Vedas became omniform for all periods of time

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By Prem Sabhlok

Via e-mail

Swami Viveknanda had said that religion is a spiritual science. Many contemporary gurus, swamis, pujaris and priests are not able to explain the concept of spiritual science. But most of them agree that the Vedas are the supreme scriptures of Hindus. The Bhagavad-Gita mentions that study of Vedas is the highest virtue. Adi Granth Sahib says Asankh grantha mukhi Vedpatha. There are innumerable scriptures but Vedic study is the supreme.

Sad-Darshana (six schools of Indian philosophy),  based on Vedic metaphysics and Vedic Ishta theory-paths, aim at welfare of mankind. They have made it amply clear that to know the concept of religion as spiritual science, the study of the Vedas is essential. To avoid spread of pious forgeries in the society, Swami Dayananda had suggested study and propagation of Vedic knowledge for the Aryans (noble people).

After the study of the Vedas through English translation of mantras, riks, hymns and even some verses, it was apparent the religion as spiritual science is dharma and it is an institution of social, moral, ethical and spiritual uplift of mankind. It is based on certain principles of spiritual science relating to Rta (cosmic laws of Nature), ideal mosaic society where people follow four divine professions (chatvar varnas) allotted through the Vedic education system based on merit, ability and aptitude and certainly not by birth.

The concept of guru —  Gu means darkness and Ru means to dispel —  dispeller of inner and outer darkness as a preceptor, the cosmic delusion (maya), the difference between soul, manifested soul, spirit and their respective roles, prakrti (divine Nature), the ineffable and formless Supreme Reality Brahman, the cosmic word “Om” (Shabd Brahma) cause of origin of the universe, physical sciences and scientific temper and many other subjects and concepts have been explained in the context of dharma as spiritual science.

In the social aspect of dharma, the Vedas refer to healthy community life through sabha and vidhta, local self-governance, iddm nan mmam — enlightened liberalism (nothing for self all for society), etc.

With regard to the moral aspect hydra-headed corruption with nine heads and 99 sources of entry in the human body is mentioned and solution thereof to eliminate corruption.

On the ethical aspect of dharma, trivarga (three kinds of value systems are explained) and as regard spiritual side of dharma harmonized divine, spiritual and material knowledge (para jnan) is explained in great details.

After study of the Vedas, I wrote Glimpses of Vedic Metaphysics as a part of Vedic spiritual science. Hence the book is by a commoner for the common human beings and seekers of Vedic knowledge, who may not have time to study over 17,000 mantras/riks in all the four Vedas, but are keen to know what these shrutis contain. The Atharva Veda clearly mentions when soul was provided to the human beings, the Vedas were revealed (hence shrutis).

Thus the Vedas became omniform for all periods of time. The study of the Vedas can save simple, honest and God-loving people from the pious forgeries of “leaders of hope” like miracles, breaking unity into diversity of cults/sects or even declaring Veda mantras have secret divine power.

Instead of publishing the book and commercially pricing it, I opted for putting it on the Internet for online reading and even taking print at no cost. It is available on http://www.sabhlokcity.com/metaphysics. The book can be accessed through google.com, yahoo.com, lulu.com search for the book or just Vedic Metaphysics.

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If Slaughter Houses had Glass Walls, Everyone would be a Vegetarian.”

Image by Marji Beach via Flickr

You are what you eat.

 If slaughter houses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.”

By Uttam K. Jain

The celebration of Thanksgiving spells a death knell to the turkey. Thousands of birds are slaughtered to enable Americans to celebrate this festival.

Conceived through forced and artificial insemination, the turkey begins its life’s journey in an egg form in the womb of its mother turkey caged together with many other such mothers made to go through the horrors of factory farming.  

Laid in a cage and rolled out in the form of an egg, and immediately separated  and moved to a factory-hatching environment it, together with  millions of others,  the chick enters  the world only to be forced through  extreme  tortures, pain and agony as  its mother did.  

