Truth is, what we say by experience.

Dear Readers,

 I would like to thanks for the encouragement and appreciations you have shown for my work.

 I would like to inform you that you can find updates on this blog at ujalaa.wordpress.com.

Keep and enjoy reading.

 Thanks & Regards,

 Sunder Dinesh
Email:  sunder.dinesh@gmail.com

VITHALC NADKARNI

JOHN Selby’s The Cool Way to Calmspecifically offers meditation for high school students as a non-religious method for calming emotions, clearing the mind, and feeling good in the body. It’s contrary to the stereotype of a bearded guru meditating in some far-off cave in the Himalayan wilderness, he clarifies. He was lucky enough to grow up in a town in California where a “wonderful meditation teacher called Jiddu Krishnamurti spent half of each year”. So by the time he got to high school he had a starting notion of how to take charge of his own mind and to use the powerful tool of meditation to help him through his teen years.
Selby says his ‘short-form’ meditation method for teenagers is something one can do anywhere, anytime — while taking a walk, sitting in class, playing sports or being out on a date. It’s supposed to be something one can do anytime; whenever one wants to calm down, to get clear to be able to enjoy life.
What’s more nobody needs to even know that you are meditating, he reassures: “All they’ll see is that right in the middle of being upset or confused or otherwise emotionally and mentally a mess, you’re able to somehow quickly regain your composure, let go of upset feelings, and attain a sense of personal balance and power that allows you to perform at your optimum, relate with strength and compassion, and in general succeed in whatever you’re doing at the moment.”
In the first four chapters, the book goes back and forth between life scenes of high-schoolers trying to apply meditation to their lives. These stories are punctuated by short explanatory paragraphs. Selby has also experimented with what he calls the ‘modular’ meditation method, where each meditation module stands on its own as a short but complete unit. When these are put together in the proper order, the seven meditation modules also work as a whole as one flows from theme to theme, being taken deeper and deeper with each modular addition.
So are you ready to start? “Without making any effort, experience the change inside when you begin to turn your inner focus of attention directly toward the physical sensation you’re feeling even right now, of the air flowing in, and flowing out of your nose or mouth as you breathe,” he exhorts. “Just tune into your breathing with all your mind’s power of attention, and watch six breaths come and go; be open to a new experience and change!”

Deepak Ranade

Nostalgia is often a pleasurable pain. But pain, nonetheless. Unpleasant memories could create bitterness while pleasant me mories tend to fill one with happiness and a desire to relive the experience. Some perceive nostalgia as part of emotional baggage, and question its bio logical relevance.
From an anthropological standpoint, remem bering where the waterholes were in a situation where the supply of water is never constant is valuable memory input. Similarly, knowledge of the precise location of food sources is important when supply tends to fluctuate. As a recording de vice, memory provides vital information in try ing situations. However, the bank is also filled with a wide-ranging mix of seemingly trivial and redundant data.
The colour of the dress your first date wore on that first day, the tears that coursed down your mother’s cheeks after she’d spanked you and the fight you had with your classmate in school over jumping the queue – these are all recorded somewhere in our memory bank. In fact, our identity and ego are but an aggregate of all recorded data. Individual identities take shape on the basis of all past events and feelings, experiences and situations that find place in a corner of the brain. Cognitive focus or concentration lends a criticality to this unique and biological data processing system.
Perception, too, plays a crucial role in this recording mechanism. What is assimilated and stored is an outcome of what is perceived. A pragmatic person may therefore not perceive an event in a complex way. If a pragmatic person’s friend passed by without a greeting, he would record it as mere oversight. But someone with a complex perception could interpret this as part of a conspiracy. His memory would record it not just as an event ; it would perhaps be a gigabyte of associative emotional data.
Studies have shown that the most vivid autobiographical memories have been of emotional events rather than of any empirical or neutral event. Consciousness is the turntable that keeps rotating while ego is the pin that records grooves on the record. Memories are grooves made by ego on unformatted consciousness. Identity is consciousness formatted by the perceptive ego.
The sense of self as a discrete entity makes all awareness an interaction between self and environment. Interaction is all about duality. But in moments of extreme pleasure or thrill, there is no interaction; there is only a sense of being.
There is an invisible time zone between self and environment. The sense of discreteness disappears momentarily. In those fleeting moments, there is nothing to record. The present has no access to data. The present is the moment just prior to the process of recording. The dominant temporal lobe is the warehouse of all data. It is an integral part of the limbic system that is phylogenically the oldest in the evolution of the brain. It was linked with emotional responses required for survival and reproduction.
Considering that the limbic system is one of the oldest, all emotional augmenting of mundane events are perhaps vestiges of primitive behaviour, and so is not evolved. In this context, a patient suffering loss of memory may be temporarily or otherwise liberated’ from stored data and its effects, though this is a source of anguish for near and dear ones.
The writer is a consultant neurosurgeon. www. neuroconsciousness.blogspot.com

