Biology of Belief

Look at the beauty and innocence of the young girl in the picture. She is a portrait of health, vitality and purity.

I have just completed reading a wonderful book ‘Biology of Belief’ by Dr. Bruce Lipton, a leading Cell Biologist from Stanford University. He quotes Mahatma Gandhi:

Your beliefs become your thoughts
Your thoughts become your words
Your words become your actions
Your actions become your habits
Your habits become your values
Your values become your destiny

This is to bring to our attention the level of effect that belief can have on one’s health.
This is not only true for the high level of success with placebos in medicine where sugar pills can cure incurable diseases but also in case of Osteoarthritis knee surgery.

The example he sites is the case of Bayler School of Medicine study published in 2002, where Dr. Bryce Moseley conducted ‘fake’ surgery on a group of patients, through the regular procedure of making three incisions and doing the salt water splash to simulate the sound of knee washing procedure and sewed up the incisions without any invasive procedure being carried out.
The patients were on regular post operative routine and were told to start their physiotherapy during convalescence. The results were shocking. The success rate of the ‘fake’ surgery was as good as the regular surgery and even one elderly patient went on to play regular basketball.

The book has many other case histories and drug research findings to substantiate the level of effect belief can have on our health. This belief has to come not only from our waking consciousness but also from our subconscious mind. This is the reason that Buddhist "Mindfulness meditation" is an effective tool for not only our spiritual but also our physical wellbeing.

This is also reflected in the miraculous healings that Jesus carries out. While Jesus acts as the medium of channelling the divine energy that pervades the cosmos to a particular recipient, he asks "Do you believe" and always says your faith has healed you. When the disciples doubt his powers he says "…… Oh ye of little faith"

May the power of belief heal us all.

Mystic River

Flowing serenely through the wooded vale,

I chanced upon you as I broke free,

From the thicket and bramble that impale,

This tortured body, a wanderer on this lea.

I have, in my sojourn, many a river seen,

But you have the exhilarating quality to convey,

As the dawn which from darkness light wean,

A lustrous texture reflecting your laminar way.

As a trickling spring, a subterranean source,

You began your life, an unhindered course,

Many rivulets supplementing this vast concourse,

Thundering in ever increasing flow; a mighty force.

Potency bestowed to invigorate or mutate,

Magic fodder to the grain nourishment brought,

Even the mighty land and Pharaoh you subjugate,

You are my life’s inspiration, I earnestly sought.

Love to you all

Buddhist Chant - Namu Amida Butsu

Namu Amida Butsu means "total reliance upon the compassion of Amida Buddha.
Nembutsu literally means "to think of Buddha." Nen (nien in Chinese and smṛiti in Sanskrit) is "to keep in memory." According to Shinran Shonin however it is more than a mere remembering of Buddha, it is thinking his Name, holding it in mind. The Name consists of six characters or syllables: na-mu-a-mi-da-buts(u) in Japanese pronunciation and nan-wu-o-mi-to-fo in Chinese. In actuality, the Name contains more than Buddha's name, for Namu is added to it. Namu is namas (or namo) in Sanskrit and means "adoration" or "salutation." The Name therefore is "Adoration for Amida Buddha," and this is made to stand for Amida's "Name."
According to belief those who in sincerity recite the nembutsu will be reborn in pure land. Pure land signifies a place where there is no differentiation. Where all existence is in pure undifferentiated energy.

This philosophy has a familiar ring in the Vedic chant in veneration of Shiva or Narayana; “Om namo nama shivaya” or "Om namo Narayana"
The adoration comes from the profound meaning these simple words carry. If we take into consideration the emanations of sound ‘Om’ and ‘na-mo’ (the two syllables separated), Om and Mo are polar opposites and signify matter and antimatter. When these two are brought together, through a negating act ('na') , there is total annihilation and immense pure energy is released for new creation. This energy, which is the embodiment of destruction and new creation, is the symbolism of Shiva.
The name Narayana is a Sanskrit tatpurusha compound of nara ("human, man") and ayana ("eternal, without ending").Tradition associates the nara element with another meaning of "water", explaining the name as indicating the all-pervasive nature of Narayana as that of an infinite ocean of energy in which the never-ending movement of birth, life and death of the cosmos occurs. Narayana, according to this etymology, is the one who moves in the infinite waters and is also the water itself. This close association of Narayana with water explains the frequent depiction of Narayana in Hindu art as standing or sitting on an ocean. Another important translation of Narayana is "The supreme Man who is the foundation of all men".

Hence the poem of Dr. Kenryu T. Tsuji, the abbot of Ekoji Temple starts with Nembutsu being the sound of the universe.

The Nembutsu is the sound of the universe.
It is the sound of the wind
as it rustles the leaves;
It is the roar of the waves
as they rush toward the shore;
It is the song of the robin, the whippoorwill
and the chorus of cicadas on a summer evening.

