VIJNANA

Rise above myths and re-discover yourself…

2009-02-15T09:34:00.001+05:30

Rise above myths and re-discover yourself… all gods are nothing before the Source of your Self.

— essence of chapter 3
Kena Upanishad

Never mess with myths people believe in. They can never be proved as true which explains the anger if others ridicule them. Religious tolerance essentially means you go ahead and believe in your incredible myths and I’ll believe in mine.

Myths have an awesome power over us. They were cleverly designed for the unconscious, designed to take deep twisted roots inside the unquestioning mind of dreams. Once they possess the dreaming mind, it is impossible to shake off. Try and discard one, the myth will return as nightmares, portents, signs from the heavens that a deep wrong is being committed.

All religions have embraced myths unto their selves. Hinduism has probably more than the rest put together. Hindu myths are known by the euphemism puraan. Every major God has a puraan. Many popular godmen have also wisely acquired puraans for themselves. If you plan to become a godman in the near future, better set a committee right now to churn up an exciting new puraan for your forthcoming avatar.

Sure, myths have been a great unifier of nations and cultures. The legend of Lord Ram helped unite India from north to south, kept up its spirit in the worst of medieval times. The legend of Jesus spread across the ends of earth into the largest most powerful religion the world has known. Myths add magic to our lives, take us back to giddy childhood days, unite us through a shared belief.

They are also double-edged swords. The second edge is hidden in the handle, and it slashes the wrists of those who wield it. Whatever the culture race or religion, the message embedded in all myths is the same. He is great, you are insignificant. He is a hero, you are a zero. He made water into wine, He made a bridge of floating stones, you did not. Eventually myths bleed your strength and weaken you into submission. It puts another person, idea or entity way above you and reduces you to a kneeling bowing grovelling person.

Vedanta says there is a time to embrace the myth and a time to rise above it. When you need to merge with your religious group, go ahead and cuddle up with all the myths you want. When you want to touch the silence within, it is time to go beyond and look at yourself and nothing else.

You don’t need to discard your faith. Just rise above it, rise above all the gods and demons the human mind has created. Rise above all the godmen and prophets who have held sway over the ages.

It is not easy, yes. Vedanta was never for the faint hearted. Walk on only if you have the courage. The road ahead is rough but the view is very beautiful.

Existence is made out

2009-02-15T09:32:00.000+05:30

Joy is the stuff existence is made of. So whenever you are moving towards becoming more existential, you will be becoming more and more full of joy and delight, for no reason at all. If you are moving into detachment, love will grow, joy will grow, only attachments will drop because attachments bring misery, attachments bring bondage, attachments destroy your freedom. Indifference is a pseudo-coin — it looks like detachment, but it only looks like detachment. Nothing will be growing in it. You will simply shrink and die.

Don’t try to achieve happiness

When you are trying to achieve happiness you will miss. The very effort to achieve happiness is absurd because happiness is here: you cannot achieve it. Nothing has to be done about it, you simply have to allow it. It is happening, it is all around you; within, without, only happiness is. Nothing else is real. Watch, look deep into the world, into trees, birds, rocks, rivers, into the stars, moon and sun, into people, animals — existence is made out of the stuff of happiness, joy. Relax and it fulfills you.

Love is not attachment

Love knows no attachment, and that which knows attachment is not love. That is possessiveness, domination, clinging, fear, greed — it may be a thousand and one things, but it is not love. In the name of love other things are parading, in the name of love other things are hiding behind, but on the container the label ‘love’ is stuck. Inside you will find many sorts of things but not love at all.

Are you afraid of aloneness?

Watch. If you are attached to a person, are you in love? Or are you afraid of your aloneness, so you cling? If the person dies or moves somewhere else or falls in love with someone else then you will kill this person or you may kill yourself and you will say, ‘I was so attached that I couldn’t live without her or without him’.

It is sheer foolishness. It is not love, it is something else. You are afraid of your aloneness, you are not capable of being with yourself. And you use the other person as a means for your own ends.

To use another person as a means is violence

Immanuel Kant has made it one of his fundamentals of moral life. He used to say that to treat a person as a means is the greatest immoral act there is. Because when you treat another person as a means — for your gratification, for your sexual desire, for your fear — you are reducing the other person to be a thing, you are destroying his or her freedom, you are killing his or her soul.

Courtesy Osho International Foundation/ www.osho.com

Slowly start unfolding the spiritual self

2009-02-14T12:08:00.000+05:30

he beginning of a new year brings new resolutions, a desire to give direction and control to life.

So, it was that the family sat huddled, reviewing the year gone by, discussing resolutions, setting goals and methodology to achieve them. Looking back, year after year, we had fixed physical, professional, financial, social, family and intellectual goals. Many were achieved, some goals became meaningless and new ones emerged.

It becomes apparent that a major portion of time was spent on fulfilling responsibilities and equipping ourselves to live more comfortably and peacefully. 'Intellectual goals' were the ones which stood out: reading, reflection and analysis were in the realm of challenging the mind and understanding life.

The most interesting aspect of looking back is that 'yoga' gently entered life under the head 'physical goals' and slowly made way to 'intellectual goals' in terms of understanding life and self. And, finally, yoga emerged as a means of 'spiritual goal', adding a new dimension to our lives. In some ways, intellectual and spiritual goals merged.

Over the years, this 'nectarine' aspect of life, though always present and experienced in parts, was not fully tapped. Yoga brings with it a lifestyle based in the 'spirit of the self' which pervades all other aspects of life.

Yoga teaches us that this body is essentially an instrument for realising the ` Param Atman' . Besides the physical body, there is an immensely powerful yet soft and gentle `spiritual body'. To build a spiritual body is a goal. The question is how to put this concept in 'actionable'? Here is where yoga as a discipline and as a 'body of knowledge' comes to our help.

Though conceptually, the spiritual body would be one 'established in its pure pristine self' we can take its outward manifestation and try to achieve them. Thus, a well-developed spiritual body would manifest in this world with the following attributes: i) Calm, ii) Serene, iii) Magnetic, iv) Efficient, v) Dynamic, vi) Tranquil, vii) Joyous, viii) Pure, ix) Disciplined, x) Graceful, xi) Physically fit, xii) Focused, xiii) Constantly learning and improving.

This list is not exhaustive. It is just a means to understand that deep within when the spiritual body will evolve what would be its manifestation in outer physical world. So, the output would be the list stated above. What would be the inputs to nourish the spirit so that the spiritual body develops? Yoga and 'yogic living' give us 'tools' to nourish our spiritual self. The list here is: i ) Mantra, ii) Jap, iii) Asana, iv) Pranayama, v) Pratyahara, and vi) Dharana .

Also develop i) Vivek or discrimination, ii) Vairagya or non-attachment, iii) Always make a conscious 'sattvic' choice, iv) Complete listening, and v) Considered speech. The above inputs and assiduous development of vivek, vairagya , always making conscious sattvic choice and considered speech would lead to an output of a calm, serene, emotionally stable, physically fit and a magnetic personality which is constantly learning and improving itself.

The 'mantra' breaks the emotional, mental and physical knots or barriers within. The vibrational powers of mantra make the spirit free-flowing. The 'jap' of 'guru mantra' pervades the spiritual self and connects the spirit of self to a very powerful source of energy and intelligence. The 'asanas' done with awareness make the body a more efficient machine. The 'pratyahara' leads to the journey within and 'dharana' leads to a focused efficient mind.

In the physical world, a person who is established in 'vivek' and 'vairagya' is like a magnet to others. The self comes nearer to its internal self, our spiritual body. The journey begins from the physical to internal with changed understanding of life. The new unfolding is that of the 'spiritual self'.

Love lessons from nature

2009-02-14T12:07:00.000+05:30

To feel love and compassion for all, observe nature with totality of mind without letting it get affected by any previously constructed image,opinion or past knowledge.

Look around to observe things as if you are seeing them for the very first time. Become one with the object of observation.

The sun provides light and warmth irrespective of who benefits from it. It shines on all. The clouds, rivers, mountains and jungles follow the same example of universal love. Trees provide shade, fruits and flowers for healthy environment and food for hungry with the same unattached benevolence for all. They do not demand any favour in return. The earth matures the seeds into healthy plants irrespective of who planted the seeds or who will benefit from them. This truly is like mother's love which is equal and forgiving for all children even when some are the cause of hurt to her.

If one learns from nature, the world will be a much better place as the destructive tendencies like jealousy, envy, hatred and selfishness will be eliminated. A new era of mutual love and trust will dawn on earth. All differences of caste, colour, race, gender and age will melt away. Most of the modern age problems have arisen because we have stopped learning from nature and caring for it.

Imagine the blissful feeling one gets when listening to the chirping of birds at dawn, observing the river flowing its course, looking at the snow-clad peaks of mountains, taking a stroll in a forest with majestically standing tall trees and looking at the moon on a full-moon night or a star-studded sky on amavasya night. The divine feelings generated by such experiences compel one to ponder over the meaning of life, our place in the universe, and create an urge to become one with the Divine to experience eternal bliss. Live with nature, love nature, protect nature, learn from nature and you will soon rise above all parochial tendencies and become a votary of universal love.

Since long, we have been drawing spiritual inspiration from nature. According to Buddhist guru Daisaku Ikeda, who is also a keen photographer, response to nature's beauty is not merely aesthetic but reflects an ability to discern a deeper meaning and interconnectedness in things. With its universal language, the photographer of nature's beauty serves as a bridge connecting the hearts of people everywhere.

Osho in his discourse on 'Intuition' quotes the haiku of Basho the Zen mystic and master:

"When I look carefully I see nazunia blooming by the hedge!"

Osho says that the deep meaning of it cannot be understood intellectually but only intuitively. The idea Osho wants to convey is that one can draw deep spiritual inspiration even from simple things like looking at an ordinary flower and pondering over its beauty, its divine message, the mystery of creation.

The main cause of discontent of mind, heart and spirit is to spend too much time indoors and being away from the nurturing restorative powers of nature. So, try to get back to nature in some way. Give yourself some time in the woods, mountains, open meadows or walking barefoot on the beach. Drink in the beauty of nature as much as you can. Even if you live in the city, go and walk on the grass in a park. You will feel more complete, rejuvenated and blissful.

What bliss it is to love and be loved

2009-02-14T12:06:00.000+05:30

Love is the most natural emotion of life. Love is the most euphoric, ecstatic, overwhelming joy one can
ever experience.

God has just dipped us into the nectar of love, which is the spice of life. Why does a newborn baby start crying the moment she comes into this materialistic world? How does a baby recognise her mother? Why does she sleep peacefully in her mother's arms?

A mother's womb for a baby is nothing less than a temple, for there is only love. Enjoying life in such a sweet atmosphere, the baby feels safe in her mother's womb. God resides in a temple, so a foetus is regarded as an incarnation of God. And when a baby comes into the world, she is separated from the spiritual world of freedom.

Every breath of the mother is connected to the breath of the baby. Every beat of the mother's heart is connected to the heartbeat of the baby. Why then shouldn't she recognise her mother? This is true love. When the universe was created, God showered his pure love on everybody. His love for us is boundless. We pray to God because we are grateful to him.

We tend to forget God in times of happiness. Most of the times we do not show kindness to others once we get happiness. God wants us to put our feet on the ground and live a life of love. Serving the children of God is the best way to love God. No human being should be deprived of love and kindness.

Kindness and courage both are different dimensions of love. Kindness is the virtue of being compassionate and merciful towards others, be it to our own baby or someone else's, be it our friend or a stranger. Every living being in some way or the other is an image of God. By showing love towards all we can hope to achieve this quality. In the same way, courage in troubled times is not everybody's cup of tea. Just as we should love others, it's also important to love ourselves and the life given to us by God. The holy spirit of God within us is called the soul. Hence, it is God who is responsible for every good deed that we do.

Joys and sorrows are like day and night. Joys or sorrows... we must welcome every emotion that God wants us to experience, with courage. Nothing is permanent, neither joys nor sorrows. No matter how dark the night, it is followed by day. No matter how painful the sorrow is, joy is bound to follow. Overcome sorrows with courage.

Nowadays there is terrorism in the name of religion. Terrorism is a dimension of hatred. God is a symbol of love. Spreading hatred for the sake of God is not justified since God can never ever be happy to see bloodshed. Gandhi fought for love and unity through the peaceful way of satyagraha . Unity cannot exist without love. Anything that brings us closer to God is love. Classical dancers worship God through their dance. Through this they gain wisdom and attain the highest spiritual freedom.

All her life Meerabai loved Krishna, she worshipped Krishna. She did not bother what the world would say about her. She just wished to be close to God, she just wished to be close to love. She is remembered as a great devotee of God. One should always choose the right path and then have the conviction and belief to tread it. This is what Meera did. Think of Krishna, and Meera comes to mind. True love brings us closer to God. God is love. Man, too, can become love.

Universal religion is moral behaviour

2009-02-09T16:40:00.000+05:30

The word 'religion' is ingrained in our psyche. It is because of over-familiarity that people feel less inclined towards religion.

Today religion is acceptable only on the basis of experimentation. At one end are people who want forever to keep to tradition. They do not want any change. At the opposite end are those who reject religion. Both these extreme viewpoints are incapable of creating a balance.
If acceptance of the hereditary character of religion is not desirable, its rejection is altogether undesirable. No one who thinks in the language of unity, harmony and love can ever reject religion. In the absence of understanding the distinction between institutionalised religion and religion as spirituality, people make the mistake of rejecting religion.

Both rationality and spirituality have given rise to society. The first signs of non-violence arose when human beings started living in communities. The first principle of living together is acceptance of the other person's existence and adherence to ethical self-restraint, of people not transgressing into others' houses or robbing others of their possessions.

Ethical self-restraint prevents people from becoming a hindrance to others. It has its origin in religion, non-violence and non-possession. Our sense of discrimination enables us to distinguish between obligation and non-obligation, edible and inedible, nectar and poison. It is made possible by religious awareness.

A religion divorced from spirituality is shackled by externally imposed rules and instead of developing religious awareness, frustrates it. Don't abandon rules, just don't be a captive of artificial rules uninformed by spirituality. Religion ought to be the culmination of independent awareness and not an imposition. When people regard themselves as Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs, they do so because of genealogy, not religiousness. Genealogy can be a source of inspiration to religion; it cannot be its soul. The soul of religion is spirituality. Only that person is religious who experiences spiritual awakening, irrespective of genealogy.

No system of government can pose a challenge to a religion that is spiritual. The question of protecting religion arises only when religion is supposed to have an existence separate from that of the religious person. Bliss and spiritual alertness are the soul of religion. They constitute the most attractive face of religion. We are seldom aware of them because we use introversion very little. Religion should spring from within, even as a well is sustained by its internal springs. The well digger should only connect the external world with the inner springs. He who is not aware of his inner riches remains deprived of prosperity. Mental conflicts result from the acceptance of the external and the rejection of the internal.

Morality is a relative term. If socially approved mores are deemed morality, their form can never be unchanging. Morality as end-result of religion is assessed not by social beliefs but by personal purity. There is no place for exploitation, oppression, arrogance and frenzy in the behaviour of a religious person. Propriety, truthfulness and simplicity constitute morality.

Shall we call him religious who does not reflect the spirit of religion in his behaviour? Just as whenever there is smoke there must be fire, wherever there is morality there must be religion. Encountering moral behaviour we can infer the religious spirit inherent in a man. Religion is first reflected in morality and only later in worship. Will a mansion without a strong foundation endure? Can a structure build on worship without morality be able to afford proper protection? In the absence of morality, the place of worship will tumble and religion will not be safe on this Earth.

Who are you?

2009-02-08T17:18:00.000+05:30

Who are you? This is the unanswered riddle of ages. We all seem to know who we are. We feel securely rooted to ourselves, yet when we dream we are not rooted at all. In dreams we could be anyone, anywhere. In deep sleep we lose even that notion of ‘I’. It is as if we didn’t exist for that duration.
Who are you? Neuroscience is getting there. The notion of ‘I’ is like an image on a screen — a hologram created by hundreds of millions of neurons firing together. So long as we live, the neurons keep firing, the hologram keeps forming and ‘you’ exist. When we die the neurons stop firing, the screen turns blank, and ‘you’ will cease to exist. This is deep. But there is something deeper. ‘You’ are continuously dying and being reborn. ‘You’ are not the same person who started reading this article. In the space of a few seconds, ‘you’ died and were reborn many thousand times.
Neurons create an ever changing ever refreshing field. Think of it as a projector beaming a movie. Movie frames refresh themselves 24 times a second. Each of those frames are a different ‘you’ recreated quickly in smooth continuity.
It is happening so fast you can’t tell the difference. Who are you then? Are you the flickering image on the screen or the projector beaming the images? If you think ‘you’ are the image on the screen, who is the projector? Isn’t that also you? If it is not you who else could it be?
The ‘projectors’ are neuronal cells creating an electrical field. What’s making them create the field? You are already wading in deep waters filled with contradictions. Neuronal cells are made of billions of living molecules. Each atom is intrinsically ‘dead matter’.
The molecule is somehow magically alive. Inside the ‘dead’ atoms there is surprisingly perpetual motion, eternal life. If you dare go deeper, laws of physics will disappear in the quantum domain.
What a strange mind bending zone you pierced searching for yourself — a domain full of extreme puzzles, more mysterious than ‘science can ever imagine’. Back off. You won’t find that answer here.
So what is creating the images? Who are you? No one through the ages has ever had the faintest clue. Vedanta doesn’t even try for an answer. It just calls this mystery as ‘That’. Whatever it is, it is beyond the grasp of mind, but know this, the mind is completely in its grasp. You are That and even if you will never know what ‘That’ is, you can still feel its presence as truth, bliss, consciousness. Its truth is your life, its bliss your joy, its consciousness the music of your existence. You can never ‘know’ it, but you can merge with its mystery… and emerge rejuvenated into your every day self. It is the deepest most luminous layer of your being after all.
Vedanta Rocks. Feel that luminous self now. It is right here looking at you.

Live life joyfully!

2009-02-07T10:54:00.000+05:30

If you are reading this, you have many more reasons to be joyful than you might think. You are alive, which is probably pretty basic, but all too often we don't realise that it is the most basic things that bring us the greatest joy.

We often forget to celebrate the things that are most important because they are so much with us. One of the few really wise people I have ever met once asked with great puzzlement, “Why isn't everyone dancing with the sheer joy of being alive?” Everything we do celebrate is a celebration of life, whether it is a birth, a wedding, or an anniversary. Religious festivals all celebrate some aspect of life as represented by the attributes of the deity, or the passage of some event of our lives. What we need to do is remind ourselves to consecrate every day, take time out at least once a day to quietly experience being alive. And the simplest way to that is to just pay attention to our breathing, which is another wonderful reason to be joyful.

Breath is the key to life and almost every spiritual discipline starts and ends with the breath, as does life itself. Every moment we are meditating. With every breath we are partaking of all the mysteries of the universe. Mathematically there are six molecules of Buddha in every square foot of air. A foolish friend of mine used to like to breathe in real deep to try and get some Buddha in him.

It seemed to work for him. Just for a few minutes pay attention to a gentle indrawn breath. Within that action is the key to sustaining our life. How does that happen? Whenever I think I need a miracle just to keep going, I stop and pay attention to one or two breaths. Each breath feeds the fire of the heart. Amazing.

Odds are that if you're reading this you have enough to eat. Most of us don’t eat gourmet food three times a day, but we are blessed with sufficient food, and I don’t just mean enough to provide the basic calory intake to keep us alive. We are blessed with all the associations of a loving mother that comes with the taste of some food, the memories of discovering new wonderful tastes every time we eat them again, and the love that we imbibe with food made by those who care enough about life to prepare good food, a spouse or a friend. I believe that food made by people who love to feed people has special nutritional properties.

If you think that nobody cares enough about you to prepare delicious food, let me invite you to go and get a banana, and pay attention to it. What a marvel of packaging, flavour and nutrition. I am not implying that that particular banana was grown just for you as an act of love, or may be I am. It grew, it made its way to you and it will sustain you. Now I can hear you arguing that it was provided by a chain of commerce.

What if that chain was forged to get that banana to you without any of the links being aware of the chain’s purpose? Might be, and even if it isn’t, the banana is still pretty amazing in its color, utility, taste and ability to keep us alive. I once knew a man named Rudy who only ate bananas, all different kinds and he was very healthy. And think about bread. I know that it is not much more than grain and salt and water but think about what that means. Bread, naan , chapatti, tortilla, pain, hobz, brot, or whatever you call it provides us with the elements of the earth. The process of growing, threshing and milling the grain transforms the earth into a form that we can use.
Sit in a comfortable chair with a large glass of water and take a small sip of water. Notice something about the water as you swallow. Feel it with you, feel the water’s presence. Take more small sips, noticing something different about the water each time until you drink one third of the water. Now take more small sips, this time noticing something about yourself each time. Keep sipping and noticing until two thirds of the water is gone. Now spend time with the remaining third of the water, notice its relationship with the glass, its relationship to you and your relationship to other things in the room.

So, there are a number of really elemental reasons to be joyful. Celebrate them everyday. Is this simple? Yes, but that doesn’t mean easy. We are all too often caught up in the drama of the day, our pain, the effort of work, the demands of family and friends to be full of joy. Yet, we each have a few minutes to celebrate the fire, earth and water and remind our selves to dance.

But there are more than elemental reasons to be joyful. You’re reading this in the my blog, which means you know English and most likely at least one other language. Every language is the key to wisdom that only that key can open. Whole worlds are yours to explore, and I don’t just mean Shakespeare or the Vedas, you also have the keys to the Marx brothers and humour in Hindi, Marathi, Kanada, French or whatever language you might know. Laughing can cure more things than you think.

How happy are you?

2009-02-07T10:51:00.001+05:30

Are you the happiest person you know? Not necessarily the luckiest, richest, or most successful, just the happiest?

If not, why not? Most people will reel off their current worries — the job, the kids, the car, the price of fish. I don’t mean to sweep these aside: problems need to be solved, if you can, or waited out until they disappear . But as far as living happily is concerned you have to face a crucial fact. If you can only live happily after all your problems are solved, you are never going to live happily, because when today’s problems are gone and forgotten, others will take their place. So either living happily is just impossible, or you have to do it in spite of your problems.

Being happy depends not so much on external circumstances as on your inner life. This means all your thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, emotions, desires, dreams — your entire mental and emotional scene. Happiness is about how you react inwardly to events, what you think and believe, how you feel, how problems affect you. It may sound obvious, but like many obvious things it’s something that is often forgotten when it matters most. We focus almost exclusively on our external lives, on getting and spending and having fun, and then wonder why we are not happy. But it’s when our inner lives are tranquil that we are happiest and we call this inner peace.

So how is inner peace to be achieved? Is it a question of religion, perhaps, or yoga? These can certainly help but only if they have a positive effect on your inner life. The difficulty is that inner life is based on patterns and habits — some you were born with, most you have acquired . You don’t choose, occasion by occasion, how you respond inside when something happens. This happens and you feel angry; that happens you feel sad; you pass the patisserie and you feel hungry; you hear a tune or smell a certain scent and it reminds you of a particular time or person? Things produce a response without you thinking about it or choosing how you feel, and they don’t necessarily leave you with inner peace. So the trick is to break the pattern.

You can’t completely avoid problems, but you can change how you react to them by acquiring new habits that provoke peaceful inner responses. Training your inner life into different habits requires learning skills of thinking, feeling, and managing your beliefs and desires. These are very like the virtues many religions and philosophies advocate, but if you think of them as skills rather than virtues, you benefit from an important and liberating shift. Instead of “I must become a better person” you can think “I would live more happily if i worked on my skills” , so the change in attitude becomes a choice, not a duty. And to these remedial skills i’ve added an extra set of enjoyment skills, otherwise getting happier could turn out a very depressing affair.

This process is not something you can do overnight, it’s a whole new way of life, but the reward is what we all want most — happiness. There are five main skills you need to cultivate.

Mindfulness:

Borrowed from Buddhism , this involves developing your ability to focus your thoughts in the present. The problem most of us have with thought is having too much of it — the worrying and nonstop mental chattering our minds are prone to. Mindfulness is a key inner skill because, as it gets stronger, it lets you focus on your own inner life and catch your habits in the act. Once you can see how you are ruled by them, the change you are seeking often happens of its own accord.
Compassion:

Most religions rightly stress compassion. As well as being a virtue in its own right it is a practical skill that counteracts negative emotions like anger and hatred, which are terrible wreckers of happiness. Try it the next time someone annoys you: put yourself in their place and ask yourself what they might they be thinking or feeling to behave like that. Even bad people, let alone people who just mildly annoy you, often have a warped or mistaken view of the world which makes them do what they do. Wars are started and atrocities committed, for example, because someone decides that this is what their God wants. It doesn’t mean they should get away with their actions, in fact it may be necessary to take strong action to defend yourself.

Story skills:

These are very useful for problems with your inner belief system, as they let you stand back and explore alternative versions of reality. Beliefs have great power over your life because a belief is something you take as fact. Start to think of your beliefs as stories, and it is easier to accept that other things might be true as well, or even instead . Even true stories only select the little bit of reality we are focusing on at the moment: no one story is the whole truth about any situation. From a different point of view we would see a different story, sometimes a whole different world. This is not about make believe, it’s about reframing situations to look at them from a different perspective.

Letting-go techniques:

These are particularly helpful when we are unhappy not getting what we want. Generally, we are encouraged to keep wanting and to think that more will make us happier, whether it’s clothes or cars or even love. But wanting is a treadmill: as long as you have unsatisfied wants and desires you won’t be at peace, so to be happy you either have to satisfy all your desires, or let go of some of them. Letting-go skills also include forgiveness, which helps hugely if one of the things you think you want is revenge.

Enjoyment skills:

This last group includes skills such as patience , humour and, especially, gratitude . You don’t have to be grateful to someone, it’s enough to cultivate gratitude for things. Our minds naturally scan the environment for dangers and resources, a useful mechanism when we were hunter-gatherers . But it can make us unnecessarily pessimistic — focusing on the 10% we lack rather than the 90% we have. Cultivating enjoyment skills will help redress the balance.
Acquiring all these skills takes time and effort. The important thing is to practise them until they operate without you thinking about them. Your practice routine will be very individual , because everyone needs to prioritise different skills depending on the specific issues that are holding them back from being happy, but keep the skills in mind and you will constantly find new ways to try them out.

We have to create the future for there's no one else who is going to save us.

2009-02-07T10:31:00.000+05:30

If we want to change the world in a significant way, if we're serious about creating a better future, then we have to face the fact that the
only way it's going to happen is through the evolution of consciousness itself. And for the universe to evolve at the level of consciousness, you and i have to be the ones to make sure it happens.

We have to create the future for there's no one else who is going to save us. Some of us cling to the hope that there is someone "up there" or "out there", a kind of higher power, that is directing the process, will intervene and make sure that everything will turn out all right in the end. Many have long since outgrown such beliefs, and it may seem utterly obvious to us that we need to save ourselves from self-annihilation. How much have we considered the deepest and most profound implications of accepting ultimate responsibility for the future?

To accept responsibility for the future means we know without doubt that it is up to us to create that future right now. Those of us at the leading edge have to stop waiting, hiding and pretending. We have to be the ones to take this leap because there isn't anyone else to do it. It needs divine intervention, but we have to be the divine interveners. We have to choose to be God, the creative or evolutionary impulse itself.

Billions of years ago, something exploded out of nothing. And who but God could have made the choice ^ to create an entire universe? That powerful urge to become is now beginning to wake up, through the unique capacity we have for self-reflective awareness. Through us, God, or the energy and intelligence that is driving this whole process, is just beginning to awaken to itself. So becoming God in an evolving universe means we have to be the ones to carry this process forward to consciously evolve for our collective salvation and transformation.

Spiritually, the enormous challenge for each and every one of us is to look directly into what it means to be the one who is going to do this. From the absolute or non-dual perspective, there is only One without a second.

We can only consciously evolve to the degree that we have actually realised at the deepest level of our being that we are that One without a second. Facing the truth of non-duality that the many is the one and that the one is ultimately who we always are in an evolutionary context forces a confrontation with any relationship to the life process that is less than whole, complete and fully committed.

To consciously evolve is to surrender unconditionally to the truth that there is no other and at the same time to accept responsibility for what that means in an evolving universe ^ a cosmos that is slowly but surely becoming aware of itself through you and me. That One without a second is simultaneously awakening to itself as it develops, as it evolves, and it is that One, as you and me, alone, that can now begin to take responsibility for endeavouring to consciously create its own future. That is the profound recognition that God is that singular energy and intelligence that initiated the creative process and is just now awakening to itself as we awaken to it. In that revelation, there is no other.

Know god through the prism of science

2009-02-07T10:28:00.000+05:30

ome people raise doubts as to whether Newton's third law of motion - that every action has an equal and opposite reaction - is violated by M K Gandhi's principle that if you were slapped on the right cheek show the other to facilitate another similar action.

This is an example of misinterpreted science. The validity of Newton's law is restricted only to physical bodies.

Sometimes God is compared with a circle. An anonymous quote in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs says: "The nature of God is a circle of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere." French philosopher Voltaire and Swami Vivekananda also said some thing like this. Swamiji took one step further and defined the nature of man in the following variant: "Man is an infinite circle whose circumference is nowhere, but the centre is at one place."

There is no fallacy in the definition of man. But the definition of God is not mathematically correct. There could not be a circle with its centre everywhere. A given circle, whether finite or infinite, cannot have more than one centre. However, there may be infinite number of circles with a given centre when the the circles are concentric.

God is beyond human imagination. God is the ultimate. Maybe, we can visualise God in our own ways. Since God is assumed to be Omnipresent, Omnipotent and Omniscient, and manifest in all forms, shapes and representations the believer is free to worship, revere or adore one or more manifestations from among the infinite choices available. This is real freedom.

With reference to the likening of God to a circle, the following modification might be necessary: God may be an infinite circle with the probability of finding its centre, in a super space spanned by infinite space and time, is unity anywhere. The inclusion of time emphasises the dynamic nature of God. Therefore, the centre changes with time. In other words, God may be an infinite circle with a centre, and since the centre is a function of time, has infinite configurations.

The circle is a wonderful shape. It is the most symmetric of all shapes in two dimensions. Perhaps this symmetry is what makes it appealing to all. Any break in the symmetry introduces tilting in the nature of God, which is unacceptable since God is the manifestation of perfect symmetry in all aspects.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna could not comprehend the beginning and end of God. A circle, likewise, has neither a beginning nor an end. Any point on it can be a beginning or an end. Thus it has infinite beginnings and endings; the circle is a manifestation of the endless form of God.

Another interesting thing about the circle is that if we would start from any point on the circle and make infinite rotations about its centre, we would once again reach the starting point. This is equivalent to saying that an infinite action can be comprehended within the finiteness of a given point.

The Bhagavad Gita says: "Cherish gods with this (Yagna) and may these the gods reciprocate; thus cherishing one another, you will reap the supreme good". Do you not see an imprint of the law of action and reaction here?

The first choice has a practical completeness about it, while the second emanates from a mind agitated at its incomplete endeavours

2009-02-06T17:44:00.000+05:30

The Sophoclean tragedy, Oedipus the King, ends with the chorus saying: "Count no man happy till he dies."

After having been an involved spectator of the tragic life of Oedipus, a man in conflict with himself and his destiny, the chorus, representing common men and women of Athens 500 years before Christ, comes out with, as it were, a verdict on man's ambiguous destiny and articulates these words of wisdom as borne out of the trials and tribulations of the protagonist. The idea is to make us realise that tragedy, whether personal or social, ennobles the man, chastens him, makes him accept reality and in the process makes him better.

However, equally true is the fact that the elements of caution, fear and seriousness that such wisdom necessarily carries, go against the restless and inquisitive spirit of man. Rather, there seems to be a continuous struggle between the wisdom, which is essentially pessimistic and debilitating, trying to ground the individual to reality and his urge to create new realities. This leads us to the other side of experience where tragedy is not an ennobling but an embittering experience.

It may be instructive to note that in the western dramatic tradition, the idea of tragedy having an ennobling impact on man is generally put forth through ploys like the chorus or chorus-like characters representing the viewpoint of laymen. But the protagonist himself, who acts out his conflicts and meets a tragic end, generally remains embittered at his fall. The artist who creates such a character and plot, despite all the moral undertones at the end, is usually 'suspected' to be on the side of the tragic hero, even though his character's choices do not conform to social norms.

As a result, we find two kinds of responses that tragedy offers. First to take the experience as a grim reminder of 'the special providence in the fall of a sparrow', to borrow a phrase from Hamlet, and thus to remain in awe of unknown forces working against man and his purposes. Or to consider the experience as a result of personal imperfection that can be corrected in all probability. The first choice has a practical completeness about it, while the second emanates from a mind agitated and resentful at its incomplete endeavours...

But is a man's insistence on endeavouring to 'prevail' over his destiny likely to end in the repeat of tragedy only? On the face of it, this appears to be an open and shut case, but perhaps it is not so. Because though history appears to repeat and move in a circular fashion, in reality the circle is never complete and events actually take the form of a spiral movement, where ends do not meet. Rather they open up new frontiers at the very point where at first instance they appeared destined to meet to complete the circle.

The spiral contour that the narrative of life takes upon itself is made possible not because there is an element of chance in life, but simply because the blighting experience of tragedy inevitably makes us rise up again and take up lost causes, subverting, as it were, the Sophoclean chorus's verdict.

Your auras reveal more about the real you

2009-02-06T17:40:00.000+05:30

The world of the spirit begins where logic ends. Logic is limited by the boundaries of reason, which is further limited by the limitations of the individual's buddhi.

However, since most speak and comprehend only the tongue of logic, we can try to understand the aura which is of the spiritual realm.

All bodies emit heat radiation or vibrations. With non-living bodies, since there is no immediate change in their structure, this emission remains constant. In living bodies cells are constantly being destroyed and created; the rate of vibrations are continuously changing. This is the superficial or logical explanation of what auras are and why they are constant or changing.

A lot of 'scientific' study of physical auras has been done in the West in recent years. Researchers have variously called it the human atmosphere, force field, and bio-energy. The fundamental substance of aura is best described by the Sanskrit term, prana. For our present purposes we could understand it as the vital essence or force, which is the basis of all manifested life. It is the steam that runs the physical and mental machinery of life. The colours of our mental states are manifested in the pranic substance of our auras.

Logically, these colours are regulated at seven energy centres of the body called the chakras. Each of the chakras, mooladhar, swadhishthan, manipoorak, anahat, vishuddhi, ajna and sahastrar vibrate at a particular colour frequency. It is like software for each chakra. When the software malfunctions or the wrong software goes into the wrong chakra, imbalance and malfunctioning occurs. Any imbalance that stays for too long becomes chronic and manifests as an ailment in the physical body.

What the clairvoyant can see are the aura or chakra imbalances in the shade of the colour being too dark or heavy or colours other than the chakra's own colour manifesting. Considerations like what shade is mixing with the natural colour, in what proportion, the positioning, the luminosity. All determine the state of the being. Only an enlightened person would be able to interpret the infinite permutations and combinations correctly.

The real person stands revealed once you have the correct interpretation of the auras. You can hide your face by applying make-up or you may hide your true body by wearing loose fitting clothes, you may even lie about your character and intention but it is impossible to hide your true self from the eyes of a clairvoyant, for aura is something you cannot hide.

