Newsletter - Past articles

The depth of the faith people have in the Vedas is amazing....There are six aspects in the musical structure of the Vedas....In the evening, going by the same way he heard the same woman's voice....What came first, the seed or the tree?....There are several other secrets of nature which have come to sight only recently....The Vedas are not only precisely accurate in the information they provide..... Vishwamitra, one of the seven Sapta-Rishis, is the seer of the famous Gayatri Mantra.

During childhood the size of the body is small which grows larger in youth. How does the soul accommodate this change in size?...This will contradict our everyday experience that the whole body is conscious of a refreshing coolness when we bathe in the river Ganga....The Upanishads clearly mention the soul as residing in the heart....The whiteness of a piece of cloth remains in it and not beyond....When a person dies, even though his physical body is lying in front of us, it is inert....

Hearing these contradictory statements, the man concluded that the woman was very impatient....We therefore see that the scriptures have described God in both ways....We must realize that even though a wound is harmful for the one possessing it, it is not so for the worm who finds shelter and nourishment....We go to somebody and ask him what is gold?....This is the only faultless theory....Here we see that these are not different mantras giving contradictory versions, but same mantras presenting apparently conflicting perceptions of God.

For the clear understanding of the nature of God, we have to filter out the camouflage....There are adjectives which qualify God using negative terms....God is Truth, Knowledge and Endless....., God, remains unchanged, even as the world changes every moment.....: When you eat food lacking in salt, you can immediately pinpoint its absence. What this means is that you can taste its absence....Prahlada the supreme bhakta had realized that the supreme God was present everywhere....We have now successfully filtered out God from this world.

In the seventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna makes a promise to Arjuna....It is this Maya, which, during creation, takes on the form of the world....The Bhagavad Gita uses the word Maya four times, and its synonym Prakriti more than 20 times...... Inspired by these emotions, we perform more and more karma to bring that which we like near us, and push what we dislike away from us....Maya thus presents the cause as an effect having a nature different from the cause....Even if we have pondered on this question, have we still not failed to overcome our intense physical desires?....In India women are named after Maya, considering it to be sacred.

According to the ancient scriptures, God is at once all the three causes of the world....This would amount to saying that Devadatta eats himself, which is obviously absurd....Therefore, your God is partial....When ornaments melt back into gold, their attributes do not contaminate it....For such skeptics, an example from modern science will suffice....Therefore, here we have an example where an effect doesn’t have a property existing in its cause...

Thus did the compassionate Lord grant the demon Moksha, exactly as He does to high-class yogis....Due to their intense love for Him, all the cowherds boys wanted to face Krishna.....Brahma is the master of intellect. That is why he is shown with a beard, which signifies his experience in worldly matters and wisdom.....Blessed are the ladies who taste the sweet nectar of His lips, the mere memories of which made the young gopis of Vrindavana faint with ecstasy....There is no use displaying one’s mathematical skills in front of a grammarian....Brahma jumped down from his royal chariot and rolled in the dust of Vrindavana, touching each of his four Vedic crowns one by one at Krishna’s feet.....The silence of the Lord speaks louder than His words.

A myth is a broad truth in regard to an event or a set of beings, men, animals or others....This world does not accept dividers, those dividing man from woman, man from animal, or live from dead, nor accepts the scale of time fragmented into past, present and future....The legend of the Great Flood is a part of many other traditions of the ancient world....Virabhadra, Lord Shiva’s son born of his sublime wrath, and one of his guards and generals, is a rare character from Indian mythology in which a weakness, such as anger, sublimates into a divine form....Among traditions related to emergence of Devi a more popular one, perhaps as popular as the one that contends that Devi is beyond time and beyond form.

Too independent to be in a wife’s frame, besides gender they have in them little which is consort-like....They are individualistic in nature, yet their identity better reveals as a group....The broad meaning of the term ‘Mahavidya’ is ‘great knowledge’. In its wider sense the term might be taken to mean complete, supreme, absolute, or ultimate knowledge....Ten mantras are ten manifestations of the deity – the Divine Female....As regards the origin of Mahavidyas, the tradition has five myths in prevalence....Frightened Shiva tried to flee from one direction to other but a burst of laughter obstructed him on every side, and dismayed and frightened he submitted. To further ensure that he did not slip the woman, obviously Sati’s transform, filled all directions around him with ten different forms....Not merely in the Buddhist myths that portray Tara as the goddess of tempestuous seas helping the masses wade their path to safety and redemption, even in Hindu and Jain traditions she is revered as the goddess who guides out of troubles and all kinds of turmoil.

Dalai Lama, an epithet used for the first time in 1578 by the Mongol ruler Altan Khan for Sonam Gyatso, the Third Dalai Lama....The Tibetan mind was thus naturally inclined to the bodhisattva-cult....The first four Dalai Lamas represented only the preparatory stage in the growth of the institution which manifested fully in the Fifth Dalai Lama....Three reincarnate Dalai Lamas died very early, the Ninth dying at the age of just nine....The Thirteenth Dalai Lama, a leader greater than the great, faced the ever gravest challenges posed mainly by Russia, China and Britain designing to grab Tibet.....Dalai Lama represents the continuous flow of the being that the Buddhist tradition identifies as Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara....In the scheme of this essay a brief account of the historic deeds and the life of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso, the One who benefits the world today with his divine presence, had to be its part.

