into other realms), others battled for the human soul because of their compassion for humans.

Every one of the exploits of our avatars are told from the point of view of a human being – from the point of view of people who reacted with the avatars. There is no standalone narration by the avatars themselves, including the Gita, which is retelling by a third party of a direct conversation between Krishna and Arjuna.

Simply put, our scriptures, especially the bhagavads, the Puranas, are largely someone’s take on a series of incidents that they saw, heard about or were directly involved in with regards to a particular avatar. It is as Sri Aurobindo says of our understanding: “A fragment of Truth is his widest scope”.

And I pose the question once again: Do we really know why God incarnates among us?

If what Rama, Krishna and Parashurama did was the mission of those avatars – then huge chunks of mankind died as a result. And to what end, just to save (or avenge) a few human beings beloved of the avatar?

Let’s look at the last stanza from set of lines from Sri Aurobindo’s poem listed above:

I have laboured and suffered in Matter’s night

To bring the fire to man;

But the hate of hell and human spite

Are my meed since the world began.

Let’s replace ‘hell’ with Patala – the underworld of our mythology. While we think of patala as the infernal regions, Narada is said to have said that it rivalled and beat Indralok in beauty, and it abound with every kind of luxury and sensual gratification.

So, Patala, far from being a place of darkness and drear, was a place of light and beauty, a place of sense gratification, love for luxury, hedonism, self-indulgence, intemperance, and decadence.

Since the world began, God has been incarnating because he hates hell – all the things associated with the above-listed negative elements that make our character. And human spite – when we hurt others for the sake of seeing them squirm or suffer – is not something God likes.

So, instead of saying: “Whenever evil rears its head, and wickedness prevails, God incarnates to punish evil doers,” would it be more appropriate to say “Whenever hedonism increases, and decadence prevails, God incarnates to pull the rug from under our feet?”

God incarnating is a saving mission, but executed in a painful way. Its purpose is to

take us back to godhead, to divinity - kicking and scratching, if need be.

For man’s mind is the dupe of his animal self;

Hoping its lusts to win,

He harbours within him a grisly Elf

Enamoured of sorrow and sin.

The grey Elf shudders from heaven’s flame

And from all things glad and pure;

Only by pleasure and passion and pain

His drama can endure.

God incarnates to remind us of our origins, our divinity – ‘To bring the fire to man’. We, in our human folly, believe he incarnates to give us happiness and wealth as we pursue our pleasurable lives on Earth. And we worship avatars to that end – begging and pleading for a long life to enjoy our fruits, families and fumblings. So far from the truth.

The Truth of truths men fear and deny,

The Light of lights they refuse;

To ignorant gods they lift their cry

Or a demon altar choose.

Maybe it is time to put aside our kindergarten approach to our avatars. Let’s not raise a ‘demon altar’ and hope a few minutes of obeisance is enough to sway God into our way of thinking; let’s not ‘lift our cries to ignorant gods” and then complain you

have not been heard; let’s not refuse, and fear and deny, what our scriptures have proclaimed for eons – God is Truth, and in Truth lies the real victory.

Instead, seek the ‘Truth of truths’, the Light of lights. Dive deep into your beliefs, and sometime, challenge them, so as to be privy to the truth they hide among their superfluity. The teachings of our ancients may appear superfluous at first attempt but that is only because they have been dumbed down by those who would use them to their own ends.

Do not let tradition, or traditionalists, hold you from finding the Truth. Do not let culture bind you to the mire. Expand your mind and see the beauty of the philosophy that has endured millennia, that has endured every kind of influx and still remains true to this day.

Notes

Avatars of Shiva

One lists has the following as the 11 avatars of Shiva

1 KAPAALI

2 PINGAL

3 BHEEM

4 VEERUPAAKSH

5 VILOHIT

6 SHAASTA

7 AJPAAD

8 AHIBURDHANYA

9 SHAMBHU

10 CHAND

11 BHAV

Others put 28 avatars for Shiva

Although Puranic scriptures contain occasional references to avatars of Shiva, the idea is not universally accepted in Saivism. As an avatar requires residence in a womb, Shiva as ayonija (not of a womb) cannot manifest himself as an avatar.

The Linga Purana speaks of twenty-eight forms of Shiva which are sometimes seen as avatars. In the Shiva Purana there is a distinctly Saivite version of a traditional avatar myth: Shiva brings forth Virabhadra, one of his terrifying forms, in order to calm Narasimha, an avatar of Vishnu. When that fails, Shiva manifests as the human-lion-bird Sharabha. The story concludes with Narasimha becoming a devotee of Shiva after being bound by Sharabha.[47] However, Vaishnava followers including Dvaita scholars, such as Vijayindra Tirtha (1539–95) refute this Shaivite view of Narasimha based on their reading of Sattvika Puranas and Sruti texts.[48] The monkey-god Hanuman who helped Rama – the Vishnu avatar is considered by some to be the eleventh avatar of Rudra (Shiva). Some regional deities like Khandoba are also believed by some to be avatars of Shiva. Other stated avatars of Shiva, according to some sources, are 8th century non-dualist Vedanta philosopher (Advaita Vedanta) Adi Shankara. He was named "Shankara" after Lord Shiva and is considered by some to have

been an incarnation of the god and Virabhadra who was born when Shiva grabbed a lock of his matted hair and dashed it to the ground. Virabhadra then destroyed Daksha's yajna (fire sacrifice) and severed his head as per Shiva's instructions.

In Dasam Granth, Guru Gobind Singh have mentioned two avtars of Rudra: Dattatreya Avtar and Parasnath Avtar.

Avatars of Devi

Avatars are also observed in Shaktism, the sect dedicated to the worship of the Goddess (Devi), but they do not have universal acceptance in the sect. The Devi Bhagavata Purana describes the descent of Devi avatars to punish the wicked and defend the righteous—much as the Bhagavata Purana does with the avatars of Vishnu. Like Vishnu, his consort Lakshmi incarnates as Sita and Radha – the consorts of Rama and Krishna avatars. Nilakantha, an 18th century commentator on the Devi Bhagavata Purana – which includes the Devi Gita – says that various avatars of the Goddess includes Shakambhari and even the masculine Krishna and Rama – generally thought to be Vishnu's avatars. Lakshmi and Saraswati are also goddesses worshipped as Devi avatars.

PATALA. [Source: Dowson's Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology] The infernal regions, inhabited by Nagas (serpents), Daityas, Danavas, Yakshas, and others. They are seven in number, and their names, according to the Vishna Purana, are Atala, Vitala, Nitala, Gabhastimat, Mahatala, Sutala, and Patala, but these name vary in different authorities. The Padma Purana gives the names of the seven regions and their respective rulers as follow: -- (1.) Atala, subject to Mahamaya; (2.) Vitala, ruled by a form of Siva called Hatakeswara; (3.) Sutala, ruled by Bali ; (4.) Talatala, ruled by Maya; (5.) Mahatala, where reside the great serpents; (6.) Rasatala, where the Daityas and Danavas dwell; (7.) Patala, the lowermost, in which Vasuki reigns over the chief Nagas or snake-gods. In the Siva Purana there are eight: Patala, Tala, Atala, Vitala, Tala, Vidhipatala, Sarkarabhumi, and Vijaya. The sage Narada paid a visit to these regions, and on his return to the skies gave a glowing account of them, declaring them to be far more delightful than Indra's heaven, and abounding with every kind of luxury and sensual gratification.

The Das of financial fracas

2012-09-24T02:55:00.000-07:00

Published in The IndianWeekender.co.nz - http://www.indianweekender.co.nz/Pages/ArticleDetails/7/3242/New-Zealand/The-Das-of-financial-fracas
Apologies beforehand to the experts who will probably pick two dollar-sized holes in this article – the finance of commonsense has little research material to back it up. My advice to you would be not to peruse this article with any kind of seriousness.
IT takes a bloody Indian to state the obvious and no-one listens to him, anyway. Satyajit Das (his name could be translated as the servant of victory in truth) has that problem. He has things to say about how we do business, and no one seems to be listening closely.
Now, I have always been leery of the mechanisms that drive the stock market, especially the trading in points of a currency. I mean, the cent is the final basic unit of the dollar but when the stock market start trading in fractions of the cent, there is something wrong.
Most businesses see the benefit – for example, sell fuel at $2.12:97 and the .097 adds up per litre pretty quickly. We humans, on the other hand, can’t even buy anything for the 10 cents we get in change on the $9.90 purchase. Or the one cent or five cent we give away every time we buy something at $9.99 or $9.95. Our loose change, and fractions of loose change, could be making millions of dollars for others. Or maybe
not.
But seriously, it is no longer a case of save a penny towards a pound - for the penny has been sliced into slivers, where these slivers make millions of dollars for any one trading in hundreds of millions of dollars.
And trading on futures and derivatives is a twist on the adage “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush” – where the two birds in the bush are as tangible an asset as the one in your hand, as long as both parties accept it to be so. I mean, WTF: you haven’t planted the crop or mined the gold but you can have the cash up front because someone is willing to take the risk of paying you now in a bid to lock up the commodities market.
And this is not the loan you need to get a venture started, but the actual payment of a crop or mineral that will be produced some time in the future. It is like someone planted a cabbage patch and is paid for the crop in the ground, and the two crops he is still thinking of planting.
Mind you, my understanding of the finance world is limited, and it probably shows here, but commonsense says: plant the crop, mine the gold and then get the cash in hand. “Investing in the future” makes money only for the monied, so they made it legal to do so. And that is why credit is so easily available – your future is locked up just as commodities are.
The finance market thrived on these convoluted mechanism, still does and no one is going to stop them, even after the economic disasters of 2008. But Satyajit Das appears to be to banging his head against this brick and mortared wall hard enough to make a few cracks.
Das’ understanding of derivatives is overwhelmingly high – the likes of me will need to spend a decade trying to fully understand the ins and outs of what he knows.

But man, can he express what he knows effectively. He says things that the economist, the financier and probably the accountant think is blasphemy.
Das was recently in New Zealand to speak to the New Zealand Initiative, an independent public policy think tank supported by chief executives of major New Zealand businesses. He has some things to say:
On growth - that erudite mechanism that pushes us each quarter to do better than before - he says in his latest paper: “Today, growth has come to the end. The global economy has stalled.”
That is the last thing a CEO would want to hear. The whole economy is judged by its growth and any stalling in growth is seen as death looming. No body in their right mind is going to listen to that, not when the very future of your economy is based around having growth.
In a NZ Listener interview, Das pointed out how he is welcomed by many who seldom re-invite him to anything again once he has said his piece. In other word, he is a border-line pariah but there is no going past the fact of the matter that Das speaks on.
He puts the housing market on par with a belief in God: it is a blind faith exercised by people who have put a value to a basic need, dependent on the vagaries of zoning change and interest rates, and the skewered perception of a market artificially bolstered by “experts”. He used the word “rigged” to describe the housing market.
The retirement nest egg is a fallacy – you get to sell your house, live off the benefits in meaner dwellings and wait to die, after having lived so well in your prime.
And he sees no harm in NOT having a growth in the economy. That is pure sacrilege for the economists, who follow whatever school of economics which is presently in favour with them. Das laments the past 30 years, where growth has come from speculation, borrowed money and the unsustainable use of non-renewable resources.
To quote him in the NZ Listener interview: “I went to a place the other day that had five large plasma TVs – one in every room, including the bathroom, which was quite disconcerting.” Three people lived there. New Zealand, Das repeatedly stressed while he was here, was in a better position than many countries because it was a food producer. The problem of feeding the world, along with the problems of clean energy,
water conservation and even logistics – the fact that a lot of stuff is wasted before it can get to market – means there is scope for future growth to come from innovation and productivity gains, rather than being simply debt-fuelled growth. But he worries we have created an artificial demand for growth at any cost, without clear evidence that it makes us happier.”
Not only an artificial demand, but a twisted supply situation too. Big food producers keep demanding higher food production from their vassals but are not beyond destroying excess produce, for example, thousands of litres of milk on a regular basis, just to keep food prices where they want it. It is a skewered sort of free market when you have to destroy produce to curtail supply – not a true supply-demand mechanism at all.
And adding to the financial fiasco is the reliance on debt-driven consumption to generate economic growth. All of the situations above, according to Das, are fallacies of the highest order.
Given the resource constraints, unbridled consumerism and the keening after growth in all sectors, Das sees mayhem in our near future. Mayhem far greater than we have experienced in this generation. Imagine the Great Depression and multiply by a factor of four – four because of the present population is quadruple that of 1923; for resources that will probably last four months if all production were to halt immediately and for four months/defaults until debts are called in, leading to the collapse of the credit sector. And for four years in which the world could revert to post-WWII conditions once economies collapse when/if we have “great” depression.
All of which is on the radar of modern economists but only as worst-case scenarios which can be averted ‘easily’ by any amount of Plan Bs to combat any disparities their calculation can throw up.
In other words, all is good, all is been taken care of and people like Das are “doomsters” which, Das readily admits, is what he is. All is good because there is a calculation out that will befuddle enough people and allow the financiers to carry on what they were doing – robbing Paul to pay Peter who will pay Simon who pays them so they can buy a future which doesn’t exist presently.
So, here is a former banker, who hobnobs in with top-notch financiers and cabinet ministers, who has a message of doom and gloom for world governments, with so much weight behind his message but who is tolerated only because he has an alternative spin: “It is good to hear the other side, only because it shows how we are doing great with what is already in place.”
Even the NZ Listener article - which was well-written - dwelt more on Das the character and what makes him tick, than on his actual message, proving again that even financial articles in magazines need that spin to sell copy. And that spin is easily provided by eccentric characters like Das (and if you play enough on the eccentricities, you can make good copy).
Das is presently somewhat of a lone voice in the wilderness, with messages which makes good copy for financial magazines looking for the alternative angle, who has garnered a small but solid band of adherents (count me in) but has little effect on arrogant financiers and/or the finance industry.
In the NZ Listener interview, Das pulled no punches in describing financiers: “Finance has become more important than it ever has in the last 30 years. I often see finance as a supporting function to the real economy. Unfortunately, that has been flipped.”… “They (financiers) think they are actually better than they are and, more importantly, they think they are outside the rules because they are the only
people who can make the world work; they understand this stuff and nobody else does.”
Then, we must be grateful that there is someone out there willing to swim against the current, who is willing to take up the cudgel against the monetary mammoths, the fiscal fossils and the artful artifices that is the finance industry.
Only thing: he is a bloody Indian and no one’s going to really listen to him, are they?
* Satyajit Das blogs here: http://www.economonitor.com/blog/author/sdas3/

The God Particle: Higgs Boson is God?

2012-07-19T14:23:00.000-07:00

The Higgs Boson walks into a bar wearing a t-shirt saying “God Particle”.

“Wass that?” asks the barman.

The Higgs Boson almost blinks off. “Where have you been? I am the God Particle. The world is agog with my discovery.”

“Eh?”

“You moron. I am the basis of the universe. I am the goddam base that gives substance to everything else.”

“Substance to what; base what?” The barman is genuinely puzzled. For all he sees is the t-shirt hanging on a black framework of subdued ethereal glow that threatens to go out and leave the t-shirt hanging in mid air.

The Higgs Boson sputters, pouts a pout that cannot be seen and orders a round of drinks for all the elements of the period table. The poor barmen is bamboozled and threats to resign from life.

The jokes edition of the ‘discovery’ of the Higgs Boson is making its rounds on the internet and the laughs are a plenty. Yet, for all the merriment – starting with the discovery announcement being heralded in Comic Sans font – the seriousness of this discovery cannot be understated. (The Higgs Bososn: Jokes edition can be found here - http://storify.com/notscientific/higgs-boson-the-jokes-edition)

Here is a particle, predicted over 40 years ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, that particle physics says is the basis of the universe. Its entrapment in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN gives us a glimpse on how the universe works. It is called the God Particle, although scientists themselves would prefer to call it the ‘goddamned particle’ – for the obvious reason that it is the most elusive of any sub-atomic particle that they have any specific knowledge of.

The elemental Stephen Hawking actually bet $100 that the Higgs Boson would never be trapped, so sure he was of its non-existence. This month he conceded defeat and paid up to Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan.

All and good in the rarefied fields of science but what does it mean for the man on the street? Zilch.

The world, or in this case, the universe goes on as before. What scientists have done is tap in another set of information about the way things work – putting firmly in place a structure of better understanding the processes of the universe. They have come just a little bit closer to understanding why almost all of the universe is beyond the observations of the likes of you and me.

What this means is:
1. The Universe is a gridwork of mass – 90 percent of which we cannot observe. The little we observe actually forms a minute part of the great mass.
2. Something is forming the base for this huge mass of planets, galaxies, stars and other heavenly bodies and the Higgs Boson could be it.
3. The universe is made of particles which by rights should be free-agents zipping all over the place. Yet something gives them mass and the culprit is seen as the Higgs Boson.
4. The Higgs Boson has a short life – we are not talking mayflies here. It lasts for one millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. Apparently this is the reason it is so goddamned hard to trap. Evidence of its existence is seen by what it leaves behind in the collider rather than its actual capture.
5. The Higgs field theory explains why some elementary particles have mass – suggesting that a unseen field permeates all of space and the Higgs Boson is the smallest possible activity in that field.

It is easier to understand that an unseen field permeates space – or is it? I just hark back to what the ancients say of this and it makes perfect sense to me.

In explaining the universe, Hindus first talk of its vastness. The root ‘Brh’ means to swell, expand or enlarge. Brahman, accepted by Hindus as the actuality of godhead, the ultimate reality, the absolute, is the basis of the universe. It is the force/power/energy that permeates the universe, giving it its form and energy.

Originally – when science had just discovered the atom – Brahman was denoted as the vastest of the vast and smallest of the small, in this case the atom.

With the discovery of sub atomic elements and particles, the smallest of the small becomes the sub atomic particles. Now with the discovery of the

Right – so I am riding the crest of scientific discovery and adopting it as part of my religion. So, sue me. Big deal.

The fact remains that the ancients knew of the existence of this unseen field upon which the rest of the universe carries out its works.

This from the Upanishads.

1. Brahman is the one Absolute Reality behind the changing appearances of the universe.
2. Brahamis the universal substrate from which material things originate and to which they return after dissolution.
3. Sarvam khalv idam brahma - Brahman is everything, and all we see are His different energies — material or spiritual
4. Brahman contains within it the potentiality and archetypes behind all possible manifest phenomenal forms.
5. Brahman is the reality behind everything in this universe, the cause which sustains the effect.
6. Brahman is the ultimate essence of material phenomena

So, what does this mean in the grand scheme of things? Again, zilch.

Brahman cannot be worshipped, only understood. Its workings are beyond the ken of man – just like the Higgs Boson. As science strives to understand the Higgs Boson, the followers of Brahman try to do the same. The only difference is that one is material striving, the other spiritual.

Science now appears to know of this particle that imbues others with some potential and is seeking to understand it more. I can’t wait for more. It just validates what I have learnt as a follower of the religions.

But most religions are getting defensive over the discovery – finger pointing about science setting out to destroy religion is happening all over the world.

