Professor of Arabic, stop googling. Google translator is not perfect, you will loose your wicket on guggly ball.ismaili103 wrote:Direct translation of these English phrase into Arabic,
ALI IS FROM ALLAH = ALI HU MIN UND ALLAH
ALI OF ALLAH = ALI MIN ALLAH
ALI IS ALLAH = ALI U ALLAH
Mawlana Sultan Mohamed Shah and others on Meditation
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shivaathervedi
- Posts: 1107
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ismaili103
- Posts: 542
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shivaathervedi
- Posts: 1107
- Joined: Mon Feb 01, 2016 10:39 pm
ismaili103 wrote:RASSI JAL GAI PR BAL NI GAYA.Professor of Arabic, stop googling. Google translator is not perfect, you will loose your wicket on guggly ba
Then mr. Professor of arabic..plz give us translation of above phrase from any perfect online translator with link source.
I have already discussed the meaning and grammar with Kmaherali in thread please read that and follow the meaning of ALIYULLAH given in Du'a book by ITREB on orders of Imam if you believe in In Imam and ITREB.
Stop repeating the same broken record. We believe in Imam. As Ismaili we do not have to believe in any other unlike those who believe in Mullas and other such Usmans and Yazids. The Ismaili Faith is based only on belief on Imam.
You are free to have multiple gods. We can not interfere in your faith.
However do not tell Ismailis that there is the Imam and there is the ITEB and there are others who have to be believed.
You are free to have multiple gods. We can not interfere in your faith.
However do not tell Ismailis that there is the Imam and there is the ITEB and there are others who have to be believed.
Ya Ali Madad.
based on Farman of imam Jaffer sadiq and Ali Shah datar.
Ali this Allah ,Allah tej ALI.
and one supreme word in the name Allah.
so Allah is just a time popular brand name.
so the entity ALI is from the name Allah can also intrepeted as well.
so Aliulllah as seen and accepted from for most popular words in Islam Allahuakbar is
Ali is Allah.
if entity is from that name Allah also stand true.
then Ali/God is from popular time pass brand 'NAME' allah.
If one's bark,bray and hisshe/she is from Allah ,that does not make him/her as ALI/GOD.
so Ali is from Allah stand of ITREB is also right ,how to read and see different between
an entitiy and time pass popular name.
based on Farman of imam Jaffer sadiq and Ali Shah datar.
Ali this Allah ,Allah tej ALI.
and one supreme word in the name Allah.
so Allah is just a time popular brand name.
so the entity ALI is from the name Allah can also intrepeted as well.
so Aliulllah as seen and accepted from for most popular words in Islam Allahuakbar is
Ali is Allah.
if entity is from that name Allah also stand true.
then Ali/God is from popular time pass brand 'NAME' allah.
If one's bark,bray and hisshe/she is from Allah ,that does not make him/her as ALI/GOD.
so Ali is from Allah stand of ITREB is also right ,how to read and see different between
an entitiy and time pass popular name.
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shivaathervedi
- Posts: 1107
- Joined: Mon Feb 01, 2016 10:39 pm
NO JUSTICE NO PEACE ONLY PIECES.Admin wrote:Stop repeating the same broken record. We believe in Imam. As Ismaili we do not have to believe in any other unlike those who believe in Mullas and other such Usmans and Yazids. The Ismaili Faith is based only on belief on Imam.
You are free to have multiple gods. We can not interfere in your faith.
However do not tell Ismailis that there is the Imam and there is the ITEB and there are others who have to be believed.
You deleted my answer against your post. You used insulting words against me like, Mulla, Osman,Yazid, now where gone your ethical values! You just keep bashing others. If I reciprocate there is HUNGAMA.
MAI(N) KAHU(N) TOU SALA CHARACTER DHELLA HAI.
BACK TO THE SUBJECT OF THE THREAD!
What is "Goat Yoga"?
If you stop by No Regrets Farm in Oregon, you'll find yoga classes with more than just a downward dog!
VIDEO
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/news/wha ... ailsignout
What is "Goat Yoga"?
If you stop by No Regrets Farm in Oregon, you'll find yoga classes with more than just a downward dog!
VIDEO
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/news/wha ... ailsignout
Goat Yoga becomes a hit
'No Regrets Farm' owner Lainey Morse shot a video in August showcasing her unique hit idea, Goat Yoga classes carried out outdoors in calming Oregon-based surroundings.
The video shows yoga instructor Heather Davis preparing for and teaching a yoga class in the Willamette Valley as the goats greet her and mingle with the attendants.
People are travelling from all over America to experience Goat Yoga, Morse told Reuters, and her last classes are already booked up.
Now Goat Yoga enthusiasts might have to wait until spring for their next healthy fix as the rain season is about to begin, said Morse who describes Goat Yoga as a wonderful and unique experience.
"It may sound silly but it's really just about getting outside in nature with beautiful scenery and having animals around you. Animals can really help humans with stress and illness or grief," the farm owner told Reuters in a written statement.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/offbeat/g ... li=AAggNb9
'No Regrets Farm' owner Lainey Morse shot a video in August showcasing her unique hit idea, Goat Yoga classes carried out outdoors in calming Oregon-based surroundings.
The video shows yoga instructor Heather Davis preparing for and teaching a yoga class in the Willamette Valley as the goats greet her and mingle with the attendants.
People are travelling from all over America to experience Goat Yoga, Morse told Reuters, and her last classes are already booked up.
Now Goat Yoga enthusiasts might have to wait until spring for their next healthy fix as the rain season is about to begin, said Morse who describes Goat Yoga as a wonderful and unique experience.
"It may sound silly but it's really just about getting outside in nature with beautiful scenery and having animals around you. Animals can really help humans with stress and illness or grief," the farm owner told Reuters in a written statement.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/offbeat/g ... li=AAggNb9
Meditation, Hypnosis, and Free Will
In a new twist on the classic “free will” experiment, meditators, average people and people who can be easily hypnotized were compared. The results hint that although nobody has free will, meditators have more awareness of their own inner processes than average and easily hypnotized people have less.
In 1983, Benjamin Libet authored the famous experiment that challenged our notion of free will. He measured electrical activity in someone’s brain while asking them to press a button, whenever they liked, while a special clock allowed them to precisely record the time they believed they made that choice.
The result: the part of the brain that controls movement lighted up more than half a second (550 milliseconds to be precise) before the finger moved. Astonishingly, somewhere in that window of time, around 350 milliseconds after the brain initiated the movement, the person had the impression of deciding to move their finger.
In the new study, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK’s Peter Lush and his collegues redid the experiment sans brain electrodes on 57 volunteers, 11 of whom regularly practices mindfulness meditation. Not having access to the moment brain activity started, the team simply compared the time subjects reported choosing to act to the time they actually moved their finger.
They found that even though, presumably, everyone became aware of the decision way after it was initiated, the group of meditators had less of a gap: they thought they chose to move 149 milliseconds, on average, before they did move, versus 68 milliseconds for non-meditators. The “easy to hypnotize” people performed the worst, reporting a choice a full 23 milliseconds after their finger actually moved.
Assuming Libet’s figure of 550 milliseconds between brain activation and movement still holds, this would imply that the length of time between movement initiation and the moment people believe they make a choice to move is:
•401 milliseconds for meditators
•482 milliseconds for average people
•572 milliseconds for easily hypnotized people
The authors’ interpretation is that meditators “become aware” of their “unconscious brain activity” sooner than others. But what is this “unconscious” that chooses for us?
https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/me ... free-will/
In a new twist on the classic “free will” experiment, meditators, average people and people who can be easily hypnotized were compared. The results hint that although nobody has free will, meditators have more awareness of their own inner processes than average and easily hypnotized people have less.
In 1983, Benjamin Libet authored the famous experiment that challenged our notion of free will. He measured electrical activity in someone’s brain while asking them to press a button, whenever they liked, while a special clock allowed them to precisely record the time they believed they made that choice.
The result: the part of the brain that controls movement lighted up more than half a second (550 milliseconds to be precise) before the finger moved. Astonishingly, somewhere in that window of time, around 350 milliseconds after the brain initiated the movement, the person had the impression of deciding to move their finger.
In the new study, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK’s Peter Lush and his collegues redid the experiment sans brain electrodes on 57 volunteers, 11 of whom regularly practices mindfulness meditation. Not having access to the moment brain activity started, the team simply compared the time subjects reported choosing to act to the time they actually moved their finger.
They found that even though, presumably, everyone became aware of the decision way after it was initiated, the group of meditators had less of a gap: they thought they chose to move 149 milliseconds, on average, before they did move, versus 68 milliseconds for non-meditators. The “easy to hypnotize” people performed the worst, reporting a choice a full 23 milliseconds after their finger actually moved.
Assuming Libet’s figure of 550 milliseconds between brain activation and movement still holds, this would imply that the length of time between movement initiation and the moment people believe they make a choice to move is:
•401 milliseconds for meditators
•482 milliseconds for average people
•572 milliseconds for easily hypnotized people
The authors’ interpretation is that meditators “become aware” of their “unconscious brain activity” sooner than others. But what is this “unconscious” that chooses for us?
https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/me ... free-will/
Does the Brain Filter out a Wider Awareness? ~ Marjorie Woollacott
The human brain has amazing capacities. It contains billions of neurons, allowing it to process vast quantities of information so that we can function effectively. But can we have too much information? Yes, and, in fact, filtering information is one of the brain’s most important functions. Brain filtering is an adaptive strategy and ensures that only the information relevant to our goals is allowed into our consciousness. This keeps us from being flooded with irrelevancies that might distract us.
To introduce brain filtering to my neuroscience students, I show them a video of two teams throwing a ball back and forth, and instruct them to track how many times each team gets the ball. After the students give their answers, I ask if they noticed anything unusual during the video. Typically, they say no. I then tell them a man in a gorilla costume walked across the court during the play. When they watch the video again, they see the gorilla. This is a classical case of the brain filtering out information (the gorilla) irrelevant to the task (counting).
