My son was telling me( he is a Believer, Agnostic and a Non believer, all rolled into one, don’t ask me how, he is-I do not tell him what he should,on occasions I used to suggest him when he is that state of Mind to enquire within;he also knows the essentials of Indian Thought and knows important Sruti by heart) and an hour ago asked my that Miracles happened in the past ,especially in Treta Yuga( an Indian Aeon) and people thought of God and He appeared and why they do not now,
In Indian Philosophy, unlike in other Philosophical Systems of the World, there is no such thing as ‘Super Natural’
For a Hindu, everything in the Universe is natural, be it Rebirth, Good Actions producing good results, Bad, the bad.Clairvoyance and the like and God.
God would appear if one where to call out to Him..
Belief is the feeling that some thing or some event would be the same way as it has been in our experience..
Child believes that its Mother would take care of it.
This kind Belief turns into Faith when the Belief turns out to be true at all times in one’s experience.
This Faith performs the seemingly impossible.
Faith is clothed as ‘Positive thoughts’ in modern parlance.
When one thinks he has Faith, he has lost it.
It should be as natural as breathing and to cite a daily example ‘the morning Ablutions’.
These things, you do not contemplate, analyse,but are Natural.
When one thinks he has Faith, he is aware of it and expects things to happen definitely.
But if this feeling is natural, you do not even for a second contemplate the desired result, because you are unconsciously convinced the that the desired result would be there and It is there for you..
Pu it simply, it is the Faith of the Child in its Mother.
In this sense, Faith does not perform Miracles,
It does , when one does and has the disposition of doing things naturally.
For people of the earlier Yugas, Miracles and Faith did not exist separately for them.
Faith was in their being and the result was embedded in that Feeling.
Hence they could do and see things which we, to-day call as Miracles .
He never thought it was faith, it was a natural feeling with him.
If he had Faith on Lord Krishna only because he believed Krishna to be God , Arjuna would not have called Krishna as ‘a Cowherd, Friend(yadava, Saket and in many instances ridiculed him(He apologized to Krishna in The Bhagavad Gita for this in The Viswaroopa chapter of the Srimad Bhagavad Gita)
Arjuna took Krishna as his friend and treated him accordingly and what we call Miracles to-day were there for him.
The moment Arjuna felt differently, he was routed.
There is a story in the Mahabharata which narrates this point.
After the passing away of Lord Krishna(the term Dehavyoha is to be used here), Arjuna’s wives were captured by ordinary Dacoits..
Arjuna got agitated and swore that he would finish the dacoits off , get his wives back and bragged that those dacois did not know the power of Arjuna and his Kandipa(Arjuna’s Bow)
Narada just smiled and accompanied Arjuna in this assault on the dacoits.
Arjuna’s Kandiva was ineffective , broken and he was squarely beaten by the dacoits.
He asked Narada what happened to him and his Kandiva.
Narada replied,
‘You forgot the essential part of You, Lord Krishna; so long He was apart of You naturally , you vanquished every one.
Now you are humiliated”
Arjuna yearns for Krishna and got his wives back after defeating the dacoits with his Kandiva.
So long as belief and Faith natural and a part of you, nothing is a Miracle.
You shall get whatever you want( so long it does not run contrary to Dharma(Righteousness)
This self belief is to be inculcated in the Children right from their infancy as it has been the case with Dhruv(Dhruva) or Prahlad.
Then there are no Mountains, only mole hills in Life.
( As water from Rains, in the form Rivulets, Streams. Ponds, Rivers ultimately reaches and get submerged in the Ocean and become a part of it,worship of all and any God ultimately reaches Kesava( Lord Vishnu)
True, those who climb mountains climb despite hazards and payments start all over again for the sheer pleasure of it.
Edmund Hillary put it better, when he asked why he kept on climbing Mountains,
‘Because it is there”
Appears to be true.
But they too need Money to climb mountains and they go in for some other jobs or for sponsors for expenses.
So Money is needed.