The entire spectrum of colour and light are in human auras. Different colours belong to different areas around the body. Lower centres or chakras of the body are associated with darker and heavier colours like reds and browns. The higher centres have light pink, violet and blue. Again, more evolved souls have much more luminescence in their auras than the average individual.

What does your aura tell you? Your aura indicates your state of health to come, specific diseases that are manifested or are going to manifest in your body, your mental and emotional state, your level of intelligence, and how evolved you are as an individual. Assigning meanings to specific colours is of no use to the novice. The positioning, thickness, luminescence, shade and changeability are some of the factors that are taken into account in interpretation. The interpretation is always left to the guru.

Raise consciousness, beware of character

2009-02-04T18:04:00.000+05:30

My whole effort is to give you a consciousness, not a character. Character is needed by those who don't have consciousness. If you have eyes, you don't need a walking stick to help you find your way. If you can see you don't ask others, "Where is the door?" Character is needed because people are unconscious. Character is just a lubricant; it helps you to run your life in a smooth way.

George Gurdjieff used to say that character is like a buffer. Buffers are used in railway trains, between two compartments. If something happens, these buffers prevent the two compartments from clashing with each other. Or it is like springs: cars have springs so you can move smoothly ^ even on an Indian road. Those springs go on absorbing the shocks; they are called shock absorbers.

Then what is character?

It is a shock absorber. People are told to be humble. If you learn how to be humble it is a shock absorber. By learning how to be humble you will be able to protect yourself against other people's egos. They will not hurt you so much; you are a humble man. If you are egoistic you are bound to be hurt again and again. The ego is very sensitive, so you cover up your ego with a blanket of humility. It helps, but it does not transform you.

My work is of transformation. This is an alchemical school: I want to transform you from unconsciousness into consciousness, from darkness into light. I cannot give you a character; I can only give you insight, awareness. I would like you to live moment-to-moment, not according to a set pattern given by me or given by the society, the church, the state. I would like you to live according to your own small light of awareness, according to your own consciousness. Be responsive to each moment.

Character means you have ready-made answers for all the questions of life, so whenever a situation arises you respond according to the set pattern. So it is not a true response, it is only a reaction. The man of character reacts, the man of consciousness responds: he takes the situation in, he reflects the reality as it is, and out of that reflection he acts. The man of character reacts, the man of consciousness acts. The man of character is mechanical; robotlike he functions. He has a computer in his mind, full of information; ask him anything and a ready-made answer pops out.

Heraclitus says: You cannot step in the same river twice. And i say to you: You cannot step in the same river even once, the river is so fast-flowing. Character is stagnant; it is a dirty pool of water. Consciousness is a river. A man of consciousness simply acts in the moment, not out of the past and out of the memory. His response has a beauty, a naturalness, and his response is true to the situation. The man of character always falls short, because life is continuously changing; it is never the same. And your answers are always the same, they never grow ^ they can't grow, they are dead.

You have been told a certain thing in your childhood; it has remained there. You have grown, life has changed, but that answer that was given by your parents, teachers or by your priests. And if something happens you will function according to that answer which was given to you 50 years before. And in 50 years so much water has flowed down the Ganges; it is a totally different life.

Excerpted from Be Still and Know, courtesy Osho International Foundation.

Rise in Love

2009-02-01T10:08:00.000+05:30

Man needs to be needed. It is one of the most fundamental needs of human beings. Unless one is cared for, one starts dying. Unless one feels that he is significant to somebody, his whole life becomes insignificant.
Hence love is the greatest therapy there is. The world needs therapy because the world is missing love. In a really loving world no therapy will be needed at all; love will be enough, more than enough.
Hugging is healing
Hugging is only a gesture of love, of caring. The very feel of the warmth flowing from the other person melts many illnesses in you, melts the ice-like, cold ego. It makes you again a child. The psychologists are well aware of the fact now that unless a child is hugged and kissed, he misses some nourishment. Just as the body needs food, the soul needs love. You can give to the child all the physical comforts, but if the hugs are missing the child will not grow into a wholesome being.
A patient can be cured by love
You can know all there is to know about therapy, you can become an expert, but if you don’t know the art of love you remain only on the surface of the miracle of therapy.
The moment you start feeling for the patient, for the one who is suffering out of 100 cases, 90 people are suffering basically because they have not been loved. If you start feeling the need for love of the patient, and if you can fulfill the need, there will be almost a magical change in the condition of the patient.
Two dimensions of love
Love can exist in two dimensions: either as horizontal or as vertical. We are acquainted with the love which is horizontal. That is also the dimension of time; the vertical is the dimension of eternity.The yearning in the heart is not for permanency; there you have misunderstood. But that misunderstanding is almost universal because we know only one plane: the horizontal, the dimension of time. In that dimension there are only two possibilities: either something is momentary or permanent.
Let love be born out of meditation
I can teach you meditation, and out of meditation a different quality of love will happen. Then it is not fooling around. Then it is wisdom, not foolishness. Then you don’t fall in love, you rise in love. Then love is a quality to you. Just as light surrounds a flame, love surrounds you. Then it has eternity. It is unaddressed. Whosoever comes close to you will drink out of it. Whosoever comes close to you will be enchanted by it, enriched by it. A tree, a rock, a person, an animal, it does not matter. Even if you are sitting alone...

Let go for things to start happening

2009-01-25T14:50:00.000+05:30

Let go for things to start happening

Take a dose of awareness and life is so beautiful, it is so utterly glorious, it is such an incredible splendor, that no drug can add anything to it. All that you need is awareness, and life becomes such a beautiful experience that you cannot imagine that there could be anything better. Ordinary life becomes so luminous. The ordinary tree that you have passed your whole life for the first time you see the luminous presence of the tree.

Life is such a gift, and we go on missing it. And the reason is, between us and life there are so many lies crowding. Your awareness will destroy those lies.

Wrong evaporates

If you are going deeper into silence and something disappears — you saw it receding, evaporating into the air — you can be certain it was wrong. The false cannot face you; it has not the guts. It cannot come in front of you, it cannot encounter you. And that which is real, which is good, becomes stronger. It becomes more a part of your actions, of your thoughts, of your being.

Meditator-Meditation

A moment comes in the life of the meditator when his meditation has reached the point where his whole mind is silent and there is not even a fragment of darkness anywhere inside him — all is light. Then whatever that person does is right, and whatever that person does not do is wrong. In that state, one never thinks about what to do. What is right, what is wrong are no longer alternatives. The right becomes spontaneous action, and the wrong simply becomes impossible — even if you want to do it, you cannot.

Higher things HAPPEN BY THEMSELVES

There are things which man can do and there are things which man can only allow to happen.

Bliss belongs to the second category. You cannot do it but you can allow it to happen, you can be available to it, you can be open to it.

All that is needed on your side is a deep trust, receptivity, love, surrender, let go, and then it immediately starts happening. It is never your doing, it can never be your doing. Even when it is happening, if you start doing something about it, it will stop happening.

Bliss and creativity

There are people who have been trying to be blissful without being creative and all have failed. All the monks and the nuns of the world have failed for the simple reason that they were trying something impossible.

They were trying to be blissful without being creative. And being creative is an absolutely necessary part of it, an intrinsic part of bliss. You cannot drop it.

Never compromise

2009-01-11T10:43:00.002+05:30

On the circumference people are different, and they should be different, and everybody should maintain his individuality on the circumference. One should never compromise for any reason. Then only can we create a really democratic world. Real democracy means that the mob, the crowd, is no more in control of the individual life.

Democracy is more important than politics
Democracy is less a political phenomenon than a religious phenomenon; it is far more important than politics. Democracy is a totally new vision of life. It has not yet happened anywhere. Democracy means each individual has the right to live according to his light; he should not be prevented. Unless he becomes a disturbance or a nuisance to others he should be allowed every freedom in all the aspects of life. That’s my vision of a really democratic world.

Don’t interfere with anybody’s life
That is how I would like meditators to function: no interference in anybody’s life. Great respect has to be given to the other. But at the centre, everybody is the same. When you meditate you move towards the centre. You are universal there, not individual. And you have to be both: individual and universal. And you have to be very flexible and fluid between these two. A person should be capable of living on the circumference and at the centre easily. He should be able to move from the marketplace to the meditative space and vice versa — playfully, easily, spontaneously.

You are stranger to yourself
From the very childhood, in every sphere of your life you are told not to come in conflict — be polite. In other words, always manage some compromise. But when there are so many compromises — politically, socially — you become a stranger to yourself. You have so many masks, you lose contact with your original face. And a mask cannot enjoy, it is dead. It cannot laugh, it cannot love. Only the original face is capable of understanding the language of the universe. Love is the language. Dance is the expression of your gratitude.

Be easy, not lazy
My whole teaching is: take everything with absolute relaxation, with ease. Whether you are doing something or not, you must be overflowing with energy even when you are not doing anything. These trees are not doing anything, but they are overflowing with energy. You can see that in their flowers, in their colours, in their greenery, in their freshness, in their absolute naked beauty in the sunlight, in the dark night under the stars.

The Robo(egoic man)

2008-12-21T10:36:00.001+05:30

Ego makes the Man a programmed system like a Robo.

Let go of your ego to experience bliss

True art means: if it helps you to become silent, still, joyous; if it gives you a celebration; if it makes you dance — whether anybody participates with you or not is irrelevant; if it becomes a bridge between you and existence — that is true art. If it becomes a meditation, that is true art. If you become absorbed in it, so utterly absorbed that the ego disappears, that is true art.

People who can’t create become critics

And don’t be bothered what critics say. Critics don’t know anything about art. In fact, the people who cannot become artists become critics. If you cannot participate in a running race, if you cannot be an Olympic runner, at least you can stand by the side of the road and throw stones at other runners; that you can do easily.

Share, don’t ask for recognition

Sharing is one thing, and asking for recognition is totally another. Share; don’t ask for recognition. I’m not saying that recognition will not come — it will come profusely. Ask for recognition and it won’t come so profusely. Even if it comes, it will limp. Because when you ask for recognition, the other becomes reluctant to give it. Because when you are seeking your ego, the other also wants to seek his own ego. Then you provoke criticism rather than recognition. And the one who recognises your art is deep down recognising, through his recognition, his own recognition.

Art can be very meditative

And art can be the most prayerful thing, the most meditative thing possible. If you can be in any art, music, painting, sculpture, dance, if any art can take a grip of your being, that’s the best way to pray, the best way to meditate. Then you don’t need any other meditation; that is your meditation. That will lead you slowly, step by step, into existence.

Music is silence between sounds

Even when you are listening to music, what really touches your heart is not the sound but the gap between two sounds. How to bring that gap to your heart is the whole art of music. But if a man can bring that gap just by his presence, and you fall into deep silence, you will know the real music. Then you will know that what you used to think of as music was only a preliminary training.

And the same is true about dancing, the same is true about every creative art. What it appears to be is not the reality; it is just a device so that you can become aware of something intangible, hidden, beyond.

Every creative art brings you to your innermost being where there is just calmness, absolute silence.

Never be a Mr pefectionist.

2008-12-14T10:22:00.001+05:30

These two words have to be understood as deeply as possible: one is perfection, the other is totality. My emphasis is never on perfection but on totality. The old religions have been teaching you for centuries to be perfect. You cannot be perfect; nobody can be perfect because to be perfect means to be dead.
If something is perfect then there is no evolution possible anymore. Perfection means the full point has come, the cul-de-sac; the road ends. Now you are stuck, nowhere to go. You cannot come back — because how can a perfect person come back? That will be becoming imperfect again. You cannot go ahead because you have become perfect; there is nothing ahead.
Existence is imperfect and will remain so
Be total in whatsoever you are doing. Be total. If you are angry, then be totally angry. If you are in love, then be totally in love. If you are sad, then be totally sad. Don’t be half-hearted in anything. That is a totally different approach towards life.
The perfectionist will say, "Never be angry, never be sad." The person who believes in totality will say, "Whatsoever is the case, just be total in it. Don’t be half-hearted, don’t hold yourself back. Go into it totally."
Be totally angry or sad
Then even sadness is beautiful when it is total. If you can cry and weep totally, it will refresh you, it will rejuvenate you, it will unburden you. If you can be totally sad you will come to know something immensely beautiful in sadness which no joy can ever give to you, because sadness has depth; joy is shallow. And total anger also has its own beauty. It will give you the experience of boiling at 100 degrees, of intensity, of passion, of fire, of becoming aflame. And the miracle is: the person who can be angry can be compassionate too, because anger will teach him compassion. sadness will teach him to be blissful.
Perfectionist has destroyed humanity
My approach is not that of a perfectionist; I am utterly against it. It has driven the whole of humanity into a kind of madness. The whole idea has to be dropped. We have to learn a new language of wholeness. And I call a person holy when he is whole in whatsoever he does.
Let this be your foundation of life: that whatsoever you are doing at the moment, be utterly lost into it. Nothing of you should be left behind. And you will come out of it immensely benefited, enriched.

How can you become sucessful in every encounter?

2008-12-09T16:34:00.000+05:30

Never let a problem become an excuse, put your problem in proper perspective
What is the secret ingredient of successful people that enable them to succeed?
Why do they win when others lose?
Why do they sear when others sink?
The answer is very simple its all in how they perceive their problems. They look at problem realistically and practically. They understand the six principles that pertain to all problems.
What are these principles?
If you know them, understood them and practices them, would you, too be a winner , a survivor? you bet? here they are Listen carefully and adopt them as your own.

1.Every living human being has problems.
What is your problem? Are you unemployed> If you're an impossibility thinker you probably think that a job would solve all your problems.
Nobody is free from problems. A problem free life is an illusion a mirage in the desert it is dangerously deceptive perception, which can mislead, blind and distract . To purpose a problem free life is to run after an elusive fantasy; it is a waste of mental and physical energies. Every living human person has problems .Accept that fact and move on to the second principle.
2. Every problem has a limited life span.
Every mountain has a peak. Every valley has its low point. Life has its ups and downs, its peaks and its valleys. No one is up all the time, nor are they down all the time. Problems do end. they do go away they are all resolved in time.
3.Every problem holds positive possibilities.
I t is the glory of God to conceal a thing. Every problem contains secret ingredients of some creative potential either for yourself or some else.
There are two sides to every coin.
What may be a problem to some one can be a profitable business for others.
Every problems holds possibilities for some willing to look for them.
4.Every problem Will change you .
Problems never leave us the way they found us. Every person is effected by the problems. No one emerges from a problem untouched by problems.
5.You can choose what your problem will do to you
You may not be able to control the problems but you can compose your response. You can turn your pain into profanity or into poetry. the choice is up to you. The choice is up to you. You may not have chosen your tough time, but you can choose how you will react to it.
when you control your reaction to the seemingly uncontrollable problems of life, then in fact you do control the problems effect only you. Your reaction to the problem is the last word!
That's the bottom line. what will you let this problem do to you?
It can make you tender or tough. It can make you better or bitter. It all depends on you.
6.There is a negative and a positive reaction to every problem.
In the final analysis the taught people who survive the tough times do so because they 'll chosen to react positively to their predicament. This is not always as easy as it sounds.
When you can't solve the problem manage it.
Twelve principles for Managing Problems positively
If you have a problem today any problem, I can help you if you'll let me. I offer to you the principles.
1.Don't Underestimate.
Don't underestimate the problem or your potential power to cope with it creativity! Unquestionably many problems are never resolved or managed effectively because they are not taken seriously enough.
2.Don't exaggerate
Instead of underestimating the problem, your instinctive reaction is to exaggerate it. The one battle most people lose is the battle over the fear of failure, try start begin and you'll be assured. You won the first round.
3. Don't wait
There is a time and place for patience. After you have breed every avenue possible and have planted as many seeds of solutions as you can . Patience is not virtue if you sit back and wait for your problems to solve itself.
4.Don't aggravate
We have the power to make any problem better or worse. We do this when we react positively or negatively. The Normal reaction would be to feel threatened by the problem, Threatened people become angry people. Fearful people reflect hatred. Hatred and anger only aggravate the problem they are not positive reactions. They will not help solve the problem.
5. Illuminate
I illuminate your mind. Get smart and then get smarter/ Ask yourself some questions.
6. Motivate
when you consider all of the positive reactions, you will be motivated to positive action
7.Bait
Need a job? Go to where the jobs are and then throw out the bait. Put in your application. Put ads in the paper. Let people know you are available.

8.Sublimate
Every problem , even yours is loaded with possibilities. you can turn your mountain into a gold mine. try "possibilities". Be live that every time one door close another will open. Sublimate your problem. That means believing that every adversity holds with in it the seeds of an undeveloped possibility.
10Now Dedicate
Most people fail , not because they lack intelligent, ability opportunity, or talent, but because they haven't given their problem all they have got.
Any one can succeed if he can get enthusiastic about life . even when life seems empty. Doors will open to the enthusiastic person first.
11. communicate.
manage your problem by remembering that often times the solution lies in help from other source. Do you need help Then ask for it. Don't be too proud to tell people you need help.
12.insulate
Don't isolate yourself from help but do insulate yourself from negative forces and negative personalities.
Maintain a positive mental attitude becomes a near impossible task if we allow ourselves to be bombarded by the negative tough ts that constantly. Surround as
Gods delays
are not
Gods denials

creative mind creates innovation

2008-12-07T09:27:00.002+05:30

Innovation the new catchy word in the world whether it's the IBM Add or the business companies every one wants innovation. But from where the innovation comes?

The paradox of art is that first you have to learn its discipline and then you have to forget it totally. If you don’t know its ABC you will not be able to move very deep into it. But if you know only its technique and you go on practising the technique your whole life you may become very skilful technically, but you will remain a technician; you will never become an artist.

Learn the technique and then unlearn it

In Zen they say, if you want to be a painter, for 12 years learn how to paint and then for 12 years forget all about painting. Just completely forget — it has nothing to do with you. For 12 years meditate, chop wood, carry water from the well. Do anything, but not painting. And then one day you will be able to paint.

Let the technique be part of you

Twenty-four years of training. 12 years training in learning the technique and 12 years training in forgetting the technique. And then you can paint. Now the technique has become just a part of you; it is no longer technical knowledge, it has become part of your blood and bones and marrow. Now you can be spontaneous. It will not hinder you, it will not imprison you.

Creativity is being innovative

Innovate new ways, new means. Try something new that nobody has ever done. The greatest creativity happens in people whose training is of some other discipline.

For example, if a mathematician starts playing music he will bring something new to the world of music. If a musician becomes a mathematician he will bring something new to the world of mathematics. All great creativity happens through people who move from one discipline to another. It is like crossbreeding. And children that come out of crossbreeding are far healthier, far more beautiful.

Creative person may not be famous

One thing has to be remembered: if you are really creative you may not become famous. A really creative person takes time to become famous because he has to create the values — new values, new criteria, only then can he be judged. If you want fame, then forget all about creativity.

Whenever you bring something new into the world you are bound to be rejected. The world never forgives a person who brings anything new to the world. The world appreciates the uncreative but skilful person, the technically perfect person, because technical perfection simply means perfection of the past. And everybody understands the past. To bring something new into the world means nobody will be able to appreciate it. It is so new that there are not any criteria against which it can be valued.

Happiness means tremendous depth

2008-11-30T10:00:00.000+05:30

Understand the very motivation of all ideas, thoughts, desires. It is a seed-like thing. Watch inside — why can’t you be here now? Why is it always that you are thinking of somewhere else? Why can’t you be happy as you are? Why are you thinking that tomorrow you will be happy? How can you be happy tomorrow if you are not happy today? Because tomorrow is going to be born out of this moment.

Today is a parent of tomorrow
If you are unhappy today, you will be more unhappy tomorrow. By that time you will have learned many more tricks to be unhappy. You are practising it, and you hope tomorrow to be happy? Then you are in a hopeless rut. You desire for tomorrow and you are continuously missing all that is here, and that is the only reality there is. If you can even for a single moment put aside desiring, then the projector stops, and the dreaming stops, and you are able to face reality.

Maturity happens when you start living without hope

Hope is childish. You become mature when you don’t project hope into the future. In fact, you are mature when you don’t have any future; you just live in the moment because that is the only reality there is. In the past, religion used to talk about the hereafter. Those were the childish, immature days of religion. Now religion talks about here now; religion has come of age.

The new religion of here now

Now another sort of religion is asserting itself all over the world, and this religion is about here-now. There is nowhere else to go and there is no other space and no other time to live, only this space and this time, here and now. Life has to become very intense in this moment. A man who lives in hope dissipates life. He spreads it too thin. Happiness means intensity, tremendous depth.

Drop hope and live intensely

When I say drop all hope, I mean be so intense in the moment that there is no need for the future. Then there is a turning, a transformation. The very quality of time changes for you it becomes eternal. What can you do with hope? In fact, what can you hope? You cannot hope for the new. You can only hope for the old, that which has happened before — maybe with a little modification here and there, a little more decorated.

But hope is nothing but past: you have lived something, you have experienced something, and you again and again hope for it. It is a repetition; it is circular.

Real joy comes from within

2008-11-30T09:58:00.000+05:30

Joy is not happiness, because happiness is always mixed with unhappiness. It is never found in purity, it is always polluted. It always has a long shadow of misery behind it. Just as day is followed by night, happiness is followed by unhappiness.

Joy is a state of transcendence

Then what is joy? Joy is a state of transcendence. One is neither happy nor unhappy, but utterly peaceful, quiet, in absolute equilibrium; so silent and so alive that his silence is a song, that his song is nothing but his silence. Joy is forever; happiness is momentary. Happiness is caused by the outside, hence can be taken away from the outside â€” you have to depend on others. And any dependence is ugly, any dependence is a bondage. Joy arises within, it has nothing to do with the outside. It is not caused by others, it is not caused at all.

Joy is the spontaneous flow of your own energy

If your energy is stagnant there is no joy. If your energy becomes a flow, a movement, a river, there is great joy â€” for no other reason, just because you become more fluid, more flowing, more alive. A song is born in your heart, a great ecstasy arises.

It is a surprise when it arises, because you cannot find any cause for it. It is the most mysterious experience in life: something uncaused, something beyond the law of cause and effect. It need not be caused because it is your intrinsic nature, you are born with it. It is you in your totality, flowing.

The flow is always towards the ocean

Whenever you are flowing, you are flowing towards the ocean. That is the joy: the dance of the river moving towards the ocean to meet the ultimate beloved. When your life is a stagnant pool you are simply dying. But when you are flowing, the ocean is coming closer every moment, and the closer the river comes, the more dance there is, the more ecstasy there is.

Your consciousness is a river

It is a continuity, an eternal continuity, an eternal flow. Buddha has never thought about you and your being as something static. In his vision, the word "being" is not right. According to him, being is nothing but becoming. He denies being; he accepts becoming, because being gives you a static idea of something inside you like a rock. Becoming gives you a totally different idea: like a river, like a lotus opening, like a sunrise. Something is constantly happening. You are not sitting there like a rock, you are growing.

Unselfish work

2008-11-28T15:07:00.003+05:30

This world is not for cowards. do not try to fly. Look not for success or failure. Join yourself to the perfectly unselfish will and work on.Know that the mind whic h is born to succed joins itself to a determined will and perseveres.You have the right to work,but do not become so degenerate as to look for results. Work incessantly, but see something behind the work. Even good deeds can find a man in great bondage.Therefore be not bound by good deeds can find a man in great boundage.Therefore be nor bound by good deeds or by desire for fame.Those who know this secret pass beyond this round of birth and death and become immortal.

Accupressure

2008-11-28T14:10:00.006+05:30

As the Medics say, Accupressure is a form of Physiotherapy which uses the method of message and stimulation of precise points of the body in order to heal all kind of pains and to provide relief from tension, exhaustion and other ailments. Accupressure has come out as a major healer for even the patients of chronic diseases like kidney and heart patient. In these cases however, Accupressure therapy is given in the guidance of the Doctor treating the patient for the Chronic Disease.

According to the Scientific research, pain or numbness in any part of the body is the indicative of an ailment in the body. Accupressure works on reliving the pain and getting the senses back to the numbed part of the human body. To see the indication, first it is made known to the patient how pain is felt. In our body, there are certain chemicals known as Endophrins. The signal of pain goes to the spinal cord, from where it passes to the motor nerves. This involves the reflex action with no involvement of the brain. From here the pain signal goes to the thalamus from spinalcord. It is this point in the brain where pain is felt. This imbalance of energy is treated by Accupressure.

Method of Accupressure :

As per the Accupressure Therapists, the body energy circulates through 14 meridians at the surface (on the skin) and 8 channels under the surface (under the skin). The energy circulation begins with the lung channel and passes through twelve meridians which are related to major body parts. The pain arises when this energy channel is not properly circulated. The Accupressure therapy works on channelizing this energy, thus treating the patient and reliving him of all the pains.

The method of accupressure is comparatively easy. The point is to release the blocked energy from the body, so that the pain is eased out. If you want to treat a particular point then pressurize that point using your thumb or any of the pencils provided by the Accupressurists. Now give an equal time to the same point on the other side of the body. The rule of accupressure is that if a point is tender, it will benefit from being pressed. Once the point is pressed, the blocked point will release energy from it. The point has to be pressurized for about 20 minutes, with inclusions of 5 minutes each. While you keep on pressurizing the point, keep in mind that the next point has to has to be less pressurized than the first one. You can use fingertips, knuckles, or thumbs to press the ailed point.

One of the best ways to pressurize the point is gripping the hand or feet or any other painful body part with one hand and then pressurizing the paining point. This way you will have a better grip of the point you are pressurizing.

In Accupressure there are particular points for every kind of ailment they treat. This Chart can be had from the Accupressure Centers. But the best way is first to learn the art of Accupressure, then try it on oneself. Easy as it is, it can be learn in a duration of a month. However for Chronic Diseases, its better to get the Therapy done from the Therapists only.

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Famous India > Healing Therapies > Accupressure

Accupressure

As the Medics say, Accupressure is a form of Physiotherapy which uses the method of message and stimulation of precise points of the body in order to heal all kind of pains and to provide relief from tension, exhaustion and other ailments. Accupressure has come out as a major healer for even the patients of chronic diseases like kidney and heart patient. In these cases however, Accupressure therapy is given in the guidance of the Doctor treating the patient for the Chronic Disease.

According to the Scientific research, pain or numbness in any part of the body is the indicative of an ailment in the body. Accupressure works on reliving the pain and getting the senses back to the numbed part of the human body. To see the indication, first it is made known to the patient how pain is felt. In our body, there are certain chemicals known as Endophrins. The signal of pain goes to the spinal cord, from where it passes to the motor nerves. This involves the reflex action with no involvement of the brain. From here the pain signal goes to the thalamus from spinal cord. It is this point in the brain where pain is felt. This imbalance of energy is treated by Accupressure.

Accupressure for migrane
Accupressure for Migrane
First of all message your hair thoroughly. Now place your thumb underneath the skull one either side of the spinal column. Tilt your head back slightly and press upward for 2 minutes while breathing deeply. The point where you are pressurizing is known as the Gates of Consciousness Point.

Accupressure for Back Ache
Accupressure for Backache
Lie on your back with your legs up and your knees bent. Place your fingertips in the center of the crease behind each knee. Holding on to these points, gently rock your legs back and forth for one minute as you breathe deeply. When you're done let your feet rest flat on the floor, with your knees bent, and relax. Repeat this method 10 times a day to be relived of the pain.

Method of Accupressure :

As per the Accupressure Therapists, the body energy circulates through 14 meridians at the surface (on the skin) and 8 channels under the surface (under the skin). The energy circulation begins with the lung channel and passes through twelve meridians which are related to major body parts. The pain arises when this energy channel is not properly circulated. The Accupressure therapy works on channelizing this energy, thus treating the patient and reliving him of all the pains.

The method of accupressure is comparatively easy. The point is to release the blocked energy from the body, so that the pain is eased out. If you want to treat a particular point then pressurize that point using your thumb or any of the pencils provided by the Accupressurists. Now give an equal time to the same point on the other side of the body. The rule of accupressure is that if a point is tender, it will benefit from being pressed. Once the point is pressed, the blocked point will release energy from it. The point has to be pressurized for about 20 minutes, with inclusions of 5 minutes each. While you keep on pressurizing the point, keep in mind that the next point has to has to be less pressurized than the first one. You can use fingertips, knuckles, or thumbs to press the ailed point.

One of the best ways to pressurize the point is gripping the hand or feet or any other painful body part with one hand and then pressurizing the paining point. This way you will have a better grip of the point you are pressurizing.

In Accupressure there are particular points for every kind of ailment they treat. This Chart can be had from the Accupressure Centers. But the best way is first to learn the art of Accupressure, then try it on oneself. Easy as it is, it can be learn in a duration of a month. However for Chronic Diseases, its better to get the Therapy done from the Therapists only.

FI
Accupressure Therapy!

Accupressure
Centres for Accupressure Therapy

# Indian Institute of Alternative Medicines - 86 Chowringhee Road - Calcutta
# Ahrcdp Accupressure Clinic, Jamia Nagar, Near Sacred Heart School - New Delhi
# Indian Academy of Acupuncture Science, Mayanagar, Cidco, Jalana Road - Aurangabad
# Sankalpa, Yoga & Natural Health Centre, Bhuvaneswarinagar, Banasanakri III - Bangalore
# Dr.H.Bhojraj, M.D. (ACU), 'E' Block, II Stage, Rajajinagar, Bangalore

Precautions
# Accupressure is a scientifically proven science, still if you want to practice it on your own, you need to first learn it from a Govt. Registered Accupressure Therapy Centre.
# Accupressure can be practised at home, but for bigger ailments, it needs to be done by a Accupressure Therapist only.
# Those having ailments like kidney and heart problems, need to consult with their doctors before going for any kind of Treatment.
# The Accupressure Treatment is a lengthy one and can take years to treat the ailment. Still its also one of the best practised treatments at home for all ages.
# It is of utmost importance that the pregnant ladies discuss any kind of treatment before undergoing any treatment.
# Accupressure is used for treating various ailments like depression, weight loss, asthma, high blood pressure, arthritis, sciatia, trauma, peripheral circulation problem, muscle strains, ankle joint swelling, hay fever, cramps, bed sores, pregnancy and so on. But before going for any of the above, consult your doctor.
# For Tours and further information, contact us.

Benfits of accupressure

Many people use acupuncture to help with specific symptoms or conditions. These might include anxiety states, arthritis, asthma, back pain, circulatory problems, depression, facial paralysis, fibrositis, high blood pressure, indeterminate aches and pains, infertility, menstrual problems, migraines, rheumatism, sciatica, skin conditions or ulcers. Accupressure is a safe treatment for all. It has proved to be effective in pregnancy management and for the relief of pain in childbirth. Accupressure is also helpful for people trying to overcome addictions such as those related to smoking, alcohol, food or drugs.

Some people may have acupuncture as a preventive measure to strengthen their constitution, or because they feel unwell in themselves without being `ill` in the western sense. It can also be used alongside conventional medicine in the treatment of both acute and chronic disease. As with any therapy, the response to acupuncture can vary from one person to another.

Oriental medicine is a holistic approach, which is based on the treatment of all bodily systems. Acupuncture benefits the improvement of physical health conditions as well as affective disorders and instills a feeling of increased mental clarity. Accupressure works directly with the body`s energy or qi, as acupuncture practitioners believe that all illnesses are a result of the natural flow of energy through the body becoming stuck, depleted or weakened and thus making the individual susceptible to illness. Accupressure benefits the rebalance of qi through treatment of specific acupoints related to symptoms or illness present. Treatment is effective in removing these energy obstructions.

Through clinical trials, Accupressure has been proven effective in treating various medical conditions and its use has been expanded into conventional medicine practices. Although best known for the control of pain, Accupressure benefits a wide variety of disorders. Respiratory disorders such as sinusitis, common cold, bronchitis and asthma can be effectively treated with Accupressure. Conjunctivitis, (pink eye), near sightedness and cataracts are a few of the eye disorders Accupressure benefits. Toothache can be reduced through Accupressure. Neurological and musculoskeletal disorders including paralysis following stroke, frozen shoulder or tennis elbow, sciatica and osteoarthritis are also treatable with Accupressure.

With certain health conditions, Accupressure can be effective enough to reduce or eliminate the need to take drugs to control pain or symptoms. Additional benefits of Accupressure are faster recovery from injuries, decreased symptoms of stress and improved circulation. Accupressure benefits the strengthening of the immune system function, which through treatment is better able to withstand colds, minor infections, and flu. Post-surgical nausea and vomiting can also be reduced through Accupressure. Many post-surgical patients find that Accupressure treatment is effective in increasing energy, and brings a sense of vitality. It also benefits the individual through a sense of restoring a sense of "normal self" after surgery or illness.

Multiple emotional or psychological disorders can be treated by Accupressure, which benefits addictions, phobias, obsessive behavior, eating disorders, and anxiety. Accupressure can also be beneficial when used alongside conventional medicine treatments for both acute and chronic disease. Often used as a form of preventative medicine, acupuncture is beneficial in preventing illness from occurring. Many people receive Accupressure without suffering from any particular malady or ailment. Treatment strengthens general constitution, and can correct a feeling of being unwell although there is no physical disorder, imbalance or illness in the traditional western medicine sense.

Benefits of AccupressureAccupressure has the great advantage of being safe and non-invasive compared to surgery and other techniques. It is free from the weakening side-effects of drugs. It is holistic and curative rather than merely symptomatic or palliative. The long-term effects are to strengthen the child. The following is a list of disorders that can be treated by Accupressure (world health organization data):

Respiratory: acute sinusitis, acute rhinitis, common cold, acute tonsillitis, acute bronchitis, bronchial asthma.
Eye: acute conjunctivitis, short sightedness (in children), cataract (without complications).
Mouth: toothache, post extraction pain, gingivitis (gum disease), acute and chronic pharyngitis.
Gastrointestinal disorders: hiccups, gastritis, gastric hyperacidity, ulcers, colitis, constipation, diarrhea, and paralytic ileus.
Neurological and musculoskeletal disorders: headache and migraine, trigeminal neuralgia, paralysis following stroke, meniere`s disease, neurogenic bladder dysfunction, nocturnal enuresis (bed wetting), intercostal neuralgia (pain in the ribs), cervicobrachial syndrome (pain radiating from neck to arm), "frozen shoulder" or "tennis elbow", sciatica, low back pain and osteoarthritis.

Acupressure Techniques and methods

Various techniques applied in an acupressure treatment include pressing, rubbing, gentle stretching, and rolling, chafing, kneading, wiping and grasping, as well as corrective exercises. Varying levels of pressure are used, most often starting by applying light pressure and gradually working deeper. The practitioner may focus more energy or pressure on a specific point or series of points, depending on the individual`s chief complaint, or the entire course of a meridian may be addressed.

Acupressure Techniques and methodsWhen the point is located and your fingers are comfortably positioned right on the spot gradually lean your weight toward the point to apply the pressure. Using the weight of your upper body (and not just your hands) enables you to apply firm pressure without strain. Direct the pressure perpendicularly to the surface of the skin as you take several long, slow, deep breaths. Hold for a few minutes until you feel a regular pulse or until the soreness at the point decreases. Then gradually release the pressure, finishing with a soothing touch.

Light touch
Therapeutically, light touch is recognized as more effective for treating acute conditions while deep touch is considered better for chronic conditions. Though deep touch may provide an intense sensation, it should always be within the client`s tolerance of discomfort. Although you may be tempted to massage or rub the entire area, it is best just to hold the point steadily with direct finger pressure.

