HINDUISM - DANCING WITH SIVA

Extract from:
http://www.himalayanacademy.com/resources/books/dws/dws_introduction.html

While other religions are precisely defined by explicit and often unyielding beliefs, Hinduism condones no such constraints. For the Hindu, intuition is far more important than intellect; experience supersedes dogma; and personal realization is held infinitely more precious than outer expressions or affiliations of faith. Philosopher S. Radhakrishnan said it well: "The mechanical faith which depends on authority and wishes to enjoy the consolations of religion without the labor of being religious is quite different from the religious faith which has its roots in experience." Hindu religious philosophy is based on experience, on personal discovery and testing of things. It does not say, "Believe as others do or suffer." Rather, it says, "Know thy Self, inquire and be free."

There are no heretics in Hinduism, for God is everywhere and in all things. In such an open laboratory, Hindu spirituality has grown over the millennia so diverse and rich that it defies definition. Even knowledgeable Hindus, after a lifetime of study, will hesitate to say that Hinduism is one thing and not another. Hinduism, more than any other religion, has encompassed the full spectrum of philosophic positions, and to this day it venerates living exponents of each. Thus it is that one teacher will praise devotion as the ultimate path, while another, spurning devotion, says liberation comes only upon the shattering of this universe's illusory appearance. How then to understand Hinduism? From the Himalayan vaults, ten thousand streams of thought descend, their cool waters giving life to all below. These flow together, their convergences becoming broad tributaries. From these, two mighty rivers are born which have through history watered and made green the growth of Indian spirituality -- one is Vedanta and the other Siddhanta. This contemporary catechism is the confluence of these two potent traditions into a single torrent, the inundation of the Sanatana Dharma in full, fierce flood and force. [...........] 

Hinduism Is an Eastern Religion

To place Hinduism in the context of world thought, it is first important to note that it is a religion of the East. This is a vital fact, for there is a vast difference between the way seekers in the East and the West have traditionally viewed the ultimate questions: "Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?" The East has tended to be unitive, idealistic and introspective. The West has tended to be dualistic, materialistic and extroverted. Whereas personal inner experience is the crux of religion from the Eastern view, belief and faith are valued most highly in the West. While Eastern religions are accommodating of other views, believing that all paths lead ultimately to God, Western religions tend to be dogmatic, stressing theirs as the one true God and the one true religion.

The Hindu View of Life

The soul, in its intelligence, searches for its Self, slowly ascending the path that leads to enlightenment and liberation. It is an arduous, delightful journey through the cycles of birth, death and rebirth culminating in Self Realization, the direct and personal spiritual experience of God, of the Self, of Truth. This alone among all things in the cosmos can bring freedom from the bondages of ignorance and desire. This is the highest realization. There is none greater. Hindus believe that all men and women are on this path and that all will ultimately reach its summit. It is a glorious and encouraging concept -- that every single soul will reach Truth, moksha, none left to suffer forever for human frailties and faults.
[.......]
While Hindus believe many diverse and exotic things, there are several bedrock concepts on which virtually all concur. All Hindus worship one Supreme Reality, though they call it by many names, and teach that all souls will ultimately realize the truth of the Vedas and Agamas. Hindus believe that there is no eternal hell, no damnation. They concur that there is no intrinsic evil. All is good. All is God. In contrast, Western faiths postulate a living evil force, embodied in Satan, that directly opposes the will of God. [.......]

Each soul is free to find his own way, whether by devotion, austerity, meditation, yoga or selfless service (seva). Hinduism's three pillars are temple worship, scripture and the guru-disciple tradition. Hinduism strongly declares the validity of the three worlds of existence and the myriad Gods and devas residing within them. Festivals, pilgrimage, chanting of holy hymns and home worship are dynamic practices. Love, nonviolence, good conduct and the law of dharma define the Hindu path. Hinduism explains that the soul reincarnates until all karmas are resolved and God Realization is attained.

What Do Most Hindus Believe?

There are nine beliefs, or shraddha, which though not exhaustive offer a simple summary of Hindu spirituality. 

1. Hindus believe in the divinity of the Vedas, the world's most ancient scripture, and venerate the Agamas as equally revealed. These primordial hymns are God's word and the bedrock of Sanatana Dharma, the eternal religion which has neither beginning nor end. 

2. Hindus believe in a one, all-pervasive Supreme Being who is both immanent and transcendent, both Creator and Unmanifest Reality. 

3. Hindus believe that the universe undergoes endless cycles of creation, preservation and dissolution. 

4. Hindus believe in karma, the law of cause and effect by which each individual creates his own destiny by his thoughts, words and deeds. 

