Monday, September 20, 2010

GOD AND I

My answers to the questions asked by The New Indian Express – City Supplement – Expresso, published today.


GOD AND I


What are your spiritual beliefs?

There is a force, subtler and all powerful, that runs the creation in an Order by the Law, which can be perceived and followed for the good of all. An ‘experience’ of connectedness of all that exist – living and non living – in unity and love, is the spiritual awakening, the spiritual way of being.

What is your understanding of God?

A Being, which is unlike any human intellect can possibly conceptualize as any amount of wording or applying thoughts would misrepresent and may even cause separation, division, strife and conflict with it. The Being cannot be conceived by any known name, form or gender and is beyond the mind too and, since all experiences are mind’s presentation, beyond experience too. However, the Being could be accessed going beyond mind and thoughts or by allowing mind to be quiet, and remain in the domain presented then, without wording and by allowing oneself to be carried in that state, as mystics would have it. We can ‘know’ God by effects.


What are your spiritual practices?

I have been practicing Meditation, half an hour twice daily, since the year 1973. It began as professional necessity as a practitioner of Mental Health, - it was considered as one of the ‘tool’ to alleviate mental suffering (stresses and strain), - and soon it became part of me as it opened a new dimension of being, of inner peace and joy.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

The Hindu : Health / Medicine & Research : Honey! It's sweet, yet comes with a sting

The Hindu : Health / Medicine & Research : Honey! It's sweet, yet comes with a sting

LEADERS DESTROYING THE NATION

Rs.58,00,00,00,00,000, that is Rs. 5.8 lakh crore. And that's the amount our netas have siphoned off in 8 years. - This is the banner heading on the front page of today's The New Indian Express. Citing from the US based research and advocacy group, Global Financial Integrity (GFI) (2010) it introduces the topic thus: " A whopping $ 125 billion of public money has been siphoned off from India by corrupt politicians and officials between 2000 and 2008, as rampant corruption plagues the country that has been rising inequalities despite unprecedented growth levels. "A quote from a GFI economist, Karly Curcio, further states " Much of the funds flowing out are generated at home within India and then sent illegally abroad. So the growth of corruption and India's underground economy contributes significantly to illicit financial flows from the country"

Corruption thrives because the vast majority of the corrupt can get away with it as either the laws are weak in dealing with them or laws are subverted or those who have to deal with it such as law makers/politicians, law enforcers/police, bureaucrats/officials connive with the corrupt to partake in the loot or being themselves indulging in corrupt practices - fence eating the crops - or erosion of moral fabric of our people, especially in the rulers. More important reason is the casting away of the values that nurtures and ennoble life of all beings that exist - living and non-living - as enshrined in Ancient Indian Thought/Vedas.We are made to think that those values are outdated not in tune with the times and would remain barbaric if we follow them without realizing that values sustaining modernity and progress is destroying the lives and the nation by promoting greed and selfishness. What is worse, the ills of the society (such as caste and gender discrimination) of the last hundred years is attributed to Vedic values and a caste group supposed to uphold those values without realizing that it was either a reaction to the alien rulers misdeeds or the unchecked human greed and selfishness among the natives with the connivance of the foreign rulers.

Universal and Eternal Values that promotes good of all beings on earth alone can help us regain our past glory and become once again a global leader, certainly not by fooling those values.