Harmonising One's Faith With Science

Francisco J Ayala, a geneticist who trained as a Dominican priest, has won this year's $1.5 million Templeton Award for making “exceptional contributions to affirming life's spiritual dimension”. As an evolutionary biologist and geneticist at University of California, Irvine Ayala has tried to keep the spirit apart from the bottle. Science and religion are two separate realms, he argues, and people come to grief when they try to ‘entangle' them, as scientists do when they argue that there is no proof that God exists; or when creationists invoke hand of God to account for evolutionary change. 

In 30 years that he has been preaching Darwinian evolution to Christian believers, Ayala has learnt to use tactics of ‘shock and awe' : one out of five pregnancies ends in spontaneously in miscarriage. Does that make God the greatest abortionist in history, he asks, assuming that God designed the human reproductive system.

But Ayala also believes that scientists who attack religion as that self-described ‘Darwin's rottweiler' Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, does or ridicule believers are making a mistake. It encourages either-or thinking and strengthens preachers to bully their flock to choose either Darwin or God.

He advocates a more conciliatory approach that would allow believers to harmonise their faith with science. Nature is not the best of designers, he concedes, pointing to oddities such as blind spots built into the human eye or the narrowness of the human birth canal which forces babies to complete their crucial brain growth outside their mothers' womb (a phenomenon known as altricial birth).

Darwinian teory can also help in explaining red-fangedNature'sfearsome cruelty, he adds, enabling us to remove ‘evil' from the natural world and to replace it with volitional acts of free will and kindness in human affairs. In his Darwin's Gift Ayala says Darwin solved the problem of evil that's been plaguing theology since eons: The earliest formulation of this conundrum is attributed to the Greek philosopher Epicurus.

As for priests, he prefers science-savvy theologians who present a God continuously updating His creative process through undirected natural selection . By addressing religious people on their own terms, Ayala aims to offer a better answer than intelligent design or creationism . May his tribe flourish!

Vithal C Nadkarni

Now You Don't, Now You See It

Do we see reality as it is? No, that's not a comprehensive enough question . Do we truly perceive what lies out there? Actually that won't do either. Can we ever possess knowledge, understanding or information and directly grasp in the mind as an inner experience the nature of all existence ? For a long time the standard answer of, say, physics was that yes we can given enough time. Ptolemy didn't know the Earth went around the Sun; Copernicus did. Copernicus didn't know the laws of motion; Newton did. Newton didn't know that matter could bend light; Einstein did. Einstein didn't believe two subatomic particles could communicate instantaneously; experiments show they can. And so on. 

In other words, science maintains that as knowledge advances reality unfolds. Which would mean that given sufficient time more and more knowledge about the universe would be available till a time comes when, in principle , all can be known. However , this comfortable conclusion is now being questioned by many physical theorists who are beginning to wonder if what we think of as the “out there” is the true or even only “out there” there is.

For example, to take Plato's cave allegory a little further, think of a flashlight held behind a 3-D ball, the projected image of which falls as a 2-D shadow circle on a screen. Now, the people living in that shadow might consider the circle to be their universe yet, no matter what theories they develop about it, they would never be able to discover the nature of the source — even if some of them realised they were projections of a higher reality. But what if the 3-D ball was also a projection of a still higher reality? Mathematicians routinely deal with the tesseract — the 4-D equivalent of a 3-D cube — as a valid construct but there's no way us 3-D beings can conceptualise it.

Or is there? According to the holographic principle which is a property of quantum theory, the universe is a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram where, like in a hologram, every part of a lower dimension structure contains all the information about the higher dimension whole and can, in theory, be accessed. Perhaps that's what mystics do. Which is probably why the substance of the spiritual experience is always and everywhere the same, even though differences in its expression and interpretation become a cause for conflict among different religions.

Mukul Sharma

Hearty Approbation And Lavish Praise

For relatively pain-free transactions in this world of men and matter, it is necessary to accept the fact that gratitude and reciprocal feelings are not only rare but also that the opposites of these are only to be expected and are inevitable. In this rat-race living, insensitivity abounds not only towards well meant acts but also towards various sublime virtues such as altruism, empathy and social responsibility, besides even to science, music and arts. 

Unwillingness to even notice, let alone acknowledge help received, is consequent on an unhealthy ego and also that self centredness, which often takes things for granted, as if others' feelings don't matter.

An incident in the life of Gandhiji is illustrative. After his lunch in a hotel, while in South Africa, Gandhiji thanked the waiter for his excellent service. “Sir,”, replied the waiter, “I'll never forget you because in my 25 years of sincere service, I never heard a word of thanks”.

Comprehension of the obvious and the related issues would enable the wise to accept this “insensitivity bug” as an inevitable hazard of life. More importantly, he would be inspired to guard against himself falling a victim to this. Self-honesty and self-analysis would enable him to divine where he too may have defaulted. He would know that just as it is easy to see a spot in others' backs but not on one's own, it is indeed difficult to observe faults within oneself.

This approach would enable this seeker to remember all those who had contributed to his welfare. He would thus think of his parents, elders, neighbours, bosses, subordinates, simple workers, servants, his own siblings, children, even pets, whosoever.

Having received the butt of unfair treatment from others, who he may have genuinely helped, he would tell himself, “all these have happened just to teach me that at least I should not be like this. I should not merely acknowledge but express my gratitude abundantly in both words and action”.

This also is the process of being “hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise”. This not merely saves you from the “insensitivity bug” but more so, is a service you do primarily to yourself, where you would be the principal beneficiary. You would thus not merely feel fulfilled and at peace, but, as Dale Carnegie notes, also “win friends and influence people”. What could be more rewarding than this supreme blessing!

K VIJAYARAGHAVAN

Do More And Remain Happy

EB White, the American writer, once asked James Thurber, his cartoonist friend, about his mother-in-law : “How's she now?” “As compared to what?” Thurber shot back. 

Thurber's reply raises all sorts of scenarios: Do you have that old nag, a smiling saint or a tarantula in mind? So, for instance, what should one expect to get when one compares a person who's just won a million-dollar lottery to a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic. In 1978 a trio of psychologists curious about happiness did just that. In their first group were winners of the Illinois state lottery. These men and women had received jackpots of between $50,000 and $1 million. In the second group were victims of devastating accidents. Some had been left paralysed from the waist down. For the others, paralysis started at the neck. A third bunch of Illinois residents randomly selected from the phone book served as their control group.

The subjects were questioned about the state of their happiness past and present and future expectations. It was a no-brainer to find that, in short term, the winners raved about their lottery in highly positive terms while the victims gave their accidents a big thumbs down. But that only made the subsequent results more puzzling: The winners considered themselves no happier at the time of the interviews than the members of the control group did. In the future, the winners expected to become slightly happier, but, once again, no more so than the control-group members. (Even the accident victims expected to be happier than the lottery winners within a few years.) Meanwhile, the winners took significantly less pleasure in daily activities — including clothes buying — than the members of the other two groups.

Does that mean things remain the same the more they change? Or does it simply mean that Time is a big eraser when it comes to vagaries of fortune? Happiness researchers found something more counter-intuitive — that people routinely mispredict how much pleasure or displeasure future events bring. So should you stop buying insurance or lottery tickets? Should one just sit back in the wheelchair wait for the cloud of misery to pass? Derek Bo, a former Harvard University president, considers such questions in his new book, The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the NewResearch on Well-being. Do more is the short answer.