5. Hindus believe that the soul reincarnates, evolving through many births until all karmas have been resolved, and moksha, spiritual knowledge and liberation from the cycle of rebirth, is attained. Not a single soul will be eternally deprived of this destiny. 

6. Hindus believe that divine beings exist in unseen worlds and that temple worship, rituals, sacraments as well as personal devotionals create a communion with these devas and Gods. 

7. Hindus believe that a spiritually awakened master, orsatguru, is essential to know the Transcendent Absolute, as are personal discipline, good conduct, purification, pilgrimage, self-inquiry and meditation. 

8. Hindus believe that all life is sacred, to be loved and revered, and therefore practice ahimsa, "noninjury." 

9. Hindus believe that no particular religion teaches the only way to salvation above all others, but that all genuine religious paths are facets of God's Pure Love and Light, deserving tolerance and understanding.
___________________________

Non-random-Thoughts: Vedics roots of modern mathematics. (part -1)

Non-random-Thoughts: Vedics roots of modern mathematics. (part -1)
We have managed to lose our great heritage and have descended to the lowest depth of culture (= restraint), morals and Value concepts. Instead of looking up to shreyas, we are steeped in wallowing in pleasure = preyas.  The article tells us of the great heights our ancient ancestors, had scaled; may it re-ignite the spark of action needed for shreyas. श्रेयो भूयात् सकल जनानां ||
mkrishnaswamy@gmail.com

THERE IS NO GREATER SIN THAN COWARDICE

**********************************************

http://kirtimukha.com/Vanamali1/Vivekananda/vivekanada/volume_8/epistles_fourth_series/contents.htm  

Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda Volume 8 

CXLVIII (Translated from Bengali.) 

To Swami Brahmananda

U.S.A., 

20th November, 1899.

MY DEAR RAKHAL,

Got some news from Sharat's letter. . . . Get experience while still there is a chance; I am not concerned whether you win or lose. . . . I have no disease now. Again. . . . I am going to tour from place to place. There is no reason for anxiety, be fearless. Everything will fly away before you; only don't be disobedient, and all success will be yours. . . . Victory to Kâli! Victory to the Mother! Victory to Kali! Wâh Guru, Wah Guru ki Fateh (Victory unto the Guru)!

. . . Really, there is no greater sin than cowardice; cowards are never saved — that is sure. I can stand everything else but not that. Can I have any dealings with one who will not give that up? . . . If one gets one blow, on must return ten with redoubled fury. . . . Then only one is a man. . . . The coward is an object to be pitied.

I bless you all; today, on this day sacred to the Divine Mother, on this night, may the Mother dance in your hearts, and bring infinite strength to your arms. Victory to Kali! Victory to Kali! Mother will certainly come down — and with great strength will bring all victory, world victory. Mother is coming, what dear? Whom to fear? Victory to Kali! At the tread of each one of you the earth will tremble. . . . Victory to Kali! Again onward, forward! Wah Guru! Victory to the Mother! Kali! Kali! Kali! Disease, sorrow, danger, weakness — all these have departed from you all. All victory, all good fortune, all prosperity yours. Fear not! Fear not! The threat of calamity is vanishing, fear not! Victory to Kali! Victory to Kali!

VIVEKANANDA.

PS. I am the servant of the Mother, you are all servants of the Mother — what destruction, what fear is there for us? Don't allow egoism to enter your minds, and let love never depart from your hearts. What destruction can touch you? Fear not. Victory to Kali! Victory to Kali!

**********************************************

As You Receive, So You Should Give

Ex-President of India Sri Abdul Kalam answering a question by the BBC:

Qn:

Please define Birthday.

Reply:

It's the only day in your life when your Mother smiled when you cried! 

=============================
Comment:

The cry signalled the first sign of your life after nine months of nurturing in her womb from a speck to a full-grown baby and, after safe delivery, until you learned to sustain by yourself as an adult.

Don't let her cry in her old age when she needs your help. 

Inaction signals absence of nurturing by you.

It is Nature's Law (dharma) that Giving and Receiving are reciprocal acts. The Law is implanted as instinct in all Beings except humans who, with their intellect, are expected to act according to Dharma. 

The tree that grew from a seed gives back a seed to enable growth of another tree.
The bee that receives honey from the flower gives back
by helping the flowers make seeds.
Hence it is that Khalil Gibran advises us "to go to our fields and gardens" 
to learn this dharma of Giving and Receiving:

***************
Khalil Gibran's advice on giving and receiving:

Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn
That it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower,
But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.
For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life,
And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love,
And to both, bee and flower,
the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy. 