Filtering of information through the attentional pathways of our brain was brought to wide acceptance in the 1950s through the work of psychologist Donald Broadbent. There is still debate regarding where in the brain this filtering takes place, but it is known that the two sides of the brain filter information differently. The left controls information important for language abilities and goal-directed actions. The right controls a broader visual-spatial attention that allows us to take in new experiences on the boundaries of our awareness.
In her book, My Stroke of Insight, neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor describes changes in her attention following a stroke to the left side of her brain. Immediately after the stroke, she found it exhausting to focus on what someone was saying. Once she allowed herself to rest in the experience of her right brain, however, she was only aware of the present moment. She says:
In this altered state of being, my mind was no longer preoccupied with the billions of details that my brain routinely used to define and conduct my life…. As my consciousness slipped into a state of peaceful grace, I felt ethereal.
Taylor says that the greatest benefit she received from the experience was an understanding that a “deep internal peace is accessible to anyone at any time.” Taylor’s experience is similar to that reported by many meditators and suggests that reducing the activity of attentional areas in the left side of the brain diminishes one filter on our awareness—and, thus, allows us to experience an expanded consciousness.
Many people’s experiences of this wider awareness have been published over the years. During near-death experiences, for instance, subjects have described perceiving their awareness leave their body and observe details of the attempts being made to resuscitate them. People also report moments when they are aware of something happening to someone many miles away. When they come back to their normal consciousness, these people sometimes ask, “Was it real? Or was it a hallucination?” Is it possible that in these moments the normal filtering mechanisms of the brain are reduced and this reduction allows the experience of expanded consciousness? Perhaps the brain’s filtering mechanisms screen out more than just sensory information.
Current research offers additional information on attentional processing and supports Taylor’s experience that the left side of the brain may selectively filter and, thus, limit access to this broader awareness. Research also shows that training can expand the way we perceive the world. Long-term meditation training, for instance, increases right hemisphere activity, and opens our awareness to a vaster field. Another brain area that is highly activated in meditators and that actually grows larger with meditative practice, is the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The ACC is also active during such practices as hypnosis and energy healing, allowing a more expanded consciousness to modulate the activity of the brain and body.
Is it possible that reducing the dominance of the left hemisphere and modulating the activity in the ACC might minimize the brain’s filter? Could minimizing the filter explain the mystical experiences of meditators and the “paranormal” phenomena reported during near-death experiences? This might indicate that there actually is an expanded level of consciousness that is accessible to our awareness. Is it also possible that, in addition to filtering out certain sensory information, the brain also blocks our awareness of this expanded level of consciousness?
William James, considered the father of psychology, made a bold proposal about this function of the brain at the turn of the 19th century, saying that the brain filters our access to a vast consciousness, which extends beyond the limits of neural activity. James proposed that the brain acts as a partial barrier and gives us only the surface of what is possible for us to perceive. The process James described so many years ago is, of course, the filter theory, and he said that what the brain filters out is consciousness itself—a supremely expanded consciousness. Not surprisingly, scientists during James’ time were polarized in their views about the proposal that a vast consciousness is filtered from our awareness by our own brain.
This skepticism persists, despite growing evidence that there are certain circumstances that allow us to experience this expanded consciousness. Research studies indicate that these experiences occur when the brain is inactive or minimally active, as occurs in near-death experiences, energy healing, or deep meditative states. At such times, the filter becomes thinner, and we can experience the expanded consciousness that is usually blocked. If these studies are valid, and I believe they are, we are faced with the paradoxical effects of the filtering process of the brain. The brain’s amazing capacity to filter sensory information is critical to forming coherent perceptions of the world. However, one consequence of this amazing capacity is to limit our direct access to the vast consciousness of which we are a part.
This article first appeared on The Huffington Post, Science Section,
Used with Permission, 2016
https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/?p ... t&p=102081
The human brain has amazing capacities. It contains billions of neurons, allowing it to process vast quantities of information so that we can function effectively. But can we have too much information? Yes, and, in fact, filtering information is one of the brain’s most important functions. Brain filtering is an adaptive strategy and ensures that only the information relevant to our goals is allowed into our consciousness. This keeps us from being flooded with irrelevancies that might distract us.
To introduce brain filtering to my neuroscience students, I show them a video of two teams throwing a ball back and forth, and instruct them to track how many times each team gets the ball. After the students give their answers, I ask if they noticed anything unusual during the video. Typically, they say no. I then tell them a man in a gorilla costume walked across the court during the play. When they watch the video again, they see the gorilla. This is a classical case of the brain filtering out information (the gorilla) irrelevant to the task (counting).
Filtering of information through the attentional pathways of our brain was brought to wide acceptance in the 1950s through the work of psychologist Donald Broadbent. There is still debate regarding where in the brain this filtering takes place, but it is known that the two sides of the brain filter information differently. The left controls information important for language abilities and goal-directed actions. The right controls a broader visual-spatial attention that allows us to take in new experiences on the boundaries of our awareness.
In her book, My Stroke of Insight, neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor describes changes in her attention following a stroke to the left side of her brain. Immediately after the stroke, she found it exhausting to focus on what someone was saying. Once she allowed herself to rest in the experience of her right brain, however, she was only aware of the present moment. She says:
In this altered state of being, my mind was no longer preoccupied with the billions of details that my brain routinely used to define and conduct my life…. As my consciousness slipped into a state of peaceful grace, I felt ethereal.
Taylor says that the greatest benefit she received from the experience was an understanding that a “deep internal peace is accessible to anyone at any time.” Taylor’s experience is similar to that reported by many meditators and suggests that reducing the activity of attentional areas in the left side of the brain diminishes one filter on our awareness—and, thus, allows us to experience an expanded consciousness.
Many people’s experiences of this wider awareness have been published over the years. During near-death experiences, for instance, subjects have described perceiving their awareness leave their body and observe details of the attempts being made to resuscitate them. People also report moments when they are aware of something happening to someone many miles away. When they come back to their normal consciousness, these people sometimes ask, “Was it real? Or was it a hallucination?” Is it possible that in these moments the normal filtering mechanisms of the brain are reduced and this reduction allows the experience of expanded consciousness? Perhaps the brain’s filtering mechanisms screen out more than just sensory information.
Current research offers additional information on attentional processing and supports Taylor’s experience that the left side of the brain may selectively filter and, thus, limit access to this broader awareness. Research also shows that training can expand the way we perceive the world. Long-term meditation training, for instance, increases right hemisphere activity, and opens our awareness to a vaster field. Another brain area that is highly activated in meditators and that actually grows larger with meditative practice, is the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The ACC is also active during such practices as hypnosis and energy healing, allowing a more expanded consciousness to modulate the activity of the brain and body.
Is it possible that reducing the dominance of the left hemisphere and modulating the activity in the ACC might minimize the brain’s filter? Could minimizing the filter explain the mystical experiences of meditators and the “paranormal” phenomena reported during near-death experiences? This might indicate that there actually is an expanded level of consciousness that is accessible to our awareness. Is it also possible that, in addition to filtering out certain sensory information, the brain also blocks our awareness of this expanded level of consciousness?
William James, considered the father of psychology, made a bold proposal about this function of the brain at the turn of the 19th century, saying that the brain filters our access to a vast consciousness, which extends beyond the limits of neural activity. James proposed that the brain acts as a partial barrier and gives us only the surface of what is possible for us to perceive. The process James described so many years ago is, of course, the filter theory, and he said that what the brain filters out is consciousness itself—a supremely expanded consciousness. Not surprisingly, scientists during James’ time were polarized in their views about the proposal that a vast consciousness is filtered from our awareness by our own brain.
This skepticism persists, despite growing evidence that there are certain circumstances that allow us to experience this expanded consciousness. Research studies indicate that these experiences occur when the brain is inactive or minimally active, as occurs in near-death experiences, energy healing, or deep meditative states. At such times, the filter becomes thinner, and we can experience the expanded consciousness that is usually blocked. If these studies are valid, and I believe they are, we are faced with the paradoxical effects of the filtering process of the brain. The brain’s amazing capacity to filter sensory information is critical to forming coherent perceptions of the world. However, one consequence of this amazing capacity is to limit our direct access to the vast consciousness of which we are a part.
This article first appeared on The Huffington Post, Science Section,
Used with Permission, 2016
https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/?p ... t&p=102081
Can Yoga Help Chase the Postelection Blues?
What some people did this past week, from interfaith vigils to yoga
classes to group mediation sessions, once the votes were counted.
They were a cheerful, if slightly dazed, group last Thursday evening at Voz, a store on Elizabeth Street that sells ethical fashion made by indigenous people — one man and seven women gathered around a garment rack and cinched to its uprights with lengths of wool. They wore back strap looms, which look sort of like belts, and they were being led in a postelection “weaving therapy” workshop by Cynthia Alberto, a master weaver and textile designer. Weaving, she explained, has long been used as occupational therapy. Its rhythms are meditative and soothing, and the tradition of a weaving circle foments community and creativity.
“It opens up a safe space to talk about our anxiety and what happened,” she said. And there was wine. Jeannette Figg, 29, and Rachel Tishler, 30, both corporate lawyers, had left work early to attend.
“It seemed like a fitting thing to do tonight,” Ms. Figg said. “The expectation yesterday at work was that we were just supposed to keep going, and it was hard because I was so traumatized.”
When what may have been the country’s most bitter presidential election — certainly it seemed like the longest — finally ended last week with a bang, it wasn’t just educational institutions that responded as if to a national trauma. While universities, high schools and elementary schools offered healing services, counseling and so-called safe spaces to their students, faith-based groups threw open their doors, too. So did yoga studios, arts organizations and meditation centers. As the week unfurled, even the New York City subway, typically not the most salubrious location, became a place of succor as Matthew Chavez, a 28-year-old artist, set up shop as the Subway Therapist.
........