Vithal C Nadkarni

The City Slicker As Metaphor

Before he disappeared under mysterious circumstances at the age of twenty in 1934, the American artist, writer and naturalist Everett Ruess, spent his last four years exploring the deserts of the American southwest — always alone. His attitude to life can be found in a letter he wrote to his brother shortly before his death: “I have not tired of the wilderness ; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and starsprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities.” 

How came he upon this manifesto which is so prized not only by nascent New Agers but also embraced down the ages by sadhus , saints and sages? How does such a (chronologically ) young mind reject perceived materialism for a pristine return to nature? Why should, indeed, a saddle be necessarily preferred to a streetcar?

What if some Mongol or Native American tribesmen were to tell someone like Ruess that they prefer the bare back to the saddle because riding in this fashion is natural, allows considerable communication with the horse and improves a rider's balance? Would a saddle become automatically repugnant in that case? Also, in that case, we should be preferring raw food instead of having it flame tempered by fire. And doing all our writing by means of stick marks on sand or a goose quill dipped in waterrubbed inkstone instead of using something like a pencil, Biro or word processor. It would be interesting to know what Ruess used for his writings.

But perhaps we do the man a gross injustice here because it's possible he was using his examples only as personal metaphor. The trouble is, we often tend to take that figure of speech, turn it on its head and begin to idolise it.

That's when we begin to suddenly see ceilings as something made of cement and not as the tops of caves or burrows and desire the elemental but essentially unprotective star-sprinkled sky. And what if a person were to find deep peace amidst a herd of people he calls his city? Would such a claim be any more falsifiable than that discovered in the wild? As for nature trails, it's the natural product of walking that occasionally get paved into highways — which, too, can still lead into the unknown. Just like swinging through the trees once did.

Mukul Sharma

Godel, Einstein And Proof For God

Kurt Godel used to walk every day with his friend Albert Einstein at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton. Einstein told a colleague that 

in the later years of his life, his own work — which had married space to time and spawned the atom bomb — no longer meant much to him and that he used to come to the institute merely “to have the privilege to be able to walk home with Godel.” If Einstein had upset our everyday notions about the physical world with his theory of relativity, his younger friend had had a similarly subversive effect on our understanding of the abstract world of mathematics. Godel , who has often been called the greatest logician since Aristotle , seemed to be unfazed by Einstein's reputation and did not hesitate to challenge his ideas. Although Einstein and Godel seemed to hover on a higher plane than the rest of humanity, they had also morphed into ‘museum pieces' , to use Einstein's words. Einstein did not accept the quantum theory and Godel believed in ghosts, rebirth and time travel and thought that mathematical abstractions were every bit as real as tables and chairs, a view that philosophers had come to regard as laughably naive. “Both Godel and Einstein insisted that the world is independent of our minds, yet rationally organised and open to human understanding. United by a shared sense of intellectual isolation, they found solace in their companionship,” writes Jim Holt in Time Bandits, his profile of the two mega-scientists in The New Yorker. Of course their politics differed . Einstein supported Adlai Stevenson and Godel voted for Eisenhower in 1952, which prompted the genial relativist to exclaim that his brilliant companion had “gone completely crazy”. As usual, Einstein turned out to be prophetically right, but only after his death. After Einstein's demise, Godel became ever more withdrawn. At some point, he tipped over the edge. Fearful of being poisoned, he would have his wife, a former cabaret dancer, test his food. And when she was no longer there, he succumbed to malnutrition. Along with inventing “proofs” for the existence of God, Godel's work also ushered in a unique philosophy of mind that challenges reductionists and those trying to mechanise it with mindless programs. For all his quirks, Godel also showed that the truth (satyam) could be both beautiful (sundaram) and transcendent (shivam).

Vithal C Nadkarni

Death Changed Ayer’s Life

One afternoon in May 1988, an elderly patient with pneumonia was admitted to London University’s Middlesex Hospital. The senior consultant on duty instantly recognised the patient as A J Ayer, professor of logic at Oxford and one of Britain’s most eminent philosophers. Ayer was the public face of atheism in Britain, often arguing on radio and TV, as well as in print, for the ‘non-existence’ of God. 

He was immediately put on oxygen and sent to the ICCU where he started to improve. He asked for and got Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time from his son-in-law . Another of his legion of friends brought him a supply of smoked salmon — which his kind nurses pretended not to see.

As Ayer wrote later, he carelessly tossed a slice of this salmon into his mouth. It went down the wrong way and he choked and suffered clinical death for four minutes before doctors could revive him.

In his own account of afterlife published in the London Daily Telegraph three months later, he said, “The earliest remarks of which I have any cognisance... were made several hours after I returned to life...addressed to a French woman in French, ‘Did you know that I was dead? The first time that I tried to cross the river, I was frustrated — but my second attempt succeeded.’ It was most extraordinary. My thoughts became persons.”

He went on to describe what he so vividly recalled on the other side, “I was confronted by a red light (and became) aware that this light was responsible for the government of the universe. Among its ministers were two creatures who had been put in charge of space,” he wrote.

Ayer told a doctor visiting him after the revival that he had seen a Divine Being and that he’d have to “revise all my various books and opinions” . But he wrote something quite different later for the newspapers:

“My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. They have not weakened my conviction that there is no God.”

Was it because of faulty memory or because he had excess of brain chemicals such as DMT? Whatever the reason, friends and family did notice that Ayer was a changed man after his return from hospital; “He became so much more nicer after he died,” quipped his wife. And the priest with whom he’d sparred so often became his closest friend.

Vithal C Nadkarni

The Race That Was Never Lost

Many years later, older and wiser now, the hare and the tortoise had become good friends who would often meet of a weekend at the local pub to quaff the froth while reminiscing their youth. One day, loaded with an ancient paradox, the hare turned to his barstool mate and said, “I know everyone thinks you won the race by being slow and steady and all that guff but you do understand why I couldn’t catch up and overtake you after I woke up from my nap, don’t you?” Tonguing a whisker of foam off his upper lip the tortoise replied, “I suppose because there was an arbitrary finish line imposed which doesn’t happen in real life, right?” 

“Wrong!” said the hare. “If there had been no finish line whatsoever I could still never have overtaken you. Hell, I couldn’t even have caught up with you.” Seeing his carapaced companion’s brow furrow in perplexity he continued, “See the reason is, the moment I reached the spot where you had been, you would have already moved a little distance ahead in that time. Then when I had caught up with you once more you would have moved a short distance in front again. And so on. Realising classical mathematics had outdone me, I knew there was no way I could win. So I gave up and a fable was born instead.”

The tortoise looked at him thoughtfully over the rim of his supping vessel and said, “Okaaay. So what you’re saying is that it takes all the running to stay in the same place because motion is an illusion. But, your point is...?” The hare paused before answering. Then taking a deep breath he blurted, “To prove my logic that I can never overtake you, all we have to do is have another race.”

“Agreed,” said the tortoise, “But on condition I get a head start and you don’t fall asleep. That still satisfies your logic doesn’t it?” The hare’s eyes lit up. “Done!” he exclaimed and they were off to the applause of the forest animals who had gathered to witness the rerun. Within a few seconds the hare had overtaken his sluggish opponent and was waiting with tears in his eyes at the finish line.

“I don’t get it, what went wrong?” he sobbed brokenly when the tortoise finally reached. “How come I lost again?” Gently leading his friend away to their favourite watering hole, the tortoise said, “Well, calculus has been invented since but more importantly, sometimes” (and here he quickly inserted a moral): it takes all the thinking to stay in the same place.