The point is we do get pleasure in doing what we want to and we perform better,yet if the basic needs are not met you can not do do or work what gives you pleasure.
The crux is the result of the Work.
If the work is appreciated by others and if the work is creative and not destroyed we work better.
So work or performance Pleasure and efficiency is determined by the results it produces.
Yet the results of work is not determined by our efforts or work alone.
It has other factors to influence the results, like the other factors , environment and people.
Even a simple task like brushing one’s teeth assumes and needs other factors like Gravity,paste being available at a given time and most imp importantly one should be alive.
These factors, agents are not in one’s control and as such the outcome of any work depends heavily on these external factors.
The best one can do is to efficiently manage the one factor in one’s control, that is Himself.
If one were to worry about the other factors like others’ opinion and other factors,the very thought will impair on’e efficiency, thus lowering the chances of the work being completed successfully and as a result the pleasure one can derive.
Therefore to improve efficiency and derive pleasure out of work is to change the mind-set into one of detached attachment.
An action that is performed is non action when there is no involvement or motivation.
An action that is performed with the results in mind are Actions, which may cause disappointments when one is not appreciated or the work is destroyed.
Non action is an action is one where one performs an action or work because it has to be done without bothering about the consequences .
Here there is action and yet there is no anticipation of results and consequently no disappointment; if it is appreciated or remains for some time you are Happy, it is a Bonus.
This is the way one has to approach to work to be Happy and be more efficient.
One should be careful in understanding this thought as this does not mean non involvement or irresponsibility.
When we think about how people work,the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze — that all people care about is money, and the moment we give people money, we can direct them to work one way, we can direct them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work and what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and difficulty to walk and difficulty of breathing — cold, challenging circumstances.And if people were just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.” (Laughter) “Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after they recover, they go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came to visit me. This was a student that was one of my students a few years earlier. And he came one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: He said that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank. This was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, “Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed.Now at the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch that made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor.And to start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said,”Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one. And when they finished, we asked them, “Do you want to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put them under the table. And we told them that at the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again. And you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating. So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycleof them building and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happenedwas that people built many more Bionicles — they built 11 versus seven — in the meaningful condition versus the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point out that this was not a big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
Sanjaya! At the Dhrama Bhoomi(place of Righteousness) Kurukshetra, what did mine and the sons of Pandu do,with the intention fighting against each other ?”
Dharma.
The concept of Dharma in Indian Philosophy is very intricate and Complex.
Dharma is
‘Verily, that which is Dharma is truth.
Therefore they say of a man who speaks truth, “He speaks the Dharma,”
or of a man who speaks the Dharma, “He speaks the Truth.”
At the Cosmic level it is called Rta or the regulatory Order of the Universe which consists of Principles for the maintanence of the order of The Universe.
According to Taittriya Upanishad it is something that One must not stray from
Taken as a whole Dharma means it is that is in consonance with Universal laws, which can be understood only by the Wise.
This is what Krishna says when he says ‘even the learned do not understand the Karma or Dharma as it is very subtle and can be understood only by the Realized.
Then how do we follow it/
Lord Krishna says it is by following the set of Rules of the Vedas, unquestionably.
As you keep following them the Dharma will dawn on you and you will follow automatically.
If you do not take food in time the acid secreted shall eat away the lining of the stomach and you may end up with Ulcer, at the least gastritis,Indigestion.
Never Skip Breakfast,.
Never delay it beyond it 830 am.
Remember to have a heavy Breakfast.
( Heavy Breakfast is recommended after offering to The Lord, which normally has variety-Hinduism)
The Heart has to supply more blood to help in Digestion, at the cost of the other organs when you are engaged in other activities.
In addition eating often adds weight.
( in Hindu Homes these are the following eating Pattern-Breakfast,Lunch and Dinner OR Lunch,Curd Rice in the after noon and light food , either Curd Rice or Idli.Dosa)
Do not heavily in the night.
