நான் யார் ? (nAn yAr) – “who am I?”. Try describing yourself. In 2 lines, in 10 lines, a page. It’s not easy to describe ourselves, as after all we are product of our vasanas (conditionings) and prakriti (material makeup, chemicals, etc.), together which determine our gunas (tendencies) – which are all in constant flux. [...]
“Don’t confuse the moon with the finger pointing to it” – Buddhist proverb The above saying is implicitly built-in to Hindu culture. Hindus embellish God with numerous decorations, stories, etc. These decorations can manifest as Krishna, Shiva, Kali, Ammachi, Buddha, Ramana Maharshi, etc. The word “idol” is a crude shallow-minded word (and even demeaning). Hindus [...]
Many people think that Hindus can’t eat because their “religion” prohibits them. Often the question is asked, “so you can’t eat meat?” or “he can’t eat meat”. No, it’s not that I can’t, but I don’t. For me as well as most Hindus it is a conscious decision (as opposed to blindly following some religious [...]
Spirituality, a constant unconditioning of your soul, slowly pushes you to your true identity, the Self — which is genderless. So it doesn’t come as surprise that there will be some reckoning regarding the feminine and masculine principles (“the Siva and Sakthi”) that operate within you, as well as in the world. Sometimes it just [...]
We are what we think.All that we are arises from our thoughts.With our thoughts we make the world.– The Buddha Thoughts are powerful. In particular directed thought towards a person, thing, or goal. Like positive thought (like positive thinking, love, healing, peace,..) or negative thought (anger, hatred, jealousy, envy, anxiety,…). The Water Crystal Experiment There’s [...]
This article is a continuation of The Caste System. Another way of looking at varnasrama is via a pyramid ranking, where people of Brahmin varna are at the top, Kshatriya and Vaishya the next two layers, and Shudras the base of the pyramid. The idea behind this is that, Brahmins represent those folks who set [...]
My two cents on the caste system. 1. Varnasrama The “caste system” as it exists today is very much a degenerate version of varnasrama – a technical classification of personality types, conceived a couple of thousand years before Carl Jung and his theory of personality archetypes . Varna = variations, variegations, colors, tones, differences, spectrums, [...]
The word Aryan was forged by Europeans from the Hindu (Sanskrit) word arya meaning “noble”. Apparently the word does not occur in anything other than in its adjective form (“arya”); that is, hardly does it occur in the sense of the proper noun “Aryan” (as in to describe a certain group or race of people). [...]
It is interesting to note how well the four varnas match the four broad categorizes of yoga (jnana, raja, karma, and bhakti). Note that none of these were mutually exclusively (in fact in the past all forms of yoga were accompanied by a good amount of bhakti).It is said that the difference between the kshatriya [...]
We take it for granted the rich variety of plants we can have in India. In the average middle class home (outside the congested cities) you will likely find a variety of trees: coconut, mango, almond, banana, guava, papaya, jackfruit, amla, neem, gulmohar, ashoka, curry, drumstick, orange, lemon, breadfruit, sapota, and a large variety of [...]