Vignaana Bhairava Tantra Link

Instinctively, I was searching for Christopher Calder, the man who wrote wonderful stuff on Meditation on home.att.net/`meditation. But that page is not visible or taken off the att.net web site, perhaps owing to controversies.

Then, I ' googled' for Christopher Calder. There were some meditation related web sites and blogs he posted his writings on. Here is on. And here, there is the much sought after, and less available
"Osho's discourses on Vignana Bhairava Tantra', the book of secrets, 112 in all.

http://www.meditationiseasy.com/mCorner/techniques/Vigyan_bhairav_tantra/introduction.htm

4 debts we are born with

The great human debt
,Tejinder Narang,


We may be rich and famous but mega debtors we are. It is not a financial or a monetary liability but a very subtle debt that is debited the moment we are born. The arrears need to be squared off during this lifetime through Dharma, the principle of righteousness as recorded in all religious scriptures. Our scriptures mention four types of debts (karza or rinn in Hindi) that a man must settle in life.

Pitri rinn (debt to parent): As small children we are weaklings — need attention and support all time. We are reared by our parents /elders with love and affection. As we grow up and turn out to be stronger, parents age and become physically weak. We are therefore obliged to attend to their welfare in old age. Even if a person gives charities of million of dollars, but neglects old parents/elders — Pitri debt is not paid off.

Dev rinn (debt to gods): The gods mean the five elements of Nature; the life sustaining forces — water, air, fire, earth, ether (intelligence) and all that is edible. They are the energies of life in this world and it becomes obligatory upon all men that they contribute to the welfare of this material plane, including one's family and society , by moral integrity and sense of discrimination. All the positive contribution that is made in this world by all of us means mitigation of debit of Dev rinn.

Guru rinn (debt to master): Spiritual mentor who leads us to the path of spirituality or moksha. In this life riddled with maya and illusion, master leads us from spiritual darkness to enlightenment. We have to pay off this debt by bhakti — meditation and living a life as instructed by him.

Brham rinn (debt to lord): At birth, life is purity personified and full of innocence. After childhood — when we acquire worldly knowledge, power of reasoning and logic , manipulation of intellect and mind — we get debased from the spiritual point of view. The life of spotlessness gets spotted. Debt to lord is created. This can be reimbursed by being pure again.

It is through the grace of guru that spiritual sheet can be made spotless. Arrears to lord can be repaid by bhakti blessed by guru. Said Jesus, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me”.

Guru Nanak Sahib describes the essence of divine realisation in one word — ‘Gurprasad' — the one realised through grace (prasad) of guru.

Discovering your 'Swa Dharma'

Truly follow your ‘truest interest’ !
---------------------------------------------

Discovering one’s ‘truest interest’ , swadharma or that field where one’s talents can be put to best use — this is the privilege of the fortunate few. Most persons — even those who desire to excel and who may also have a fair idea of where their talents truly lie — often become conformists, driven by various forces within and without. They become ‘square pegs in round holes’ or vice versa.

Even with regard to many cases, where the aspirant musters the needed courage and conviction to actually put his talents to best use, certain practical impediments could arise. One is with regard to those cases, where the seeker could himself feel that after all, wisdom and light had dawned on him a bit too late.

In the above regard, various true-life examples would serve to motivate and inspire. Rukmini Devi, the great Bharatanatyam exponent, had her first exposure to dance — that too to Russian ballet — when she was well over 20 years of age. Only in her 30th year, she first witnessed a Bharatanatyam performance.

However, the fire within soon lit itself into flames of great creativity , with her founding the great school of dance and music — Kalakshetra — and also going on to give virtuoso performances and choreographing great dance dramas. The rest is history.

Somerset Maugham’s portrayal of the life of the great artist Paul Gauguin, through his character , Charles Strickland, is also a reminder to many that often it is never too late.

Another issue, which could deter even the realised soul, would be the stark realities of mundane living and various commitments and obligations , which one could get entangled in. It is in this regard that various exhortations to persistence would spring to life, not as mere writings, but as practical tools to be applied for tangible results.

Clarity of priorities through that abiding wish power (iccha sakthi), exhortations, as in the Bible (Mathew: 7-7 ,8 and Luke: 11-9 ,10) that for one who knocks , it shall be opened and he that seeks shall find — these would uplift the sagging spirit “when things seem worst” or when “everything goes dead wrong” . Problems have a way of disappearing in such situations!

Indeed, the resourceful, persistent and the privileged seeker combines within himself all the necessary virtues that would enable him not only to discover his ‘true interest’ but also to work upon and follow this truly to its ultimate fulfillment!

Ed & Deb Shapiro's ' Be the Change ! '

Pain flowers kind fruit

In the days of the Buddha, a group of monks wanted to get far away from the madding crowds of cities like Pataliputra to meditate. The Buddha promised them such a place in a forested glade where they could live and work on their liberation undisturbed by human distractions.

The monks went to the tranquil forest laden with fruit and fresh water springs and settled down to meditate. However, unbeknown to the monks there lived a gang of tree spirits in that very patch of wood.

The sprites were most upset about the monks coming and making themselves at home in their beloved sacred grove of trees. Now as you know, trees spirits can be extremely mean and menacing when they want to scare someone out of their wits! So they did everything in their power to spook off the monks from their meditation seats.
The poor monks hurried back to the Tathagata and complained loudly about the antics of the tree spirits.

They requested the Buddha to recommend another, safer haven for meditation. But that wasn’t to be. “Instead the Buddha taught them a meditation practice of loving kindness, or metta in Pali ,” write the eminent self-development experts Ed and Deb Shapiro in Be the change: How meditation can transform you and the world, “which develops loving kindness toward everyone, including ourselves and our enemies . And then he sent them back to the forest. His famous last words were this ` is the only protection you will need.’”

