Mother Nature

Just before the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, some of the industrial nations, and specifically the United States, were lambasted for their obscenely high consumption of the world’s finite resources which had a direct impact on nature worldwide.

Anti-capitalist and other activists who were claiming that the United States, then the world's biggest energy consumer, was also its biggest polluter

Environmentalists warned that the world was being gradually destroyed, by unsustainable consumption.

When representatives of developing nations asked then U.S. president George H.W. Bush (bush senior) to put on agenda the over consumption of resources by the developed countries, especially the United States he stood up to give his speech, all eyes were on him expecting a solution, he famously or infamously said only sentence, quote: “The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period.”

Meaning; we can afford it and we will do what suits us, to hell with others….

As per bush senior the American way of life was not negotiable, apparently, even if maintaining this lifestyle will lead to the destruction of nature resulting in deaths of millions of people subject to increasingly unpredictable weather and loss of land used by tens of millions more people because of rising ocean levels and local flooding  

Most of us have a George h w bush in us, our attitude, we can afford it and so it is our birth right to use it and we do not care about anything.

Giving a few examples; people put on their air conditioners full 24 hrs at the lowest temperature setting not bothering to think about villages that do not get any electricity, not even for growing their crops or in their hospitals, since all the power is consumed in the cities.

A single person takes a car instead of going for carpooling or using the public transport system.

Imagine the space it takes on the road for a single bus which carries 30 people or 30 cars with single occupants, then people complaint and get irritated that I am caught in a traffic jam not reflecting that their own vehicle is a part of that traffic and equally responsible for creating that traffic jam.

While waiting the car engines are kept on for the air conditioning never mind the pollution.

Newspapers are delivered to all houses again at the offices, resulting in deforestation. How many people think to limit the use of newspapers?

In the Himalaya I visit some spots by the river Ganga full of beautiful natural landscape of white and coloured stones, rich people who built their luxury villas get these stones picked up for their garden decoration never giving a thought to the destruction of the pristine environment 

The list is endless.

The same attitude I can afford it so luxury (great comfort) is my birth right never mind the destruction of nature

Alarm bells will not ring till the day there will be no water coming out of the water taps, in the past many advanced civilizations have collapsed due to unsustainable resource consumption, but how many people realize (understand clearly) that this could also happen to us.

The only hope is if people change one by one then this problem will be solved since we are all connected in a single consciousness

We should not depend on the government to solve any problems because the government itself is a problem

It is not what some say “save the Earth”. For no one’s God or father or Guru has created our Earth. He who has created the Earth is beyond human comprehension and he alone can destroy it; what humans are capable of is destroying us.

A money minded business man will not understand what is written above he is every ready to destroy nature to set up money making ventures. If one has to make him understand the valve of nature he will have to be put in a sealed chamber with an offer that he will get lots of money, of course he will be very happy and most readily accept the offer; as more and more money is put in the chamber the air will be displaced and at one time he will realize that air is more important than paper money and then he will understand not to destroy nature.

          

     

Today people buy bottles of drinking water daily since water which is available outside is contaminated. I hope and pray that a time should not come when people will have to buy air cylinders to breathe good air.

A quote by Hubert Reeves is the best caption for the photo of the Holy Mount Kailash below:

"Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that the Nature he is destroying is this God he is worshiping."

Photo credit Ms Alka Kaushik

You may also like to read

http://bhoj11.blogspot.com/search/label/self-awakening

Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to calculate a single second of human brain activity

On 13^th Jan 2014 Scientists in Japan simulated one per cent of the neuronal network in the brain using the K computer, the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world.

With 705,024 processor cores and 1.4 million GB of RAM at its disposal, the K computer took 40 minutes to model the data in a project designed to test the ability of the supercomputer and gauge the limits of brain simulation.

The project saw teams from the Japanese research group RIKEN and the German Forschungszentrum Jülich centre collaborate to use the Neural Simulation Technology tool, replicating a network of 1.73 billion nerve cells and 10.4 trillion synapses.

my only question 

Who designed our brain?

And it is up to us how we make use of this miracle; by having a beautiful mind or.............

source:  

http://www.itproportal.com/2014/01/13/supercomputer-takes-40-mins-calculate-single-second-human-brain-activity/#ixzz2qRFHzfph

 

Learning from the ants

I also write at a spiritual forum and Of late I was a bit troubled by a few things happening there like front page articles of money minded Gurus etc.

The more I kept on thinking about it the more faults came to my mind.

I always live in self-reflection and I thought to myself; why don’t I become like an ant.

