A great day

It was really nice to run into Mr. Sampath. He said that Swami recommends people to do the following:
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* Namasmarana, if possible
* Narayana Seva, if possible
* Help people, if possible
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The only thing He commands people is to "Hurt Never"!*

I was in a very exalted mood after a call to my good friend Ravikrishna Yerramsetti. There's so much similarity in my thoughts with those of Mr. Yerramsetti that I am amazed. I am yet to document the wonderful trip we had to Swananda on 22.APR.2004.

Anyway, we went to Swananda again yesterday (23.MAY) afternoon for the Suddha Chavithi homa. On the way back, he was narrating an instance how he ran into a massive hissing king cobra in his fields when he was about 25 years old. While his younger brother warned him and ran off to get some help, he kept his peace and told the cobra, which was facing the russet setting sun: "Please do your Surya namaskars and carry on. I am a devotee of Shirdi Sai; why are you angry with me?". The cobra soon slithered away.

Today, I called him up and said that I'd always wondered how to handle a snake if I ran into it and his experience helped me regarding the correct course of action.

He narrated another instance when he was taking a shortcut in the dead of night and a massive Alsatian accosted him. It was about to flatten him to the ground when again he kept his peace and thought: "O Shirdi Sai, you are there in me as well as this dog. Why are you so angry with me?"! No sooner had he thought of this that the dog quieted down and went away. Due to some reason, this overwhelmed me to such an extent that I couldn't continue the conversation.

Today, Mr. Sampath narrated a stunning instance of Swami's teaching. Mr. G "GV" Venkataraman who wrote that nice Divine Journey was a high-falutin' physicist and Mr. Sampath's boss at Kalpakkam. His credo was: "Physics is the only God". When his extremely brilliant son went to IIT-Kharagpur and later hanged himself, he & his wife became terribly distraught. After some time, he met Swami through another devotee. Swami's first question was: "What do you want?" Venkataraman said: "I want peace". Swami's response was:

You drop the "I" and then the "want". What is left is Peace!

This left me totally flabbergasted, with its clarity and elegance.
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* Later in the night, when a series of incidents (rain at 7:30 PM scuttling my shuttle badminton game, cooking gas getting over, not able to unlock the gas chamber due to a rusty lock, not able to change the regulator after somehow opening the lock, etc.) reflected today's Compound 8, this Command helped me keep my cool. I set out to H&S for dinner and helped the driver of #108 with his Kawasaki, which wasn't starting, by switching on my BlackDiamond Ion headlight for him to clean the spark plug ;-)

Tracking the Ego to Its Source

A nice one by A R Natarajan:
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The vision of the self and awareness of it as the abidance in the heart - where the unbroken awareness of one's existence can be felt spontaneously as the 'I-I' - has been described by Ramana Maharshi.

...
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The pigeon has landed!

Last (20.MAY) afternoon, I had to go to Indiranagar to draw some money from the ICICI ATM and do some purchases at Namdhari's, a neat dept. store.

Navigating the traffic on the busy Airport Road, I was thinking whether so much pain was worth it, when, in front of Kemp Fort, a pigeon slowed down in flight and landed on my car, right in the middle of all that traffic. Boy, did it make my day!

I was wondering why the heck it chose my car. I had done a pooja for my Silver Santro on Wednesday (19.MAY) on it completing five years and the Om symbol was still on the windshield. Probably that was it.

Anyway, the pigeon hung around for a while, holding on to the windshield wiper for support. At the next signal (the one before Manipal Hospital/The Leela Palace), it suddenly took off.

For these torrid times, an amazing quote

Men cannot see their reflection in running water, but only in still water.
-Chuang Tzu, philosopher (c. 4th century BCE)

Can you figure this out?

Ever since I read Sri Ramakrishna's observation:
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Just like the spider which brings the web out of itself, Brahman creates the Universe out of Itself
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I've been fascinated by the spider. So much so that I look at the appearance of a spider as a beneficent omen.

Last Saturday (08.MAY), in the pooja room, I was going through the center-spread photos of a 40-page booklet on Tirumala. Suddenly, I noticed a fine spider web, right in the middle of the book. How the heck can that happen in a book that's normally kept closed?!

I don't believe in miracles per se* and soon figured out how that would have happened.

* I was quite amused by the milk-drinking Ganesh episode of 21.SEP.1995. In Cast Away, when the character of Tom Hanks starts opening the FedEx parcels on the desolate island on which he's marooned, he finds a b'day card with the words: The most beautiful thing in the world is the world itself.

A weird way to know about a book

I was searching for books on Analysis Services in Amazon.com. The second item in the list was Journey of Awakening - A Meditator's Guidebook by Ram Dass*. What the heck does that have to do with Analysis Services?!

Anyway, I found it intriguing enough to open the link and found a weird review on the same, which went:
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5 out of 5 stars
Just what I needed
September 29, 2002
Reviewer: Rick Jones from Washington, DC United States
True story...