Be in your pleasures like the flowers and the bees.   -- Gibran in 'Prophet'

MKK
***************************************************

What Death Taught Me About Life

--by Thao Phi, Aug 30, 2012   ; http://www.dailygood.org/view.php?sid=305  

A part of my summer internship with ServiceSpace.org involved initiating conversations with people I didn't know, and one question I'd ask them is what do they know for sure in life? Something they know with certainty. When I was initially asked this question, the immediate answer that came to mind is death. Death is everywhere. And I don't mean death is everywhere in some cynical or morbid sense, but death is an inevitable part of life. Rather than seeing death as something good or bad, it is just something that happens.

 

When I was 12, I attended a boarding school that was also a temple. My parents came to pick me up to for winter break. My mom was planning on staying at the temple for a retreat, but I pleaded her to come back since I would finally be home. My mom listened to me, and we began heading back to my house. Dusk was drawing near, and the rain was drizzling. For the first time since I had gone to boarding school, my parents and I were having a happy conversation in the car without any sign of arguing. I can't say I remember the exact moment it happened; I can't even say that I remember it happening at all. The next thing I can vaguely recall is waking up in a hospital bed, and for the next few days I drifted in and out of consciousness.

 

Death rips you out of a relationship and we are to a large degree the sum total of our relationships. The relationship between a mother and child is especially unique and irreplaceable. How do you tell a child that that relationship has been severed by death? I don't explicitly remember being told that my mom passed away on site of the car accident, but it hit me when it was only my brother, dad, and I on the ride home.

 

There's a quote that says, "When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time." And that's how it felt for a long time. Dealing with grief as a child is a very peculiar thing. My mom's funeral was exactly a week after her passing, and I could barely process what had happened by then. I was numb and didn't know what to feel.

 

Death is so abrupt and sudden that we go into a kind of shock. That abrupt ending and then there’s no more. No more taking back all that was done, no more of the things that would’ve been. It is after that one moment that changes everything that anything else is too late. And that was probably the worst part of it all - the grief of not knowing what it would be like if my mom were there for the big and little events in my life, in the world. For years I didn't know what to do with the grief, and it probably manifested in ways that I wasn't even aware of.

 

But over time you come to reconcile with this loss. It's not that you're okay with it, but you learn to accept it for what it is.

 

“Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight [and used to] how it holds you in place." My mother's death became an anchor - in some ways it weighed me down. I found myself talking about her death way more than necessary. It was like a sad song repeating itself on a broken record-player. I tried to make it seem like me being so precocious and responsible after my mother's death was in some way triumphant and showed strength. While her death has been one of the worst experiences of my life, I came to grasp that this wasn't the first bad thing to happen to me, and it probably wouldn't be the last. Death can give an obscure and distorted view of reality.

 

In other ways, my mother's death was an anchor in the sense that it helped me stay grounded. When other not-so-good things happen, if I give myself some time and take a step back, the upset becomes smaller. Instead of seeing it as an isolated event of something bad, I can see the bigger picture. In the grand scheme of things, these moments of suffering are complemented by instances of joy. Without my mom around, I've become much closer to my dad and our relationship is great. This brush with death has made me cherish other relationships I have in my life as well. Whether it's because of death or something else, you never know when someone may be permanently gone from your life, and you don't want to take the time you have with them for granted. Her death has helped me be more open and reach out to others for support, and I've met an abundance of dynamic people. And in subtle ways, her death has taught me to be more humble about life.

 

Death is a strange thing. Even though it happens all the time, it can blindside you. To be human is to fully come to grips with how you react and deal with death. Not to be overcome by it, not to be obsessed by it. But not to let it slip too far away that you lose the immediacy of this reality. Because it's in losing something that we so closely identify with that we can begin to find ourselves.
source; http://www.dailygood.org/view.php?sid=305  

ROBOTS Are Replacing Human Beings

"This is the Future", states this article in NY Times -

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/new-wave-of-adept-robots-is-changing-global-industry.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120819#h[]

What a Future and at what a human cost for the increasing World population estimated at 8 billions by 2020. Jobs in agriculture, factories, businesses, Offices and other Establishments, Homes etc lost to Machines. One shudders in fear at this final stage of mechanisation which started with the industrial age 300 years ago. Praise be to Gandhi and 'Small is beautiful' by Schumacher.

