Year: 2024
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On Inadvertence
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The online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines Inadvertence as: a result of inattention. This word comes up many times in Nisargadatta Maharaj’s conversations collected together in ‘I am That’. I have been recently thinking that what Maharaj says about inadvertence or inattention gives pointers to a powerful spiritual practice. Take a look at the following excerpts and…
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Learning is effortless
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Principle 1 of true teaching: Nothing can be taughtAll learning happens within the child. No teacher can have direct control over it. The teacher is a helper and a guide. They can only attempt to draw the attention of the student to where the knowledge lies and thus assist him/her to see it.– From ‘Learning…
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Narayan Ashram Retreat
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I have just got back home from the SIDH retreat at Narayan Ashram. This retreat was unique in many ways. Firstly, Narayan Ashram set at an altitude of 9000 feet on the India-Nepal border is very difficult to get to. Our 35 participants arrived in many difficult ways but most of us reached Delhi from…
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Materialism – The Cult of the Mother Goddess
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In a recent YouTube video, Dr Rupert Sheldrake discussed various aspects of matter. At around the 31 minute mark he proposed that Materialism, the worship of matter, was really the unconscious worship of the Great Mother. The relevant excerpt from the video is given below: “There is a mythological aspect of matter. The word ‘matter’…
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On Tentativeness
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Lately I have been thinking about a child-like tentativeness in thought and behaviour as a desirable trait. I will quote two ancient Chinese sages and let them present the case for me. Take a look and let me know what you think… THE Sage has no interests of his own,But takes the interests of the…
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Four Ideas on Education
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A friend with young school-going children was recently talking to me about education. Some ideas came up in the conversation that I thought were worth sharing here as this week’s blog post. Imagine a classroom with many children working on some set task and an adult sitting in the classroom busy with some work of…
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The Future of the Body – Part 3
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(The Future of the Body is a remarkable book that has an encyclopedic cross-cultural study of the extraordinary potentials that human beings embody. Of the 12 capacities that the book identifies and details out, the following are the notes I made for ‘Vitality’ and ‘Love’. The overview of the book is available here and the…
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The Future of the Body – Part 2
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(In last week’s post we looked at the overview of a remarkable book, The Future of the Body, that has an encyclopedic cross-cultural study of the extraordinary potentials that human beings embody. This week and the next I will share some notes I made from the book. Of the 12 capacities that the book identifies…
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The Future of the Body
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‘The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution of Human Nature’ is the title of an 800 page scholarly book (the bibliography is 85 pages long) by Michael Murphy. When I read it many years ago I was so impressed and so overwhelmed by the details that I decided to read it all…
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On Thinking for Yourself
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The following are excerpts from an essay written by Arthur Schopenhauer in 1851 and translated into English by L.P. Koch. The full essay is available here. Excerpt 1:Reading, you see, forces thoughts on your mind that are as foreign and incompatible with its current direction and mood as the signet is to the wax on…
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The lost tools of learning
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(I recently came across an interesting paper on British education written in 1947 by Dorothy Sayers. I thought that the paper had many insights that are relevant to our current Indian education system. Take a look at the excerpt below and download the full article here if you get interested.) Is not the great defect…
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Adhyatma aur prakriti prem
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I was again listening to a video of Guruji Ravindra Sharma and a sentence he said struck me this time. He said that someone who is not adhyatmik can have no prem for prakriti. (Around 43:00 of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-pMQeKe8GI). In this video he also talks about soundarya drishti, kala and about the Bharatiya life designed on…