VITHAL C NADKARNI

NORMAN Macrae, former deputy editor of The Economist who died at 89, was one of post-War Britain’s intellectual giants. Prophesying the future was his great gift. “Nobody listened then everybody did,” he wrote in 1991 in a future history of privatisation. He also foresaw with chilling clarity how growing life-expectancy would become a curse and backed a ‘system of planned death’ to cope with it. But his timing was all wrong when he wrote (circa 1975) that euthanasia would become as acceptable as abortion in 15 years; the devil lay in the detail: as horribly skewed sex ratios show, in some countries killing of female foetuses flourishes surreptitiously while that of old codgers is nowhere near acceptance except in a few European ones that turn a blind eye to the upsurge of ‘one-way tourism’.
He was more spot on about big company capitalism as on biggovernment socialism. That also turned him into a technophile and an incurable optimist. Like Dr Pangloss from Voltaire’s Candide he seemed to believe in the Leibnizian mantra that “all was for the best in the best possible of worlds” if only obdurate politicos could see it that way.
His influence can be discerned in a wide variety of works including Matt Ridley’s recent opus, The Rational Optimist. Ridley, however, is also the nonexecutive chairman of Northern Rock, the bank bailed out by government handouts during the credit crunch. So how would Norman have handled the paradox? “Take a lesson in how to run village businesses (like Grameen) and how not to handle bank crises (like Japan or USA),” he wrote after a lunch with the Nobel laureate Mohammad Yunus at the Royal Automobile Club in 2008. “Learning from Dr Yunus and those who have exponentially sustained community raising microcredit seems to be the best way forward worldwide women and US Congressmen can get.”
(Norman was no stranger to East Bengal, having studied economics there by an Indian correspondence course while waiting to be drafted by the RAF as a teenager and his wife was the daughter of the British judge who went on from jailing Gandhi to helping write India’s Constitution in the 1940s).
His favourite heroes were John von Neumann, the polymath who pioneered the modern computer, Game Theory and nuclear deterrence, and Albert Einstein who once said, constancy was the virtue of idiots. It’s best therefore to embrace constant change.