The rule of thumb is to apply slow, firm pressure on the point at a 90 degree angle from the surface of the skin. If you are pulling the skin, then the angle of pressure is incorrect. Consciously and gradually direct the pressure into the center of the part of the body you are working on. It`s important to apply and release finger pressure gradually because this allows the tissues time to respond, promoting healing. The better your concentration as you move your fingers slowly into and out of the point, the more effective the treatment will be.

After repeated acupressure sessions using different degrees of pressure, you will begin to feel a pulse at the point. This pulsation is a good sign - it means that circulation has increased. Pay attention to the type of pulse you feel. If it`s very faint or throbbing, hold the point longer until the pulse balances.

If your hand gets tired, slowly withdraw pressure from the point, gently shake out your hand, and take a few deep breaths. When you`re ready, go back to the point and gradually apply pressure until you reach the depth where it hurts good. Again, press directly on painful site (which often moves, so follow and stay with it) until you feel a clear, regular pulse or until the pain diminishes. Then slowly decrease the finger pressure, ending with about twenty seconds of light touch.

Each body - and each area of the body - requires a different amount of pressure. If it hurts a great deal when you apply pressure on a point, then use light touch instead of pressure. The calves, the face, and genital areas are sensitive. The back, buttocks, and shoulders, especially if the musculature is developed, usually need deeper, firmer pressure.

After repeated acupressure sessions using different degrees of pressure, you will begin to feel a pulse at the point. This pulsation is a good sign - it means that circulation has increased. Pay attention to the type of pulse you feel. If it`s very faint or throbbing, hold the point longer until the pulse balances.

Deep touch
At each impulse our body reacts, adjusting in order to restore the balance. The soft tissue, in this case, relaxes or contracts leading to movement in the muscles or in the joints. The stimulus, that could be a sound, a thought or an intention, provokes a number of body forms which, for their natural tendency, express themselves. To prevent this natural response would be an unnecessary waste of energy. In fact, when the body doesn`t adapt to the stimulus, it produces stress. By pin-pointing the deep touch technique on the relevant reflex points, a specialist in this unique treatment can encourage self-healing to begin by channeling vital energy to flow to the most adversely affected areas.

Various techniques applied in an acupressure treatment include pressing, rubbing, gentle stretching, and rolling, chafing, kneading, wiping and grasping, as well as corrective exercises. Varying levels of pressure are used, most often starting by applying light pressure and gradually working deeper. The practitioner may focus more energy or pressure on a specific point or series of points, depending on the individual`s chief complaint, or the entire course of a meridian may be addressed.

The meridians, or channels, connect the internal organs through 12 primary and 8 extra meridians. These meridians, through which qi travels, emerge at the surface of the body. Therapeutically, deep touch is considered better for chronic conditions. Though deep touch may provide an intense sensation, it should always be within the client`s tolerance of discomfort.

A deep touch technique is used to find the tender and nodular areas in the feet and relate them to the relevant anatomical areas of the body. These nodules are treated by applying a precise deep touch technique, thereby helping the related the distant areas of the body to receive energy for healing. It is used to concentrate on the tender and nodular areas in the feet - those areas which are under the most stress - and relate them to specific areas of the body.

With subtle but deep touch stimulate acupuncture channels (meridians) using thumbs, fingers, elbows and knees. Gentle or dynamic stretches and joint rotations promote deep relaxation, helping your vital body energy (qi) back to balance. It can be a very deep touch to disperse energy that stimulates to encourage energy flow.

Imbalances at particular points along the meridian lines and within the organs themselves can be perceived with a deep touch sensitivity and particular technique, equilibrium can be restored. Holding tension points located on the face and body with a deep touch can help to relieve bodily aches and pains, reducing muscular and emotional stress and providing relaxation of both body and psyche. At times treatment may be deeply relaxing and other times it can be deep, direct causing soreness often described by clients as `good pain`. It is important to communicate if you are not comfortable with deep, releasing and effective pressure however, it is equally important to ask for more pressure and not shy away from the deep touch.

Gentle massage
Gentle massage has many benefits for those with arthritis. Massage therapy can provide pain relief, soothe stiff sore muscles and reduce inflammation and swelling. Massage and gentle stretching help maintain range of motion for your joints. By applying gentle massage to your reflexes, this therapy improves circulation and relieves stress and tension. When your body is in this natural state of relaxation, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual self-healing may occur.

Reflexology is an ancient, natural, non-invasive therapy that is based on the principle that there are reflex areas in the hands and feet, which correspond to all glands, organs and parts of the body. Stimulation of these reflexes by applying gentle massage and specific pressure point techniques helps create a relaxed, healthy and harmonious state of being. Reflexology improves blood and nerve supply, removing congestion and blockages, restoring balance, improving energy and relieving stress and tension. Acupressure Techniques and methods

brahma sutra

2008-11-22T17:49:00.002+05:30

Brahmavidya is a Method
Eligibility, Course Content, Duration & Fees
Breath & Thought – Foundation of Life
Time Required For Practice
Observed Benefits
Beyond Basic Course

Brahmavidya is a Method

Most religions teach that there is a spark of the Divine in every human being. Brahmavidya merely helps you to realize this more clearly and to use the Supreme Intelligence within, in a very practical way. Being potentially divine, man has within him all the power required to overcome his difficulties and problems. Brahmavidya teaches definite methods by which a person can overcome all of his physical and mental problems and lead a better, happier life.

We hope that this introduction to Brahmavidya would inspire you to remove by the root all that appears to be evil in your life and replace it with real happiness, comfort and success. This can happen here and now, in the year in which we are living if you give yourself an opportunity to learn and practise these rare methods.

YOU can use these methods for mastering your personal problems, for building the superior mind and ability and power necessary to carry out your ambitions, to fulfil your desires, and to give you greater strength to fight off sickness and old age. No matter what your talents, no matter what your ambitions, you should learn the way to call upon the SOURCE OF ALL INSPIRATION within you. What have you done to get in touch with the Source of all inspiration - the Divine Power within you? The supreme purpose of Brahmavidya is to do this for you.

Eligibility, Course Content, Duration & Fees

• Any person above 18 years in age can join this course.
• The Basic Course comprises of THREE parts:

Pranayam and 8 Spiritual Breathing Exercises which are to be practised daily in the morning.

Simple methods of Meditation which are to be practised during night or early morning as may be found convenient.

Related philosophical topics explaining the fundamental principles of LIFE.

• Written lessons are given every week so that one can study these subjects at home.

• The duration of the course is 22 sessions of 1 ½ hours conducted once a week or 5 days Residential Workshop.

• Donation for the course by 22 weekly sessions is Rs. 750/- and for the residential workshop it Rs. 3500/- inclusive of lodging and boarding.

• It also can be done through Postal Course.

Breath & Thought – Foundation of Life

The purpose of this course of Brahmavidya is to show you the correct way to use these two important aspects of our life - BREATH & THOUGHT.

Our BREATH is OUR LIFE. Life continues only till breathing continues. Thus our life is totally dependant on our breathing. Through our breath we receive Oxygen and Prana energy (Life Force). Oxygen helps in purification of blood whereas the Prana energy is used by the nervous system. Most diseases and illnesses are caused due to insufficient supply of Oxygen and Prana energy.

Though we are breathing right since our birth, it does not ensure that our breathing is correct. Moreover, as we do not pay for the air that we breathe or make any conscious effort to breathe, we do not give importance to our breathing. We can breathe correctly only by learning it.

By practising the Spiritual Breathing Exercises taught in this course we learn correct breathing. Through regular practice the capacity of the lungs increases, the body learns and forms a habit of right breathing, bringing in more Oxygen and Prana energy. This makes the body healthy and efficient. Breath (Prana) brings Health in our body, Joy in our mind and Peace in our spirit. Our two nostrils are truly the gateway to Heaven.

As Right Breathing purifies our body, Right Meditation cleans our mind. Regular practice of meditation improves mental outlook of the person and makes him more positive, cheerful, optimistic and confident. Due to better physical and mental health a person can do his daily work more efficiently. This can make him more successful at his job, his business or his profession.

Breath and Thought are the two basic elements on which our life is completely dependent. We cannot think of life without Breath or Thought. We have been using these two elements right since our birth, yet no one has ever taught us how to use these fundamental forces of our life.

Time Required For Practice

It takes about 60 minutes to practice all the Eight Spiritual Breathing Exercises taught in the Basic Course. Of course, we do not have to devote 60 minutes from the first day and capacity of the body to take such exercise has to be gradually increased over a period of time.

Practice of various Meditation techniques taught in the Basic Course requires about 60 minutes.

Depending upon the level of interest and availability of time one can devote more time, but minimum requirement is 20 minutes for Breathing Exercises in the morning and 20 minutes for Meditation at Night.

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Observed Benefits

Brahmavidya is not like a medicine, which is meant for a particular ailment. It is a system, which helps to remove root cause of illness and promote health. Hence in principle it is useful for any disorder of body and mind.

Breathing exercises and Meditation have been found useful to get rid of Asthma and other breathing troubles such as chronic cold & cough, high blood pressure, Spondilitis, backache, heart trouble, joint pain and many other ailments.

On the mental level benefits such as reduction in the restlessness, fear & tension, better concentration, self-confidence, more calm & composed nature have been observed.

Beyond Basic Course

Further teaching in Brahmavidya is available in following two courses of ascending level.

• Advance Course: This course is of 104 weeks. One can join this Course only after successful completion of the Basic Course.

• Teachers' Training Course: This course is of 96 weeks. This Course is only by selection. After completion of Advance Course if the student is found suitable then he is given admission for this course.

Brahmavidya

2008-11-22T17:43:00.002+05:30

Health and Success! What more a person can ask in life? Brahmavidya Seems to be a formula for complete life!
But, Health and Success are so different from one another! Health is of the Body, whereas Success is related to so many different things. How can Brahmavidya help to achieve both?
How is it useful to a common man in his daily life?
Can we say Brahmavidya is a science of happy life? What methods are taught in Brahmavidya?
Which ailments are cured with Brahmavidya?
How much time one has to devote for these Breathing Exercises and Meditation?
What is the Origin of this teaching?

Health and Success! What more a person can ask in life? Brahmavidya Seems to be a formula for complete life!

Yes, that sounds fantastic; isn't it? Here I will briefly explain the principles of Brahmavidya. I do hope that it will inspire you to join the Brahmavidya class and verify the efficacy of these methods by your own personal experience.
But, Health and Success are so different from one another! Health is of the Body, whereas Success is related to so many different things. How can Brahmavidya help to achieve bother?

It is quite true that Health and Success appear to be very different from each other. Yet both these are dependent upon following the Order of Life.

All truth is hidden and if we limit our observation only to the appearance we can never comprehend the truth. One may say that every scientific discovery is a proof of this. 'Appearances are deceptive'. For example, the earth looks quite flat, but actually it is round; it appears that the sun rises every morning in the east, but actually there is no sunrise.

As the modern science tells us about the laws of the material universe, Brahmavidya tells us about deeper truths about your life, my life - human life! When we follow these laws in our life, it makes our life orderly. And what we call as Health or Success is nothing but ORDER.

How is it useful to a common man in his daily life?

Brahmavidya teaches that every human being is potentially divine. Hence he has within him all the power required to overcome his difficulties and problems. Brahmavidya gives definite methods by which a person can overcome all of his physical and mental problems and lead a healthier, more successful and happier life.

Can we say Brahmavidya is a science of happy life? What methods are taught in Brahmavidya?

Yes, Brahmavidya is a Science of Life teaching human beings the spiritual laws of life. These Spiritual laws operate in human life through Breath and Thought. We cannot think of life without Breath or Thought. Hence Brahmavidya teachings emphasize on Breath and Thought, which are the basic elements of life.

Though we are using Breath and Thought right from our birth no one has ever taught us correct way of Breathing or thinking. You will be surprised to know that average person uses only 10% of his lung capacity. Brahmavidya teaches a) Spiritual Breathing Exercises, which improve breathing and b) Meditation techniques, which improve thinking. The Breathing Exercises purify the body and Meditation purifies the mind.

Which ailments are cured with Brahmavidya?

Brahmavidya is not like a medicine, which is meant for a particular ailment. It is a system, which helps to remove root cause of illness and promote health. Breathing exercises and Meditation have been found useful to get rid of asthma and other breathing troubles, high blood pressure, spondilitis, backache, heart trouble, chronic cold and cough and many other ailments.

The practice also improves mental outlook of the person and makes him more positive, cheerful, optimistic and confident. Due to better physical and mental health a person can do his daily work more efficiently. This can make him more successful at his job, his business or his profession.

How much time one has to devote for these Breathing Exercises and Meditation?

Depending upon the level of interest and availability of time one can devote more time, but minimum requirement is 20 minutes for breathing exercises in the morning and 20 minutes for meditation at night. The methods are simple yet very effective. Any person above the age of 18 years can learn and practice without any difficulty.

What is the Origin of this teaching?

This is a very ancient system of Spiritual Practice or Sadhana. The System of Practice originated in India, then migrated to Tibet and has now come back to us from Tibet.

Golden eggs

2008-11-22T17:37:00.001+05:30

You know sometimes we're so busy chasing goals
that we lose ourselves in the process. Remember
the story of the goose that laid the golden egg?

One day, a farmer discovers his pet goose has
laid a golden egg. But instead of looking after
the goose and nurturing it, he decides to splice
open it's belly to get more eggs!

To his dismay, the farmer doesn't find any more
golden eggs and even worse, the goose is now dead!

Being successful is not just about getting more
golden eggs or results. If you want to be happy
in the long run, you also need to take care of
the asset that creates your results - that is YOU

Realisation

2008-11-17T14:45:00.001+05:30

REALISATION

This is to be realised. The Buddha said emphatically: ‘This is a Truth to be realised here and now.’ We do not have to wait until we die to find out if it’s all true - this teaching is for living human beings like ourselves. Each one of us has to realise it. I may tell you about it and encourage you to do it but I can’t make you realise it!

Don’t think of it as something remote or beyond your ability. When we talk about Dhamma or Truth, we say that is here and now, and something we can see for ourselves. We can turn to it; we can incline towards the Truth. We can pay attention to the way it is, here and now, at this time and this place. That’s mindfulness - being alert and bringing attention to the way it is. Through mindfulness, we investigate the sense of self, this sense of me and mine: my body, my feelings, my memories, my thoughts, my views, my opinions, my house, my car and so on.

My tendency was self-disparagement so, for example, with the thought: ‘I am Sumedho,’ I’d think of myself in negative terms: ‘I’m no good.’ But listen, from where does that arise and where does it cease?...or, ‘I’m really better than you, I’m more highly attained. I’ve been living the Holy Life for a long time so I must be better than any of you!’ Where does THAT arise and cease?

When there is arrogance, conceit or self-disparagement - whatever it is - examine it; listen inwardly; ‘I am....’ Be aware and attentive to the space before you think it; then think it and notice the space that follows. Sustain your attention on that emptiness at the end and see how long you can hold your attention on it. See if you can hear a kind of ringing sound in the mind, the sound of silence, the primordial sound. When you concentrate your attention on that, you can reflect: ‘Is there any sense of self?’ You see that when you’re really empty - when there’s just clarity, alertness and attention - there’s no self. There’s no sense of me and mine. So, I go to that empty state and I contemplate Dhamma: I think, ‘This is just as it is. This body here is just this way.’ I can give it a name or not but right now, it’s just this way. It’s not Sumedho!

There’s no Buddhist monk in the emptiness. ‘Buddhist monk’ is merely a convention, appropriate to time and place. When people praise you and say, ‘How wonderful’, you can know it as someone giving praise without taking it personally. You know there’s no Buddhist monk there; it’s just Suchness. It’s just this way. If I want Amaravati to be a successful place and it is a great success, I’m happy. But if it all fails, if no one is interested, we can’t pay the electricity bill and everything falls apart - failure! But really, there’s no Amaravati. The idea of a person who is a Buddhist monk or a place called Amaravati - these are only conventions, not ultimate realities. Right now it’s just this way, just the way it’s supposed to be. One doesn’t carry the burden of such a place on one’s shoulders because one sees it as it really is and there’s no person to be involved in it. Whether it succeeds or fails is no longer important in the same way.

In emptiness, things are just what they are. When we are aware in this way, it doesn’t mean that we are indifferent to success or failure and that we don’t bother to do anything. We can apply ourselves. We know what we can do; we know what has to be done and we can do it in the right way. Then everything becomes Dhamma, the way it is. We do things because that is the right thing to be doing at this time and in this place rather than out of a sense of personal ambition or fear of failure.

The path to the cessation of suffering is the path of perfection. Perfection can be a rather daunting word because we feel very imperfect. As personalities, we wonder how we can dare to even entertain the possibility of being perfect. Human perfection is something no one ever talks about; it doesn’t seem at all possible to think of perfection in regard to being human. But an arahant is simply a human being who has perfected life, someone who has learned everything there is to learn through the basic law: ‘All that is subject to arising is subject to ceasing.’ An arahant does not need to know everything about everything; it is only necessary to know and fully understand this law.

We use Buddha wisdom to contemplate Dhamma, the way things are. We take Refuge in Sangha, in that which is doing good and refraining from doing evil. Sangha is one thing, a community. It’s not a group of individual personalities or different characters. The sense of being an individual person or a man or a woman is no longer important to us. This sense of Sangha is realised as a Refuge. There is that unity so that even though the manifestations are all individual, our realisation is the same. Through being awake, alert and no longer attached, we realise cessation and we abide in emptiness where we all merge. There’s no person there. People may arise and cease in the emptiness, but there’s no person. There’s just clarity, awareness, peacefulness and purity.

Realisation

2008-11-17T14:45:00.000+05:30

PATIENCE

2008-11-14T16:08:00.000+05:30

here is a perfect timing within everything. Within every thought, feeling and action there is a divine alignment to the cycles of the seasons, planets, stars, and galaxies. One cannot hurry the ripening process of a fruit, force a baby to develop faster, nor increase the planet's momentum around our Sun. The planet is moving through space around the Sun at the perfect speed of 67,000 mph. We wouldn't want it to move faster or slower since it would throw everything off balance. We are part of a vast Universe that is carefully orchestrated with the most Divine Perfection. Once we are tuned into this perfection that is already here now, our lives emulate a divine synchronicity everywhere we are.

“The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it.” ~ Arnold H. Glasgow

The tomato falls naturally from the vine when it is ripe, and just like you, it naturally knows when to hold on and when to let go. When you learn to live each moment relaxed in your body, you naturally live in divine harmony with the Universe. Your entire energy field opens up and you become receptive to whatever the Universe brings your way. Through deep relaxation there is a sense of acceptance, and a deep feeling of being in alignment with everything. Relaxation is simply practicing, "Being With What Is" whether it's your innermost thoughts about you, or your ideas about the outer world. Through relaxing, you naturally become patient and are in tune with the cosmic timing behind everything and can truly see that the world is perfect just the way it is.

“He that can have Patience, can have what he will” ~Benjamin Franklin

So where does impatience come from? It is an ego based energy that stems from not choosing to be at peace with what is. It's an old habit brought on by not loving yourself, your body, your friends, family, and your experience of this world just the way it is. You tend to push or rush through an experience when love is not present. Rushing is truly an act of violence to your soul. It's all about the ego trying to make the river flow faster because it thinks once it gets through this experience THEN the goodies will arrive and it will finally be happy, rich, fulfilled and at peace. The big joke is that the ego never arrives at peace because it's a wanting machine! As you may have already noticed, your ego wants everything that it wants right now! It is not willing to wait another day. It acts like a spoiled child yelling for Mother to fetch its favorite chocolate. It wants exactly WHAT it wants WHEN it wants it, and not a moment later. It doesn't care whether the season is right, it just NEEDS to be satisfied now or else!

"Misery does not exist in reality but only in mere imagination." ~Ramana Maharshi

By rushing to get things done, your body becomes contracted, your mind narrows and your being misses this divine moment. With all this constriction you block the flow of your Manifesting Vibration, causing things to manifest with massive delay and perhaps never come to fruition. The ego is impatient simply because it feels separate from this divine ocean of existence. This suffering is caused by years of believing in the Great Illusion, that you are not connected to the Infinite Source of love, intelligence, and power. The ego is obsessed with its own private agenda. It has its own "separate" desires, time schedule, and has completely forgotten about merging with God and experiencing bliss. Whenever your ego is in charge, you will rush through each life experie nce and actually miss the greater mission of your life, which is to celebrate your life, and ridiculously enjoy this amazing divine existence.

“Patience is the companion of wisdom.” ~ Saint Augustine

By practicing relaxing into each experience of your life, you will magically increase your Manifesting Vibration and always bring your desires more effortlessly to you. Patience is a major aspect in the process of consciously manifesting what you desire. With infinite patience, you can send any request into the Universe and it will easily manifest! It is important to let go of attachment to your future outcome and patiently allow the Universe to answer your request. The most Divine timing is waiting for you. The question is can you relax enough to wait for it?

“Hurry up...and wait.” ~John Oswald

One of the best ways to master patience is learning how to live in society in a relaxed, open, and receptive body. This means living IN the world, yet not OF the world. Being connected to the big rat race, yet not rushing to get ahead of the other rats. Whenever you are late for an event, instead of rushing and freaking out about what might happen, enjoy the excitement of the journey there. Know that the more you rush, the more impatient energy you are creating. Whenever you "have to" wait for someone, instead of being impatient choose to see that you "get to" wait. This is your opportunity of the day to practice relaxing into your magical manifesting vehicle! What if every time you had to wait, it was actually the Universe offering you this amazing gift to take a mini-vacation and enjoy yourself deepl y! Waiting allows you to deeply sink into a vast spaciousness where you can taste the beauty of your infinite soul. Waiting is really just a form of meditation. Doing nothing means your mind and heart are completely in the now, and not focused on the past or future, and receiving the divine blessings of existence. Be patient and all the goodies you desire will spring forth into existence.

Throughout my recent travels in Uganda to assist the children there, I (Margot) have experienced countless hours of waiting. The Ugandan people have a different relationship with time and are in general very patient. They were my greatest teachers in this arena. I never ceased to marvel at their ability to patiently wait even in uncomfortable situations without complaining or trying to change anything. I experienced eight hour bus rides where people stood in the aisle, some even carrying babies on their backs. It is normal in Uganda to wait for a bus to fill up with people for an hour or so before it even leaves. I invite you to imagine what that would be like to be that patient. There are sooooo many oppor tunities to practice patience, such as sitting in traffic, at stop lights, with children, your partner, or even waiting for the right moment to speak your truth. With each opportunity we invite you to notice how you feel inside as you drop deeper into choosing the experience of being patient.

"Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish." ~ John Quincy Adams

WINGS OF HUMAN

2008-11-14T16:00:00.000+05:30

You are more powerful than you have ever imagined. You have the ability to manifest massive transformation in this world. The time has come for each one of us to realize that we are powerful beyond measure, and that we can easily co-create the world we want to live in. We are each being urgently called to harness our divine manifesting energies, and focus them towards co-creating the kind of world we all want to live in, one that is full of beauty, love, and abundance for all mankind.

"You were born with wings. You are not meant for crawling, so don't. You have wings. Learn to use them and fly." ~Rumi

You are a powerful manifestor who can easily sculpt the world around you just like an artist sculpts a hunk of clay. That's right you have always been and will always be an amazing manifestor who has the power to instantly and effortlessly sculpt this beautiful world we live in. This may seem impossible, ridiculous, or miraculous, yet it is as natural as the warmth from the sunshine above. We have each been born with an innate ability to materialize thoughts into physical form and can improve upon this gift by learning how to harness the power of the mind. To do this, all that is needed is a constant positive focus of your energy into the image and feeling of what you want to manifest as if it is ALREADY HERE NOW! So start by asking yourself, this powerful question, "What do you want the world we live in to look and feel like?" Wri te out a full description of the kind of world you want to co-create. Then, spend a few minutes daily focusing your manifesting energies in this direction as part of your daily manifesting routine.

“The key to success is to focus our conscious mind on things we desire not things we fear.” ~Brian Tracy

Here are two more powerful steps you can take to manifest a world we all truly love:

1. Raise your own vibration. Stop wasting your time judging others, and finding fault with their level of emotional and spiritual evolution. It's vital that you focus all of your energies on shifting and honing the frequency at which you vibrate as you go through your day. What kind of energy are you sending out towards the people of this planet? The more you can embrace and express the beauty and love that resides at your core, the more the world around you will reflect these higher level states. Each time you allow the powerful and supremely loving energy of your Divine Self to radiate out to the world, you literally shift the vibration of this planet and there is more love, compassion, and harmony circulating through the planet's energetic field.

"One individual who lives and vibrates to the energy of optimism and a willingness to be nonjudgmental of others will counterbalance the negativity of 90,000 individuals who calibrate at the lower weakening levels while one individual who lives and vibrates to the energy of pure love and reverence for all of life will counterbalance the negativity of 750,000 individuals who calibrate at the lower weakening levels." ~ Dr. David Hawkins

2. Take Inspired Actions that Support the World
Every action that you take in your life sends out an energetic frequency to the world around you, and impacts the kind of world we all live in. The movement of your body literally shifts the molecules inside you and around you on a physical level. This mass energy movement is directly linked to the types of things you manifest, or don't manifest into your life and world around you. Every inspired action which you don't take also sculpts the world, just like an artist hesitates to remove a piece of clay to unfold the masterpiece. When you hold back from doing something in this world, which you know brings you tremendous energy, inspiration and joy, you are negatively impacting the frequency of the world we live in. You have the choice to either use your body-mind to actively support the kind of world you want to live in or not. Every time you take actions from a n inspired expanded heart, you send out positive energy which magnetizes more of what you desire into your life, and literally shifts the make-up of this planet. Imagine how amazingly beautiful and blissful the world would be if we all were taking actions that inspired us and gave us energy instead of doing things out of a sense of duty or drudgery.

"Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live." ~Nicolas de Chamfort

If each one of us makes the commitment to focus our powerful manifesting energies and awareness on creating a new world that we love, we will quickly see the manifestation of a world where we all live together in peace, harmony, and abundance.

hinduism

2008-11-14T14:34:00.000+05:30

Hinduism is a way of life, an Indian tradition that encompasses several religious beliefs, cultural practices and ideologies. The exact date of Hinduism's origin is not known, though estimates vary from 3200 BC to 2500 BC. It is the world's oldest major religion. It is also the third largest religion with a following of approximately a 1.2 billion people. The Indian subcontinent is home to 98% of this populace. The Himalayan kingdom of Nepal is the only nation which has Hinduism for its state religion. The term Hindu itself derives from the name of the Sindhu river.

Hinduism comes under a branch of religions known as the Dharmic religions. The Dharmic religions are less prone to dogma and offer generic universal truths. Such universal truths serve as general guidelines for their follower's philosophies and actions. They remain open to interpretation, adaptation and enrichment at any date and in any age. This core makes Hinduism flexible in accommodating even contradictory opinions seamlessly within its fabric. Hinduism provides several paths to the common goal of divine bliss. The choice of a particular path is left to the ability, discretion and temperament of the follower.

Experience of the divine supreme knowledge, known as moksha, is the core concept of Hinduism. Hinduism teaches its followers the ability to differentiate between the pure actions of virtue and the wrongful actions of evil. The concept of karma lays forth free-willed human actions and how such actions can lead both to moksha and to the cycles of birth and death. The soul is ever thirsty for this divine knowledge and it accumulates knowledge through all human experiences. Virtuous actions take the soul closer to the divine supreme, Brahman. Realization and experience of the divine bliss makes all the soul's desires redundant, including the desire for another worldly-experience-giving cycle of birth. Evil hinders recognition of the Brahman and misleads the Atman (soul) to seek knowledge through experiences in various forms of worldly life. All human actions leave their imprint on the soul. They affect and even decide the form and circumstances of life sought by the soul in its next cycle of birth.

Origins of Hinduism

Hinduism is eternal with no beginning and no end. Current thinking suggests that Hinduism was formed somewhere between 3200-2500 BCE. The date of approximately 3102 BCE comes from the Mahabharata epic, where the exact positions of the stars were recorded at Sri Krishna's birth. The later dates come from linguistic and literary dating of the Rig Veda, the oldest of the Hindu spiritual texts.

The origin of Hinduism cannot be ascribed to a single founder, a single time and a single place of foundation. The Vedas (regarded as the earliest piece of written Hindu work) are the spiritual laws binding upon all of creation and even upon God. Each Veda was written by multiple enlightened beings (Hindus) over a period of time. The term "Hinduism" is derived from of the word Sindhu, which literally means "dweller in the Sindhu (Indus) Valley". Hinduism is more of a federation of loosely banded conventional religions and cultures. It is non-organizational and does not seek or encourage collectivism.

According to Hindus, certain spiritual principles hold eternally true, transcending man-made constructs, representing a pure science of consciousness. This consciousness is not merely that of the body or mind and intellect, but of a supramental soul-state that exists within and beyond our existence, the unsullied Self of all. Religion to the Hindu is the native search for the divine within the Self, the search to find the One truth. Truth sought with faith shall yield itself in blissful luminescence no matter the race or creed professed. Indeed, all existence, from vegetation and beasts to mankind, are subjects and objects of the eternal Dharma. This inherent faith, therefore, is also known as Arya/Noble Dharma, Veda/Knowledge Dharma, Yoga/Union Dharma, Hindu Dharma or, simply, the Dharma.

What can be said to be common to all Hindus is belief in Dharma, Karma, and Moksha (liberation) of every soul through a variety of moral, action-based, and meditative yogas. Still more fundamental principles include ahimsa (non-violence), the guru/chela dynamic, the Divine Word of OM and the power of mantras, love of Truth in many manifestations, and an understanding that the essential spark of the Divine (Atman/Brahman) is in every human and living being, thus allowing for many spiritual paths leading to the One Unitary Truth.

Bindis are worn by Hindu women on their forehead to symbolize the opening of their spiritual third eye. An example of the pervasiveness of this paramount truth-seeking spirituality in daily life is the laltika which is a religious symbol denoting marriage. It is sometimes also said to symbolize the need to cultivate supramental consciousness, which is achieved by opening the mystic "third eye." Men, too, will bear on their foreheads the equivalent tika (tilaka) mark, usually on religious occasions, its shape often representing particular devotion to a certain main deity: a 'U' shape stands for Vishnu, a group of three horizontal lines for Shiva.

Yoga Dharma
Hinduism is practiced through a variety of Yogas (spiritual practices), primarily Bhakti (loving devotion), Karma Yoga (selfless service), Raja Yoga (meditational Yoga) and Jnana Yoga (Yoga of discrimination, pronounced Nyāna). These are described in the two principal texts of Hindu Yoga: The Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutras. The Upanishads are also important as a philosophical foundation for this rational spiritualism.

The four goals of life
A major aspect of Dharma that is common to all Hindus is that of purushartha, the "four goals of life". They are Kama, Artha, Dharma and Moksha. It is said that all humans seek kama (pleasure, physical or emotional) and artha (power, fame and wealth), but soon, with maturity, learn to govern these legitimate desires within a higher, pragmatic framework of dharma, or moral harmony in all. Of course, the only goal that is truly infinite, whose attainment results in absolute happiness, is moksha, or liberation, (a.k.a. Mukti, Samadhi, Nirvana, etc.) from Samsara (a.k.a. Reincarnation), the cycle of life, death, and existential duality.

The four stages of life
The human life is seen as four phases called "Ashramas". They are Brahmacharya, Grihasthya, Vanaprastha and Sanyasa. The first quarter of one's life, Brahmacharya (literally "grazing in Brahma") is spent in celibate, sober and pure contemplation of life's secrets under a Guru, building up body and mind for the responsibilities of life. Brahmacharya is the phase where a human obtains knowledge of God and the world, while learning to keep strict control of his mind, senses and body. Grihastya is the householder's stage, in which one marries and satisfies karma and artha within a married life and professional career. Vanaprastha is gradual detachment from the material world, ostensibly giving over duties to one's sons and daughters, spending more time in contemplation of the truth, and making holy pilgrimages. Finally, in sanyasa, the individual goes off into seclusion, to find God through Yogic meditation and peacefully shed the body for the next life.

Views on God

Within Hinduism a variety of lesser deities are predominantly, are seen as aspects of the one impersonal divine ground, Brahman. Brahman is seen as the universal spirit. Brahman is the ultimate, both transcendent and immanent the absolute infinite existence, the sum total of all that ever is, was, or ever shall be. Brahman is not a God in the monotheistic sense, as it is not imbued with any limiting characteristics, not even those of being and non-being, and this is reflected in the fact that in Sanskrit, the word Brahman is of neuter (as opposed to masculine or feminine) gender. Vedanta is a branch of Hindu philosophy which gives this matter a greater focus. Yoga is the primary focus in many ways of a Hindu's religious activities, being somewhere between meditation, prayer and healthful exercise.

Some of Hinduism's adherents are Smarta monists, seeing in multiple manifestations of the one God or source of being. It is seen as one unity, with the personal gods being different aspects of only one Supreme Being, like a single beam of light separated into colors by a prism, and are valid to worship. The great Hindu saint, Ramakrishna, a monist, was a prominent advocate of this traditional Hindu view. He achieved the spiritual high of other religions besides Hinduism and came to the same conclusion proclaimed by the Vedas, "Truth is one, the wise call it by different names."

Contemporary Hinduism is divided into four major divisions, Vaishnavism, Shaivism, Shaktism, and Smartism. Hindus believe in one God but differ in their conceptions. The two primary form of differences are between Vaishnavism which conceives God as Vishnu and Shaivism, which conceives God as Shiva.

Hinduism grew out of the religion described in the Vedas. The earliest of these, the Rigveda centers on worship of the gods Indra and Agni, and on the Soma ritual. The Ashvamedha was the most important sacrifice described in the Yajurveda, possibly performed for the last time by Samudragupta in the 4th century. The age and origins of the Vedas themselves are disputed, but it is clear that they were transmitted orally for several millennia. They show strong similarities to the language and religion of the Avesta, which are sometimes traced back to the influence of the 3rd millennium BC Saraswati Valley Civilization.

Link your conscious mind to the subconscious mind

2008-11-02T13:57:00.003+05:30

Your conscious and subconscious mind
The conscious mind has the ability to think. It can accept or reject. But the subconscious only accepts. It makes no distinction regarding inout. If we feed our mind with thoughts of fear, doubt and hate, the auto-suggestions will activate and translate those thing into reality. the subconscious is like a databank. The sunconscious is like the automobile is lke a databanl. the subconscious is like the automobile while the conscious is like the driver. Of the two, the sunconscious is more powerful.The power is in the automobile but the control is with the driver.

Secrets of Self Hypnosis- Unconscious mind

Self-hypnosis is fast becoming one of the most popular method which can prove beneficial in successfully in solving our life’s problems. Self-hypnosis is about taking the courage to admit your own problem and taking action to solve it and bring changes to your life. It is suitable for anyone who wants to change their habits, their personality to make their life better through the power of the unconscious mind.

What is self-hypnosis? First thing first, self-hypnosis is not really about mind control. Well, self-hypnosis is the process of getting in touch with your subconscious mind. Getting in touch with your subconscious mind involves awakening and strengthening the subconscious mind. Our subconscious mind power is a very powerful tool. Hence, self-hypnosis is about linking our conscious mind to the subconscious mind. Hence, in order to utilize the full potential of our mind, it is crucial that we take time off from our busy schedule to talk and practice self-hypnosis.