Given only three square feet of floor space on which to spend its life, each bird is forced to endure beak and toe mutilations intended to prevent crowded birds from injuring one another, both procedures are performed without the use of anesthesia and can cause extreme pain, stress and even death.  

Although turkeys have a natural life expectancy of about 10 years, they are commonly slaughtered between 12 and 26 weeks of age.

When they grow up they have to endure horror. During transportation to the slaughter houses these birds are crowded in small cages with very little or no ventilation and they are even deprived of food and water during the long distance hauls that sometime take days.  When arrived at the destination to get them off the truck, these birds are thrown mercilessly handled by their necks and feet only to become ready to be hung up by their feet on a rotating conveyor with anchors.  

The conveyor moves and takes each bird to the knife to have its throat slit while it is alive.  While trampling, confused as to what’s happening to itself and trying to free itself some fall on the bloody floor only to be picked up, smashed and put back on the anchor for its only crime that it was created by artificial insemination and for no fault of its own!

 Stunning is not legally required for most farm animals. (The poultry, which comprises over 90 percent of “food animals,” is not covered under The Humane Slaughter Act).

Even when stunning is required, industry reports indicate an alarming failure rate. Standard slaughter practices, combined with gross negligence, result in immense pain and suffering for millions of animals.  So, these birds go through the torture factories while being conscious.

 Speed, not humane consideration, guides the slaughter process. Thousands of animals are dismembered or dropped into a scalding tank while they are still conscious.

  Next, these birds are thrown into a machine where their feathers, toes and beaks  are removed in few seconds.  The carcasses are then packed neatly and shipped across the nation to distribution warehouses and then to the grocery stores.

This is the bird that gets cooked, sliced and put on the dinner plates — to celebrate Thanksgiving by neatly dressed family members and invited guests, who are blissfully ignorant of the torture the turkey has suffered from the birth to the death.  

Is it not  the pinnacle of hypocrisy  indulged in by the so-called civilized society? Is there no better way to celebrate the Thanksgiving?

Paul McCartney said: “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.”

“I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals,” said  Henry David Thoreau.

When most in a society consume flesh as a normal food, you have a violent society.  Most of us have heard of the saying: “Your are what you eat.”

Smile Philosophy

Rules to Live By…..

Some Times : Santosh Bhatt

Smile reveals the world to us. Body and soul crave it. It triggers in our heart the sensations of love. Smiles feed us, supplying the energy for us to grow.

It inspires us with dreams and hopes.

Smiles cast an aura of mystery and beauty in the face of those who smile. Faces lit with smiles enlighten the whole world.

Smile is almost like air. A human would no longer linger over the concept of smile than a fish would ponder over the notion of water.

But people are smiling less and less these days. Why are people smiling less? And what can be done about it?

The answer is that nobody knows. The reason nobody knows is a flipside of the Human behavior – its uncertain nature.

In theory, solving this sort of problem is easy.

Connect to life by doing things you never thought possible. Spend more time with family and friends. Now you can really start living. And ultimately you will smile.

But in reality it is very difficult to smile when you are having multidimensional problems throttling your neck all the time.

Furthermore, not every man or woman who smiles is happy. Nor every man or woman who doesn’t smile is sad.

Such is the mystery of life, my friend.

But remember, sometimes, when we cry, we shed happiness instead of tears, and therein lies the true test of heart and the hearts character.

It’s easy to shed happiness, but it’s tough to gather it thereafter.

Sometimes it takes a moment, an hour, a day or a week but at times, you may not be able to gather them at all after years and years.

Take care of your happiness, no matter how tiny they are – they’re as precious as the dawn.

Isn’t life all about challenges and wouldn’t it be nice to grow old with few more laugh lines?

It’s easy if you know how to make more friends and fewer foes with your humbleness and attitude.

Hence, greet the unhappy face, with a beautiful smile.