Before the election, Manpreet Katari, a clinical associate biology professor at N.Y.U., had organized a yoga and smoothie event for his students at Shaktibarre, a yoga studio in Brooklyn. But after hearing their postelection fears about President-elect Donald J. Trump, who had threatened or insulted immigrants, Muslims, Mexicans, African-Americans, women and the disabled, Professor Katari recast the Sunday afternoon class as a bolstering interlude. One student had a cousin who was worried about being deported; others in the L.G.B.T. community felt betrayed by parents who said they supported them and also voted for Mr. Trump. Many worried about how to talk to family members and friends at home over Thanksgiving.
“People feel beaten up,” he said, “especially women and minorities. My daughter, who is in middle school, was very upset. I’ve been advocating the yoga class as an event to regain composure and gather strength. We need to continue this kind of group support.”
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/fashi ... d=45305309
What some people did this past week, from interfaith vigils to yoga
classes to group mediation sessions, once the votes were counted.
They were a cheerful, if slightly dazed, group last Thursday evening at Voz, a store on Elizabeth Street that sells ethical fashion made by indigenous people — one man and seven women gathered around a garment rack and cinched to its uprights with lengths of wool. They wore back strap looms, which look sort of like belts, and they were being led in a postelection “weaving therapy” workshop by Cynthia Alberto, a master weaver and textile designer. Weaving, she explained, has long been used as occupational therapy. Its rhythms are meditative and soothing, and the tradition of a weaving circle foments community and creativity.
“It opens up a safe space to talk about our anxiety and what happened,” she said. And there was wine. Jeannette Figg, 29, and Rachel Tishler, 30, both corporate lawyers, had left work early to attend.
“It seemed like a fitting thing to do tonight,” Ms. Figg said. “The expectation yesterday at work was that we were just supposed to keep going, and it was hard because I was so traumatized.”
When what may have been the country’s most bitter presidential election — certainly it seemed like the longest — finally ended last week with a bang, it wasn’t just educational institutions that responded as if to a national trauma. While universities, high schools and elementary schools offered healing services, counseling and so-called safe spaces to their students, faith-based groups threw open their doors, too. So did yoga studios, arts organizations and meditation centers. As the week unfurled, even the New York City subway, typically not the most salubrious location, became a place of succor as Matthew Chavez, a 28-year-old artist, set up shop as the Subway Therapist.
........
Before the election, Manpreet Katari, a clinical associate biology professor at N.Y.U., had organized a yoga and smoothie event for his students at Shaktibarre, a yoga studio in Brooklyn. But after hearing their postelection fears about President-elect Donald J. Trump, who had threatened or insulted immigrants, Muslims, Mexicans, African-Americans, women and the disabled, Professor Katari recast the Sunday afternoon class as a bolstering interlude. One student had a cousin who was worried about being deported; others in the L.G.B.T. community felt betrayed by parents who said they supported them and also voted for Mr. Trump. Many worried about how to talk to family members and friends at home over Thanksgiving.
“People feel beaten up,” he said, “especially women and minorities. My daughter, who is in middle school, was very upset. I’ve been advocating the yoga class as an event to regain composure and gather strength. We need to continue this kind of group support.”
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/fashi ... d=45305309
Pause. Breathe. Now Let’s Discuss Mindfulness.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/opini ... dline&te=1
To the Editor:
Ruth Whippman (“Actually, Let’s Not Be in the Moment,” Sunday Review, Nov. 27 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/26/opini ... oment.html) is totally missing the point of mindfulness and the practice of mindfulness meditation. The goal is not for you to love the congealing SpagettiOs on the dirty dishes or any other unpleasant facet of your life.
Mindfulness meditation teaches you how to be aware of your thoughts and feelings, which in turn enables you to be in charge of your actions. Instead of being on autopilot and reactive, the practice of meditation creates a space between you (your thoughts and feelings) and the decisions you make or the actions you take. In that space, that pause, you can be in control of what happens next.
Meditation is a practice that is thousands of years old. It is not a fad. Think of being really present with your child while reading a bedtime story or how to effectively approach your boss for a raise or apply for a job.
Think of how much safer we would all be if Donald Trump practiced meditation. Perhaps he wouldn’t blurt out every repulsive thought in his head. More important, in a dire situation, it might help him to pause before pressing the nuclear button.
EMILY KIRSHEN
Great Barrington, Mass.
To the Editor:
Ruth Whippman is correct that mindfulness is not always advised. Apart from the obvious class bias of this approach, which Ms. Whippman points out, everyone has moments best not concentrated on.
I once listened to a colleague exhorting us to be mindful of every moment, while another colleague was going home to begin the dreadful preparation for a colonoscopy. I assured her that she did not have to live in the moment — she just had to get through the moment.
Surely many poems would have gone unwritten if poets had stayed in the moment. What if Keats had listened to that nightingale rather than letting its song take him far away on the “wings of Poesy”? And whether Newton really was inspired by an apple or Archimedes by a gold crown, surely many scientific discoveries would have gone unmade or made much later if scientists had stayed in the moment.
ELAYNE ARCHER
Brooklyn
To the Editor:
As a former Family Court attorney who now leads an organization that brings mindfulness programs to incarcerated and highly vulnerable youth, I was dismayed by Ruth Whippman’s false dichotomy between mindfulness and systemic reform.
Giving vulnerable kids access to inner peace does not trade off with changing the conditions that can devastate their lives. Instead, it is an immediate way to empower youth while the longer-term struggle for societal change rages on.
As 16-year-old Ebony, a student with whom we worked, said: “My home is really chaotic, and I used to get stressed as soon as I stepped in the door. Thanks to the teachings, the minute I get home I can go into a small space I set up for myself and do the breathing. Then I can face the drama in my house in a calmer way.”
Giving kids like Ebony tools to better manage their pain only supports our collective work to make the world less painful.
GABRIELLE HOROWITZ PRISCO
Brooklyn
The writer is executive director of the Lineage Project.
A version of this letter appears in print on December 5, 2016, on page A22 of the New York edition with
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/opini ... dline&te=1
To the Editor:
Ruth Whippman (“Actually, Let’s Not Be in the Moment,” Sunday Review, Nov. 27 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/26/opini ... oment.html) is totally missing the point of mindfulness and the practice of mindfulness meditation. The goal is not for you to love the congealing SpagettiOs on the dirty dishes or any other unpleasant facet of your life.
Mindfulness meditation teaches you how to be aware of your thoughts and feelings, which in turn enables you to be in charge of your actions. Instead of being on autopilot and reactive, the practice of meditation creates a space between you (your thoughts and feelings) and the decisions you make or the actions you take. In that space, that pause, you can be in control of what happens next.
Meditation is a practice that is thousands of years old. It is not a fad. Think of being really present with your child while reading a bedtime story or how to effectively approach your boss for a raise or apply for a job.
Think of how much safer we would all be if Donald Trump practiced meditation. Perhaps he wouldn’t blurt out every repulsive thought in his head. More important, in a dire situation, it might help him to pause before pressing the nuclear button.
EMILY KIRSHEN
Great Barrington, Mass.
To the Editor:
Ruth Whippman is correct that mindfulness is not always advised. Apart from the obvious class bias of this approach, which Ms. Whippman points out, everyone has moments best not concentrated on.
I once listened to a colleague exhorting us to be mindful of every moment, while another colleague was going home to begin the dreadful preparation for a colonoscopy. I assured her that she did not have to live in the moment — she just had to get through the moment.
Surely many poems would have gone unwritten if poets had stayed in the moment. What if Keats had listened to that nightingale rather than letting its song take him far away on the “wings of Poesy”? And whether Newton really was inspired by an apple or Archimedes by a gold crown, surely many scientific discoveries would have gone unmade or made much later if scientists had stayed in the moment.
ELAYNE ARCHER
Brooklyn
To the Editor:
As a former Family Court attorney who now leads an organization that brings mindfulness programs to incarcerated and highly vulnerable youth, I was dismayed by Ruth Whippman’s false dichotomy between mindfulness and systemic reform.
Giving vulnerable kids access to inner peace does not trade off with changing the conditions that can devastate their lives. Instead, it is an immediate way to empower youth while the longer-term struggle for societal change rages on.
As 16-year-old Ebony, a student with whom we worked, said: “My home is really chaotic, and I used to get stressed as soon as I stepped in the door. Thanks to the teachings, the minute I get home I can go into a small space I set up for myself and do the breathing. Then I can face the drama in my house in a calmer way.”
Giving kids like Ebony tools to better manage their pain only supports our collective work to make the world less painful.
GABRIELLE HOROWITZ PRISCO
Brooklyn
The writer is executive director of the Lineage Project.
A version of this letter appears in print on December 5, 2016, on page A22 of the New York edition with
Excerpt from"Science of God"(By: K.M.Sadiwala)
""My father,Mohmadali Mansurali, was fond of meditation; he learnt meditation from the saint of Gujrat, Kara Ruda. My father was a witness to a live example; he has seen that once Kara Ruda floated himself in the air, four feet above the ground while in yoga. One another incident about Kara Ruda surprised the surgeon in an operation theatre at J. J. Hospital in Mumbai, India. He convinced the doctors to perform a surgery without administering chloroform. With great amazement of the doctor, Kara Ruda stopped the blood circulation of himself for nearly 45 minutes till the operation was over. ""
.....K. M. Sadiwala.
.....Science of God
.....Creation to End
.....Part II (56 pages)
""My father,Mohmadali Mansurali, was fond of meditation; he learnt meditation from the saint of Gujrat, Kara Ruda. My father was a witness to a live example; he has seen that once Kara Ruda floated himself in the air, four feet above the ground while in yoga. One another incident about Kara Ruda surprised the surgeon in an operation theatre at J. J. Hospital in Mumbai, India. He convinced the doctors to perform a surgery without administering chloroform. With great amazement of the doctor, Kara Ruda stopped the blood circulation of himself for nearly 45 minutes till the operation was over. ""
.....K. M. Sadiwala.