The Nembutsu is naturalness...
The first cry of the baby
as it emerges into the world
from the darkness of the mother's womb;
It is the powerful cry of independence
of individuality, of selfhood;
But it is also the great cry of awakening
to its dependence on something greater than self...
for its sustenance.

The Nembutsu is the proclamation of the Buddha...
"Above heaven and below heaven,
I alone am the World Honored One."
It is the ultimate declaration of life;
I alone hold my destiny in my hand
leading to perfect Buddhahood.

When I touch the heart of reality,
It is Namu Amida Butsu...
What else can I say?
When I truly share someone's happiness,
it is Namu Amida Butsu;
And in that moment of deep grief
over a loved one's death,
it is just Namu Amida Butsu.

Namu Amida Butsu...
it is the song of gratitude
not of my finding the Buddha,
but Buddha finding me.

Love to you all

Cloud Messenger

One work which I immensely enjoyed reading is Kalidasa’s Megdoot or ‘cloud messenger’. In this work, the role of the cloud as the messenger to bring to fruition a union of the Yaksha and his beloved is beautifully depicted. The characteristics that facilitated the cloud to play this role is its ability to traverse large distances in quick time and its capacity to transfigure itself to overcome obstacles in its path. This is not a mere human love story but a portrayal of the human seeking the union with the divine beloved. Just as Radha pines for the love union with Krishna so also a male, female union in sacred literature is a mystical depiction of the soul seeking divine merging.

The following part of the Megdoot is very apt in mapping the quality of the cloud to that of Shiva.

Clothing thyself in twilight's rose-red glory,
Embrace the dancing Shiva's tree-like arm;
He will prefer thee to his mantle gory
And spare his grateful goddess-bride's alarm,
Whose eager gaze will manifest no fear of harm.

Yaksha says; the black cloud, painted with twilight red, is bidden to serve as a robe for Shiva, the god entrusted with continuous creation through annihilation, instead of the bloody elephant hide (mantle gory) which he commonly wears in his wild, and destructive (pralaya) dance. This dance transforms the subtle energies into gross manifestation. The cloud would be better attire as it will become integral with this specific attribute of Shiva; namely transformation. This is the reason that the poet says Shiva’s eager gaze will not bring about any fear. Fear is associated with lack of fore knowledge. But as the cloud is capable of any form of manifestation due to its both subtle as well as gross nature, it is already in the realm of the fruit of ‘Rudrha Thandavam’ (Destructive dance of Shiva)
Vedic cosmology had a very deep understanding of the concept of continuous creation and assigned a trinitarian character to the Godhead as Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. All these three roles are basically same at the most fundamental level as what we perceive are emanations from an implicate order which is all pervading.

Love to you all

Sun - Earth Symphony

A recent discovery by the Astrophysicists at Goddard Space Centre establishes, what is known as a Flux Transfer Event (FTE) between the Sun and the Earth. As you read this blog , a magnetic portal will open, linking Earth to the sun 93 million miles away. Tons of high-energy particles may flow through the opening before it closes again. Researchers have long known that the Earth and sun must be connected. Earth's magnetosphere (the magnetic bubble that surrounds our planet) is filled with particles from the sun that arrive via the solar wind and penetrate the planet's magnetic defences. They enter by following magnetic field lines that can be traced from terra firma all the way back to the sun's atmosphere.
We used to think the connection was permanent and that solar wind could trickle into the near-Earth environment anytime the wind was active. We were wrong. The connections are not steady at all. They are often brief, bursty and very dynamic.
On the dayside of Earth (the side closest to the sun), Earth's magnetic field presses against the sun's magnetic field. Approximately every 8 minutes, the two fields briefly merge or "reconnect," forming a portal through which particles can flow. The portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth.

{for those of you interested in more scientific probing, the spin of the atom keeps flipping between up and down spin as they are normally buffeted by thermal energy but when there is a strong magnetic field the spin is fixed. By polarization scanning quantum computing can be done at nano scale. Is the portal when open, do computation and data transfer? please see http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2007/September/18090702.asp}

The beauty of this discovery is the 8 minute window. The number 8 has great significance in music as it represents an octave of musical notes. Notes an octave apart have the same tone but a double or half pitch. Before 2004 it was unknown if the human brain is hard-wired for the perception of octave circularity but now research has proven that not only humans but also monkeys have this unique brain structure.

I think we are witnessing a cosmic musical ensemble. There is tremendous order within the perceived chaos and the beauty of the Creator is manifest for the deep probing mind.

Love to you all

Returning Souls

During my assignment for three years in Asia-Pacific, I was stationed in Singapore and the main attraction for any friends visiting was to take them to the Imax theatre to have a real visual treat. The very first film we saw there was on the migration of birds, animals and insects. A very impressive migration, given its stature, was the migration of the Monarch butterfly.