Mukul Sharma

Gratitude Is Precious But Rare

Ingratitude and all the pretensions that go with this vice, can indeed be galling, especially when one observes that these emanate from those whom he may have sincerely and significantly helped. Shakespeare refers to such ingratitude as ‘the most unkindest cut of all’ (Julius Caesar — III, 2) and as ‘sharper than a serpent’s tooth’ (King Lear — I, 4). In his As You Like It (II, 7), he writes: “Blow, blow thou winter wind,/ Thou art not so unkind/As man’s ingratitude”. 

The Tamil great, Valluvar notes, (Kural 110), “There may be salvation for those who have killed all other virtues, but not for the one who has killed gratitude”.

Well accepted though the merits of gratitude may be, it is, like precious stones, rare. Ingratitude, on the other hand is spread all over, common as the autumn leaves. Like germs in the air, it impacts on almost all who have to interact and transact in this sad, mad, bad world of men and matter. The wise, however forearm themselves through forewarnings from the evolved self within.

Ensconced thus in authenticity and inner power, they cease forever to even look forward to any acts of gratitude or approval from ordinary folk. Thus applying the concept, “When you forget, others remember”, they obtain goodly responses from just where and whom, these would be needed.

Realised souls would also divine that most acts of ingratitude or lack of response emanate from those whose ego is unhealthy and shaky. Many would pretend they are ‘self-made’ and would have made it, even otherwise, on their own! Acknowledging help received, they feel, would lower their value in their own eyes and those of others!

The wise observer would also comprehend that common folk take all help for granted, as if these were their birth rights. A case in point is that of a leading opposition leader, who was shot dead, about two years back, by his own younger brother because the former refused to yield to the latter’s continual demands.

Memories of all acts of earlier help received often get drowned in feelings of self righteousness, enhanced expectations and anger. This is the way of the world. There are only a very few exceptions.

These exceptions, however, are the truly precious ones, because, like acts of repentance, even in isolation, these bring that ‘joy in heaven’, as conceived of by the Bible (Luke: 15,7). The fact that these are rare only serves further to add to their lustre!

K Vijayaraghavan

Leave Your Cravings To Be One With All

Have you heard the story of the monk and the sandwich vendor? “Make me one with everything.” So goes the monk’s humble request to the foodstall peddler. But when the Buddhist hands over a $20 bill to the chef in return for his deck sandwich, he waits for a long time for his change. Finally, when he asks for it, he’s politely informed that “change comes only from within” . 

Jokes apart, the vendor sounds like the Zen Master Ikkyu more than the monk does. Born in 1394 Ikkyu was an illegitimate son of the emperor Gokomatsu . He was known by some as the emperor of renegades , a wild wandering monk and teacher, sometimes called Crazy Cloud.

But Ikkyu is also said to have understood the beauty of both high and low culture, and he gently celebrated the ironies of life in a series of poems and drawings as he practised Zen Buddhism medieval Japan. Listen to his verse on change:
“Natural, reckless, correct skill;/ Yesterday’s clarity is today’s stupidity / The universe has dark and light, entrust oneself to change/ One time, shade the eyes and gaze afar at the road of heaven.”

Ikkyu was reputed to be very clever even as a boy. His teacher had a precious teacup, a rare antique . One day Ikkyu happened to break the cup and was greatly perplexed. Hearing the footsteps of his teacher, he held the pieces of the cup behind him. When the master appeared, Ikkyu asked: “Why do people have to die?”

“That’s natural,” the older man replied. “Everything has to die and has just so long to live.” With a smile, Ikkyu, produced the shattered cup and added: “It was time for your cup to die.”

The moral of the story is about change and that every journey, even the ones you want to last forever , must inevitably come to an end. Whether you view it as a tragedy or a comedy depends on your stance and your involvement. For even the things that one gets attached to are constantly changing. Hence attachment to them only leads to unrest and sorrow.

But when one knows things as they truly are (yathabutam) or annicca (impermanent) hence liable to cause dukkha or sorrow, one ceases to get agitated by them. One also ceases to take refuge in them. Just as attachment to things is to get fettered by them, even so detachment from them is to get freed from them. In Buddhist ethics, the perception of impermanence is the first step to the eradication of all cravings, which has the attainment of Nirvana as its final goal.

Vithal C Nadkarni

Towards Gaining Unique Insights

When it comes to a meeting between science and religion, two words usually sum it up: they don’t . We’re not just talking about extremists on  either side like totally unbelieving scientists who froth at the mention of a first cause or the unwaveringly faithful who insist on divine creation. 

It includes middle-roaders who say science and religion are two sides of the same coin since they both spring from human minds, while tacitly maintaining an eternal edge always separates the sides. And it includes those scientists who see some sort of deep mysterious beauty in the cosmos but remain atheists and religious mystics who shun dogma but retain a personal faith.

Therefore it’s refreshing to come across someone who can say: “I’ve never encountered nor do I expect or conceive of a place where there would be a conflict (between science and faith), partly because I know my science well enough to know not to trust it 100%, and I know my religion well enough to know not to trust my understanding of it 100%.”

That’s Guy J Consolmagno. Consolmagno obtained his MA degree in planetary science from MIT and his PhD from the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. After postdoctoral research and teaching at Harvard College Observatory he entered the Society of Jesus and took his vows.

In addition to over 40 refereed scientific papers, he has also co-authored several books on astronomy for the popular market. Today he is a research astronomer and planetary scientist at the Vatican Observatory who believes that religion needs science to steer it away from superstition to keep it close to reality and to protect it from creationism which is a kind of paganism.

Fortunately a rising number of people are beginning to believe, too, that science and religion should work alongside one another rather than as competing ideologies. Perhaps neither empiricism nor theology will ever provide a complete understanding of the universe, but at the very least they should be complementary approaches to gain unique insights.

Or as Consolmagno puts it: “( This view) allows me to have more than one perspective on the big mystery of life, and that’s cool because the more perspectives you have the better. But I don’t expect them to agree. I don’t want them to completely agree, because then I lose the benefit of having more than one point of view.”

Mukul Sharma

Learn To Know The Now & Turn Wiser

When Barbara Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer she did what any veteran of the women’s health movement would do: she started researching , looking especially for support and information from other women who had the disease. The journalist who began as PhD researcher in cell biology says she found a lot. 

“Yes, I found useful tips and information,” she adds. “But I found something else shocking : a whole culture had grown up around breast cancer and it certainly did not contain the sisterhood I was searching for.”

Ehrenreich, who is also known for her earlier expose of welfare reform Nickel and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America, describes the subculture of breast cancer as being “very pink and femme and frilly — all about pink ribbons, pink rhinestone pins, pink T-shirts and of course a lot about cosmetics , all very commercialised.”

But the worst of it, for her, was the perkiness and “the relentless cheerfulness of the breast cancer culture” . Equally distressing was the notion of suffering being essentially good for you; that the survivor would turn a better person for it — more feminine, more spiritual — someone better that a ‘mere cancer-free’ person.

One health channel went so far as to describe breast cancer as “a form of spiritual upward mobility : something that a woman should be happy to experience.” Was this cheeriness a result of a defensive reaction to what was undoubtedly an extremely traumatic experience? If so, why wasn’t it seen in other ailments such as diabetes, TB or heart disease ? Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer alludes to a reverse phenomenon of transformed victimhood. She has been championing the idea of mindfulness and its impact on disease outcomes.

In her lectures about her book Counterclockwise people sometimes ask whether the idea that we have more control over our illnesses than most of us realise inevitably leads to blaming the victim. “Their reasoning must be that if we can control either the severity of our symptoms or the entire disease process, than those who suffer are suffering by their own hands since they did nothing to help themselves,” Langer comments in her blog.