.....Science of God
.....Creation to End
.....Part II (56 pages)
More on Kara Ruda at:kmaherali wrote:Excerpt from"Science of God"(By: K.M.Sadiwala)
""My father,Mohmadali Mansurali, was fond of meditation; he learnt meditation from the saint of Gujrat, Kara Ruda.
61. Kara Ruda, Missionary - page 240
http://ismaili.net/heritage/node/20722
It is with great sadness that I learned yesterday that Vazir Kurban Sadiwalla passed away a couple of days ago. It is an important loss for our community. He was a treasure of knowledge. He introduced me to the Gupti Jamat of Bhavnagar thought one of this friends in 1988.kmaherali wrote:Excerpt from"Science of God"(By: K.M.Sadiwala)
""My father,Mohmadali Mansurali, was fond of meditation; he learnt meditation from the saint of Gujrat, Kara Ruda. ""
.....K. M. Sadiwala.
.....Science of God
.....Creation to End
.....Part II (56 pages)
Silence
The power and meaning of silence
Where, how and why to be quiet
http://www.economist.com/news/christmas ... lydispatch
IF YOU had heard it on one of Yangon’s chaotic streets you would have paid it little mind. It would have been a euphonious whisper swiftly lost in a cacophonous torrent. But in the pre-dawn quiet of the monastery it was as piercing as an air-raid siren. Shortly before 4am a monk struck two gongs, one about a second after the other. They sounded two different notes, the second just short of a fourth higher than the first. Then, pausing for a few seconds, the monk struck the gongs again. He did this several times.
The monastery began to stir: soft footsteps and the rustling of clothes—no voices. Most of the monks, nuns and lay worshippers filed out of their cells and into the dhamma halls—one for men and one for women—for an hour of seated meditation before the first of the day’s two meals. Some instead did an hour of walking meditation: slow, deliberate, measured steps forward, hands clasped either in front or behind. After the morning meal the day’s meditation, eating, sweeping, cleaning were done slowly, deliberately, and, for most lay worshippers, in complete silence.
The silence of this monastery, like most silence outside the fanciest anechoic chambers, is an aspiration rather than a fact. Not that long ago the chanting of the monks of Mingaladon would have carried over nothing but the fields and farms of what was then a rural township of Yangon, with little more than the crowing of cocks and lowing of cattle flowing back the other way. No longer. Though there are still farms in Mingaladon, it is also home to Myanmar’s biggest and busiest airport, which is set to get even busier as the ever-less-secluded country assumes its place on the trails of backpackers and adventurous investors. Highway Number 3, a tributary to the busy Yangon-Mandalay Highway, bisects the township; in the monastery monks and laypeople alike meditate to the constant thrum of passing traffic.
But the silence of not speaking, as opposed to that of not hearing, persists. And, if anything, it gets more attractive as the noises outside the walls mount up. For someone whose working days are relentless blizzards of phone calls, e-mails, tweets and deadlines, and whose home life is filled with the constant screeching and breaking that only children at the demon-puppy stage can provide, a week spent in silent meditation within the monastery’s walls sounded heavenly. No demands, an inward focus, time to breathe and reflect.
In fact, the plunge into silence proved powerfully disconcerting: like a cartoon character shoved over a cliff, running fruitlessly in mid-air. Your correspondent’s modern mind craved stimulation; the sought-after silence brought only soured boredom. This, say meditation enthusiasts, is just the first stage: you have to push through it to reach something worthwhile on the other side. It turned out to be easier said—or easier to recall, in silence, someone else once saying—than done.
The quiet, once you are in it, is difficult. Saying you want it is easy, and commonplace. After the age of 30, if you tell any friend that you are in need of peace and quiet he is likely to nod in recognition. The demand is high enough that silence of all sorts is for sale. Noise-cancelling electronics, first discussed in public as a throwaway joke by the science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, now sit in hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of high-end world-excluding headphones. The intrepid, tight-lipped tourist can choose from silent retreats on six continents; many of the growing number headed for the seventh, Antarctica, probably do so in part out of yearning for a great white silence. Smaller doses of silent meditation, in the guise of mindfulness, are cropping up in secular school curricula across the Western world.
Finland boasts of its rural wooded silence as other countries sing the praises of their beaches or mountains: it markets itself as a silent tourist destination. Gordon Hempton, an “acoustic ecologist” (he records natural sounds) has designated a small chunk of territory deep in Olympic National Park in Washington state, far from roads and flight paths, “One Square Inch of Silence”. He believes it is the quietest place in America’s lower 48 states, and wants to keep it that way. He monitors the area for noise pollution, and tries to track down the offenders and ask them to quieten down.
Obviously, the inch is far from silent. The forest is alive with the whispers of nature: frogs and crickets, distant streams, squirrels and deer running over fallen leaves. This is the contradiction built into the pursuit of silence; the more sources of noise are stilled, the more the previously imperceptible rises to the level of perception. This was the essence of the silence that John Cage, a composer, used in several of his works, most famously “4’33”, a composition for piano that consists of three movements. At the beginning of each the pianist opens the instrument’s lid, and at the end of each he closes it. No notes are played. The piece allows an audience to attend to the sounds around them and the questions within.
What the silence reveals can be grim. Samuel Beckett’s mimed plays “Act Without Words I” and “Act Without Words II” use silence to draw out the frustration, pointlessness and endured unendurability of life. His novel “The Unnamable” ends on a similar note (or absence of note): “I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Beckett believed that “every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness”; and yet he went on writing them.
Fundamental though it is to some finished art, silence may matter even more as a circumstance for art’s creation. “The impulse to create begins—often terribly and fearfully—in a tunnel of silence,” wrote the American poet Adrienne Rich. In “The Aesthetics of Silence”, the writer and critic Susan Sontag urged artists to maintain a silent “zone of meditation” in order to protect their creative impulses from a world that wants to stifle them.
That said, stifling can be a silence of its own—one imposed through convention or power. In the censor’s hands silence can be a brutal intervention. Part of the strength of Harold Pinter’s plays, in which characters taunt, worry, threaten and displace each other with unnervingly long pauses, is their ability to dramatise in domestic form the silence imposed by states on many other political artists.
But although silence can be a necessary beginning, a tool of oppression and, properly deployed, a cutting critique of power, it is comparatively rare that it is the essence of an artist’s work. Few have trusted their audience to create the art without them, as Cage did; most feel a need to say something. For the deepest human relationships with silence—and also those most widely incorporated into the mundane life—turn not to art, but to religion
Through the earthquake, wind and fire
Some Christians, Buddhists and, to a lesser extent, Muslims have chosen silence for centuries, and there are rooms like those available in the Mingaladon monastery set aside for those who wish to explore its potential in Buddhist and Christian monasteries around the world. For the religious, silence offers a way to ponder and listen for the divine, the unsayable and inexplicable. Christians commonly choose silence because they believe in a god who speaks. They need to be silent to create a space for him—always at the risk, as in Shûsaku Endô’s novel, recently filmed by Martin Scorsese, that the silence remains unfulfilled, an abyss. Silence is also, the religions teach, personally improving. The Prophet Muhammad told Muslims that, “One can greatly beautify himself with two habits: good manners and lengthy silence.” For Buddhists, silence teaches devotees to master their passions.
Silence is often a retreat from worldliness, and the inauthentic. Ignatius of Antioch, an early Church father, advised Christians at Ephesus: “It is better to be silent and be real than to talk and not be real”–foreshadowing by around 1,800 years Mark Twain’s advice that it is better to keep one’s mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. It is also a way to avoid doing ill. One of the admonitions that comprise Buddhism’s eightfold patch is to practise samma vaca, or “right speech”, which scriptures define as abstaining from false, slanderous, harsh and idle speech; all major religions counsel their adherents to choose their words carefully and use them sparingly. Religions can supplement the self control required for such abstinence in ways that may be helpful or oppressive; if the faithful cannot speak, they can ask no questions, preserving the authority of their superiors.
The Knife Grinder: Kazimir Malevich
Many forms of religious practice make use of silence; some, such as that of Quakers, may consist of little else. But there are particular places where it really lives and breathes: in wildernesses like Mr Hempton’s; in some monasteries. Benedict, the sixth-century monk seen as the father of Christian monasticism, did not explicitly include silence in his rule, but in the cloistered life speech is widely seen as something requiring permission or exigency. Today monks who live by the Rule of St Benedict in hundreds of (normally small) Trappist monasteries speak only sparingly.
Thomas Merton, an influential American Trappist who was ordained in 1949, held that the only words required of a priest were those of the Mass. This disdain for speech (which caused him to agonise about his own copious writings) stemmed in part from his belief that God’s words were beyond the scope of “human argument”. Some things are mysterious, and not subject to analysis. One must be silent to understand them, and it is better to say nothing than to try to explain them. As Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian philosopher, put it in his “Tractatus Logico-philosophicus”: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” It is not power that compels silence here, but the inadequacy of any attempt at communication.
The Buddha would have called this practice “Noble Silence”. When asked a question the answer to which he believed the questioner incapable of understanding, he said nothing. Usually these questions concerned the world’s fundamental nature; perhaps more than any other of the world’s great religions, Buddhism prizes the observable, and does not much concern itself trying to define the undefinable. When a disciple asked Buddha whether the universe was infinite or finite; or whether there is a self; or the more plaintive, “Will you tell me the truth?”: silence. Better no speech than speech that misleads, or answers that limit.
Buddha himself became liberated through silent meditation. Though Buddhism varies markedly with geography, from the wry, austere Japanese practice of Zen to the rigorous, state-entwined Theravada Buddhism practised in Myanmar and Thailand, silent meditation is generally the central practice of faithful Buddhists, whether monks, students, housewives or fishermen. When Mr Hempton says, of his square-inch of silence deep in the piney wilderness, that its silence “is not the absence of something. Silence is the presence of everything,” he is expressing a thought Buddhists would understand perfectly.