The Monarch butterfly, a beautiful insect known for its orange and black markings, is famous for its annual migration to the highland forests of Michoacan, deep in the heartland of Mexico.
Each year, hundreds of millions of butterflies travel from the United States and Canada, to winter in forests of Fir and Oyamel trees. Those butterflies that survive the journey, which in some cases amounts to a 2,000 mile trip, cluster profusely in trees, creating a marvellous sight.
Near Morelia, the capital of the state is the ‘Santuario Mariposa Monarca’ (Mariposa Monarch Sanctuary), a reserve dedicated to protecting their environment.

Each year, starting in late October to early November, the butterflies start to arrive. Incidentally, this time period coincides with the ‘Dia de los Muertos’ (Day of the Dead) holiday (Second day of the month of November). The indigenous peoples of the area believe the butterflies represent their departed loved ones souls, returning in the form of the butterfly. During the evening hours, the insects gather on tree trunks and branches. After morning arrives and the heat begins to rise, the butterflies begin flocking to the forest floor, creating a tapestry of orange and black as far as the eye can see.

The eternal return is a concept deeply embedded in various tribal cultures including that of the Aztecs in central Mexico. This has been carried into the Christian tradition.
But what does this return mean for us.
This is beautifully reflected in Tagore’s Gitanjali:

“The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long.
I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light, and pursued
my voyage through the wildernesses of worlds leaving my track on many a star and planet.
It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself,
and that training is the most intricate which leads to the utter simplicity of a tune.
The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own,
and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.
My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said `Here art thou!'
The question and the cry `Oh, where?' melt into tears of a thousand
streams and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance `I am!'….”

Love to you all

Miracle of Life

Look at the beauty of the fold of the rose petals or the perfect geometry of the Nautilus shell in the accompanying picture. There is a mathematical precision. Most of these spirals we see in nature follow what is known as the Fibonacci spiral based on the discovery of the mathematical series by an Italian monk called Leonardo Fibonacci in the twelfth century.

We are discovering that creation is full of precision that defies reason. This is the reason why Darwin’s theory of natural selection is facing increasing pressure and we are now looking at a scenario where we see an implicate order at work. After David Bohm, who came up with this concept in explaining the principle behind perceived reality as emanation from implicate order, many others have followed this line of thinking in other fields of science such as Biology. One scientist who has used this concept in plant biology is Dr. Rupert Sheldrake of Cambridge University.

Recent discoveries have pointed out the extreme complexity of the human species. We are made up of nearly 100 trillion cells, more than the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Each cell is a living organism of high complexity. 10 million cells die and regenerate every second of our life. Skin cells live only for two weeks and bone cells live for three months. Every ninety seconds millions of antibodies are synthesized, each from about twelve hundred amino acids.

We are not just flesh and bones but a highly evolved system whose order is mind boggling.
We are a walking miracle and this is resonated in Aurobindo’s poem:

My breath runs in a subtle rhythmic stream;
It fills my members with a might divine:
I have drunk the Infinite like a giant’s wine,
Time is my drama or my pageant dream.
Now are my illumined cells joy’s flaming scheme
And changed my thrilled and branching nerves to fine
Channels of rapture opal and hyaline
For the flux of the unknown and the supreme
I am no more a vassal of the flesh,
A slave to nature and her leaden rule;
I am caught no more in the senses’ narrow mesh.
My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight,
My body is God’s happy living tool,
My spirit a vast sun of deathless light.

Love to you all

Lessons from My Mother

"Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die."
………….. A sonnet by John Donne

On 16th October 2008, my mother completed her earthly life after 88 years of yeoman service to thousands of individuals, which extended form the immediate family to many individuals who came into her life as a husband, mother, care giver and, in the last five years of her life, to the many nurses who attended her. She was a person beyond narrow dictates of caste, creed or colour.
She was not of a high education but always open to ideas and knowledge. Though she was a person of deep and unshakable Christian faith, she was open to deeper interpretation of many dogmatic dictates of the Catholic faith and the events in the Bible. Whenever I had given a talk or a seminar, she was keen to know the contents and listen to the stories I had used in my deliberations and ask for its moral in the context of the subject being addressed.

In the past few years I had a wonderful spiritual relationship with my mother. Everyday we used to sit for evening prayers which always ended in reading the Bible and she expected me to explain the deeper meanings of the words of the Old Testament prophets, wisdom of Jesus and letters of Paul. I used to refer to parallel meanings in Bhagawat Gita, Upanishads, teachings of Buddha and other spiritual leaders.
You could see her eyes light up and mind focused and there was a great feeling of someone present who is being filled with renewed energy. Even on days when she had excruciating pain, she would never miss the evening spiritual dialogue and singing.

