PHILANTHROPY IN NATURE

• Evolutionary scientists teach us that human beings have evolved through a long struggle in which only the fittest have survived. The fittest are those who pass on their genes.
• But it is a mistake to believe that life is a tooth and claw struggle where only the selfish survive. Yes, we have evolved from animals — we share 98.6% of our genes with chimpanzees — but nature is replete with dharma-like goodness.
• Wolves and wild dogs bring food back for their young who cannot hunt.
• Dolphins will help lift an injured companion for hours to help him survive.
• Blackbirds and thrushes give warning calls when they spot a hawk even if it risks their own lives.
• Similarly, human parents make huge sacrifices for their children with little expectation of return. So, it is wrong to view nature as an amoral law of the jungle.

Link to the article from which the above excerpt is tken :

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Gurcharan_Das_Time_to_free_schools/articleshow/2274711.cms

calibrate our life and celibrate

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2251762.cms
Life is celebration. In order to be able to experience the joy of celebration, you need to first learn to calibrate your life in a manner appropriate for celebration. Your life starts from a thought. The thinking process keeps generating thoughts. When you enact these thoughts you experience the fruition of your actions. Thought is the root and the outcome of action is the fruit. Life is evolving; it is changing constantly from the root to its fruit. Between the roots and fruits lie the trunk, branches, leaves, buds and flowers. These are our various thought processes. Thoughts make the mind. As are your thoughts and thinking, so is your mind. And that is your life. The 'tree' of life. Life also consists of feelings and emotions, called the manas or spiritual heart. Due to prana or the process of breathing, the spiritual heart is connected to the mind. In other words, feelings and emotions are linked with the process of thinking or its product, thoughts. This connectivity generates more thinking, creating thoughts that make your life emotion and feeling-based as well. The mind is the gateway to the brain which is the seat of intellect or buddhi. So once again, life reaffirms itself and reaffixes itself to the intellect. Your whole life revolves around your mind and intellect. Your mind and intellect together generate strong likes and dislikes — raag and dvesh — which create intense beliefs and disbeliefs. These lead us to love and hate relationships with fellow human beings and also with Divinity. When we understand this true aspect we can clearly see that our life is based on our mind, level of intelligence, strong beliefs and disbeliefs. Seers have established that we are a part of the Supreme Spirit. This is our link with the Divine source. We need to form our life around the Supreme Spirit, who is Parama, also known as the soul or atman. Soul also means spandana or vibrations. We need to get firmly established in the Divine source. We need to restructure our lives from being thinking-based to being vibrations-based. Just as an object vibrating at high speed does not allow even a single particle of dust to stick to it, intense vibrations of the soul blow away residual and negative thoughts, beliefs and disbeliefs. How should we convert our lives from being thought-based to being vibrations-based? To move from thought-based to vibrations-based life, seek the company of the holy and the wise, attend satsangs, read and assimilate wisdom from the Bhagavad Gita, Vedas, Upanishads and other world scriptures and learn more about the lives of the accomplished. Practise meditation, mantra chanting or japa, and intense sadhana. Try to follow spiritual and divine traditions. By doing so the mind, intellect, beliefs and disbeliefs, likes and dislikes, which have prevented vibrations of the soul to be felt and experienced, recede to the background and there is a spontaneous ignition of soul energy that is released. This energy release brings out waves of bliss, where we feel immense happiness, satisfaction, joy and contentment. The transition brings a blissful life without worries. We experience a joyful, thoughtless state of being, full of peace and contentment. Life is without anxiety and fear. We calibrate our life and celebrate forever. E-mail: shrinimishamba@hotmail.com . Website: www.shri-nimishamba.org .