Treat the scorched ears, with the jingle of rhapsody. Feed the desiccated heart, with the fountain of love. Extinguish the darkness, with the lamp of perception. Heal the sore of the wounded, with the balm of compassion. Escort the estranged soul, with the cohort of hope.

Solve the violent problem, with a non-violent solution.

Bathe the desert of malice, with the dew of harmony. Chop the branches of woe with the sickle of laughter. Enshroud the smoggy mind, with the luminous rays of humanity. Demolish the mansion of falsehood, with the bull-dozer of truth. Add meaning to your life, by subtracting the egos one by one.

Paint the canvas of your dreams, with the blood of your sweat for you are the Picasso of your own life.

Life, yes, it is not the distance between the cradle and the grave.

It is the borderless edge. You never know how far you will reach or how soon you shall fall in the pit.

So cheer up, smile often and make yourself necessary to yourself and you will never be sad, my friend!

I’ve learned…

TO FRIENDS AND FAMILY

Written by Andy Rooney, a man who has the gift of saying so much with so few words.

is at the feet of an elderly person.

I’ve learned…. That when you’re in love, it shows.

I’ve learned…. That just one person saying to me, ‘You’ve made my day!’ makes my day.

I’ve learned…. That having a child fall asleep in your arms is one of the most peaceful feelings in the world.

I’ve learned…. That being kind is more important than being right.

I’ve learned…. That you should never say no to a gift from a child.

I’ve learned…. That I can always pray for someone when I don’t have the strength to help him in some other way.

I’ve learned…. That no matter how serious your life requires you to be, everyone needs a friend to act goofy with.

I’ve learned…. That sometimes all a person needs is a hand to hold and a heart to understand.

I’ve learned…. That simple walks with my father around the block on summer nights when I was a child did wonders for me as an adult.

I’ve learned…. That life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes.

I’ve learned…. That we should be glad God doesn’t give us everything we ask for.

I’ve learned…. That money doesn’t buy class.

I’ve learned…. That it’s those small daily happenings that make life so spectacular.

I’ve learned… That under everyone’s hard shell is someone who wants to be appreciated and loved.

I’ve learned…. That to ignore the facts does not change the facts.

I’ve learned…. That when you plan to get even with someone, you are only letting that person continue to hurt you.

I’ve learned…. That love, not time, heals all wounds.

I’ve learned…. That the easiest way for me to grow as a person is to surround myself with people who are smarter than I am.

I’ve learned…. That everyone you meet deserves to be greeted with a smile.

I’ve learned…. That no one is perfect until you fall in love with them.

I’ve learned…. That life is tough, but I’m tougher.

I’ve learned…. That opportunities are never lost; someone will take the ones you miss.

I’ve learned…. That when you harbor bitterness, happiness will dock elsewhere.

I’ve learned…. That I wish I could have told my Mom that I love her one more time before she passed away.

I’ve learned…. That one should keep his words both soft and tender, because tomorrow he may have to eat them.

I’ve learned…. That a smile is an inexpensive way to improve your looks.

I’ve learned…. That when your newly born grandchild holds your little finger in his little fist, that you’re hooked for life.

I’ve learned…. That everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it.

I’ve learned …. That the less time I have to work with, the more things I get done.

India’s Innovation Stimulus.

India‘s Innovation Stimulus

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: November 5, 2011

New Delhi

Josh Haner/The New York Times

Thomas L. Friedman

Go to Columnist Page »

THE world hit seven billion people last week, and I think I met half of them on the road from New Delhi to Agra here in India. They were on foot, on bicycle, on motor scooters. They were in pickups, dented cars and crammed into motorized rickshaws. They were dodging monkeys and camels and cows. Somehow, though, without benefit of police or stoplights, this flow of humanity that is modern India impossibly went about its business.

But just when your mind tells you that this crush of people will surely overwhelm all efforts to lift the mass of India out of poverty, you start to notice a pattern: Every few miles there’s a cellphone tower and a fresh-looking building poking out of the controlled chaos. And the sign out front invariably says “school” — engineering school, biotechnology school, English-language school, business school, computer school or private elementary school.