The only thing I can say to that is: “Why would God – the omnipresent, the omniscient and the omnipotent – require to be defended? Especially by the likes of puny humans.”

Leave be – get on with your faith, and leave the faith of science alone. They have done great in making the lives of human better – why not allow them a little fun in making a discovery any Hindu (with a little thinking) already knows?

Or maybe it is just an over-reaction to the nickname. Some see the Higgs Boson’s nickname as the God Particle as a direct attack on faith in God.

If the particle had been nicknamed Nick, it may not have aroused so much antipathy amongst the religious.

So, Nick walks into the bar and says “I am Higgs Boson.”. The Barman would probably say: “What are you having, Mr Boson?”

An analogy:

For decades, experts have been trying to come up with analogies to illustrate how the Higgs mechanism works. One of the best-known was proposed in 1993 by David Miller, a physicist at University College London. Imagine looking down from a balcony in a ballroom, watching a cocktail party below. When just plain folks try to go from one end of the room to the other, they can walk through easily, with no resistance from the party crowd. But when a celebrity like Justin Bieber shows up, other partygoers press around him so tightly that he can hardly move ... and once he moves, the crowd moves with him in such a way that the whole group is harder to stop.

The partygoers are like Higgs bosons, the just plain folks are like massless particles, and Bieber is like a massive Z boson

Why we need to suffer

2012-06-11T20:28:00.000-07:00

Or how to be objective about ourselves

We may wish evil on others, but never do we wish evil on ourselves, (or for those we care about). Yet, we suffer evil, wickedness and setbacks in our lives on a very regular basis. And compared to the upsides, the downside of life appears to dominate our whole life.

Most times we pass over whatever negative things that happen to us by either blaming others for our misfortune, or - when we can’t find someone to blame - blaming providence/God/karma for this unpleasant situation that we are going through.

A novel approach to this constant good/bad state of affairs that we call life would be to actually start welcoming the idea that ‘bad’ things should happen to us. What a stupid idea, you say? But if we believe in karma, and believe that we are on Earth to work out our karma from previous lives, why should we not want to get over it quickly?

Given the choice, what would anyone like to do? Would you spread your bad karma over several more lives or spend one life cleaning up all your bad karma and then setting yourself up to expand on your good karma in another life?

Karma, of course, is not anything like a 25-year home mortgage, a painless payment that almost goes unnoticed as we go about living our lives. Each time karma extracts its ‘repayment’ it does so with an acute emotional strike, somewhat like a hatchet job on our mental state. This seesaws between deep anguish and euphoria – both of which are extremely unstable mental states.

If we choose the first where a little karma is paid off bit by bit, let’s be prepared for a mediocre life of a mixture of good and bad, ups and downs (possibly a one step forward, two steps back type of life) until several lifetimes later, we are finally ready for the ‘good’ life, a life of doing good and saving up good karma until you are done on Earth.

If we choose to telescope our karma in a much shorter timeframe (and yes, we can make that choice) be prepared for some heavy duty karmic action that will sledgehammer us into a tattered life. This is free will but not as we understand it. Here we have a choice in how we choose to live our next life, a choice made by us before we take rebirth, and a choice just as easily forgotten when we actually take birth.

We are the makers our own destiny - our holy scriptures are very clear on this. And this choice of making our own destiny allows us to choose our life events before our birth. The garland of karma one wears through birth and death and rebirth is malleable. It can switched around to set up a life of events for each birth. We could choose to ‘live it up’ with your good karma in one lifetime, shunting off bad karma to another life time, or vice versa.

For example, say we were a cruel landlord in a previous life, prone to narcissism, arrogance and being ‘right’ all the time. In this birth (because of some good we did previously) we are ‘given’ a home with an average household. We go through a series of setbacks all through our life and it appears to be unending. Everything we touch crumbles, every project we undertake fizzles out, every move we make ends up harming us.

Did we, in the presence of our rebirth, choose to look at our karma in total honesty and string together a series of events to make us ‘realise’ the folly of our past deeds in the preceding lifetime? Did we, in total honesty, deem ourselves ready for a lesson in humility, understanding and compassion – something we lacked very much in the life we just had?

Probably yes – our forefathers were clear on this, giving us many adages and folklore to tell us of how karma determines our birth and lifestyle, how it can mould us into what we are and how it can be used to free ourselves from our karmic debt.

They also said we are unaware of this debt as the essence of the karma is all that we bring with us in our new life, not its memory. The memory of this collective karma sometimes penetrates the veil that enshrouds it but that is only occasionally. In general we start our new birth unaware of these consequences and what we have planned with them. There is a good reason for this – if we were aware of what was to happen to us while working out our karma, our egos most probably won’t be able to take it.

In working out our karma, we have options – curse our life/our birth, curse the people involved (it is because of them!) or accept our karma for what it is and look at our life objectively. (Please remember that karma is not fate. Fate - as non-Hindus understand it - is a notion of predestination that says everything is mapped out for you and you have no say in the matter).

Our ancient scripts lays out the way to observe ourself in an objective manner. Before looking at this, let’s familiarise ourselves with two words.

Thithiksha (fortitude) vs Sahana (patience)

Sahana is the ability to tolerate things, to be able to put up with disagreeable things. This is largely because we don’t have a choice in the matter. It is beyond our control – that is why we have no choice but to practice sahana. For example, we are in a situation in which, through no fault of ours, we lose out – be it a job, a partner, a project, a deal, whatever. Why does this happen when we did everything right? Why should someone ‘less deserving’ get it and we can’t? This is something we appear not to have any control over. Either we grin and bear it (showing patience in an intractable situation) or we lash out, making more ‘new’ karma in the bargain.

We can put all such events down to plain bad luck, nepotism, unfairness, a short shrift from providence. Or we can see it for what it actually is – a past event in a previous life that needed to be worked out in this life.

The better way to tackle the downside of karmic potshots is to have fortitude (Thithiksha). Fortitude is having the capacity to overcome an ongoing karmic situation, but yet, disregarding it. Allow the situation to happen, be aware of what is happening but do not react. It is in reacting that we exacerbate a situation, gleaning more karma in the process.

Fortitude involves looking at our lives in an objective manner. The scriptures offer several ways to attain to this mental state.

1. Feeling the presence of something beyond yourself.

Call it God or nature or any super normal being – The idea is to feel something beyond yourself, either through silence or in a conducive environment. Keeping silent for long periods of time allows the mind to un-tether itself from the senses, thus giving it an opportunity sees things for what they are. Establishing yourself in a quiet environment helps do the same thing – your senses are not working overtime and this allows the mind to slow down and gather its wits for searching objectively through the tirade of thoughts it normally endures. That is why the scriptures call for meditation and keeping ourselves away from the ‘marketplace’ as essential to knowing our Self.

2. Meditating to understand the thought process.

This is done by isolating thoughts from each other. Generally we believe thoughts run on as a continuous thread. We think of this as a process – we believe the ongoing thoughts in our minds is who we are. When we aggressively withdraw ourselves from the process, we start seeing thoughts as individual snippets, and by doing so, we become a witness to both their creation and to their individual progression. This process of becoming a witness to the thinking process allows us to divorce ourselves from the process and see us for who we really are – the witness.

3. Direct self analysis. Seeing ourselves for what we really are.

The bundle of thoughts, habits and traits that make up our personality/ego is not what we really are. To know this one must undertake the cruellest task of all – the honest appraisal of one self. The ego resides under layers and layers of contrived thinking that are like the stones of a fortress. Through a honest approach these bricks or traits can be destroyed, revealing the ego for what it is – a bundle of personality traits.

There are many other ways – losing ourselves in devotion to a chosen deity; losing ourselves in good works/social works; caring for our parents; seeing everything as a spark of the divine. The list is endless but all have one common ground - losing yourself in the doing of it and not asking for any reward or fruit thereof of the action. For as soon as you ask for the payment of the deed, it is not a spiritual deed but a trade-off and it doesn’t work.

Fortitude comes about when we have understood why we act as we do, and this leads to tackling anything that life (or our karma) springs on us. As we witness the emergence of thoughts, so shall we witness the emergence of our karmic deeds, and see them for what they really are.

And what are karmic deeds?

They are our teachers, offering lessons to be learnt and opportunities to realign our lives. They are our makers and can be our ‘destroyers’ if we don’t handle them with fortitude. These are the laws of action and its consequences, and need to be understood from a logical point of view. If we can think through the consequence of each of actions rather than just reacting to them, we can both understand and control our action and the karma it generates.

And so it comes to what I said before – why not ask to have suffering so we get over it quickly? And go on to better things.

If suffering/karma is an important part of our purpose, that teaches us how to overcome adversity and making us stronger, smarter, why not say :”Bring it on and let’s be done with it.” After all, there isn’t much time until we die, and we do want something different in our next life, don’t we?

Notes

Destiny and the Divine Power of Love

Although the word "karma” is Sanskrit and is associated with Eastern religions, it simply refers to the law of cause and effect. Karma is not blind destiny or divine judgment, but is the principle the describes the natural reverberation that emerges from every action, whether that action is physical, emotion, mental, or spiritual.

Suffering and pain are not punishment from a tyrant God, nor are they "normal” or mere "coincidence.” When we truly understand the law of action and consequence, we can see that our lives are a result of our own moment to moment ignorance of the effects of our actions. We create our own suffering, therefore, we can create our own happiness instead, if we know how. No matter what religion or background we come from, through conscious action from moment to moment, we can originate a new set of causes, which in turn will generate a new set of results. This is how we can revolutionize our life. The power to change is in our hands.

Karma is Negotiable by Nikias Annas

Some karma quotes

Give up your selfishness, and you shall find peace; like water mingling with water, you shall merge in absorption.

Sri Guru Granth Sahib

Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.

Unknown

Contrary to popular misconception, karma has nothing to do with punishment and reward. It exists as part of our holographic universe's binary or dualistic operating system only to teach us responsibility for our creations-and all things we experience are our creations.

Sol Luckman

We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Work done with selfish motives is inferior by far to the selfless service or Karma-yoga. Therefore be a Karma-yogi, O Arjuna. Those who seek [to enjoy] the fruits of their work are verily unhappy [because one has no control over the results].

Bhagavad Gita

A man who sees action in inaction and inaction in action has understanding among men and discipline in all action he performs.

Bhagavad Gita

The person whose mind is always free from attachment, who has subdued the mind and senses, and who is free from desires, attains the supreme perfection of freedom from Karma through renunciation.

Bhagavad Gita

As the blazing fire reduces wood to ashes, similarly, the fire of Self-knowledge reduces all Karma to ashes.

Bhagavad Gita

When you lose, do not lose the lesson.

Dalai Lama

Sometimes not getting what you want is an amazing stroke of luck.

Dalai Lama

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Wayne Dyer

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

Wayne Dyer

http://www.lexiyoga.com/karma-quotes

God quotes

2012-04-23T21:15:00.001-07:00

Any fool can count the seeds in an apple. Only God can count all the apples in one seed. ~Robert H. Schuller

Every evening I turn my worries over to God. He's going to be up all night anyway. ~Mary C. Crowley

God loves each of us as if there were only one of us. ~St. Augustine

Young man, young man, your arm's too short to box with God. ~James Weldon Johnson

God understands our prayers even when we can't find the words to say them. ~Author Unknown

What we are is God's gift to us. What we become is our gift to God. ~Eleanor Powell

A man with God is always in the majority. ~John Knox

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees. ~Victor Hugo

You can tell the size of your God by looking at the size of your worry list. The longer your list, the smaller your God. ~Author Unknown

Maybe the atheist cannot find God for the same reason a thief cannot find a policeman. ~Author Unknown

If God had wanted to be a big secret, He would not have created babbling brooks and whispering pines. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't. ~Jules Renard

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell. ~C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

The soul can split the sky in two and let the face of God shine through. ~Edna St. Vincent Millay

God is not a cosmic bellboy for whom we can press a button to get things done. ~Harry Emerson Fosdick

The feeling remains that God is on the journey, too. ~Teresa of Avila

God's last name is not "Dammit." ~Author Unknown

Once one has seen God, what is the remedy? ~Sylvia Plath, "Mystic"

As the poet said, "Only God can make a tree" - probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on. ~Woody Allen

Clearly, God is a Democrat. ~Patrick Caddell

God: The most popular scapegoat for our sins. ~Mark Twain

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things. ~Vincent van Gogh, Dear Theo: An Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh, 1937

No matter how much I prove and prod,

I cannot quite believe in God;

But oh, I hope to God that He

Unswervingly believes in me.

~E.Y. Harburg, attributed

People see God every day, they just don't recognize him. ~Pearl Bailey

How tired God must be of guilt and loneliness, for that is all we ever bring to Him. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

God's will is not an itinerary, but an attitude. ~Andrew Dhuse

Let God's promises shine on your problems. ~Corrie Ten Boom

I just hope God does not get bored of dreaming me. ~Author Unknown

By night, an atheist half believes in God. ~Edward Young, Night Thoughts

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them. ~George Santayana

When I saw others straining toward God, I did not understand it, for though I may have had him less than they did, there was no one blocking the way between him and me, and I could reach his heart easily. It is up to him, after all, to have us, our part consists of almost solely in letting him grasp us. ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke and Benvenuta: An Intimate Correspondence

God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame. ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much. ~Mother Teresa

Fanaticism is not becoming of a Hindu

2012-04-18T18:12:00.001-07:00

Allow me to define a Hindu.
First, there are many sects in "Hinduism" that take ownership of this religion. They are and remain just that, a sect. For the simple reason that they have defined their interpretation of God, labelled everything and are able to present a form of God that some can subscribe to. This, of course, leads to fanaticism when ‘promoting’ their god over others. The trend is also noted in all other religions.
Hinduism is a relatively new term, starting off during the Mughal reign and gaining coinage during the British Raj. This belief system has existed before this term was coined, and will continue to exist until the end of times.
Many accept the term Sanatan Dharam (Sanatana Dharma – the eternal dharma/pathway) as the right understanding for the ambiguous word Hinduism. There are five precepts of this ‘religion’ – Truth, Right Conduct, Peace, Love and Non-violence.
A follower of Sanatan Dharam sees ALL religions as paths (and all religions have that high philosophy that seeks to attain to godhood) leading to the truth – different ways to attain to the same. In fact, a follower of Sanatan Dharam sees every one as a Hindu – in this case a person who practices non-violence (Hin – violence, Du – away from).
How can, then, a follower of this Hinduism be a fanatic?
Just because we have fanatics promoting their ‘revealed’ scriptures, their idea of what god is, does not mean they are promoting Hinduism. They are promoting just an aspect of it, their understanding of it.
The other beautiful part of Sanatan Dharam is the belief that we live in an illusion, a phantasm of a universe, or, as Michael Talbot puts it so brilliantly, a holographic universe. The concept of Maya, the illusion of reality, is the basis of Sanatan Dharam.
If everything is indeed an illusion created by our minds or our collective consciousness, we are but spots of mental activity in the ongoing flow of consciousness that is the basis of the universe.
An article on the mind, and Maya here: http://www.indianweekender.co.nz/Pages/ArticleDetails/25/1774/In-focus/Manas-the-Hindu-perspective-of-the-mind
The basis of Sanatan Dharam is the belief in the oneness of all – there is only one and no other. Everything is God, that flow of consciousness from which we emanate, like wavelets on a body of water. The wave has a form, separating it from the body of water but in reality is still the water. Some ideas here: http://www.indianweekender.co.nz/Pages/ArticleDetails/25/1376/In-focus/What-I-like-about-Hinduism

http://www.indianweekender.co.nz/Pages/ArticleDetails/25/1334/In-focus/The-importance-of-Karma-and-Vivek

For my son Parik – who celebrated his 25th on 11 April

2012-04-13T03:46:00.000-07:00

When I sometimes meander in my thoughts,
And touch on things I hold dear
Topping this, right next to God, are you, my son.

I’d like to think I had something to do with
Moulding you into this great young man,
But I know it is not so:
You were born with a streak of goodness,
A sliver of heaven in you,
And I can’t take any credit for that.

As you start your next quarter century,
As you seek out what you are,
I will be watching with pleasure,
In anticipation of the goodness that
You will add to this world.

I know this because I know you: Love you

The Nautanki in the Naatak within the Drama

2012-04-13T01:33:00.001-07:00

The drama of life: Life is like the projections of a cinema camera onto the cinema screen. The play of light, colour and flicker causes images to be portrayed onto the screen. There is no basis for the images, except for these elements coming together. Take away the screen and the projection is washed out into nothingness. Thus is the drama of life – the screen is the basis on which life takes place with all its interplay of emotions, living and dying. Take away the screen and nothing computes. God is like the screen on which everything else interplays, where everything is interwoven to make some sense. God is what life is projected on, the basis of life itself.

( I ) The Cosmic Drama
But because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear. - Alan Watts

We moderns are too smart to be taken in by the concept of The Leela, where the Lord, in a spirit of joy (Ananda), creates the universe for his enjoyment and in which we are but puppets shunted around by the whims of the master string puller, the Cosmic Puppeteer.

It is hard to believe that we are just imaginations of a supreme being; of someone outside of ourselves who dreamt us up and is now controlling us – just as a video gamer can create an avatar and take part in an online game, interacting with several others in a similar situation.

It is hard to accept that we are someone’s or something’s figment of imagination; that what we se as a solid reality is nothing but a perception of the mind; a veiling of ‘that/tat’ to give rise to multifarious projections of reality.

No, we are too smart for believing anything like that. Why? Because we have been hammered with alternative beliefs – beliefs that actually work within this ‘real’ life, which can be proved again and again.

When science and logic tells us that we are beings of reason, a ‘super’ animal quite capable of looking after ourselves without a problem, and we have proven it by achieving such dramatic adventures as landing on the moon, probing Mars and plumbing the depths of our oceans, we see no reason to believe in a God who does not redress wrongs, allows suffering to carry on, and brings about death and destruction on both the innocent and wicked. This logical mind tells us that a God - should He/She/It exist - is unfair, an oxymoron (in some case a moron), and a projection or a mental aberration that is used by megalomaniacs to control people through awe and fear.

In our ‘logical/reasoning’ minds, God should not compute. Our minds work on seeing and experiencing, and what can be observed can believed in. Then, what is beyond the senses and beyond the comprehension of the mind, is beyond our knowledge and thus, beyond what we have to believe.

But the majority of the population of Earth just refuse to give up on the concept of a supernatural power that determines the cause and flow of our lives. While die-hard atheist (not all scientists are included here) would want us to believe that this a brainwashing of some kind, these ‘brain-washed people continue merrily with their lives, adoring a god of their choice to which they pay homage with the expectation for it to look after them in times of need and woe.

And they die proclaiming the existence of God (and with fingers crossed) hoping to be heading to a better place. They skilfully use logic and reasoning in all aspects of their lives but will not use it for their belief system, their belief in God.

And they have a good reason for it. Logic and reason appear to fail miserably in the ‘understanding’ of God, in fact, call it the paradox of God.

But that in itself is part the Leela. For one cannot comprehend things beyond its conditioned life. How can a plant understand the concept of travelling for pleasure, and while an animal can feel a whole gamut of emotions, the finer understandings with which we humans carry out our daily lives is beyond the ken of animals.