The ant has one very good quality if a mixture of sugar and sand is placed before the ant it will eat only the sugar without bothering about the sand. So I decided to become the ant only absorbing what benefits my progress without bothering about the other things.

Another example is that of a ship, the ship cannot navigate without water but if the same water is allowed to enter the ship than it will result in a big problem and in extreme cases the ship itself would be lost.

Similarly comparing me to the ship and the water as the material world it is would be a disaster if I allow the material world to enter inside me.

What was a “means of living” will become a “means of destruction”.

Lyrics of the title song of Tv serial Mahabharata on star plus

“Hai katha sangram ki

Vishwa ke kalyaan ki

Dharma adharma aadi anant

Satya  asatya kalesh kalnak

Saarth ki katha parmartha ki

Shakti hain bhakti hai

Janmo ki mukti hai

Jeevan ka ye sampurn sar hai

Yug yug se kan kan me

Shristi ke darpan me

Vedo ki ghata aphar he

Karmo ki ghata he

Devo ki bhasha he

Sadiyo ke ithas ka praman hai

Krishana ki mahima hain

Geeta ki garima hain

Grantho ka granth ye mahan hain

Mahabharat mahabharat..”

Two Wolves

An ancient town devastated—let it be a turning point in our lives.

Kedarnath the ancient town which houses the temple of Shiva the Mahadev--the spirit of the universe that destroys

A few days back the Mahadev manifested in Kedarnath and other places and danced the Rudra Tandava the dance of destruction and death.

Why did this happen? Why has humanity suffered so much? Why so much devastation?

We ourselves are responsible for this.

We material minded people have a complete disrespect for mother Earth.

We are all connected in one consciousness, our thought patterns materialize in our lives and environment; we have brought this destruction on ourselves.

Let us reflect on this, let this be a turning point in our lives, let us realize why we have come to this earth and what should be our aim in life, and instead what are we chasing?

Till then a Shiv shilla as old as time itself lies buried in mud in an ancient town now destroyed.

{the Kedarnath temple does not have a Shivling it has a huge rock called the Shiv shilla}

Mahadev on Immortality……

Shiva tells Parvati; “countless numbers of asuras {demons} were granted immortality, but not a single one among them is alive today.

Their egos lead them to their destruction.

Those who wish to be immortal are fools who have so much attachment to their physical bodies and the physical world.

Getting attached to the physical world one cannot strive for the liberation of the soul.”

Ashes (bhasma) the ultimate reality

He {Shiva} smears his body with ashes.

One of the lesser known names of Shiva is Bhashmeshwar Mahadev. I like to call him with this name.

Ashes signify the ultimate reality of this material world. Everything in this world is destined to perish; nothing is permanent; only a Mahadev can understand this fully.

Than it is up to the person how much he wants to get attached to or chase material things. A person can only take his virtues and vices with him and no material thing.

He {Shiva} lives in the cremation grounds.

The cremation grounds represent or are a symbolic meaning for a place not everyone wants to frequent.

People want to go to places where they can make money or for some entertainment.  

Staying in a cremation ground represents Indifference and disenchantment with all worldly things that is Freeing from false belief or illusions of this material world.

By the metaphor of smearing his body with ashes and staying in the cremation grounds the Mahadev sets an example of voluntarily detaching oneself from the material world and hence earned his name--The Bhashmeshwar Mahadev.

One has to detach from the material world to recognize his true potential.

You don't have a soul. You are a soul.

You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. 

This one sentence says it all.

Most people attribute these words to C. S. Lewis the author of the series  The Chronicles of Narnia 

My flower offering

I wanted to offer flowers to the Gods, one fell down on the earth and i discarded it, and then realized; without mother earth would it be possible for this flower to grow.

Then why do i not offer a flower which has touched the earth.

If you try to float.....you drown…....If you wish to drown…you achieve…

ख़ुसरो दरिया प्रेम का, उलटी वा की धार,

जो उभरा सो डूब गया, जो डूबा सो पार.

Khusro dariya prem ka, ulṭī vā kī dhār,

Jo ubhrā so ḍūb gayā, jo ḍūbā so pār.

Khusro! the river of love has an opposite, very  unusual flow

He who chooses to floats up will drown (will be lost), and he who abandons himself and drowns will get across and achieve what the world calls impossible.

What do these words, written in the 13th century mean…?

The realm of love has an unusual, opposite flow as compared to the flow of the material world.

To seek one must abandon himself completely and jump in this river without any fear

Then such a person makes his way to the opposite shore

It is necessary to fully immerse oneself in this love

The one who tries to float----he drowns.