But the presence of everything—and of all of one’s self—is not always a release. It can be a burden. Around sunset on the second day of his seclusion in speechlessness, your correspondent realised that for all the equanimity offered by Buddhism, the psychological acuity of its founder’s teachings and the hospitality of the Mingaladon monks, he would rather be in one of the cars he could hear passing by on Highway Number 3, wherever it was going, than inside the dhamma hall, where he was supposed to be meditating. Having booked a seven-day retreat, he lasted a bit less than 70 hours. His still, small voice within, he decided on listening to it, was insufferable.
It is possible that pushing further would have brought a breakthrough, not a breakdown. It is also possible that, for many people, 15 minutes of silent meditation each morning and afternoon can be wonderful while 15 hours of it each day is both a waste of time and a greased slide into insanity.
Discovering the limit to the silence you can bear has its advantages. To some extent it can teach you to appreciate the irksome chaos and noise that led to the original yearning for silence—to realise that just as there can be inner tumult in silence, so there can be tranquillity in the thrum of activity. For all that, in English, the words are so often neighbours, “peace” and “quiet” are not necessarily conducive to each other. The Hebrew word “shalom” is reasonably translated as “peace”, but it has other shades of meaning too: completeness, prosperity, wholeness. These are things that need not be silent. As Diarmuid MacCulloch writes in his quirky, insightful book “Silence: A Christian History”, in Old Testament scripture “peace and rest are associated with busy, regulated activity”. The preacher in “Ecclesiastes” tells his listener that “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.” In its permanence and completeness, the grave is silent. But its peace is not one to seek out too soon.
There is a tradition of silence in those scriptures, too. “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him,” the Psalmist says. But it is pulled at by the possibility of worldly, noisy peace, and the tension matters. Rescued from the austerity of the Mingaladon monastery and plunked down in hectic central Yangon, a refugee from silence may jostle less and smile more at the whorling sea of humanity that surrounds and presses in upon him. He may sit down for a steaming bowl of noodles at a packed stall on a narrow patch of pavement and see the customary elbows in the ribs from the diners on either side not as an annoyance to be endured but as signs of brotherhood, community and fellowship, to be received with love. He may even make a joyful noise unto whomever is listening.
The power and meaning of silence
Where, how and why to be quiet
http://www.economist.com/news/christmas ... lydispatch
IF YOU had heard it on one of Yangon’s chaotic streets you would have paid it little mind. It would have been a euphonious whisper swiftly lost in a cacophonous torrent. But in the pre-dawn quiet of the monastery it was as piercing as an air-raid siren. Shortly before 4am a monk struck two gongs, one about a second after the other. They sounded two different notes, the second just short of a fourth higher than the first. Then, pausing for a few seconds, the monk struck the gongs again. He did this several times.
The monastery began to stir: soft footsteps and the rustling of clothes—no voices. Most of the monks, nuns and lay worshippers filed out of their cells and into the dhamma halls—one for men and one for women—for an hour of seated meditation before the first of the day’s two meals. Some instead did an hour of walking meditation: slow, deliberate, measured steps forward, hands clasped either in front or behind. After the morning meal the day’s meditation, eating, sweeping, cleaning were done slowly, deliberately, and, for most lay worshippers, in complete silence.
The silence of this monastery, like most silence outside the fanciest anechoic chambers, is an aspiration rather than a fact. Not that long ago the chanting of the monks of Mingaladon would have carried over nothing but the fields and farms of what was then a rural township of Yangon, with little more than the crowing of cocks and lowing of cattle flowing back the other way. No longer. Though there are still farms in Mingaladon, it is also home to Myanmar’s biggest and busiest airport, which is set to get even busier as the ever-less-secluded country assumes its place on the trails of backpackers and adventurous investors. Highway Number 3, a tributary to the busy Yangon-Mandalay Highway, bisects the township; in the monastery monks and laypeople alike meditate to the constant thrum of passing traffic.
But the silence of not speaking, as opposed to that of not hearing, persists. And, if anything, it gets more attractive as the noises outside the walls mount up. For someone whose working days are relentless blizzards of phone calls, e-mails, tweets and deadlines, and whose home life is filled with the constant screeching and breaking that only children at the demon-puppy stage can provide, a week spent in silent meditation within the monastery’s walls sounded heavenly. No demands, an inward focus, time to breathe and reflect.
In fact, the plunge into silence proved powerfully disconcerting: like a cartoon character shoved over a cliff, running fruitlessly in mid-air. Your correspondent’s modern mind craved stimulation; the sought-after silence brought only soured boredom. This, say meditation enthusiasts, is just the first stage: you have to push through it to reach something worthwhile on the other side. It turned out to be easier said—or easier to recall, in silence, someone else once saying—than done.
The quiet, once you are in it, is difficult. Saying you want it is easy, and commonplace. After the age of 30, if you tell any friend that you are in need of peace and quiet he is likely to nod in recognition. The demand is high enough that silence of all sorts is for sale. Noise-cancelling electronics, first discussed in public as a throwaway joke by the science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, now sit in hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of high-end world-excluding headphones. The intrepid, tight-lipped tourist can choose from silent retreats on six continents; many of the growing number headed for the seventh, Antarctica, probably do so in part out of yearning for a great white silence. Smaller doses of silent meditation, in the guise of mindfulness, are cropping up in secular school curricula across the Western world.
Finland boasts of its rural wooded silence as other countries sing the praises of their beaches or mountains: it markets itself as a silent tourist destination. Gordon Hempton, an “acoustic ecologist” (he records natural sounds) has designated a small chunk of territory deep in Olympic National Park in Washington state, far from roads and flight paths, “One Square Inch of Silence”. He believes it is the quietest place in America’s lower 48 states, and wants to keep it that way. He monitors the area for noise pollution, and tries to track down the offenders and ask them to quieten down.
Obviously, the inch is far from silent. The forest is alive with the whispers of nature: frogs and crickets, distant streams, squirrels and deer running over fallen leaves. This is the contradiction built into the pursuit of silence; the more sources of noise are stilled, the more the previously imperceptible rises to the level of perception. This was the essence of the silence that John Cage, a composer, used in several of his works, most famously “4’33”, a composition for piano that consists of three movements. At the beginning of each the pianist opens the instrument’s lid, and at the end of each he closes it. No notes are played. The piece allows an audience to attend to the sounds around them and the questions within.
What the silence reveals can be grim. Samuel Beckett’s mimed plays “Act Without Words I” and “Act Without Words II” use silence to draw out the frustration, pointlessness and endured unendurability of life. His novel “The Unnamable” ends on a similar note (or absence of note): “I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Beckett believed that “every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness”; and yet he went on writing them.
Fundamental though it is to some finished art, silence may matter even more as a circumstance for art’s creation. “The impulse to create begins—often terribly and fearfully—in a tunnel of silence,” wrote the American poet Adrienne Rich. In “The Aesthetics of Silence”, the writer and critic Susan Sontag urged artists to maintain a silent “zone of meditation” in order to protect their creative impulses from a world that wants to stifle them.
That said, stifling can be a silence of its own—one imposed through convention or power. In the censor’s hands silence can be a brutal intervention. Part of the strength of Harold Pinter’s plays, in which characters taunt, worry, threaten and displace each other with unnervingly long pauses, is their ability to dramatise in domestic form the silence imposed by states on many other political artists.
But although silence can be a necessary beginning, a tool of oppression and, properly deployed, a cutting critique of power, it is comparatively rare that it is the essence of an artist’s work. Few have trusted their audience to create the art without them, as Cage did; most feel a need to say something. For the deepest human relationships with silence—and also those most widely incorporated into the mundane life—turn not to art, but to religion
Through the earthquake, wind and fire
Some Christians, Buddhists and, to a lesser extent, Muslims have chosen silence for centuries, and there are rooms like those available in the Mingaladon monastery set aside for those who wish to explore its potential in Buddhist and Christian monasteries around the world. For the religious, silence offers a way to ponder and listen for the divine, the unsayable and inexplicable. Christians commonly choose silence because they believe in a god who speaks. They need to be silent to create a space for him—always at the risk, as in Shûsaku Endô’s novel, recently filmed by Martin Scorsese, that the silence remains unfulfilled, an abyss. Silence is also, the religions teach, personally improving. The Prophet Muhammad told Muslims that, “One can greatly beautify himself with two habits: good manners and lengthy silence.” For Buddhists, silence teaches devotees to master their passions.
Silence is often a retreat from worldliness, and the inauthentic. Ignatius of Antioch, an early Church father, advised Christians at Ephesus: “It is better to be silent and be real than to talk and not be real”–foreshadowing by around 1,800 years Mark Twain’s advice that it is better to keep one’s mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. It is also a way to avoid doing ill. One of the admonitions that comprise Buddhism’s eightfold patch is to practise samma vaca, or “right speech”, which scriptures define as abstaining from false, slanderous, harsh and idle speech; all major religions counsel their adherents to choose their words carefully and use them sparingly. Religions can supplement the self control required for such abstinence in ways that may be helpful or oppressive; if the faithful cannot speak, they can ask no questions, preserving the authority of their superiors.
The Knife Grinder: Kazimir Malevich
Many forms of religious practice make use of silence; some, such as that of Quakers, may consist of little else. But there are particular places where it really lives and breathes: in wildernesses like Mr Hempton’s; in some monasteries. Benedict, the sixth-century monk seen as the father of Christian monasticism, did not explicitly include silence in his rule, but in the cloistered life speech is widely seen as something requiring permission or exigency. Today monks who live by the Rule of St Benedict in hundreds of (normally small) Trappist monasteries speak only sparingly.
Thomas Merton, an influential American Trappist who was ordained in 1949, held that the only words required of a priest were those of the Mass. This disdain for speech (which caused him to agonise about his own copious writings) stemmed in part from his belief that God’s words were beyond the scope of “human argument”. Some things are mysterious, and not subject to analysis. One must be silent to understand them, and it is better to say nothing than to try to explain them. As Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian philosopher, put it in his “Tractatus Logico-philosophicus”: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” It is not power that compels silence here, but the inadequacy of any attempt at communication.
