Year: 2024
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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…
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My Shadow
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I got forwarded a WhatsApp video which showed an American girl talking in a very artificial manner and an American man making fun of her accent and telling her that she was not sounding posh when she put on her fake accent. The conversation with my friend on WhatsApp went like this: Friend: What do…
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Purnapramati retreat near Mangalore
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(Note: Pawanji conducted a retreat for the teachers of Purnapramati school of Bangalore between 3rd to 11th February, 2024 at Purnaprajna Prakruthi Paathshaale near Mangalore. The Paathshaale is set in a lush forested area near Kudremukh national park. Around 50 teachers from Purnapramati came in three batches to attend a retreat titled ‘Sanaatan and modernity.…
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On the Bhagavad Gita
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“The Gita can only be understood, like any other great work of the kind, by studying it in its entirety and as a developing argument. But the modern interpreters, starting from the great writer Bankim Chandra Chatterji who first gave to the Gita this new sense of a Gospel of Duty, have laid an almost…
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Visit to an organic farm
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(A few days ago, I went to the yearly function of a large organic farm near Bangalore. The morning pre-lunch session had many interesting talks about diet, lifestyle, sustainability etc. and it was all very intense and contemplative. At the end, the audience was invited to comment or ask questions and many people spoke up.…
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Ghar Wapsi
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(The following is extracted from a long note Pawanji wrote on the SIDH WhatsApp group) Since 2014, a sharp divide has emerged in the Bharatiya samaj. No, I am not talking of the Hindu-Muslim, or the caste, or the rich-poor or the North-South divides. In the context of power, the only divide of significance in…
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Who Am I?
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Sri Ramana Maharshi, in 1902, wrote out the answers to some questions asked by a disciple seeking spiritual guidance. These questions and answers, collected together as ‘Nan Yaar?’ or ”Who Am I?’, give a short introduction to self-enquiry as a path to liberation. The 8 page PDF of ‘Who Am I?’ is available here. The…
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What are our retreats about?
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(The following is collected together from messages written by Pawanji on a WhatsApp group) In the retreats that SIDH has been organising over the recent past, we have tried to invite only those who in our opinion are more or less aligned together. More or less on the same page in terms of self-enquiry and…