Category Archives: Ramesam

Ramesam’s Blogs

Mapping Emotions

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Bodily Maps of Emotions (after Prof. L. Nummenmaa et al, Dec 2013)

Bodily Maps of Emotions
(after Prof. L. Nummenmaa et al, Dec 2013)

Imagine yourself to be the Sun God.

Think that your entire body — the face, limbs and all – is made out of the Sun-stuff, as though you are a 3-D cutout of the Sun disc.

Visualize yourself as the brilliantly shining, dazzling-to-the-eyes, bright person with boundless effulgence all around with an intensely white lustrous contour line along the edges to your shape.

(Hint:  As a first step, you may think of yourself as an astronaut completely covered in a space suit. Then imagine the suit shining like the Sun). Continue reading →

Two Genres Of Thought

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“The Problem is I can’t tell the difference between a deeply wise, nudge from the Universe and one of my own bone-headed ideas!”

(Copy right: Bradford Veley)

It looks to me that we are besieged by two genres of thought.

When I say two genres, I do not mean the yes- no- thoughts or being double minded and undecided in our view about things. Nor do I refer to split personalities. Actually it has NOTHING to do about the “content” of the thought.  What I have in mind is about the suite or family of thoughts – based on their possible source of origin (real or apparent).

As advaitin-s, we all know that everything is a manifestation of brahman. We shall use the term ‘Universal Self’ for It. The Universal Self is kUTastha – does not do or intend to do anything. It is changeless, actionless, eternal and It is Beingness-Consciousness-Infinity. We also know that we act, talk, walk, eat, breathe and live as an individual.  We shall use the term ‘self’ for this separate entity. Continue reading →

The Male Chauvinist Pig in Us!

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varahavatara

Varaha avatar – Vishnu’s Incarnation as a Boar

vivekacUDAmaNi is a famous text on advaita teaching, usually  ascribed to Shankara. The very first verse, after the formal salutation for auspiciousness, speaks of the rarity to be born as a male human being. It says:

jantUnAm narajanma durlabham atah pumstvam tato vipratA …

(For all beings, the human birth is difficult to obtain; much more so is a male body; rarer than that is brahminhood…)

Now we have genetic support!

Dr. E.M. McCarthy, a Georgia University geneticist, comes up with a controversial new hypothesis of humans evolution. He says that the genetic evidence overwhelmingly suggests that we are a rare cross between  a male Pig and a female Chimp.

Can 48/2 of Chimps chromosomes + 38/2 of pig = 46 of a man? Well, don’t ask such silly math questions. Who  can remember  what happened after all over 80 million years ago?

So Sitara, Dhanya and Meenakshi, Don’t blame us if we are boastful of ourselves!

(If you are more curious see: http://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html#.Upoej8RDuSr)

ROLE OF “REPETITION” — 2

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ROLE OF “REPETITION” IN SPIRITUAL INSTRUCTION, PRACTICE AND UNDERSTANDING — 2

 

This is an alternative viewpoint regarding the role of “Repetition” in understanding the core message of advaita.  As it often happens, there is nothing like “the right perspective” in these matters. One may use one’s own discretion in evaluating these different points of view.

1.  There is no doubt that Repetition helps in getting a thing by heart or to memorize a quote, a mantra, a verse etc.

2.  We know ‘Practice maketh perfect’ and  practice necessarily involves repetition.

That means, we are making an operation (mostly those that involve neuromotor skills) into a more mechanically executed action – transferring a routine from being a cerebral activity to cerebellar activity.

3.  The ‘phala‘ (result) of certain ritualistic karma (like offerings made for the appeasement of gods, gaining merit etc.) is expected to increase proportionally with the number of times the ritual is carried out. (Please see Note: 2 at the end). Continue reading →

Action – Without Ego, Oh, “I” am the ‘Pain’ on my Neck!

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Uff, It’s a terrible pounding head-ache. Felt like a herd of hundred elephants at once trampling on my head. Cups of freshly brewed coffee, and green, white, oval, or round caplets and tablets proved themselves totally inefficacious.

It’s been bright and sunny outside; my write up went off smooth and fast; I got even that rare pat from Dennis. Enjoyed a delightful gastronomic luncheon.  Overall, it had been a very pleasant day. I couldn’t find a reason for the exploding headache.  I was helpless by late evening and had to visit my Doctor. He let me in, though far out off his Consultation hours.

The Doctor lifted his head out of the piles of Advaita books around him, the light from the table lamp throwing an eerie arc of illumination on his face. The soft light from the computer screen added a strange greenish glow-effect to his broad smiling face welcoming me into his otherwise dimly lit drawing room. I felt that I was seeing the grin of a live Cheshire Cat rather than a welcome from my Doctor friend.

The Doc heard my story of agony and suitably tutt-tutted.

And suddenly his Advaitic genius sprang out. He declared, Oracle-like,  that there should be a ‘head’ to have a headache. And he convincingly argued that I had no head. Yes, Did I ever see it? No, never. Even if my hands touched it, could the hands know what they touched? No, never.  It was I who imagined what it was that was touched by the hands and gave a name to the resulting sensation as ‘head.’  Meekly succumbing to his invincible logic, I lifted my head a little when I saw myself in the window glass on the opposite side. I shouted in joy to prove to him that I had, after all, a head that was begging for a cure. But no, he didn’t relent.