The Buddha would have called this practice “Noble Silence”. When asked a question the answer to which he believed the questioner incapable of understanding, he said nothing. Usually these questions concerned the world’s fundamental nature; perhaps more than any other of the world’s great religions, Buddhism prizes the observable, and does not much concern itself trying to define the undefinable. When a disciple asked Buddha whether the universe was infinite or finite; or whether there is a self; or the more plaintive, “Will you tell me the truth?”: silence. Better no speech than speech that misleads, or answers that limit.
Buddha himself became liberated through silent meditation. Though Buddhism varies markedly with geography, from the wry, austere Japanese practice of Zen to the rigorous, state-entwined Theravada Buddhism practised in Myanmar and Thailand, silent meditation is generally the central practice of faithful Buddhists, whether monks, students, housewives or fishermen. When Mr Hempton says, of his square-inch of silence deep in the piney wilderness, that its silence “is not the absence of something. Silence is the presence of everything,” he is expressing a thought Buddhists would understand perfectly.
But the presence of everything—and of all of one’s self—is not always a release. It can be a burden. Around sunset on the second day of his seclusion in speechlessness, your correspondent realised that for all the equanimity offered by Buddhism, the psychological acuity of its founder’s teachings and the hospitality of the Mingaladon monks, he would rather be in one of the cars he could hear passing by on Highway Number 3, wherever it was going, than inside the dhamma hall, where he was supposed to be meditating. Having booked a seven-day retreat, he lasted a bit less than 70 hours. His still, small voice within, he decided on listening to it, was insufferable.
It is possible that pushing further would have brought a breakthrough, not a breakdown. It is also possible that, for many people, 15 minutes of silent meditation each morning and afternoon can be wonderful while 15 hours of it each day is both a waste of time and a greased slide into insanity.
Discovering the limit to the silence you can bear has its advantages. To some extent it can teach you to appreciate the irksome chaos and noise that led to the original yearning for silence—to realise that just as there can be inner tumult in silence, so there can be tranquillity in the thrum of activity. For all that, in English, the words are so often neighbours, “peace” and “quiet” are not necessarily conducive to each other. The Hebrew word “shalom” is reasonably translated as “peace”, but it has other shades of meaning too: completeness, prosperity, wholeness. These are things that need not be silent. As Diarmuid MacCulloch writes in his quirky, insightful book “Silence: A Christian History”, in Old Testament scripture “peace and rest are associated with busy, regulated activity”. The preacher in “Ecclesiastes” tells his listener that “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.” In its permanence and completeness, the grave is silent. But its peace is not one to seek out too soon.
There is a tradition of silence in those scriptures, too. “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him,” the Psalmist says. But it is pulled at by the possibility of worldly, noisy peace, and the tension matters. Rescued from the austerity of the Mingaladon monastery and plunked down in hectic central Yangon, a refugee from silence may jostle less and smile more at the whorling sea of humanity that surrounds and presses in upon him. He may sit down for a steaming bowl of noodles at a packed stall on a narrow patch of pavement and see the customary elbows in the ribs from the diners on either side not as an annoyance to be endured but as signs of brotherhood, community and fellowship, to be received with love. He may even make a joyful noise unto whomever is listening.
Meet Yourself in Stillness
Within you, there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at anytime and be yourself.
- Hermann Hesse
Learn to become still.
And to take your attention away from what you don't want,
and all the emotional charge around it,
and place your attention on what you wish to experience.
- Michael Beckwith
Breathe; let go; relax; forgive.
- Mary Anne Radmacher
In the midst of movement and chaos,
keep stillness inside of you.
- Deepak Chopra
The essence of your true being dwells in stillness; meet yourself there.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Within you, there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at anytime and be yourself.
- Hermann Hesse
Learn to become still.
And to take your attention away from what you don't want,
and all the emotional charge around it,
and place your attention on what you wish to experience.
- Michael Beckwith
Breathe; let go; relax; forgive.
- Mary Anne Radmacher
In the midst of movement and chaos,
keep stillness inside of you.
- Deepak Chopra
The essence of your true being dwells in stillness; meet yourself there.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Non-Duality and the Mystery of Consciousness by Peter Russell
VIDEO at:
https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/?p ... t&p=104404
What is non-duality? What do we mean by consciousness? Does it really exist? What is reality? Is there any thing “out there”? Why don’t we see consciousness in the material world? What do we mean by “I”? Why is any of this important?
From the deep pools of Eastern wisdom, to the fast-paced rapids of the West, Peter Russell has mastered many fields, and synthesized them with consummate artistry. Weaving his unique blend of scientific rationale, global vision, and intuitive wisdom, Peter brings a sharp, critical mind to the challenge of self-awakening. The next great frontier of human exploration, he shows, is not outer space, but inner space — the development of the human mind. He has degrees in theoretical physics, experimental psychology, and computer science from the University of Cambridge in England, and has written ten books in this area, including The Global Brain Awakens, Waking Up in Time, and most recently, From Science to God: A Physicist’s Journey into the Mystery of Consciousness.
VIDEO at:
https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/?p ... t&p=104404
What is non-duality? What do we mean by consciousness? Does it really exist? What is reality? Is there any thing “out there”? Why don’t we see consciousness in the material world? What do we mean by “I”? Why is any of this important?
From the deep pools of Eastern wisdom, to the fast-paced rapids of the West, Peter Russell has mastered many fields, and synthesized them with consummate artistry. Weaving his unique blend of scientific rationale, global vision, and intuitive wisdom, Peter brings a sharp, critical mind to the challenge of self-awakening. The next great frontier of human exploration, he shows, is not outer space, but inner space — the development of the human mind. He has degrees in theoretical physics, experimental psychology, and computer science from the University of Cambridge in England, and has written ten books in this area, including The Global Brain Awakens, Waking Up in Time, and most recently, From Science to God: A Physicist’s Journey into the Mystery of Consciousness.
The More You Look
The more you look, the more you see.
- Robert M. Pirsig
The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass,
it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
- Henry Miller
You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one.
Each day is a different one, each day brings a miracle of its own.
It's just a matter of paying attention to this miracle.
- Paulo Coelho
Reason, observation, and experience;
the holy trinity of science.
- Robert Green Ingersoll
Look closely... See with new eyes...
Don't just pass by what is familiar without a thought.
Pay attention and look closely.
There is beauty - there is discovery -
there in a whole new world hiding
beneath the face of the familiar.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
The more you look, the more you see.
- Robert M. Pirsig
The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass,
it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
- Henry Miller
You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one.
Each day is a different one, each day brings a miracle of its own.
It's just a matter of paying attention to this miracle.
- Paulo Coelho
Reason, observation, and experience;
the holy trinity of science.
- Robert Green Ingersoll
Look closely... See with new eyes...
Don't just pass by what is familiar without a thought.
Pay attention and look closely.
There is beauty - there is discovery -
there in a whole new world hiding
beneath the face of the familiar.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
FESTIVAL
The World Yoga Festival is bringing together the most revered collection of teachers in yoga, meditation and wisdom gathered together in one glorious 3-day open-air festival on 7-9 July 2017 in the grounds of
Child Beale Trust near Reading, UK.
It will be an outstanding opportunity to learn from true masters
The location is close to major transport corridors making access to it easy by car, train or air.
http://www.yogafestival.world/?mc_cid=0 ... a3ac270552
The World Yoga Festival is bringing together the most revered collection of teachers in yoga, meditation and wisdom gathered together in one glorious 3-day open-air festival on 7-9 July 2017 in the grounds of
Child Beale Trust near Reading, UK.
It will be an outstanding opportunity to learn from true masters
The location is close to major transport corridors making access to it easy by car, train or air.
http://www.yogafestival.world/?mc_cid=0 ... a3ac270552
World Yoga Festival, UK. 7th-9th July 2017
LEARN, REJUVENATE & ENJOY
The largest yoga festival in the UK, World Yoga Festival takes place 7th-9th July 2017 and brings together the most revered collection of teachers in traditional yoga, meditation and wisdom gathered in one glorious 3-day event. Promising to be one-of-a-kind for yogis of all ages, abilities and disciplines, think somewhere between a retreat and a festival, with ample opportunity for reflection - a genuinely authentic yoga festival giving you the chance to get in touch with the real you!
Masters confirmed include Tao Porchon-Lynch, Rupert Spira, Dr. Madan Bali, Zubin Zarthoshtimanesh, Swami Ambikananda, Swami Brahmavidananda Saraswati, Guru Dharam, Sheila Whittaker, Peter Russell, Swami Svatmananda, Swami Santatmananda and many more! There will be 12-hours of expert-led yoga each day, followed by entertainment and dancing in the evenings, delicious vegetarian world food, a healing area and dedicated family entertainment zone - book using the discount code SAND10 to receive 10% off adult weekend passes: http://www.yogafestival.world
LEARN, REJUVENATE & ENJOY
The largest yoga festival in the UK, World Yoga Festival takes place 7th-9th July 2017 and brings together the most revered collection of teachers in traditional yoga, meditation and wisdom gathered in one glorious 3-day event. Promising to be one-of-a-kind for yogis of all ages, abilities and disciplines, think somewhere between a retreat and a festival, with ample opportunity for reflection - a genuinely authentic yoga festival giving you the chance to get in touch with the real you!
Masters confirmed include Tao Porchon-Lynch, Rupert Spira, Dr. Madan Bali, Zubin Zarthoshtimanesh, Swami Ambikananda, Swami Brahmavidananda Saraswati, Guru Dharam, Sheila Whittaker, Peter Russell, Swami Svatmananda, Swami Santatmananda and many more! There will be 12-hours of expert-led yoga each day, followed by entertainment and dancing in the evenings, delicious vegetarian world food, a healing area and dedicated family entertainment zone - book using the discount code SAND10 to receive 10% off adult weekend passes: http://www.yogafestival.world
BOOK
American Veda
by Philip Goldberg
From yoga to Hindu texts, Indian culture has long impacted faraway countries. Here, its influence on Western civilization is detailed with depth and intelligence. “Illuminating, gracefully written, and remarkably thorough” (Deepak Chopra).