But such an understanding couldn’t be further from the truth, she adds. For blaming (as well as praising) entails going back into the past, away from the present. One becomes smart and wiser by learning to know the now.

Vithal C Nadkarni

The Wise Guy And The Sensitive Cop

Like Jen, the protagonist in her memoir Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert was a plucky blond American woman in her 30s with no children and no major financial worries. As the book opens, she was going through a messy divorce, followed by a stormy rebound love affair. 

Awash in tears in the middle of the night on the floor of the bathroom, she began to pray for guidance, “You know — like, to God.” God answered. He told her to go back to bed. She embarks instead on a year-long pilgrimage to Italy, India and Indonesia!

“I wanted to explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country, in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well,” Gilbert writes. “I wanted to explore the art of pleasure in Italy , the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two.”

As she studied Italian and searched for the world’s best pizza with new-found friends, Gilbert was still stalked by depression and loneliness which she casts as ’Pinkerton Detectives’ — depression , the wise guy, and loneliness , ’the more sensitive cop’ .

They frisk her, “empty my pockets of any joy I had been carrying” and relentlessly interrogate her about why she thinks she deserves a vacation, considering what a mess she’s made of her life.

After literally eating herself out of depression, she came back to the US for Christmas holidays and went to an Indian ashram for yoga and meditation; then onwards to Bali, to be with a seemingly ageless medicine man. It seems he had read her palm before her trip began and predicted that Gilbert would have more good luck than anyone he’d ever met and that she would live a long time, have many friends and experiences.

Her only problem in life was “You worry too much!” In real life, Gilbert’s story turned out to be exactly like the wise man’s prophecy : the memoir based on her odyssey became a megabestseller and she went on to acquire acult following as an author.

Now she had a new worry about her best days being already behind her! People constantly began to ask her if she felt she was doomed as a creative writer. What if she could never replicate the phenomenal success of her last book? Again Gilbert met her inner demons head-on and got a clean’ answer: If you don’t grab an idea or a poem when it flies by, then it will go looking for another muse, she says in a TED talk. The lesson was: grab an idea, or know that it will be fleeting.

Vithal C Nadkarni

A Very Fine And Great Difference

Arjun says to Krishna: You praise both the renunciation of work as well as its unselfish performance — so which is better? Krishna’s answer is that the renunciation of work and its unselfish performance both lead to the soul’s salvation . But of the two, the unselfish performance of work is better than its renunciation. The reason? Action is better than inaction ; even the maintenance of one’s physical life cannot be effected without action and the true worker is also the true renouncer for he does his work in a detached spirit. So, naturally, one wants to know how working in a detached spirit would pan out in daily life. 

Today’s ET carries the story of how Ford now wants to roll out compact cars and ultimately drive in all models into India in order to realise the dream of its founder , Henry Ford, to open up the highways for everybody. This is because the company’s new chief executive (CE) has realised the flawed strategy of rolling out the rickety Escort model way back in 1998 and the folly of not producing right-sized and right-priced vehicles here which subsequently saw it cede space to Asian rivals such as Hyundai and Honda.

But this would mean that the CE also has a dream. He is apparently motivated enough to undo past damage, see the company make a turnaround in the future and make its presence felt in a much bigger way than before. This would ultimately translate into profits and more business and then even more profits which would, in turn, mean he would be held in high esteem for the reversal of Ford’s fortunes and it becoming a force to reckon with in the Indian automobile industry .

It appears at least, that neither has he renounced work nor is he working in a detached spirit. Yet a person like the ceef executive could also comment along with Radhakrishnan that we must be inspired by the hope of embodying ideals in earthly institutions. In a tired age we adopt the gospel of renunciation and endurance; in an age of hope and energy we emphasise active service in the world. Or as the Christian philosopher Boethius said: “He never goes to heaven who is content to go alone.” And if the CE’s right, the end result for Ford would still be the same because “before enlightenment trees and mountains appear like trees and mountains whereas after enlightenment trees and mountains appear like trees and mountains.” If only we knew the difference.

Mukul Sharma

When You Forget, Others Remember

Resentments arise due to various reasons — missing on opportunities (the sad cases of, “it might have been” ), difficult times faced earlier,facilities denied or annoyance over unfairness all around (including those affecting one’s society or country). 

A very common manifestation of such resentments or grudges, however, is anger over ingratitude or lack of appreciation. These damaging feelings, even where justified , have to be erased through comprehension of certain truths. Doing good ‘in the sly’ is a ‘twiceblessed’ virtue, where the giver also benefits, when he contributes without expectations — the Bhagavad Gita injunction (2,47) on work without motive. All kindly acts do not always bring “equal and opposite reaction” . All such acts done should also be viewed as closed chapters in life.

Of course, even Gods need approval , as most religions prescribe lavish praise of His attributes! More so, humans need acknowledgement and affirmations. Nevertheless , the true seeker would look forward to these from only worthy souls. Having something to give, he would, as a flower attracts bees, obtain unto himself the needed approval from the right sources, including from his own evolved self. Benign indifference (upekshana) to the gross and superfluous would also open doors to greener pastures, new opportunities and also inspiring companionship (satsang ), marked by mutual approval and true regard for one another.

The trick thus lies in becoming authentic within, delighting in one’s chosen field and interests. One would then no more look for tell tales of changes in persons , as he would know that in this world of make believe and pretence, many would rather choose not even to notice, let alone acknowledge any help received. The aspirant would thus apply Henry Thoreau’s concept, “Things do not change ; we change” , not ever being affected by any “dreary intercourse of daily life” .

It is indeed a paradox that praise and approval often come to the one who does not thirst for these, as if they were dire needs. Bertrand Russel points out, “... human nature is so constructed that it gives affection most readily to those who seem least to demand it”. This also is the expression of the law of powerful silence or the law of least effort. True, when you yourself learn to forget particular issues, with which you had been obsessed thus far, others commence to remember!

K VIJAYARAGHAVAN

Breathe Consciously And Live Mindfully

In the Stranger, Albert Camus, the Algeria-born French Nobel laureate, narrates the story of man who is condemned to be executed in a few days. As he sits in his cell on death row, the prisoner notices a small patch of sky through the skylight. 

Suddenly, he seems to feel the deep touch of the present moment, of life itself. He vows to spend his remaining days in mindfulness, in full appreciation of every moment that’s inexorably slipping away towards his sentence . He sticks to his resolve for the remaining days.

At last, just three hours are left for his execution when a priest comes into his cell to receive the prisoner’s confession and to administer the last rites. But the man only wants to be alone. He tries one way after another to get the priest to leave and when he finally succeeds, he mutters to himself that the priest lived like a dead man. (“Il vit comme un mort”). He sees that the one trying to save him was less alive than the one about to be hanged.

Camus’s story came to Thich Nhat Hahn’s mind when he took a taxi in New York. The noted Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Master saw that the taxi driver was not at all happy. “He was not in the present moment . There was no peace or joy in him, no capacity of being alive while doing the work of driving. And he expressed it in the way he drove,” Nhat Hahn writes in his classic manual on mindfulness, Touching Peace. “Many of us do the same. We rush about, but we are not at one with what we are doing; we are not at peace. Our body is here, but our mind is somewhere else — in the past or the future, possessed by anger, frustration, or dreams. We are not really alive; we are like ghosts. If our beautiful child were to come and offer us a smile, we would miss him completely, and he would miss us. What a pity!”

The antidote to this tragic situation lies in getting off your autopilot, to live mindfully. For “our true home is in the present moment,” Nhat Hahn advises. “To live in the present moment is the miracle. The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the Green Earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available right now.” He then prescribes a series of exercises for living mindfully, beginning with conscious breathing. This leads to love being directed towards ourselves and to the world.