These are the words of the sufi mystic-- Amir Khusrow. Applicable when one seeks his beloved or God…one has to jump in the river of love to drown.

  



Traffic

I was most irritated whenever I got caught in a traffic jam; I called and said “I am caught in a traffic jam”.

Then one day I realized that my car was that traffic and a part of creating that jam.



And he was Enlightened..Nirvana Shatakam..Atma shatakam in story form.

What is the state of enlightenment?
I do not know;
I do not wish to understand it; 
I want to experience it.

I know one thing for sure that the path to this state comes from within.

No shri shri guruji or shri shri multiply by 108 or shri shri multiply by 1008 can bring us to this state; it is the journey of the soul, and the soul is the self.

I write this story inspired by Nirvana Shatakam; The eternal words of Adi Shankaracharya. And dedicate this article to all those souls who have little to do with the world and who strive for the progress of the soul.

The journey which begins with the prayer to the universe to lead us from darkness to light; till the day the soul comes out of all dualities to realize that without darkness light would have no meaning.

He grew up hearing stories of one enlightened soul known as the Mahavatar and he had a wish to meet him. He also heard a lot of stories about different baba’s; some known to have walked on water, some known to have travelled in thin air, stories of some giving up their bodies willfully.

In reality nor he nor his fore fathers had come across such people but there were stories and more stories.

He heard some beautiful words “….And no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dream…” and he decided to follow his dream, even though he did not know what enlightenment was; he desired to be enlightened.

Maybe this was the call of his soul. And he needed to experience it rather than understand it.

The spiritual super market had a lot to offer, because there was a huge demand, there was a huge supply.

He joined cults, and met Guru’s, followed rituals and took part in ceremonies.

After years he realized that the pious agony of the Gurus took him nowhere.

All of religion, all the cults, all the guru’s wanted to bond him, he was entrapped. These person themselves bound in their theories and believes, how they could liberate any one.

Everyone wanted to take charge of him, they wanted him to follow something, and no Guru set him free to experience the world, as they themselves were bound in their fancy dress and their titles.

He left them for good and started studying philosophies, tried to understand quantum physics, read the scriptures till the day he came across two lines of a saint.

पोथी पढी पढी जग मुआ पंडित भया ना कोय
ढाई आखर प्रेम का पढे सो पंडित होय

Pothi padhi padhi jag mua,
pandit bhaya na koi
Dhai aakhar prem ka,
padhe so pandit hoye

meaning:


Reading Books and Scriptures everyone died, No one became wise
whoever understands the small word ‘Love’, he truly becomes wise.

Still he kept on wandering from one temple to other, one river bank to other, he noticed that no one was interested in the onetime great Sindhu—The Indus river but people were attracted to the Ganga in the hope of washing their sins, and one day when the Ganga will dry up people will change their loyalty to some other source of water.

Now he was not well-seasoned in tradition, nor a part of the pomp of ceremonies, nor bound by theories, Nor corrupted by beliefs, not held in the bondage of religions or entrapped by philosophies.

He was finally free.

The mind which had entrapped him once; today that same mind became the cause of his freedom; his big step on the spiritual journey.

He no longer performed the difficult task of becoming someone’s student, nor did he perform the easy task of becoming a Guru himself.

He had neither merit nor demerit, he had neither virtues nor vices, nor was he high or low, neither was he pure or impure. He was neither liberated nor captivated.

He desired no one’s attention. He had no friends or enemies.

Neither was he interested in performing good deeds or bad deeds.

He did not have any chants or a mantra or a holy place not even was he interested in any pilgrimage or Vedic fire ceremonies.

He got up one day where he had no hatred or dislike, no desires.

Not even the desire to have no desires.

And he experienced eternal bliss.

Having opened his higher chakras to the universe and also his lower chakras to accept love, though he had no desire for the same, at the same time he had no reservations nor did he undertake spiritual practices or vows.

Slowly he did not associate his self with his body or the elements that made it or the five senses or the mind, ego or the intellect.

And that final state when the five coverings (pancha-kosha) that covered his soul were of no meaning to him, the big I had vanished, the I, the ego which bound his soul to these five coverings had disappeared and with that everything covering his soul vanished.

Today he was without any attributes and without any form.

He had no wishes for anything because his soul was everything.

He was himself Bliss and eternal consciousness.

He had no desire to fly or walk on water he had learned to walk on earth without that I which had held so many coverings on his soul; and whatever he had learned, he unlearned.

Then the Enlightened one whom he sought from ages to ages was in front of him----face to face-----When he saw his own shadow in the waters of the river.

And the Shiva in him danced the Ananda Tandava;

The dance of eternal joy.