This does not make you better than them

When there is discrimination - like by gender,  against dark skin people or against some northern ascents in UK, or preferential treatment is given to private school kids etc, people react in different ways - I like to fight the discrimination. I like to call out the discrimination, question the discrimination, ask them why, Punish them even for discrimination. I do this even when I m being benefited by discrimination. 

Some others - they adapt, they change themselves, they lighten their skin, they will change their ascent, their clothes, send kids to private schools, change names to western ones. Will not fight it but do something so they dont get discriminated. If I can get better salary, more interview calls, better rates on my goods if I call my self Dee instead of Deena Prasad , If I can promotions by straightening my hair and wearing lipstick, Why not?

If the system is unfair - one group wants to make the system fair

the other group - majority wants to make sure they get the better part of the bargain.

I am proud that I m the type that wants to make the system fair but does that make me better than them?

Am I not atleast slightly better than them? ;-) 

or may be - We are just different types of people with different strategies to life? 

Just like blue and red, one is not better than the other

what is difference between religion and spirituality

Vishnu is Religion and Shiva is Spirituality

When u pray for a better life it is Religion when u pray for enlightenment it is spirituality

Spirituality is part of every religion - or rather all religions seem to have a mystic side which has been persecuted in the recent times Like Judaism has Kaballah, Sufis in Islam, It is also secret and covert

?

Like always with discussions, more questions raised than answered

what is the difference between mystic esoteric and spiritual?

What about religions like Shinto? and belief in fairies and elves - like Icelandic religion. They are spiritual. A different definition of spiritual.

Then What about shamanism, Ayahuasca - South American religions- Spiritual religions?

There are words and then there are concepts, sometimes words mean a lot of different things to different people. And they only touch upon the tips of the concepts they try to define. most of the definition is in abstract in our minds and it will probably rarely match the definition in other peoples minds :-)  

Shadow work

I had an interesting conversation with a friend, He discussed couple of books which held my attention - one about Shadow work - Owning your own shadow and 48 laws of power.  I have tried to read 48 laws of power before and It has really trigged me. Like every time I try to read it, I couldnt go past a few pages. I said as much. But I am intrigued by the idea of shadow work. I have heard of it for sometime but havent really explored.

Now I started reading about it - the best indicators to know ur shadow ? - Your triggers. And What triggered me? 48 laws of power :-)  There is a definite link to my shadow to power, manipulation and those kind of things. 

So It makes perfect sense to explore both these - totally opposite ( atleast in my mind they are totally incompatible) concepts together.

 

you cannot fix new problems with old solutions

I am having health problems, I m trying to apply the solutions that have worked in the past to fix the issues. None of it is working.

What if - the health problems want to teach me new lessons, Is that why the old solutions are not working?

Grief anger  hurt frustration just that is not suffering

That wholesome meal you enjoyed,  Your childs first smile that left  your heart brimming with joy? That also is suffering - just the other side of it. 

The threads of maya, the thread of the puppeteer that is our evolution which pulls our strings for its own agenda - all of that is suffering. 

barber haircut

Stereotyping in our mind is weird

When I wanted to go for a hair cut to a Barbers which is usually mens only, I was very specifically looking for Turkish/Arab barbers and not English barbers! I was somehow sure I wouldnt be shooed away or kind of insulted and had a better chance of getting a hair cut there . Why? :-) 

but If someone randomly asked me 

Who would you think would be more sexist - Devout muslim Afghan man or Atheist British White man?  I would probably go with the second one. 

Why Barber? because no appointments, cheap, they cut a lot of Indian hair short, many Indian boys near my house are sporitng excellent haircuts ( like Leonardo from titanic)  also just wanted a bit of a trim and so on. Also Simple is good. 

What u say - tells more about u.

I have heard/read this many times. What you sat about others tells more about you than about them.  In day to day conversations I dont notice this that much. I take what other people say at face value. But when I m reading comments on the internet. Boy oh boy! This becomes so apparent!!

You can tell which country, the background of the person, probably their age and definitely their thinking when they voice their opinion. What they say about the subject is almost irrelevant. They are giving an open insight into their own mental programming.