Rama instructed Hanuman to establish the mountain near the banks of the river Yamuna at Vrindavana, where in His Krishna avatara He would play with his bare feet....So than sprung from the feet of Govardhana, the river Ganga, known as Manasi Ganga....Krishna initiated one of the most fascinating of all His Lilas....Overflowing with emotion, the residents of Vrindavana rushed to Him. Many of them embraced Him....God’s Lila doesn’t fulfill only a single purpose....Krishna’s mother Yashoda too got wind of the conversation. Consequently, there started blowing in her mind winds of doubt....Krishna always lives in the eyes of the gopis of Vrindavana....God’s exceptional love for cows is made amply evident in this Lila.

Beauty in context to art is a vision of the mind that the artist translates into a form, or rather into a transform beyond such form’s actual dimensions....The Indian maxim ‘Satyam Shivam Sundaram’ perceives beauty as the manifestation of the ultimate truth and the highest good, and at the same time conjointly all three are the attributes of the Supreme....Indian vision of beauty combining aestheticism with theology deifies beauty and perceives it enshrining all forms, divine or ephemeral, live or dead, or even those that common mind considers awful or ugly....The peacock’s legend is one of its best examples....This magnification of the cult of adornment is obviously metaphoric....Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra gave to the Indian art, especially temple-sculptures, across the land for many centuries its timeless imagery thriving with the vigour of life.

The factum of Vishnu’s incarnation as Rama has been interpreted in terms of Rama’s act of eliminating Ravana....She has not only kept to the right track Indian womanhood, affording it the most perfect model....Sita, the term literally meaning ‘furrow’, the line made by plough, is the Vedic name of the goddess associated with the ploughed fields....It was for her emergence from fire that Sita is sometimes alluded to as Agnija....This gives Sita her name Raktaja, one born of blood.....Sita represents absolute devotion, unshakable faith, chastity, service, constant companionship and a desire to help accomplish his cause, besides her unique divinity with which blends the highest kind of womanhood....When Rama feared that the forest life, and that too for fourteen years, would be difficult for Sita, she relieves him of his reluctance by telling him that astrologers, considering the position of planets at the time of her birth, had predicted that she would pass a part of her life in the forest.

Light is the endless celebration, the man’s as also nature’s....The so far known earliest text that alludes to celebrating a night with multitudinous lights – a kind of the festival of light, is the Kama-Sutra by sage Vatsyayana....Some astrological studies have established that the day of Rama’s return to Ayodhya was the same as the one on which Dipawali is celebrated....The Skanda Purana links Dipawali celebrations with the destruction of the demon king Bali and Vishnu’s incarnation as Vamana, the Dwarf....celebrations stretch into a group of at least five minor festivals and thus Dipawali is a festival of composite nature. The first of them is Dhana-Terasa....Lakshmi is unanimously revered as the presiding deity of Dipawali.... Dipawali begins its rituals with the joint worship of Lakshmi and Ganesh, one representing the primordial energy and the other who channeled it into creative process by controlling detriments.

Barahmasa, is the ‘songs of twelve months'....Inter-action-reaction of nature’s phenomena and human emotions.... The classification of the annual cycle into six ritus was more sensitive and minute. It was around then that a kind of inter-relationship between the changes of nature and man’s emotional world was first recorded.....Whatever their source, the Great Epics are the earliest reported poetry to comprise season descriptions....The passage begins with the description of the river’s beauty to which is added the description of Basant and Rama’s love-longings....Nature description is the core of many of Kalidasa’s works – Kumarasambhava, Meghdoot, Raghuvansa among others; however it evolves in its fullest accomplished form in the Ritu-samhara.....Not only literature, miniature painting and even music have resorted to the Barahmasa model for seeking in it narrative continuity, vivid imagery, intense emotions.

One should never cultivate the habit of receiving too much respect or honor....It was with reluctance that I gave away my delicate young daughter to him in marriage....Sati Devi, the wife of Shiva, observed numerous airplanes carrying heavily ornamented beautiful women along with their spouses....One should never go the houses of those who look upon the visitor with a frown and angry looks....She burst out into copious tears and with her body trembling looked askance at Shiva as if to burn him down....Concentrating on the lotus feet of her beloved Lord Shiva, she became completely absorbed and lost track of everything else....However the gods and sages were still fearful of facing Shiva....It will find rest only on the shore of absolute faith.

Elevation of the humblest, the fish, the most ignored, the tortoise, and the man's headstrong antagonist, the boar, first three of Vishnu's ten incarnations, to the status of the Supreme Being, not only generated reverence for all beings but also helped cosmic unity and equilibrium....The concept of incarnation has its origin in the Rig-Vedic mysticism....Texts have classified incarnations into three types....Significantly, world literature, to include Greek, Latin, European, Babylonian, and South Asian among others, abounds in tales of Great Flood with someone like Manu escaping it under Divine commandment. The Holy Bible (Genesis, Chapters 6, 7 and 8) in Noah's episode seems to recount an identical flood and emergence of God instructing Noah to make an ark....In his Buddhavatara Vishnu adopts an altogether different path to uphold 'dharma' - righteousness....