“Also the difference of condition in the world of beings is an obstacle to comprehension. For example: this mineral belongs to the mineral kingdom; however far it may rise, it can never comprehend the power of growth. The plants, the trees, whatever progress they may make, cannot conceive of the power of sight or the powers of the other senses; and the animal cannot imagine the condition of man, that is to say, his spiritual powers.” - Baha’i Faith

Humans are conditioned beings, even from before being born (keeping in mind the karmic burden we bring into each life of ours). From birth we are conditioned into certain behavioural patterns in addition to the karmic burden - from our parents and relatives, from our teachers and from all people we interact with. This forms our gunas, or attributes, our characteristics.

Such a well-conditioned mind is incapable of seeing beyond this conditioning, and thus it is religion (well, most of them, anyway) that sets out to recondition man in the image of God. That is what is meant by seeking Samadhi/seeking God, either through devotion, inquiry or doing good works.

According to monism, there is only One and no other. Everything in the universe is the One emanating into many; when the One chooses to become the many so to experience the many – at the same time, in real time. This is the leela.

When God, the One without attributes, the Nirakaar, the Absolute, chooses to start this leela, He (I use this as a convenient pronoun for God is without attributes) has to become the material cause of the world that he brings forth.

God has to surround itself, envelop itself with the ‘material’ of this universe (or universes). The material is the dream stuff of His dream, His leela. The natives of Australia are spot on in their interpretation of Creation as Dreamtime. They believe that every person essentially exists eternally in the Dreaming.

Hindu philosophy goes further by saying that only He exists and everything is a figment of His imagination. That the personality we display as individuals is the merriment (ananda) of God’s mind taking shape in multitudes of egos, engaging itself in multifarious activities, seeking every possible kind of outcomes for each and every kind of interaction and engagement life can have, and does have.

Only a mathematician could possibly appreciate the awe-inspiring ratio of possibilities these multitude of forms, each one of the trillions of forms itself faced with multitude of possibilities, and each of those possibilities having at least two choices in itself.

That is why one of Vishnu’s name attribute is Amitesh – he who permeates the universe as its material cause.

( II ) The Naatak – the drama we are involved in
The knowledge of the dreaming, the existence of God was placed into the minds of man. Ever wondered why man is the only ‘animal’ capable of seeking satisfaction outside of itself, in abstract reasons and understandings like peace, justice, love and kindness? Why we are ‘set above’ animals, not in our superiority in subjugating them, but in our understanding of seeking a purpose in life.
So, if everything is just a dream, an illusion, why does everything feel so real? Religions have their own interpretations of why this ephemeral world, ranging from the archaic where a god chooses to create the heavens, planets (Earth) seas, mountains, animals, other worlds and mankind in a number of days to the Vedantic postulation of Maya enveloping God so as to delude us from its reality.
Any number of reasons are given as why we live in this illusion, ranging from the falling from grace with God (the original sin) to the effects of karma to the vibrations of the anu (the atom)
Quantum physics states that everything in the most minute level is actually pure energy that is conscious, intelligent and living.

All things exist as energy from the lowest rate of vibration, the densest physical condensate of matter all the way to the highest rate of vibration in the universe, The Source, God. The Entire Universe is a Single Super Spectrum of Universal Energy.
The play of this energy is interpreted by our sense and the brain into a semblance of the reality, a very holographic interpretation that feel so real.
“Know that there are two kinds of knowledge: the knowledge of the essence of a thing, and the knowledge of its qualities. The essence of a thing is known through its qualities, otherwise it is unknown and hidden.” – Baha’i faith
Psychology also comes in to help us understand this better – the mind is a most powerful instrument. It is quite capable of building a world for itself, both in the dream state as well as in the waking stage. Only in the waking stage, such world-building activities are called neuroses, and are very likely to help you end up in a mental institute. Nevertheless, the capability of spawning a reality is inherent in each and everyone of us, and we do it on a very regular basis when we start day-dreaming.
Science tells us that subatomic particles are simply energy packets. You are a cluster of energy, so is everything else. A cluster of energy is always in motion, moving and changing to form new configuration at every moment. The table that is in your dining room is not as solid as it appears to be. On a highly magnified level, you would realize that it is in constant flux, “losing” and “gaining” billions of energy packets, but intelligently maintaining the overall “look” of a table There is a consciousness that keeps the energy in that particular form for our perception (or is that something we do).
What ‘helps’ us in stopping us from building our own individual realities is the collective consciousness we share. God, after all, is One, thus only one consciousness pervades the universe/s.
It is this universal consciousness – the Chith – that is responsible for holding the overall form of the universe/s, the planets, stars and other cosmic bodies, the forms of life and materials within each cosmic body, and the form of cells or the energy packets we have isolated in our verification of the ‘truth’.
And we are part of this conscious - sharing its forms, observing them through whatever little our senses are able to gather as information which is then analysed by our brains and offered to us as objects that we can understand.
Scientist says that all the electrons and subatomic particles of an atom are held together in their precise position and orbit by an invisible force, by which without it, everything would fall apart and reality as we know it, would cease to exist in an instant.

( III ) The Nautanki – the delusion of life through Attachment and Maya

He who would bring the heavens here
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way.
[God’s Labour: Sri Aurobindo]

Now the part where we, as personalised egos, take over is the nautanki of the universe/s. This is where we ‘clash’ as individuals, seeking out our satisfaction/place in the world by means of skills, cunningness or aggressiveness.

It is ongoing, this staged play in the great drama of life – birth, living, death, getting, forgetting, remembering, memorising. We are born, we are conditioned towards certain goals, we try to achieve them, we are either thwarted, or are successful and then we die. In dying we leave behind either weeping friends and relatives, or legacies or a sigh of relief from others.

We pin traditions to what we do and call it culture. We pin habits to our lives and call it character. We try to do good, we try to get away with it, constantly pushing the envelop – both physical and mental. We set up systems, we rage against other systems. We build our civilisations, we destroy others. We say we are lords of some domains and wage wars to protect, or we see other domains and lust after them.
We raise children so that we can leave behind something of ourselves when we are gone. We mould children in our images, using them to fulfil our unfulfilled dreams. We marry; for convenience, for lust, for love, to show off. We step out to do something extraordinary, no matter how trivial, or in bad taste it is. For we are built to do something, not just vegetate in our lives.

We are social animals, we are individuals with unalienable rights, we are pockets of similar-thinking people, or we are groups - a nation, a political boundary, a religion, a creed, or common cause.

Our minds are the formalised aspects of the Great Thought that is God.

What is the form of God?

2012-03-23T02:44:00.000-07:00

Nalinesh Arun

Our ancients have variously tried to tell us what God looks like through our scriptures; some with success, others with interpretations that make little sense.

For purpose of clarity, let’s keep the two aspects of godhead – God and avatar – separate or else we will be very confused. God is beyond what we can apprehend with our minds; avatars, on the other hand, are sparks of divinity that choose to walk among us with a mortal body.

For example, Vishnu is godhead – Rama, Krishna, Buddha and others are aspects of Vishnu that took “birth” on Earth.

The same applies to Shiva – Dattatreya is an avatar of Shiva (or as some want it, a combined avatar of Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva) and Dakshinamurti is Shiva in His aspect as a guru.

The cosmic form of God that most people are familiar with is the being with thousands of arms, thousands of heads all doing something. In a population of 7 billion, a thousands arms and heads is, well, peanuts. This ancient description of God as many-limbed and many-headed is of little relevance in a very populated world.

Then we have the individual godhead descriptions: Vishnu reclining on Sesha Naag on the Kshir Sagara; Brahma cross-legged on a lotus and Shiva meditating on Kailasha (or in a cemetery in some portrayals). The images we have of Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva are artists impressions made from description of Godhead in our scriptures. By the way, none of these artists actually saw God but take their cues from someone else’s interpretation of God.

So, are these depictions nothing but fairy tales? Yes, and no.

Yes, because God cannot be visualised, not with our limited minds at least. It is an exercise in futility to paint God, or the Trimurti, or anything we call God. There is no way we can say God looks like this. Take a look at a collection of renditions of either Vishnu or Shiva. The face, the body types, etc are different in each rendition – what remains constant is the attire and the masculinity (or the femininity in case of our goddesses) of the figure. Each artist brought his or her own standard of beauty to the painting – some prefer oval faces, some elongated, but in each case region, religion and race played a part in the depiction of God in art.

Those cultures which like man with a moustache render Shiva with moustache; some others draw Krishna with almost feminine grace, others with a cherubic face even in a teen depiction. Our goddesses are all in the perfect dimension for a female – following the standards of beauty prevalent 50 to 100 years ago. Thankfully they will probably never be drawn as the waif-like, stick figures of womanhood as depicted in our modern ads.

These renditions of gods, and avatars, play a major part in our religious feelings for they are used as points of concentration for both our faith and for identifying ourselves to the world. With the coming of cinema, these paintings then became the launch pad for the various portrayals of God on the silver screen. The cumulative effect of this mistake has been that we generally end up divided on what our gods are really like. But that has already been written about http://www.indianweekender.co.nz/Pages/ArticleDetails/40/1244/Tongue-in-cheek/Bollywooding-of-Hinduism

On the other hand, we have to say ‘no, they are not really fairy tales’ because the depictions are based on imagery of Gods that our ancients used in order to tell us what God is. In telling us of God, the ancients first SPOKE of it through narrations and verses, then WROTE down that God was omnipresent, that He/She/It was everybody, and everything. And that God dwelt in everybody, and was able to experience everything that all others experienced, that God was the in-dweller in our hearts, our very soul – list goes on.

Writing down the experience of God task must have been formidable – for it is generally said that no word can describe the truth, the glory, the auspiciousness and the beauty of God. There is no language refined enough (although people think Sanskrit can do the job), to fully express the attributes (or lack thereof) of God. Even the sound of Aum (Om, Omkara), whilst closest in expressing the word of God, is not the actual word of God (we are saying Om is a thousand different ways).

Yet we tried, time and again, to express God in language, using everything from metaphors, imagery, symbolism, even idioms – every figure of speech has been used and we are no closer to express that which cannot be expressed, that can only be experienced.

We used words like glory, auspiciousness, purity and beauty and then had to resort to our own understanding of these words. It is the interpretation of these words that has led us into the mire that is religion today. And yet, it is this endeavour to express the inexpressible that actually led to the development of our languages.

Otherwise we would have been stuck with rudimentary language to explain the mundane things that happened to us everyday. The abstractions in language is only thanks to our efforts to understand that which cannot be understood.

Colour, of course, plays an important part in ‘understanding’ of God. For example, what personifies purity (Sattwa guna) better than white? So Vishnu reposes in a milk-white sea/sea of milk; Shiva is amidst the snow-capped Kailasha Parvat; Brahma is snowy-bearded, sometimes shown on a white swan, sometimes on a white lotus.

And Shiva the destroyer is dark, a herald of death and destruction (tamasic). In his Rudra aspect he is raging darkness itself (this was toned down a lot later in our history).

Both Rama and Krishna are also dark – but painted/portrayed in blue to show they are not really dark but the colour of rain-laden clouds (so such names as Megha Shyama come about). Some say the colour is of infinity itself, others says it a ‘whitewashing’ of the effect that our avatars were actually dark. Take your pick.

For Lakhsmi the colour of choice is red – rajasic – denoting activity, a go—getting attitude and, most importantly, commerce or success in commerce. We approach her to increase our fortunes.

She is, especially at Diwali, worshipped together with Ganesha, the remover of obstacles. Not a weird combination at all if the shifting of priorities is your only concern when it comes to worshipping. Ganesha needs to be there to remove any obstacles before Lakshmi can bestow bounty on you (can you see how we continually shift things about to suit us?).

The holy apparel (pitambara) is colour coordinated – the yellow throw-on over the shoulder is a favourite for Krishna; white dhotis largely for Vishnu and Rama. Durga is in blood-red sari to denote her avenging spirit. Kali, in tamasic mode, is in darker, even muddier, colours.

Parvati is seldom seen in lighter colours, in keeping with her position as the dark one’s (Shiva) consort. Saraswati is almost always in white – denoting the purity of the arts and learning.

It was always going to be a challenge to depict our gods – though some thought did go in the artistic impressions of them based on our scriptures. It did not start out as deliberate conning of the people because there was integrity in the making of it, but reliability took a back seat in the actual execution of it over millennia.

There is small story of how traditions begin, concerning a cat, a basket and a bowl of milk. In times past a priest offered a bowl of milk as an offering before a goddess at a festival time.

Because he owned a cat that got to the milk, he would ask his children to catch the cat, and hold it captive under an upturned basket. This became a regular ‘event’ during the festival prayers.

All and good for the first few generation when the kids and their kids understood why the cat had to be caught and held captive under a basket. But several generations down the line, whenever the prayers were held, a cat was caught (whether the family had a cat in residence or not) and then held captive under a basket. Because somewhere down the line, someone had forgotten the reason behind the catching of the cat and all had started thinking it was part of the rituals to have a cat under a basket present during the prayers.

A simplistic explanation but nevertheless one that sheds light on our many, many rituals that we really cannot understand.

And so it happened with our gods – someone rendered an image of god based on his understanding of what he/she had read in the scriptures (or following direction from someone who had a good understanding of what needed to go in the image).

Initially the rendition was copied faithfully and even improved on but given the timeline we have for Hinduism, the reasoning behind the renditions were all but forgotten.

Why does Vishnu hold a lotus and a disk in his hands? Why the gadha (mace)? Why does Shiva have a trishool, why is his hair matted, snakes around his neck and body covered with ash (sometimes)?

Why do some of our goddess hold a noose (depicting punishment?). And all of these are offset by the abhaya hasta – the mudra of protection, the palm raised in blessing.

These questions are asked not to look at why these ‘needhis’ or treasures are used for (Vishnu’s disk is used for chopping off heads) but to under stand the background – why was this particular weapon chosen?; why would they need a weapon at all?; why do our gods always have this war-like aspect to them?.

And why do gods have particular personal carriers when they have the power to move anywhere at will – Garuda, king of eagles for Vishnu; a bull for Shiva; Ganesha on a tiny mouse; Kartikeya on a peacock; Durga on a lion? Why is Surya’s charioteer legless? Just symbolism that has either lost its true meaning or has been rehashed over time to mean something different?

It is little wonder, then, that stories get woven about the Gods – how Shiva married (for the second time); how Ganesha got an elephant head (or how he was created out of the dirt of his mother’s body); how Vishnu took the form of a beauteous woman to con the rakhsas from getting their hand on the nectar of the gods; and how as Mohini, she/he had a son with Shiva called Ayyapan.

And it all spirals out of control as various ‘pundits’ move into explain the why and wherefores of our celestial families, adding explanation after explanation to things that cannot be explained off easily. Technically, of course, these explanations are impossibility as Godhead is a force/energy/spirit rather than actual beings. So, why did our ancients start off these ‘rumours’ of God in human form, and of their ‘families’?

Given the dumbing down of the concepts of God for followers of any particular religion, God had to be personified and thus we have God/gods in the image of humans (with some physical animal features thrown in) and reverse concepts such as man was created in the image of God. These concepts were acceptable when we thought the sun revolved around the earth and that we were the centre of the universe. But they are no longer valid as they are only people’s way of understanding God at the level that their minds allow.

Now consider a rishi or sage trying his or her best to make others understand the power of the universal or God, given an atmosphere where the others have no idea of this ‘type’ of God. The tools available to the rishi is only the language concepts that the others can understand – humanness, the emotions, aspects of nature, families, work, play, etc.

Straight off the limitations are apparent – where the mind cannot conceive a tangible aspect, the human psyche balks. So the concepts of omnipresence, omnipotent and omniscience are dumbed down so people could understand them.

What tools would a rishi have on hand to show the concept of God to people? Descriptions, essences, all words that were handy and understandable. The appellations for Vishnu, including names like Amitesh, mean that which permeates everything.

The question raised is: Was God already named Vishnu or was the name chosen by us to show one of his ‘abilities or essences’? Shiva means the auspicious one – note the use of ‘one’. Does this mean someone told someone that God was auspicious and in some language Shiva meant auspicious and they collectively named God “The Auspicious One” and thereby ending up with the name Shiva?

And by a name to God, God then just had to take on a personality. He/She/It became humanlike and gathered all the attributes of humans and humanity – but in large/better doses that made him/her/it divine. And God did not have faults like humans did, although God could get angry and be retributive but these were never considered faults as they were the divine rights of God.

And God had to be born, faced human-like conflicts with mighty being, sometime accepting temporary defeat as the stories spun out of control over the generations. All these stories, while humanising the supreme, left it a fallible entity, capable of weaknesses, judging wrongly and favouritism. Thus, we get “God’s own people”, “The Chosen Ones”, “Beloved of the Lord”, etc.

This, of course, is contrary to the basic make of Hinduism – where God is attributeless (nirguna), deathless, is never born, is eternal and does not have a form (nirakaar), always is forever (nitya). God is the basis, the very substance of the universe. As ‘Creator’ God could only create anything out of himself (the term is generally used). Out of the nabhi (navel) of Vishnu comes the Brahma, the creator. And his term of office is a thousand days and nights before everything is sucked in again at pralaya.

In the beginning we talked of Vishnu permeating the universe/s. Instead of seeing Vishnu reclining and a lotus coming out of him, let’s imagine a coalescing of matter to form a universe within Vishnu, with the starting point being Brahma and then an outward expansion of the said universe within the entity called God. Here we are contained in every aspect in the huge entity called God/Brahman. Brahman comes from the root ‘brh’ (to grow) and connotes immenseness that continues to grow or expand – sounds like a good definition of the growing universe.

In depictions of creation we see a large figure of Vishnu (in some cases Krishna) reclining at the top of the picture, with a lotus stalk growing out of his navel the end of which has a much smaller figure of Brahma sitting on it and then various aspects of creation emanating out of it. Given the limitations the painter had, it is a pretty good depiction because there is no way of showing the Brh (expansion and immensity) aspect of God otherwise. How can one show the immensity of God on a scrap of paper? But we tried.

So, our pictures of God are not fairy tales but neither are they really the whole truth. It is the best we have come so far in expressing God in art form and should be seen as such. There are great initially for the mind to comprehend some aspect of some understanding of God but each of us must strive to go beyond these just as a child moves beyond the kindergarten, into primary school, then secondary and finally to the tertiary level.

The truth of God is beyond the mind of man and so it is said that one has to go beyond the mind to ‘apprehend’ the truth. Most meditations then seek to still the vrittis (mental tendencies, or psycho-physical propensities) of the mind – the individual ideas or elements of thought are first isolated then ‘discarded’ to attain to the anandamaya kosa (the final of the paanch koshas that make the physical entity we call man) and then beyond it.

It is said that the universe is the apparel of the Lord – the Pitambara. And every planet, every star, every country, everything, is a part of the body of God. What this means is we are limited or contained within God, are essentially a part of God and are nothing beyond God. That is a good definition but again it is just words. To know it to be true (or otherwise) one has to actually experience it and that means getting down to embracing spirituality to know the truth.