Publisher Description
A fascinating look at India’s remarkable impact on Western culture, this eye-opening popular history shows how the ancient philosophy of Vedanta and the mind-body methods of Yoga have profoundly affected the worldview of millions of Americans and radically altered the religious landscape.
What exploded in the 1960s, following the Beatles trip to India for an extended stay with their new guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, actually began more than two hundred years earlier, when the United States started importing knowledge--as well as tangy spices and colorful fabrics--from Asia. The first translations of Hindu texts found their way into the libraries of John Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson. From there the ideas spread to Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and succeeding generations of receptive Americans, who absorbed India’s “science of consciousness” and wove it into the fabric of their lives. Charismatic teachers like Swami Vivekananda and Paramahansa Yogananda came west in waves, prompting leading intellectuals, artists, and scientists such as Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Allen Ginsberg, J. D. Salinger, John Coltrane, Dean Ornish, and Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass, to adapt and disseminate what they learned from them. The impact has been enormous, enlarging our current understanding of the mind and body and dramatically changing how we view ourselves and our place in the cosmos.
Goldberg paints a compelling picture of this remarkable East-to-West transmission, showing how it accelerated through the decades and eventually moved from the counterculture into our laboratories, libraries, and living rooms. Now physicians and therapists routinely recommend meditation, words like karma and mantra are part of our everyday vocabulary, and Yoga studios are as ubiquitous as Starbuckses. The insights of India’s sages permeate so much of what we think, believe, and do that they have redefined the meaning of life for millions of Americans—and continue to do so every day.
Rich in detail and expansive in scope, American Veda shows how we have come to accept and live by the central teaching of Vedic wisdom: “Truth is one, the wise call it by many names.”
less
https://www.bookbub.com/books/american- ... ®ion=ca
American Veda
by Philip Goldberg
From yoga to Hindu texts, Indian culture has long impacted faraway countries. Here, its influence on Western civilization is detailed with depth and intelligence. “Illuminating, gracefully written, and remarkably thorough” (Deepak Chopra).
Publisher Description
A fascinating look at India’s remarkable impact on Western culture, this eye-opening popular history shows how the ancient philosophy of Vedanta and the mind-body methods of Yoga have profoundly affected the worldview of millions of Americans and radically altered the religious landscape.
What exploded in the 1960s, following the Beatles trip to India for an extended stay with their new guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, actually began more than two hundred years earlier, when the United States started importing knowledge--as well as tangy spices and colorful fabrics--from Asia. The first translations of Hindu texts found their way into the libraries of John Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson. From there the ideas spread to Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and succeeding generations of receptive Americans, who absorbed India’s “science of consciousness” and wove it into the fabric of their lives. Charismatic teachers like Swami Vivekananda and Paramahansa Yogananda came west in waves, prompting leading intellectuals, artists, and scientists such as Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Allen Ginsberg, J. D. Salinger, John Coltrane, Dean Ornish, and Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass, to adapt and disseminate what they learned from them. The impact has been enormous, enlarging our current understanding of the mind and body and dramatically changing how we view ourselves and our place in the cosmos.
Goldberg paints a compelling picture of this remarkable East-to-West transmission, showing how it accelerated through the decades and eventually moved from the counterculture into our laboratories, libraries, and living rooms. Now physicians and therapists routinely recommend meditation, words like karma and mantra are part of our everyday vocabulary, and Yoga studios are as ubiquitous as Starbuckses. The insights of India’s sages permeate so much of what we think, believe, and do that they have redefined the meaning of life for millions of Americans—and continue to do so every day.
Rich in detail and expansive in scope, American Veda shows how we have come to accept and live by the central teaching of Vedic wisdom: “Truth is one, the wise call it by many names.”
less
https://www.bookbub.com/books/american- ... ®ion=ca
Why idle moments are crucial for creativity
Our brains are at their most innovative when they are resting, so why aren’t we making time for quiet reflection?
Last month, both the US Department of Homeland Security and the UK Department of Transport issued a new ban. Passengers flying from certain areas of North Africa and the Middle East can no longer carry electronics larger than a smartphone on flights.
Royal Jordanian airlines cheekily responded by offering travellers “12 things to do on a 12-hour flight with no tablet or laptop.” Number 11 was “analyse the meaning of life.”
There’s nothing inherently funny about this suggestion. It’s amusing because the thought of quiet contemplation on a long flight rather than being entertained via a screen is, in today’s world, ridiculous.
More...
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/201704 ... creativity
Our brains are at their most innovative when they are resting, so why aren’t we making time for quiet reflection?
Last month, both the US Department of Homeland Security and the UK Department of Transport issued a new ban. Passengers flying from certain areas of North Africa and the Middle East can no longer carry electronics larger than a smartphone on flights.
Royal Jordanian airlines cheekily responded by offering travellers “12 things to do on a 12-hour flight with no tablet or laptop.” Number 11 was “analyse the meaning of life.”
There’s nothing inherently funny about this suggestion. It’s amusing because the thought of quiet contemplation on a long flight rather than being entertained via a screen is, in today’s world, ridiculous.
More...
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/201704 ... creativity
Yoga Teachers Need a Code of Ethics
I was relieved when Bikram Choudhury, the 73-year-old founder of Bikram yoga, was finally served a warrant for his arrest late last month, after failing to pay nearly $7 million in legal fees he owes for a sexual harassment lawsuit. Many in the yoga world had been waiting for that moment, after years of rape and assault claims against Mr. Choudhury, the millionaire creator of a 26-posture “hot yoga” sequence and studio system. But the news brought only a grim satisfaction; many of us wish he’d been arrested for the assault claims themselves.
Unfortunately, the case of Mr. Choudhury is not unique. In 2016, a beloved teacher in the New York City-based Jivamukti Yoga center, known for its celebrity clientele, was sued, along with the center and its leaders, for sexual abuse by her mentee. John Friend’s Anusara community was rocked and dissolved in 2012 after he was discovered having affairs with married students and performing Wiccan-like sex rituals. Kripalu’s Amrit Desai was accused of sexual misconduct and abuse of authority in 1994 and a $2.5 million settlement was paid (the Kripalu Center in Massachusetts divorced itself from Desai and reorganized). And there are, of course, countless under-the-radar stories of yoga teachers coming on to students or touching them inappropriately in class.
This must stop. As a practitioner of yoga for 20 years who has been teaching for a decade, I know that people often approach spiritual practices like yoga and meditation when they are vulnerable. They come recovering from broken bones and hearts, and usually at some greater personal crossroads. They come with trauma, addictions or eating disorders. They come after divorce. They come with hope.
In this state of vulnerability, it is absolutely critical that students feel safe. Teachers, like therapists or educators in other fields, have an inherent power, which can be used to either heal or exploit. But because it is also easy to conflate the goodness of yoga with the teachers themselves, instructors can benefit from an aura of ethical conduct, or even holiness — what some call a spiritual blanket that protects those who abuse their power. While it is up to students to discern between teacher and teachings, those in authority have a responsibility to protect.
According to the 2016 Yoga in America survey co-sponsored by Yoga Journal and Yoga Alliance — the largest nonprofit in the United States representing the yoga community and providing teacher-training requirements — there are 36.7 million yoga practitioners nationwide, 72 percent of them women. Though Yoga Alliance has published a bullet-point code of conduct, few know it exists until they are explicitly looking, and by then it may be too late.
I have personally seen things go wrong. Early in my practice I became involved with a meditation teacher and learned, after the breakup, that he had dated students serially. I lost my community. I’ve received inappropriate sexual Facebook messages from well-respected teachers and have had my bottom slapped (not an adjustment) in a balancing pose. Though these actions are not as serious as the egregious behavior Mr. Choudhury and others have been accused of, they provided a personal window into the hurt and confusion crossed boundaries can create.
Yoga transformed my life: healing a back injury, giving me tools to work with my anxiety and providing a spiritual home. Had it not, I would have quit. Some victims have quit, and face years of trauma from what should have been a refuge from the hurt of life: spiritual practice. This sort of violation denotes rape on many levels: spiritually, mentally, emotionally and, yes, sometimes physically.
When I began teaching yoga at an all-girls charter school in Lower Manhattan, we took the first class to create a “yoga contract.” Girls from 5 to 12 years old brainstormed and signed lists of rules to “keep everyone safe and happy” during practice. Rules they themselves invented included “respect others’ space” and “use active listening.” As the teacher, I signed, too. We ended each class with a Sanskrit chant that translates to, “The one true teacher lives in the center of your heart.” I wanted these young girls to know, though teachers are helpful guides, the one true authority is inside of them. I wanted them to carry this lesson forward into their adult yoga world as women. Mr. Choudhury and others like him could learn plenty from these girls.
I’m hopeful the arrest warrant for Mr. Choudhury will ignite this conversation in spiritual communities. I believe all organized yoga teacher training should include training in ethics and, if affiliated with Yoga Alliance, point students toward that resource. Each community center, meditation group and yoga studio should post a code of ethics, as Jack Kornfield’s Spirit Rock community recently did. Every center should have a formalized, safe place to report abuse seriously and anonymously. Even secular yoga studios should provide this service, alongside mats and towels.
We cannot rely on karma alone.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/opin ... &te=1&_r=0
I was relieved when Bikram Choudhury, the 73-year-old founder of Bikram yoga, was finally served a warrant for his arrest late last month, after failing to pay nearly $7 million in legal fees he owes for a sexual harassment lawsuit. Many in the yoga world had been waiting for that moment, after years of rape and assault claims against Mr. Choudhury, the millionaire creator of a 26-posture “hot yoga” sequence and studio system. But the news brought only a grim satisfaction; many of us wish he’d been arrested for the assault claims themselves.