One day I was walking in San Francisco on my way to the Carl Jung Institute, when I had an overwhelming urge for a cup of cappucino. I mean, completely overwhelming. I turned and headed down a street (Van Ness) that I knew (at the time) did not have any cafes or coffee shops, yet I could not seem to help myself. I was being pulled.

After walking a few blocks, I noticed a sign for a bookstore below street level, and for some reason I went in. It was a weird little place filled with crystals and Hopi dream catchers, and I knew immediately it was probably not my kind of bookstore. Nonetheless, I decided to stay and browse a bit. I was turning one of those turning bookstands, when my eyes hit upon this book among a bunch of extreme New Age titles. I looked through it, and got tremendously excited as I realized that I had found something I had been barely aware I was looking for. So I bought it, read it about a dozen times, and it provided me with absolutely the right information I needed to make some decisions about meditation techniques, teachers, etc. In that sense, you could say it changed my life.

Based on my own experiences, I would recommend this book unconditionally to anyone who feels themselves drawn in that direction but needs a bit more information first. As always, Ram Dass does a first-class job of presenting somewhat arcane information in a very accessible manner.

Going back to that particular day, the funny thing was that as I walked out of the bookstore with the book, that overwhelming urge for a cup of cappucino had completely disappeared. And when I went back a few months later to find the bookstore again, I couldn't find it. I've always wondered what Carl Jung would have thought of the whole episode.

* In his stunning non-fiction book on outer & inner Travels, Michael Crichton refers to this guy, Ram Dass né Richard Alpert, who used to edit The Harvard Crimson, and how he found it difficult to even utter his new name ;-)

On Luck

Why do some people get all the luck while others never get the breaks they deserve?

A psychologist says he has discovered the answer - The Luck Factor.

Spiritual High: Interview with Pt. Shivkumar Sharma

A stunning interview, wherein Shivji discusses his music, his guru, and his fellow composers.

Global Oneness and The Venus Transit

Hear a lot of talk about the Kali Yuga ending in 2012 (21.DEC, according to the Mayas).

Here is some more of that:

The darkest hours of night arrive just before the light of dawn. Undoubtedly, the Earth faces a tremendous crisis today, a painful “dark night of the soul”, maybe even catastrophic obliteration. Yet, according to many ancient traditions, it is also a time of hope, evolutionary renewal and purification: The dawning of a Golden Age.

The ancient Mayan calendar resembles a cosmic timing code, and it reflects a deep understanding of long-term cycles of creation. As evolutionary cycles of cosmic energies are absor-bed into Earth’s electro-magnetic fields via the Sun, human consciousness responds in a predictable manner, following a cosmic pattern of dark and light. The Mayan calendar describes the sequence and timing of these patterns — the year 2012 symbo-lises the end of certain cycles of history based on duality and separation, and represents the birthing of a Golden Age of Enlightenment.

Venus is rich in archetypal symbolism. As the Morning Star, it is the Bringer of Light. It is related to love, human unity, beauty, and oneness. On June 8, 2004, the path of Venus directly crosses over the disc of the Sun, an eclipse lasting for the space of seven hours. The blended radiations make their way into the Earth’s electromagnetic fields, they weave energies of love and unity into the planet’s collective consciousness, and potentially into the hearts of every human on Earth.

Interestingly, Venus transits always come in pairs. The second passage of Venus across the Sun’s disc will take place on June 6, 2012. The eight-year period in between represents a “doorway” through which Unity consciousness will come to dominate our mass consciousness. This is a 130-year cycle and every time this transit has happened, it has represented a new level of harmonisation. Interestingly, the Taj Mahal, a great monument to love, was built during the Venus Transit of 1631-1639 AD.

The transition into Unity consciousness could be turbulent. As old structures of human consciousness collapse, it may be accompanied by a degree of darkness and destruction. “When the light hits”, as Jose Arguelles puts it, “the dark gets tough”. This current “doorway of Venus” is especially significant because it remains open until 2012 AD, the completion of our current cycle of human evolution. Some refer to this date as the end of linear time, the end of a period of human consciousness conditioned by separation and duality. The Mayans refer to it as the Return of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, and look to this eight-year doorway as the timeframe within which mass enlightenment of humanity will take place.

Worldwide, people should observe the days leading up to this Venus Transit as a time for opening to the bright impulse of cosmic energy that is streaming into our collective consciousness. What are our highest dreams and hopes? What is our greatest potential as divinely ins-pired humans? What can we create together as we step into the “doorway” to the Golden Age?

June 6-8 is being promoted worldwide as the Global Oneness Celebration. Let’s come together during this time in gatherings and prayers throughout the world to celebrate love and beauty, light and unity and translate these energies into art, economics, culture, politics, education and ecology. Let us pray for peace, healing, beauty, and global oneness.