Vithal C Nadkarni

Blindsided By The Unimaginable

Odd, atypical and unexpected things always surprise us. But, generally speaking, this is a short-term reaction, one from which we routinely rebound to normal and move on with our day-to-day life. More bizarre occurrences induce a heightened sense of shock or amazement, which lingers longer in memory and can sometimes lead to life changing behaviour patterns. People who have had so-called out-of-body or near death experiences, for instance, often say that their attitudes towards life has undergone a radical shift of perspective and that they have subsequently become far more tolerant, kind and compassionate. 

There's also a third category of magnitude involving the extraordinary . When we're confronted with something, so unimaginably different and alien that we possess no vocabulary or concept to articulate or even process it, the mind does one of two things: it either denies its existence altogether or accepts it without acknowledging any part of its continuing validity. Some exobiologists believe that if we ever find extraterrestrial life, it might turn out to be so totally outside our ability to conceptualise it that we may fail ultimately to recognise it at all.

The story goes that when Captain Cook's ship arrived off Australia in 1770, the vessel drew no reaction from the natives. According to the historian Robert Hughes: "It was the largest artefact ever seen on the east coast of Australia, an object so huge, complex and unfamiliar as to defy the natives' understanding." It was almost as if the ship could not be seen. Botanist Joseph Banks who accompanied Cook was also baffled by their indifference: "... they pursued their way in all appearance entirely unmoved by the neighbourhood of so remarkable an object as a ship must necessarily be to people who have never seen one."

Our own 'native' reaction on being told that the godhood resides in us is somewhat similar. Those of us who have no problem worshipping a deity that is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and eternal - qualities which should make us baulk at the very incomprehensibility of the notion - simply cannot come to terms with how we could be that! But we nod and smile and accept the words of the wise and then go right back to our normal worshipping. Which is why it remains out there as a purely intellectual construct and doesn't affect us any further.

Mukul Sharma

Muster Up The Will To Change Oneself

Angelo Siciliano was a £97 stripling. One fateful day, when he’d gone to the beach, a bully kicked sand in his face. Humiliated, young Siciliano joined the YMCA to try out exercise routines to develop his physique. It was while watching a lion in the zoo that he had an Aha moment: “Does this old gentleman have any barbells, any exercisers?” he asked himself. “And yet how is it so strong and husky? And then it came over me,” he reminisces in his memoir. “The lion’s been pitting one muscle against another!” Siciliano concluded that lions and tigers became strong by muscle resistance and went on to develop his famous 12-step method which transformed the scrawny weakling into the “world’s most perfectly developed man”. 

Siciliano also changed his name to Charles Atlas after being told that he resembled the statue of Atlas supporting earth on top of a hotel in Coney Island, where he worked as a strongman.

The Charles Atlas brand revolved around the insult that made a man out of a mac (changed later to “a champ from a chump”). This is not so much about patented weights and pulleys as about belief. Most of us are very good at describing what is. But how many can muster up the will to believe what can be? That calls for giving up old habits of thought and action.

This is not as tough as it may seem. Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer’s research shows that small changes, small gestures repeated slowly and steadily, can make big differences, but “(first) we need to open ourselves to the impossible and embrace a psychology of possibility,” she writes in Counterclockwise.

Rather than starting from the status quo, this argues for a starting point of what we would like to be. In the case of Charles Atlas it began with inner vision of a perfectly formed man superimposed on the reflection of the scrawny weakling staring back from the mirror. It’s a subtle change in thinking. But too many of us believe the world is to be discovered, rather than a product of our own making and thus to be invented.

“Pursuing the psychology of possibility is itself empowering,” Langer insists. “It feels good to have a personal mission, it contributes to a more positive outlook in general, and it works against the idea that the rest of us are soon to follow suit and fall apart. As we actualise the possible, we may find out other interesting things about the world.” 

Vital C Nadkarni

Nurture Qualities To Flourish & Flower

The notion of a positive psychology movement popped into Martin Seligman’s head soon after his election as president of the American Psychological Association. He was weeding the garden with his five-year old daughter, Nikki. He seemed to be in a tearing hurry and was rapidly beginning to lose patience while his daughter merrily kept throwing weeds into the air and dancing around. Finally, he yelled at her. She walked away, only to return and say, “Daddy, I want to talk to you. Do you remember before my fifth birthday?” she asked. “From the time I was three to the time I was five, I was a whiner. I whined every day. When I turned five, I decided not to whine anymore. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.” 

That was a turning point for her father, nothing less than a full-blown epiphany. He had learned something about his daughter, something about raising children, something about himself, and a great deal about his profession. Raising Nikki was not about correcting whining, he writes in his classic treatise on positive psychology. She did that herself. Rather, he realised that raising Nikki was about taking that marvellous skill which he called “seeing into the soul,” amplifying it, nurturing it, helping her to lead her life around it to buffer against her weaknesses and the storms of life.

Raising children, he realised, was more than fixing what was wrong with them. It was about identifying and nurturing their strongest qualities, what they own and are best at, and helping them find niches in which they can best live out these positive qualities.

In retrospect, Seligman admits that his daughter had “hit the nail right on the head” with her comment as far as his own life was concerned. “I was a grouch. I had spent 50 years mostly enduring wet weather in my soul, and the last 10 years being a nimbus cloud in a household of sunshine.”

Any good fortune he had was probably not due to his grouchiness, but in spite of it.” In that moment, he resolved to change. He went on to develop therapeutic initiatives that focused on positive rather than negative aspects. The rationale seemed simple enough: If one only focused on the problem, one might not see the solution. The goal was to nurture the very qualities that enabled individuals and groups not just to survive and limp along but to flourish and flower.

Vithal C Nadkarni

Resentment, Most Costly Indulgence

While all the seven failure traits elaborated by Dr Maxwell Maltz are highly relevant, ‘resentment’ is the most damaging of all these. The person concerned, perceiving injustice, wrongs or ingratitude nurtures a vague hope that his antagonism and intimidation would bring change of heart on the other person or situations without. But this imagined ‘cure’, as noted by Dr Maltz, is worse than the disease. This unabated resentment, he also points out, “is a deadly poison to the spirit, makes happiness impossible and uses up tremendous energy, which could go into accomplishment”. 

Such resentments are manifest signs of a self-image of not just a “pitiful person, a victim, who was meant to be unhappy” , but also one who needs unfavourable and hostile situations around him as alibis and excuses to justify this self-image chosen for himself. The person thus easily finds causes to attribute motives, ill intentions and hostilities, where none may exist.

To go into the root causes of resentment , which process alone would also root it out permanently , it is thus necessary to be brutally frank about oneself, rooted in that abiding self-honesty that would expose to one’s own evolved self’s various complexes within , besides startling, yet glaring truths. This dynamic approach would enable one to comprehend that just as a harmful self-image was of his own making, changing that, to form a new one, is also in his own hands.

This process, as Dr Maltz points out, is that “creative goal striving” , where one becomes responsible for his own success and happiness. This also is the pathway to real freedom from impediments, both from within and without.

Such freedom is thus through selfanalysis , understanding and acceptance , leading to the needed major paradigm shift. This analysis would also reveal to the seeker that resentment and anger are often the same — the two sides of the same coin. In its passive form, anger is resentment manifest as brooding , self-pity , depression, unhappiness and masochism.

Comprehending the various aspects of this complex, yet ‘not, after all so complex’ issue would be pathway to truly and enduringly changing one’s self-image . The new found self-image , bringing with it freedom from that costly indulgence of resentment and other retarding traits within, would also indeed bring with it a new chapter in all aspects of life and living.