Unfortunately, the case of Mr. Choudhury is not unique. In 2016, a beloved teacher in the New York City-based Jivamukti Yoga center, known for its celebrity clientele, was sued, along with the center and its leaders, for sexual abuse by her mentee. John Friend’s Anusara community was rocked and dissolved in 2012 after he was discovered having affairs with married students and performing Wiccan-like sex rituals. Kripalu’s Amrit Desai was accused of sexual misconduct and abuse of authority in 1994 and a $2.5 million settlement was paid (the Kripalu Center in Massachusetts divorced itself from Desai and reorganized). And there are, of course, countless under-the-radar stories of yoga teachers coming on to students or touching them inappropriately in class.
This must stop. As a practitioner of yoga for 20 years who has been teaching for a decade, I know that people often approach spiritual practices like yoga and meditation when they are vulnerable. They come recovering from broken bones and hearts, and usually at some greater personal crossroads. They come with trauma, addictions or eating disorders. They come after divorce. They come with hope.
In this state of vulnerability, it is absolutely critical that students feel safe. Teachers, like therapists or educators in other fields, have an inherent power, which can be used to either heal or exploit. But because it is also easy to conflate the goodness of yoga with the teachers themselves, instructors can benefit from an aura of ethical conduct, or even holiness — what some call a spiritual blanket that protects those who abuse their power. While it is up to students to discern between teacher and teachings, those in authority have a responsibility to protect.
According to the 2016 Yoga in America survey co-sponsored by Yoga Journal and Yoga Alliance — the largest nonprofit in the United States representing the yoga community and providing teacher-training requirements — there are 36.7 million yoga practitioners nationwide, 72 percent of them women. Though Yoga Alliance has published a bullet-point code of conduct, few know it exists until they are explicitly looking, and by then it may be too late.
I have personally seen things go wrong. Early in my practice I became involved with a meditation teacher and learned, after the breakup, that he had dated students serially. I lost my community. I’ve received inappropriate sexual Facebook messages from well-respected teachers and have had my bottom slapped (not an adjustment) in a balancing pose. Though these actions are not as serious as the egregious behavior Mr. Choudhury and others have been accused of, they provided a personal window into the hurt and confusion crossed boundaries can create.
Yoga transformed my life: healing a back injury, giving me tools to work with my anxiety and providing a spiritual home. Had it not, I would have quit. Some victims have quit, and face years of trauma from what should have been a refuge from the hurt of life: spiritual practice. This sort of violation denotes rape on many levels: spiritually, mentally, emotionally and, yes, sometimes physically.
When I began teaching yoga at an all-girls charter school in Lower Manhattan, we took the first class to create a “yoga contract.” Girls from 5 to 12 years old brainstormed and signed lists of rules to “keep everyone safe and happy” during practice. Rules they themselves invented included “respect others’ space” and “use active listening.” As the teacher, I signed, too. We ended each class with a Sanskrit chant that translates to, “The one true teacher lives in the center of your heart.” I wanted these young girls to know, though teachers are helpful guides, the one true authority is inside of them. I wanted them to carry this lesson forward into their adult yoga world as women. Mr. Choudhury and others like him could learn plenty from these girls.
I’m hopeful the arrest warrant for Mr. Choudhury will ignite this conversation in spiritual communities. I believe all organized yoga teacher training should include training in ethics and, if affiliated with Yoga Alliance, point students toward that resource. Each community center, meditation group and yoga studio should post a code of ethics, as Jack Kornfield’s Spirit Rock community recently did. Every center should have a formalized, safe place to report abuse seriously and anonymously. Even secular yoga studios should provide this service, alongside mats and towels.
We cannot rely on karma alone.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/opin ... &te=1&_r=0
-
shivaathervedi
- Posts: 1107
- Joined: Mon Feb 01, 2016 10:39 pm
Read MSMS's statement in the first post of this thread, It says:shivaathervedi wrote:What sexual harassment lawsuit has to do with MSMS on meditation. In BK we do not practice yoga, neither our missionaries are involved in such practices.
"The objective is to attempt to tap into the Divine Reality and draw strength from it. Yoga, transcendental meditation, Hindu jaap, Buddhist mantra or the Sufi word are some of the different schools of meditation."
Some Yoga teachers abuse the respect that they are accorded by students.
-
shivaathervedi
- Posts: 1107
- Joined: Mon Feb 01, 2016 10:39 pm
Our meditation practice is for spiritual advancement in higher circle. MSMS discontinued AASAN YOGA practice in his tenure for Bk members. Your adopted article is about Mr. Choudery's sexual law suit.kmaherali wrote:Read MSMS's statement in the first post of this thread, It says:shivaathervedi wrote:What sexual harassment lawsuit has to do with MSMS on meditation. In BK we do not practice yoga, neither our missionaries are involved in such practices.
"The objective is to attempt to tap into the Divine Reality and draw strength from it. Yoga, transcendental meditation, Hindu jaap, Buddhist mantra or the Sufi word are some of the different schools of meditation."
Some Yoga teachers abuse the respect that they are accorded by students.
The intention for posting this article was to demonstrate that there are negative as well as positive aspects to modern Yoga practices. We should be careful about that.shivaathervedi wrote: Our meditation practice is for spiritual advancement in higher circle. MSMS discontinued AASAN YOGA practice in his tenure for Bk members. Your adopted article is about Mr. Choudery's sexual law suit.
The general purpose of this thread is to demonstrate the plurality of the esoteric practices, methods and ideas. Sometimes there are aspects we can learn from other traditions as well.
In one of the speeches MHI said:
"All cultures naturally influence each other to a greater or lesser degree; the strongest are those in which the dominant elements remain dominant and refuse to be overwhelmed by external forces. They become stronger still when they retain the ability to select, to absorb that which invigorates and enriches and to reject that which is inimicable."
Read more at http://www.nanowisdoms.org/nwblog/categ ... cwgUmpD.99
What meditation can do?
An old Farmer lived on a farm in the mountains with his young grandson. Each morning Grandpa was up early morning and sat for meditation. His grandson wanted to be just like him and tried to imitate him in every way he could.
One day the grandson asked, “Grandpa! I try to meditate just like you but thoughts disturb me, and what I do understand I forget as soon as I come out of meditation. What good does meditation do?”
The Grandfather quietly turned from putting coal in the stove and replied, “Take this coal basket down to the river and bring me back a basket of water.”
The boy did as he was told, but all the water leaked out before he got back to the house.
The grandfather laughed and said, “You’ll have to move a little faster next time,” and sent him back to the river with the basket to try again.
This time the boy ran faster, but again the basket was empty before he returned home. Out of breath, he told his grandfather that it was impossible to carry water in a basket, and he went to get a bucket instead.
The old man said, “I don’t want a bucket of water; I want a basket of water. You’re just not trying hard enough,” and he went out the door to watch the boy try again. At this point, the boy knew it was impossible, but he wanted to show his grandfather that even if he ran as fast as he could, the water would leak out before he got back to the house. The boy again dipped the basket into river and ran hard, but when he reached his grandfather the basket was again empty.
Out of breath, he said, “See Grandpa, it’s useless!”
“So you think it is useless?” The old man said, “Look at the basket.”
The boy looked at the basket and for the first time realized that the basket was different. It had been transformed from a dirty old coal basket to now clean, inside and out.
“Son, that’s what happens when you meditate. You might not understand or remember everything, but when you meditate every day, thoughts starts to diminish, like dirty coal basket transformed to clean, in same way you tend to be pure, you will be changed, inside and out. That is the work of Meditation in our lives.
Never give up spiritual practice. By doing spiritual practice daily all heaviness and unnecessary things tend to fall and you start feeling light. This is the indication that you are evolving. Slowly you will feel peace and calmness within you. Instead of reacting you start responding."
An old Farmer lived on a farm in the mountains with his young grandson. Each morning Grandpa was up early morning and sat for meditation. His grandson wanted to be just like him and tried to imitate him in every way he could.
One day the grandson asked, “Grandpa! I try to meditate just like you but thoughts disturb me, and what I do understand I forget as soon as I come out of meditation. What good does meditation do?”
The Grandfather quietly turned from putting coal in the stove and replied, “Take this coal basket down to the river and bring me back a basket of water.”
The boy did as he was told, but all the water leaked out before he got back to the house.
The grandfather laughed and said, “You’ll have to move a little faster next time,” and sent him back to the river with the basket to try again.
This time the boy ran faster, but again the basket was empty before he returned home. Out of breath, he told his grandfather that it was impossible to carry water in a basket, and he went to get a bucket instead.
The old man said, “I don’t want a bucket of water; I want a basket of water. You’re just not trying hard enough,” and he went out the door to watch the boy try again. At this point, the boy knew it was impossible, but he wanted to show his grandfather that even if he ran as fast as he could, the water would leak out before he got back to the house. The boy again dipped the basket into river and ran hard, but when he reached his grandfather the basket was again empty.
Out of breath, he said, “See Grandpa, it’s useless!”
“So you think it is useless?” The old man said, “Look at the basket.”
The boy looked at the basket and for the first time realized that the basket was different. It had been transformed from a dirty old coal basket to now clean, inside and out.
“Son, that’s what happens when you meditate. You might not understand or remember everything, but when you meditate every day, thoughts starts to diminish, like dirty coal basket transformed to clean, in same way you tend to be pure, you will be changed, inside and out. That is the work of Meditation in our lives.
Never give up spiritual practice. By doing spiritual practice daily all heaviness and unnecessary things tend to fall and you start feeling light. This is the indication that you are evolving. Slowly you will feel peace and calmness within you. Instead of reacting you start responding."
Related threads:
"Meditation"
http://www.ismaili.net/html/modules.php ... 37&start=0
Complete Translation of Bhrahm Prakaash
http://www.ismaili.net/html/modules.php ... t=prakaash
"Meditation"
http://www.ismaili.net/html/modules.php ... 37&start=0
Complete Translation of Bhrahm Prakaash
http://www.ismaili.net/html/modules.php ... t=prakaash