PART OF A WHOLE

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Albert Einstein

CALIBRATE YOUR LIFE AND CELEBRATE

Our mind is a bundle of thoughts. The state of our mind decides the quality of our life. We convert most of the thoughts that arise in our minds into action. This produces the Karmic reaction which rules our life. So we see that the mind is the cause of our happiness or dissatisfaction. Our external surroundings, circumstances and relationships constantly make our mind oscillate between joy and sorrow. So our mental equilibrium is upset. When we are strongly grounded in our Spiritual Tradition, we have complete control over the mind. Regular practise of the Spiritual techniques taught by the Sages and Scriptures will help us to control our thought process and use it to generate a happy and contented life. Ordinary thoughts can be transformed into wise, dynamic and divine resolutions, which will transform our lives and bring success with effortless ease.
When we gain control over the mind, the desires which are the root cause of sorrow are eliminated. We let go of all expectations and accept each day as a gift from God. Life becomes joyous, expansive and meaningful.
A person’s profession, fame, wealth, health and success are determined by his Karma. Even if he succeeds and scales the peak in any field through hard work and training, and accumulates enough to satisfy all his material needs, he still lacks mental peace. Peace and contentment can be obtained only through the Grace of God or the Guru.
When we worship the Divine Mother, who is the creator and sustainer of all creation, the mind attains equilibrium. Our thoughts become pure and our actions are selfless. All the negative Karma is dissolved, and our life is shaped only by the good Karma that remains.
When we practise spiritual techniques that propel us towards the Divine Mother, we transcend all human limitations and spiritual awareness dawns within us. As we surrender completely at Her feet, She annihilates our ignorance. We attain a state of complete Oneness with the Cosmic Will and the entire Cosmos. This establishes us in everlasting peace, unconditional love and eternal bliss.”






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A NEW SCIENCE OF RELIGION & INTERDEPENDENCE

• Not many people will agree that it’s time for a new religion to emerge. But before going into that let’s have a re-look at what’s come to be known as the Gaia hypotheses, or Gaia theory.
• Named after the Greek goddess of the Earth, the theory was formulated in the 1960s by the research scientist James Lovelock. Lovelock believed that the so-called living and non-living components that go to make up the whole Earth actually constitute a new and emergent property which is more than the sum of its parts. In other words, “life” modifies the conditions on the planet to make conditions on the planet more hospitable via feedback it gets through “non-life”.
• Only together, can the two components comprise a true living organism. With this initial hypothesis, Lovelock claimed the existence of a global control system of surface temperature, atmospheric composition and ocean salinity.
• His arguments were that since life started on Earth, the energy provided by the Sun has increased by 25% to 30%; yet the surface temperature of the planet has remained remarkably constant when measured on a global scale.
• Also, atmospheric composition has remained the same too even though it should be unstable. And so has the salinity of the oceans, which is a mystery because river salts should have raised the level much higher by now than is observed.
• In spite of all this, however, mainstream science has had a tough time accepting that the whole Earth behaves as a single, self-regulating system composed of physical, chemical, biological and human components. It seems simply too pre-scientific, pagan and like some New Age religion.
• Especially since the theory almost posits endowing the planet with a kind of life of its own. Palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, for instance, criticised Gaia as merely a metaphorical description of Earth processes.
• Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, claimed “there was no way for evolution by natural selection to lead to altruism on a global scale.” Be that as it may, the Earth is now beginning to get a battering despite science and paganism.
• Global warming is no discriminator of life or non-life. In order to survive, humankind now needs a totally new kind of religion which embraces the entirety of existence and the interdependence of all its parts. Or as Gaia itself proposes, the entirety of the universe and the interdependence of all its parts too.

THE STORY OF SHIVA

• Shivs is also known as bholenath for his child like disposition.
• He is also seen as love personified.
• While his wife as Shakti is out battling demons, he stays at home to take care of the children.
• And when Shakti dances , in tandav , that sends tremors around - after vanquishing the demons, Shiva lies quietly beneath her feet, in the hope of calming her by making her aware that if she continued , she would end up crushing him under her feet.
• Many of these stories indicate gender equity and the importance and beauty of loving togetherness. People invoke the blessings of Shiva for a happy and peaceful life.