In case you still having doubts what is self-hypnosis, let me give you a simple analogy. Imagine you are driving a car for the first time. Since this your first try in driving a car, you will most probably feel nervous and be at your utmost alertness level. You will tend to drive slowly and carefully. However, once you master the art of driving and driving becomes your everyday routine, most of us did not even pay the slightest attention to the strategies required to drive a car. All the required steps to driving a car are all heavily implanted into our minds until we do not need to put in any conscious effort. It has by default become a part of the subconscious mind.
Hence, self-hypnosis is also like driving, needs lots of practice until we become masters of self-hypnosis. Again self-hypnosis is not really about mind control.

Now, you may ask what self-hypnosis can do for us? self-hypnosis is one of the methods to let our subconscious mind to communicate with our conscious mind. This can only be done when we are in a relax and comfortable state. When we do self-hypnosis, we reprogram me our mind such that our little computer functions automatically on the responses it has stored in early practice sessions.
Certainly, self- hypnosis is not about mind controlling.

With self-hypnosis, we can reprogram me ourself to get rid of unwanted habits like smoking, stage fright and nervousness. Furthermore, self-hypnosis can help you become a self-confident and high self-esteem man which can greatly make your life better.

So, how exactly do we do self-hypnosis?

There are 2 important you need to acquired to have a successful self-hypnosis.
1) A effective method which can make you in a trance
2) Something you really really want to change (you personality, your habits)

Let us now look at the things you want to change for the better. It could be anything ranging from your social life, your habits, your concentration, anything. Once you decided what you want to change, settle down with a pen and paper to do some writing. Do write about mind controlling other people, it won’t work.

The work you need to do is to write down a statement that encapsulates what you want as if you have it already. You’ll know you have the right statement when you get a pleasurable emotional reaction when you read it. The emotional reaction is important.

After that, you need to make a effort to create a strong mental picture of already achieving what you really want. The picture NEEDS AND MUST have a strong positive feeling to it. A strong positive feeling means you are feeling joyful, happy, ecstatic, excited.

Next, you need to know that your subconscious mind has 3 very powerful attributes. They are namely
Your subconscious mind believes in whatever you tell it whether it is right or wrong.
Your subconscious mind cannot comprehended negatives.
Your subconscious mind will make anything you tell it isn’t true to become true.

It is also crucial that you phrase your needs in a positive way. DO NOT PHRASE IT IN THIS WAY:
I am no longer unhealthy
I am not afraid of cockroaches anymore
I am no longer a chicken

Instead phrase it like
I am enjoying paying all my bills on time with money left over to go out for a meal once a week and a wonderful holiday twice a year.
Accompany this with images of you looking forward to the bills and putting them in the mail, or having fun on your holiday.

I am relaxed and comfortable in all circumstances and situations.
Accompany this with images of you having fun playing Frisbee in the boardroom with your managing director.

I am so successful that I’m now a success guru.
Accompany this with images of you sitting cross-legged on your yacht with a group of admirers eager for your every word.

What works best are the images and words that emerge from within you.

Now back to the beginning – a method of inducing the trance where you can start re-programming your subconscious mind.

Make yourself comfortable, sit on a chair preferably. Concentrate your attention on your feet and ankles and release any anxiety or tension in them. Move to your lower legs and so on up your body, release any bit of tension. Release any tension also around your mouth and eyes.

Count from 10 to 1. Each time you count, tell yourself that you are becoming more and more relaxed until you are receptive to any positive messages. Repeat the messages that you have written and chosen earlier on. Repeat it until the phrase bring into your mind the fantasy you created. Make it as realistic as you can. Make full use of your five senses. When you have fully experienced this allow the image to fade. Allow the mantra to fade, and start to count yourself back up to waking awareness. Remind yourself that when you reach ten you will feel fully alert, refreshed and ready to enjoy the rest of the day/evening.

And as I say, self hypnosis is not about mind control but an effective method to communicate with your unconscious mind to create positive new changes.

Self Hypnosis -The 9 Things You Should Really Know

1. Self-hypnosis is a skill that everyone should and can learn. You do not need to hire or go to a certified hypnotherapist to do self-hypnosis. self-hypnosis is a skill where you are in a trance and that everyone can master. Self-hypnosis is not about mind controlling others.

2. The way we think will determine the way we act. We determine our own future through the way we think. The more positive we are, the more we act like a champion or a winner. The more negative we are, the more we act like a loser, a wimp. You can change all this through self-hypnosis, putting yourself in a trance, reprogram your subconscious mind power and live life again.

3. During the process of self-hypnosis, you can remember what happening around you and hear everything around you. The depth of your trance will vary between people. You many be in a very light trance like daydreaming or a deep one like you are sleeping. self-hypnosis is nothing much but a nice feeling of letting go. So you do not have to worry about being mind control or unable to remember what you have say to yourself. It all make perfect sense and yes self-hypnosis is not about mind controlling others.

4. Everyone of you has the right and power to use self-hypnosis to have a healthier mind and body. A typical human being only utiises about one tenth of his brain power. self-hypnosis may be one of the ways to fully unlock the full potential of our mind and bring unlimtited benefits to the individual.

By the way, I personally believed that everyone can performed self-hypnosis and be hypontized. A simple example of self-hypnosis is that we daydream(a form of light trance), lose concentration and in a trance. Self-hypnosis is not about mind controlling others.

5. Nobody even the most skilled and talented hypnotherapist can mind control you or manipulate you in anyway. The hypnotherapist is only there to guide in if you need help in self-hypnosis and put you in a trance. You are the one who is fully in control of your mind and situation. You do have to remember that stage shows are done with VOLUNTEERS when you see stage hypnotherapist doing their stuff.Self-hypnosis is not about mind controlling others.

6. Power of self-hypnosis is unimaginable. self-hypnosis has a huge potential. Many successful people use self-hypnosis to motivate themselves and see themselves being successful. Before any competition, successful athletes used self-hypnosis to bring themselves into the right state. The state of motivation, passion, focus and determination.

7. You can change your internal belief systems through self-hypnosis. Beliefs that have been deeply implanted into you like " You are worthless, you don’t deserve to be loved" can be change. With self-hypnosis, you finally have the power to rid of these unwanted beliefs.

8. With self-hypnosis, you can have a much better and natural anesthesia of your body after a surgery. The comfortable level of anesthesia learned and achieved self-hypnosis happen too often to be considered pure luck.

9. Self-hypnosis can certainly change your life and make anyone a better person. Practice it and start living again.

In conculsion, self-hypnosis is an excellent tool to change your life around. You can become a new person if you believe in self-hypnosis and practice it everyday. Self-hypnosis is not about mind controlling others. Start TODAY!

"Confusion"Why live in confusion

2008-11-02T13:40:00.004+05:30

People confuse goals with dreams and wishes.Dreams and wishes are nothing more than desires. Desires are weak. Desires become strong when they are supported by:

Direction

dedication

determination

Discipline

Deadlines
These are what differentiate a desire from a goal. Goals are dreams with a deadline and an action plan. Goals can be worthy or unworthy. It is passion, not wishing that turns dreams into reality:
1.Have a definite, clear written goal.
2.Have a plan to accomplish and write it down.
3.Read the first two twice a day.

Great minds have purposes, ohers have wishes.
-Wahsington Irving
Your mind have the power to fulfill your desires.

How to make use of your mind
Mind Power- Inner Psychology to Success

The term mind power and the subconscious mind power are described in many different ways. In the psychosomatic sense mind power is labeled as ability to have emotions, imagination, memory, and will; and subconscious mind power is labeled as part of the normal individual’s personality in which mental processes function without consciousness under normal waking conditions.

Contents

1. How Mind Power and Subconscious Mind Power work
2. How to use Subconscious Mind for success

Mind power is our conscious mind, the way we think. The mind is similar to a constantly flowing spring however a natural spring cannot send forth fresh water and bitter from the same opening, nor yield both salt water and fresh. So it is with the mind and its thoughts; it cannot equally think negative and positive thoughts at the same time. One will rule the other.

mind power Since the mind reflects habitual thoughts, it is therefore our responsibility to influence our mind and brain with positive emotions, thoughts and energy as the dominating factors in our mind. Mind power is beyond positive thinking or brain power, it is thinking than believing what you think that will manifest your reality. Since this mind power is power of thought and beliefs, and these thoughts and beliefs will create the outcome of your now, you will want to stay aware to the reflections you are thinking.

Now mind power is a dual system that includes your power of thought(brain) and your subconscious mind. We all have subconscious mind power; it can be as small as smiling at your boss in the hopes of improving the odds of acquiring a raise.

It can be the way you unconsciously handle a situation whether appropriately or not. Power of the subconscious mind comes from the thoughts and beliefs of your the power of the your mind. However you think and believe is what your subconscious mind power will produce. This is done continuously, one minute at a time. Every thought nourished regularly by your mind power will activate your subconscious mind to generate those thoughts and energy whether good or bad into your life. This is how you’re present and future is created.

Your mind power and your subconscious mind work together and they fashion your reality. Let’s use a parallel to help you visualize how this works. Your subconscious mind power is similar to fertile soil that consents to any seed planted inside it. Your habitual thoughts and beliefs are the seeds which are being continually sown and they will eventually produce a crop. So if you plant weeds you will get weeds, if you plant fruit, you will get fruit. In other words, you reap what you sow. Now the conscious mind is the gardener, and it is the mind power to choose what reaches our inner garden- the subconscious.

Unfortunately, most of us do not have green thumbs because of lack of knowledge of this law, the psychology behind this success and because of this ignorance we have allowed all kinds of seeds, both good and bad, to enter. So our subconscious mind power will manifest failure, ill health and all kinds of misfortunes just as effortlessly as it will manifest success and abundance. However, it cannot manifest it both at the same time, which is why the need to constantly actuate the positive until the fertile soil of your subconscious mind power reaps only abundance. Success is only a choice away.

Power of the Subconscious Mind - Your Inner Engine

Subconscious mind power is being aware of what information enters your mind. This is critical as the subconscious mind runs on auto pilot and whatever information enters it is what it will process.

CONTENTS

1.Positive affirmation
2.Subconscious mind power
3.Daily affirmation

Positive Affirmation is a declaration that what one is declaring will happen or will be. Positive affirmation is a way to plant positive seeds of hope, courage and victory into the subconscious mind. It is believed that faith is a form of affirmation as one believes the desires have already happened though it is not manifested yet. In other words faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the confidence of things not seen as though they were or are. Affirmations in the realm of ancient Christian faith convinced these Christians that nothing was impossible and they believed the impossible into reality. These Christians conquered kingdoms, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, and escaped the edge of the sword, from weakness they were made strong, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight and even received back their loved dead by resurrection.

Subconscious mind power is gaining victory over negative thoughts and with this victory overcoming our setbacks and failures. The subconscious mind is powerful and can alter your decisions in a negative way if allowed to do so. Even though something may be true your subconscious does not deal with if it’s true, it deals with what it believes is true.

Daily affirmations or declarations are a form of feeding the subconscious mind with proper food for thought that will manifest positive situations in one’s life. Proclaiming one’s faith without ceasing is one technique for daily affirmation. For whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that has overcome the world-our faith

"NOW"The ultimate goal in life

2008-11-02T12:32:00.006+05:30

Make most out of NOW

Life is enjoying the overflowing energy
Don't be confused about goals.The ultimate goal is Live in present

only fools think of the past--fools who do not have the intelligence to live in the present. And only fools imagine about the future, because they don't have the courage to live in the present. Forget the past, forget the future, this moment is all . This moment has to become your prayer, your love , your life, your death, your everything.
ONLY COWARDS THINK OF CONSEQUENCES
Live courageously don;t be cowards. Don;t think of consequences; only cowards think of consequences. Don' t be too result-oriented; people who are result-oriented miss life. Don't think of goals, because goals are always in the future and far away, and life is here-now, close by.
PURPOSE MAKES LIFE MEANINGLESS
Don't be too purposive. Let me repeat it: don't be too purposive. don't always bring in the idea, "what is the purpose of it?" because that is a strategy created by your enemies, by the enemies of humanity, to poison your very source of life. Ask the question, "What is the purpose of it?"and everything becomes meaningless.
WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF ROSES?
It is early morning, the sun is rising and the East is red with the sun, and the birds are singing and the trees are waking up, and it is all joy. It is a rejoicing, a new day has happened again. And you are standing there asking the question, "What is the purpose of it?" you miss, you miss it totally. You are simply disconnected.
TRUST EXISTENCE LIKE ROSES DO
A rose is dancing in the wind, so delicate and yet so strong, so soft yet fighting with the strong wind, so momentary yet so confident. Look at the rose flower. Have you ever seen any rose flower nervous.? So confident, so utterly confident, as if it is going to be here forever. Just a moment's existence, and such trust in eternity. Dancing in the wind, whispering with the wind, sending out its fragrance and your are standing there asking the question, "What is the purpose of it?".
LIFE HAS NO PURPOSE
there is no purpose in life. Life is its own purpose; it is not a means to some end,it is and end unto itself. The bird on the wing, the rose in the wind, the sun rising in the morning, the stars in the night, a man falling in love with a woman, a child playing on the street.. there is no purpose. Life is simply enjoying itself, delighting in itself. Energy is overflowing, dancing, for no purpose at all. It is not a performance, it is not a business. Life is a love affair, it is poetry, it is music.

Be Here Now
Life is not a dress rehearsal. I don't care what philosophy you believe in-- we have got only one shot at this game called life. The stakes are too high to waste your life. The stakes are the future generations.
What time is ti and where are we? the answer is now and we are here. Let's make the best of now and utilize the present to fullest.The message is not that swe don't need to plan for the future. If we utilize our present to its fullest, we are sowing the seeds for a better future.
If you want to build a positive attitude, learn the phrase, " do it now" and stop the habit of procrastination.
The saddest words in life are:

"It might have been."

"I should have."

" I could have."

"I wish I had"

"If only I had given a little extra."
Never leave till tomorrow, which you can do today.
-Benjamin Franklin

We all live in the present moment but very few of us utilize thepower of this current moment.The only thing that truly exists is what is happening rightnow.The past does not exist; it's over with and should be nothing but afading memory. The future does not exist; it simply hasn't happened yet.Both the past and the future are only a part of your thoughts andmemories; they only exist in your mind and not in reality.The only thing that really exists right now is the very presentmoment that you live in and from this present moment you can drawtremendous power; the kind of power that can change your life andallow you to achieve your goals.You may not like the present moment but that's only becauseyou're thinking about what you feel the present should be. You'recomparing the present moment to something else and not appreciatingwhat is happening right now. I know some of you may say: "student, right now I don't have a job and the bank is about toforeclose. Plus my wife/husband just left me and I'm stuck with 3kids. My present is not exactly pleasant."If you're present or current situation is not pleasant then you'recomparing it to something else. You're probably thinking about whatthe now should be instead of dealing with what is going on.If you don't have a job then it's time to look for one. Don't focus on the fact that you don't have a job, and don't focus on how difficult it may seem to get a job. Instead, simply concentrate on going out andgetting a job. You live in the present moment by doing what has to be done now and not worrying about the way things should be.At the end of the day see where you are and focus on what needs tobe done next.If your children need attention right now then give them attention. If you need to go out and look for work right now then do it. Don't compare your present situation to anything. Accept what it isand make the most of it with the intention of making the presentbetter with each step that you take.I'm not saying accept don't do anything to improve your current situation.Deal with your present situation and do everything youcan to improve your life.When you begin working on the present moment with the intent ofimproving your life you begin to utilize the power of now you leavethe past in the past, you don't concentrate on the future andinstead you start living in the present moment doing everythingthat you can to improve your life now.When you do this you send a powerful message to your subconsciousmind. You tell your subconscious that you are here now and ready to getto work to improve your life.Your Subconscious mind then begins working for you because yoursubconscious only understands the present moment your subconsciousdoes not understand the future or the past your subconscious onlylives in the now; it only exists in the present moment.Understanding this process is one thing - practicing it is quite another thing.To start working with the power of now you have to get your mind simply focus on what is happening and what needs to be done right now. No more comparing or hoping for things to get better. Just deal with what is and what has to be done. When you do this you start moving forward and you allow yoursubconscious mind to help you achieve your goals because you'rehere now - working with your subconscious to create the situationsthat you want. Start living in the present moment and get yoursubconscious mind working for you

The Present is All That ExistsYou have memories, you will have feelings when you think about thepast, but let's face it the past no longer exists. You can't step back in time and go into the past. The past is done with. It doesn't exist.You can't step into the future and see what happens. Despite whatso called psychics and astrologers say there is no way of seeingthe future or living in the future. It hasn't happened. One day that future will arrive and if you'renot paying attention, if you're too focused on the past or stillworrying about the future you'll miss it completely.The only thing that is taking place right now is the present moment. As you read this newsletter that's all that you're doing. When you're done... the moment that you are currently experiencingwill never happen again! The now will never happen again! Your present moment will never happen again!Even when you think about the past you think about it in thepresent moment. You don't physically go back in time and remember the past. You only remember the past in this present moment.When you think about the future you do it in the present moment notin the future.When you think about the past and the future you are wasting thevaluable time and power that you have in the present moment.The only reason people are unhappy is because they fail to live inthe present moment, they fail to embrace the now. Instead, they often think about what their present moment should be and that always leads to unhappiness.It is impossible to have a problem and live in the present momentat the same time. When you live in the present moment your attention is completelyfocused on what is happening at that very moment. There are no thoughts of the future or the past. If you are at work - focus on work. If you are at home focus on thehome. If you're with friends focus on your friends.When you do this your subconscious mind is released and free tostart working on improving your life.Focus on the present moment. Allow your subconscious mind to work for you everyday by workingwith the power of the present moment.
How You Can Live In The Now
If you're ready to start living in the now and begin creating thelife that you want then take a look at your present situation andask yourself what's wrong with the very moment you are in.Don't think about what happened yesterday or sometime in the past. Don't focus on what might or might not happen tomorrow. Take a look at the very moment you are in see if there is anything wrong.If you're at home is there something wrong?Don't say you are out of work that's not the present moment becauseyou are looking at what is not happening.I want you to focus your mind on what is happening then see what iswrong with that picture.You should find nothing wrong with the present moment it is what itis and once you accept it you can start living again.Let's face it you can't turn your mind off but you can get it towork differently and that's what you should start doing.If you don't take control of your mind your mind willcontrol you and that's not going to help you improve your life.Ask yourself these next questions: Do you find yourself waiting for something to happen? Are you waiting to get some more time? Make more money?Meet the right person? Are you waiting for the right opportunity?Waiting is another game the mind plays because it doesn't want tolive in the present moment.If you answered yes to any of the above questions then you're notliving in the present moment you are focusing on anything but thepresent moment. I know you can't focus on the present moment or live in the now 24hours a day. But start by doing this for a few minutes a day and then continueexpanding the exercise everyday. Then track your progress. See how you feel when you only focus onwhat is happening right now. As you continually do this you'll seeyourself starting to enjoy the process.Here's a suggestion. The next time you are driving or walking payattention only to what is happening around you. Listen to thesounds, observe the people. Don't think about what you have to door what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow or whatmight happen in five minutes. Focus your attention only on what is happening right now. Doingthis will get your mind to start living in the present moment andbefore you know it you'll be able to focus your mind and utilizethe power of now.Start utilizing the power of now - you'll be more focused andyou'll enjoy the present moment. Best of all you'll start movingtoward achieving your goals and living the life - you only get one life and one chance.Make the most of it. Stop defeating yourself, stop limitingyourself. Create all the success you want and deserve in life.

Mind power through yoga

2008-10-28T13:22:00.000+05:30

Dear friends,
We'll take forward the theory of 'inner mind' as per the Indian vedic knowledge, from the last discussion. When we are asleep, who takes care of our respiration, heartbeat, temperature regulation etc.? as per the modern medicine, it's the 'autonomic nervous system'.

Vedas say that it's the inner mind. The external mind or the mind as we know is nothing but a bundle of thoughts and desires. Once the thoughts are calmed down and desires do melt away after the sadhana, the external mind gives way to the awakening of inner mind. The inner mind when awakened, makes the man a super-human. Almost every well organized religion has talked about the self realization or liberation attained by many saints, prophets, sages.

It's the inner mind, which contains all the knowledge, wisdom of the world, and one glimpse of it can transform the human life. A theory in medicine says that our DNA contains all the history of mankind and the steps of evolution. It also agrees that we have enormous unexplored knowledge within us, which needs to be decoded. Lets take an example of a home PC. It's working well but usually is underused by almost all of us. Some people make use of it to the tune of 90-95% of its capacity, but average usage is only 10% of it. It's just like our external mind.

When the PC is connected to the Internet, a whole world of knowledge opens before us. We can see any place, know almost any damn thing, do shopping, and what not just using it. This is like the inner mind.

When we experience the inner mind, we are calm, balanced, stable, very happy and above all the worries and humanly sorrows. The sense of 'being' or 'me' alone remains in the initial stages, and that also gets sublimated in the advanced stages of the experience. The vedas confirm the above states of higher experiences. Thousands of practitioners have also witnessed the same state of realization.

We at 'mindpower' are attempting to work on the same subject of awakening the inner mind, understand that everyone possesses a great power within himself, and to make the world a better place to live.

How does one do this? It needs some good training, which we will be talking about shortly. Till then, it's worth trying for everybody: the nature gives us the experience of the inner mind daily for a few minutes!! It's the time we just wake up!! There are no disturbing thoughts, no desires, only a fresh mind and a feeling of oneself! Try to experience the same tomorrow, and your day will be done! These few minutes are the happiest moments of our life.

Yoga for CM

2008-10-28T13:04:00.002+05:30

Yoga is the union of the individual soul with the Infinite Consciousness or Paramatman. The goal of all spiritual practices is the attainment of the same Infinite or Super Consciousness, by whichever name one may describe it. In this wider sense all spiritual masters are Yogis. There is, however, a particular variety of spiritual practices (Sadhana) which are called Yoga in a narrower sense, and it is usually in this sense that the word Yoga is used. This Sadhana consists mainly in controlling the Prana-vitalizing breath with Pranayama and other processes. The Yogi starts with the postulate that the microcosm contains everything that is in the macrocosm.

There is a Bengali proverb which states that what is absent in our body is also non-existent in the universe. The Yogi therefore considers his own body as the temple for worshipping the Supreme Self (Paramatma).

Kriya Yoga Simplified for the Common Man

simplified the infinite multiplicity of the processes of Raja yoga into a few stages and made it available to the common man, especially the householder who is simply lost in the wilderness of worldly duties. It is next to impossible for a householder to follow the strict principles of restraint enunciated in the ‘Ashtanga (eight step) Yoga’ of Patanjali. The processes in the Kriya yoga make us gradually fit to unfold the Divine within ourselves, with much less effort than is usually necessary. Individual Yogis have always been there in India, but due to a great general deterioration in the mass consciousness characteristic of the current world cycle of Kali Yuga, Yogic processes remained circumscribed in the hands of Yogis alone. It was much too difficult for the common man to follow. Only those who would be ready to dedicate their lives to the cause of the Divine, would be initiated into the teachings. Naturally, their number was very small. The majority of the people had no opportunity to follow the principles of Yoga even if they might have eagerness for these.

Kriya yoga teaches man that God is to be discovered in his own body first, concentrating his gaze on the point between his eye-brows. Once man realizes God within his own body, he automatically realizes Him in others too. His body is the temple where he starts worshipping the Prana which controls the entire physical machinery. Each and everybody has this Prana-vitalizing force in common and by realizing its mystery through Pranayama, etc., man realizes the Supreme Consciousness that controls the universe, for it is the same force that impels the individual and the universe. Thus, Kriya yoga will go a great way in bringing about a sense of unity amongst all men and women, and ultimately in bringing about world peace. We are on the threshold of a new era. Preparations have been going on, and we are surely ahead of a great spiritual resurgence of India and the world.

Kriya Yoga and Mantra Yoga Work Well Together

Mantra yoga can certainly lead man to success, because through a constant chanting of the Mantras the Sushumna is gradually opened up. But the opening of the Sushumna through chanting of the Mantras is an indirect process, although it is easier for the common man. The Kriya Yogi makes the Sushumna his starting point by taking recourse to different processes of controlling and channeling the Prana-lifeforce through the right path. The combination of both practices can only accelerate ones progress.

When one is not doing Kriya proper, one can keep his attention focused at the point between the eyebrows and meditate on one's mantra, practice remembrance of God's name, or attunement to Ishvara, the Soul within (editor).

Since Kriya Yoga is a series of techniques and not a Religion, Kriya Yogi's can be of Any Religion

The liberality, inherent in the Kriya yoga .As to places it on a universal footing. A man practicing the teachings of any religion may be initiated into Kriya yoga without the necessity of leaving his own religious faith. Besides, Kriyayoga may be given to any one having eagerness for Self-Realization, to whichever caste, creed or country he may belong. The Kriyayoga propounded. and the Yogasutra of the great sage Patanjali. It is a compendium of all kinds of spiritual training. But, after all, Shastras are the records of spiritual researches conducted by Great Saints. Unless one follows the teachings of the Shastras in practice, one cannot have the experience of the Divine Bliss. That is why the mystery of Dharma described in the Gita has to be realized only by direct experience. Shri Shri Lahiri Mahashaya’s Kriya yoga leads the Sadhaka to the final goal, each stage unfolding its peculiar effect and thus encouraging the seeker. As the difficult processes of Raja yoga have been much simplified , the Kriya yoga as propounded by them has been called the ‘Sahaja Kriya yoga’, that is the Kriya that comes naturally to man, without putting any artificial strain on the physical machinery. This again, is another point in favor of Kriya yoga that it is free from the dangers which sometimes come in the way of the Sadhaka in the shape of some physical distortion or disease, the outcome of mistakes in following the processes of Yoga. There is no such danger attending Kriya yoga even if one commits a mistake. Of course, Kriya yoga is "Sahaja" (meaning literally ‘that which originates at our very birth’) also in the primary sense that it is a process where we have to take recourse to the regulation of breath, the process of inhalation and exhalation which is co-equal with the very being of man.

1The human body has 3 great nerve-cords. On both sides of the spinal cord there are gangliated cords of sympathetic nerves. Ordinarily the Prana-life force moves through the passage within the gangliated cords: Ida and Pingala. But it must move through Sushumna (the very subtle passage through the spinal cord) before any success in spiritual practice (Sadhana) is to be attained. The unfolding of this passage is called the rousing of the Kundalini or the spiritual force latent in every man.

All religious and spiritual schools of thought all over the world have declared in unison that the mind has to be stilled. Only when the mind has been stilled, can there be room for the ultimate experiences that one may desire. Those who wish to have visions of divine beings (of their religious tradition), even they have to still their mind in order to achieve this vision. Those who wish to reach the stage beyond all beings – the ultimate – they too must still the mind.

However, the achievements (through the teachings) of the Bhagavad Gita are a little different. It suggests that we should reach a stage where the mind has overcome desires, where the mind should not be mindful. As long as the mind is there, there will be resolutions and dissolutions of desirable activities, and because of this, it will be impossible to overcome the cycle of birth and death.

It is because of this it is necessary to still the mind. The sum substance is that if the mind is not still nothing will happen – to that extent even our worldly activities will not be fulfilled properly . . . the human being becomes a monster.

Now the question arises: what is the mind? The agitated movement of Prana is the mind. Prana by its nature is still. However, because of several reasons it loses its stillness and starts vibrating. On the flag of this chariot called the body, rides Hanuman in the form of still current/Prana. The Prana current is still in the Sahasrara (Crown Chakra), but becomes agitated when it descends to the lower Chakras. In the five parts of the body, that Prana is given the five different names – Prana, Apana, Samana, Udana, and Vyana.

If these five Pranas reside in the body in equal balance, then there is no form of agitation in the mind. Otherwise it becomes agitated by reasons that are very ordinary.

The body is in good health when Vayu (Air), Pitta (heat) and Kapha (Moisture/Water) are in proper balance. However, because of reasons that are quite ordinary, when the balance is lost, it may fall ill. e.g. exposure to cold creates an imbalance, which may become the reason for illness. Therefore, one has to be careful not to cause any imbalance or agitation.

Similarly for the five Pranas, care must be taken not to disturb the balance by dealing with the Prana.

The chief practice to do this is Pranayama. By doing Pranayama, the Prana and Apana currents are stilled; with Nabhi Kriya, Samana current is stilled, while Mahamudra stills Udana and Vyana currents.

With these tools (the kriyas), the 5 Pranas are stilled (made quiet), and when that happens one perceives the nature of the soul through Yoni Mudra. This is the ultimate success of a human life.

As a result of these practices, in the stilled Prana at the Sahasrara, the state of the mind finds it advantageous, and one experiences the state of no mind. To date, among all practices discovered and known to the world, Pranayama is the best (most effective).

There are many types of Pranayama, but among them that Pranayama that is done along the Sushumna through the Six Chakras1, is the best, because by this Pranayama the movement of the mind and Prana are done together in unison. Those who practice this know that when the Prana is exercised along with the mind in unison, the mind does not wander in other directions. Over a long period of this practice, the mind becomes still, and no agitation remains. Just like Ganga is the best among rivers, Kashi among all places of pilgrimage, Gayatri among all Mantras, Pranava (Om)2,3 among all Beejas (root sounds), so also is Pranayama the best among all practices. This has been accepted in one voice by all sages and those practicing it, because the result of this practice can be experienced and achieved in this lifetime, at this time, and within this very body.

1The chakras are the major means upon the physical plane through which the Soul works and expresses its purpose. The glands are the physical correspondents of the chakras. The condition of the chakras and the reflection of this condition in the glands determine the state of evolution and consciousness of man and the degree to which the soul can fully express itself on the physical plane. Through the practice of kriya yoga, the kriya yogi purifies the chakras and accelerates the evolution of his consciousness. He makes his body a fit vehicle for the expression of the Soul.

2In the Sutras of Patanjali in Sadhana Pada, OM is discussed in the following Sutras:

23. By intense devotion to Ishvara, knowledge of Ishvara is gained.
24. This Ishvara is the soul, untouched by limitation, free from karma, and desire.
25. In Ishvara, the Gurudeva, the germ of all knowledge expands into infinity.
26. Ishvara, the Gurudeva, being unlimited by time conditions, is the teacher of the primeval
Lords.
27. The Word of Ishvara, is AUM (or OM). This is the Pranava.
28. Through the sounding of the Word and through reflection upon its meaning, the Way is
found.
29. From this comes the realization of the Self (the soul) and the removal of all obstacles.

3 The sounding of OM has four effects on the subtle body. It: (1) burns out coarse matter, (2) builds in refined matter, (3) it carries force through all the inner chakras to the pranamaya kosha or etheric body, and causes a definite stimulation of the petals of each chakra. If the lotus is only partially unfolded, then only some of the petals receive the stimulation. This stimulation creates a vibration (especially in the chakra in which one meditates- the head or heart) which causes a reflex action in the sushumna and down to the base. This is not in itself sufficient to arouse the kundalini; that can only be done when other conditions have been met. And (4) it sets up a vortex of energy between the reciter and the Soul / Ishvara / Source of grace invoked and creates a vacuum that results in a down pour of energy.

Why is the Kriya pranayam important? Why is the end result of the pranayam practice soul realization? How is the spirit and physical body linked? It is linked through your breath. As long as the spirit and the body are together you are breathing. The moment that spirit leaves you are not breathing. So, one end of the breath is connected to your physical body and the other end is connected with your spirit. So if you will catch hold of the breath and move along with it, you are bound to reach your spirit one-day. That is why the pranayam practice is so important. Breath links body and spirit. It is the bridge between the two. Everybody breathes but no one has seen his own breath. It is invisible but you can feel it and the spirit is even more subtle than that. And you have some control over your breath. So, if you just realize the link and the connection and if you practice ardently, you're bound to realize your spirit, the Self.

First, you become aware of the breath then the prana in the breath and then the spirit within the prana. It is the breath that indicates that the soul is there and the soul pervades your entire body. It is not centered somewhere. Life is everywhere. Even in a single hair there is life.

Though you are using your physical body to practice kriya, you should always focus beyond that.

The focus should be on the soul or spirit. And that is done through the breath.

What is the kutastha? Kutastha is a Sanskrit word that means immortal Soul.

Kriya yogi’s use the term in ways that are often confusing to westerners with no knowledge of Sanskrit. It is commonly used in two ways among kriya gurus. It is used either to describe the immortal Soul or to designate a place to focus in the head, e.g., the ajna center. When writers instruct students to focus in the kutastha, the student will typically interpret this to mean focus in the ajna center. If the student does this, he has only followed half of the instruction. Since the kutastha represents the unchanging divine aspect of the Self, what is really meant when the guru tells us to focus in the kutastha is to focus on the Soul that is revealed at the point between the eyebrows. The real point of focus is not so much a place in the head as a state of consciousness. Since the light of the Soul or Kutastha is revealed at the point between the eyebrows, kriya gurus instruct us to physically focus there. The point I am making is that the ajna center is not the kutastha. It is an instrument of perception that is able to perceive the light of the kutastha (immortal, unchanging Self) as well as many other things unrelated to the Soul. However, through usage some writers have begun to substitute the word kutastha for ajna center. This narrow use of kutastha to specify ajna center focus has been a source of some confusion. The goal of kriya yoga is union with the Soul. Kriya yogis keep that goal in view right from the start by being instructed to focus on the immortal Soul in the ajna center or the kutastha.

Let us examine some definitions of Kutastha to get a better feel for what it means.

Def. 1 The Kutastha is eternal and unchangeable

Def. 2 Kutastha, in philosophy, whatever is immovable, unchangeable, perpetually and universally the same; the indestructible spirit. (kuta, the summit; stha, standing: standing on the peak.)

Def. 3 Kutastha A philosophical term meaning 'holding the highest position,' hence the primordial divinity. As a noun it is often used as a synonym for Isvara, the Divine-Spiritual Monad. Kutastha is often used derivatively for Akasa (q.v.) and for Mulaprakriti. (Compound kuta, the highest, the summit; stha, standing. Bhagavad-Gita, W. Q. p. 108).

Def. 4. One who pervades all, supports all, and yet Himself undergoes no transformation.

Def. 5 Kutastha refers to Lakshmi, the consort of Vishnu, who is the "abhimAni"(controller) of all nature; thus, she is like a changeless anvil which supports change in others, in being herself changeless, but supporting all of nature that is ever-changing.

The world's most amazing tool

2008-10-02T15:13:00.001+05:30

The mind is a truly amazing tool. Anything that you want to have,
do, or be -- your mind can make happen.

If you don't use this tool properly it will cause more harm than good.So learn how to use this amazing inbuilt tool.
But the reality is... as powerful as the mind is, humans for the
most part greatly under use it. We've all heard the theory that we
only use about 10% of our brain's capacity.

Just 10%!

What's even crazier is that new studies suggest we don't even use
that much. It may be closer to 1 percent ...even as low as 1/10th
of 1 percent.

So "why" aren't we using more of our brains and minds?

I believe it's because we honestly don't realize how much we're
capable of.

==> WE HAVE THE TOOLS TO ACCOMPLISH ALMOST ANY GOAL WE SET FOR
OURSELVES RIGHT NOW!!

Most people just don't know it.