She was in constant preparation for the end of her earthly journey. She was a personification of the words of Heinrich Suso, the great German mystic:

“Thou shalt understand that it is a science most profitable, and passing all other sciences, for to learn to die. For a man to know that he shall die that is common to all men; as much as there is no man that may ever live or he hath hope or trust thereof; but thou shalt find full few that hath this cunning to learn to die. I shall give thee the mystery of this doctrine; that which shall profit thee greatly to the beginning of spiritual health and to a stable fundamental of all virtues”.

If I am, today, open to seeking the truth in the entire spectrum of human thought and divine inspiration, which are inseparable part of cosmic consciousness, it is thanks to my mother.

Love to you all

Spiritual Transit

Return from existence to non-existence!
You are seeking the Lord and you belong to him.
Non-existence is a place of income;
Flee it not! This existence of more or less
Is a place of expenditure.
………. Jallauddin Rumi

Today we are witnessing a global turmoil in the financial market arena. What had seemed to be an unshakable revenue generator lies in shambles. The future looks bleak and we need an apocryphal and yet believable forecast to induce hope in the feeble heart that now beats in the dying embers of the stock market.

Have we placed too much hope on the concept of having? The answer is definitely yes. This is where the wise words of Rumi came to my mind, when he calls our life “…This existence of more or less is a place of expenditure”.

There are two distinctions to be made to the word 'existence'. The first distinction is that there are other existences possible and next, in Rumi's words 'this existence' means a life of existing in the purely physical realm. This is what most of us do. We are so involved in material well being whether it be our body or the comforts we surround ourselves with under a false pretext of an illusionary satisfaction which inevitably is very short lived. When this phase of temporary pleasure comes to an end there appears a false vacuum which becomes the tool for aggregation of more material and physical comforts. Man is caught in this ever expanding spiral of vacuum that sucks out his true being and leaves him with a sense of despondency and loss. So in the wise words of Rumi, you are expending all the, God given, creative energy in such existence. This is equivalent to having not only expenditure but also a negative cash flow. A negative cash flow or empowering energy crunch, results in us borrowing at a damaging interest rate from scrupulous markets or sourcing from elements dealing in devious energies.
On the contrary if we live a life of conscious presence of our true reality, as an entity that belongs fundamentally to the very source that came from non-existence, we become the conduit of that energy flow. We are then not only in the income mode but in a positive cash flow situation. We become the giver of life.

Love to you all

Obelisks of Heliopolis

The obelisk, called TEJEN in the sacred language of the ancient Egyptians, was a term which was synonymous with "protection" or "defence." The needle of stone had the function of acting as a concentrator of cosmic energy, and through the various symbols of the hieroglyphs channels this energy to provide protection and good energy spectrum for those who enter the temple complex for worship. The word "Obelisk" comes from the Greek obeliskos, meaning a prong for roasting. Hence it is a conduit of cosmic energy to cleanse the accumulated dross of human lives before entering the temple.
It is a stone that is frequently monolithic, of a quadrangular base, placed upright and ending with a pointed top. It was placed in the centre of large open spaces in the temples of the god RA. They arose, by the time of the pre-dynastic period cults, to a great sacred stone which was raised in the Temple of Heliopolis, the "City of the Sun." As with the pyramids, this monument had a primitive relation with the solar cult. As a general rule, obelisks were erected in pairs so that harmonized energy flow between the two could be additive and upward flowing so that when the devotee entered between the two there was a surge of energy from the base chakra to the cosmic portal of the body.
The obelisk is composed of two parts: the body and the pyramidon. The body is a long block of a conic trunk section and the pyramidon symbolizes the rays of the sun. The top is the point of a pyramid formation which crowns the monolith and rested on a base. It was plated in gold; a metal which the Egyptians affirmed was the "flesh of the gods." But more due to the reason that gold is a very good conductor of energy.

A hymn to the Sun God Ra, who also takes the names of Tum and Horus, sings the central role of the cosmic sun:

Hail, thou who art come as Tum, and who hast been the creator of the gods!
Hail, thou who art come as soul of the holy souls in Amenti (kingdom of the dead)!
Hail, supreme among the gods, who by thy beauties- dost illumine the kingdom of the dead!
Hail, thou who comest in radiance and travellest in thy disk!
Hail, greatest of all the gods, bearing rule in the highest, reigning in the nethermost heaven!

We can see the resonance of Gayatri mantra in the above hymn.

Gayatri Mantra is devoted to God Savitr. Savitr refers to Sun. Sun here does not imply the sun of our solar system. Rather it implies a Sun of all suns. Sun that is the source of eternal light that provides life, knowledge and enlightenment. Light that can illuminate the soul.

Love to you all