K VIJAYARAGHAVAN

Mind Accounts For Bondage, Freedom

Three decades ago, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer carried out a novel experiment to check if thought patterns alone could reverse aging. What  she uncovered borders on the miraculous — the amazing power that mind seems to have over matter. 

This has long been celebrated in traditional systems around the world, but it has been soundly disparaged by the votaries of western medicine rooting for a Cartesian split between the body and mind.

Earlier, Langer had found that merely by giving nursing home residents an ‘illusion of control’ over their decisions made them live longer. In later studies, she’d found that she could make hotel maids lose weight simply by telling them that their work burned as many calories as a typical work-out.

In the 1979 study, conducted in a retrofitted monastery in New Hampshire, Langer and her colleagues found that instructing a group of elderly men to talk and act as though they were 20 years younger could reverse the aging process! Of course this was supported by a sort of total immersion effect in surroundings that obliterated all signs of the present.

So one group of men was made to “spend a week in the ‘nifty fifties,’ a time when an IBM computer filled a whole room and panty hose had just been introduced to US women,” Langer writes.

After just one week, the men in the experimental group (compared with controls of the same age) showed dramatic improvements in joint flexibility, dexterity, had less arthritis in their hands. Their mental acuity had risen measurably, and they had improved gait and posture. Outsiders who were shown the men’s photographs judged them to be significantly younger than their counterparts in the control group.

“This study shaped not only my view of aging but also my view of limits in a more general way for the next few decades,” she says.

“Over time I have come to believe less and less that biology is destiny. It is not primarily our physical selves that limit us but rather our mindset about our physical limits. Now I accept none of the medical wisdom regarding the courses our diseases must take as necessarily true.” As the Sanskrit proverb says, verily the mind alone accounts both for bondage as well as freedom!

The story of that electrifying experiment narrated in Langer’s best-seller Counterclockwise is now bought by Hollywood, with Jennifer Aniston cast in Langer’s role on the screen.

Vithal C Nadkarni

All Hooked Up And Nowhere To Go

The US moral philosopher, Judith Jarvis Thomson, once came up with an interesting thought experiment. In it, we are asked to imagine a famous violinist falling into a coma. A society of music lovers determines that only person A can save the violinist’s life by being hooked up to him for nine months. They break into A’s home while he’s asleep and hook the unconscious (and unknowing, hence innocent) violinist to him. 

A may want to unhook himself, but he is then faced with this argument put forward by the music lovers: The violinist is a blameless person with a right to life. Unhooking him will result in his death. Therefore, unhooking him is morally wrong.

Thomsonobviously had other issues in mind when she devised this ingenious armchair exercise in ethical behaviour, and one that strikes us immediately is whether a woman has the right to have an abortion following rape. But even if we leave that contentious debate to the pro- and antichoice lobbies to bang their heads out over whether a foetus becomes as much of a ’person’ as, say a violinist, we can still apply the experiment to other kinds of more ordinary hook ups. Like arranged marriages for instance.

Generally speaking such matrimonies manage to function fairly well over time to a greater or lesser extent — perhaps due to personal, familial or societal reasons and people from monarchies to persons on the street have practised it for millennia.

Atypically, however, sometimes the situation begins to resemble that faced by the person who wakes up to find himself hooked up to the violinist. And, more often than not, only that person wants out. Should such people be allowed to exercise their right to happiness knowing that it could result in intense unhappiness for the innocent other who may also have been hooked up without choice or knowledge?

Ironically, so-called love marriages , advocated by the less conservative as the preferred pairbonding alternative, don’t weather the moral dilemma too well either. Barring the purely biological imperative for mating, is there really any choice being exercised when people fall in love?

For, if not, then the same argument as given for arranged marriages holds. In other words, what right do we have to consciously fall out of love and unhook from our lovers when we know the other party could die a slow and protracted emotional death?

Mukul Sharma

Waves In The Ocean Of Existence

We are all waves in the ocean of existence. Existence itself is pure, intelligent energy. This loving Existence desires that each of us succeeds and experiences fulfilment in life. The effect of the peace radiated by a person, fully satisfied and blissful within himself is similar to the waves that happen in a lake when you throw a stone into it. Everything in the lake is touched by the effect of the stone. The waves of bliss radiating from a peaceful person naturally and automatically touch the people , animals, trees, and rocks, affecting everything nearby. 

To make the whole world blissful and happy, you don’t have to do anything. Just change your centre. When you are seeing a horror movie, your world will be filled with fear. But if you just change the channel to say a comedy movie, you can see how your whole world changes!

With the inner awakening happens the higher emotions. It all finally boils down to your own experience of what is happening. If you want to save the world, all you need to do is save yourself! Everything is happening in this world — great spiritual sessions where enlightenment is being shared and at the same time terrorist training camps where violence is being shared. The world that you attract and see will appear to be so according to what you tune yourself with. You will attract the same type of people and situations in your life.

Even one person struggling for enlightenment, seeking, raises the consciousness of at least a million people. Not only are we all connected to each other socially, the great Truth is that we are all part of the whole, the collective consciousness. We are not individual islands. Our thoughts , emotions, and feelings not only affect us but also the whole world.

When we realise our role in the existential scheme of things, we can no longer feel separate from all those around us. We can only feel separated when we feel unconscious of our role, when we are unaware. All calamities around the world are created only by unconscious human beings . Only by creating more and more people who are awakened, who are enlightened, can the collective influence of individual negativity be destroyed.

Existence desires that each of us succeeds and experiences fulfilment in life. When we realise this, we can simply let go of our fears, desires, jealousies, pains, and depressions and relax into the loving arms of existence.

Be Blissful! 

PARAMAHAMSA NITHYANANDA

Thrive On Current Opportunities

Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen got 77 rejections for their idea Chicken soup for the soul. In retrospect each rejection could be seen as a turning point. They had the option of throwing the towel every time; to say enough is enough; or to keep on trying for the nth time. But the 78th publisher they met at a literary jamboree said “Yes” and they went on to sell over 100 million books. The moral of their story is to remember that you are only one choice away from changing your life. Don’t let the past be your guide. 

A similar sort of insight becomes applicable when one is trying to resist potentially crippling effects of our collective achievements. “Forget the past,” advises the noted novelist Allegra Goodman. “Nothing stops the creative juices like thoughts of the literary tradition. You’ll never be John Donne!’ your inner critic shrieks. Or Middlemarch! Now that was a book!’”Such thoughts used to fill her with gloom. Then she went to graduate school at Stanford and steeped herself in Shakespeare , Wordsworth and Defoe and the experience set her free.

Goodman’s Aha moment came when she was sitting in the Green Library, struggling to write a short story. As she looked around, at all those shelves lined with rows upon rows of books, “Suddenly the obvious occurred to me,” she writes in her Calming the inner critic and getting to work.

“All the great Romantic poets and Elizabethan playwrights and Victorian novelists that tower over me — they’re dead! Think about it. Past masters are done. Their achievements are finite, known, measurable. Present writers, on the other hand, live in possibility. Your masterpiece (like Canfield and Hansen’s Chicken soup for the soul) could be just around the corner . Genius could befall you at any moment.” But don’t worry too much about the future either . Be in the present . As Horace says, “Seize the day trusting as little in the future (Carpe diem quam minime credula postero).”