If you'd like to know how to "tap into" this in-built power you
already have,

Here's a Visual Representation of what I mean:

Right now, right this very second, you live in this oversized, ten
million dollar mansion. It has 26 bedrooms, 32 bathrooms, an
indoor heated pool, a bowling alley, two kitchens, three exercise
rooms, a movie theater, six hot tubs, and even a carousel for when
kids come over.

Trust me, you have all this right now inside you.

The problem is you don't know it. And because you don't know it
...you are living in a small, cramped closet in one of the many
bedrooms that you have.

Now - if you *knew* about the rest of the house, you'd be out of
that closet in a second, wouldn't you?

Unfortunately most people don't know the rest of the house exists,
so they live frustrated in that cramped little closet....

Feeling trapped, poor and unhappy - when there is a MASSIVE FEAST
on the other side of the door.

Ok, so now you know about the mansion inside of you. What's next?

Once you realize you have this incredible potential already in you,
the next step is to use simple but powerful techniques to help your
'subconscious mind' transform your potential ...into REALITY.

There are some very *powerful* mind techniques that've been around
for many years, but few people know of them ...and even fewer still
actually perform them.

If you look at the biographies and writings of most great
individuals, you will see they put these "mind techniques" into
daily practice (although many did so without being aware of it).

This Is Exciting News!

Just Think: Whether you want a million dollars, a slimmer figure,
more confidence, a better golf game, or anything else ...you can have
it.

Performing these 'mind techniques' puts you back in charge.

.

Simple pranayama for mind control

2008-10-02T14:35:00.000+05:30

Pranayama
the yogic way of breathingis pranayama
Breathing is life. The ancient yogis in India knew the intimate connection between breath and mind. For example, when your mind is angry, watch your breathing. It will be disturbed. And similarly, if you hold your breath for long, your mind will get agitated. The yogis were trying to get some degree of control over the mind. By controlling the breath, they were indirectly able to influence the mind. Breathing is an automatic process controlled by the autonomic nervous system. We do not have any conscious control over it. The science of bio-energy including the breathing movements is the practical yoga par excellence. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna explains to Arjuna that one should practice Yoga to purify himself.

Pranayama, or control or regulation of the life force is the fourth step in the Ashtanga yoga system of Patanjali. The control of the breath leads to the control of the life force or prana. The ancient yogis developed many breathing techniques to maximize the benefits of prana. The word "Pranayama" is made up of two words, Prana and Yama. Here Prana means the capacity to keep body alive by air i.e breath and Ayama means expansion, stretching or extension and control of breath. Thus Pranayama means the art of controlling breath. Pranayama is used in yoga to clear and cleanse the body and mind. It is also used in preparation for meditation, asanas, postures and focussing of the mind. Pranayama create alertness, heat on both physical and subtle levels, and arouse body, mind and spirit or kundalini power. The purpose of Pranayama is to make the respiratory system function at its best. Pranayam is not so complex as it is thought to be. The ancient Sanskrit texts state that Pranayam properly done can cure all diseases, but wrongly done will only invite the same diseases. Therefore we must take extreme caution before practicing and learn it under the supervision of an experienced teacher. If you feel any kind of discomfort or symptom such as dizziness or nausea arising as you practice breathing, then lie down and relax in Savasana or the Child Pose for a few recovery breaths. If discomfort persists, do not continue your practice until you get advice regarding your symptoms.

Before doing Pranayama, one must first learn the sectional breathing. We breathe through three parts of the chest mainly, upper, middle and lower as well as the abdomen. We must first learn how to breathe through each part individually before we can breathe through all of them. Sectional breathing helps to increase the lung capacity by encouraging fuller breathing into the lungs. It has a deeply calm effect on body and mind. This technique is used as an introduction to the full Yogic breath. Simple breathing techniques can be used at the start of a session to calm and focus the mind and body. The practice of Pranayama is highly recommended before relaxation and meditation or at the end of the session.

Types of Pranayama

The different types of Pranayama are the Bhastrika Pranayam, Anuloma / Viloma, Kapalbhati, Bhramri, Sitlee, Sitkari, Ujjayi, Vedhene Bandh. The main Pranayama is the Bhastrika Pranayama.
0.Simple pranayama
Sit in sukhasana close the right nose using the thumb and breahte small equal amounts of air through the left nose for 10 times.Next close the left nose with ring finger and leave the air from the right nose. repeat the procedure by alternating the breathe in and breathe out for the right and left noses.

1. Bhastrika Pranayama
The word ‘Bhastrika’ is a Sanskrit word which means leather bellow, which was used in the olden times to blow furnaces, where air is forcibly drawn in and out. This pranayama increases the fire in the body. In this type of pranayama, the diaphragm movement is used for the internal fire creating physical, Pranic and psychic heat. Bhastrika constitutes as a very powerful pranayam. Basically, a combination of Kapalbhati and Ujjaye Pranayam makes one Bhastrika. One who starts practice of Kapalbhati or Ujjaye finds it very easy to do the Bhastrika.

Steps in Bhastrika Pranayama
1). Firstly, sit in Padmasana, Siddhasana or Sukhasana with tends on knees and eyes closed. These postures lock the body into a stable position and permit freedom of abdominal movement. Also these postures are firm and strong which is a strong requirement for this pranayama in which rapid breathing is required.

2) Secondly, breathe in vigorously but deeply through both the nostrils and then breath out or exhale forcefully through both the nostrils. One such vigorous, forceful inhalation and exhalation with out any strain constitute one cycle of Bhastrika. It should be remembered that the inhalation should be with the same and uniform force and vigour. Please ensure that both nostrils are clear and blowing freely. The intensity or frequency of breathing should be very mild, without any undue force. It should be like an amplified form of normal breathing.

2. Ujjayi Breath
The Ujjayi technique is a very soothing technique which can be applied to sectional breathing or used while holding Yoga postures. This type of breathing helps to increase the lung capacity (and more oxygen is absorbed into the bloodstream), energy levels, and also achieves a state of calmness and mental clarity. In this technique, partially close the back of your throat, which cover the windpipe, so that as you inhale and exhale through your nose, the air passes through a narrower air passage in your throat, creating the sound made by your breathing while you are in a state of deep sleep. This sound can be likened to the whispering of the letters “hhhhh” expressed on inhalation and exhalation.

3. Bhramri
Bhramri is known as the bee breath. Bhramri helps to clear and strengthen the respiratory system and improve vocal resonance. It has a calming effect on the body that uplifts the spirit, and clears and invigorates the mind. In this pranayama, keep your lips gently closed throughout, inhale deeply, then hum as you exhale, extending the exhalation as long as possible. Use your abdominal muscles to control the evenness of your breath on exhalation. Repeat this once more. If you wish to stimulate your lung cells to further invigorate the vocal resonance and your body, tap your chest with your fists or fingertips as you hum on the out breath.

4. Sitali and Sitkari
Sitali and Sitkari are the two breathing techniques which have a cooling effect on the body. This technique is very useful during the hot months of the year. They also calm the nervous system. Sitali, particularly, can alleviate nausea and the symptoms of asthma.

In Sitali on inhalation, curl your tongue so that the sides fold up, forming a tube, with your tongue protruding from you lips. Raise your chin as you inhale through your tongue (like a straw), feeling the cool air over the tongue. On exhalation, slightly lower your chin, place the tip of your tongue behind your front teeth, close your lips, and exhale through your nose.

In Sitkari part your jaw slightly, so that your upper and lower teeth are a small distance apart. Your tongue rests at the base of your mouth, and the corners of your mouth are opened out as if in a wide smile. Inhale and exhale through your teeth, with the air passing over your tongue. The air should feel cool as it moves over the surface of your tongue during inhalation.

5. Anuloma Viloma
Anuloma means with the natural order and Viloma means going against the order. This technique helps to balance and harmonize the functioning of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. It has a soothing effect on the nervous system and calms the mind. Because exhalations are longer than inhalation, it encourages the removal of state air and toxins.

In this type of pranayama, raise your right hand, curling your forefinger and middle finger into your palm, leaving thumb, fourth finger, and little finger extended. Then place your thumb on the right side of your nose and apply gentle pressure just under the bone, where the fleshy part of the nose begins. Inhale through the left nostril then release and exhale through both nostrils. Then, use your fourth finger, apply pressure to the left nostril, inhaling through the right and release and exhale through both nostrils.

Creativity

2008-10-01T16:19:00.001+05:30

1.think about creativity

Brainstorm. If properly carried out, brainstorming can help you not only come up with sacks full of new ideas, but can help you decide which is best. Click here for more information on brainstorming.

3.

Always carry a small notebook and a pen or pencil around with you. That way, if you are struck by an idea, you can quickly note it down. Upon rereading your notes, you may discover about 90% of your ideas are daft. Don't worry, that's normal. What's important are the 10% that are brilliant.

4.

If you're stuck for an idea, open a dictionary, randomly select a word and then try to formulate ideas incorporating this word. You'd be surprised how well this works. The concept is based on a simple but little known truth: freedom inhibits creativity. There are nothing like restrictions to get you thinking.

5.

Define your problem. Grab a sheet of paper, electronic notebook, computer or whatever you use to make notes, and define your problem in detail. You'll probably find ideas positively spewing out once you've done this.

6.

If you can't think, go for a walk. A change of atmosphere is good for you and gentle exercise helps shake up the brain cells.

7.

Don't watch TV. Experiments performed by the JPB Creative Laboratory show that watching TV causes your brain to slowly trickle out your ears and/or nose. It's not pretty, but it happens.

8.

Don't do drugs. People on drugs think they are creative. To everyone else, they seem like people on drugs.

9.

Read as much as you can about everything possible. Books exercise your brain, provide inspiration and fill you with information that allows you to make creative connections easily.

10.

Exercise your brain. Brains, like bodies, need exercise to keep fit. If you don't exercise your brain, it will get flabby and useless. Exercise your brain by reading a lot (see above), talking to clever people and disagreeing with people - arguing can be a terrific way to give your brain cells a workout. But note, arguing about politics or film directors is good for you; bickering over who should clean the dishes is not.

The principle is that the body always follows the mind.

2008-10-01T15:59:00.000+05:30

In modern terms this means romance, and many of our reader's are looking for some ideas and we have some great ideas for to start thinking about:

* IDEA # 1 If your partner is going away for a few days, tell her that you are worried about her so you have organized a bodyguard to look after her. Then give her a small teddy bear.

* IDEA # 2 Buy a packet of glow in the dark stars and stick the stars on the roof above your bed to spell out a message such as "I Love You" When the lights go down, your message will be revealed!

* IDEA # 3 On a special occasion, buy your partner eleven real red roses and one artificial red rose. Place the artificial rose in the center of the bouquet. Attach a card that says: "I will love you until the last rose fades."

* IDEA # 4 Buy the domain name of your partner's name if it is available for example www.TanyaJohnston.com. Create a web page containing a romantic poem and a picture of a rose. When your partner is surfing the web, casually ask whether she has ever checked to see whether her domain name is taken. Let her type it in to discover her page.

* IDEA # 5 Buy a stylish hand mirror and give it to your partner as a gift. Include a card in the box saying "In this mirror you will see the image of the most beautiful woman in the world."

Education

2008-10-01T15:28:00.003+05:30

The first step towards knowledge is awareness of areas of ignorance. The more a person gets, the more he realizes what areas he is ignorant in. A person who thinks he knows everythig has the most to learn.
Ignorant people don't know they are ignorant.They don't know that 'they don't know'.In fact , more than ignorance, the bigger problem is the illusion of knowledge, because when you think you know something-but don't-your decision-making will be flawed.
"sixty years ago I knew everything; now i know nothing;education is a progressive discovery of your own ignorance"
Will Durant

Brainpower vs Brawn power

2008-10-01T14:53:00.003+05:30

Animals are those people who have not received any education. And those who r not compassionate,no skill for anything and those who know not what charity is. A person who has got knowledge or skill for something, is richer than the rich who is not educated.
One must look carefully before treading to avoid ditches or potholes. A poject needs careful thought before being started.
To benefit from someone's advice aperson must have capacity to imbibe or riceive. A seive collects no water. No book can help a slow brain. A mirror in the hands of a blind person os of no use.
Don't ever live with your relatives as a poor consin. It will kill your self respectand you will lose confidence in yourself. It would be better ti retreat to some jungle and face its dangers. There you may lose your life but the honour will remain intact.
The birds converge on a tree in the evening to spend the night.But in the morning all of then fly in different directions in search of food. Man must learn a lession from this .Pepole come together and then they go thier own ways to pursue thier own interst. The separations must not grieve you. It is the law of nature.
The brain power is greater than brawn power. The brain has the winning edge

HOME

2008-10-01T11:33:00.007+05:30

The blog contains the articles about

Love
Brain power
Yoga
Wisdom
NEW posts

Articles of Love

2008-10-01T11:29:00.004+05:30

How yoga is usefull in sex
LOVE is a feeling that clings materialistic mind on one single object
Yoga focuses people on how they feel, which is something they don’t do enough during sex,
Yoga plays an important role in shaping our love life.
yoga and sex

Back HOME

Articles on Widom

2008-10-01T11:09:00.003+05:30

Click on the below links to read the posts on wisdom
Wisdom
Reaching your goals quickly by using Energy manager
Never let a problem become an excuse.
Why pepole hate or love each other
ideal woman
Ancient Solutions for Modern Dilemmas
sixty four arts
Cosmic Consciousness: Break Your Mental Barriers
hinduism personal adornment
stress
Unlimited potential
Psychic
Telepathy
Telekinesis
stress
depression
superstitious
Self Defense Kalari
The Three Orders of Thought
Home

NOVELEX(Novel Exercise)

2008-10-01T09:04:00.003+05:30

Dr. Arnold Scheibel a neuroscientist beleives firmly that novel tasks stimulate brain power. Challenge the brain with anything new and different. He advises people to do things they have never done before. He himself recently took up sculpture. Novelty is very biologically stimulating to the brain. The Novelex programme calls for providing the brain with novel,unique and different eperiences on a day-to-day basis. They should constitute non-routine and unexpected experiences using various combinations of your physical senses - vision, hearing,taste,smell, and touch. It differs from other types of brian exercise, such as solving puzzles, riddles, magic squares, mathematical/accounting problems and memory exercise. Novelex makes use of the five senses in novel ways to develop the brain's natural drive to form associations between different types of information.

Adults normally go through life in remarkabnly fixed routines.Most of their actions are perfectly predictable and free from surprise.The result is that our brains's ability to make new associations declines. Routine behaviours are almost subconscious in nature and performed using a minimum of brain energy. Thus the brain gets little exercise . The power of the cortex to create new associations is, therfore, not properly utilised. The human brain hungers for novelity. It is designed to repond to new information coming from the outside world. the brain gets stimulated when novel and unexpected stimuli are presented. It is what turns the brain on. In reponse to novelity, cortical activity is increase in more and varied brain areas. this strenghtens synaptic connections, links different areas together in new patterns, and pumps up the production of neurotrophins.
Noveles is neither passive nor routine. It uses the sense in novel ways to break out of everyday routines. The latest brain imaging studies have clearly established that novel tasks activate large of the cortex , indicating increased levels of brain activity in several distinct areas. Of the five senses with which we establish contact with the outside world, we mostly rley upon only the two sense of vision and hearing. the other senses of taste,smell and touch are rarely used. Novelex makes use of all the senses.
Any exercise programme demands time. One should be higly motivated to set aside a specific time to slot take up a physical exercise programme. Fortunately, NOvelex programmes are designed in such a way that they fit into what you do routinely, without taking extra time.
they are recommended as a lifestyle choice, nopt as a crash course or a quick fix. Simply by making small changes in your daily habits you can turn daily routines into 'mind-building' exercise. How ever, Novelex exercises should not become a routine affair.

The following techniques constitute Novelex:

Involve one or more of your senses in a novel way:
We normally use the sense of vision for most of our routine activities. When the sense of vision is blocked, you are forced to use other senses. For example, get dressed for office with your eyes closed.

HAve bath with the eyes closed: All activities relating to bathing should be done with the eyes closed . Your hands will probably notice varied textures of your own body, which you were not aware of earlier.

Make liberal use of your non-dorminant hand.
If you are right handed , start using your left hand for most routine work like brushing your teeth , buttoning clothes, opening the door ,turning on switches, etc. A variety of things can be done using your left hand. When you use your left hand, your right brain is stimulated, which we rarely stimulate.

If you are habituated to using a ball pen, use jpencil or an ink pen.

Take a different route to yuour office/school or college.
When you go on yuour normal route your brain gets on automatic pilot. When anything is done automatically without any awareness, the brain is not stimulate at all.
when you take a new route all your sense must be alert while you drive.

If you want to read fast, silent reading is recommended.
But if you want to stimulate your brain readin aloud helps. You may also ask a friend to read to you. When you read aloud or listen to someone read , you use very different circuits tha when you read silently. Brain imaging clearly showed three distint brain regions lighting up when the same word was read , spoken or heard. for example, listening to words activated two distinct areas in the left and rigth hemispheres of the cortex, while speaking words activated the motor cortex on both sides of the brain as wll as the crebellum. Just looking at words activites only one area of the corted in the left hemisphere.

if you are a South Indian, ocassionally try Norht indian dishes.

You may also change the order of eating , szy start with deset. Your brain will thank you for such a change.

Try to identify the items of oof on your plate only through the sense of smell.

When you go for a walk in the morning, try to change thr route every day. If you walk in a park , try to walk with your eyes closed.

If you plan a vacation, visit new places and interact with new people. the more you travel the more would be the brain power. Travel broadens teh vision and percepton and also stimulates the brain. Travelling is something novel for the senses.

Write something creative. Creative activity stimulates the brain.

Learn Sign language. this would not only help you communicate with challenged people comfortabley, but stimulate your brain because of the novel way of communiocating.

In office or at home, once in a way , repositon the furnitur and furnishings.

Learn a new language, acquire new skills and also try to understand and operate any new gadgets.

Constantly change the pattern of whatever you are doing.

Do all the Novelex and Find out how refreshing you will be.Home

Articles on Yoga

2008-09-30T19:55:00.003+05:30

Pranayama
Pranayama
Basics of various types of Pranayama
Yama principle of yoga
Yoga Tips
Ahimsa (Non Violence):YAMA
Satya (Truthfulness):Yama
Asteya (Honesty):Yama
Brahmacharya (Sexual Continence):
Aparigrah (Non possessiveness):Yama
Yoga & Sex
Surya Namaskar some practical guidelines
Why practice Yoga?
Yoga Sutras by Patanjali
BharataNatyam: A Kala and its Biological Implications
Meditation and Stress
Jnana Yoga
Dharana (Fixation of Attention)

Articles on subconscious mind

2008-09-30T19:47:00.002+05:30

Habits
The Subconscious Mind
Eliminating Negative Thinking
Acknowledging
Mind Power Basics
Visualization
The Subconscious & Synchronicity
mind power basics
Mind power
Fate
Managing energy to acquire energy (Subconscious mind and habits)

Stress

2008-09-30T18:11:00.005+05:30

Stress destroys the ability to concentrate in several ways:

Stress causes release of both norpinephrine and serotonin. Both these neurotransmitters are necessary for sharp thinking, but prolonged,excessive release depletes their store and eventually leaves the brain in short supply.

Stress releases hydrocortisone. Scientists have found that excess hydrocortisone damages the hippocampus, which is the centre of learning and remembering.Chronic hydrpcortisone release will actually shrink brain size through cell death.

Stress stimulates the glutamate receptors and causes excitotoxicity of the brain cells, which are pushed into overtime activity. This condition fatigues brain function,and in chronic conditions will eventually also cause cell death.

Stress interrupts sleep patterns.Loss of sleep immediately affects one's ability to concentrate.

Manage stress by developing a wholesome philosophy in life:
For effective functioning of the brain it is essentiqal to manage stress by adopting the following philosophy in life:

Live in the present : "NoW" is all there is, and the future is just another present moment to live when it arrives. the present moment is inseparable from us.At any point of time you cannot do away with the NOW. This is the only thing that is always with you. the past is dead and the future is unborn. People who experience stress are those who live either in the past or the future. Guilt of the past and worries of the future always haunt them.Those who know how to grab the present moment and maximise it have chosen a stress free, effective and fulfilling life. It is a choice each of us can make.

Accept the Inevitable: Many things in life are beyond our control. Our birth itself could be considered as fate. Death of our beloved ones may occur any moment in our life. Accidents can happen to any body at any moment .These are things for which we are not responsible.Many things cannot be changed. All things that are inevitable in life should be accepted gracefully;otherwise we shall be tormented with stress,tension and worries.

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change
the courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference.

You are what you are:

Our relationship with others should be one of the neither superiority nor inferiority.the repetition of the following statements would reinforce in you this philosophy:
No one is superior to me
No one is inferior to me
I am what I am.

You are unique in this world:
Be convinced that you are something new in this world. Be proud of being unique."Make the most of what Nature gave you. In the last analysis all art is biographical. You can sling only what you are. You must be what your experience,your environment and your heredity have made you. For better or for worse,you must cultivate your own little garden, and play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life," said the Legendary Dale Carnegie.

There is no success or failure in life:
success or failure is a matter of attitude in life. We should take life as it unfolds. Our main business in life is to involve ourselves deeply in the creative activities in which we are keenly interested without bothering much about reward or result.There is no question of failure. Failure might or result.There is no question of failure .Failure might suggest that we have to make some more attempts to accomplish the task in hand. Develop the attitude:
"When I win I win ,when I lose I learn".Every second of our wakeful state provides a wonderful opportunity to learn one thing or another.Every failure should be considered as deferred success. Never quit.Pursue your project till you succeed in your attempts.
"Never,Never,Never.Never, NEVER GIVE UP" said WINSTON Churchill.

Whatever happens is for your good:
Think in a positive way that whatever happens to you in life is for your own good. An ancient story is related here to illustrate this point:
A king and his minister went into a jungle to hunt. A tiger attacked them and in the fight the king lost a finger. He was in agony, but the minister said,"Every thing is for our good." At this the king got angry and pushed him into a shallow dry well. Falling into the well, the minister uttered,"Everthing is for our good."
After a while some tribals captured the king. They intended to sacrifice him,bu on second thought freed him when they realised he was minus a finger. Then the king came to the minister, rescued him from the well and asked, "Why did you say 'Everthing is for our good' when I pushed you into the well?"
The minister said: "you Majesty was saved because of the loss of a finger, for the sacrificial victim should not have any blemish. But if I had not been pushed into the well, they would have sacrificed me."

Convert minus into plus:
one of the best ways to manage stress is to convert minus into plus. Count your blessings and not your troubles. Develop an attitude to convert minus into plus.

Don't expect justice and fairness:
There is virtually no justice and fairness in this world. The general trend is that might is right. The prisons are filled only with those who are not able to defend their case with money. People in power do far worse things but escape due to the power they hold.Few politicians in India have been punished for fraudulent and corrupt practices. Only poor and helpless people are regularly punished and victimised. There fore, don't except justice and fairness at every turn of life3.

Expecting gratitude is unrealistic:
People may tend to forget the good you have done them. It is unwise to expect that every one should be graceful.

Accept mysticism gracefully:
We cannot reason our everything that happens in our life. A certain amount of mystery pervades the life of everyone. In an accident many died and a few escaped. Why? we don't know.Accept it.

the best is yet to be:
This is one of the best principles to be adopted in the sphere of personal growth and development. We should always be satisfied with what we have but not with what we are. It i s better to strive hard to improve our potential , capabilities ,efficiency, character etc. Every minute of our personality for a happy and prosperous life through a stress free attitude.
Kaizen is the word given by the Japanese for continuous steady growth and development in life.

Articles on Brain power

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A MYSTICAL ENTITY
A Vital Organ
Affirmation
Aromatherapy
Awareness
Brain Foods
Brainstorming
Calmness
Concentration
Creativity
Creeping and Crawling
CHEMICAL ENVIRONMENT OF THE BRAIN
Depression in the Workplace: Treatment Program Can Improve Productivity Outcomes
Environment
EXPLORING THE BRAIN’S ROLE IN CREATIVITY
Exploring the Relationship Between Sleep, Dreams, and Memory
Flow Experience
Forgetting
Happy Frame of Mind
Imagination
IMPOSSIBLE IS NOTHING!
Learning Exercises The Brain
List the types of depression and their symptoms
Problem-Solving Techniques
Memory
Memory Improvement Techniques
Mind Power - Power of Inner mind I
Mind mapping
Martial Arts for brains development
NOVELEX(Novel Exercise)
Physical Aspects of the Brain
Proper diets for brain
Problem-Solving Techniques
Principles for brain
Right Brain and Left Brain
Stress
Sri Yantra
To increase IQ
The list of (Brain power) tools
Travel
Unlock your true Potential

Please click below to know more articles about subconcious mind
Articles on subconscious mind

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Mind Power - Power of Inner mind I

Travel

2008-09-28T23:07:00.000+05:30

Visiting new places and interacting with strangers is a good way to coax the brain into making new demdritic connections. What you should mostly avoid is simply doing nothing. Those who remain active perserve cognitive function and brain metabolism. Travel provides abundant opportunity for mental exercises, which is vitally important for brain regeneration.

The ideal qualities of a person

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I am a man so anything I say is only going to be my opinion of what I feel are important qualities. I am straight btw so there is no confusion here. The list I am about to make would more or less be the same as a list of ideal qualities I would seek from a female I wanted to be in a relationship with.

Close to his family; I'm not talking mama's boy here but a guy who has a very close caring relationship with his parents is more likely to treat you well and your family well than a guy who is a total ass towards his family. It is also a clear indicator in many cases on how ready he is to be a good father to any future children that may come as a result of the relationship.

Compassion; a guy who is compassionate towards others is more than likely going to be compassionate towards you when you need him to be. Men who are incapable of showing compassion towards others usually turn out to be lousy choices for long term comitted relationships.

A great sense of humor; I am not saying you should be with a guy that finds every little thing funny. However life would suck big time being with someone who had absolutely no sense of humor at all and was serious about everything.

Intelligence: It is not necessary for you to seek out only card carrying members of Mensa. However you certainly don't want a guy who is capable of memorizing every little insignificant sports fact known to man but can't figure out the square root of 9 is 3.

Faithfulness; This should actually have been listed as the first quality. Now mind you you don't want a needy man who is going to be all clingy and everything. However if you find out a guy you are interested i has had 8 girlfriends in the last 6 months that would be a pretty good indicator that he is one night stand material but definitely not long term comitted relationship material.

Romantic; While it is not necessary to have a guy that romance novels are made of You do want someone who can be spontaneous and do sweet little things for you just because. Unromantic men are the biggest cause of their partner cheating on them. Guys tend to get into this comfort zone after being in a relationship for awhile where they think their partner knows they love them and they don't need to show it any more. However most women never get tired of being told how beautiful they are to their mate or having their mate do sweet little romantic things for them just because. When men stop doing that stuff women tend to take it personally and feel that the guy no longer loves them. Then along comes another guy who tells them all the things they long to hear and before you know it the boyfriend/husband is history.

In my opinion these qualities are way more important than how hot and hunky the guy is. Don't get me wrong it's not a crime to want someone that appeals to the eyses as well as the other senses but I think looks should be less of a priority.
As a man myself, I know it is important to pick a right female partner. I see the beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure that she carries, or the way she combs her hair. The true beauty of a woman must be seen in her eyes, because that is the doorway to her heart - the place where love resides.

Likewise, a woman should also know how to pick her ideal male partner. All the while, I thought it was true love of the man was good enough for all women. Until I met an intelligent attractive lady who enlightened me further. She said, getting a man who could shower her with true love alone isn't sufficient. Most important her partner has to be intelligent, kind, fun, good hearted, understanding, motivated and lovable. WoW! Love alone isn't good. The man can be intelligent but can he creates fun and excitement or offer humour to make her laughs when she is sad. The man can be smart but does he cares and has concern for others. He can be rich but has he the understanding of life and offer humanity. Has he got the confidence to motivate and advise. Is he an all rounder of being a likable and lovable person.

Gentlemen there! Man looks at women but ladies look at us too. Is not easy to be a true lover to an ideal intelligent attractive lady either. Before I left, I asked her,"My dear, do I qualify to be that ideal man?
This book is for women who want to be more Cinderella than Cruella De Vil, but this book is not just about living happily ever after. It's a thoughtful look at the wonderful, unique, and God-ordained role a woman has in her husband's life. Author Sharon Jaynes surveyed hundreds of men and conducted countless interviews. In them she asked these important questions:

* How would you describe the woman of your dreams?
* What does your wife do well that other women learn from?
* What has been you greatest struggle in your marriage?
* How could your wife help alleviate that problem?
* What is one thing you wish women understood about what a man wants in the woman of his dreams?

Seven qualities came up over and over again as men honestly shared their responses. The woman of a man's dreams prays for him, respects him, adores him, initiates intimate friendship with him, sees him as second to none, encourages him, and sexually fulfills him. Also included is a study guide, which makes this book perfect for individuals or groups of women wanting to be all God has called them to be in the lives of the men they love.

Right Brain and Left Brain

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The three part brain is also divided into a right and left hemisphere. Each hemisphere is responisible for differnt modes of thinking, each specialising in certain skills.

Although there is some crossover and interaction between the two sides, the thinking processes of the left brain are

logical

linear

orderly

rationaly

sequential

organised

systematic

reality based

dealing with abstract ideas

verbal expression

reading

writing

auditory association

identifying facts and figures

phonetics and symbolism and

micro approach

The right brain thinking modes are

creative

imaginative

random

intuitive

non-verbal ways of knowing

unorganised

spatial awareness

shape and pattern recogintion

art

music

colour sensitivity

feeling the presence of objects and people

visualisation and

macro approach
To lead an effective life both hemisphers of the brain should be given equal importance. Those who make use of both hemispheres of the brain tend to produce better results in life. They learn very fast. Most geniuses use both left and right brains . Unfortunaely, the modern sytem of education emphasisesleft brain activities and neglects right brain activities.

Habits

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Most of life is habitual. You do the same things you did yesterday, the day before and every day for the last month. It’s estimated that out of every 11,000 signals we receive from our senses, our brain only consciously processes 40.

Habits, good or bad, make you who you are. The key is controlling them. If you know how to change your habits, then even a small effort can create big changes.

I’ve been using these techniques for years to re-engineer many aspects of my life. That includes overhauling my diet, exercising regularly, cutting out television, and bulking my e-mail and work routines. Little changes that, when put on autopilot, can result in an improved quality of life.

Here are some tips to get you started:Use a Trigger - A trigger is a short ritual you perform before a habit. If you wanted to wake up earlier this might mean jumping out of bed as soon as you hear the sound of your alarm. If you wanted to stop smoking this could be snapping your fingers every time you feel the urge for a cigarette. A trigger helps condition a new pattern more consistently.

Replace Lost Needs - If you opened up your computer and started removing hardware, what would happen. Chances are your computer wouldn’t work. Similarly, you can’t just pull out habits without replacing the needs they fulfill. Giving up television might mean you need to find a new way to relax, socialize or get information.

One Habit at a Time - A month may seem like a long time to focus on only one change, but I’ve found trying to change more than a few habits at a time to be reckless. With just one habit change you can focus on making it really stick. Multitasking between three or four often means none become habits.

Balance Feedback - The difference between long-term change and giving up on day 31 is the balance of feedback. If your change creates more pain in your life than joy, it is going to be hard to stick to. Don’t go to the gym if you hate it. Find diets, exercise, financial plans and work routines that are fun to follow and support you.

“But” to Kill Bad Thoughts - A prominent habit-changing therapist once told me a great way to nuke bad thinking. Anytime you feel yourself thinking negatively about yourself, use the word “but” and point out positive aspects. “I’m lousy at this job – but – if I keep at it I can probably improve.”

Write it Down - Don’t leave commitments in your brain. Write them on paper. This does two things. First, it creates clarity by defining in specific terms what your change means. Second, it keeps you committed since it is easy to dismiss a thought, but harder to dismiss a promise printed in front of you.

30, 90, 365 - I’d like to say most habits go through a series of checkpoints in terms of conditioning. The first is at thirty days. Here it doesn’t require willpower to continue your change, but problems might offset it. At ninety days any change should be neutral where running the habit is no more difficult than not running it. At one year it is generally harder not to run the habit than to continue with it. Be patient and run habits through the three checkpoints to make them stick.

Get Leverage - Give a buddy a hundred bucks with the condition to return it to you only when you’ve completed thirty days without fail. Make a public commitment to everyone you know that you’re going to stick with it. Offer yourself a reward if you make it a month. Anything to give yourself that extra push.

Keep it Simple - Your change should involve one or two rules, not a dozen. Exercising once per day for at least thirty minutes is easier to follow than exercising Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays with yoga the first day and mountain biking the third day, except when it is raining in which case you will do… Simple rules create habits, complex rules create headaches.

Consistency is Key - The point of a habit is that it doesn’t require thought. Variety may be the spice of life, but it doesn’t create habits. Make sure your habit is as consistent as possible and is repeated every day for thirty days. This will ensure a new habit is drilled in, instead of multiple habits loosely conditioned.

Experiment - You can’t know whether a different habit will work until you try it. Mix around with key habits until you find ones that suit you. Don’t try to follow habits because you should, but because you’ve tested them and they work in your life.

Dharana (Fixation of Attention)

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Dharana is the sixth limb of Ashtanga Yoga. Dhr means "to hold." Literally, the word dharana means ‘immovable concentration of the mind’. The essential idea is to hold the concentration or focus of attention in one direction. This is not the forced concentration of, for example, solving a difficult mathematics problem; rather dharana is a form of meditation which could be called receptive concentration.

For example, imagine a large reservoir of water used by farmers for watering their fields. There are channels leading away from the reservoir in different directions. If the farmer has dug all the channels the same depth, the water runs equally in all directions. But if one channel is deeper than the others, more water flows through it. This is what happens in dharana: we create the conditions for the mind to focus its attention in one direction instead of going out in many different directions. Deep contemplation and reflection can create the right conditions, and the focus on this one point that we have chosen becomes more intense. We encourage one particular activity of the mind and, the more intense it becomes, the more the other activities of the mind fall away.

The objective in dharana is to steady the mind by focusing its attention upon some stable entity. Before retracting his senses, on may practice focusing attention on a single inanimate object. After such retraction, some inner means of focusing may help. Practices such as:
bullet Rolling the eyes upward and holding them together, as if attending to a spot in the center of the forehead,
bullet Rolling the eyes downward, as if attending to the navel,
bullet Rolling the eyes forward, as if attending to the tip of the nose,

are very popular in this regard. The particular object selected has nothing to do with the general purpose, which is to stop the mind from wandering -through memories, dreams, or reflective thought-by deliberately holding it single-mindedly upon some apparently static object.

When the mind has become purified by yoga practices, it becomes able to focus efficiently on one subject or point of experience. Now we can unleash the great potential for inner healing. If the yogi chooses to focus on a center ("chakra") of the inner energy flow, he or she can directly experience the physical and mental blocks and imbalances that remain in his or her system. This ability to concentrate depends on excellent psychological health and integration and is not an escape from reality, but rather a movement toward perception of its true nature.

Jnana Yoga

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Part I

One lesson a jnani must learn is the limitation of both words and concepts. We work with them; they are useful tools. Some concepts more nearly approximate the truth than others. Some lead towards the truth while others lead away from it. Some phrases or ideas even have the virtue of invoking an experience of truth, although they are not themselves the truth. The jnani cannot be attached to certain expressions. All will be seen to fall short of the goal, and must be relinquished along the way. Better sooner than later. The attachment to ideas or expressions is as bad or worse than the attachment to material goods or sensory experience.