India is still the only country I know where you can find a billboard advertising “physics degrees.”

All these schools, plus 600 million cellphones, plus 1.2 billion people, half of whom are under 25, are India’s hope — because only by leveraging technology and brains can India deliver a truly better life for its masses. There are a million reasons why it won’t happen, but there is one big reason it might.

The predicted really is happening: India’s young techies are moving from running the back rooms of Western companies, who outsourced work here, to inventing the front rooms of Indian companies, which are offering creative, low-cost solutions for India’s problems.

The late C.K. Prahalad called it “Gandhian innovation,” and I encountered many examples around New Delhi.

Meet Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya, the C.E.O. of Ekgaon. His focus is Indian farmers, who make up half the population and constitute what he calls “an emerging market within an emerging market.” Ekgaon built a software program that runs on the cheapest cellphones and offers illiterate farmers a voice or text advisory program that tells them when is the best time to plant their crops, how to mix their fertilizers and pesticides, when to dispense them and how much water to add each day.

“India has to increase farm productivity,” explains Aditya, “but our farms are small, and advisers from the Agriculture Department can’t reach many of them. So they go for hearsay methods of planting, which leads to low productivity and soil desertification.”

Using cloud computing, Ekgaon tailors its advice to each farmer’s specific soil, crop and weather conditions. Some 12,000 farmers are already subscribing ($5 for one year), and the plan is set to grow to 15 million in five years.

Meet K. Chandrasekhar, the C.E.O. of Forus Health, whose focus is “avoidable blindness” among India’s rural poor. A quarter of the world’s blind people, some 12 million, are in India, Chandrasekhar explains, and more than 80 percent of those are blind as a result of a lack of screening and a lack of ophthalmologists in rural areas.

In the past, comprehensive screening required multiple expensive diagnostic devices to check for diabetic retinas, cataracts, glaucoma, cornea and refraction problems, all of which cause 90 percent of the avoidable blindness in India. So Forums invented “a single, portable, intelligent, noninvasive, eye pre screening device” that can identify all five of these major ailments and also provide an automated “Normal or Needs to See a Doctor” report; it can be run by a trained technician, who through telemedicine connects patients to a doctor.

“We work with a Dutch company on optics, and the University of Texas supports us in business development,” Chandrasekhar adds.

“We are talking to a Brazilian company that is interested in manufacturing our technology and selling in Latin America.”

Outsources are becoming outsources.

Meet Aloke Bajpai, who, like others on his young team, cut his teeth working for Western technology companies but returned to India on a bet that he could start something — he just didn’t  know what.

The result is iXiGO.com, a travel search service that can run on the cheapest cellphones and helps Indians book the lowest-cost fares, whether it is a farmer who wants to go by bus or train for a few rupees from Chennai to Bangalore or a millionaire who wants to go by plane to Paris. iXiGO now has one million unique users a month and is growing.

Bajpai used free open-source software, Skype and cloud-based office tools like Google Apps and social media marketing on Facebook to build his software platform and grow his company. They “enabled us to grow so much faster with no money,” he said.

Finally, there’s Nandan Nilekani, the former C.E.O. of Infosys Technologies, India’s outsourcing giant, who is now leading a government effort to give every Indian citizen an ID number — a crucial initiative in a country where most people have no drivers license, passport or even birth certificate.

In the last two years, 100 million people have signed up for an official ID.

Once everyone has one, the government can deliver them services or subsidies — some $60 billion each year — directly through cellphones or bank accounts, without inept or corrupt bureaucrats siphoning some off.

“We’re bringing the most sophisticated technology to the most deprived,” said Nilekani.

“The hyper connected world is giving us a chance to change India faster, at a larger scale, than ever before.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 6, 2011, on page SR11 of the New York edition with the headline: India’s Innovation Stimulus.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/opinion/sunday/friedman-indias-innovation-stimulus.html?_r=1&src=tp