We Are What We Are

It sounds pretentious, speaking of religion and spirituality, but I think this is a way of looking around and inward, and taking stock of where we are and what we are: and accepting that we are what we are, of course, and getting on with our life- perhaps something will  change from what we have seen...

1. How does it feel to go offline for a whole month?- no more: "... a todo list that goes for pages, a thousand emails to respond to, hundreds of blog posts to read, twenty open tabs, a dozen IM windows, a text message to answer, a Twitter stream to catch up on"; Aaron Swartz loves his one month life offline:- "... don’t know how I’m going to carve a life away from the world’s constant demands and distractions. I don’t know how I’m going to balance all the things I want to do with the pressures and responsibilities they bring. But after my month off, I do know one thing: I can’t go on like this. So I’m damn well going to try."- www.aaronsw.com.

Let's give it a thought- what is online for us? Can we get offline from the distractions and demands of the world?

Aaron Swartz writes, "...simply inwardly thinking I could do more than was expected of me — is the only thing that’s gotten me anywhere in life. I see no reason to stop now." Now, where do we begin?

2. Remember Suelo- the man who lives without money? He has a website: Living Without Money. His FAQs are interesting:

Why Do You Live Without Money? (A Biographical Intro)
Do You Think Money Is Evil?
What Do You Do For Food?
What do you do for shelter?
What do you do for transportation?

Interestingly, he has a quote of Gandhiji in his website: "Possession implies provision for the future. A seeker after Truth, a follower of the law of Love, cannot hold anything against tomorrow"

That is what I call courage.

3. Right livelihood does not mean you need to disengage from life- some of us are so totally engaged with what goes around us, we are almost selfless. Like Malalai Joya, TIME has a video on her (runs for five minutes plus)

4. Here's a bracing thought for the day: Do understand that what you think to be the world isyour own mind:

‘I am’ is an ever-present fact, while ‘I am created’ is an idea. Neither God nor the universe have come to tell you that they have created you. The mind obsessed by the idea of causality invents creation and then wonders ‘who is the creator?’ The mind itself is the creator. Even this is not quite true, for the created and its creator are one. The mind and the world are not separate. Do understand that what you think to be the world is your own mind.

- Nisargadatta Maharaj.

5. Love is healing- people with Alzheimer's disease that are loved and cared for show as good results as people on medication- Science Daily

6. Speaking of illness and medicine, here is someone that says it is all in the mind- even madness.

'Madness is a disease of the will, of judgment. That is what is impaired. And so, in there, along with so much else, your will was taken away, like a pen, because you could not be trusted with it. Yet your will is the thing that makes you feel human. Without it you cannot be well, which is why no one in there really got well, or even, perhaps, significantly better.'

-Norah Vincent quoted in Philosophy and Life

Do we will madness in that giving it away is what makes it mad? Interesting thought. So sanity would be engagement with what is in and around us, is that so?

7. I don't know whether you want to hear Buckminster Fuller talk about love: anyway, here it is-



I heard him say love is all-embracing and makes no exceptions: would love to get hold of a transcription of the talk.

8. Living in India, should we not speak of Temples? Here is a blog on temples:

Thiruppurambiyam is the temple you need to go to if you are in litigation.

Be happy, no matter what.