Life and Spirituality

O ften at around five 5 p.m., I go out for an evening walk around my neighborhood or to a shopping area nearby. Yesterday as I was out on a walk, I spotted a group of around ten rural laborers returning from work at some construction site in the area. They were indeed a bubbly and cheerful lot, laughing and joking with each other as they walked briskly towards their temporary urban shelter. The exuberance was certainly far greater than other rich or middle class neighbors that I encounter on these evening walks. It is a common sight most evenings. These simple rustic labor folk that drop into the city from time to time from nearby rural areas do so to make some extra money. In recent years there has been much economic progress in India, but such progress is in the main confined to urban areas. In the villages, life has not yet changed substantially. Most villagers are farmers but their farm holding are small and they do not have money to invest in intensive modern farming. As a...

In a comment of my last post it was mentioned that rural living might be good for some individuals. Present day urban life usually involves an eight-hour workday along with commuting that may be up to one to two hours a day for the round trip. This leaves little time for an individual for himself or herself and it is not surprising then that some individuals who go through that for most of their lives get dehumanized. It is not written in any scripture that the normal workday should be a fixed eight hours, day in and day out. I have lived in towns and countries where the work hours were from eight a.m. to one p.m. six days a week and commuting time to work was just five minutes. However, that is an exception rather than the rule. In ancient times the normal working hours of an individual varied throughout the year. There were weeks of round-the-clock work followed by weeks of lean hours. In modern times this sort of thing has become confined to a few areas of life such as farmers and s...

T he last two posts described a configuration for farm lots titled as AM farms. This one provides a few more details. Essentially, AM farms were described as farm lots that are two hundred feet wide and half a mile deep on the average, yielding farm lots of a little over ten acres each. Each of the farm lots would be of unequal size if they face a curving road as shown in the adjoining figure. Curving roads are more natural for rural areas. Often such roads are laid so that they are on lowest ground to catch the run off rainwater. However, AM farms are such that they are not completely rural but rather semi urban because of their configuration and because a depth of two hundred feet is permitted for construction of homes as well as commercial establishments such as shops, restaurants, pub, primary school, produce shop, motels etc. A width of two hundred feet on the road is sufficient to set up both a residential home as well as a commercial establishment if the width is divided i...

NOTE: do read the older post http://someitemshave.blogspot.in/2011/10/towards-green-life.html for a background to this one. S ome of my earlier posts have alluded to the possibility of a return to land as a way of creating jobs in developed economies such as that of the USA that is trying to deal with this issue. The last post described a layout of farmlands in designed narrow strips so as to minimize some of the hardships faced by rural communities. May I call these AM farms for convenience here. Let us consider a fifty into fifty mile irrigated land area divided up into AM farms and try and estimate roughly the expenses for creating them and the number of jobs that might be created by doing so. It would be necessary to divide the landmass into a grid of roads that are a mile apart in order to provide road access to all the farms for the purpose. One square mile of land area results in 50 AM farms laid back to back and facing two roads that are...

Golu, (Naynesh), my God Grandson H uman life is made up of sad and happy moments, some very sad moments, and brief or prolonged periods of sorrow or difficulties as well as prolonged periods of happiness. Yesterday on TV one of the principal characters of a program I watch mentioned that an evolved human is one who can face both sorrow and happiness calmly with equanimity, since these are inevitable portions of life. I completely agree with this view and feel that the Universal Intelligence makes humans face sorrow for precisely such evolution. One of the things that has made me face sorrow and difficulties in life with calm is the belief in an afterlife – the belief in reincarnation. I know that many do not believe in a soul or reincarnation but I believe that when one firmly accepts reincarnation as a fact, then sorrows and difficulties of life become less serious, even trivial at times. Perhaps all of us would have experienced an unpleasant dream in which something awfu...

T he developed economies of the world, reeling under debt and rising unemployment, have been facing severe economic pressures ever since the crisis began in 2008. One may wonder as to where the future of developed economies is heading. The developed economies still lead the world in high technology manufacture such as such as computer chips, aircraft etc. They will probably continue to do so for several more decades. However for the rest of manufacturing, ranging from undergarments to motorcars, it appears that high standards of living coupled with high wages in developed countries makes much of manufacturing uncompetitive in a globally trading world. It is partly for this reason that economies of the BRIC countries are growing rapidly while developed economies stagnate or struggle with insignificant growth. The largest of developed economies, the US, that is largely consumer driven hopes to grow once again if consumer demand increases. However a sustainable future for mankind...

  Note: Please read first the earlier article : http://someitemshave.blogspot.in/2009/02/spiritual-view-of-recession-and-economy.html According to Sumerian mythology as well as ancient Indian one the great city of Dwarka/Atlantis was destroyed by the gods when greed and sin increased tremendously. The message of the story is applicable even today. Although our planet is beautiful, some of the cities on our planet especially in the developing world are incredibly messy and dirty. My spiritual interpretation of this phenomenon is that we are all children of the universe and mother earth – kind parents who allow their children to play and mess about in the play yard. Just as the play room of a naughty child can become very messy, we too as children of mother earth have messed up some of the spaces we have to play about in. Charged by greed, lust and pride, we have trampled on the flowers and gardens of Nature. We suffer as a consequence of it. Father Universe permits that so tha...