The Bible also echoes this when it advises you to “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die”. So make the most of current opportunities because life is short and time is fleeting. But Horace also tempers his Epicurean spiel with stoicism: “Whether Jupiter has allotted you many winters or this final one, be wise, strain the wine, and scale back your long hopes to a short period. While we speak, envious Time will have {already} fled.”

Vitalc Nadkarni

Self Image, Base For Everything

The seven-plus-seven traits and manifestations, denoted by the seven alphabets, each in the word ‘success’ and ‘failure’, could, as noted by Dr Maxwell Maltz, serve as the basis for accurate analysis and self evaluation. Through intelligent application, the aspirant can thus reduce the intensity of the negative aspects within, while also further empowering the positive traits, already inherent. This is not merely personality development, but shaping one’s potential, future and destiny. To a large extent, thus, one can be the master of his fate and the captain of his soul! 

Dr Maltz also observes how all characteristics finally boil down to expressions of one’s own self image, which actually is the sum total of all the stuff, the ‘goings on’ and the matter within — one’s ‘personality’, to sum up.

For instance, ‘sense of direction’, ‘understanding’ and ‘charity’, in a ‘success’ mechanism, are born of one’s own healthy self image that he himself is a truly capable personality, fully respectful of others’ capacities too. He also sympathises with their imperfections, caused often by their limitations and troubles, as they too are children of God. The other traits of the ‘success’ personality — ‘esteem’, ‘self confidence’ and ‘self acceptance’ are also outer signs of the fulfilled self image within.

Similarly, regarding ‘failure’ mechanism, the seven traits sprout from the person’s own self image. To illustrate, one who is given to resentments over others’ unfairness or injustice, is possibly one who finds such reasons to justify his own self image of one who is a “pitiful person, a victim, who was meant to be unhappy”.

Taking cue from external traits should thus be a process, which should also go with watching one’s own self image and enhancing this through positive thinking and healthy vibrations all over. Awareness of one’s own potential, promise and latent capacities is as important, as being aware of the limitations and infirmities within.

This, verily, is right auto suggestion, based on this famous success formula of Emily Coue: “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better”. This also is the process of further empowering the positive traits within, simultaneously weakening the undesirable ones. The crux thus lies in discovering and shaping for oneself the appropriate self image, which, doubtless, is the base for everything!

K VIJAYARAGHAVAN

The Work-Life Balance Issue

There seems to be a perpetual dichotomy in our lives. It is known as the work-life balance problem. In the pursuit of happiness, man is rushing to make money so that he and his family can enjoy. But the more he rushes to earn the less time he has to enjoy. And the more he enjoys, the less time he has to earn. So it seems that the two are in eternal discordance. How is it possible to balance these two opposing forces? 

The great Einstein has said that the a problem cannot be solved by the same type of thinking that created it. So let’s try to look at the problem differently.

One way of doing so is: why separate work from enjoyment. Why consider work as a mere source of money which will then buy enjoyment. Why not enjoy work itself? That may well be true but then comes the question, how? How does one enjoy work which is not always enjoyable. Let us take recourse to literature — The Elixirby George Herbert:

Teach me, my God and King, In all things thee to see, And what I do in any thing, To do it as for thee: ... A servant with this clause Makes drudgerie divine: Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, Makes that and th’ action fine.

Put less poetically, it talks of the having an higher ideal or higher vision in one’s work If there is no ideal in the action, the work becomes mechanical, dull, routine, boring. But even is there is an ideal in the work, if one is able to work for something beyond the money, status, etc. There still remains the question of time. A person needs time to spend with his family and other interests. If all time is spent at work what about the rest of life?

Is there a way to spend less time at work and yet achieve more? Yes, there is such a way. It is known as clearer thinking. The more clear the thinking, the more the work accomplished in the given time. Fuzzy thinking makes a job take longer. It is the difference between working hard and working right. A handcart puller is working very hard but what he will achieve may not be much.

Sharpening the axe is better than chopping away with great effort with a blunt one. Some people make in one day what is a year’s salary for others. Clearer thinking gives a quantum leap in output. Like inventing the wheel raised life onto another level.

The way to develop clearer thinking is through reflection. The more the thinking one does, specially on philosophical literature , the more clear a thinker does a person become.

Janki Santoke

From Magical To Miraculous

Science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke famously said that “any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.” What he had in mind as analogy was what would happen if we could travel back in time some 2,500 years and show a television or calculator to some of the greatest minds of ancient Greece. We could tell them, “this is the way we entertain and inform ourselves by sending moving pictures through the air over vast distances . 

And this is how we do our most intricate and complex calculations in a matter of seconds which would otherwise require the mental labour of hours or perhaps days.”

How would Plato react? What would Aristotle make of it? Despite their awesome sagacity, intelligence and rhetoric there would be no way they could coherently deconstruct these devices into their existing worldview comprising concepts of either science or philosophy . Even if a highly trained team of technologists from our time were to try and explain how such things worked, it would still be futile. Like where does one begin? Can one seriously back up more than two millennia of scientific developments to convey a comprehensive picture? No, it would be only understandable in terms of magic.

And note that we’re just talking about the difference in development over a few paltry thousand years. What if our descendants were to travel back in time from a million years or more in the future and show us what they had accomplished? Supposing they demonstrated methodologies that were so incredibly advanced by our current scale of thinking that our minds were not able to understand , extrapolate or accept.

Suppose they said something like, “this is the way we make a universe out of nothing and then grow life on it to seed the stars into intelligent civilisations who try to make sense of what they observe around them.”

Applying Clarke’s celebrated sound bite would fall so greatly short of its magicality as to sound absurd. Mere sorcery would not suffice. We would have to rephrase him to “any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from divinity.” Seeing their all knowing and unlimited universal power what else would there be left to do then but venerate and revere such authority? And why not? We would only be worshipping ourselves. Communing with what we too can be. What we will be.

Mukul Sharma

Mind Is Something Dynamic And Alive

Mind, according to vedic psychology, is a process.Mindisnota machine but a process. It is constantly happening. The word manas, which is the Sanskrit word for mind, means a constant happening, something that is not passive and dead but something that is dynamic and alive. 

We all believe unconsciously that mind is matter , a thing or a machine. That is why constantly we connect all the past happenings of the mind as a chain, and start believing our mind is a solid thing. The low mood that you experienced years ago, months ago, weeks ago or days ago are all unconnected and independent incidents . Fifteen years ago, you would have felt the low mood and felt depressed because your toys were lost.

Few years ago you would have felt depressed or disturbed because your son was not listening to you. The reasons were different , situations were different, and the cause was totally different . However, when you connect all these low moods and decide , ‘My life is full of depression ,’ you have created hell for yourself! It is only what you believe to be your past that you will reproduce in the future.

When we believe the mind is a thing, we create problems that do not exist. You need to understand this one truth: you are a process, and that by your very nature, your thoughts are unconnected, independent and ‘unclutched’ .

What you think as your identity is not required for you to run your life. You may say, ‘No, if I am unclutched, unconnected , how will I plan for my future ? I have deadlines , project plans , etc. How will I work? How will I run my day-today life?’ These are big questions that haunt you.

You have an automatic intelligence to run, to maintain , to live and to expand your life. For example when you are driving, do you plan every step? Do you plan how much you need to press the accelerator, when you need to press the brake, when you need to turn right, turn left? No. In the initial level when you are getting trained, you may plan but once you learn driving, you just sit. Many times you don’t even remember what happened while driving . Only when you park your car in front of your office, suddenly you realise that you have been driving all this time and even reached your destination!