Annette Moser-Wellman

Annette Moser-Wellman is the president of FireMark, an innovation consultancy that works with some of the world’s leading companies.Her expertise spans the range of strategy and vision planning to leadership and executive coaching. She is author of The Five Faces of Genius, Creative Thinking Styles to Succeed at work. Website: http://www.fivefacesofgenius.com/ •
www. capital-me.com Success Factors On the Curve

• The successful business leader must start thinking of his or her career as an upwardly sloping sine curve, perhaps as a function described as y=2x+3sin(x). This graph is a series of gently sloping up-and-down undulations with an overall trajectory upward.The graph of your career must be a series of gentle waves, with up representing accomplishments and down representing fallow or transition periods. This shift from the linear path to the sine curve is an important delineation and here’s why I make it.

• As business leaders, we must become more comfortable with risk and the attendant failure that goes with it. Because change will so fully characterize the market and our work, if we are not failing, we will not be risking, and if we are not risking,we will not be succeeding. Fewer and fewer companies will be able to claim“good to great status,” as large, stable companies that can stand the test of time.This is because technology will accelerate the axis of time and we will see competition accelerating as well.New business leaders must now manage the sine curve of his or her career, the multiple up-and-down undulations of success and failure.
• They must seek to point this sine curve in an upward trajectory, always learning from the past and positioning themselves for success in the next venture.
• The key is to optimize the amplitude of success: the good position, the new enterprise, the great idea. But when the downward transition comes – loss of revenue,layoffs, market shifts – be able to step back, wait and create the next opportunity.
• Dealing with Dips This ability to make the most of the downward wave requires comfort in what I call“The Dips,” which are the spaces between the successes. They are the negative troughs in the waves of the sine curve.They represent the transitions from one change to the next.
• Most business managers want to avoid the Dips as much as possible. But it is here that the best ideas and new things are born.
• When we have the ability to withstand the troughs and even expect and welcome them, we find the best new opportunities.We can especially learn this skill from the creative greats of history.
• Artists and scientist scan teach the business leader how to perform this new math of success –how to keep this sine curve undulating upward in the right direction. Artists, scientists and literary greats are experts at managing the crests and troughs of innovation.They build their careers around the ebb and flow of their creative energy.Here’s what they teach us about the time in the Dip.The Dip is a time to learn.
• Conventional wisdom says that most of us will have anew job every seven years. Given the pace of change ahead, we will most likely have a new job every four years. We can bemoan this lack of “job security”(which, by the way, never really existed),or we can revel in the fact that we can transfer our skills to a different area and learn something new.
• What Comes Down, Must Go Up The physicist Richard Feynman had his greatest breakthroughs early in his 20s.But he went on make many other contribution in physics using his fascination for other areas: music, mythology, even drumming. He was able to further his field by applying learning from other interests.
• The Dip is a time to create. When we are in transition, we re-evaluate our priorities and can make decisions on what is really best for us and what we really want to do.
• As passion for work increasingly becomes a requirement for success, we can tailor our work more closely to what we really love and enjoy.
• The great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy had a period in his life in which he felt so low that he could no longer write. But during this time he began to formulate his personal philosophy of nonviolence and wrote a book that highly influenced Mahatma Gandhi’s work.The
• Dip is a time to reflect. We cannot innovate when our conscious mind is overly active and managing too many demands. When we quiet down and listen to the new stimulus of the world around us, we begin to understand what the new opportunities are.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson would say that he denied all company so that he could follow his “whim.” When he would get even the slightest idea, he would lock himself away and listen to that inspiration.
• As a community of business leaders, we must get more comfortable with our Dips.In fact, we should consider the Dips others experience as badges of success.Because in the times ahead, if we don’t dip, we’ll slide. So maintain a sense of pride and enthusiasm for all that you have accomplished on your trajectory upward,even in your Dips. And you’ll be surprised to find that it’s the artist who can teach us the most about the new math of success.