Soma Chakravertty

We say “God-fearing” of a man who is a deeply religious person. Is that not a misconception? If the essence of God is love, why fear Him? Hasn’t he created the universe and all life, providing us with resources? Why should anyone fear Him? The Bible (John) states: “He that loveth not, knoweth not God. For God is love. There is no fear in love but perfect love casteth out fear.”
Fear is negative, it’s limiting. It makes one weary and distrusting. It stops us from standing up against corruption, it prevents us from protesting against wrongdoing and it makes us hesitate to challenge injustice. In a state of fear we turn passive supporter of misdeeds. Since God is not only love but also upholder of universal law, perhaps we do need to fear Him.
Virtue is rewarded and ill-doing attracts retribution. If at all one needs to fear something, it is to fear retribution. On the other hand if one has nothing to fear, it means the conscience is clear, there is courage of conviction and life flows smoothly.
Religious diktats are followed not out of fear of God but because of fear of ungodly misguided people in authority who are themselves far removed from God. We fear pain, failure, separation. We fear situations that can be full of opportunities to learn and move on. If we resent setbacks and blame it all on God, then God becomes intimidating.
Yet, we do look up to God as our saviour. And when we do so, we pay more attention to rites and rituals, chants and intonations rather than on invocation. We are depriving ourselves of His love, losing sight of the soul, the integral part of the supreme soul; we are turning a deaf ear to the voice from within. “He who realises the joy of Brahmn is free from fear,” say the Upanishads. “Only by love can men see me and know me and come unto me” said Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. According to the Svetavatara Upanisad “The one God is hidden in all beings, all-pervading, the inner self of all beings, the ordainer of all deeds dwells in all beings, the witness, the knower, the only one…” Therefore it is futile to try to hide dark thoughts and actions from the Divine. Make friends with the Almighty who could then be your sakha or ally in life and help you overcome anger, jealousy, lust, passion and greed.
Sufism is perhaps the best example of complete surrender to the Almighty with devotional love, reflected so beautifully in Rumi’s verse: “I thought of you so often, that i completely became you. Little by little you drew near, and slowly but slowly i passed away.” With the strength of divine love Meerabai united with her beloved Krishna and Chaitanya Mahaprabhu got engulfed in the blue God’s ocean of love.
According to Swami Surya Jowel, fear acts as hindrance to freely love the Supreme. When we condition our love with expectation there are chances of disappointment and fear of rejection. This creates distances. Divisibility of self creates room for dilemma, doubts, and insecurity. All fuelled by fear. “Turn to the Sun; he says you will realise how he takes care of life with love and light.”

VITHALC NADKARNi

IT’S more than just an ad. The three-minute ‘Write the future’ film, first shown during last month’s European Club Final, captures that moment of truth when colours, but not colour, suddenly matter; when headlines get written from a single pass or strike which brings abject misery or triumphal exultation to entire nations — as, for instance, when Spain loses to Switzerland — when the world’s collective imagination gets hijacked by a sport turned into secular religion.
But this phenomenon
emerged only recently. As a blogger notes, the days following World War II had “great masses of people who considered the game to be a pre-historic pastime, a sporting brontosaurus on its way to extinction”. Their image of football was of “socially disenfranchised men passing through creaking turnstiles and standing on crumbling terraces beneath dishwater grey skies when players (had) bad haircuts, bad shorts and bad prospects”.
Then the great makeover happened. Overnight, the world as we know changed as the pop prophet Bono promised it would. The medium became the message only to rewrite the world’s TRP history. Football became “a post-modern religion,” as the late Catalan writer, Manuel Varquez Montalban wrote, “one that was perfectly in tune with the commercial needs of mankind, intrinsically linked to business and consumerism. Its cathedrals were stadiums, its gods footballers, its faithful the millions of fans, who not only participated in this ritual every matchday, but practised their faith on a daily basis, thinking about and reflecting on the deeds of their gods.”
But it would not be prudent to push that image further: because you might end up with a ‘Hand of Clod’ sort of self-goal that had British tabloids in a tizzy. For all that euphoria, the transcendence provided by football, alas, is only temporary. Of course, it embodies a ‘kinetic beauty (which David Foster Wallace said “was not the goal of competitive sport”). So what does Prophet Bono mean when he says, “One game changes everything”? The Mbombela Statium (which literally means ‘many people in a small space’) that cost $137 million to build will host only four games, a total of six hours of the beautiful game. After that which of the professional teams would return to patronise it? Still, one should be grateful for small mercies. We shouldn’t blame the game for our sins.Ke Nako!