For it is said that God cannot be known by worship, by rituals, by japa but only by experiencing God – through bhakti (becoming God through emotions/feelings) and jnana (comprehending God through the intellect). This does not mean worship, rituals, japa are wrong – they are an essential part of ‘purifying oneself on the road to knowledge. They are the first steps to godhead, a path to godhead, a means but not the end.

*And bhakti is jnana and jnan is bhakti. The fool separates the two, the wise see them as an essential one.

NOTES

In Sanskrit, "brihh" or "bruhh" means to grow, "brihad" or bruhad" means great and so on.

Some confuse Brahman with Brahmin, the name of a caste in India. Brahman is different from it and also from Brahma. Brahma is a Deity, in fact he is the very first created by the Lord to create the world. Whereas Brahman is an absolute reality, the original source, the one and the only God from which creation emerges; It is formless, omnipresent and omniscient, all powerful and absolute.

The term Brahman is not to be confused with:-
1) Brahma, the Creator God;
2) Brahmana, Vedic texts, nor with
3) brahmana, Hindu priest caste (English spelling: brahmin).

God created this Universe on His own initiative and ordained various codes for its upkeep and smooth running. There were rules of correct conduct for every individual and groups of people. These form the tenets of Dharma (Righteous Conduct). The word Dharma is derived from the root, Dhr, meaning 'wear'. Dharma means that which is worn or practiced. It is the holy apparel (Pithambara) of the Lord. Dharma guards both honour and dignity; protects and gives beauty and joy, lending charm to life. As clothes maintain the dignity of the person who wears them, Dharma protects the dignity of every country and its people. Every single country in the world, has its own special Dharma or unique duty. Every country (desha) is a part of the body (deha) of the Lord, and is protected by the Dharma that is practised.

Take the five elements, the components of this Prapancha (Universe). Of these, water has movement and coldness as its Dharma; combustion and light are the Dharma of fire. Each of the five elements have their unique Dharma. Humanity for man and animality for animals - these guard them from decline. How can fire be fire, if it has no power of combustion and light? It must manifest the Dharma to be itself. When it loses that, it becomes as lifeless as a piece of charcoal. Similarly man too has some natural characteristics that are his very life-breath; one can be identified as 'human' only when these abilities are present. To preserve and foster such qualities and abilities, certain modes of behaviour and lines of thought are laid down. This is called Dharma. These qualities are not imported from somewhere o utside, nor can it be removed. It is your own genuine nature, your uniqueness.

A little-known Maori philosophy

2011-07-18T19:07:00.000-07:00

The concepts of higher philosophy is generally claimed as the domain of more ancient civilisations like Hinduism, Shintoism, Daosim, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, or of their off-shoots like Buddhism, Christianity or Islam. .

These concepts range from a supreme god, the lord of the universe, an all powerful entity for a chosen people to having created the world, being the material cause of the universe and (in monism) everything being God.

Cosmological concepts range from the seven heavens, the three worlds, the hells or netherworlds, creation, sustenance and destruction. The concept of the soul and the spirit, along with reincarnation, karma, judgement day, purgatory and cleansing are elements in most, if not all, of these religions.

On the other hand, generally, the world sees the belief systems of ‘minority’ races as primitive, nature-based, unable to stand up to the scrutiny of the higher concepts of the more forceful strains of religion like Christianity or Islam.

A classic case is the belief system of the ancient Greeks – adopted with variations by the Romans – which fell to the onslaught of Christianity. This belief system was then turned in mythology of legends and accepted as a cultural innovation that these people had to ensure until supplanted by a ‘better, more acceptable’ system of beliefs.

The Pacific Island nations, particularly the Polynesians, endured a similar supplanting of their beliefs, mostly after missionaries took Christianity to the islands during European empire-building era.

In New Zealand, the present-day Maori mythology is largely focused around Rangi and Papa, Hine-nui-te-po and Maui.

“Rangi and Papa are the primordial parents, the sky father and the earth mother who lie locked together in a tight embrace. They have many children all of which are male, who are forced to live in the cramped darkness between them.

These children grow and discuss among themselves what it would be like to live in the light. Tumatauenga, the fiercest of the children, proposes that the best solution to their predicament is to kill their parents.” (Grey 1956:2).

Traditions on migrations name Kupe as the discoverer of New Zealand, or Toi as the first important origin ancestor, or place special emphasis on descent from a particular canoe migration.

But it is the little-known, and rather controversial, philosophy of Io Matua Kore that puts the lie to the Maori belief system lacking high philosophy. It is controversial because some scholars still refuse to accept it as integral to the Maori, saying it was made up in response to the Christian missionaries’ relentless move to convert the people.

But Io has been known to Polynesians for millennia with oral tradition in Hawaii referring to Io, and the place-name Ur (very Abrahamanic), or Uru and the heroic figure Nu'u. Polynesians call their homeland Hawaiki, a legendary place that sank beneath the waves in calamity still remembered by these island dwellers and migration specialists.

Maori elders say the knowledge of Io was with the people for eons, but as a path of higher aspiration in which only the chosen could tread. It was not for all and sundry and thus not well-known outside of its rather-secretive circle.

On the face of being overwhelmed by the missionaries, the elders had little choice but to bring out the knowledge of Io into the mainstream to combat the missionary zeal.

Io Matua Kore (Maori for "Io the Parentless who was always existent without beginning or end") is in many ancient Polynesian traditions the supreme god. Io is the absolute principle of being, of reality, of being eternal and unknowable.

Io is: “both Being-itself and absolute Nothingness. That is, He is truly infinite, encompassing within himself both the absolutely Positive and absolutely Negative."

Such a refined concept is similar to the concept of Brahmam in Vedanta in its aspect of ajar, amar (beyond birth and death), Nirakaar (formless), nirguna (attributeless) and its aspects of Sat (Being), Chith (Consciousness), Ananda (Unalloyed joy).

A good piece on the concepts of Io can be found at this site: http://teiranaahi.auturoaartists.com/2010/08/02/the-science-of-io/

More intriguingly, and compounding the belief that the Maori have in their grasp one of the highest philosophies, is a poem written by a Maori ancestor, Tieme Ranapiri. When I came across this poem I was much taken by its depth and its exposition.

To my limited knowledge, there are indeed very few pieces in Western literature (religious and secular) that can come close to the concepts this poem portrays so concisely, despite the fact that some of its grandeur and nuances may have been lost in the translating of it.

"My Law"
Written by Tieme Ranapiri (1700AD/CE?)
and translated from Maori by Kere Graham.

The sun may be clouded, yet ever the sun
Will sweep on its course till the Cycle is run.
And when into chaos the system is hurled
again shall the Builder reshape a new world.

Your path may be clouded, uncertain your goal:
Move on - for your orbit is fixed to your soul.
And though it may lead into darkness of night
The torch of the Builder shall give it new light.

You were. You will be! Know this while you are:
Your spirit has traveled both long and afar.
It came from the Source, to the Source it returns
The Spark which was lighted eternally burns.

It slept in a jewel. It lept in a wave.
It roamed in the forest. It rose from the grave.
It took on strange garbs for long eons of years
and now in the soul of yourself it appears.

From body to body your spirit speeds on
It seeks a new form when the old one has gone
and the form that it finds is the fabric you wrought
On the loom of the Mind from the fibre of Thought.
As dew is drawn upwards, in rain to descend
Your thoughts drift away and in Destiny blend.
You cannot escape them, for petty or great,
Or evil or noble, they fashion your Fate.

Somewhere on some planet, sometime and somehow
Your life will reflect your thoughts of your Now.
My law is unerring, no blood can atone
The structure you build you will live in alone.
From cycle to cycle, through time and through space
Your lives with your longings will ever keep pace
And all that you ask for, and all you desire
Must come at your bidding, as flame out of fire.

Once list' to that Voice and all tumult is done
Your life is the Life of the Infinite One.
In the hurrying race you are conscious of pause
With love for the purpose, and love for the Cause.

You are your own Devil, you are your own God
You fashioned the paths your footsteps have trod.
And no one can save you from Error or Sin
Until you have hark'd to the Spirit within.

Here we have concepts that Hindus and Buddhists (and even mystical Judaism, Islam and Christianity) are very familiar with:

1. Karma –
your orbit is fixed to your soul;
Somewhere on some planet, sometime and somehow
Your life will reflect your thoughts of your Now
2. Reincarnation of the soul –
You were. You will be! Know this while you are:
Your spirit has travelled both long and afar. It came from the Source,
to the Source it returns
From body to body your spirit speeds on
It seeks a new form when the old one has gone
and the form that it finds is the fabric you wrought
3. The Soul –
The Spark which was lighted eternally burns.
It slept in a jewel. It leapt in a wave.
It roamed in the forest. It rose from the grave.
It took on strange garbs for long eons of years
and now in the soul of yourself it appears.

Cultures deemed a more ‘primitive’ culture do have some of the highest philosophies – philosophies wrapped up as riddles of a mythology, understandable only to the initiated.

And outsiders see the most obvious traits of a culture, and miss out on the beauty and the basis of that culture. Or plainly refuse to accept that anything outside of their culture can carry the truth.

Beautiful synopsis

2011-06-23T13:32:00.000-07:00

"My Law"
Written by Tieme Ranapiri
and translated from Maori by Kere Graham.
The sun may be clouded, yet ever the sun
Will sweep on its course till the Cycle is run.
And when into chaos the system is hurled
again shall the Builder reshape a new world.

Your path may be clouded, uncertain your goal:
Move on - for your orbit is fixed to your soul.
And though it may lead into darkness of night
The torch of the Builder shall give it new light.

You were. You will be! Know this while you are:
Your spirit has traveled both long and afar.
It came from the Source, to the Source it returns
The Spark which was lighted eternally burns.

It slept in a jewel. It lept in a wave.
It roamed in the forest. It rose from the grave.
It took on strange garbs for long eons of years
and now in the soul of yourself it appears.

From body to body your spirit speeds on
It seeks a new form when the old one has gone
and the form that it finds is the fabric you wrought
On the loom of the Mind from the fibre of Thought.
As dew is drawn upwards, in rain to descend
Your thoughts drift away and in Destiny blend.
You cannot escape them, for petty or great,
Or evil or noble, they fashion your Fate.

Somewhere on some planet, sometime and somehow
Your life will reflect your thoughts of your Now.
My law is unerring, no blood can atone
The structure you build you will live in alone.
From cycle to cycle, through time and through space
Your lives with your longings will ever keep pace
And all that you ask for, and all you desire
Must come at your bidding, as flame out of fire.

Once list' to that Voice and all tumult is done
Your life is the Life of the Infinite One.
In the hurrying race you are conscious of pause
With love for the purpose, and love for the Cause.

You are your own Devil, you are your own God
You fashioned the paths your footsteps have trod.
And no one can save you from Error or Sin
Until you have hark'd to the Spirit within.

End of an era, beginning of another

2011-04-26T03:48:00.000-07:00

Sai Baba’s passing mark the end of one era, the beginning of another

It is the passing of an era. Sathya Sai Baba, the focus of millions of devotees around the world, has left His body. Sai Baba died at 7.40am local time on Sunday at the Super Speciality Hospital which he had built for the poor. He had been on life support for a few weeks.

It is the passing of an era and the making way for a new one. For devotees, history has marked its path. We devotees need to look forward to the coming of the next sad guru, Prema Sai within eight years of this time in history.

The passing away of Sai Baba falls short of the time frame we devotees have been told of – He was supposed to leave his body in 2020 at the age of 96. But recently Sai Baba has been talking of leaving earlier as he felt his mission was nearing completion. This he has been saying for the past few year so it does not come as a surprise that he has left his mortal coil now.

The message of Sai Baba far superseded the many social works he was involved in. The unity that he proclaimed inspired millions around the world to work towards free education (with character); free medical and health services (with compassion); and commerce with conscience.

Working off the blueprint of free schools, free hospitals and free water supply that Sai Baba has in India, ardent devotees around the world put together similar programmes in the country of their origin. Even a small nation like Fiji has a free Sai school in Lautoka, passing many benefits to a nearby Fijian village.

Class, creed. colour did not matter to Sai Baba. I have celebrated Christmas with over 20,000 Christian followers at Puttaparthi, and enjoyed Eid, celebrated the Chinese New Year and Buddhist festivals there also. Sai Baba’s message of universal brotherhood/sisterhood remains true and has remained true for the past 60 plus years.

In many ways Prashanti Nilayam, in the village of Puttaparthi, was a United Nation of sorts. It is a place of which mixes humanity, almost like a cauldron in which gold is purified. Prashanti Nilayam teems with such a cross-section of people, of so many languages and so much culture it is hard to think of another similar place elsewhere.

While many will remember him for his miracles, Sai Baba himself paid little heed to that. His greatest achievement, he said, was the transformation of the human psyche, the real mission he said he was here for.

His lessons are well documented, in almost all languages. The scope of these lessons is what makes Sai Baba truly awesome – he had a true grasp of all the scriptures and made these easily available to all, including women.

Women, it is apparent, have a place of importance in Sai Baba’s teachings. His first school was for girls as he felt women needed that education to be able to make the right decisions. Women, he said time and again, were ready to lead the world. But he also demanded a lot of the women who followed his teachings – fortitude, compassion and understanding.

Sai Baba placed his faith in children for a better world. His organisation has a special wing where child development was taught. This wing is integral to the mission of service, devotion and education that he proclaimed around the world. The students from his various schools are making an impact worldwide, in various organisations, both commercial and social.

In the end his messages of Help Ever, Hurt Never; Love All, Serve All will be legacy he leaves behind.

Archive of Indian Weekender articles by yours truly

2011-03-30T18:01:00.000-07:00

The Earth Owns Us II

2011-03-30T02:46:00.000-07:00

Earthquakes are fearsome to a different level – they come without any warning and rip the ground from under our feet. Unlike hurricanes, flooding and other ‘predictable’ natural disasters, an earthquake rattles us to the bone because we have no answer to the fury of that sudden ground shake.

Adding to the fearsomeness of earthquakes is its concomitant disaster, the dread tsunami if the earthquake is epicentred at sea.

Science can only step in after the quake to say how big the quake was in comparison to atomic bombs, why it happened on this fault line, whether some plate was subducting, and so on. There is little science can do, no matter how advanced we get.

Some scientists have realised the idea of how the skin of the earth works and are able to correctly say where earthquakes could possibly strike, but they are rare. Some people, probably mathematicians, observe planet orbits, pull of gravity of celestial bodies and sometimes correctly predict an earthquake happening. These, of course, are pooh pahed by mainstream science and its followers.

There is evidence of both the ‘capability’ of what an earthquake/tsunami (and other natural disasters) can do at its most fearsome, as well as evidence of the inability of science in stopping this from happening.

For this we have to shake off some prevailing scientific thoughts and see with different eyes what was happening on earth many, many years ago. In the first part of this article ‘The Earth Owns Us’, I dwelt on the earth as a continually changing entity with an inherent ability to balance itself as it circuits the Milky Way.

This balancing act of Mother Earth is the cause of much of our natural disasters. There are forces in play here that are largely beyond the comprehension of much of mankind – all we see is isolated events of natural destruction and think of them as a one-off (or in the case of Christchurch, two-off) event.

Many mainstream scientists shy away from the fact that each and every natural disaster on Planet Earth is inter-connected. It may be an intellectual exercise for us to admit that inter-connectedness but very hard to accept as a reality. The reality remains that we in this part of the world were visited by a natural disaster, that Japan was visited by another natural disaster, that Myanmar had its own disaster. We tend to own these disasters and work on ways to get around them.

No real effort is made to see the inter-connectedness that leads to these disasters. Yet, history provides ample proof (if we approach history with an open mind) that ‘natural disasters’ were the cause of major massive changes to the planet, enough to wipe out whole species. Enough to wipe out whole civilisations.

Science says a ‘non-natural disaster’ like a comet or asteroid hitting Earth 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs. For many, the jury is still out on this theory. In the past 65 million years the changes to Earth has been of its own volition – the poles engorged with ice throwing the planet off balance and thus leading to pole shift. Pole shift is when the north and south poles switch, or when the poles end up at the equator and the equator becomes the poles.

In The Earth's Shifting Crust, and two successive books, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966) and The Path of the Pole (1970), Charles Hapgood proposed the radical theory that the Earth's axis has shifted numerous times during geological history. The Earth's crust had undergone repeated displacements and that the geological concepts of continental drift, and sea-floor spreading, owed their secondary livelihoods to the primary nature of crustal shift. According to Hapgood, crustal shift was made possible by a layer of liquid rock situated about 100 miles beneath the surface of the planet.
In The Path of the Pole he wrote:
Polar wandering is based on the idea that the outer shell of the Earth shifts about from time to time, moving some continents toward and other continents away from the poles. Continental drift is based on the idea that the continents move individually. A few writers have suggested that perhaps continental drift causes polar wandering. This book advances the notion that polar wandering is primary and causes the displacement of continents. My book will present evidence that the last shift of the Earth's crust (the lithosphere) took place in recent time, at the close of the last ice age, and that it was the cause of the improvement in climate. – from the Internet.

However much science says that man only evolved into a civilised being in the past 10,000 or so years, evidence all over the world show that civilisation is more ancient than that. I have already talked of the underwater cities discovered around Japan and Taiwan and India and off the coast of Bimini Atoll in the Bahamas. The pyramids of Egypt (presently in a desert) show water marks on their sides dating back to 9600 BCE.

A major cataclysm caused these sunken cities, some stretching for miles outward from its centres with roads comparable to modern day highways, to be covered by the sea. In some cases, the sinking was gradual, in others sudden and disastrous.

One event supersedes every other natural disaster to come up with a solution for these sunken cities – the universal Flood or Deluge. Whether from the Bible, the Puranas, the Chinese scriptures, or Tibetan scriptures or the myths and legends of the natives of the continents – the Incas, the Mayans, Indians of North America or the islanders of Hawaii or Easter Islands, one fact stands out. There was a massive flood – whether from a tsunami or a rising of the sea level or the sinking of the landmass or a mixture of all three. And it happened some 10,000 plus years ago.

The Incas and Mayans as well as the Hopi Indians of North America also ‘tell’ of the foreigners who came to them, as either bringers of knowledge or as conquerors. In some case, the foreigners were then turned into gods and worshipped, others were prophets who told of things that were to come in the future.

They told the people that they were the remnants of a great people whose cities had been destroyed in floods, that they, the survivors, wanted to pass on the knowledge they had accrued so that they wouldn’t be lost altogether. It is theorised that the pyramids of South America are works of these survivors rather then the works of the natives of that place. Some see the Olmecs, a civilisation superseding the Mayans, as the survivors of the global catastrophe, who then died out and whose pyramids and other artefacts were taken over by the natives.

There are many who believe in this theory, and not only that, this as well as other theories of ancient civilisation that go back to pre-10,000 BCE, is substantiated by the digging up of OOParts: out of place artefacts – archaeological artefacts that make no sense in the present understanding of history.

Some examples below:

• There are prehistoric copper mines on Lake Superior, in California, Arkansas, New Mexico, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Georgia, New Jersey and Ohio, where prehistoric iron smelting furnaces have also been found.

• Manganese was mined near Broken Hill in Zambia. Carbon dating of charcoal on the site indicates these mines were being worked 28,130 years ago.