Thinking the Buddha must be wanting to test them, the monks grudgingly went back to the glade, sat down and began practising what the Master had taught and it worked! The tree spirits no longer had any effect. For all their antics, the meditators just kept sitting there and beaming out loving kindness.

The moral of the story: the spirits were won over by the waves of compassion radiating from the robed ones and, far from chasing the bonzes away, the same nasties that once had been so ferocious now became docile disciples!

According to the Shapiros the tree spirits stand for everything that goes on in our minds — all the doubts, fears, anger and negativities — that keep addling our minds. The Buddha’s point was that loving kindness has the power to overcome all manner of inner monsters and to lead us to a true heart opening, to prove that love is stronger than any opposing force. Seeing and knowing pain, we embrace and actualise kindness.

Mind of a Sage : Zen 12.May.2010

May 12, 2010
---------------------------
I enjoy my lifelong path
Between misty vines and rocky caves
In the wilds there's room to spare
And time to accompany clouds
The road doesn't reach the world
Only the mindless can climb
I sit alone nights on a couch of stone
And the round moon comes up
Cold Mountain

- Han Shan

-----------------------------------------------------
May 9, 2010

The mind of the sage is
Empty and calm,
Profoundly calm,
Dealing with the world
Harmoniously
Like bellows taking in air,
Like pipes containing music.

- Chen Ting-Van

----------------------------------------------

May 12, 2010
---------------------------
I enjoy my lifelong path
Between misty vines and rocky caves
In the wilds there's room to spare
And time to accompany clouds
The road doesn't reach the world
Only the mindless can climb
I sit alone nights on a couch of stone
And the round moon comes up
Cold Mountain

- Han Shan

-----------------------------------------------------

May 5, 2010


Rain

I've heard that Sagara's rain, like truth,
Delights each heaven in different shape,
And now here's proof: I watch the rain
Stamp rings on water, shower jewels on lilies.

- Kokan shiren (1278-1346)
-----------------------------------------------------------

A short hisotry of delusion

A short history of delusion
,Mukul Sharma,
Save Print EMail Share Comment Text:

The rise of behaviourism last century rose as a reaction against what mainstream scientists perceived psychology to be till then: a waffling kind of soft pseudo-science whose practitioners had gone woolly in the head and were generally faffing around the place.

Luckily for them, however, Pavlov had just shown dogs could be made to salivate not just by the sight of food but even by some stimulus that was associated with food. Here at last was some solid empirical methodology ! Meaning, in order for psychology not to be seen as a fringe member of the elite hard science club, they realised their theories needed to be supported by experimental data obtained through careful and controlled observation and measurement of behaviour.

Then they started going over the top. They became concerned mainly with observable external activity since only these could be scientifically quantified — as opposed to internal events like thinking, judgment, feelings, etc, which were subjective and could not.

Maintaining there was no difference between the learning which takes place in humans and that in other animals they concluded all behaviour, no matter how complex, could be reduced to a simple stimulus-response association. In other words, when we are born our minds are a blank slate and everything thereafter is learnt from the environment through the process of conditioning.

“Give me a dozen healthy infants , well-formed and my own specified world to bring them up in,” declared John Watson, a man who dominated behavioural psychology at one time, “and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents , penchants, tendencies, abilities , vocations, and race of his ancestors.”

Finally, they denied the entire existence of anything like mind, free will or consciousness even though each of them had memories , made decisions and dreamt on a regular basis. This instantly devalued what should have been considered senior and of primary importance. And while it may sound ludicrous, it's believed, promoted and applied in many theories and methods used in society today. Is it any wonder then why, instead of embracing a proper, empowering and correct philosophy, totalitarians simply adore modern psychology?

(cosmix) Very simple ' creation' story !

A very simple creation story
-------------------------------

Scientists rubbish the creationists' argument about the origin of life, and human beings in particular, along two fronts: the practical and the theoretical. The first refers to the paleontological evidence and the second to the theory of evolution.

While the practical refutation is pretty watertight with fossil and other geologic records abounding, the case for evolution can sometimes be perceived as resting on shakier ground with creationists constantly trying to pick holes in some still not fully understood aspects of evolution.

But now it seems science has finally managed to win on that front too. It's because of an ongoing experiment called Avida, developed at the Digital Evolution Laboratory at Michigan State University in the US.

Avida is an artificial life software platform which is designed to study the evolutionary biology of self-replicating and evolving computer programs or digital organisms that starts with the representation of a simple life form and then applies Darwin's laws to it.

The program allows these life forms to mutate with the inferior mutations dying out and the superior ones surviving. Over the years, Avida has shown that the mechanics of evolution can by itself provide a race of creatures with an ever-improving gene pool that slowly improves a species to a very high level. And this happens not by divine intervention, but by simple chance as a blind response to a hostile environment.

As Robert Pennock, a philosopher at Michigan State puts it: “Avida is not a simulation of evolution; it is an instance of it. All the core parts of the Darwinian process are there. These things replicate , they mutate, they are competing with one another. The very process of natural selection is happening there.”

So it appears evolution is a powerful and validated mechanism. But consider this scenario. What if an Avida like experiment was allowed to continue till it produced an artificial life form that became sentient in the end like us? If such entities could think, it's not improbable that they too might one day ascribe their development to evolution and not to some designer working behind the scenes.

They would be right of course yet they would also be wrong. For we know don't we that they actually arose from the minds of a bunch of scientists in a university lab during the course of a long-term experiment . Just another argument.