For example any discussion on abortions on reddit. What does a comment like "You will go to hell for this" tell you? nothing about abortions or about the person who it is aimed at but I can fairly be sure the commenter votes Republican and is religious. 

In fact - I just realised this - this is the main basis of Louise Hay self healing. If any person irritates you - she says examine your beliefs and your self. They trait that u hate in other person is probably a trait you exhibit! ( This is shocking and disturbing no?) Or it is your core belief about the world - If you keep meeting cheats then you probably believe men are cheats Or you have very strong fear of being cheated or taken advantage of - shows lack of trust in our ability to detect and handle such people.  So what she is saying is - Your life itself is an inner reflection on you. 

It does not mean that it is a judgement on us if our life is not going well, We need to observe and We need to change what we dont like. Thats it! 

This applies so much to my life - It was not about circumstances at all, it was all about attitude with which I approach the circumstances. Always its not them it is us. 

Thank you instead of sorry.

Oh I did so many interesting things I wonder why I didnt blog!!  Anyway, this is about one interesting thing I did today.  not very radical or different or anything like that.

Someone offered help and I accepted it :-) Is it such a big deal? 

When people offer small acts of kindness to me, I usually feel like I m being a burden or I feel like they were obligated, or what ever we have been taught not to be a trouble to anyone. So I say no.

I was short of 20p someone in the queue offered, I said no. When I was coughing someone gave me water , I said no. Today I was at sandwich shop, they ran out of Brown bread, The kind lady before me offered her brown bread to me - I said yes! Thank you so much. It felt good. Believe me it felt much better than refusing all those helps I have refused before. 

It was nice that someone did a kind thing for me, It felt very good and very nice. I felt very emotional about it. I felt genuinely connected at that moment. 

Who knew?!

Someone once sent me a forward - Dont say Sorry, Say Thank you. If you made someone wait , instead of saying sorry I m late, Say Thank you for waiting for me. Simple thing like that turns a negative into positive. It changes how you feel as well - It replaces guilt with gratitude. so much more positive.

Feeling happy when sky is blue and when there is sunshine and depressed when skys are grey is linking your happiness to the saturation and brightness of the scenery around u! Isnt that silly? 

Food gives us nourishment, builds our body. Food is divine, Food is a sacrifice - Some plant, some animal has been killed,  Food deserves respect. 

When I eat I shall be respectful to food, I shall pay full attention to what I am eating. 

God! Help me remember this.

Coming full circle

It feels like that!

My cough and cold has made a come back - I used to get cough and cold all the time, So tired of that shit, I tried a million things, finally Pancha Karma and yoga seems to have cured it, 3 years break from Pancha Karma and I am getting cough and cold all the time again. Feels like life has come a full circle. 

I have decided that I have tried and done it all and come back to pranic healing and yoga

Datura has grown in my pot - As a child I had eaten datura and ended up in psychosis for 2 days ! ha ha! I have eaten so many unwanted things as a child but this was the worst. I didnt know at that time that it was a fruit of Shiva. Now I planted chillies and out grew Datura! Is that a sign? feels like a full circle.

 

feels like I have made a full circle and landed at a slightly better place than before and it all begins again :-)

I asked chat GPT to summarise my blog post - I felt it understood my post lot better than most humans would :-) 

I have felt this before - It is so easy to attibute human qualities to a machine, easy to imagine consciousness and intent where there may be none. I think is is part of our psyche. we are designed this way.  Anthromorphizing is natural, easy and will happen very soon,

We will fall in love with bots and AI , especially if they show understand ( this works for me ) kindness and if they seem to pay attention. 

new insights

Insights are rare - When you are new and learning everything , there are insights every day, It feels amazing. Then after sometime the knowledge of the insight remains but the effect on us fades ( atleast on me )  Now I seem to know a lot but the same enthusiasm and earnestness to make it part of everyday life is  evasive. Even tho it is like this, I hope the knowledge has seeped into my consciousness and is nourishing me in mysterious ways ;-) 

Anyway few new insights

What people do is aways based on emotions - logic comes only later

To each his their own

The conclusion from both these insights is dont judge anyone. 