I use the term "expressions" to mean "certain phrases, sentences, terms, or ideologies which are customarily used to express a given concept or concepts." I prefer to use the term expressions rather than dogmas or doctrines because even non-dogmatic or non-doctrinaire people can be attached to a given expression.

Part 2

A jnani must understand that one cannot change one's reality by changing one's thoughts. This is precisely the problem with most New Age visualization faddishness. It is a change in consciousness, not ideas, that produces an alteration in reality. Unless the quality of consciousness changes, then you get more of what you already have. This is not to say that those New Age methods never produce results. They can and do. However, the changes they produce amount to nothing more than shifting the furniture around on the stage, or at best moving the play from one theater to another. The plot remains the same, and the ending is identical. If you want a new story, you need a new script. The new script is the product of creation. Creation occurs at the level of super-consciousness, not at the level of ordinary, ego-based self-consciousness. Thus jnana yoga is not about opinions, concepts, etc. The purpose of jnana yoga is not a new set of notions, any more than the purpose of asana practice is a healthy body. In both cases the purpose is heightened awareness of one's identity with the One Source.

Could you give specific examples of how one might practice jnana yoga?

If you read the posts, earnestly attempt to assimilate and integrate them, and allow yourself to observe how your reactions to life's events compares, contrasts, or is in any way modified by the comprehension you have gained, you will be doing jnana yoga. This is brief, and I will go into much more detail as time goes on. There is a certain order to the unfoldment of these things, and foundations to construct, but you will see how it all fits together. In the meantime, (which as St. Jimi observed is a fine time), the message is in the doing. More later.

Could you explain what is meant by raja yoga?

The short answer is that it is the yoga discussed by Patanjali in the "Yoga Sutras," combining asana, pranayama, moral observances, etc. For further information I would refer you to one of the many excellent translations of Patanjali that are available. My personal favorites are "How to Know God" by Swami Prabhavananda of the Ramakrishna Order, and "The Science of Yoga" by I.K. Taimni (no longer in print in the U.S. but I recently found an Indian printing on the Web by doing a search on "Taimni". It was inexpensive and arrived swiftly. I no longer remember who the merchant was but I believe he was in LA. Many Indian publishing houses do a wonderful job of keeping inexpensive versions of classics in many fields, such as yoga, philosophy, and homeopathy, available when they are no longer in print elsewhere.)

Perhaps a stupid question but is there any "organizing
construct" which links the various disciplines (branches of yoga)
together? Do they all agree on certain overriding tenets? Also, is
yoga intrinsically tied to Hinduism or are these two concepts separate
ideologies which do not necessarily go together.

As far as I know there is no central organizing construct tying all branches of yoga together. There are many different philosophies within Hinduism, with degrees of disagreement between them. Yoga sprang out of Hinduism and is closely tied to it, and yet it can be and is taken separately by many. I know devout Christians of many types who practice yoga without buying the Hindu theology. Having said that, let me qualify it some: there are definitely similarities in practice. If you look at Hindu yoga, Buddhist meditation, Zen koans, Chinese systems such as chi qong and t'ai chi, and western systems such as Qabala and alchemy, there are remarkable similarities among them. But their practitioners probably could not get together in a room and agree on how to describe it or put it into words.

Finally, I am wondering if you also could share your take on the concept
of metaphysics and whether you feel it has any connection to yoga or
spiritual practice.

Metaphysics and spiritual practice: there is definitely a connection. Definitions need to be precise, though. There is a term metaphysics which is a technical term in western philosophy which has meant basically the same thing for many centuries, and then there is the contemporary, new age usage which means something quite different.

Frankly I have never been able to get a good handle on what the contemporary usage means, partly because my prior philosophical training has me using it in one particular sense for which it is so useful I hate to give it up, and partly because the new age usage seems vague, like it changes from person to person depending on what they need it to mean. So please let me know what metaphysics means to you and we can go from there.

If you are not familiar with the philosophical meaning, by all means do a word search on the Web and see what you come up with. You will have to winnow a great deal of chaff from the wheat but you will come up with some good resources if you look more to URLs with .edu at the end rather than .com :-)

Having done such a search, if you have more specific questions I will be happy to go into it, but I do prefer that people (this is addressed to all in general and not just you, L.) do some homework on their own -- we all have access to the same libraries, Web, etc. My first guru had a precept which I have felt to be quite wise and I have followed it since. What he said to me was "Please don't ask me questions that you could answer by looking it up or going to see for yourself." It was an important step to mental discipline for me and I recommend it to one and all. I would even say that the lessons I've learned from following this dictum have been an important part of jnana yoga as I have known it.

Part 3

Jnana is a term signifying wisdom. It is related both conceptually and etymologically to the term 'prajna'. Prajna is more often found in the Buddhist literature, jnana in the Hindu. Both signify a specialized form of wisdom. Western scholars often translate both terms as 'transcendental wisdom'.

The use of the term 'transcendental' is problematic to an extent. It implies a false distinction between higher and lower. Why this is false will be dealt with more thoroughly later in this series. For now, suffice it to say that it refers to the wisdom gained from absorption in samadhi, or as a Buddhist might say the experience of sunyata. By practicing jnana yoga, one will experience that absorption. This is the first goal or purpose of this practice.

Having experienced samadhi, the second purpose of jnana yoga is to help one know what to do with it. Samadhi is not an end in itself; it is a tool to use. For more on that topic, I refer my readers to Patanjali. He goes into considerable detail on that topic in the latter part of his 'Yoga Sutras'. There is a Western term which means much the same thing. This term is 'Philosophy'. Philos means love of, and sophia is divine (or transcendental) wisdom. Unfortunately, the word has lost that connotation. Over the centuries it has come to mean either a particular academic discipline inhabited by certain specialists, or it refers to one's point of view. From this transformation we see how often the love of opinions overcomes the love
of wisdom. There is an object lesson there for all jnanis.

Your information sounds like Ramakrishna. He experienced God through many
disciplines, exoteric and esoteric. Because of his extreme receptivity
and intensity, I still don't think this validates some of the systems he had
Samadhi through--if that is indeed what he did. Did he inadvertently mix
up his efforts?

I was dramatically influenced by Ramakrishna at around the age of 15, and that influence continues. I never thought of the checkered path I've followed as being like his, because I just never thought about it. I did what seemed best at the moment.

But now that you mention it, yes there is a comparison, and no doubt it was due to that influence. Ever since I have been able to think coherently on my own, I have thought that he did not really "follow the practices of all religions" as he and his followers state. He adapted them to his own Hindu devotional and meditational style.

And then there is the matter of his extreme sensitivity and receptivity. He had a gift for the kinds of experiences he describes, like an Olympic athlete of mysticism. Few people will approach to what he accomplished, even if they live just as he did – it's a matter of native ability.

So no, his experience does not validate much of anything. He remains my favorite avatar and I am reading a book called "The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna" bit by bit even as we speak. On the bedside table, don't you know.

I might rephrase one thing you said- that the love of opinions overcomes
the love of wisdom. Rarely does this occur- usually those who attain the love
of wisdom know better than to regress to the love of opinions. But the love of
opinions is very seductive to those who have not yet gotten a taste of wisdom.
Although maybe I'm being idealistic. In my case, it's more of an ongoing
temptation.
But you know- Mark Twain built an impressive case for his claim that there
is no such thing as a genuine seeker after Truth. He maintained that all
seekers must sooner or later find- something or other. And it may in fact
be true. But then they set about building a castle and a moat around that
truth, and erecting the cannons and other weapons.

The bit about the love of opinion swallowing up the love of wisdom refers to the mass, not the individual. More precisely: the mass of those who love opinion out-clamor the few who love wisdom. You are right, of course, in pointing out that those who have tasted wisdom are unlikely to turn back to opinion -- although it does happen -- I give you Art Kleps for an example.

And always important to note that Twain, for all that I love, admire, respect, and believe him to be an enlightened man, was also cursed with life-long chronic depression which colored what he wrote. No matter who, you gotta allow for their bias. Same with Buddha, Jesus, whoever.

Part 4

An important perspective to keep in mind is that religious and philosophical writings do not describe truth in a scientific sense. (Neither does science, which is why they call their claims 'theories'.) Sophisticated religionists know that faith precedes thought. If you have a certain faith, then certain doctrines naturally follow. For example, if you believe in the literal inerrancy of the Bible, then Darwin's theses make no sense. If on the other hand you have faith in the process by which Darwin came to his conclusions, then Biblical literal inerrancy makes no sense.

There is a branch of religious philosophy called 'soteriology'. This refers to the actual practical ability of religious or philosophical statements to produce certain outcomes. In the Christian tradition, for instance, acceptance of the statement that Jesus died for your sins is believed to produce actual salvation from damnation for those sins. In Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism, it is accepted that chanting 'Namu Myoho Renge Kyo' produces enlightenment and other desirable outcomes. This is also soteriological.

All ideas of any religious tradition are primarily soteriological, no matter how much their proponents assert that they are the bald-faced truth. For that matter, much secular philosophy is soteriological. I give you Plato's Dialogues and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations: both of these works were intended to produce actual life-changing effects on their audiences. Jnana yoga is more a method than a set of beliefs. Nonetheless, there is a soteriological thrust to it. You're not just doing it for your health. To put it as simply as I can, the point is to experience and integrate samadhi. That is a soteriologcal statement. It presupposes something called samadhi, that you would want to experience it, and that by practicing this method you will have that outcome. That makes no sense unless you have faith that there is such a thing as samadhi, that some methods lead one to it, and that you are willing to believe that this one can and will. Otherwise why waste your time?

Nonetheless, the jnani knows that these statements have no real meaning outside of their soteriological worth. Please don't be led into a glassy-eyed stupor by such a 50¢ word as soteriology. I use it solely because it is the only word which means what it means. Clarity and precision are so crucial to the jnana enterprise that I make no apology for introducing technical language. Any effort you put into accommodating that will more than repay itself.

Does soteriology depend upon the creative power of emotional thought? I
guess that power depends upon soteriology?

That's quite a question. Let me say that the word "soteriology" is refers to those philosophical or religious statements which produce a religious or philosophical effect. It's just a word that describes a certain phenomenon which has been noticed enough to have a word named after it. See what I'm saying? The question as asked is barking up the wrong tree. "Soteriology" doesn't depend on anything except an arbitrary definition. I'm belaboring this point because we need to understand the nature and limitations of words. A word refers to something but is not the thing itself.

Change the question a little, and we have this: does the ability of certain religious or philosophical ideas or statements to produce a desired effect depend upon the creative power of emotional thought? I would say yes. This is my bias. Others may feel differently, with good reasons. In my preferred system of thought, emotion, and especially desire, is an essential element of creativity. Since these certain statements create a certain experience, then desire is at the heart of it. IMHO.

Hmm... Soteriological. Excellent word. I've re-read your message
quite a few times, trying to wrap my head around it, and I think I've just
come up with my difficulty. It seems to me, by my understanding of the word,
that EVERY religion has a soteriological bent, so that I don't see what
the big deal is in its application to jnana yoga, other than to point
out the need that to achieve samadhi, you need to believe in samadhi.

For instance, it is a cornerstone of certain Christian sects that hell
awaits those who fail to accept the One and True Lord Our Savior Jesus
Christ as King of the World, &c. By implication, the acceptance of this
theory, the acceptance of the King of Jews as God's Favorite, sends you
to Heaven. Thus, soteriological. I can't think of a single religion,
or occult system, which is not soteriological.

So, have I missed the point? Or can your paragraphs be summed up by
this one:

It presupposes something called samadhi,
that you would want to experience it, and that by practicing this
method you will have that outcome. That makes no sense unless you have faith that
there is such a thing as samadhi, that some methods lead one to it, and that
you are willing to believe that this one can and will.

Also, perhaps I'm jumping the gun, but thus far I haven't seen anything
to separate jnana yoga from, say, raja yoga. Forthcoming, I presume?

Great questions. You are right, every religion has a soteriological bent. The point of learning that word, and its application, is to recognize that certain statements, which attempt to pass for truth, are soteriological rather than descriptive. Remember, jnana yoga is the intellectual approach to yoga -- raja is the meditative approach. The tools of jnana are logic and clarity. The use of the term soteriology promotes the latter.

The point of referring to samadhi in that post is to make it clear that the statement "jnana yoga leads to samadhi" may not be descriptive, in the sense that the statement "I am typing this on my computer keyboard" is descriptive. Its value is soteriological, rather than whether or not it states a knowable fact. If you think back, we have often seen these arguments between what one person believes to be true, which another believes to be false. If they know that certain statements were soteriological rather than descriptive, the argument vanishes. Clarity in action.

Perhaps we should say that the difference
between a religion and other systems (philosophies, sciences,
arts, etc.) is that you get some kind of benefit (heaven, better
hunting, winning in war, glory, personality transformation, etc.)
from religion. On the other hand, philosophies, arts, and sciences
do not necessarily give physical benefits, other than a better map
of the terrain to help us understand where we are.

That dog don't hunt. Too much evidence to the contrary. I.e., religions that don't offer those kinds of benefits, and philosophies, arts, and sciences that do.

Where did you learn all of this information? Did you study it formally or did you
come about this kind of expertise otherwise?

Hmm -- yes and no. I majored in comparative religion and philosophy for my BA, so that's formal study. I continued studying on my own after college, so I guess that's informal. I don't know of any "guru", Indian or otherwise, who professes to teach on the basis of jnana yoga. Not that there aren't any, but they haven't come across my radar yet if there are. I guess I've mostly picked it up on my own. And, as I said way back, my version incorporates material from various traditions such as Buddhism, Qabalism, and philosophers like Hume. So this is by no means "classical jnana", although at present I am going over some of the classical material.

Does this sort of yoga stand alone from postures or does all yoga
involve the physical performance of postures. Is yoga actually similar
to the concept for "school" or branch of philosophy ie. the xyz school
of philosophy etc.

Only asana yoga involves the use of postures. Mantra yoga involves the use of words, bhakti yoga involves the use of devotion, karma yoga involves the use of work. Since asana yoga is so well-known, that's what most people think of when they say "yoga." It would be more analogous to the term "method" than "school." The Indo-European root is the same as for our word "yoke." The comparison is this: a both are something that joins things together. A yoke joins, for instance, two mules together. Yoga joins the aspirant and the divine together.

Yoga as a whole is one of the six schools of Hindu philosophy, which include Vedanta, Nyaya, Vaisesika, Samkhya, and Mimamsa. So you've hit the nail on the head there.

What, in your opinion, is the connection between manifestation and
spirituality. Are they related? Is there an esoteric aspect of
creativity and/or ensuing manifestation?

You keep coming up with these really meaty questions. I wish I had time to really chew into them. Whole books have been written on what you are asking here.

Yes, there is an esoteric or spiritual aspect of creativity and manifestation in the system of thought I favor. Briefly put -- and there are many who would disagree but this is where I'm at -- there is One Source. Some call it Brahman, some call it God. In its essence it has no attributes and there is no manifestation. No attributes means it is neither this nor that. Neither big nor small, loving nor hateful, neither actual nor potential -- neither this nor that kind of sums it up. It is also neither something nor nothing. All those sets of pairs, which I (along with many others) call dualities or polarities, only crop up after manifestation. The One precedes manifestation. Manifestation of the universe as we know it comes about as a result of the desire of the One to make something manifest. How could the One have a desire, if it is without qualities or attributes? Well, that is just the best way I know of to describe the way I understand it. Since my understanding and ability to express things is finite, then so are my descriptions. We just have to live with that. Something triggers the One to create a manifestation. Personally I believe that is because without opposites you have no tension, and without tension you have no stories, and the One likes stories. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Some of this will come up again, so ask again when it does, and see if your question changes any along the way. This is way way way the short version.

Entre-Acte

(Some questions came up about astral planes, Ascended Masters, and the like, which were not precisely on the topic of jnana yoga, but which addressed issues which one hears mooted about in esoteric/New Age/yoga circles.)

One hears these descriptions of "planes of existence" from time to time. I'm not sure what value they have. If they exist at all, they are also part of Maya or illusion, so they would have to be transcended the same as any other illusion. For my part, I am fully willing to accept that there are non-embodied or discarnate entities such as angels that inhabit other planes of existence and occasionally come to visit ours, but on a day-to-day basis, so what? When we get further into the meat of jnana yoga, you will see that I am not being flip here.

I also think it reasonable to see the planets as entities -- life forms -- and the Solar System as yet another, higher form, and the galaxy yet another, and the Local Group as yet another, and so on. Again, so what? Again, I don't mean to be flip. But what good does this knowledge do? There are many interesting things in the cosmos, and if this is what interests anyone, I think they should look into it as much as they can. But I'm not sure it's any more valuable than any other hobby.

Part 5

The previous notes on jnana yoga were introductory in nature. They established some definitions, gave an idea of the scope of the thing, and issued a caveat that what we are discussing here is not a matter of facts so much as a matter of method. Now I want to move on to discuss that method further.

In classical jnana yoga, the yogi would be conversant with the six primary systems of Hindu philosophy: Vedanta, Nyaya, Vaisesika, Yoga, Samkhya, and Mimamsa. It would be safe to say that most jnanis were advaita vedantins. That is to say, they would see Brahman as the undifferentiated one source of all manifestation, and manifestation as a particularized representation of Brahman. We will not go into a discussion of the six systems. It is a fascinating study and would reward any who undertake it. These are ways of looking at the world which have for thousands of years been found to be of interest to many and absolute descriptions of the Truth to many others. Which is another way of saying that, whether you agree or disagree with any of them, they all speak deeply to the human condition.

In fact, if one is to know anything more about jnana yoga than what I will be saying in these brief notes, one must at least read a good book-length summary of these systems. Partly, this is because the jnana tradition evolved within this framework. Mainly, though, I recommend it for soteriological rather than intellectual reasons. Why this is will be apparent if you have paid close attention so far. Jnana yoga is not a set of opinions, it is a method. In reading and comprehending the six systems of Hindu philosophy, you will be exercising and strengthening precisely those faculties which are so important to the jnani: clarity, discretion, discernment, logic, concentration, and the ability to lift yourself up out of yourself to see a wider perspective from the point of view of someone else. In the next post, I will discuss some of the Buddhist sources which I have found helpful in furthering my study/practice of jnana yoga.

Could you comment further on
"clarity, discretion, discernment, logic, concentration, and the
ability to lift yourself up out of yourself to see a wider perspective
from the point of view of someone else."

It is an intriguing statement and once again not totally unlike a series
of lectures I once attended called "Tibetan lessons" The content of
these lessons was fascinating although I have some difficulty with the
notion that the lessons came from a metaphysical source known as the
"White Brotherhood" Does anyone know from what tradition this
terminology originates or was it specific to that particular
organization which taught the lessons?

The passage you quote was in the context of recommending that it would be worthwhile to do some study of the six main Hindu philosophical systems (I recommend Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan's book for a decent one-book introduction.) So in reading about these systems, the simple exercise of understanding them will by itself bring about an increase in clarity, discretion, etc. Partly by having to learn something new, and partly by then comparing it to your own point of view. Lifting yourself up to a wider perspective will occur because each of these systems takes a distinctly different way of looking at the Hindu tradition. The study of them, therefore, means an encounter with six very different perspectives, which will in turn broaden your own.

The Great White Brotherhood as a phrase came into use through the Theosophical Society (Mme. Blavatsky and Annie Besant.) In other versions of the western hermetic tradition it is also called the Illuminati, Third Order, Inner School or the Ascended Masters. It is said to be composed of discarnate beings who were formerly humans and who can still assume a human body at will when it suits their purposes. The Brotherhood is said to be responsible for guiding their still-incarnate human brothers and sisters to higher awareness/enlightenment/liberation. There is also said to be a Himalayan Brotherhood, which is an identical group only composed of Oriental masters rather than Western. Yogananda talks about this in his autobiography, and tells of one he met named "Babaji" who could appear and disappear, sometimes with a whole group of followers, at will. Probably the best known in the West is the Count of St. Germain, who was said to appear in France, Germany, England, Belgium, and (in this century) in America from around the time of Louis XIV onwards.

Some use the term Great White Brotherhood to denote both the Eastern and Western branches. No doubt the Masters call themselves Joe and Jim and Alice and such. There are accounts of people who say they have been in contact with one or more of these beings. I know personally one such person whose veracity I have never had any reason to doubt and who in fact tends to debunk airy-fairy notions. Take it for what it's worth. On the whole, I think it is of little practical relevance one way or the other.

Part 6

The next few posts are going to get out of the realm of standard or classical jnana yoga. This is because I will be looking at elements from outside of Hinduism which I've found invaluable as a practicing jnani.

Today I want to look at a contribution from Buddhism. As a matter of historical fact, Buddhism influenced jnana yoga a great deal, because much of Shankara's contribution to philosophy was in response to Buddhism. Jnana in the Hindu tradition is quite similar to Prajnaparamita in Buddhism. Prajnaparamita means roughly "the perfection of wisdom." Two of the principal, and most accessible, scriptures of the Prajnaparamita tradition are the Heart Sutra and Diamond Sutra. They are short and well worth reading. You could read both in an hour or so.

Nagarjuna was a Buddhist in approx. the 6th century AD. He was part of the Mahayana tradition, and in particular the Prajnaparamita school. In my view, Nagarjuna scaled the heights of philosophy. Even David Hume, whom I respect above all other Western philosophers, could have learned a trick or two from Nagarjuna, and I believe it can be demonstrated, that nothing more true can be said in words (given the limitations of language) than what Nagarjuna said.

Or, I might rather say, the way Nagarjuna said it. He himself espoused no opinions. His writings mostly elaborate a method of thinking which cuts through all illusion like a hawk through mist, a hot knife through butter, a catamaran through water. In essence, Nagarjuna's method is to discredit all sides and possible combinations of any polar opposite you can think of.

For instance, there is an old argument within Buddhism about whether physical materiality is real (Form), or is it illusory (Emptiness)? Nagarjuna would say that there is neither Form, nor Emptiness, nor 'both Form and Emptiness', nor 'neither Form nor Emptiness.' Let's try another one. A classical Western argument is why a loving God would allow so much evil and suffering. Nagarjuna might say that there is neither good nor evil, nor 'both good and evil', nor 'neither good nor evil.'

In a later post I will talk more about how this works and why it is important. For now, let me suggest that you simply experiment with it. When faced with seemingly irreconcilable opposites in your life, think it out in this manner: neither A nor B, nor both A and B, nor neither A nor B. It has the effect of canceling out all ideas about what is going on, which if followed sincerely will lead to direct experience of the event without intervening notions, which ultimately leads to transcendental experience. For now, just try it. It takes practice, and you can't just say the words like a mantra. If you really think it through each time, you may experience some confusion at first but with perseverance will experience a lightness as though a fresh wind were blowing through you.

Instead of using A or B, could you put it into more words? Could
you give a real life example of how to use the concept? I am interested
in trying it, but would like a few more examples.

I don't think I want to come up with more examples, although I can say more about method. It would be easiest to start with an incident from your own life -- perhaps recent, perhaps in the past. Look at the incident and see what polarities were operating. Attraction-repulsion? Love-hate? Good-bad? Pretty-ugly? Desirable-undesirable? It shouldn't be too hard to figure it out. Then, think it all the way through. What would it mean if, for instance, that which you thought was ugly was neither pretty nor ugly, nor both pretty and ugly, nor neither pretty nor ugly? I can't go farther than that without discussing a particular incident, because what it might mean in that situation depends on the situation itself. But if you take one from your life, concentrate on really following the logic through, and see what happens -- you may report back a shift in perspective, a new insight, or a change in consciousness.

Part 7

As I've said before, I am not describing classical jnana yoga, which was an avowedly Hindu construct and used sources from that tradition. So far we have given some thought to ideas from Buddhism, and especially of that great philosopher Nagarjuna. Today we will turn to Western sources, and consider the work of David Hume.

If Nagarjuna is the greatest philosopher ever to have lived, David Hume is the second. His uncompromising honesty and courage, along with a brilliant mind, resulted in a number of books which have stood the test of time. Probably the best introduction to his mature thought is "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding." It is fairly short and contains a distillation of most of his ideas. "An Essay Concerning Human Nature" is also good, albeit long.

Hume noted that we can know nothing except what our senses report to us. I see, I hear, I smell, I taste, I feel. In a sane person, these sensations form patterns, which replicate themselves over and over. For instance, I see the same color on my front door every time I walk in. It does not change from time to time. Therefore, I develop the habit of thought of thinking that there IS a door, and it IS that color.

But I don't know that. All I know is that I receive a sensory impression of what I call a door, and that the sensory impression is characterized by something I call color, and that every time I have the experience it has the same color. But that does not mean that I can know that there is a door, or what the color is. All I know is that this is my customary experience. You may see red where I see green, or vice versa.

Extending this further, then, there are other things I cannot know. Chief among them is that I don't know whether or not there are other people. I have experiences of these complex patterns of sensory impressions which I call people. Each of them tends to manifest certain typical characteristics. For instance, my secretary is usually pert and inquisitive. I come to expect this of her. But do I know that there is another person there, just because I have these habitual sensory impressions? I do not. All I know is that I have these impressions and they follow a more-or-less predictable pattern.

This may be tricky, so let me give an even more detailed example. When she has a certain expression on her face, she tells me she is sad. After that, I note that every time she has that look on her face, if I inquire, she tells me she is sad. Therefore, extrapolating from my experience of what I feel when I am what I call sad, I assume that she is feeling something much the same. But I don't know that. I can't know what she feels, only what I feel.

The mere fact that I can often guess what another person is feeling, and that they agree to the word I choose to describe my guess (such as sad, or angry, or happy) only means that there are very complex groupings of sensory impressions. It still doesn't mean that I can know that there is a world out there which exists independently of my sensing of it. Let me say that again, for emphasis: I cannot infer, from the fact of my having sensory impressions, that they originate in objects which exist whether I sense them or not (external reality.)

This may remind some of the old question, If a tree falls in the forest with no one around to hear it, does it make any sound? The problem with this question is that it does not take its own premise to its logical conclusion. If I do not sense the forest or the tree, is it really there? No one can answer this question honestly. I am not saying it is not there, I am simply saying that I cannot know if it is or not. All I know is whether or not I experience sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch.

Another way of approaching this topic is to ask if there are any other logical explanations of sensory experience besides the existence of external reality. And there are, close to hand. When I go to a movie, and become engrossed in the drama, I react to it just as if it were "real life." I may cry, or laugh, or become angry, just as though these events were "really happening." When I come to myself again during the closing credits, I know that it was just images of light and patterns of sound reproduced via screen and speakers. How do I know that all my sensory experience is not in some way analogous to this situation? I don't.

Another analogy involves dreaming. When I dream at night, it seems very real. I can be hurt by bumping into objects, I talk to other people that seem to have emotions, thoughts, and lives of their own, I move from one place to another, etc. Yet none of it has any existence outside of my sensing of it. When I wake up, poof it's gone.

To train oneself in jnana yoga is to adopt this same kind of strict, empirical, logical manner of thinking. Hume is an excellent "role model" for the jnani. Again I state that it is not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of method or technique which distinguishes the jnani. The jnani uses intellect to understand experience so that the illusion is milked out of it. This concludes the introductory survey of jnani philosophy. Next, we will turn to particular tools which the jnani finds useful.

The next logical question is whether 'I' exist, either!

Good point. However, Hume didn't go into it, to the best of my
recollection. Nor did he attempt a cheesy "I think therefore I am"
runaround. He just left it be. It was not on his agenda. It would be
fascinating to know what he would have come up with had he done so.

I am beginning to lose interest in this listserver because there is not enough of
the "hard core" info of the sort which you present and too much of the
guru-gushing to which I don't relate.

Well, I delete a lot.

Can you recommend other lists and/or sites which are more in line with the sort of thing
which you post?

For what you want, you are not going to find much of it anywhere. The fact that you ask the kinds of questions that you do means that you are already head and shoulders above most of the people who indulge in these kinds of topics. With all my experience, travels, correspondence, etc., I have known only a handful of people who can talk about spiritual topics with knowledge, intelligence, wit, and the authority of experience. You will sometimes find one or two of those things, but rarely all four.

You are better off going to the original sources, such as I have suggested in my jnana yoga series (the next installment should be ready soon.) I know that you don't have a lot of time with your professional workload, but such time as you have would be better spent working just a few pages a day at Nagarjuna or David Hume then surfing around on the Net looking for really high-class stuff. I am talking quite bluntly because I think you want the truth. The Net is a wonderful thing but it takes a lot of time to separate the wheat from the chaff. As Art Kleps, a great American philosopher who unfortunately went mad once told me, "the first test of a prospector is to know gold when he finds it."

(You want to know what I mean by "unfortunately went mad"? Check out Art's
website at

http://okneoac.com/ompage.html

but don't blame me if you feel icky afterwards.)

What I am about to say may be really self-serving but whatever you do I hope you will stay in touch. I have found your posts to be quite stimulating. Few people (I mean this sincerely) cut through the BS and get down to brass tacks. Most have to show how smart they are by playing word games or trying to get one-up vis-a-vis how much they have read or which gurus they have been to or whatever.

I like your willingness to not be a know-it-all but just ask for what you want to know. This is what Suzuki Roshi called "Beginner's Mind" in his book "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" (another classic.) All the most evolved people I know have this same quality. They know what they know, they know what they don't know, they don't confuse the two, they aren't afraid to admit to ignorance when they want to find out the stuff that they don't know -- I just love and respect those folks so much.

Part 8

One of the main tools of jnana yoga, or any worthwhile thinking, is logic. Logic is not an end in itself. The most important parts of our lives, such as feelings and values, are non-logical. This is not the same as illogical. The fact that you love your spouse, or favor chocolate over butterscotch, does not contradict logic.

The foundation of logic is the inference. An inference takes related facts (called premises) and forms a conclusion from them. The classical form of this is called a syllogism. For instance: long hair is hard to care for; I have long hair; therefore my hair is hard to care for.

Inference only works on two conditions: the premises have to be true, and my reasoning has to be valid. For instance, if long hair is easy to care for then the above conclusion will be false. Or if I conclude that "therefore I will not care for my hair", then my reasoning is invalid. (In this case I've substituted an unspoken premise: "I don't want to work hard.")

Poor reasoning also produces flaws, and there are many common errors. Here's an example: "I am a man, men like to be good at sports, therefore I am good at sports." The proper conclusion is "therefore I like to be good at sports."

There are a number of appealing ways to duck being logical. A lot of them have to do with wanting things to be different than they are. Here's an example: "No man would ever hit a woman." Confronted with the unpleasant reality that in fact some men do hit women, it changes to "Well okay then, no real man would ever hit a woman." In other words changing the definition of terms to suit one's preconceptions.

Another mistake occurs in presenting the premises in such a way that a preferred conclusion seems unavoidable. The common guilt trip is an example of this "If you really loved your mother, you wouldn't move so far away." The implied syllogism here is "People who really love their mothers don't move far away from them, you love your mother, therefore you can't move away." It is simply not true that loving children never move away.

This is very common in spiritual or New Age circles. Wanting to believe in something, let's say the healing power of crystals, then I am open to all kinds of mistakes. I may accept premises which are not based on fact. I may reason invalidly, as in this example: "I had a cold, the cold went away after I put this crystal around my neck, therefore the crystal cured my cold." This is an example of the "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" fallacy: after this, therefore because of this. I think I have demonstrated a causalconnection between putting on a crystal and my cold going away, when in fact all I have shown is that one event followed the other.

One common flaw arises from what is called the argument "ad hominem", or "to the man." If I can make you look like a fool, a cad, a slacker, or some other bad thing, then I may succeed in casting doubt on anything you may say. This is an effective ploy but nonetheless deplorable for that. If what one values is truth, regardless of the source or consequences, then the argument ad hominem is a distortion of that value. If Hitler or Savonarola says the sky is blue, does it make it any less true?

Another fallacy is called the "reductio ad absurdum", or reduction to the absurd. Let's say I state that the 2nd amendment to the US constitution guarantees to all citizens the right to own firearms, and then someone who dislikes guns says "Oh, so you think we should give guns to any child old enough to lift one?" By casting my statement into an extreme form which no sane person would maintain, you attempt to discredit what I am actually advocating. As with the argument ad hominem, this is an assault on the truth. Any extreme statement is likely to be mistaken. And reasonable people can have legitimate differences of opinion without painting each other as desperate fanatics.

One of the key disciplines of jnana yoga is to recognize your beliefs as such. It is not that beliefs are bad and knowledge is good, but that they are different. Each has its place and function. I don't believe the sky is blue, I know the sky is blue. I believe that Jesus rose from the dead on Easter morning, but I don't know it for a fact. That is one reason why formal logic is so powerful. It allows me to distinguish between belief and knowledge, to prevent me from going off on vain fantasies that I mistake for reality.

So who says "feelings" are non-logical? They are perfectly logical, but
the deductive logic by which they come about is sub-conscious and therefore
not known to our self-conscious mind. The images and feelings that we "feel"
are generated by that perfect deductive logic engine called the
sub-conscious.

I am writing a book, working title "The Reality of Irrationality and the Poverty of Illusion." Very few people realize the real power of the subconscious and the emotions. One might say that they have a certain rhythm, harmony, and process of their own, but on the other hand they can also be arrhythmic, disharmonious, and the process can be chaotic. The incredible power and sweep of irrationality has to be seen to be believed, like a hurricane, a tornado, or a supernova. I hope that my subconscious is never so tame as to be a "perfect deductive logic engine."

This business of referring to the process exemplified by the Empress as deduction was invented by PFC out of whole cloth. The word deduction has a pedigree stretching back for 25 centuries and it was never used that way until he did. Paul noticed a similarity between the "Empress activity" and deduction, which is that it works from generals to particulars, and decidedto appropriate the term for his use. I have no problem with that, except that he might at some point have made it clear he was drawing a parallel, not using a technical term.

Inductive Reasoning goes from the particular to
the general. It is how we use Reason to discover Truth. Inductive
Reasoning is attributed to the Magician, and comes about from keen
observation. When you see a wooden 4 legged shaped object and think
"chair", you are using inductive reasoning.

This is a poor example of induction, because it is deduction. This is still reasoning from the general to the particular, and the syllogism looks like this: A chair has 4 legs and a seat. This wooden object in front of me has 4 legs and a seat. Therefore it is a chair.

Here is an example of induction: I give aspirin to 10 people and note that 9 of them report decreased pain. I therefore infer that aspirin will relieve pain for most people. That is reasoning from the particular (these particular 9 people out of this group of 10) to the general (most people.) Of course, there is a problem with inductive reasoning. A different set of 10 people might turn up different results. Maybe only 3 would have pain relief. Would I therefore infer that aspirin is not effective with very many people? Maybe I would decide that 10 is too small a number for statistical significance (it is.) So I get 1500 people. But no matter how many people I get, or how high the correlation is, every statistician (and every scientist worthy of the name) knows that there is always a margin of error.

My man, David Hume, discredited induction because it is based on the assumption of causality, which cannot be proved. How can we possibly know that taking aspirin relieves pain? All we know is that X number of people reported that they had reduced pain after taking aspirin. This is an example of the "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" fallacy -- "after this, therefore because of this."