( Srimad Bhagavad Gita on Three Gunas speaks on this and other Food Habits to be followed-Please read my Blogs on this)
Most of us wait until most of the bristles have either fallen off, or are in such bad shape that we”d be embarrassed to pull out our brush in public.
Damaged bristles can harm the enamel, and don”t massage your gums well.
Crossing our legs.
Do you cross your legs at your knees when sitting?
Although we may believe that this is the lady-like elegant way to sit, sitting this way cuts down circulation to your legs.
If you don”t want varicose veins to mar the beauty of your legs and compromise your health, uncross your legs every time you realise you have one knee on top of the other.
The best way to sit is to simply place both legs together on the floor, balancing your weight equally.
If you feel like changing position, instead of crossing your legs, simply move both legs together to one side.
As an alternative, you could also consider crossing your legs loosely at the ankles.
This is a classically elegant way to sit, and is far better for your legs and your health than sitting with your legs crossed at your knees.
( This is regarded- crossing legs – as a sign of disrespect )
High heels
High heels sure look great, but they’re murder for your back.
This however doesn’t mean you should steer clear of stilettos.
Wear them, but not when you know you will be walking around a lot.
Wear them when going out for lunch or dinner – when the only walking you will be doing is to your car, to the table, and back.
Avoid high heels when you are going somewhere on foot.
If you are constantly tempted to wear your heels, take a good look at your flats.
Is there something about them you dislike? Invest in a new pair of beautiful flats or shoes with a low heel.
Buy something you love, that you will enjoy wearing. If possible, get a matching bag.
You will then enjoy your flats as much as you do your heels.
Hindu Samskaras gives the pride of place to Garbha Dhaanam,the Rite performed to be get Good Children over other 39 Samskaaras by placing it at the top of the list and , in a Man’ Life, it is the First Samskara to be performed as an Adult.
In it is the Hindu’s Belief that a son will relieve the sin of the parents of the results of their actions .
A son, according to Hindu Sastras is a reflection of Oneself in as much as he is expected to continue the action sequences set in motion by his parents.
He is temperamentally more suited because of the genes in him .
Therefore, any action performed by the Father will affect the son directly or indirectly.
The great Tamil work Tirukkural states that one’s worthiness is known by his Offspring for he is the remnant of the parent’s results of action.
‘தக்கார் தகவிலர் என்ப ரவரர் எச்சத்தார்க் காணப்படும் .’
எச்சம் என்பது இங்கு மிகுதி என்னும் பொருளில் அமைந்துள்ளது .
It is also believed that one who does not have a son will suffer from the Hell designated as ‘Puth’.
Here Puth means, not a hell where one suffers physically and mentally, but as being born again for the non-performance of Rites after one’s Death by his son.
After the ‘Retiring Stage’ Vaanaprasthaa- of one’s Life, the son takes care of the worldly affairs of his Father , including looking after his mother while the father meditates for the Realisation of The Self.
Just before Death, the sun places his Father’s head on his left thigh and recites the ‘Karna Mantra’ in the Father’s right ear to enable the father to attain Salvation.
One should have a son to perform the Rites for the Ancestors.
Man in enjoined to have inter course at least once in his married Life.
Later it is not obligatory.
(Hinduism is of the Opinion that the act of Sex is to be get children in the interest of the son performing th Rites for the ancestors and the pleasure one gets out of Sex is only an unintended offshoot.
This also indicates that the Hindus, though they may have sex with their wives, child is not ensured for the Sastras mention Days on which one can have Sex.This tallies with the ‘Safe Dates’ of modern Medicine.
With whom one should not have Sex.
Pregnant woman,
One who is unwilling,
Diseased
Woman of uncontrollable temper
One who is Hungry
How to be with Wife.
Cloth beneath the Waist is not to be removed.
A small lamp is be lit.
If it is the first time, the Yagnapaveedham(Sacred Thread), should be worn as usual, that is, it should cross the Left shoulder.
At other times it should be ‘Niveedhi’-as a Garland around the neck.
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