“Mirrors can lie,” he said, “Don’t believe the reflection. A glass can show things even if the things are not there.” To prove his point, he quickly linked on his computer to the 1 min Video clip of his fellow Psychologist here. Yes, the mirror showed a banana, even when there was none!

In utter bewilderment, I asked submissively, “Who is this that thinks I am and what is this pain?”  The Doctor declared triumphantly, “It’s only ‘Pain’ that is there. No separate ‘you’ anywhere.”

“Do you mean there is nothing of my personality, my prestige, my ego, my….. …..”

“You see, you are appearing as the ‘Pain’ at this moment.”

“So, you mean to say that I am present in the now as the ‘Pain’ on my neck?!”

Two-Icings on the Cake of SAND-2013:

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For AV PostSAND-2013 has undoubtedly matured.

There is a greater participation of  Scientists well-known and respected in their fields of study spanning from Cognitive science to Computational Neuroscience, Lucid dreams to Non-linear mathematical models, Physics to Consciousness.

Susana Martinez-Conde from Barrow Neurological Institute was a pleasant surprise. A number of years ago I wrote  to her and her colleague Stephen, after seeing their work on the Perception-Reality Disconnect, about how Non-duality considers the world as an illusion and if they would like to explore this line of thought. They had no interest and disposed off my mails as if it’s all quack science. They may not remember the correspondence, but the change in their perspective is very welcome!

The highly popular Non-dual Teachers like Francis Lucille, Rupert Spira and others were also there. Continue reading →

The Ghost of Bharcchu

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SarvajnatmanSarvajnatman, a well-reputed advaita Acharya of the 9th-10th century, was the author of samkshepa shArIraka.  As the title indicates, this book is a brief presentation of Sankara’s sUtra bhAshya in four chapters corresponding to the four adhyAya-s of the brahma sUtra-s.

Sarvajnatman sums up the essential nature of brahman in ten words. They are:

nitya, suddha, buddha,  mukta, satya,  sUkshma, sat, vibhu, advitIya and Ananda

(eternal, pure, knowing, free, true, subtle, existent, auspicious, without a second and infinite (or happy)).

advaita teaches that you and brahman are one and the same. You being already brahman, the above ten words, therefore, describe you also. That means you, yourself, are Happiness.  So Happiness should be known to you like you know the back of your hand. You do not have to search for or attain Happiness.

But an enigmatic question arises: Okay, I know that I am already eternally existing, knowing and  ever happy brahman.  How come then I don’t know the Happiness which should be present right here? What ghost of an obstruction would block me from feeling it, from seeing it?

The shAstra replies: Oh, Yea, something like the Ghost of Bharcchu can cripple you from seeing the very things that are right in front of you!

“The Ghost of Bharcchu?  What’s that?,” you ask in wonderment.

Continue reading →

On Reductionism

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Dr. ChurchlandWay back in the sixties, that is over half a century ago, it was quite common to hear many spiritual teachers in India, haranguing to large audience how science was analytic and philosophy was synthetic in approach.  The strength of the ancient Indian wisdom, according to them, lived in its spirit of synthesis. So people were exhorted by these speakers to cultivate a habit of developing a conjoined view of diverse systems, rather than decompose them through a rigor of analysis. A current joke at the time was that a specialist was one who knew more and more about less and less until he knew almost everything of nothing.

Perhaps that approach was the need of the hour in India which had attained the status of an independent sovereign republic only a decade earlier through the coming together of many differently administered provincial units. But to extend that political logic based on the social needs of integration to the realms of philosophy and more so to Vedanta and pushing the spirit of questioning, almost derisively, to the bottom was an unfortunate development. How can I say so? Continue reading →

Living In The Moment Eternally – 1

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Appayya Dikshitar - (1520-93)

Appayya Dikshitar – (1520-93)

We, the traditional Advaitins, are a prejudicial lot – aren’t we?  Appayya Dikshitar’s words uttered in delirium when his brain was under the influence of the hallucinogenic Datura seeds are for us a beautiful AtmArpaNastuti in praise of Lord Shiva. But the mutterings of some other ordinary mortal with a differently affected brain is mere meaningless chatter unworthy of any notice. Let us not forget that both are actions done under conditions of an altered brain. And in both cases, an external agency is responsible for causing the change in the brain.

It was UG who famously said once that whether it was Beethoven’s 9th Symphony or pulling the chain in the WC sounded the same to him.  Some of the Zen Masters used to respond to the simple questions like “What is the time now?” with an answer that the mountain was running or some such response – totally frivolous and meaningless on the face of it. But their effort was to draw our attention to the way our mind functions in assigning ‘meaning and significance’ (which are actually not there) ever caught up in a habituated pattern which we  normally fail to detect.

Over six years ago, I prepared a comparative statement of the characteristics of an ordinary person and a ‘Self-realized’ man. I used the information  collated from many sources  that I could lay my hands on in preparing this tabulated compilation — almost like what a Purchase Officer does with the quotations (s)he obtains. There were several reasons behind this exercise of mine. Continue reading →