Let's think : By Dr.King, Swami Satyapriya

[Quick links] [Pause]   All of us routinely employ this even without being aware of it. I had a student whose name was some difficult to pronounce Arabic word. That was the first time I was hearing such a name. I had tough time remembering his name.  So, once I asked him what that name really means. He not only gave me its meaning, but also told me some story from Quran related to that name. I remembered that name for a long time, after that!

[Quick links] [Pause]     UFO sighting, purported incidents of aliens from outer space visiting the earth, and so on, have always intrigued modern humanity.  Many interesting and popular movies have been shot based on these themes.

[Quick links] [Pause]   I always had lot of interest in the Vedas. But my focus has always been on the Upanishad part that deals with philosophic issues covered by the Vedas. Being a person whose main access to Vedas is through printed books or electronic media, I did not have much need to remember things. My computer could do that job for me 😉

[Quick links] [Pause]           Contrary to what most people believe, Yoga is not all about ‘twisting and turning’😉. The body postures that are most popular as Yoga today are only a small part of Yoga. The real Yoga is about how we can modulate our minds to achieve various ends.

[Quick links] [Pause]   Do you remember how you used to memorize a nursery rhyme in your younger days? If the rhyme is a bit too long, you probably split it into fragments, went back and forth uttering the words in these fragments, probably even repeating some of the words, and so on. You kept repeating this process for a while. That seemed to help you in remembering the rhyme.

[Quick links] [Pause]   We were discussing various reasons why Vedic Indians never wrote down the massive texts namely the Vedas. They chose to orally transmit them from generation to generation. No matter why they did that, it was a herculean effort considering the size of these texts. Added to this, there were stringent restrictions on exact ways of pronouncing the Mantras, the elaborate liturgy and so on. They appear to have managed to preserve all these things almost unchanged over thousands of years without resorting to writing them down. How did they manage to do that?

[Quick links] [Pause]        In the previous episode we discussed whether the ancient Indians who propagated the Vedas were illiterates. This doubt arises since Vedas were never written down and were passed down from generation to generation in a purely oral tradition. What could be the reason?

[Quick links] [Pause]   Just imagine that some day, not in the distant future, our entire earth gets completely destroyed either due to some natural calamity or some man-made disaster, wiping out the entire humanity. And some alien lands on this earth either by accident or as part of his exploratory expedition. What would he find here? He will definitely find lot of RCC structures, well laid roads, remnants of our electronic and other mechanistic gadgets.    But he would find no evidence of our vast knowledge which were recorded and stored in our computers. All those hard drives and CDs would have been burnt to ashes. We are also not in the habit of erecting stone inscriptions the way our forefathers did. Our books and other such storage devices are highly perishable. What do you think the alien would conclude?

[Quick links] [Pause]       Many people are curious to know what happens when one meditates for a prolonged duration on a regular basis. Will we experience God? Will there be an extreme ecstatic experience? Does one attain special psychic powers? These are some of the questions people often ask.

[Quick links] [Pause]   Sometimes, we have a tendency to associate importance with size. If a Guru has billions of followers then he must be a great Guru; if someone has millions of followers on the social media then whatever that person says should be important; if a religious scripture is voluminous, then what it contains must be the truth, and so on. But that is not necessarily true. I sometimes joke that greater the following a Guru has, more mediocre he is 😉 You find more people at the base of the intellectual pyramid!