Discourse: Lilashahji

If you want to be ever cheerful, remember the following mantra: “Even this shall pass.” Let this be inscribed indelibly in your heart. With the practice of this mantra you can remain alert in the event of both pleasure and pain and stop yourself from getting engrossed in them. Then, you can establish yourself in the supreme bliss of equanimity.
Pairs of opposites such as pleasure and pain, honour and insult, joy and sorrow affect the body. They will come and go in greater or lesser degree so long as the body exists. Do not be overwhelmed by them. You are the absolute Self, imperishable Atman while pleasures and pains are fleeting. How can they ever affect you? They have no existence of their own. In fact, they appear on the ground of your existence. You are distinct from them. Hence witness them, withstand them, and let them pass away. Be ever blissful and peaceful.
There is no object that brings pleasure or pain. They are creations of your mind, your thoughts and feelings. With the help of these thoughts be absorbed in your own eternal Being, the Truth absolute and be always peaceful.
You are the Supreme Bliss, Brahmn personified. It is your Self that dwells in all. The happiness that appears in the world is in fact just a glimpse of Self-bliss. It is your inner bliss but because of your ignorance, you think it is obtained from external objects of sense pleasures. Just as the sun’s reflection in water is not the real sun but is merely an illusory appearance thereof, so also is the pleasure experienced through sense-enjoyments – it is not real bliss. It is illusion, not real.
Supreme Brahmn alone is existence, consciousness and bliss absolute. It is the One absolute reality which appears as existence, consciousness and bliss in different beings. But one who has a pure heart beholds the Lord as the One, non-dual Reality. A person prayed to Swami Ramatirtha, “Swamiji! Bless me that i become king of the world.” Swami Ramatirtha asked him, “What will you do if you become so?” The man replied, “I will be pleased and happy.”
Swami Ramatirtha said, “Suppose you become a king, you will still come across many miseries in your life since the things through which you seek pleasure are themselves transient. They never remain with anybody forever, then how will they stay with you? Better than that, if you renounce the desire for seeking pleasure from transient things you will attain supreme bliss right now. That would be greater than the happiness you can derive from your dream kingdom.”
The mind becomes peaceful when it overcomes desires; then you can experience imperishable bliss. True peace lies only in the renunciation of desires.
A content person alone can remain happy. Even a millionaire is bankrupt without contentment. A content person is the wealthiest of all. He alone attains peace. Appreciate the present. Overcome greed and be content with what you have. Give thanks to God. Then you could help others achieve bliss.
www.ashram.org

MUKUL SHARMA

THE reason technology can’t keep up with art is because while technology keeps improving all the time, ideal art doesn’t. It has no need to. Take photography. An entry level digital SLR today is as far removed from a 1950s rangefinder as that is from a turn of the century box camera. They’re literally light years apart in performance. Yet when it comes to the value of the end result — the actual photograph in question — the aesthetic estimation remains at the same level. It’s either good or not good. Or, take literature. How much better would Shakespeare have written if instead of a quill he had used a fountain pen, typewriter or word processor? His output may have increased but would the quality of King Lear also have improved?
And almost all of us would agree with this simple precept. The pyramids, Great Wall of China and Taj Mahal were built before the development of heavy earth-moving equipment and other sophisticated civil engineering tools, yet they remain equal marvels of architecture. Eleventh century Gregorian chants were monophonic whereas the Grateful Dead routinely used polyphony, a much later musical growth. If, however, the chanters were to be switched through centuries with the real deadheads the chances are that both would still be singers of great songs. But to be fair to technology, it’s not in competition with anything except its own outdated avatars. It’s the technologists who sometimes don’t get it and get into the race.
Take religion. For thousands of years they’ve outdone one another trying to build bigger and better temple complexes, each grander and more ostentatious than the other, studded with precious gems and stones, carved in ivory and jade, embellished with gold and silver. Despite this monumental overkill, though, some of these structures do turn out to have great artistic merit even if, in the process, designing gets casually confused with worship which, like all artistry, has its fountainhead completely elsewhere and can hardly be affected by outward appearances.
Similarly idols and symbols for that matter which are also subjected to improved makeovers on a regular basis. What does the technical knowledge of building (or blasting) a 180 foot Bamiyan cliff carving have anything to do with the essence of Buddhism except to show that, once again, technology couldn’t match the art of inner reverence?