You may be saying, what makes Bruce claim that causality is only an assumption? Well, if I take an aspirin in a dream tonight, and my dream headache gets better, was it the little white dream pill that relieved the pain? Of course not. The only difference between dream life and waking life is that there is rather more continuity to waking life. In other words, time seems to flow in one direction, and events seem to follow what are called the "laws of nature." Nonetheless, that this is an assumption is shown every minute of every day by the constant procession of synchronicity. All that occurs is at the will and pleasure of the Prime Mover (as Joseph N. has recently called it), including the appearance of causality, which is as subject to change as the cost of eggs in Istanbul.

Part 9

Last time we looked at a form of logic called deduction which makes use of the syllogism: if A is the same as B, and B is the same as C, then A is the same as C. "If all dogs with tight curly fur and ribbons on their heads are poodles, and this dog has tight curly fur and a ribbon on its head, then this dog is a poodle." (I know, this would not always be true, but it displays the form of deduction.)

In this installment we'll look at another form of logic, called induction. Deduction looks at generals to discover something true about particulars (all dogs, this dog.) Induction goes in the reverse direction: from particulars to generals. To use the same silly example, I see ten dogs in a row that have tight curly fur and ribbons on their head, which are all poodles, then I predict that the next dog I see with tight curly fur and a ribbon on its head will also be a poodle.

Here's a better example, so you can see the use of induction. If I give aspirin to 10,000 people, and 9,000 of them experience pain relief, then I will say that aspirin is an effective pain reliever for 90% of the population. Now, I haven't tested the whole population, but I am making an inference -- going from the particular people I have observed, and making a generalization about all the people I haven't tested. We do this all the time. "If this stove which is red on top burned me, then all stoves which are red on top will burn me." I didn't need to try it twice, did you?

The application of this to jnana yoga is: people make claims all the time. "XYZ yoga will wake up your kundalini, make you rich, and give you a better sex life." How do they know this? Is it just a claim? Is it based on trial and test, and therefore an induction? If you're not looking to answer these kinds of questions, then you will be taken in by all kinds of false statements. Not the kind of thing a jnani wants to do.

We see this all the time on the Net, where claims are made for this or that guru, avatar, pundit, or whatever. The statements are phrased like simple declarative sentences: Swami Bananananda is an Adept of the Jupiterian Order, which gives him to power to initiate people into the wonders of the Outer Solar System. (I just made that up. I know of no such thing as an adept of the Jupiterian Order.) You see, there is supposition slipped in with fact. Swami Bananananda may well be a member of this order; that can be checked. It is either factual or not. But does he have any power, what do they mean by the wonders of the Outer Solar System, and so forth? Presumably, these claims are made on prior experience, which would be induction. "Since Swami B. has successfully initiated 9,000 out of 10,000 candidates into the wonders of the OSS, then he will be able to successfully initiate 90% of the population into the wonders of the OSS." Digging into it, you find no such basis for the claim. It is mere supposition. But you cannot verify whether he is a fraud or a guru if you don't know to ask the right kinds of questions.

Next time we will get beyond the formal logic stuff and look at some applications of all this material into practical spiritual topics.

Reading about jnana yoga the thought came to me that
spirituality is spirit is God. Do we forget God and talk about A B C ? I
just don't seem to get it. I know I followed Gurudev for over 20 years and
Bapuji and have done yoga faithfully and taught yoga for years and would
not be this far in my spiritual quest if I had not found this path. So in talking about A B C where is God??? ( If I gave ten people 1 aspirin,
9 people felt pain relief that to is 90 %, therefore 90% of this small
amount of people feel better. What is the problem? This is a physical
aspect.) Do you compare aspirins to spirituality? When someone walks,
runs, breathes, sings, cries, hurts, bleeds, loves, hates, listens, speaks,
combined forms the road to spirituality. To God?

I admit that I was somewhat taken aback by your letter. After -- let's see -- nine installments in the series, your post arrives wondering about the basic premise. What I'm trying to express here is surprise, not disapproval.

So, OK -- review time. There are several basic systems of yoga in India, from which all other systems derive. They are: Raja, Bhakti, Asana, Jnana, Karma, Tantra. (Subsets, or specialties, include mantra yoga, mudra yoga, kundalini yoga, etc.) They are devised for people of different makes, so that each may find a compatible path to the One. For the more meditative, there is Raja. For the more physically-oriented, there is Asana. For the devotional, there is Bhakti. For the intellectual, there is Jnana. For the doer, there is Karma. For the sensual, there is Tantra. This is how good God is, that for every character there is a path.

People who are attracted to one system, often "don't get" its opposite. Jnanis may have no difficulty with Raja or Asana, but "don't get" Bhakti. Karma yogis often "don't get" Raja ("who wants to just sit around staring at their navel all day?") Most everyone "doesn't get" Tantra. This is why I am not going to reply to the specific questions you raise. If you don't get it, you don't get it. That's fine. But you can accept that it is a path for others. In fact, although I expect you did not mean to give this impression, one might think it the height of arrogance to say "If I don't get it then it must be wrong." I'm sure you have neighbors who feel that way about yoga. I will give you one hint about, though, in response to one question you raised. The question was, Do you compare aspirins to spirituality? My answer is, do you think aspirins are something other than God?

Part 10

I've thought about continuing our study of logic, having already covered deduction and induction. However, with the tools already presented, carefully employed, one can accomplish a great deal by way of observing and discerning the nature of given statements or ideas. Even for those whose spiritual path tends more to devotion than to philosophy, it is useful to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. I hope that these lessons will have helped some to do that more satisfactorily.

What I would like to do now is to turn from the tools of jnana yoga to its principles. For me, this is the most enjoyable. I feel the same about these principles that others feel about Jesus or Krishna or the Great Mother. Not because of the ideas themselves, but because of that Reality, the One Source, of which they are a pale reflection.

The classical approach of jnana yoga is referred to in Sanskrit as "neti, neti" or "not this, not this." In other words, the One Source is in its innermost nature without any characteristic whatsoever. Anything which can be sensed or thought has characteristics; therefore, none of these things are Brahman (or, as I prefer to say, the One Source, the One Life, or just the One.)

Let me digress for a while. In Hindu philosophy, the One is called Brahman. In Buddhism, when they refer to Emptiness, they refer to much the same thing: the unbounded and unmanifest. In Taoism, it is said that before there is anything, there is Tao. In Jewish Qabala, a similar ideal is referred to by the term Ain. So we see that this same ideal has its counterparts in various parts of the world.

The One is unbounded and unmanifest because it is the Source of manifestation. Only that which is manifest has characteristics, so that which is the source of manifestation is without characteristics. The nature of language is such that we can say something like "The One is prior to creation", which points in the right direction. Yet it is also incorrect because time is a characteristic of manifestation. How can there be a time before time? Naturally, there cannot. The word "before" presupposes time. Think this through before proceeding further. Words like "before", "after", and "now" all exist within an idea of time. But the One created time, so it in itself has no time. It also created space, so it in itself has no dimensions.

This is why the "neti, neti" approach has been associated with Jnana yoga. When one rejects the ultimate reality of anything which is manifest, eventually all one is left with is the Unmanifest. This is not an idea, it is not a thought, it is an actual experience -- the Hindus call it samadhi. We will look further into this process in another essay.

The No-Thing is actually a thing, but not in this created
universe. Think of this universe as a meditation (computer game) of
the Brahman (the computer programmer who made the game, including
the bugs). The No-Thing is not an idea or a thing IN THE GAME. However, on the
plenum of existence (the hyper-pleroma) of that programmer, the
No-Thing is actually a thing.

I see what you are saying, but I have to disagree. It is an feature of language alone that you can say such things and have them be logical and syntactically correct, yet they do not correspond with experience or received wisdom. Well, I'm not all that big on received wisdom, so let's stick with experience.

We could also do a linguistic analysis. There is no existence prior to the creation of the universe -- existence being an artifact of creation -- so that which "precedes" existence neither exists nor doesn't exist. The concept of existence just isn't relevant. Existence is one pole of the existence-nonexistence duality, and the One -- the Ain -- is not defined by any dualities whatsoever. Again, based on experience. I am not bandying concepts, but just trying to express within the limitations of language as best I can something which is without limits. But I am getting ahead of myself -- the next episode in this series will go into polarity, duality and non-duality.

In the Heart Sutra, the word for "emptiness" is better translated "energy".
It is unbounded, but actually manifests everywhere. It
emanates into our universe in accordance with the computer program
the game programmer programmed.

Got to disagree again. Emptiness is emptiness (sunyata.) You may be thinking of prabhasvara, often translated as luminosity, and which is roughly cognate to "the Limitless Light."

You said, "So we see that this same ideal has its counterparts in
various parts of the world. The One is unbounded and unmanifest
because it is the Source of manifestation." Okay, if that is how you define unmanifest.

Short version, limited by the limitations of the language.

You said, "Only that which is manifest has characteristics, so that
which is the source of manifestation is without characteristics."
Again, this is correct if you mean no characteristics in this universe,
since it is not part of this universe; however, in the
universe in which it exists, it certainly has characteristics. In
this universe it also has the characteristic of "being outside this
universe". So "not having any characteristics at all" leads to the
same contradictions as "perfect in every way" and other logical
contradictions. God is not perfect because it is not possible to be
perfect. God has characteristics, including "outside this universe",
"imperfect programmer of this universe", "having no characteristics
in this universe", etc.

You can say this because the language allows it, but it does not correspond with the experience of the unmanifest (samadhi, cosmic consciousness, call it what you want to.) There may be other universes, but there is no other universe in which the One Source exists.

I feel like I'm repeating the same thing over and over, so rather than continue to respond to each paragraph as it comes along, I guess I have to just stop and say:

You are repeating the same mistake over and over. In part, you are mistaking ideas for experience. In part, you are not acknowledging the limitations of language, or the fact that even if something is logically valid and syntactically correct it is not therefore true. In part, you are making it up as you go along, which is fun but not philosophy.

Can you share what your background is in regard to Yoga?

Well, I've had a "checkered past." I've been a logger, paper mill worker, bicycle messenger in San Francisco, Quaker pastor, social worker, nurse's aide, motorcycle tramp, dishwasher, and some others. Somewhere in there I managed to get a Master's in Social Work and attend the Quaker seminary in Richmond, IN. I focus chiefly on my practice of psychotherapy and clinical hypnosis at present. I am Jungian and Ericksonian (Milton, not Erik -- well, him too) in my orientation. I've mostly worked with children and families but have been doing mainly adults for the last few years. Studying for a diploma in homeopathy to work that into my practice for a more well-rounded, holistic approach -- have used Bach Flower Remedies with selected patients for years. Majored in philosophy and religion as an undergrad. Been studying/practicing this stuff most every day since I was 13 (I'm 46 at present -- hmm, that makes 33 years, a nice round number.) I've practiced a variety of different disciplines at different times: TM, Kripalu, other forms of yoga, kung fu and t'ai chi, Buddhist mindfulness meditation, chanting Namu Myoho Renge Kyo (homage to the Lotus Sutra.) Was on staff at Kripalu in 1988-89. Initiated by Gurudev on 10/14/88. For the last ten years I have focused more on the Western "yoga" which is contained in the hermetic or Rosicrucian tradition, and includes the practice of tarot, alchemy, Qabala, and astrology. So, you know, a little here, a little there, sooner or later it all adds up.

I have also made it a point to get to know like-minded people wherever I've lived (which has been North, South, East, West, and Midwest) since you learn a lot that way too. Also literature, poetry, science (esp. physics and astronomy), history, all that, because it all reveals something about the human condition which is a microcosm of the cosmic condition. "That which is below is as that which is above, and that which is above is as that which is below, for the performance of the miracles of the One Thing." (The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus)

But of course learning is not enough. That's why I emphasize practice. If you don't practice, you don't really know what you've learned. Practice takes the learning, breaks it down, reveals your misunderstandings, shows you the right questions, points you to the answers, and then you've made the material your own. After that, as Van Morrison said, No Guru, No Method. Left a lot out but, you know, I don't want to blow my horn too much. Still, you asked, so there it is.

Surprisingly, you did not provide a Christian equivalent to "the source".

You note that I included no Christian version of the One. Well, really, there isn't one. The Christian tradition does not contain a good analog to Brahman, the Void, the Ain, or the Tao. Most of the tradition is quite emphatic about the Trinity, and even the non-trinitarians tend not to see things as non-dualistic, non-qualified, or what have you. If I've overlooked something please someone speak up. There are some in the Christian tradition who do have this kind of non-dualistic idea (we'll get into non-dualism more in the next essay), such as Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme, but they were part of the Rosicrucian tradition which has been greatly influenced by Qabala and would therefore have known of the Ain.

Part 11

In the last essay on jnana yoga, we considered the classical Hindu approach, called the "neti, neti" approach, in which all which is not the One Reality is discarded. In so doing, it is found that the One has no characteristics at all. All characteristics are marked by duality, and the One is not dual. It cannot be divided. Only in its manifestations, as we experience, do there appear to be distinguishable qualities.

These qualities, qualifications, or expressions of duality, are marked by appearing as polar opposites. Therefore we have hot and cold, long and short, up and down, in and out, good and bad, and so on. In each case, it becomes clear, when using the tools of logic which were summarized in previous essays, that these terms are all relative. To give a common example, consider hot and cold. Is 40 deg. hot or cold? Well, if you have just gone through 3 months of sub-zero weather, 40 deg. would be shirt sleeve weather. However, in the middle of summer after weeks of 90 deg. heat, if the thermometer suddenly plunged to 40 deg. it would seem impossibly cold and everyone would be breaking out the sweaters and heavy coats. Similar instances could be drawn from any conceivable set of polarities.

One such set that is often a hang-up for the non-reflective is that of good and bad. It seems so clear, from any given point of view, that some things are good and some are bad. Some things may seem so good as to be thought of as pure, exemplary, or perfect, while others may seem so bad as to be thought of as terrible, unconscionable, or evil. Shift your point of view by just a little bit, and these no longer hold -- but a new set of circumstances will be seen to be right or wrong.

Perhaps the most basic of these dichotomies is that of existence and non-existence. It seems self- evident that something either is, or is not. However, this is not true from the point of view of the One. Existence is a condition of manifestation, and manifestation proceeds from the One. Or, to say the same thing in reverse, the One precedes existence. There is no existence until there is manifestation. If the One did not manifest, there would be no existence. Without existence, there would not be non-existence either, just as you cannot have high without low or near without far.

It is part of the discipline of the jnani to work with these ideas until they are not just ideas at all, but actual experience. This may need explanation also. A slave may have an idea of what freedom would be like, but until he is free, he doesn't really know. In fact, freedom will be seen to be quite different in many ways from the preconceived idea. The young lad or lass who dreams of marriage and family, or career, status and success, does not really know anything about them until they are part of his or her experience. So, while the jnani may be quite able to say to himself or herself "there is no such thing as good or bad, these are just concepts," it is the intent of jnana yoga to someday culminate in the experience in which this is actually perceived, felt, known to be so. This experience is that of samadhi.

Where you wrote It seems self- evident that something either is, or is not.
However, this is not true from the point of view of the One. Existence
is a condition of manifestation, and manifestation proceeds from the One.

I had to complain. (; Remember the Big Book says, "God either is or He
isn't" Now what? Okay, I'm playing with words.

"God either is or He isn't." That's true from the POV of the unenlightened consciousness, which is to say: when I look at the world through everyday eyes, all those dichotomies hold. Things ARE near and far. Things ARE up and down. Things ARE good and bad. And, of course, things ARE and ARE NOT. From that perspective. Including God, who when asked his name, could do no better than "I AM THAT I AM." :-)

It's only from the CC point of view that the polarities are resolved. In a sense, jnana yoga is a way of tricking the intellect into thinking it's doing its usual thing, when in fact it is being short-circuited. And this is the purpose of writing this series and sharing it with these folks, so many of whom are so Hodian – if they follow the hints, and really think about it, everything goes haywire and they will be given samadhi – or to put it another way, samadhi being a pre-existent condition, everything goes haywire and their resistance to experiencing samadhi vanishes.

You said, "God also makes the choice when we act irresponsibly."
Then we have no responsibility, and it matters not at all what we do.
Responsibility depends upon choice, and though it may be a thought
attributable to my pea-sized brain, it seems to me that this idea implies
a lack of choice.

To sit back and take the view that murder, rape, theft, etc. is
activity that serves some purpose in the Grand Plan of the Master
Architect of the Universe may be a valid viewpoint. You may argue
that since the concept of property is an illusion there can be no
such thing as theft; you may even argue that since we all enjoy
eternal life, there can be no such thing as murder. Nevertheless, I
believe all of us would agree that this is irresponsible behavior and
not appropriate for a society of upright and true persons.

Many people hold this viewpoint that everything and anything we do is in accord
with God's plan. What I consistently fail to understand, however, is why
at the same time such things as murder, theft and kicking a dog should be
considered anything less than sublime, holy behavior. If it is God
kicking the dog through me, what is irresponsible? If it is God pulling the
trigger of a gun while aiming point blank at Heston's medulla oblongata, why is
this anything less than perfection? What is so wrong about bombing a nursery
in Chechnya, gunning down a village in Bosnia, stealing a pensioner's social
security check? If it is God bombing and gunning and robbing, why should
we not give thanks whenever these events unfold?

Blessed art Thou, Lord of the Universe, who hath spilled 15,000 gallons of
crude into the river!

This again has to do with context. The statement which says "God is responsible for all actions" is not of the same Order of thought as the statement which says "Oil in the ocean kills thousands of life-forms" or "A bullet to the medulla oblongata will cause terrific damage or death to the recipient."

God is not bound by polarities; they spring from his manifestation. Therefore he is neither good nor evil, responsible nor irresponsible.

Within the manifestation, concepts such as good or bad, right or wrong, honorable or scurrilous, harmful or helpful, sick or healthy, all have usefulness. But only within the manifestation. To put this more concretely, if we loot and pillage and kick the dog, it is heinous, within the manifestation. However, since everything that is, is an expression of the One (what else could it be?), then looting and pillaging and kicking the dog also serve the purpose of the One, in ways which I personally often find too obscure for me to grasp.

Self Defense Kalari

2008-09-28T18:03:00.000+05:30

Every intelligent law abiding citizen should be able to protect her/himself from physical threats. Today, with so many people learning one art or another, you should look for something more specialized, Kalari Payat is arguably one of the most specialized arts. Kalari Payat is a direct method of combat. Each one of the thousands of Kalari Payat techniques is a complete finishing tactic, which enables the person to get into the enemy and put him under control. It consists a wide range of methods of combat: chops, blows, kicks, punches, squeezes, locks, throws, sweeps breaking technique, fallen-down techniques and steps, movements and pressure-point tactics, also vital-point attacks, all methods of sticks, all ranges of weapons, swords, shields, axes, daggers, ropes etc., and all releasing techniques. It also includes yoga, acrobatics, gymnastics and wrestling for the body techniques. International Kalari Payat is taught strictly for self defense. It is aimed to equip it's practitioner with devastating combat tactics that would be applied in real defense. This training is a form of discipline which gives a basic knowledge in physical health and self defense. The art has it's origin with the training of soldiers, Buddhist monks as well as noblemen who had to learn the art, for there were frequent raids on the Kings and Princes' of the time in Kerala (South India) by neighbouring power crazy state/war lords as well as marauding thugs. Kalari Payat was developed a few thousand years ago in the state of Kerala in India, which was introduced in Malaysia by the Mahaguru Ustaz Haji Hamzah Haji Abu, who is the founder of the International Dynamic Self Defense Kalari Payat (FIDSDK).
. .
THE DEADLY NATURE OF KALARI PAYAT - THE MARTIAL ART
.
The struggle for existence is man's history and is as old as the beginning of man himself. The inventive nature of man has enabled him to be the master of his environment, when the brain and the brawn of man are put together, there is no other force but God in this world which would not bow to him. In the early days man had to fight not only against wild animals but also against man himself. So he had to try harder or improve methods to outdo others. This competition between man against man carried on and continues even today in this space-age. Thus any part of the world where man has inhabited there are traces of some art of combat method or as we call it today, the art of self-defense. In the olden days because of the lack of communication each group or race of people confined to their own part of the world and the knowledge or mode of living of those people stayed with them and come to be known as belonging to them only. The art of self-defense also suffered this confinement and so we hear today arts of self-defense of Indian origin and so on. Now we come to Kalari Payat, which has it's origin in Kerala State, South -West of India. It is based on the principal of first apparently giving way to the attacking force, then adding one's own force so that the sum of both forces is applied against the attacker. Thus a physically weaker defendant can gain victory over a stronger attacker. Up to a certain limit, all self-defense arts are martial arts in the full sense of the word. Beyond that limit all are deadly. Their deadliness can only be measured from the form of application they take. Kalari Payat is a combined application of might and wit. It's techniques are devised in such a way that at close combat even before the enemy thinks of making an attacking move, Kalari Payat experts can not only anticipate but also react accordingly. Training begins with respecting others. Each move, while teaching a new technique, involves certain limbs of the body. The exercises make the body fit and healthy and the feeling of well being develops the trainees. Kalari Payat can finally be compared to a spring which never dries up however much you draw from it.In Kalari Payat, students are more confident in trying new methods and practicing dangerous moves because even in the case of an accident, the instructor is well versed and qualified to remedy the situation and is a specialist on finger-pressure. Just as Kalari Payat is deadly, it has it's finer qualities in making it a really superior and sophisticated martial-art. The training itself is vigorous and painful. Only those with the self-discipline and perseverance can endure the early painful training session. With every new technique learnt, Kalari Payat makes one bold, self-assured and physically fit. It also works into the mental system and makes one calm, cool philosophic and god-fearing and keeps one's equanimity. Kalari Payat itself can be compared to a friend and companion because it comes to one's aid when one's life and properties are threatened by thugs, robbers or other intruders. It is like a religious teacher who teaches one to respect others and to be courteous to all. Anything that is deadly should be handled with care. Therefore Kalari Payat should also be given the respect. Otherwise it would react in such a reverse force that all the training, time and money spent will come useless and may turn against it's own master and destroy him. The long period of training taken to master Kalari Payat makes it a much desirable and reliable force. Kalari Payat totals eighteen (18) methods of training, there are 400 types of locks, the same number of throws and more than a thousand blows and punches. "INTERNATIONAL DYNAMIC" Kalari Payat was introduced in Malaysia by Ustaz Hj Hamzah Hj Abu (FIDK). Fired with enthusiasm to popularize the art he decided to introduce a grading system based on international standards (DAN SYSTEM) the roles and combat outfits have also been changed to reflect a "Modern Kalari Payat Warrior".

Martial Arts for brains development

2008-09-28T17:50:00.001+05:30

Marshal arts (also known as kung-fu or Wushu) are one of the typical demonstrations of traditional Chinese culture which includes Wushu and Qu Gong. Perhaps it is one of the earliest and long-lasting sports, which utilizes both brawn and brain. The theory of Wushu id based upon classical Chinese philosophy. Throughout its long history it has developed characteristically with a unique combination of healthy push, practical self-defense, self-discipline and art. In sports such as field and track, ball sports, weightlifting, and boxing, an athlete typically has to retire from full participation in his or her 30s, due to failing physical vigor. The athlete often will have sustained injuries that he r she was not aware of and those injuries will affect his or her health in middle age and older, because of overexertion when young. In Chinese kung-fu, however, a distinction is made between “external” and “internal” kung-fu, it is said that “In external kung-fu, you exercise your tendons, bones, and skins; in internal kung-fu, you train your spirit, your Qi, and your mind.” In addition to training to achieve strong body and mind, strengthen internal organs, and increase circulation of one’s Qi, or flow of vital energy. Progressing from movement to stillness, from firmness to softness, the older one gets the more adept one becomes at kung-fu. And the higher one’s level of achievement in kung-fu, the better one is at maintaining good health and living a long, active life. For Chinese kung-fu, the internal training, that is, practicing Qi Gong, is essential. Chinese say: “Practicing boxing without practicing Qi Gong will come to nothing.”

The skills of Chinese Wushu consist of various forms of fighting: fist fights, weapon fights, and other fighting routines (including such offence and defenses acts as kicking, hitting, throwing, holding, chopping and thrusting) and unarmed combats. According to statistics, there are over 100 schools of Chinese boxing. Among them, seven schools (Shao Lin, Wu Dang, Tai Ji, Xing Yi, Ba Gua, E Mei and Nan Quan) are widely recognized. People see many individual styles within each of these schools.

Yongchun Quan (Eternal Youth Boxing) originated in Fujian Province, later spreading south to Guangdong, Macao hang Hong Kong. Yongchun Quan is just one of a number of styles under the general term, Nan Quan, the Southern Schools of Boxing, a vigorous and aggressive school popular south of the Yangtze River. Of the many styles of Nann Quan, the mists well known are Hongjia Quan, Liujia Quan, Caijia Quan, Lijia Quan, and Mojia Quan, “the Five Great Schools”. Other schools of Nan Quan are Tiger and Crane Boxing, White-Eyebrow Boxing, Confucian Boxing, Souther Skills Boxing, Kunlun Boxing, House of Kong Boxing, Han-Exercising Boxing, Diao School of Teaching, Yue School of Teaching, and Song School of Teaching.

Bei Quan, the Northern School of Boxing is a generic term for those schools in the provinces north of the Yangtze River. Characterized by speed and strength, the Northern School emphasizes variations of kicking and footwork, hence the common saying “Southern fists, Northern legs.” The major styes of the Northern School are Shaolin Boxing, Wheeling Boxing, Zha School of Boxing, Essence Boxing, Flower Boxing, Cannon Boxing, Hong School of Boxing, Full-Arm Boxing, Maze Boxing, Six-Harmony Boxing, Springing Legs, Jabbing Feet, Eigh-Ultimate Boxing, Great Ancestor Extended Boxing and Silk Floss Boxing.

Chinese Wushu involves practice with weapons as well as well as the standard bare-hand skills. Weaponry includes nine kinds of long weapons and nine short, such as knives, spears, swords, and clubs, which together constitute what is called the Eighteen Types of Martial Arts. The majority of these weapons, hence the use of the term the “eighteen military weapons”. This term was already widely used during the Song Dynasty. The Ming novel, Outlaws of the Marsh mentioned it frequently. One version of the book records the eighteen military weapons as the lance, mallet, long bow, crossbow, jingal, jointed bludgeon, truncheon, sword, chain, books, hatchet, dagger-axe, battle-axe, halberd, shield, staff, spear and rake. Today, the term generally refers to the broadsword, lance, rapier, halberd, hatchet, harrow, trident, staff, long-blade spear, cudgel, dagger-axe and wave-bladed spear. This is only a general term, since military weapons were never restricted to just eighteen forms. Other weapons frequently used include the rope-dart, Emei dagger named after the Emei Mountain in Sichuan Province from which the style originated, as well as the bent handled club and hook. Today, the wide variety of weapons used in Wushu practice fall into four groups:

1. Long weapons: Longer than the height of a person and wielded with both hands during practice. They include the lance, staff, great broadsword, spear, halberd, fork, trident and spade.
2. Short weapons: Shorter than the height of a person and wielded with one hand. These include the broadsword, rapier, hatchet, hammer, truncheon, jointed bludgeon, dagger and shield.
3. Soft weapons: Rope, chains, or sings are used to create linked weapons which are able to strike cloae or far and are wielded with one or both hands. They include the nine-sectioned chain, three-sectioned flail, flying hammers, which are tow iron balls linked by a long iron chain, the rope dart, flying claw and the ordinary flail.
4. Twin weapons: Here a pair of weapons are wielded, one in each hand. These include twin broad-swords, handled clubs, twin lances, twin hatchets, twin daggers, double-bladed daggers, Pangusnbi (Twin rods with fist-shaped heads) and duck and drake battle-axes.

Taiji Quan (Tai Chi) originated long age in Chinese history, and was a martial arts practice, with Quan meaning fist or boxing. Due to its heritage and practicability, it has evolved in three directions. With its origin and heritage in Taoism, it is a way to spiritual perfection; with its practicability, it is a way to protect oneself or really fight; and with its health caring effects, it is accepted by the common people as a self-healing or disease prevention or treatment tool.

Taiji Quan boasts several major school of Yang Style, Chen Style, Wu Style, and Sun style, etc., which in turn include a variety of forms respectively. For instance, the Yang school includes the Greater Routine and the Lesser Routine, while the Chen School includes an Old Routine, a New Routine, and the Zhaobao Routine. And most of these forms have created a short form, with Yang Style of 48 movements as an example. Therefore, the beginners are able to learn it more quickly, and the elder or patients are able to learn it more easily.

Tianji Quan exercises are believed to be helpful in treating illness and strengthening the constitution, therefore it is an exercise performed regularly by many people to keep fit, prevent and cure diseases, slow down the pace of growing old and to prolong life. The concentration of the mind is beneficial to biochemical profile of the brain and nervous system, and the flow of the internal self healing energy is beneficial to the delivery of oxygen and nutrition to the tissues. Studies found that practicing Taiji Quan is a great help to the elders. This is an indication of its immense value to men’s health, as has been testified by practice and research. In its purest form, Taiji Quan is a beautiful combination of eloquent, fluid and balanced body movement, yet it can be quite physical and is often used for defense. Because the level of input and complexity is either under the control of or susceptible to the willingness of each individual, Taiji Quan can be enjoy by all ages. This is perhaps why more and more people take to Taiji Quan. Now in China, million of citizens practice Taiji Quan every day.

Over the past three centuries, Taiji Quan has received more and more attention, and its popularity has increased, not only in China, but also gone far beyond its borders to Southeast Asia, Japan, America, European countries and many other countries.

Depression in the Workplace: Treatment Program Can Improve Productivity Outcomes

2008-09-28T17:40:00.000+05:30

An outreach treatment program for depression in the workplace can significantly lower depressive symptoms among employees, improve job retention, reduce absences, and increase work productivity, according to Philip S. Wang, MD, and colleagues. The researchers, who reported their findings in the September 26 JAMA, believe that employers would experience a positive return on investment from such a program.

Study participants were employees of 16 large companies who screened positive for possible depression on a health risk appraisal survey and were contacted via telephone and given a survey that included the Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology–Self-Report (QIDS-SR); those with a score of 8 or higher had moderate or severe depression and were eligible for randomization. A total of 304 participants were randomized to receive a free-of-charge, structured telephone intervention program that systematically assessed the need for treatment and encouraged employees to enter outpatient treatment with psychotherapy and/or antidepressant medication. The program also provided support for treatment adherence, monitored treatment quality and continuity, and made recommendations to clinicians.

Another 300 participants were randomized to usual care, informed that they had possible depression, and advised to consult with a clinician. They were allowed to access any usual available insurance benefit or service, such as psychotherapy or pharmacotherapy.

ENHANCED INTERVENTION FOR DEPRESSION

“Workers in the intervention group worked an average of two more hours per week than workers in the usual care group, which is equivalent to an annualized effect of more than two weeks of work,” noted Dr. Wang, Director of the Division of Services and Intervention Research at the NIMH, and colleagues. This, coupled with increased job retention (at 12 months, 92.6% in the intervention group vs 88% in the usual care group; odds ratio [OR], 1.7), resulted in a significant 2.6-hour improvement per week in overall work function among intervention participants. At six months, QIDS-SR scores were significantly lower among those provided with the intervention than in those who received usual care, with mean scores of 10.2 and 11.2, respectively. Substantial depression symptom improvement (≥50% reduction in QIDS-SR score) occurred in a larger proportion of the intervention group than in the usual care group at six months; by 12 months, the difference was significant (30.9% of the intervention group and 21.6% of the usual care group). More than one-quarter of the intervention group experienced recovery at 12 months with a QIDS-SR score of 5 or less, significantly greater than those receiving usual care (17.7%).

Those assigned to the intervention group were also 1.6 times more likely to receive any mental health specialty treatment compared with those in usual care, but they were less likely to receive depression treatment in primary care or nonmedical settings (ORs, 0.7 and 0.6, respectively). Intervention patients also had more treatment contacts during the 12-month study, with a mean of 12.7, compared with a mean of 6.5 treatment contacts in the usual care group.

REDUCED DEPRESSION LEADS TO EMPLOYER COST SAVINGS

Although a formal evaluation of the intervention’s return on investment to employers is not yet possible, the investigators asserted that “the $1800 annualized value of higher mean hours worked among intervention participants retaining their jobs by itself far exceeds the $100 to $400 outreach and care management costs associated with low- to moderate-intensity interventions.” They proposed that companies view outreach and enhanced care for depressed employees as an investment in worker productivity rather than a workplace cost.

In an accompanying editorial, Kenneth B. Wells, MD, and Jeanne Miranda, PhD, of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Services at the University of California, Los Angeles, noted that depression interventions offer advantages for employees with depression, their family and friends, their employers, and society. Drs. Wells and Miranda also pointed out that insurance policy changes need to avoid undermining the goals of such programs, for example, the exclusion of depression treatment from health care coverage when an employee changes jobs or insurance, based on a recent history of treatment in an employer-based depression program. “Under such an ill-advised policy, the risk of losing coverage would serve as a major deterrent to seeking care,” they asserted.

“Learning how to optimize personal and societal gains by improving access to quality depression care across diverse communities through employer, practice, and community-based programs and policy changes is a next agenda for evidence-based action,” concluded the editorialists.

Exploring the Relationship Between Sleep, Dreams, and Memory

2008-09-28T17:39:00.001+05:30

MINNEAPOLIS—Sleep benefits the most difficult learning tasks and helps extract the most important information from the brain, according to Robert Stickgold, PhD, who presented his view on the role that sleep plays in processing memories at the 21st Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

“There are many, many different systems within the brain that are used for the storage and processing of information,” said Dr. Stickgold, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “Sleep acts to consolidate and strengthen specific memories by creating new ways of identification and creation of associations among them,” including specific details. This requires physiologic processing using a variety of distinct brain states, which may correspond with stages of sleep. “A strong hypothesis would be that varied stages of sleep originally evolved to meet the varying demands of the memory system and enhance understanding,” he added.

Within the past decade, an explosive growth in knowledge of the relationship between sleep and memory has occurred. Research conducted by Dr. Stickgold and colleagues has focused on slow-wave sleep, which precedes and follows REM sleep and is believed to be critical for memory consolidation. Slow-wave sleep has four distinct stages, from drowsiness to progressively deeper sleep. These different stages are believed to be associated with procedural learning tasks, such as learning how to play checkers or whether to take an umbrella if it looks likely to rain.

To test the theory that sleep is involved in consolidating procedural memory, Dr. Stickgold and Matthew P. Walker, PhD, a former colleague at Harvard who is now the Principal Investigator of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, conducted experiments in which participants were trained to tap nine-digit sequences—the second-to-last digit of which was always the same—and then allowed to sleep. After a night of sleep, the volunteers were two-and-a-half times more likely to recognize the sequence pattern.

“What’s getting better on this test is a complicated question,” Dr. Stickgold said. “While we sleep, the brain sifts through and integrates all that information,” extracting information not available before we go to sleep. “[Participants] get better, but they get better differently,” he added, noting that those who recognized the sequence did not necessarily complete the sequence any faster. “It’s as if the brain has decided to focus on the details … how to take that sequence and step back and nail down exactly what I’ve learned to try to look for—a pattern or a shortcut or a meta-description. You don’t get faster, but you figure out the shortcut. It’s not time that’s important for this improvement in performance; it’s sleep itself.”

Recent data suggest that people who discovered this insight had less slow-wave REM sleep than those who did not. Some research suggests that sleep works to extract rules from specific information. “The rules don’t have to be correct,” he said; rather, the brain finds a pattern, “and this is the best it can do at trying to figure out what [that pattern] means.”