• Ancient 8,000-year-old shoes found in a Missouri cave – mainstream science says no one was living in the region at that time.

• BBC News Online science editor Dr David Whitehouse: Woven clothing was being produced on looms 27,000 years ago, far earlier than had been thought, scientists say.

• The famous Ice Age statuettes known as the Venus of Willendorf and of Brassempouy show clear evidence of stylised hair – that is, at the time of so-called caveman, the Neanderthal people.

• Ancient ornaments of platinum found in Ecuador. This poses a provoking question--how could the American Indian produce the temperature of over 1,770 degrees Celsius necessary to melt it? It should be borne in mind here that the melting of platinum in Europe was achieved only two centuries ago.

• The tomb of the Chinese general Chow Chu (A.D. 265-316) presents a mystery. When analyzed by the spectroscope, a metal girdle showed 10 percent copper, 5 percent manganese, and 85 percent aluminium. But according to the history of science aluminium was obtained for the first time by Oersted in 1825 by a chemical method.

• An iron pillar in Delhi which weighs 6 tons and is about 7.5 meters high has, for fifteen centuries (it could be more, according to some experts), withstood the tropical heat of India plus the heavy downpours during the monsoons. It does not show any signs of rust formation and provides proof of the superior metallurgical skill of ancient India.

Despite these OOParts, mainstream science refuses to acknowledge the existence of civilisations pre-3000 BCE. Or maybe they haven’t gotten around to changing the textbooks yet.

Yet, millions accept that there were civilisations before the so-called ancient civilisations of Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Harappa and Mohenjo Daro. These millions accept it through their scriptures: whether the Bible, or the Hindu texts, or the Islamic scriptures, or the Buddhist annals.

Whether it be Noah’s Ark or Manu’s boat pulled by the Matsaya avatar, the deluge at the melting of the last Ice Age has been put into folk history. The history of an entire era, a civilisation, no less, have been put down in these ancient books. Granted over time, it has been added to, subtracted from and hyperbolised to become almost meaningless in a modern world but the fact remains that for all its over-the-top legends, the scriptures may be the best representation of the ancient civilisations that pre-dated us, for science as well as for religion.

And as we move in situation with global warming, polar ice cap meltdowns, increasing earthquake activity and a slow pole shift (the north pole has a south-bound shift by over 12 degrees in the past 25 years), what are we to make of these myths and legends?

There a lot of people out there on the fringe who believe that a major crust displacement could happen soon. And that the increasing number of earthquakes are signs that this could happen. What is a crustal displacement?: “The theory of Crustal Displacement states that the entire crust of the Earth can shift in one piece like the lose skin on an orange.”

It is hard to believe that a great flood or a massive tsunami could be the cause of a global catastrophe but add in the crustal displacement theory and it becomes almost viable.

Could this be what happened to the ancient civilisations? Could it be that, in one of its balancing acts, the Earth saw a crustal displacement happen where the ice caps (over-weight and cumbersome) moved into warmer parts and were melted? Scriptural stories tell of a quick deluge, but not a sudden one. In the Bible, it is said that it ‘rained for 40 days and 40 nights’ (could it mean something else than a literal rain flood?); in the Puranas, the flood was unstoppable but gradual. In other myths and legends, the flooding was accompanied by earthquakes, erupting volcanoes and subsiding land masses. Different things happened in different parts of the globe although, apparently, each of them was connected to the main event – the crustal displacement.

What could those ancient civilisations do on the face of a massive flooding? Nothing. That civilisation was not prepared for a global phenomenon of this magnitude.

Our scriptures tells of the high technology that these civilisations had – of flying vehicles, of weapons on par with nuclear bombs, of weapons with missile-like features. Here was a civilisation of conquests and empire-building, using weapons of a high technology and infrastructure that equalled any modern present-day country.

Yet, they had no answer to nature’s adjustment of itself. Entire cities were flooded, those who could leave did, those who couldn’t….

The survivors took to higher grounds, met with ‘lesser civilised’ people, erected monuments to their lost civilisations and tried to pass on as much of their accrued knowledge as they could. (Ever wondered why the gods of most mythology choose a mountain for their abode? Higher grounds would be a natural when the world was under water around you.)

But it is hard to pass on a few thousand years of knowledge to people who could barely read or had no idea what a wheel was. What was passed on as knowledge was effectively for daily use, some astronomical calculation and better agricultural practices while ‘higher knowledge’ was reserved for a selected few (and apparently jealously guarded by those few).

And how does a survivor pass on the wonders of a high civilisation to people who have been hunters and gatherers all their lives, who believe him to be a god? He tells them of the wonders at a level of understanding that they can comprehend and thus these stories become part of their mythology, of their religion.

Finally, what does a survivor do to leave behind a sign of the passing of such a civilisation for future generations? He builds monuments – like the pyramids, maybe Stonehenge, great etchings in the ground, so that his people do not pass out of the memory of mankind.

Iron, steel and glass are pretty fragile because the elements decomposes them quickly within a few hundred years, as the survivors would have known. So they resorted to stone, massive stones to create monuments to their vanished civilisation. These stone monuments, peppered around the world, is all that remains of this proud global civilisation.

And, they say, history repeats itself.

NOTES
In 1958 Hapgood published his first book, The Earth's Shifting Crust in collaboration with James H. Campbell, a mathematician and engineer. Here we find a foreword by Albert Einstein shortly before his death.
I frequently receive communications from people who wish to consult me concerning their unpublished ideas. It goes without saying that these ideas are very seldom possessed of scientific validity. The very first communication, however, that I received from Mr. Hapgood electrified me. His idea is original, of great simplicity, and if it continues to prove itself of great importance to everything that is related to the history of the earth's surface. I think that this rather astonishing, even fascinating, idea deserves the serious attention of anyone who concerns himself with the theory of the Earth's development.

The Pleistocene has been dated from 2.588 million (±5,000 years) to 12,000 years before present (BP), with the end date expressed in radiocarbon years as 10,000 carbon-14 years BP.[2] It covers most of the latest period of repeated glaciation, up to and including the Younger Dryas cold spell. The end of the Younger Dryas has been dated to about 9640 BC (11,590 calendar years BP).

What NASA says of the fears associated with 2012.

NASA has already stated:

Nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.

Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax. There is no factual basis for these claims. If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth in 2012, astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye. Obviously, it does not exist. Eris is real, but it is a dwarf planet similar to Pluto that will remain in the outer solar system; the closest it can come to Earth is about 4 billion miles.

The Earth has always been subject to impacts by comets and asteroids, although big hits are very rare. The last big impact was 65 million years ago, and that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today NASA astronomers are carrying out a survey called the Spaceguard Survey to find any large near-Earth asteroids long before they hit. We have already determined that there are no threatening asteroids as large as the one that killed the dinosaurs. All this work is done openly with the discoveries posted every day on the NASA NEO Program Office website, so you can see for yourself that nothing is predicted to hit in 2012.

Q: How do NASA scientists feel about claims of pending doomsday?
A: For any claims of disaster or dramatic changes in 2012, where is the science? Where is the evidence? There is none, and for all the fictional assertions, whether they are made in books, movies, documentaries or over the Internet, we cannot change that simple fact. There is no credible evidence for any of the assertions made in support of unusual events taking place in December 2012.

Q: Is there a danger from giant solar storms predicted for 2012?
A: Solar activity has a regular cycle, with peaks approximately every 11 years. Near these activity peaks, solar flares can cause some interruption of satellite communications, although engineers are learning how to build electronics that are protected against most solar storms. But there is no special risk associated with 2012. The next solar maximum will occur in the 2012-2014 time frame and is predicted to be an average solar cycle, no different than previous cycles throughout history.

Re: Crustal displacement and a sudden Ice Age - Thousands of animals have been found to be frozen in a brief moment of geological time. Ancient maps of Antarctica suggests that it too was 'frozen over' in a brief moment in time.
By studying the carcasses of the woolly mammoth and rhino found in the northern regions of Siberia and Canada one can see the land these animals grazed on was suddenly shoved into a much colder climate. Their stomachs reveal food found in warm climates where they grazed just prior to their deaths. This was found frozen along with them suddenly.

Very little is known about the Precambrian, despite it making up roughly seven-eighths of the Earth's history, and what little is known has largely been discovered in the past fifty years. The Precambrian fossil record is poor, and those fossils present (e.g. stromatolites) are of limited biostratigraphic use.[5] Many Precambrian rocks are heavily metamorphosed, obscuring their origins, while others have either been destroyed by erosion, or remain deeply buried beneath Phanerozoic strata.[6][7]
It is thought that the Earth itself coalesced from material in orbit around the Sun roughly 4500 Ma and may have been struck by a very large (Mars-sized) planetesimal shortly after it formed, splitting off material that came together to form the Moon (see Giant impact theory). A stable crust was apparently in place by 4400 Ma, since zircon crystals from Western Australia have been dated at 4404 Ma.[8]
The term Precambrian is somewhat out-moded, but is still in common use among geologists and paleontologists. It was briefly also called the Cryptozoic eon.

He is Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram

2011-03-18T16:52:00.000-07:00

He is Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram

He is Everyman
And thing and thought.

Every action is His,
History is HIS STORY,
His is the making, the breaking and the mending,
His is the thinking, the thought and the imagining.

He is Everyman
And will and wont.

Every decisions is His,
Resolution is HIS SOLUTION
His is the assessing, the selecting and the judging
His is the custom, the tendency and the disposition.

He is Everyman
And passion and poise.

Every enjoyment is His,
Transport is HIS SPORT
His is the joy, the bliss and the rapture
His is the pride, the nobility and the aplomb

He is Everyman
And valour and veracity.

Every authority is His,
Rectitude is HIS ATTITUDE
His is the courage, the determination and the morality
His is the reality, the truth and the certainty

He is Everyman
And mercy and might.

Every outcome is His,
Efficacy is HIS ECSTASY
His is the compassion, the magnanimity and the deliverance
His is the power, the potency and the fulfilment

He is Everyman
And perfect and pure.

Every virtue is His,
Decency is HIS POTENCY
His is the ideal, the excellence and the magnificence
His is the innocence, the simplicity and the incorruptible

He is Everyman
And one and all

He is everything
Diverse is HIS UNIVERSE
His is the singularity, the particular, and the specific
His is the entirety, the inclusive and the whole

CIA – Constant Integrated Awareness

I move within, tethered to everything,
everything responding to me.

The flow is constant, un-abating.
Shockingly understandable, manageable.

Everything I know, is known to me,
The beginning and the end are only
words, drenched in meaning if we only
allow it to be.

Constant is the knowledge of IS, being and becoming, constantly.
Unvarying is the tempo, the movement of the knowledge,
Neither fast nor slow, just a flow
And I flow with it.

The message is integrated, related, included,
Nothing amiss, nothing missing
Melding into a oneness of knowing.

Who speaks, who hears, who says, who listens?
I do and I do and I do and I do.
What is said anew, a fresh – nothing.
Yet, I listen to it afresh, and then I listen again.
Each time in bliss, revelling in its novelty.

All in one and one in all, who to tell the message to?
Yet, the message is relayed, integrated into everything
Flowing, not flowing, there, and everywhere.

From every point, every dimension the message reverberates,
I AM, being, becoming, beckoning,
calling to all and calling to itself only.
What call is it?

The call to be LOVE,
to be all in LOVE,
to become LOVE,
to become all in LOVE.

The Universe

I expand, evolving into
the Universe,
Changing into IT, the divine.

My mind teeters, tottering in
the vastness, into the miniscule,
unable to comprehend,
constitute itself.

There is no anchor: freewheeling,
flying, the mind tries to grab
the debris of its existence.
A last dab at its being, its frothy
life of vicissitudes and vanity
just flimsy elements of film
that it cannot hold on to.

Brightness incomprehensible, beyond
anything the senses can grasp
has the mind reeling in a vortex.

Yet, something holds its all together.

What is it that gives me the firma
on which to see all these?

To see it in its oneness, in its
completeness, in its entirety.

What am I? to be able to experience
the interaction, the woven play,
the mesh of life and energy that is.

The I is not me, yet me, and all of me.
The I is everything, everyone, every and all.

What is is, what was is no longer
And what will be doesn’t exist.
Everything is now, the point, the dot,
the bindu sanyuktam, the origin.

Are we made anew every moment?
What is a moment in the place of no time,
in the space of a blink of an eye?

Expanding, the universe marks its own time,
its own rhythm. How miniscule our frames
of time and space, of past and future.
The mind, beset with its own parameters
cannot bring to bear the vastness into any confine.

Nor can it adjust to the minuteness of everything in it,
every tiny detail perfect in its place, deliberated to finest particularity
every facet sought out to its own brilliance.
Each fitting flawlessly into a lattice of life.

Beyond alpha and omega, beyond the finest calculation,
the universe expands in dimensions unknown,
writing its story, relaying its message, listening to it itself

God's Name and Natural Disasters

2011-03-17T21:13:00.000-07:00

God’s name and Natural Disasters

The 22 February earthquake in Christchurch once again brought to me how great is God’s name. We lost many lives this time around, the damage to the city is horrendous and it will be long time before anyone can be ‘normal’, if ever.

I was at work when the quake struck. At first I though it was just another of the hundreds of aftershocks we had experienced since last September. But no, this was going to be different as people started screaming and things started falling down off the desks and from the ceiling as the building swayed back and forth and the ceiling-height unbreakable glass window shattered.

When anything out of the ordinary happens I mentally say my name mantra “Sairam”. This is something that is ingrained me, something that I have been doing for the past 20 years. I found that the violence of the quake was so much that my mind was going blank. It took an effort to say “Sairam”. But when I finally did say it, a sense of calm descended on me. All this took place in less than five seconds – which is a lot of time in an earthquake.

The calm allowed me to carry out my duties as a fire warden for the floor I work in. It allowed me to herd out those people who were not out for lunch. As I waited on the fourth floor stair landing to allow people from the fifth and sixth floors to file past (we have well over a thousand people in one single building), I worried about my daughter who was in the central city and my son who was at home. That one single ‘Sairam” was all I had said but I knew, deep in my heart, it was enough to keep them safe.

But the mind plays its own games and as we wardens came out of the building last, my thoughts turned to my kids again. Had they said “Sairam”, were they alright? Was my son lying under the rubble of our house? How would I ever find my daughter in the city? People were trapped under rubble of buildings that just down the street from us, the Christ Church Cathedral, two blocks down, had crumbled. All communications were down.

To remember God in your direst need is enough, I found out. My son was okay, the house was still standing but almost everything inside had been damaged. My daughter had been in Cathedral Square with a friend, right in the thick of things (she took a picture as the Cathedral spire crumbled). Yes, she had said “Sairam” and yes, it did make her calm. And no, she had very little fear although people around her screaming. My son had also resorted to “Sairam”, and then started calling his sister on his mobile, to no avail. Being alone when a natural disaster strikes is not a situation anyone would want to be in. But then you are really never alone, are you?

The name of God is a very powerful weapon against adversity. Religion is as simple as this. To remember God’s name when you are in trouble, and when you are not. But as I had found out, it is very hard to remember God’s name when a force like a bomb blast is going off under the ground below. The mind starts going blank as the sensory receptors try to make sense of the overload of information coming in: the floor bucking, the lights and fittings swaying out to incredible angles, the sound of glass shattering, computer monitors flying off desks, people screaming, and the grinding, awful sound of the earthquake itself.

For me the five second lapse before I could force my mind to say “Sairam” was worrying. Thankfully God does protect people “as the eyelid protects the eyes” – instinctively and without thought. To go about your daily business knowing God is looking after you is a beautiful thing; to know God will look after you come what may is a thing of wonder.

I have found religion to be simple – it is a one-to-one with God. Identify one Isht Devata and stick to Him/Her. Posit everything on that one name, be it father, mother, guru, friend or kin. Make that relationship a living one, putting as much into it as you would with a relationship with your mother, your father, or your friend. Get rid of anything that hinders this relationship.

For me, God is Sathya Sai Baba, in his aspect of Sai Shiva. As a Hindu, you can choose from the hundreds of names and forms that we have given the One God over the past few millennia - just make it yours, as truly as you would give a name to a child when it is born and make it yours. Imagine all the time, effort and love you pour into a child and do the same for God.

Remembering God’s name comes from practice, so that it forms an unbreakable habit. There are two ways to do this: constantly reciting the name or the mantra mentally and, as some people find it easier to do, substituting everyday things with the name or mantra. What we as a family do is an example (it may right, it may be wrong but it works for us): we say “Sairam” to virtually everything when we are together. We have replaced our good mornings, hello, exclamations, etc with “Sairam”. Uttering “Sairam” with different nuances gives it different meanings – it can replace ‘Oh my God’, ‘excuse me’, ‘please’ just in the way it is said. It took years of practice but it is now a family habit.

Another thing we do as a family is the reverence we offer to Mother Earth. I have talked much about Mother Earth in the article “The Earth Owns Us” in this site. Bhu Devi/Bhoomi Devi is our mother. We say this a lot at our religious gatherings but we must mean it, not just pay lip-service to this hoary adage. It should not just be a thing understood at an intellectual level but be an integral part of our lives.

When I say pay reverence I don’t mean doing pooja. Mother Earth does not need special rites and rituals to be respected. There are everyday things we can – give thanks for the food we eat, respect trees by not cutting them down unless we have to and loving the animals around. In an urban environment, it could the birds that we complain about making a mess of our compounds. It is better to keep your environment clean, and thereby pest free, than whipping out the canister of poison for the flies, mosquitoes, rodents and cockroaches.

Sometimes we just have to kill them. In that case, do as the so-called primitive people do when hunting: they thanked the animal they killed for giving up their lives to feed the hunters. When you kill pests, take a moment to apologise. They are pests because of their nature, their Karma, if you will have it. They are not out to get you.

Keeping with older traditions, I will not shorten the life of a flower by plucking it; I will pass a tree and touch it if I can, seeking its blessing. It could a simple thing like brushing my head against the leaves and saying a mental ‘hello’, caressing the trunk, or actually hugging it when no one is around.

One of the most important thing is actually asking the tree/plant its permission when picking its fruit. You can pooh pah it as an old wives tale but science has established plants have a consciousness of their own and will react to response, positive and negative.

Modern life has divorced us from Mother Earth. We no longer really appreciate the bounty Mother Earth has in store for us, nor the life She has created for us. Instead we see our food coming from supermarket shelves. To hear a child say milk comes from the supermarket shelf and not knowing it comes from a cow is disheartening in that we are so separated from the natural things around us.

Too many young people in urban centres don’t know or don’t care of the primary industries that is the fuel of our lives. They see products coming from factories into stores and that is a fact for them. By unhinging ourselves from the lifeline of the earth, we have divorced ourselves from nature. For too many, nature has now become walking tracks, the beaches, the ‘wildlife’ in zoos, the camping in hi-tech vehicles, something we see on TV - a subset of life apart from the “reality of everyday life”.

And then when nature strikes we can’t believe what is happening. It is unacceptable. Yet, it is but a fact of life that natural disasters will happen. There appears to be no ‘cure’ or prevention for natural disasters. But hopefully this article is clear in saying there is a way of ensuring safety.