The Times web-site has a picture of a new Tesla factory in Fremont, California where "128 robot arms do the same (human) work with yoga-like flexibility. Video cameras guide them through feats well beyond the capability of the most dexterous human".

A quote from the book "Star Sight" seems apt in the present context, advising us to practice self-restraint:

The danger that lies ahead in the near future then is that today's Prometheans, trusting their power to change the future will lead us into disaster and unwittingly pay the heavy price of losing the future itself ! Wisdom therefore, consists in restraint and making our choices in harmony with and not contrary to Nature's laws which we should try to understand fully. With our intelligence, we have reached a stage when anything is possible; it is now time to use our power of discrimination and choose what is holistically desirable for all of us.  

Book:  Star Sight by Patricia Wallace Garlan; Maryjane Dunstan; Dyan Howell Pike (1977)

Read a longer extract from this book at: http://kirtimukha.com/surfings/Cogitation/6Futurists.htm

Extract from the Times article:

This is the future. A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distribution. Factories like the one here in the Netherlands are a striking counterpoint to those used by Apple and other consumer electronics giants, which employ hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers.

“With these machines, we can make any consumer device in the world,” said Binne Visser, an electrical engineer who manages the Philips assembly line in Drachten.Many industry executives and technology experts say Philips’s approach is gaining ground on Apple’s. Even as Foxconn, Apple’s iPhonemanufacturer, continues to build new plants and hire thousands of additional workers to make smartphones, it plans to install more than a million robots within a few years to supplement its work force in China.Foxconn has not disclosed how many workers will be displaced or when. But its chairman, Terry Gou, has publicly endorsed a growing use of robots. Speaking of his more than one million employees worldwide, he said in January, according to the official Xinhua news agency: “As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”The falling costs and growing sophistication of robots have touched off a renewed debate among economists and technologists over how quickly jobs will be lost. This year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made the case for a rapid transformation. “The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications,” they wrote in their book, “Race Against the Machine.”
In their minds, the advent of low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in agricultural technology over the last century, when farming employment in the United States fell from 40 percent of the work force to about 2 percent today. The analogy is not only to the industrialization of agriculture but also to the electrification of manufacturing in the past century, Mr. McAfee argues.

---

Tesla Factory, Fremont, California, USA

Role Model for Positive Thinking plus determined Effort

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheena_Iyengar
Sheena Iyengar was born in Toronto, Canada in 1969. Her parents had emigrated there from Delhi, India. In 1972, Iyengar’s family moved to Flushing, Queens, where her father helped establish the first permanent Sikh temple; and in 1979, the family moved to Elmwood Park, New Jersey. Iyengar grew up in a bicultural environment, observing the tenets of Sikhism with her family but partaking in American culture outside of the home.

When Iyengar was three years old, she was diagnosed with a rare form of retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited disease of retinal degeneration. By 6th grade, Iyengar had lost the ability to read, and by 11th grade, she had lost her sight entirely and could only perceive light. Iyengar’s life had also taken another turn in high school; when she was 13, her father died of a heart attack.

In Iyengar’s book, The Art of Choosing, she explains how these seemingly random events and external influences, which shaped her life, led her to become interested in choice:

"My parents had chosen to come to this country, but they had also chosen to hold on to as much of India as possible. They lived among other Sikhs, followed closely the tenets of their religion, and taught me the value of obedience. What to eat, wear, study, and later on, where to work and whom to marry—I was to allow these to be determined by the rules of Sikhism and by my family’s wishes. 

But in public school I learned that it was not only natural but desirable that I should make my own decisions. It was not a matter of cultural background or personality or abilities; it was simply what was true and right. For a blind Sikh girl otherwise subject to so many restrictions, this was a very powerful idea. I could have thought of my life as already written, which would have been more in line with my parents’ views. Or I could have thought of it as a series of accidents beyond my control, which was one way to account for my blindness and my father’s death. However, it seemed much more promising to think of it in terms of choice, in terms of what was still possible and what I could make happen."

==========

Sheena Iyengar about herself, marriage to Garud Iyengar, family:http://www.columbia.edu/~ss957/about.shtml 

Extract:

"I met the man, Garud Iyengar, who would one day become my husband. We were both waiting for the Marguerite bus at the top of the oval, he with a torn ligament, me just being lazy. Garud asked me to join him for lunch at the Thai Cafe. That was December of 1993. On July 6th, 1997, we got married in a traditional wedding in Bangalore, India. We both joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1998. I teach in the business school, and he teaches in the school of engineering."

TED Talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_on_the_art_of_choosing.html