PARAMAHAMSA NITHYANANDA

Correction Begins With Admission

Tiger Woods has now ‘rediscovered’ his childhood religion. The championgolfer , who faced censure for his alleged extra-marital liaisons, said he hoped to relearn the lesson of selfrestraint taught by Buddhism. His statement had been analysed “like a State of Union address even though the only union Tiger Woods addressed was his own” , a sympathetic columnist said, “( for) this was no voluntary conversion to an old religion. Rather , this was a forced one to the new Oprahite religion of emotional openness and making public one’s miseries and failings.” 

Newspersons who asked the Dalai Lama to comment discovered that the Tibetan spiritual leader was blissfully unaware of Tiger Woods’ travails, having somehow been uninformed of the golfer’s triumphs as well. When the matter was explained to him, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist extolled the importance of ‘self-discipline with awareness of consequences’ .

The embattled golf champion himself said as much in his carefully scripted statement of apology: in recent years he had ‘drifted away’ from the Buddhist values of his upbringing which taught that “a craving for things outside ourselves causes unhappy and pointless search for security” .

But would that satisfy the scolds berating Woods for letting his impulses get the better of him? As his former coach, Butch Harmon , said, “( They) want Woods to stand there in front of everybody , take his medicine, be humble , be embarrassed, be humiliated , and answer the questions.”

His self-lacerating public apology could also be part of the famous 12-step plan for recovering from addictions, compulsions and other behavioural problems. The process starts with the admission that one is powerless against the demons of addiction and compulsion . One then moves on to admit “a greater power that can give strength” .

One way of achieving this, as encoded by the next step, is by establishing cosmic connections: make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand Him, says the original Alcoholics Anonymous programme . In its summation, the Bhagavad Gita calls it the supreme secret of transcendence (psychologists might call it ‘transference’ ) which promises to empower the seeker to withstand most severe soul-crushing pressures . But what if one has no faith in redemption? Then beg, borrow or steal some!

Vithal C Nadkarni

When The Centre Cannot Hold

Why is the right to spiritual guidance not included (at least as far as this writer is aware of) in the constitution of any country which guarantees various other important fundamental rights to its citizens? Two initial objections can be dealt with immediately. The first is, almost all such countries that enshrine fundamental rights of this nature claim to be secular, that is, not extrinsically bound by monastic restriction , and, therefore , do not promote religiosity. 

But spirituality is not religion. Something as simple and clear as being kind or caring for instance cannot by any logic or justification be the sole province of scriptural teachings.

The second is, the right to education already exists to a greater or lesser degree in these countries and it’s taken for granted that some sort of moral instruction would, in that process , be imparted — perhaps even delivered through formal classroom hours. However the problem is, it devolves into tokenism and is never taken seriously either by the ones imparting it or by those at the receiving end.

More importantly, the exercises quickly take on shades of one or another religion which in itself should militate against the constitution of the country concerned . In the US the debate over the teaching of creationism or intelligent design as separate from biology is nothing but undisguised biblical Christianity.

Could it be that developing a spiritual dimension is not considered as important as education per se? Perhaps the state believes that inculcating such values in children should be the responsibility of parents. In that case why not educate children at home too instead of making it a compulsory feature of the right to education ? The answer is not far to see.

Either the state does not think it has the capacity to give spiritual guidance to its citizens or it believes parents are not equipped to educate their wards by themselves. It’s true that a lot of parents do not necessarily possess the advantage of an education themselves or the wherewithal to instruct wards in their care as it should be instructed.

However, it’s a sad commentary on the state if it thinks it does not possess the ability or aptitude to teach basic human values to anyone who wishes to learn them. What after all can one say about the supposed majesty of a Centre which cannot even differentiate between right and wrong?

Mukul Sharma

Signs Of Success And Failure

In a remarkable analysis, Dr Maxwell Maltz, in his book, Psychocybernetics observes how the manifest signs of success or failure, comprise each, of seven particular traits. The words denoting each of these seven traits begins with the corresponding seven alphabets in the word ‘success’ or ‘failure’ itself. 

For instance, the seven alphabets in the word success each denote seven traits , as applied to a success personality — sense of direction , understanding , courage, charity , esteem, selfconfidence and self-acceptance . In the same manner , ‘Failure’ is marked by seven characteristics, each beginning with the seven alphabets in the word ‘failure’ itself: frustration, aggressiveness (misdirected), insecurity , loneliness, uncertainty , resentment and emptiness.

Dealing with each of these seven plus seven traits, Dr Maltz points out how these give indication of one’s positive aspects and also his infirmities. These, thus, are like specific indications in an automobile, which reveal to the driver about the overall condition of the car — the battery , the oil pressure, availability of fuel, the engine’s heat etc.

The right thinker would also in a similar manner, obtain the needed indication from his own reactions and also his physical and mental states to gauge how far he is on the right path. Just as a driver would not abandon the entire vehicle just because of certain particular adverse indications , but would take the needed remedial action, the true aspirant would adopt a ‘proactive’ approach for making the needed corrections, as per the natural ‘corrective mechanism’ inbuilt within.

For instance, observing and analysing some of his particular negative traits, he could neutralise these emotions through generation of those feelings which would be contrary to these harmful aspects within. From the yoga point of view, this is Patanjali’s concept of generating the opposite feelings, whenever the person is troubled by thought patterns, which would otherwise have damaged him.

Dr Maltz’s observation would thus enable every aspirant to take cue from the external indicators , which verily are the tips of the iceberg within — the personality within. These indicators would only be too obvious to the discerning eye. This, verily is the pathway to self-discovery , self-realisation , knowing oneself or atmagnanam, call what you will.

K VIJAYARAGHAVAN

Karma Sans Kama Leads To Liberation

Once upon a time there lived a sage named Mandavya. He was an expert on dharma, who had kept a vow of silence for a long time. One day robbers fleeing from the King’s soldiers came to take shelter in his house. Mandavya refused to break his vow when the soldiers questioned the sage about the robbers. Eventually the robbers were discovered and the soldiers took them in chains to the King with the silent sage. In the assembly the King again asked Mandavya for an explanation, only to be greeted by a serene silence. 

The King then ordered the sage to be impaled on a stake along with the robbers. The Brahmin , the very soul of dharma, remained on the stake for a very long time. Though he had no food, he did not die; he willed his life’s breaths to remain within him, until the King came to beg forgiveness for his folly. The sage forgave him and the King had him taken down from the stake. But his men were unable to pull it out of the sage’s body and so it was cut at the base. Mandavya went about with the stake still inside him, in his neck, ribs and entrails, writes Wendy Doniger in her alternative history of the Hindus, and people used to call him Tip-ofthe-stake’ Mandavya.”

The sage then went to the house of Dharma to berate him for the disproportionate punishment heaped upon him. The Mahabharata shows Dharma becoming extremely defensive: “As a child, you used to stick blades of grass up the tails of little butterflies; your punishment is the fruit of that karma,” the God of Death replies. Mandavya continues to protest: “For a rather small offence you have given me too great a retribution!” The sage then curses Dharma himself to be reborn as a man and sets up a moral boundary — no sin is to be counted against anyone until the age of 14.

That is how Dharma came to be born as Vidura. “Dharma, the god, had to undergo the curse for miscarriage of dharma, writes Doniger. This implicitly challenges the ideal of an even-handed dharma for all, implying that one can take it too far; that people are not the same as insects and that impaling a butterfly may not count for as serious an offence as impaling an innocent’ sage!

The Mahabharata itself rules out easy fixes. But it’s not amoral when it enjoins karma without kama or action without expectation . That’s the way to liberation or Moksha. For those who find that too difficult, the Bhagvad Gita advises the path of bhakti or surrender.

Vithal C Nadkarni