These ‘random’ acts of violence will happen, again and again. I have lost count of the number of cyclones I have been through in Fiji, and then these two earthquakes in Christchurch have had a major impact on my life. All through this, the name of God and the reverence for Mother Earth have been the only stability to rely on in making it through unscathed. It is a humbling aspect as well as wondrous phenomenon – that a power exists that can look after you because you have established a relationship with it.

It is a loving relationship, with all its concomitants: including the tiffs, the exasperation, the uncertainty, the withdrawals. Even with the anger and frustration, I have noticed that God will come through to protect you, anywhere, anytime. This protection is a verified aspect of God in all our scriptures, in Hinduism, in Christianity, in Buddhism, in any faith that posits a loving and caring God.

All these scriptures clearly show the way of establishing this one-to-one relationship with God. It behoves us as human beings to look for these ways of establishing the relationship for it may be the only way to be stable in an increasing unstable environment.

It is time for the Hindu to become a better Hindu, the Muslim a better Muslim, the Christian a better Christian. Don’t believe that your faith is the only right one – if it was there would not be any other faith at all. See any particular faith as a path denoted by the forefathers to show a people the best way designed for their temperament. Religions are designed as paths to godhead through processes that worked before and continue to work today. Only much of the real message is lost among the multitude of processes and God has become hidden in mechanical routine. Seek and ye shall find. Call His/Her name and you will be answered.

What kind of times did the Ramayana exist in?

2011-03-17T21:04:00.000-07:00

Science, at its worst, is a rigid institution, unwilling to consider anything outside the venue of acceptable orthodoxy, which brings about stagnation in learning and quenches the fires of research; at its best, however, during those times its willing to acknowledge it has still much to learn about our world, science can be a beacon of enlightenment. - J Allan Danelek

Modern human have been around for over 100,000 years. Science would have us believe that in the first 90,000 years humans foraged like animals, hunting and gathering things to survive on, made rudimentary tools and did nothing much else.

And that it is only in the past 10,000 years that we, as a species, have been able to grow our food and to domestic animals - for food, as beasts of burden, as labour-saving devices and for companionship.

Science wants us to desperately to believe myths like mankind was stuck in the Stone Age for most of its 100,000 years on the earth; that our so-called ape-like ancestors had to develop at ‘its own pace’ to bring about the modern man; that finally we grew a brain good enough to be considered a human only the past 4000 years or so.

Why is this so? Only because science is unable to go beyond that 10,000 year mark. It is a matter of technicality. 10,000 BCE or thereabouts a major planetary event took place that has confounded science since it began a mere 150 years ago.

A mini Ice Age, called the Pleistocene Age, ended at that time, thought to be sometime between 10,000 BCE to 9600 BCE, with latter figure finding more favour with the scientists. In this mini-Ice Age much of present-day North America and Europe were under a cover of thick ice. Very little else is known of this age, although the bank of knowledge is steadily growing larger.

The breakdown of the topography of the earth during that Ice Age (below) is from writer J. Allan Danelek, who I believe has got closest ever by anyone in understanding events that happened pre-10,000 BCE, including scientists. The quote at the start of this article is also Danelek’s.

Says Danelek (edited for style only):
* The topography of the earth would have been different – the Baltic, the North Seas and the water around the British Isles would be dry land;

* The region around the Bahamas and Florida would be dry land. The Bering Strait would not exist – there would be a land bridge joining the two continents and it would provide easy access from Asia into the Americas;

* The south western Pacific and the Indian Ocean would have been much different than today – think of a massive section of land stretching from India to the shores of Australia, which would contain in itself the present day island nations of Java, Sumatra, Indonesia, and the numerous islands there.

* Keeping in mind the topography, this land mass would have broad fertile plains often for thousands of miles in area, criss-crossed by broad rivers. It would be a tropical paradise of about five hundred miles wide and two thousand miles long – about the size of western Europe.

* The Yellow Sea and parts of the East China Sea would be the extended coastline of China, with present day Taiwan and Hainan just mountain ranges in this landmass.

* Following the end of the ice age, the peaks of these plains would survive the flooding by becoming the isolated islands of Borneo, Sumatra, Java, etc.
Philippines would have been as large as Madagascar, while Papua New Guinea and Australia would be one landmass, separated by a small sea from mainland Indonesia. Japan would be linked to the Korean Peninsula by a land bridge.

* India’s western coastline would have extended further into the sea by a hundred miles. And the Persian Gulf would not have existed – it would have been a delta of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

* The rest of the planet was ice-locked –only the area between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer was warm.

* A third of North America and half of Europe were buried under a thick layer of ice. The same situation was in Patagonia in South America. Three of the seven continents were inhabitable. Central and South America were one huge rainforest with some agriculture being undertaken.

The reason I chose to use Danelek’s analysis of the topography of earth during the Ice Age is because he has come closest to what we as Hindus believe – civilisations come in cycles and that we have had many civilisations other than what we are in the present. Danelek is a proponent of a global civilisation existing pre-10,000 BCE which was wiped out in the global catastrophe that took place when the Ice Age ended.

If we believe in what science would have us believe than we, as Hindus, would have to believe that Lord Rama, the glory of Ayodhya and high science environment of Ravana’s Lanka did not exist. For the story (history) of Rama is set some 20,000 years before the story of Krishna. And, according to science, civilisation could not have existed in that time.

The Ramayana (meaning the Journeys of Rama) tells of two civilisations in contention - that of Ayodhya and Lanka. It is as much Ravana’s story as it is Rama’s, for Ravana represents what many of us can relate to in modern life – a superpower nation based on high technology, arrogant in the face of everything because of its superiority in arms and finance.

It is said that Ravana, the powerful great administrator and Emperor, ruled over seven continents from Lanka. They were the modern South America, Southern Europe; the Himalayas including the Hindukush mountain range and continents up to Madagascar.

The kingdom of Ayodhya is said to have extended from present day India well in South East Asia, including the Indochina peninsula and probably beyond. Many believe it was not just a city but an empire. These two close neighbours contended constantly - with legends saying that it was Dashratha’s martial superiority that kept Ravana from launching an all-out war of supremacy in the region.

One particular legend has Ravana sending a message asking Ayodhya to kowtow to the superiority of Lanka, to become his vassal or be besieged. Dashratha replied by shooting a missile to Lanka that permanently sealed the main gates of the city, demonstrating what faced Ravana if he ever chose to attack. Ravana stayed put, biding his time to get back at Dashratha.

Of course, over the course of time, the missile became an arrow shot by a bow, leading to much incredulity in modern times as to whether this could have happened.

Let’s look at Ravana’s Lanka to show what kind of technology existed at that time, if only through conjecture.

According to some scholars, Ravana’s capital, Lanka had 25 Palaces and over 400,000 streets and it was a continent south of India of which the present day Sri Lanka is the only remnant. (We have to keep in mind there are several versions of the Ramayana, both in India and in South Asia as well as in South East Asia.)

In most versions, Lanka is described as a huge continent, a mega world power with Ravana having dominion over a large part of the earth including Africa and Western Europe (that which was not under ice). Flying vehicles abound (including Ravana’s personal Pushpak Vimana) and weapons of mass destruction were common enough and were readily demonstrated during wars of conquest and when Rama besieged the city.

The final battle/s of the Ramayana are epic, any way you look at it. On the face of lack of evidence of weapons of high technology being used in the Ramayana – evidence that disappeared in the deluge that first covered/washed away everything and which, after subsiding, still left massive chucks of land under water – translators chose to make it easier on their readers by replacing missiles with bows and arrows (the weapons that existed in the time after the deluge). A whole host of replacements must have taken place because it is hard to get your head around the anomaly of bows and arrows, spears and swords having the devastating result that is described in the Ramayana. For that matter, in the Mahabharata, too.

To counter this anomaly, translator talked in their interpretations of weapons which took on destructive powers after its powers were evoked/unleashed through a mantra. Just as a nuclear device will need a very complicated series of processes for its activation and detonation, so do the weapons of the Ramayana need a complicated process to be activated – now we just think of them as mantras that evoke supernatural powers in handheld weapons.

Vishwamitra is said to have taught these mantras, these activation codes to Rama and Lakshmana during their sojourn with him in his ashram. We are asked to suspend our beliefs in accepting that these mantras unleashed massive destruction from a puny bow and arrow. Now that we moderns are aware of nuclear devices and weapons of mass destruction, maybe it is time to accept that the Rama civilisation may well have had weapon as advanced and maybe more advanced than this civilisation?

There is some justification for this belief that a forgotten race of man attained not only the knowledge that we have so recently won, but also a power that is not yet ours. Apart from our ‘myths and legends’ other cultures also talk of gods with extraordinary abilities. Most of them have been supplanted by other, ‘more believable’ beliefs but not so with Hinduism.

There are many books in India that talk of the superhuman exploits of the ‘gods’, of extraordinary vehicles and vessels they used, of the weapons with destructive powers similar to our weapons of mass destructions. (see notes below of a description of the weapons’ effect and compare with what nuclear weapons nowadays can do).

Some scholars believe the story of the Ramayana is the actual history of a people living in a time of great technological advancement. Passed down through generations despite the catastrophe of a near-wipe out of the human species, the story has taken particular and peculiar turns in its narration depending on regional and cultural influences over the centuries/millennia.

The basic construct of this ‘history’, though, remains constant - the contention between Ayodhya and Lanka. Ayodhya was no slouch in the ways of the empire: Rama concluded the Ashwamedha yagna (the empire-building process after he is crowned king). If he was just a tribal chief, as western interpretations would have us believe, how is it is that his story so widespread in Asia? And why do each of the cultures that revere him as god choose to do so as someone who belonged to them (not an outsider) – a person who lived among them in ancient times, who interacted with them and left behind a legacy that they, as people of Rama’s descent, still hold true to this day?

Rama must have been an iconic figure in his time to command such love, respect and reverence throughout South Asia – from India to Thailand to Cambodia.

So, did the disaster of global proportion circa 9600 BCE wipe out all evidence of such a civilisation?

Not really. Mysterious ancient ruins keep turning up – from the lofty Andes (a seaport high in the mountains) to beneath fathoms of water in Japan (the 8000-year-old Yonaguni-Jima which has pyramids).

Ruins of underwater cities dot the coasts of India, Japan and Taiwan and more ruins are being found around Bimini Atoll in the Bahamas (these ruins have fluted columns!).

Dating of water marks around the base of the great pyramid bring up time frames several thousands years prior to the circa 3000 BCE that is generally accepted by mainstream science. Some readings are coming back with dates going back to 10,000 BC – a time when mainstream science says homo sapiens had not even domesticated animals or learnt to cultivate grains.

Why are all these ruins popping out now, and what do they tell us of our past – our true past?

Notes:

Some underwater cities:

Havana, Cuba: A team of scientists continues to explore megalithic ruins found in the Yucatan Channel near Cuba. They have found evidence of an extensive urban environment stretching for miles along the ocean shore. Some believe that the civilization that inhabited these predates all known ancient American cultures.

Bay of Cambay, India: A few years back divers discovered the remains of a vast 9500 year old city. This submerged ruin has intact architecture and human remains. More significantly, this find predates all finds in the area by over 5,000 years, forcing historians to re-evaluate their understanding of the history of civilazation in the region. The find has been termed Dwarka, or the ‘Golden City,’ after an ancient city-in-the sea said to belong to the Hindu god Krishna.

Yonaguni-Jima: Discovered by a dive tour guide some t20 years ago, controversies have arisen around a mysterious pyramids found off the coast of Japan. These structures seem to have been carved right out of bedrock in a teraforming process using tools previously thought unavailable to ancient cultures of the region.

Description of weapons of mass destruction in the Ramayana and the Mahabharatha:
"Gurkha, flying a swift and powerful vimana (fast aircraft)
hurled a single projectile charged with the power
of the Universe. An incandescent column of
smoke and flame, as bright as ten thousand suns, rose with
all its splendor.

It was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt, a gigantic
messenger of death, which reduced to ashes the entire race
of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas.

The corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable.
Hair and nails fell out; Pottery broke without apparent cause,
and the birds turned white.

...After a few hours all foodstuffs were infected...
...to escape from this fire the soldiers threw
themselves in streams to wash themselves and their
equipment."
- The Mahabharata

"(It was a weapon) so powerful that it could destroy the earth
in an instant. A great soaring sound in smoke and flames:
And on its sits death..."
- The Ramayana

"Dense arrows of flame, like a great shower, issued
forth upon creation, encompassing the enemy...
A thick gloom swiftly settled upon the Pandava hosts.
All points of the compass were lost in darkness.
Fierce wind began to blow upward, showering dust and gravel.

Birds croaked madly... the very elements seemed disturbed.
The earth shook, scorched by the terrible violent heat of this
weapon.
Elephants burst into flame and ran to and fro in a frenzy...
over a vast area, other animals crumpled to the ground and died.
From all points of the compass the arrows of flame rained
continuously and fiercely.
- The Mahabharata

The cosmology of Hinduism

2011-02-15T18:08:00.000-08:00

In the Vahara avatar of Lord Vishnu, one wonders how the rescue of earth was affected?

Where was Vishnu? Was he reclining on Sesha, and creation was in abeyance? If so, earth would not have been created at all and would not be in need of rescuing.

If creation was already in progress, one needs to know where dwelt Lord Vishnu. And why take the form of a boar to facilitate the rescue?

And what was the Samudra Manthan? What Samudra (Ocean) was churned? Why was it giving up such goodies as the amrita, the celestial elephant Airavat, the unequalled equine Uchachaihsravah, and even the goddess Lakshmi. More than that, why, and how, is the moon one of the goodies that came out the churning?

Why would the devas and the asura work together to something like this, especially the asuras who already had the upper hand in their ongoing battle with the devas?

Who are Madhu and Kaitabh? And why did they rampage across the universe, undefeated by even the mighty Vishnu, only to succumb to the boon he asked of them to die when they could not defeat him either? Why Vishnu with a horse head – Hyagriva?

Why a half-man, half-lion incarnation? Only to give a messy death to some evil king? The questions can be endless, and some answers are hard to make sense of. Nevertheless, there must be some basis for these myths, maybe one lost in antiquity, or suffocated in interpretations over the generations that have rendered them so unlike what they should be.

Let’s start with an overview of the Das Avatars, the 10 incarnations of Lord Vishnu that practically forms the basis of Hinduism in our age. Why does the Lord need to take a fish form, one may ask? And ask this with some validity. There are many answers given to this, and most are based on interpretations of a holy man, which itself is based on what that holy man has understood of that particular scripture he is interpreting.

Yes, the raison d’être of our mythologies change from scripture to scripture, interpretation to interpretation, depending on what one wants to make of it. While the avatars of Vishnu is largely accepted to be 10, there are groups who believe in 22 avatars, or more. We will stick to Das Avatars for practical purposes.

Some say the first few avatars of Vishnu is the Hindu way of depicting human evolution.

Science says life was first formed in the waters of the earth, and then that life learned to live on the land (water creature to amphibian to land animal). The first avatar of Vishnu - Matsya, the fish - is said to depict the first step of evolution through from water to land.

The background to the Matsya Avatar is the great flood that makes up the starting point of present times in virtually every religion/mythology in the world. Lord Vishnu takes the form of a fast-growing horned fish to save Manu, who builds a ship and hooks it onto the horn of the fish to be towed to safety when the flood comes.

Over time, the facts associated with these events kept changing to suit the mentality of that generation. The evolutionary fish turned into the fish that saved Manu and his family for repopulating Earth after the devastating flood.

The second avatar of Kurma, the tortoise/turtle is the amphibian intermediary before life of the purely land-based creatures. That has turned into Lord Vishnu taking the shape of a turtle to base Mount Mandara while the devas and asura churned Kshirsagar (the Ocean of Milk, or Buttermilk Ocean) using the serpent Vasuki has the churn rope.

And the first land animal as per Hindu evolution is represented by the boar, which in the Dash Avatar tales is Lord Vishnu taking that anthropomorphic form to save the Earth from the evil grasp of the demon Hiranyaksha. Hiranyaksha is, of course, the brother of Hiranyakashyap, the father of Prahlad who was torn apart by the Narsimha (Nar Singh) avatar.

In between (or before all these) is the fascinating myth of Madhu and Kaitabha, the demons inadvertently spawned by Vishnu, and as strong as him, for which Vishnu had to take on an incarnation of horse-headed man to make these demons succumb. More on this later in the article.

Then comes the half man, half lion Narasimha (Nar Singh) showing our pre-evolution into the human cycle, followed by the dwarf avatar Vamana depicting the first man, small and cunning, relying on its intellect to survive in an environment where claws, fangs and brute strength ruled.

The next few avatars are all humans (Parasurama, Rama, Krishna and Buddha) until the last one, the yet-to-come Kalki avatar who/which is either going to be a white horse or be seen as riding a white horse. Again we have the fascinating horse amalgamation in an avatar. What is it with the horse and our celestial stories?

The Hindu cosmology does provide some different/better answers to understanding our mythology but we have to shift the arena somewhere else to make sense of the ‘myths’.

The Das Avatar of Vishnu is the history of the cosmos wrapped, or rather lost, in the dumbing down of its true origins – the story of the formation of the Milky Way galaxy.

The obvious link to the Milky Way is the creation mythology – Vishnu reclines/sleeps/is in yoganidra on Sesha/Anantha Naag in Kshirsagar (Ocean of Milk) until creation is to start. The kshirsagar is the Milky Way (thus named for its milk-like appearance in the sky above us), Sesha represents the spiral formation of this particular galaxy and Vishnu is the universal that governs/sustain this galaxy.

When creation is ready to start, a lotus comes out of Vishnu’s navel (the centre of the Galaxy) and Brahma is enthroned upon it. Brahma then sets forth the basis of all creation.

Before we can go into the Das Avatars and how they relate to our galaxy, let’s deal with the Madhu and Kaitabha phenomenon that has baffled Hindus for generations.

There is a lot of talk - among astronomers, astrologers and people of science - that the sun has a double - a planet or star that shadows it – and which affects the progress of our sun as well as its very temperament. Some say the double is an opposite of the sun, either in opposite orbit or in the opposite side of the sun in relation to their orbits.

The story of Madhu and Kaitabha is the story of the sun and its double (doppelganger?) in their initial days of rampaging around the galaxy. It is the story of how the force of the galactic centre finally curbed their wild orbits into a semblance of order around itself.

When they finally settled in their orbits around the galactic centre or Vishnu Naabhi, Madhu and Kaitabha are said to have succumbed to the Lord. That is why Vishnu is called Madhusudhana (the forceful pacifier of Madhu), rather than Madhu Mardhan (the destroyer of Madhu).

Pretty much the same cosmological concept applies to the Varaha avatar. The mythology says the Earth is lost among the disorder and chaos of the galaxy, and was rescued by Vishnu in his boar form.

This could very well be from the time when the moon was formed from a collision between two planets – one of which lost a chunk of itself and then was formed into what we call the earth. The collision takes place in time immemorial – the planet orbiting the sun is then called Tiamen.

