Life and Spirituality

" A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space . He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.”   Albert Einstein M y professional career was that of an engineer, scientist and academic but nowadays I sometimes describe myself a mystic when talking on spiritual matters. Some have inquired what that means and if it same as a religious person. No, a mystic is just as different from a religious person as a religious priest is different from a business man, although some of the much evolved ones have been recognized as saints by different religions. A mystic may have originally belonged to a religion and would therefore be called for exampl...

  Sant Dashrath of Gehlaur (Dashrath Manjhi, 1934 - 2007) W hile India is famous for ancient esoteric yoga knowledge and leading mystic lights of humanity such as Buddha and Gandhi, the situation and state of the general population in modern times is far from the lives of saints that inhabited the land. While India boasted in the past of leading international universities like Nalanda that were the light of the   ancient world even as Harvard and Princeton are today, the less said of its modern universities the better. And on the street chaos rules. From remnants of ancient education people still keep their bodies and homes clean, but they pick the garbage and many throw it on the street outside. When they visit a market or office, instead of parking their vehicles in an orderly fashion, they leave it anywhere in a random manner so that disorder is the order of the day. If there is a hole in the road, few will venture out to fill it or remove some obstructio...

The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes b y Lambert Lombard W hile the main thrust of mysticism is about human goodness, compassion and divinity that sees the same consciousness run through all life, from times immemorial, prophecies, miracles or magical things have been associated with mystics and impressed ordinary humans. Some miracles have an explanation in science. For example it is easy to make wine from water with help of dehydrated alcohol now available and to communicate with distant humans that most everyone does now with mobile phones. There are other miracles that have something to do with exceptional abilities that are a part of all life and awaken in the mystic through their spiritual practice or yoga. Some of these not within the reach of most humans in the normal course, can be experienced by just about anyone through some brief practices of yoga as this author touched upon in an earlier post as also some that awaken on their own under rare condition...

Classical Landscape by John Wootton A line in the morning newspaper (in the editorial section, Times of India) today caught my attention - Hemmingway said the world breaks everyone but afterward some are strong at the broken pieces. It is true that the world has both joys and sorrows but as to how much it breaks anyone varies from individual to individual. The nature of life is such that one begins with struggling through education and then spends the largest part of life at earning a livelihood. There are struggles in raising a family and when one becomes too old to work and the family has grown and departed, one struggles to maintain oneself in the interim before the final sleep. Through it all are also periods of peace and moments of joy, pleasure and merrymaking not just when time and opportunity permits but also when the mind can be freed from its numerous concerns. Such concerns often increase as one's riches increase. The rich and the ambitious try for success i...

Photo of the Himalayan foothills near Haidakhan and superimposed text by author T his note should have been entitled women and mystics but you know how the human mind is, it would have jumped to sexual connotations and that is not what this note is about although it does have a bit of that too. It goes without saying that it is nice sexual experiences very many humans look for soon as they have had nice food and when they are done with all that, they go about the world looking for fame, wealth, important positions in society and so on. It is pursuits such as these that drives much in the world. When these interests are in control, society runs reasonably well; when any such drive becomes excessive and when it involves ethical violations, for example when a few usurp most of the wealth of the world while others starve or worse, suffer homelessness, then we have an upheaval and people may rise to chop the head off a queen as they did in France or to have a communist revo...

Golden Bricks Recently, a religious mystic of Northern India by the name of Shoben Sarkar informed the government of India through his foremost spiritual associate Swami Om ji Maharaj that he had knowledge of a huge cache of gold buried at a depth of fifteen feet or so under an old ruined fort near his Monastery/Ashram. The claim was made on the basis of some old records and the divine perceptions of the mystic. The Mystic wished that the government should recover this gold and use it to restore the faltering economy of India. The government took cognizance of the mystic’s claim and ordered a geological survey of the grounds. Scientific tests declared the presence of buried material and the possibility that it could be Gold. Thereupon, the government ordered the Archeological Survey of India to carry out excavations of the area. Perhaps a better organization to have been given the task would have been a building organization that would have excavated the site within a day a...