According to another study conducted with thematic word lists, “it turns out that when you see a list of words, your brain does two things,” said Dr. Stickgold. “It tries to create a memory of each and every one of those words that it saw, and it tries to create a memory of the gist of what that list was about. It has both of those memories, and it gets them confused,” in that the brain “remembers the gist long after any of the words on the list.”

One subcategory of procedural learning is perceptual memory, or how one learns to carry out various perceptual tasks. “It could be visual; it could be auditory; it could be kinesthetic; it can be the ability to reach into your pocket and [make the distinction necessary to] pull out a nickel instead of a quarter, unlike when you’re in [in a foreign country] and you have take the whole handful out,” said Dr. Stickgold. “This is a skill that’s developed slowly, mostly unconsciously, and it is consolidated across a night’s sleep.”

Dr. Stickgold noted that one unexpected source of evidence for sleep-dependent memory consolidation comes from the study of dreaming. “Dream reports, in common with microarray analyses of gene expression, single-cell and neural network recordings, and human brain images, can provide a window into the activity of the sleeping brain, albeit a subjective one,” he wrote in Nature in 2005.

Two studies suggest that episodic memories are not reactivated during dreaming, as sleep more likely protects and consolidates episodic memories, in addition to discriminating among them. In one study, volunteers who played the computer game Tetris before going to sleep reported that as they drifted off to sleep, they saw specific shapes from the game floating downward. When a group of patients with mild amnesia and bilateral damage to the hippocampus and medial temporal lobes who could no longer form new memories—to the extent that they had no memory of playing the game despite having done so for hours—were asked about their dreams, three of five reported seeing images “turned on their sides” or as “shapes on a screen,” although they could not remember what they were.

“So although those people cannot form a declarative memory that they can [recall], they still form traces of this memory in nonhippocampal regions of their brain, which holds the information in a way that they don’t have conscious access to it,” said Dr. Stickgold. “This is the path to the unconscious. They are displaying memories that, due to brain lesions, they are unable to recall during the day,” suggesting that it is not the act of playing the game that creates the Tetris images, or procedural learning, but some other feature.

In another study, 14 of 16 volunteers who played an “Alpine racer” computer game before going to sleep “reported images of skiing across three nights of sleep-onset dreaming,” Dr. Stickgold said. “Like Tetris, it has a profound impact on sleep-onset dreams,” with 42% of participants noting a skiing image the first night.

“So what happens to those images?” Dr. Stickgold asked. “Well, most of them disappear, but something even more interesting happens. We start getting reports like this: ‘I felt as if I was falling downhill.’ The brain, now having had two hours of sleep to process this information, is no longer playing it the way it happened; it’s asking different questions now: What’s that like? What other information do I have that might be relevant to this? What should link this up with? What association should I connect to this?”

He noted that one person reported, “‘I was moving forward very stiffly, my entire upper body incredibly straight; I felt like I was moving forward on a conveyor belt.’ So whatever it is that made those dreams, those images, so intrusive into our sleep-onset dreams, that’s been altered across the first two hours of sleep, so that it no longer had that intrusive quality. This is really important clinically, because that’s what fails in [patients with] PTSD [posttraumatic stress disorder]. We’ve all had those sleep-onset dreams after September 11. What should happen over time is that those memories get processed; they get integrated into our sense of self and to our understanding of the world and the trauma disappears. In those individuals for whom this doesn’t happen, the replay … continues. I would argue that this is a failure of sleep-dependent memory processing…. It’s as if the brain is trying to create meaning, and the way we create meaning is by taking information and embedding it in our general knowledge. After September 11, people said, ‘I don’t understand what happened.’ It’s not that they didn’t understand [a plane] crashing into a building. They understood that; they didn’t understand what that meant about their life. They didn’t know if they should go to work [the next day]. They didn’t know if they should take public transportation. They didn’t know if they should get on that plane with ‘that guy who looks a little different to me.’ It’s that kind of understanding that is probably the most sophisticated conditioning the brain does.”

Physical Aspects of the Brain

2008-09-28T17:36:00.005+05:30

The brain is safely secured in your head. It should not be confused with the mind. The brain is physical; the mind is functional. The brain is the hardware, the mind is the software.
There are approximately 100 billion neurons in the brain. The adult brain weighs about 1.4 kg and is only 2 percent of the body weight.

The brain has three major parts; the brain stem, cerebellum, and cerebrum.

The brain stem sits atop your spinal column. This is the first part of the brain to be formed in the womb. It has three nerve centres- the midbrain, pons and medulla oblongata. The nerve centres in the midbrain help control movements of the eye. The pons links the two hemispheres of the crebrum. The medulla regulates breathing, heartbeat and blood flow. In short, the brain stem takes care of the survival mechanism of the body.

The cerebellum is ocated just behind the brain stem and manages the movement of our body. Therefore, it contains memory for movement. Thei is called kinaesthetic memory or muscle memory. Most good athletes have very well developed cerebellums.

The crebrum is the final stage of brain development in evolution. this the real brain where thinking and feelings arise. The cerebrum is divided into four areas or lobes:
-> the frontal lobe deals with abstract problem solving.
->the parietal lobe helps process information from the sense.
-> the occipital lobe governs vision and
->the temporal lobe controls memory, hearing and language.

the cerebrum contains the neocortex and limbic system. these two work in tandem. The neocortex is the thinking brain and limbic system is the feeling brain. the limbic system is where the mind meets the body and the endocrine system interfaces with the brain. It is also where thought meets emotions. when the physical health of the limbic system is stimulated, one can effectively operate the intellectual and emotional aspects of life.

The primary parts of the limbic system ate the

hippocampus stores dry and unemotional facts of short term memories. It ships most long-term memories to the neocortex.

Amygdala stores emotinal memories. when there is an emotional impact in a thought, it is automatically shifted to long term memory. Therefore emotion plays a crucial role in long-term memory. In other words, any experience involved with strong emotions is not forgotten for a long time.

Hypothalamus is closely connected to the amygdala . Its primary function is to tell the body how to respond to various situations. Based on the situation it gives messages to the pituitary gland. this is the master gland in the body that relays the message to the rest of the body. The messages are sent through hormones. The hypothalamus controls body temperature, hunger sexual functions. In a crisis, it sends out orders for more adrenaline.

thalamus picks up all incoming sensory messages except smell, and relays them to the appropriate processing centre in the brain. It is basically a relay station.

Pituitary is the master endocrine gland and gives orders to other gland about what to do. It receives messages from the hypothalamus and helps the body produce hormones it needs to respond to various situations. this is considered as the third eye, involved in intuition.

the brain generates electricity. the brain cells run on electricity and the brain has enough electricity to light a 25 watt bulb. thoughts travel through brain cells on electrical currents. Long strings of brain cells light up with electrical energy to form complete and emotions.

Most brain cells are elongated, shaped rather like trees with a branch system. The roots of the neuron are called axons. Information flows into axons form the dentric branches of adjacent neurons. Information travels to the axons of another neuron in the form of an electrical impulse. Eventually, this forms a complete chain like thought or memory. New dentric branches can be stimulated to grow.

EXPLORING THE BRAIN’S ROLE IN CREATIVITY

2008-09-28T17:36:00.001+05:30

EXPLORING THE BRAIN’S ROLE IN CREATIVITY

SAN DIEGO—Being one of the true geniuses of the modern era, Albert Einstein recognized that a useful method for understanding the brain’s role in creativity was to study the brains of highly creative people. He also realized that there would be a great deal of interest in examining his own brain after his death, so he willed that his brain be removed before cremation. However, nearly all of the 240 blocks into which Einstein’s brain was dissected were lost and never analyzed.

Thirty years later, the Brodmann’s area 39 portion of Einstein’s brain was analyzed histologically by Marian C. Diamond, PhD, and colleagues. They reported that this area of Einstein’s brain contained a higher proportion of glial cells versus neurons, compared with the brains of control subjects. Assuming that the paucity of cortical neurons was not the result of aging (the control subjects were significantly younger than Einstein at the time of his death), how did the loss of neurons relate to Einstein’s creative genius?

When Einstein was about age 3, his parents brought him to a pediatrician because he was not yet talking. Researchers have learned that Einstein had developmental dyslexia. More than a century ago, it was found that lesions of the left angular gyrus—ie, Brodmann’s area 39—induce acquired alexia. Therefore, it is possible that people with developmental dyslexia may also have abnormalities in this region, Kenneth M. Heilman, MD, suggested in his lecture at the 17th Annual Meeting of the American Neuropsychiatric Association. In his view, however, the high ratio of glial cells to neurons that was reported by Diamond et al was less a sign of Einstein’s dyslexia than an indication of the high degree of what Dr. Heilman refers to as "connectivity."

After viewing photographs taken of Einstein’s brain before its dissection in 1955, Witelson and colleagues noted that Einstein had an enlarged left inferior and—unlike most human beings—undivided parietal lobe, suggesting that this bigger and more highly connected supramodal cortex gave Einstein an advantage in doing mathematics and spatial computations. In 1985, Geschwind and Galaburda posited that delay in the development of the left hemisphere of the brain may allow the right hemisphere, which mediates spatial computations, to become highly specialized. It was Einstein’s view that his own creativity was heavily dependent on spatial reasoning. Thus, the abnormal development of his left hemisphere may have led to the right hemisphere becoming highly specialized for spatial computations, Dr. Heilman theorized.

"If you have something going on in one side of the brain, [could] that ‘disinhibit’ the other side of the brain [into] developing even greater ability?" Dr. Heilman asked. "Could Einstein’s dyslexia and lack of development of his left hemisphere have allowed his right hemisphere to grow and be well connected and to have excellent modules?... People who have tremendous creativity also have tremendous connectivity."

FINDING THE THREAD THAT UNITES

According to Dr. Heilman, who is the James E. Rooks, Jr, Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Health Psychology at the University of Florida’s College of Medicine in Gainesville, connectivity is a key component of "creative innovation," a concept that combines two of the four stages of creativity—incubation and illumination (the others are preparation and verification)—identified by Hermann Helmholtz in 1826.

In an article titled "Creative Innovation: Possible Brain Mechanisms" appearing in Neurocase in 2003, Dr. Heilman and his colleagues, Stephen E. Nadeau, MD, and David O. Beversdorf, MD, defined creative innovation as "the ability to understand and express novel orderly relationships." A high level of general intelligence, domain-specific knowledge, and special skills are necessary for creative innovation, but even when they coincide, these three components are not sufficient for creative innovation. One further crucial component is the ability to develop alternative solutions—otherwise known as "divergent thinking"—yet, even the coexistence of specialized knowledge and divergent thinking is not enough to enable an individual to find the thread that unites the two.

"Finding this thread might require the binding of different forms of knowledge, stored in separate cortical modules that have not been previously associated," the authors wrote. "Thus, creative innovation might require the coactivation and communication between regions of the brain that ordinarily are not strongly connected."

Based on the findings of anatomic studies, it appears that creative individuals such as Einstein may have alterations of specific regions of the brain’s posterior neocortical region. At the same time, it has been observed that creative innovation frequently takes place during times of diminished arousal (eg, sleep) and that many well-known creative people have experienced depression, suggesting that alterations of such neurotransmitters as norepinephrine might play a critical role in creativity. In the view of Dr. Heilman and his coauthors, highly creative individuals "may be endowed with brains that are capable of storing extensive specialized knowledge in their temporoparietal cortex, be capable of frontal mediated divergent thinking, and have a special ability to modulate the frontal lobe-locus coeruleus (norepinephrine) system, such that during creative innovation cerebral levels of norepinephrine diminish, leading to the discovery of novel orderly relationships."

In his lecture and in a follow-up interview with NeuroPsychiatry Reviews, Dr. Heilman focused on the importance of divergent thinking in creative innovation, how our understanding of its neurobiologic underpinnings has evolved over the past two centuries, and the clinical implications of depression and other brain disorders for future neuropharmacologic treatments.

"To be creative, people need to break away from what they have been taught to believe, and thus divergent thinking is a critical element of creativity," he said. "Patients who have their frontal lobe[s] removed or injured cannot perform divergent thinking…. The major hypothesis of this talk is that creativity is dependent upon the ability to diverge and then form innovative solutions.

"The development of innovative solutions is dependent on the ability to coactivate anatomically distinct representational networks that store different forms of knowledge. This simultaneous distributed activation … may allow people to develop alternative innovative solutions, thereby finding the thread that unites."

ENCOURAGING CREATIVITY BY FOSTERING INDEPENDENT THINKING

Dr. Heilman cited several items that are important for clinicians to know to get a handle on current research into creativity and the brain. Besides the importance of both divergent and "convergent" thinking, he observed that "many people who are very creative have a higher incidence of mood and addiction disorders [and that while] many neurologic disorders can reduce creativity … there are some that might enhance creativity."

As an example of the latter, he cited the work of Miller and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, describing a series of patients with frontotemporal dementia who acquired new artistic abilities despite evidence of deterioration in the left anterior temporal lobe (see NeuroPsychiatry Reviews, June 2003, page 1). "These are people who had no history of artistic production," Dr. Heilman said. "They actually became creative—perhaps because the deterioration on the left side ‘disinhibited’ their right side, and the right side got creative doing artistic things."

Regarding mood and addiction disorders, Dr. Heilman explored the links among creativity and sleep, dreaming, rest and relaxation, and depression, and observed that one thread uniting them all is changes in neurotransmitter systems. Two components indispensable to divergent thinking appear to be disengagement and the ability to develop alternative solutions. To arrive at a creative solution to a persistently unsolvable problem, an individual must often change the method by which he or she has already attempted to solve the problem—in other words, think outside the box. Observations on problem solving have included William James’ view, expressed in 1890, that the ability to switch strategies is integral to divergent thinking and Charles Spearman’s suggestion in 1931 that creativity results from bringing together two or more ideas that previously have been isolated. One way to solve a persistent problem, then, would be to see it in a "new light" by combining different forms of knowledge and cognitive strategies mediated by the two hemispheres of the brain.

Dr. Heilman cited as examples a number of scientists who reported solving a difficult scientific problem while asleep or when falling asleep or awakening from sleep. He also pointed to the association between creativity and novelty seeking and the high rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, bipolar depression, and monodepression among such creative types as writers, composers, musicians, and fine artists. Based on what is known from existing evidence, such associations raise more questions than answers, according to Dr. Heilman. "For example, does treatment of depression and bipolar disorder influence creativity, and what are the effects of different treatments?" he asked.

PROMOTING CREATIVE THINKING

Can creativity in individuals be encouraged regardless of the makeup of their brain, or are we limited by such factors as the number of glial cells and amount of white matter? "I believe creativity can be ‘encouraged,’" Dr. Heilman responded. "We have known for decades that when young rodents are put in a stimulating environment, they have a much richer neural network than their sibs who were not raised in this environment. Thus, bringing up children in an enriched environment and making certain that they receive a good education is critical for their brain development.

"The frontal lobes appear to be the part of the cortex that is most important for creativity, in that they are critical for divergent thinking and might modulate the coactivation of diverse cognitive networks so important in innovation. The means by which family and friends might be able to encourage the development of the frontal lobes is to encourage independent and divergent thinking."

Apart from such sociocultural interventions, Dr. Heilman believes that there is a limit to the extent to which neuropsychiatry and neuroscience can enhance creativity, particularly with regard to the development of new neuropharmacologic treatments. "It is possible that certain drugs taken by people might enhance creativity and others inhibit creativity," he said, citing an editorial titled "Cosmetic Neurology," written by one of his former fellows, Anjan Chatterjee. "But physicians have learned that ‘when it is not broke, do not attempt to fix it.’ In other words, if you alter a person’s homeostasis, there might be a price paid."

Creativity

2008-09-28T17:23:00.003+05:30

left brain vs Right Brain Thinking
brain

LWW Budget Brain
with Arteries
The human brain is physically divided into two connected hemispheres, left and right. Research has shown that although these two halves of the brain work closely together there is a definite degree of specialisation, a process kown as lateralisation (or "lateralizaion"). The degree to which this takes place is open to dispute. It certainly exists at some level but probably not to the extent claimed by some pop psychology. Regardless of that it still provides an interesting and useful metaphor for considering creativity.

Cerebral Specialisation
In general the left side of the brain is usually associated with logical, reasoning type activity. It plays safe and follows systematic, convergent patterns of thought. Mathematics and language are often associated with the left brain.

The right side of the brain is usually associated with visual and musical activitty, emotional empathy, etc. It takes risks and makes leaps of divergent thought. It is often known as the artistic side of the brain.

For example: When you saw the word "Brains" in the section index, did you think of neurology? Or of zombies?

Someone - I forget who - once told me an excellent mnemonic for remembering which side is which:

L is Logical
R is Artistic

Lateralisation and Creativity
Both sides of the brain are needed for the complete creative process. However the right side is the one most needed for the initial, idea generating phase. It is the right side of the brain that is more useful in generating new ideas and synthesising concepts, in breaking away from conventional patterns of thought. The left side of the brain is better at analysing and criticising these new ideas. Very often "left brain" functionality is applied too early in the creative process and ideas are rejected as "impractical" before being fully explored.

Unfortunately our society tends to value "left brain thinking" more than right. In particular much of our education system stresses left brain activity.

Many creativity techniques and courses stress ways to enhance and stimulate right brain activity. Once the right brain has generated creative ideas then the left brain can be usefully called upon to sort, sift and analyse them in detail.A new study attempts to answer the question of whether people who are creative problem solvers have different brain activity patterns than the less creative.

A new study led by John Kounios, professor of Psychology at Drexel University and Mark Jung-Beeman of Northwestern University answers these questions by comparing the brain activity of creative and noncreative problem solvers. The study, a published “Article in Press” in the journal Neuropsychologia, reveals a distinct pattern of brain activity, even at rest, in people who tend to solve problems with a sudden creative insight -- an “Aha! Moment” – compared to people who tend to solve problems more methodically.

At the beginning of the study, participants relaxed quietly for seven minutes while their electroencephalograms (EEGs) were recorded to show their brain activity. The participants were not given any task to perform and were told they could think about whatever they wanted to think about. Later, they were asked to solve a series of anagrams – scrambled letters that can be rearranged to form words [MPXAELE = EXAMPLE]. These can be solved by deliberately and methodically trying out different letter combinations, or they can be solved with a sudden insight or “Aha!” in which the solution pops into awareness. After each successful solution, participants indicated in which way the solution had come to them.

The creative types had patterns of resting brain activity that were different from the patterns of brain activity seen in non-creative types.

The participants were then divided into two groups – those who reported solving the problems mostly by sudden insight, and those who reported solving the problems more methodically – and resting-state brain activity for these groups was compared. As predicted, the two groups displayed strikingly different patterns of brain activity during the resting period at the beginning of the experiment – before they knew that they would have to solve problems or even knew what the study was about.

One difference was that the creative solvers exhibited greater activity in several regions of the right hemisphere. Previous research has suggested that the right hemisphere of the brain plays a special role in solving problems with creative insight, likely due to right-hemisphere involvement in the processing of loose or “remote” associations between the elements of a problem, which is understood to be an important component of creative thought. The current study shows that greater right-hemisphere activity occurs even during a “resting” state in those with a tendency to solve problems by creative insight. This finding suggests that even the spontaneous thought of creative individuals, such as in their daydreams, contains more remote associations.

What I want to know: does the creative style of thinking have a genetic cause? If it does then when people start genetically engineering their offspring will they choose the genetic variations that cause creativity more often or less often than it now occurs naturally? In other words, will genetic engineering boost the amount of creative thinking in the world?

Second, creative and methodical solvers exhibited different activity in areas of the brain that process visual information. The pattern of “alpha” and “beta” brainwaves in creative solvers was consistent with diffuse rather than focused visual attention. This may allow creative individuals to broadly sample the environment for experiences that can trigger remote associations to produce an Aha! Moment.

This pattern of diffuse attention reminds me of low latent inhibition. See my post Low Latent Inhibition Plus High Intelligence Leads To High Creativity?

Children Of Bipolar Parents More Creative

Creative and mentally ill parents have creative and mentally ill children.

STANFORD, Calif. – Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown for the first time that a sample of children who either have or are at high risk for bipolar disorder score higher on a creativity index than healthy children. The findings add to existing evidence that a link exists between mood disorders and creativity.

The small study, published in the November issue of the Journal of Psychiatric Research, compared creativity test scores of children of healthy parents with the scores of children of bipolar parents. Children with the bipolar parents—even those who were not bipolar themselves—scored higher than the healthy children.

Obviously genetics plays an important role in creativity, ADHD, and bipolar disorder.

Artists have higher rates of mental illness.

Many scientists believe that a relationship exists between creativity and bipolar disorder, which was formerly called manic-depressive illness and is marked by dramatic shifts in a person’s mood, energy and ability to function. Numerous studies have examined this link; several have shown that artists and writers may have two to three times more incidences of psychosis, mood disorders or suicide when compared with people in less creative professions.

Terence Ketter, MD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and a study co-author, said he became interested in the link between mental illness and creativity after noticing that patients who came through the bipolar clinic, despite having problems, were extraordinarily bright, motivated people who “tended to lead interesting lives.” He began a scholarly pursuit of this link and in 2002 published a study that showed healthy artists were more similar in personality to individuals with bipolar disorder (the majority of whom were on medication) than to healthy people in the general population.

Some people with higher intellectual capabilities might be able to handle their bipolar and ADHD and still manage to be productive. But less bright people are probably more likely to be overwhelmed by their mental illness and unable to harness their creativity for productive purposes. But do the genetic variations that contribute to causing bipolar also raise IQ?

People who use their negative emotions to initiate searches for solutions to problems tend to be more creative.

The children of parents with bipolar disorder were themselves either bipolar or had ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).

During the study, the researchers looked at creative characteristics in 40 bipolar patients and 40 offspring, comparing them with 18 healthy adults and 18 healthy offspring. The children in the study ranged in age from 10 to 18. Half of the children of bipolar patients also had bipolar disorder; the other half had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD, which appears to be an early sign of bipolar disorder in offspring of parents with the condition. The majority of participants with bipolar or ADHD were on medication.

The researchers included children with ADHD so they could study creativity before the onset of full bipolar disorder. “We wanted to see whether having a manic episode is necessary for this sort of creativity,” said Chang, who also directs the Pediatric Bipolar Disorders Program at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.

Study participants were given psychiatric evaluations and then completed the Barron-Welsh Art Scale, or BWAS, a test that seeks to provide an objective measure of creativity. The scoring is based on “like” and “dislike” responses to figures of varying complexity and symmetry; past studies suggest that creative people tend to dislike the simple and symmetric symbols.

The researchers found that the bipolar parents had 120 percent higher BWAS “dislike” scores than the healthy parents. The children with bipolar and the children with ADHD had, respectively, 107 and 91 percent higher BWAS dislike scores than the healthy children.

“The results of this study support an association between bipolar disease and creativity and contribute to a better understanding of possible mechanisms of transmission of creativity in families with genetic susceptibility for bipolar disease,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

On the bright side, the bipolar mania stage is not needed to cause creativity. The presence of ADHD alone boosts creativity. The problem, though, is that people with ADHD might be full of ideas. But many lack the patience needed to translate their ideas into implementations. If you can't stand to focus long enough to write down the melody or story line you see in your head or to draw a mechanical design that you've thought of your creativity doesn't do you or the world much good.

The researchers had hypothesized that the scores of children with ADHD would differ significantly from the scores of bipolar children so they were surprised when the scores did not. Chang said this indicates that mania is not what is fueling the creativity. “The kids with ADHD who hadn’t been manic yet still had very high levels of creativity,” he said.

Being mentally ill for a longer time erodes the BWAS dislike score. Mentally ill people burn out and cease to be creative.

The researchers also found a link between the length of a bipolar child’s illness and creativity: the longer a child was sick or manic, the lower the BWAS dislike score. It makes sense, Chang said, that this illness could, over time, erode one’s creativity. “After awhile you aren’t able to function and you can’t access your creativity,” he explained.

We all get less creative with age.

BWAS dislike scores tend to decrease with age even in healthy individuals, so more research is needed, Ketter said. Further studies are also needed to assess the role of genetic and environmental factors in creativity and bipolar, he added. The team plans to next examine whether the degree of creativity in parents correlates with the degree of creativity in their children.

If the mental illness eventually leads to declining creatvitiy by causeing neuronal cell death then perhaps the development of treatments based on Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) will provide ways to preserve neurons and creativity as the years and decades go by.

Maybe one cause of hyperactivity is a low threshold for noticing external stimuli. See my previous post "Low Latent Inhibition Plus High Intelligence Leads To High Creativity?"

Brain Scans Show Why Schizotypal Personalities More Creative

Schizotypal personalities are more creative.

New research on individuals with schizotypal personalities – people characterized by odd behavior and language but who are not psychotic or schizophrenic – offers the first neurological evidence that they are more creative than either normal or fully schizophrenic individuals, and rely more heavily on the right sides of their brains than the general population to access their creativity.

The work by Vanderbilt psychologists Brad Folley and Sohee Park was published online last week by the journal Schizophrenia Research.

"The idea that schizotypes have enhanced creativity has been out there for a long time but no one has investigated the behavioral manifestations and their neural correlates experimentally," Folley says. "Our paper is unique because we investigated the creative process experimentally and we also looked at the blood flow in the brain while research subjects were undergoing creative tasks."

Folley and Park conducted two experiments to compare the creative thinking processes of schizotypes, schizophrenics and normal control subjects. In the first experiment, the researchers showed research subjects a variety of household objects and asked them to make up new functions for them. The results showed that the schizotypes were better able to creatively suggest new uses for the objects, while the schizophrenics and average subjects performed similarly to one another.

"Thought processes for individuals with schizophrenia are often very disorganized, almost to the point where they can’t really be creative because they cannot get all of their thoughts coherent enough to do that," Folley observes. "Schizotypes, on the other hand, are free from the severe, debilitating symptoms surrounding schizophrenia and also have an enhanced creative ability."

So then is creativity just the result of unusual brain anatomy?

Brain scans showed that schizotypes use more of their right hemispheres for creative work than do normal or schizophrenic people.

In the second experiment, the three groups again were asked to identify new uses for everyday objects as well as to perform a basic control task while the activity in their prefrontal lobes was monitored using a brain scanning techniques called near-infrared optical spectroscopy. The brain scans showed that all groups used both brain hemispheres for creative tasks, but that the activation of the right hemispheres of the schizotypes was dramatically greater than that of the schizophrenic and average subjects, suggesting a positive benefit of schizotypy.

"In the scientific community, the popular idea that creativity exists in the right side of the brain is thought to be ridiculous, because you need both hemispheres of your brain to make novel associations and to perform other creative tasks," Folley says. "We found that all three groups, schizotypes, schizophrenics and normal controls, did use both hemispheres when performing creative tasks. But the brain scans of the schizotypes showed a hugely increased activation of the right hemisphere compared to the schizophrenics and the normal controls."

Suppose the schizotypes have some genetic component to how their brains work. Once genetic engineering of offspring becomes possible or even once detailed genetic testing of fertilized eggs becomes possible will future parents make choices that decrease the fraction of the population that have brain wiring that make them especially creative?

Or, more optimistically, will genetic variations be found that increase creativity while lowering risk of mental disorders?

Functional MRI (fMRI) brain scans show the location of activity in the brain of visual short-term working memory.

The amount of information we can remember from a visual scene is extremely limited and the source of that limit may lie in the posterior parietal cortex, a region of the brain involved in visual short-term memory, Vanderbilt psychologist René Marois and graduate student J. Jay Todd have found. Their results were published in the April 15 edition of Nature.

Previous findings have determined that an extensive network of brain regions supports visual short-term memory. In their study, Todd and Marois showed that the severely limited storage capacity of visual short-term memory is primarily associated with just one of these regions, the posterior parietal cortex.

Todd and Marois used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technique that reveals the brain regions active in a given mental task by registering changes in blood flow and oxygenation in these regions, to identify where the capacity limit of visual short-term memory occurs.

The brains of research participants were scanned with fMRI while they were shown scenes containing one to eight colored objects. After a delay of just over a second, the subjects were queried about the scene they had just viewed.

While the subjects were good at remembering all of the objects in scenes containing four or fewer objects, they frequently made mistakes describing displays containing a larger number of objects, indicating that the storage capacity of visual short-term memory is about four.

The fMRI results revealed that activity in the posterior parietal cortex strongly correlated with the number of objects the subjects were able to remember. The magnitude of the neural response in this brain area increased with the number of objects viewed up to about four and leveled off after that, even when additional objects were presented.

A different team led by Edward Vogel of the University of Oregon at Eugene were able to use signals measured by electrodes attached to the scalp to precisely measure the size of each person's visual working memory.

A large increase in the subject's brain activity on the four-dot test indicated that his or her memory capacity had not been pushed to its limit. No increase in electrical activity indicated that his or her working memory had topped out on the two-dot test. By graphing these responses, the team worked out the exact size of each subject's working memory.

It is likely that the measured differences in visual memory have some genetic basis. With that in mind it would be interesting to use Vogel's technique to compare measured visual working memory with BDNF gene variations that affect visual and episodic memory capabilities.

Another team at Northwestern University and Drexel University has used fMRI to demonstrate that the problem solving mechanism that produces the "Eureka!" moment of discovering an answer works by a different mental mechanism than what is used to solve problems by more conventional methods.

While several regions in the cerebral cortex showed about the same heightened activity for both insight and noninsight-derived solutions, only an area known as the anterior Superior Temporal Gyrus (aSTG) in the right hemisphere (RH) showed a robust insight effect. The researchers also found that 0.3 seconds before the subjects indicated solutions achieved through insight, there was a burst of neural activity of one particular type: high-frequency (gamma band) activity that is often thought to reflect complex cognitive processing. This activity was also mapped to the aSTG of the RH, providing compelling convergence across experiments and methods.

Problem-solving involves a complex network of brain regions to encode, retrieve, and evaluate information, but these results show that solving verbal problems with insight requires at least one additional component. Further, the fact that the effect occurred in RH aSTG suggests what that process may be: integration of distantly related information. Distinct neural processes, the authors conclude, underlie the sudden flash of insight that allows people to "see connections that previously eluded them."

Some problems are easier to solve because they require the use of straightforward procedures which has been trained to use. For example, if one solves a math problem with a known method of solution then there is no "Eureka!" moment when one calculates the answer. Whereas when a solution found by noticing previously unobserved connections there is more a sense of revelation. It is this latter case that involves a burst of activity in a part of the brain called the anterior Superior Temporal Gyrus (aSTG).

Mark Jung-Beeman says these results demonstrate that "Eureka!" moments are different than moments when problems are solved with conventional methods.

“For thousands of years, people have said that insight feels different from more straightforward problem-solving,” he said.

“We believe this is the first research showing that distinct computational and neural mechanisms lead to these breakthrough moments.”

The paper by Mark Jung-Beeman et. al. is available online here: Neural Activity When People Solve Verbal Problems with Insight.

It would be interesting to know whether people who are considered more creative in their fields have a bigger anterior Superior Temporal Gyrus (aSTG). Every time a part of the brain is discovered as key for some function the obvious question that arises is just how valuable would it be to enhance that part of the brain. The aSTG for reaching insights and the posterior parietal cortex for working short-term visual memory both strike me as useful areas to enhance to make one better at scientific and engineering work.

Low Latent Inhibition Plus High Intelligence Leads To High Creativity?

Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto and colleages at Harvard University have found that decreased latent inhibition of environmental stimuli appears to correlate with greater creativity among people with high IQ. (same press release available here and here)

The study in the September issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology says the brains of creative people appear to be more open to incoming stimuli from the surrounding environment. Other people's brains might shut out this same information through a process called "latent inhibition" - defined as an animal's unconscious capacity to ignore stimuli that experience has shown are irrelevant to its needs. Through psychological testing, the researchers showed that creative individuals are much more likely to have low levels of latent inhibition.

"This means that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming in from the environment," says co-author and U of T psychology professor Jordan Peterson. "The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is much more complex and interesting than he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities."

Previously, scientists have associated failure to screen out stimuli with psychosis. However, Peterson and his co-researchers - lead author and psychology lecturer Shelley Carson of Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard PhD candidate Daniel Higgins - hypothesized that it might also contribute to original thinking, especially when combined with high IQ. They administered tests of latent inhibition to Harvard undergraduates. Those classified as eminent creative achievers - participants under age 21 who reported unusually high scores in a single area of creative achievement - were seven times more likely to have low latent inhibition scores.

The authors hypothesize that latent inhibition may be positive when combined with high intelligence and good working memory - the capacity to think about many things at once - but negative otherwise. Peterson states: "If you are open to new information, new ideas, you better be able to intelligently and carefully edit and choose. If you have 50 ideas, only two or three are likely to be good. You have to be able to discriminate or you'll get swamped."

"Scientists have wondered for a long time why madness and creativity seem linked," says Carson. "It appears likely that low levels of latent inhibition and exceptional flexibility in thought might predispose to mental illness under some conditions and to creative accomplishment under others."

A less able mind has a greater need to be able to filter out and ignore stimuli. A less intelligent person with a low level of latent inhibition for filtering out familiar stimuli may well sink into mental illness as a result. But a smarter mind can handle the effects of taking note of a larger number of stimuli and even find interesting and useful patterns by continually processing a larger quantity of familiar information.

You can find the original paper here: Decreased Latent Inhibition Is Associated With Increased Creative Achievement in High-Functioning Individuals (PDF format)

The central idea underlying our research program is therefore that individuals characterized by increased plasticity (extraversion and openness)retain higher post-exposure access to the range of complex possibilities laying dormant in so-called ‘‘familiar ’’environments.This heightened access is the subjective concomitant of decreased latent inhibition,which allows the plastic person increased incentive-reward-tagged appreciation for hidden or latent information

Note from the text of the full paper that stress causes the release of the hormone corticosterone which lowers latent inhibition. In a nutshell, when an organism runs into problems that cause stress the resulting release of stress hormones causes the mind to shift into a state where it will examine factors in the environment that it normally ignores. This allows the organism to look for solutions to the stress-causing problem that would be ignored in normal and less stressed circumstances.

So perhaps we could hypothesize something like this:under stressful conditions,or in person-ality conﬁgurations characterized by increased novelty-sensitivity,approach behavior,and DA activity, decreased LI is associated with increased permeability and ﬂexibility of functional cog- nitive and perceptual category [see Barsalou (1983)for a discussion of such categories ].Imagine a situation where current plans are not producing desired outcomes —a situation where current categories of perception and cognition are in error, from the pragmatic perspective. Something anomalous or novel emerges as a consequence (Peterson,1999), and drives exploratory behavior. Stress or trait-dependent decreased LI, under such circumstances, could produce increased signal (as well as noise), with regards to the erroneous pattern of behavior and the anomaly that it produced. This might oﬀer the organism, currently enmeshed in the consequences of mistaken presuppositions, the possibility of gathering new information, where nothing but categorical certainty once existed. Decreased LI might therefore be regarded as advantageous, in that it allows for the perception of more unlikely, radical and numerous options for reconsideration, but disadvantageous in that the stressed or approach-oriented person risks ‘‘drowning in possibility,’’ to use Kierkegaard ’s phrase.

One can easily see how this response could have been selected for evolutionarily. At the same time, one can also see how chronic stress could lead a person to fall into a state of confusion as a sustained large flood of stimuli could overwhelm the brain by giving it too much to think about and make a person unable to clearly see solutions that will relieve the feeling of stress.