Another planet, in another elliptical orbit (but not around our sun) crosses Tiamen’s orbit with disastrous effect. A chunk is blown off to become the moon later on, the debris from the collision form the asteroid belt and Tiamen is thrown off course by the impact.

Lost among the debris of the solar system (the asteroid belt) and buffeted and banged about, the former Tiamen has to be rescued and restored to its orbit around the sun.

Was Hiranyaksha the rogue planet that slammed into Tiamen, later to be called the Earth? It is said that Vishnu battled a 1000 years to restore the earth. Was the gravitational pull of the rogue planet so great that a major effort had to be made by the galactic centre to pull the earth back on course?

Thus we come to the story of the Samudra Manthan. One of the goodies that came out of the manthan was the moon itself. It is one of the several things that came out of the churning (some versions also say the Sun came out of the churning too).

The Samudra manthan is the story of the formation of the galaxy, of the diverse and disparate elements coming together to form various other elements, some good (the nectar of life, the celestial toys, medicine, apsaras,etc). And some bad - the halahal poison that endangered everyone and which Shiva is said to have sucked in and kept in his throat.

Substitute the halahal poison for the initial calamitous antimatter-like substances that could have destroyed the galaxy, substitute Shiva for the blackhole at the centre of the galaxy (Vishnu Naabhi) that had to come in help quell and isolate the production of this antimatter-like substance, and the story starts making sense, somewhat.

Once the destructive elements are subdued, the goodies can come into being. Each of the elements represents some thing of the beauty (see notes below for a list of what was produced in the churning).

The Moon (and in some versions, the Sun) was, in another age, churned like butter out of the primordial ocean by the “gods” and “demons.” And that could be the basis of the Samudra manthan myth.

As before, ‘clarifying’ additions were made to this observation by the ancients (or their descendents) and we ended up with the ‘understandable and acceptable’ version of today. Which is that the devas went to Lord Vishnu and asked for his intercession in the drubbing they were taking from the asuras. Lord Vishnu came up with the plan to whip up some amrita (nectar of immortality) by churning the ‘ocean’, invited the asuras to partake on the basis they would share in the bounty but cunningly only allowed the devas to become immortal. (It’s your choice what you want to believe as a Hindu, but it is good to open your mind to other explanations.)

Many believe that the ancients intimately knew the workings of the universe, but focussed more on the workings of the Milky Way as it was the galaxy in which they resided.

When the ancients wrote of the early days of the galaxy when things were falling into place around the centre, they would have had either akashik records to fall back on or would have had direct knowledge (supra-knowledge) of the phenomenon that was the beginnings of our galaxy.

How could they pass on the knowledge of this phenomenon to the people? Maybe they related it as they saw it and it was later changed to more palatable rendering so that more people could ‘understand’ the story of creation? Who knows? But one thing is clear – there were records of what happened in our skies and these records were either wilfully or inadvertently changed to suit some people.

Today they are available to us as metaphors, allegories, parables – of the celestial battles in the sky between devas and asuras, or Shiva’s contention with Prajapati, or any of the many stories out of our Puranas.

Sadly the observation of the ancient into the workings of the universe appears to have changed into the power struggle between the devas and the asuras, of greed and violation of trust and cunning and betrayal – all the things that make humans human. In ‘humanifying’ the information, we lost the true knowledge of the heavens.

Notes:
Creation in Hinduism is cyclic – it will happen again and again. Many says each cycle will have its own set of avatars, repeating the avatars as required again and again. Sounds like premises of the Matrix movie.

Yet the universe is an expanding entity, and each cycle must have some difference to the preceding one.

Each cycle or age is denoted by an astrological sign. The Age of Pisces is variously said to have either begun in 330 BCE or AD1 (Year One) and it is the age that we are in presently.

Does the Matsya avatar mythology denote the beginning of this age? Is Jesus Christ’s symbol of the fish (as the fisher of man) another allegory of the start of the Age of Pisces?

And does this mean that when the next cycle starts, will it start with a different incarnation? Say if the age starts of with the astronomical positioning in the Leo quadrant, will the first incarnation be that of the lion or lion-man?

These are the questions few can answer, and I look forward to the day when I do come across someone who can provide valid answers. It will be an honour to know someone like that.

Ages exactly 2000 years each
Many astrologers find ages too erratic based on either the vernal point moving through the randomly sized zodiacal constellations or sidereal zodiac and, instead, round all astrological ages to exactly 2000 years each. In this approach the ages are usually neatly aligned so that the Aries age is found from 2000 BC to 1 AD, Pisces age 1 AD to 2000 AD, the Aquarian age 2000 AD - 4000 AD, and so on. This approach is not consistent with the precession of the equinoxes. Based on precession of the equinoxes, there is a one degree shift approximately every 72 years, so a 30 degree movement requires 2160 years to complete.

The list of products from the Samudra Manthan (Other lists have additional products):
Lakshmi, the Goddess of Fortune and Wealth -Vishnu's consort
Kaustubha, the most valuable jewel in the world
Parijat, the divine flowering tree with blossoms that never fade or wilt
Varuni, goddess and creator of alcohol
Dhanvantari, the doctor
Chandra, the moon
Kamadhenu, the wish-granting divine cow
Kalpavriksha, the wish-granting tree
Airavata, the elephant of Indra
Apsaras, various divine nymphs like Rambha, Menaka, Punjikasthala, etc.
Uchhaishravas, the divine 7-headed horse
Sharanga, the bow of Vishnu
Shankha Vishnu's conch
Amrita the nectar of immortality.

The symbolism of samudra manathan
The story represents the spiritual endeavor of a person to achieve self-realisation through concentration of mind, withdrawal of senses, control of desires and practice of austerities and asceticism.

The Devas and Asuras represent the positives and negatives respectively of one's personality. The participation of both the Devas and the Asuras signifies that when one is seeking bliss through spiritual practice, one has to integrate and harmonise both the positive and negative aspects and put both the energies to work for the common goal.

The ocean of milk is the mind or the human consciousness. The mind is like an ocean while the thoughts and emotions are the waves in the ocean.

The Avatars and Yugas
The Avatar concept is the very cornerstone of Hindu theology. According to it, the Supreme Power manifests itself in animal or human forms on earth, with the divine mission of cleansing it of the periodically increasing evil. The Avatar concept is closely related to the measurement of time in Hindu theology which has its basis on one working day of brahma. According to the Bhagwat Purana, Brahma, the creator, is the causal effect of the predetermined periodic creation and dissolutin of the universe.

Each creation of Kalpa is equal to one day and each dissolution or Pralaya is equal to one night in the life of Brahma. A Kalpa and a Pralaya last for 4,320 million human years each. Every Kalpa has 1000 cycles of 4 Yugas (ages). Each cycle of 4 yugas is completed in 4,320,000 human years.

The Yugas are called Satya, Treta, Dwapara and Kali. The Avataras which are considered most significant are ten in number and they form the "Dasha Avatar" these ten start with the form of a lowly fish and work up to the noble man, cast in the image of God.

The fanciful find a parallel to Darwin's theory of evolution in the progression of these Avatars. The Avatars enable the common folk to speak of or listen to stories of divine doings which is a simple way of proceeding towards Godhead; particularly in our Kali Yuga with its 'sick hurry and divided aims'.

- Nalinesh Arun is a former Fiji journalist who lived in India for many years. He is now based in Christchurch

The Earth owns us

2010-12-23T11:56:00.000-08:00

The Earthquake in Christchurch on September 4 brought the message of the fragile nature of our lives too close for comfort. Fortunately, we did not lose any lives, although the cost of damage is expected to run in the billions. The majority of people only want one thing in the aftermath of the Earthquake – get back to their normal lives as quickly as possible.

One message that the Earthquake again failed to impress on our minds is the reality of how we as a species are inter-related, that we live in the interconnected world of nature and are as open to the vagaries of nature as anyone in any part of the world.

However, much and which ever way we protect our borders and our way of life, natural disasters don’t recognise these demarcations. Nor does something like global warming or climate change or any other global event like El Nino or La Nina.

While the Earth has been divided up in countries and regions, oceans and stratosphere and other spheres, it remains for all intents and purpose a ‘single operating system’ – connected in so many ways that we only starting to understand. It is rightly said that the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings in Wales will eventually lead to a storm in the Amazon, that is how interconnected we are.

Why the Earth is continually changing
The Earth has been around for some time now and in that time it has experienced change that is not only mind-boggling but beyond our scope (science or otherwise) to truly understand.

Several ice ages, dinosaurs, mass extinctions, different species of humans and hominids, secrets deep in the ground, under the seas, pole reversals, and other climatic ‘disasters’ – the planet is in a state of continuous change, all the time.

It is the nature of things, or, if you will, the nature of the Earth to do these things to maintain its balance. After all, it is but a satellite of the sun, and has to keep up pace and decorum with the others in the grand design of things.

Forget the universe, the Earth is a very tiny entity in the galaxy itself. In the solar system, it has to play a role in the general balance of things, spinning at great speed around the sun while itself spinning at head-snapping speeds on its axis. On top of it, it is wobbly and slanted in its circuit around the sun.

Every planet circulating the sun exerts its own force on every other planet in some way, influencing their movement one way or another. Imagine the solar system as a three dimensional freeway, with lanes marked out for each planet and traffic management and traffic lights in place. Then imagine an acrobat whirling a number of dinner plates on sticks, getting the balance just right and ensuring the rotating plates do not collide as he moves the sticks around on his hands and forehead. Put the acrobatics and freeway image together and you can get an idea of how the solar system operates.

When Sir Isaac Newton was talking of gravity, it was this balance, poise and movement of the planets that he was talking about. (And we have taken this great man’s computations of the planets and shoved it in the inane illustration of an apple falling on his head to illustrate what gravity is.)

As the Earth continues its relentless, yet varying, march around the sun with the other planets, and the sun spins around in the galaxy around some other pivotal point (many agree it is the galactic centre), and the galaxy itself travels in its relation to the other billions of galaxies in the universe, this gravitational pull, working in so many different ways, keeps a tight rein in the movement of planets, solar system and galaxies.

All this while, what happens on its surface has to be noted and attended to by the Earth. In the past millions of years, the Earth survived the dinosaurs, and it survived the extinction of the dinosaurs. It is still here, 65 million years after the dinosaurs, sustaining us. It has seen several races of people live and become extinct, seen civilizations start, dominate and fade away from memory, has spawned several species of flora and fauna, lost them, had more species come up to replace those lost.

At different stages of its journey in the cosmos, the Earth is a different thing at different times. What it is now is near-perfect for the life forms on it. What it will be next (whenever this happens) may not be as good for us (or it could be better, who knows?). We, the human race, may just be a passing phase for the Earth however much we want to believe that we are the rulers of Earth.

So, who is in charge?
The Earth, apparently, is in charge here. If we believe that we, as a species, have dominated the Earth and wrought our changes on its face, we are sorely mistaken. The day we control the weather or stop dead a natural disaster is the day we can claim to have a semblance of control over the Earth.

Until that day comes, we can only say we have been given leave to live on this planet, that we are here at the tolerance of Mother Earth. What we really do is exist within the bounds of the conditions that have been established by the Earth.

And she is a marvellous host, giving us the bounty of her land and seas, allowing us to go forth and multiply, and multiply, and multiply. As a species, we have ‘conquered’ almost all kinds of obstacles and made a good life for ourselves amid conditions detrimental to our existence including the heat or the cold, the dry or the wet.

But at all times we remain but a subset of the entity we call the Earth. There is little or no chance of this species surviving outside of the Earth, however much we may want to live on the moon.

Just another disaster?
Disasters on Earth is always a given – from our point of view. For the huge entity that is Earth, it is only a matter of maintaining its poise and balance. It has a habit of reversing its poles to balance its magnetic fields – the Earth has reversed its poles 200 times in the past 178 million year, the last one being 730-750,000 years ago. After all, the Earth is also a dynamo, with its solid inner core using solar magnetic energy to throw up a deflecting field against the solar winds that could burn the Earth to a crisp.

But there are disasters that even the Earth may not be able to take in its stride.

Now science is telling us that the solar system is careening towards the centre of the galaxy, where, it is believed, awaits it a supermassive blackhole. So say scientists who have been keeping a extremely close eye on the workings of the galaxy. They also say that this supermassive blackhole could be benign – meaning it is well-meaning and perhaps may not swallow up the Earth, or the solar system.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory revealed in 2000 what was long-suspected - a black hole does exist at the centre of the galaxy. Instead of the highly active monster that most other galaxies have, our blackhole is less active. Apparently a supernova exploded close to it sometime back and masked its pulling capabilities with enough dust to make it a starving blackhole.

Nevertheless it can still eat up a comet or two if they come close enough, as was shown in 2001 when the blackhole swallowed a comet and released enough x-rays to brighten a nearby star by 45 times its normal brightness. So its devouring capabilities are largely intact. By the way, blackholes cannot be seen and so are only discerned by the x-rays they emit.

On the face of it, careening headlong towards a blackhole is a mother of a disaster. Maybe not. The galactic centre is a massive area – a radio signal associated with the centre and called Sagittarius A emanates from an area with a diameter of 44 million kilometres.

There are a thousand stars and systems already very near the galactic centre, including a ‘sun’ that is seven times as big and 15 times as heavy as our sun, called the S2. It is so close to the centre that it only takes 15.2 years to orbit it (our sun does it in 50,000 plus years). In fact there are some 100 new stars, ‘born’ and evolved near the centre and scientists are baffled as to why this happened if a blackhole exists near to them.

No-one is absolutely sure how far away the centre of the galaxy is away from us presently. In the great scheme of things it could be trillions of kilometres away or ‘just around the corner’. For all we know, it could take the solar system a twinkling of time to cover the enormous distance, or it will not never happen in our lifetime. So far, so good as far as science is concerned

The creation of our galaxy
Now, our ancients had a good idea of what’s happening in the galaxy. Let’s look at our so-called mythology and see what these ancients have been trying to tell us.

Our galaxy is called the Milky Way, because of the dusting of the white that accompanies its spiral formation. And Lord Vishnu, the all-pervading, lies in the ocean of milk (Ksheer Sagar) on the endless coils of the serpent Anantha/Shesha Naag. The allegory is so right: the Ocean of Milk for the Milky Way, the coils of the serpent to indicate the spiralling nature of the galaxy. And Vishnu (the name means that which pervades all) right in the middle of it all, or forming the basis of it.

Vishnu in his preserver role, is either non-active or active, depending on whether creation (shristi) is in progress, or is in abeyance. When creation is in abeyance, Vishnu rests and the serpent lies coiled. Come creation, the serpent uncoils and everything starts happening, including the spinning off of solar/star systems and galaxies.

To start creation, a lotus pops out of Vishnu’s navel on which is borne Brahma, the creator. This is called Vishnu Naabhi and correlates to the centre of the galaxy (the seat of Brahma). And planets, suns, star and systems are spawned out of this centre. It is all a matter of expansion, for creation is expansion. As the systems evolve, they start their elliptical journey from the centre in an outward direction, growing, spawning and ‘living’.

For our solar system, this journey takes some 26,000 years before it comes back to the periapsis or pericentre( the point of closest approach to the centre) and it will take a similar timeframe to do the circuit in the opposite direction. Many of our astrologers are saying the elliptical journey for the sun is halfway done now and it is approaching the centre, where the solar system will be the closest to the Naabhi in the past 26,000 years.

Now all this galaxy creation is a microcosm of the greater role of creation, where Vishnu pervades the universe and Brahma starts creation of the galaxies and systems (or lokas). The process of creation is passed down intact to the lowest level so that any small creation is similar to the ultimate creation and vice versa. What is above is below and what is inside is outside. Or is our galaxy really the centre of the universe if it actually has the Vishni Naabhi at its centre?

The end of creation
And with creation comes dissolution, as it should be. The Naabhi started the creation and its here where dissolution must take place. As stars and systems spawned out of the centre, so must they come to the centre to be ‘consumed’.

The blackhole can be said to be the destroyer of the trinity, Shiva. The tandav dance of Shiva is the crackling, electrifying, super heavy, all-swallowing, x-ray emitting processes of a blackhole. It is the ultimate dissolution and destruction. Nothing escapes Shiva when he sets out to destroy something, not even light.

But dissolution is an ongoing business, not a one-time event only. Of course, for a planet about to be destroyed, it is a one-off thing but there are myriad of planets and each will eventually be destroyed. And each destruction will be termed a pralaya (dissolution).

Alternatively, followers of Shiva believe it differently. Shiva is the creator, preserver and destroyer all rolled in one, as represented by Natraja. The Tandav is itself the ongoing story of creation, preservation and destruction; a creation ringed by fire, keeping rhythm to the Anahat Sound, represented by Shiva’s damaru (drum).

Each of Natraja’s four arms symbolises the four aspect of divinity: beating the rhythm of the universe with the damaru; blessing us and telling us not to fear anything (abhayahasta); holding fire to show the destruction of both the universe and the ego; and, most importantly, pointing to the demon pinned under his foot that is not upraised in dance. The demon Apasmera represents ignorance, especially ignorance that is an offshoot of dualism. Others call the dwarf demon, Mara (illusion) or Maya (illusion).

Whichever way one will have it, the ancient knew a thing or two and tried their best to pass it on to us. Wrapped in allegory, metaphor and downright-in-your-face imagery, the workings of the universe was told to us. Yet, we failed to understand them.

Now, as science counts down the headlong rush of planet Earth to the centre of the galaxy, it is an apt time to look to our mythology and see what happened in such situations, and find counters to it, if we can. And to ask questions that we have dared not ask before.

Are we heading right into the jaws of this suppermassive blackhole? Is it Earth’s time to experience pralaya?

According to our scriptures, NO. The benign blackhole will certainly exert a force, a tremendous force but not enough to break the sun’s orbit of the centre. There is a great chance of survival for the Earth. But for the people and the other species that reside on Earth, it may be another thing.

Like I said, from the point of view of Earth, the adjustments to the planet may be minor indeed. But the trickle down effect on things living on it may be enormous. What awaits mankind as we speed ahead to this tryst?

The things that have been predicted could happen to us:
Cataclysms – major upheavals, including monster volcano eruptions (there is talk of the nine mountain gods erupting in several mythologies), Earthquakes, tsunamis of giant proportions. A vast majority of humanity will suffer and the planet will reface itself (resurfacing).

Cleansing - a virtual wiping out of many species without much damage to the planet itself. This includes solar winds that pass through the Earth’s protective magnetic shield and change the very molecular structure of things on the planet. It may also just burn every thing up, leaving no chance of cultivation on the surface, and thus little chance of civilisation surviving for very long. Electrical storms would disrupt communications and cut off everyone from everyone.

Consciousness – several cultures and several noteworthy scholars believe the closer we come to the centre of the galaxy the more in tune we become to the pervading consciousness of the universe (God, Brahman, Vishnu, Shiva, Shakti, etc). This rise in consciousness will, of course, come at a price. We will need to give up our body awareness (maybe even our bodies?) – either voluntarily or be forced to do so.

Our ancients have been calling for a new way of living for millennia, in which we are to go beyond body consciousness into the unified field consciousness. Our body is only a vehicle and we have to realise our real self to understand the part we must play in understanding the workings of the universe.