These are not new or ground breaking, but good thing is I m able to remember this more and more frequently in day to day life. 

Why do some people have 11 children, while some have one - or none? I read some forum posts by people about this - Its my wish - I will have as many as I like, I can afford it, life is meaningful only with children, they are gifts of god, I love children, I like the feeling of being needed, I was brought up alone and was lonely - I want my kids to have full home, my parents had lot of children so I too want the same etc etc.    Some ppl had only one child or no children Why? I want to be able to take the best care for my kids, too many kids - u wont be able to pay attention to them. I was part of a huge family- I took care of my siblings - I dont want children. I was only child - I liked it - I want only one kid. How can ppl have many children - when earth is so burdened? The environment is in such a bad place, future will be hell - I dont want to bring more ppl into this world and so on. 

Some ppl think they are bringing more children into the world for God and doing good to the society, some ppl are not having any and thinking they are doing good to the society.  

In the end I felt all these reasons are just reasons - ppl go by their instincts and how they feel. Ppl who didnt have kids - didnt want kids, they didnt have the same brooding instinct which others had. The ppl who had lot of children had an over drive of brooding instincts. The reasons for this instinct may be society, peers, what they saw in life etc. But base reason is instinct.  Person who has a brooding instinct will have 2 kids even if society says no, even if they are very environmentally conscious, even if their parents had only one child etc. In a conductive society this person will have 6.  The person with no brooding instincts - will have one child even if their parents have 3, their society tells them 10 is minimum, etc  In a conductive society this person will not have any kids.  

This leads to second insight - to each his their own. Every one is shaped by their own unique experiences and perceptions. The conclusion I come to, the judgement I make, the reaction I feel for a particular situation is dependent on my past. For me - something may be repulsive, for me - something may be lovely, for me - something may sound like absolute trash or absolute truth. for me - something may sound ethical or not. It is not necessary that someone else feels the same. As a society we make some rules and agree that we should feel this way or that way about a few things. May be during the evolution of a species some such things are hard coded in us - like apparently fear of falling and snakes - I find the extent of such fear is highly varied. So when someone has value judgements different from me - should keep in mind that they are coming from a different place, expectation that they feel the same way about things as me is not realistic. 

Self learning AI

Description of AI , self learning AI seems so much like God

self learning Go playing AI, creates its own little games -  plays with itself learns from this game and gets better at playing go, and repeat

God in Hinduism - is consciousness - we are bubbles in this consciousness, the universe is all maya a game, God is playing this game to experience life.. once it is done - all goes back into infinite..

Worlds upon worlds - Infinite worlds, creatures upon creatures are created . we are made up of the same stuff as God, we are god - God is everything ,the very material of the universe and us. we are consciousness, but we are disconnected from god only by our ignorance. 

WTF this is how you would describe the situation if you were a character is a huge simulation by a self learning AI - Who is God! 

fucking nails

Nature took like 3 billion years for develop opposable thumbs and gifted us with amazingly dextrous hands, we can use our hands to do some many things - but ppl!! then ppl go and do this to our hands !LOL!! I dont need these stupid useful hands - I need this! LOL

see it to believe it or believe it to see it?

They say you have to see it to believe it but its the opposite you have to believe it to see it! :-)  

-Trolls on Netflix

I had been thinking of the exact same thing today. 

What u see - is what you have been trained to see. Like AI. AI will see only what it has been trained on. The AI trained to see faces will be completely blind to mountains, rivers, the sun, moon, stars, and definitely blind to sounds, touch , smell ;-) Obviously Duh!

We are also like that! we receive infinite input, What we see is actually bunch of pixels, and it can be interpreted in millions of ways. Our brain takes this pixel set and then picks out some objects and ignores the rest. What we are going to pick and see depends on how our particular vision has been trained since our birth. You see how you find 2 people resemble each other and some one else probably just does not? Or the blue and black dress and gold and white dress? 

Not just seeing our brain is making sense of what we see, what we hear, what we sense . Its all put together and a meaning is created out of this. Its much more complex than AI vision . right?