Has the time arrived for major upheavals to take place in our lives, in our very existence? If yes, are we ready for it? Most probably, no. The unrelenting sequels of natural disasters taking place on Earth should teach us something but we are too enamoured by life to see the deadly destruction. It is Yuddhistar who said (when asked by Yama) what was the most astounding thing on Earth: “Thousands are dying everyday but people believe that they will go on living forever. This is the most astounding thing”.

It is the killing of ignorance, especially of the duality of this world, that Shiva’s tandav is teaching us. Maybe it is time to actually look at what we really need to do and see how we can actually live while we still have a body and a mind to understand things.

Asato maa, Sad gamaya
Tamaso maa, Jyotir gamaya
Mrityo maa, Amritam gamaya

NOTES
Black holes
The intense gravity of the black hole prevents any light from escaping it, and it is therefore invisible. Its vicinity, however, contains a fairly high density of stars, including one big star--about 15 times the mass of the Sun and 7 times its radius--which was recently found to go around the centre with an orbital period of only 15.2 years. That star, designated S2 by astronomers, follows an ellipse which at its closest comes within about 124 astronomical units (1 AU=mean Sun-Earth distance) of the centre of the galaxy. At that time it speeds up to about 5000 km/sec--close to 2% of the velocity of light! Its side facing the black hole is somewhat closer to the black hole than the side facing away, and is therefore pulled more strongly; on a very close approach, such a difference could tear a star apart, but S2 would have to get some 70 times closer before that would happen, at a distance comparable to the orbital radius of Mars.

Galactic Centre of Milky Way
The central parsec around Sagittarius A* contains thousands of stars. Although most of them are old red main sequence stars, the Galactic Center is also rich in massive stars. More than 100 OB and Wolf-Rayet stars have been identified there so far. They seem to have all been formed in a single star formation event a few million years ago. The existence of these relatively young (though evolved) stars was a surprise to experts, who expected the tidal forces from the central black-hole to prevent their formation. This paradox of youth is even more remarkable for stars that are on very tight orbits around Sagittarius A*, such as S2.

A world-ending prophesy
Pope Leo IX (Pope from 1513-1522) wrote in 1514 of what is coming: "I will not see the end of the world, nor will you my brethren, for its time is long in the future, 500 years hence." 500 years hence would be 2014, just two years after the Mayan Prophecy End Date, and as Leo was obviously rounding the date to a full sum, it is very possible he is even referring to the year 2012.

Mayan Calendar and yuga separation of the Hindus
The now famous date December 21, 2012 is the date that the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, used by the preColumbian Maya civilization, and known by them and by the Aztecs as the Fifth Sun, completes a "great cycle" of thirteen b'ak'tuns. This means that since the last creation date on August 11 3114. or 13.0.0.0.0 in the Long Count calculation, the "clock hand" will have reached 13.0.0.0.0 again for the first time, marking the completion of this cycle.

Yet this period, lasting c. 5125 years, is just one last (fifth) part of an even longer cycle that turns out to be the same as the Great Year. Knowledge of the Great Year is found in other ancient astrological-astronomical records (i.e. in India) and so with further study the Mayan 2012 calendar end finds roots in other cultures too. With the ending of the last part of this age, the Mesoamerican cycle of five ages also completes. Herewith a large time period of five x 5,125 (c. 25,625 years) is also drawing to a close.

The second coming?
Mention of nine godlike figures is found in many ancient cultures - Maya, Egyptian, Chinese and Tibetan and if you do enough reading of the ancient texts it is quite clear that these nine were volcanic mountains.

They were connected to a very ancient plan that has been copied and kept alive in different areas of the world (you can begin to recognize the connection by reading on Nine Tibetan Mountain Gods). The Return is, then, of fallen or lost mountains, which might cause a certain amount of Earthquakes, tsunamis and eruptions. Moreover they were connected in the plan to one central volcanic mountain that marked the centre of the whole Earth, a mountain that has completely disappeared, sunk below the seas and into our own subconscious

2012 – the year of reckoning?

2010-12-23T11:43:00.000-08:00

As 2012 draws near, a growing number of people are proclaiming massive changes that will be taking place on Earth. Much of the speculation is due to the Mayan (large) calendar which ends on December 21, 2012 (according to its relation with our modern calendar, of course). The movie 2012 has some information about this, and the web is full of it.

Type “2012” into a search engine and you will get 332,000,000 results. The web is buzzing with the ‘end of days’ sites, with much greater emphasis than the Y2K bug could ever have generated. All kinds of outcomes are offered, from a meteorite hitting the planet, to utter collapse of civilisation due to greed, to the third world war.

All religions are being tapped into for “clear signs” of the catastrophe, as well as prophets and science. Pseudo-scientists have either the Planet X (also Nibiru, or sometimes as having Nibiru, with its Planet X) crashing into earth in or around that date. Other “prophets” say the people of planet Nibiru (or Planet X) will arrive to earth to see what their “creation” (the Human race) is up to.

Others still talk of comets or other heavenly bodies striking the planet, causing a climatic change of such proportions that only a half billion people will be able to survive. They imagine a “nuclear” winter that will either send the earth into another ice age, or turn large parts of it into searing deserts. The list of catastrophes is endless on the web.

December 2012 is an important time in many calendars and prophesies, including the Hindu calendar, the Hopi prophesies and, interestingly, Maori lore. In Maori lore December 2012 or thereabouts is when the curtain is lifted. Or is dissolved or comes down – depending on the various translations of the phrase in old Maori - "ka hinga te arai".

This speaks of the reunification of “Rangi” (the Sky) and “Papa” (the Earth). The creation legend goes thus – in the beginning Rangi and Papa were partners and were closely clasped together. They had a number of children, who lived in between these two parents, squashed and without light. One day these children (who were all Gods - God of the Wind, God of the Sea, God of War etc) decided to push their parents apart so they could have room to move. They all tried and failed, till one of the Gods, Tane, pushed them apart, separated them, and there was light.

Ka hinga te arai then could mean the Earth and Sky becoming one (what would be consequence of such a move, or does it mean something other than coming together?); it could mean the blotting out of the sun due to some kind of covering (whether from an explosion that send dust and debris into the atmosphere to block out the Sun’s rays) or (my favourite) it could mean an opening of the dimensions through an upsurge of the human consciousness so things previously unknown to us becomes apparent.

One meaning of the phrase is the removal (dissolving) of the planes separator - basically the merging of the physical and spiritual planes. Some translate this as a time when the unknowables become known through a shift in perception that is forced onto mankind. This, for once, is one of the saner interpretations of what could happen in 2012.

In the Hopi Indian prophesies 2012, or thereabouts, is seen as the return of the Pahana (the White Brother from the skies) with whose coming will come the dawn of the
Fifth World. We are presently at the end of the fourth world, according to Hopi Indians. Out in South America it is the Sons of Light returning to Earth to help mankind onto the next step in their evolution.

There are many people around the world who believe in something close to this understanding of what will happen in 2012 – humanity will undergo a change of sorts to their consciousness in that time, with or without help from others. Some web pages are dedicated to this approach, with a number talking of the galactic centring where our sun, for the first time in thousands of years, will hit the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

This alignment to the galaxy will have profound impact in the way we use our senses, our brain and our consciousness. Gravitation forces and other cosmic forces (including the cosmic background radiation) will work together in ways that will change us, and everything else, associated with our planet. This includes some major changes to the alignment of the planet, it is said.

“But our old ways of thinking, including our biology will change as the Sun, Earth and Pleides line up in space. This will cause an increase in discharge of photons from the sun which is bound to cause changes in our brain pattern,” – astrologer and modern day guru Dattatreya Siva Baba.

Others still are saying that around December 2012, several wormholes will open at the centre of our galaxy, allowing “others” from around the universe to finally contact use. Various ideas and descriptions have been given of these others, including the Sons of Light, and a host of “aliens” who are not aliens but our friends from far across the universe.

In Hinduism, the field of speculation is vast as far as 2012 is concerned. Several people are putting forth the idea that Kali Yuga will end in 2012, and Satya (Krita) Yuga begins. Other are saying the Kali Yuga has a few thousand years to go, some say 5000 years, others 427,000 years.

Some modern “thinkers” believe that the yuga calculations are all wrong and, yes, the Satya Yuaga (the Golden Age) is about to begin. But with a proviso – there will be calamities, natural and otherwise – like financial problems, wars and global warming.

These thinkers take the likes of Sri Aurobindo and use his proclamations like "India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples" to show the changes the end of the next two years will bring for the Earth.

India has long been touted as the guru of the world by the many modern sages and thinkers and innovators of the spirit. They, including Swami Vivekananda, have said that India will rise as the teacher of the world when the rest of the world is surfeit of its childishness and is willing to learn the way of wisdom from India.

Keeping such prophesies in mind, it is no wonder that the younger generation in India and the Indian Disapora is leaning towards a consciousness shift rather than catastrophe in 2012. But as long as we, the Indians of today, continue aping the West, this guru aspect of India will remain in abeyance (but that is another story).

All and good, as this writer also believes in something positive and even good happening in 2012. After snuffling through the thousands of ideas surrounding the year 2012, one thing was very clear – mankind is desperately looking at ways to stop the wounding of its psyche and the planet.

The escalation of the war against the planet and its people has reached a peak that even WWII could not achieve. When children start dying at the rate one every six minute (due to disease, abuse and lack of clean water and food) then it is time to re-look at the way we have been doing things.

As it is said: the solution of a problem that exists today cannot be found in the methods of problem solving that we were using yesterday. So we must look to the extraordinary and as yet “unthought” of solutions to our present problems.

Every idea of governance that we have seen has its pitfalls, some more than others as shown by the collapse of “communism” in the recent past. The so-called collapse of “capitalism” in the recent years has also shown us what happens when greed and rampant consumerism is let loose upon the people.

The so-called liberations and revolutions have, in fact, not liberated people, just made us more like the people who had held us off from that world of power for so long. Children appear to be more abused worldwide than maybe ever before – with child slavery on the rise, and child prostitution even being condoned by parents in the less developed sections of the world, where a father can sell a daughter to pimps for less than $100.

Food production is the highest it has ever been and so much of it is wasted, yet a third of the population find it hard to put together three square meals each day for the family. Water, the most abundant element on earth, is getting expensive to have as more waterways are poisoned and fewer places of clean water become available to the world’s population.

And nature is taking its toll (or its revenge) on every sphere of the globe. Mankind, it appears, is finding harder to adjust to the new ways that the Earth is reacting to its perilous situation.

These are the problems that have been besetting mankind for a very long time now. And we still haven’t any answer to them. Is the “end of days” phenomenon (this attitude to the years 2012) a subliminal cry of help from the collective psyche of mankind? Why is it that so many from several parts of the planets are concerned so much over a little date?

I, for one, don’t believe the Earth will be destroyed. Yet, I can’t help feeling something will happen in 2012. I think it will be a bit of almost everything – some calamity will hit us at a pace and proportion that will force our hands into living a better life. Whether this is a global catastrophe or an event of such proportion that mankind finally says “enough is enough”, I don’t know.

One of the prophesies I abide by is that there will be “minor adjustments” to the planet, with minor adjustments seen from the point of view of the planet and not us. This is already happening. Few of us know that the magnetic poles has already shift by several degrees southward over Europe. Some say it is as much as 15 degrees (?). This would explain why Spain and Portugal are presently experiencing snowfall in areas where it was previously sunny at this time of the year.

Could it get worse? Yes, it has been steadily getting worse. The nature and scope of natural disasters in the past few years has been unprecedented. Earthquakes and tsunamis are getting more frequent, global warming (whether man-made or natural) is a fact, and the weather patterns around the world is throwing up surprises almost every day.

The level of human suffering will have to peak before “realisation” of the evils of greed, selfishness, partisan leanings and racism takes place for humans. It has to get worse before it gets better. Maybe it is up to us to ride out this ‘worse’ phase before we can get to the golden age.

The way of wisdom as shown by our ancient seers is to hold everything in trust – there is no ownership of anything, including the resources of the earth. Just as a school headmaster will look after the property of the school with diligence and with faith, so should every human being look to the things he or she owns, individually and as a collective.

But just as when the headmaster is transferred and he give up the ‘ownership’ of the school properties without a fuss, so should human being be ready to give up anything they ‘own’ – their family, their property, their very life. This is the way of detachment that our ancients showed.

Notes:
Golden Age Could Begin in 2012
The ancient Hindus mainly used lunar calendars but also used solar calendars. If an average lunar year equals 354.36 days, then this would be about 5270 lunar years from the time when the Kali Yuga started until 21 Dec 2012. This is the same year that the Mayans predict rebirth of our planet. It is also about 5113 solar years of 365.24 days per year, and is day number 1,867,817 into the Kali Yuga. By either solar or lunar years, we are over 5000 years into the Kali Yuga and it is time for Lord Krishna's prophecy to happen according to the ancient Hindu scriptures. Lord Krishna's Golden Age could easily begin in 2012.

Ka hinga te arai (from the internet)
Basically the other more secretive legend that follows on from this (Creation mythology) says that there will come a time when the children of Tane (that's you and me) are so busy, so distracted with fighting, with greed, with lust etc, so separated from our original parents (Rangi and Papa - so that kinda means we have lost our links with the natural order of things) that Rangi and Papa will take that opportunity - while no one is looking - to quickly come back together...destroying everything in the process. There has been much meditation done on this event and yep...2012 seems to be the year the old people are coming up with.

What the more grounded among the Indian astrologers says - The widely accepted belief of Hindus is that Kali Yuga will see total annihilation. Creation will once again begin after total destruction. This will be Satya Yuga.

So connecting 2012 to Hinduism and Vedic astrology is done by those people who want to create fear and optimism at the same time among people – and earn a living by predictions and writing books.

Hinduism teaches that all animate and inanimate is Brahman. Doomsday predictions and 2012 are products of ego or ignorance, which hampers self realisation. To the realised there is no beginning and end.
So – No, the world will not end in 2012. Many such predictions had come and gone and this too will go as will the many such doomsday predictions that will come in future.

It is widely believed that Kali Yuga began in 3102 BC.
Now there are several people quoting Puranas to indicate that Lord Krishna had predicted an end the Kali Yuga after 5000 years and the beginning of the Golden Era.
But traditional scriptures do not agree to this as Kali Yuga will last for 432,000 years.
Now those who are stating that Kali Yuga will end after 5000 years are indicating the beginning of Golden Age in 2012. They are scrupulously using a mix of solar and lunar calendars used by Hindus to suggest that Kali Yuga will end in 2012.

In the “Brahma-Vaivarta Purana”, Lord Krishna tells Ganga Devi that a Golden Age will come in the Kali Yuga - one of the four stages of development that the world goes through as part of the cycle of eras, as described in Hindu scriptures. Lord Krishna predicted that this Golden Age will start 5000 years after the beginning of the Kali Yuga, and will last for 10,000 years.

Sai Baba and Human Values

2010-12-05T14:58:00.001-08:00

Followers from some 85 countries around the world, the President and Prime Minister of India and various Chief Ministers, some of India’s top industrialists, and many noted personalities attended Sathya Sai Baba’s week-long 85th birthday celebrations earlier this month. Click here to see the Indian Weekender photogallery.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was deeply impressed by the free educational institutes that Sai Baba runs and said he was going back with some good ideas that he would like to see implemented into the national system. Sai Baba offers education through free universities, colleges and schools throughout India but with the added dimension of human values as an integral aspect of the curriculum.

The President, Pratibha Devisingh Patil, chief guest at the Women’s Day function at Prashanti Nilayam, the abode of Sai Baba, called on women-related issues to the forefront. Governors E.S.L. Narasimhan (Andhra Pradesh) and Shivraj Patil (Punjab) and State Minister for Information and Public Relations J. Geetha Reddy were present for the Women’s Day celebration which is part of the birthday celebrations.

Sai Baba is not a religious movement, cult or sect. His organisation is based on a few very simple affirmations – Help Ever, Hurt Never; Love all, Serve all, and God is Love and Love is God. While apparently simplistic in the first instance, Sai Baba has spent the past few decades honing the understanding and practice of such axioms for his followers the world over. That is why he is regarded as a Satguru (a teacher of truth), a world teacher (jagat guru) and an avatar in line with Krishna, Rama, Buddha and Jesus.

His teachings have reverberated every teaching of every scripture, his followers are from every religion: Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, followers of Judaism, Shintoism, - the list is endless.

He has always said all religions have the same basis of attesting to truth, right conduct, peace, love and non-violence. These human values make up the foundation of his service organisations in more than 167 countries around the world.

The adherents of his philosophy of divinity in all number over 100 million, many of them registered to the organisations in their country, including New Zealand.

Every religion is celebrated at Prashanti Nilayam – with annual celebrations of Eid, Christmas, Hindu festivals and many more. Sai Baba does not tolerate any differences in the practitioners of any religion – every follower of the Sai philosophy is asked to treat everyone else as himself/herself, without an iota of otherness.

It is a philosophy that has held true for the past 60 years. While initially people are drawn to Sai Baba because of his miracles, the past few decade has seen a massive growth in followers based on the social commitment Sai Baba has to humanity. He says his life is an example of service to humanity and his followers need to follow that.

His services include free super speciality hospitals that undertake heart surgeries and other high-level surgeries, his water projects that bring potable water to millions of villagers in several states in India and offering free education up to university level. His overseas branches are geared to assisting local issues as and when they rise, as well as starting free schools and medical facilities in their own countries.

Sai service organisations operate on a simple maxim - help fellow man without any conditions whatsoever. While no money or subscription is every asked for in the organisation, these national and regional bodies have been carrying out successful relief work for years in their areas.

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Sai Baba – Man of Miracles

The Western world was introduced to the godman, Sathya Sai Baba in a book by an Australian journalist Howard Murphet. While since that book – Sai Baba Man of Miracles - several hundred other books on Sai Baba have been written, the simple beauty and deliverance of that book remains a must-read for all followers.

Murphet spent years in India in the 1960s in search of ancient knowledge, and then dedicated himself to Sai Baba after finding in him everything he wanted as guru. A practising Christian, he freely acknowledges Sai Baba as an avatar, as god walking on Earth.

Books on Sai Baba have been written in many languages. While many dwell on the miracles that he has been doing for the past six decades, there are dozens of books about the his mission, his accomplishments and his methods. Many more exist of the personal experiences of people who have stayed with him, tested him and accepted him as an avatar of the age.

Sai Baba says he has come to clear the path to spirituality that has been overgrown with the five diseases of humanity: anger, greed, attachment, pride and lust.

Sai Baba does not advocate one religion over another, saying that each is a pathway to god and each provides a particular way for people to reach that goal. He asks that his followers become better in the religion they have been born in: a Hindu to become a better Hindu, a Muslim to become a better Muslim, A Christian to become a better Christian.

In all, he says one thing – everyone has to become a better human being to attain anything in life. Humanism is the basis of all religion and with the appropriate reasoning and intellectual discrimination, one can understand what it is to be a true human being. It is this message of Sai Baba that appeals to all, no matter what state their minds may be in.

International Sai Organisation website - http://www.sathyasai.org/
Sai organisation – India - http://www.srisathyasai.org.in/