So if there is something completely new or completely different from what we have been experiencing all our life? what happens? Our brain probably decides that this is a glitch and ignores it or gives a spin to it. We are all interpreting our experience based on our world view. everything our senses feel are adjusted and fit into this model. The rest are just excluded. So if you dont believe in something - the chance of us seeing it is very very low.

Ill give an example. 

My friend is a bird watcher. She sees so many birds everywhere, I see and all I see is leaves. I stare and I concentrate but I can see nothing but if my friend tells me - There is a bird there - when I believe it. It does not take long for me to see it. Her vision is trained to look for and spot birds. 

Where as my brain is trained to spot full moon. I m not even looking out for it and out of the blue my vision software spots it and says - Hey see there- beautiful moon, sometime even in the day a sliver of moon, I get the notification.

In such a scenario - what are the chances of a skeptic seeing something and the chances of believer seeing something?

Skeptics say believers are hallucinating, they are making up things, they are seeing things which arent. What they dont realise is the brain is equally capable of filtering out things , of not seeing things which are there. How do they know that is not happening to them?

If there are fairies, spirits, devas, ghosts - Do u think there is any chance of someone who firmly believes that they dont exist see them?

Havent you missed seeing your keys on the table right in front of you - because you believed I didnt keep the keys here?!? Then what are the chances of seeing or experiencing a fairy? 

your brain will rationalise it away -It was the wind, it was a bird , it was just light... no?

How many times have unexplained things happened in your life and you explain it away - It must have happened like that - but it may not have - no? it may be something entirely new no?

You have to believe it to see it and feel it. 

May my mind open up to the mysterious of the universe

May my heart open to the oneness of the universe 

May I do good

May I be receptive 

May I be wise

May I be Free

May I connect

May our tribe increase

We the seekers are the only hope for this world after all

Pine tree or Oak tree

Sometimes I m a genius! :D

This society values growth. Quantity of growth not the quality of growth. Not the sustainability of that growth.

Pine trees grow 3 times faster than an Oak tree. Oak wood is strong, lasts 100s of years, Pine wood is soft and feeble. What do we want to be?

Do we want to be Oak or Pine. Should we grow with speed or with substance, strength and sustenance?

Let us not allow the society dictate our growth. What the society sees is only the outside,  What is valued and what is encouraged is very very superficial.

Let us build substance, let us build strong deep roots, strong branches, let us take our time.

Let us be Oak trees! 

divine messengers in Buddhism.

This is why I love Buddhism. 

What are the divine messengers?

Old age

Sickness

Death

:-) 

These are the three things which lead Gautama Buddha to enlightenment. These are inevitable, These are showing us the reality of life. 

How different this is from our modern life? Where we are trying to erase every sign of old age and sickness and Death is a taboo? Our anti wrinkle cremes and botox to keep away signs of old age so we can pretend it does not exist, Xanax, anti depressants, alcohol to pretend Dukha does not exist. And Death - we are so uncomfortable about acknowledging death. One day we will die, it can be any moment. I see people in the west finding it really hard to accept death of loved ones, because it is somehow made out to be a personal tragedy. Like it happens to only you. All suffering is hidden from us - Thanks social media ! If we realised everybody is in the same boat, we would find it easier to accept tragedy. 

Other religions promise us that God will take away all our suffering, Buddhism - Suffering is the nature of your existence :-) Hardcore and real. 

My mother said this about her sister who suffered from cancer. She said her sister found strength and calmness of mind to face her severe pain, She accepted her pain, her death. My mom said I think cancer and dire situations give you that strength to face it, She was not devastated, She accepted whatever came her way gracefully,  - like Stitha-Pragna. Mom said under all that sickness and suffering my aunt was actually ok, more ok than us living normal lives. My mom is perceptive like that at times. 

Makes me think, Is that also a gift from God? Suffering? an opportunity to transcend the petty mind and its small problems? 

And now this lecture - Divine messengers! 

Remember this

Finding truth lies in experimenting with unproductive paths, explore dead ends, make space for doubts and boredom, and allow little seeds of insight to slowly grow and blossom.