The dark waters of the child Vishnu’s myth transform into the grown-up Vishnu’s ocean of milk abounding in unique radiance..... Hence, Vishnu is not a mere sanctum deity or worshippers’ idol but also a deep cosmo-metaphysical principle that defines on one hand the principle of evolution, and on the other, manifests the Rig-Vedic theory of God’s oneness and unity of the cosmos....He is the only divinity whom the Rig-Veda seeks to personalise....His seated postures are rare except sometimes as in his manifestation as Yoga-Narayana, or in shrines like one at Badrinatha....Vishnu is believed to have abandoned Baikuntha and migrated to Tirumala, a hill-range in south India.

Even after having atoned for a sin, and knowing very well that committing a sin is against our interest, we commit those very sins again and again....Many rivers cannot purify a pot of wine....Even after performing the atonements prescribed in the Vedic Scriptures, our mind again runs to towards sin....Thus the messengers of Shri Narayana convincingly explained to the Yamadutas the essence of 'Param-Dharma', meaning the 'Higher-Dharma'.....An extreme sinner is unable to fulfill the stipulated time allotted to him...Paramhamsas (ascetics of the highest order) are exalted people who have no taste for material enjoyment, but constantly drink the sweet fragrant honey of the Lord's lotus feet....The purpose of life is not just to create more good karmas, but to terminate karmas once and for all by transcending the entire karmic process....Engaged in karma over numerous lifetimes, by our very nature we are unable to place faith in any means which doesn't require a heavy dose of karma.

Sudama is one of the three names that the Vaishnava tradition inseparably clubs with the name of Krishna, two other being Radha and Balarama....As the Bhagavata Purana has it, one among the close friends of Krishna was a poor Brahmin....His devoted and faithful wife would bear any affliction but not that her husband went to bed hungry....Sudama was reluctant to disclose for his humble four handfuls of beaten rice could not be a gift to him who was the master of all three worlds....The Krishna-Sudama episode reveals strong mysticism..... Krishna was the Supreme Self present in all beings, and accordingly, Sudama was the individual self, a part of the Supreme Self, now separated from it but pining ever after to re-unite.

A postal address is not Mira's home-address....Mira was wedded to One Infinite who manifested in human, personal, beatific and joyous form of Krishna.....Mira's mother smiled at her innocence and picked the idol of Krishna and giving it to her said that he was her groom.....She yearns for Krishna but these are her own yearnings, not Krishna's.....Krishna had taken on him poison's evil effect with the result that his image turned blue.....Now her devotional life was in full swing. She moved in sadhus' company, danced and sang in temples.....When in her forties, Mira came to Dwarika. Now every moment of her life was devoted to Krishna.....Those who had seen her entering the temple never saw her coming out.....The moment Mira met Girdhara, sorrows vanished and happiness emerged, all agitations of mind and body extinguished, and the cycle of birth and death is destroyed.

A fusion of contradictions is the essence of Kali's being, a mysticism which no other divinity is endowed with....In Kali's invocation, the devotee stands face to face with darkness....As suggests the term Kali, she appears to be the feminine aspect of Kala – Time, that being invincible, immeasurable and endless has been venerated as Mahakala – the Transcendental Time, represented in Indian metaphysical and religious tradition by Shiva....Skanda Purana links Kali's origin to Parvati. Initially Parvati had dark complexion for which Shiva used to tease her every now and then....Shiva asked her to compete him in dance to which Kali agreed....By nature, Kali is always hungry and never sated. She laughs so loud that all three worlds shake with terror....Guhyakali, literally meaning 'Secret Kali', is Kali's esoteric aspect, which only those well versed in the Kali tradition know....Yoga perceives Kali as Kundalini Shakti....Kali's disruptive behaviour, unkempt appearance, confronting activities and involvement with death and defilement are what better suit Tantra, especially the Vamachara Tantrism....To the Tantrika, Kali's black is symbolic of disintegration; as all colours disappear in black, so merge into her all names and forms.

A ritual in temple or at home, celebrating a birth or marriage or mourning a death, sari has its own sanctity on all occasions....Sari is an imaginative wear which the wearer drapes to her fancy using it to add volume to her frail figure or relieve it of its awkward bulk....Whatever the early Sanskrit denominations, the vernacular term 'sari', among others denoting Indian textiles, had evolved with specificity by the 14th century, if not before....Mirabai alludes to term 'sari' in her verses....It was Indian cinema that led sari to its all time heights of popularity.

The young Nanak was often found engaged in cosmic questions and fundamentals of life....Mardana was fascinated by Nanak's sweet melodious voice, charming manners, human concerns, spiritual fervour and soul-touching quality of his verses....His clothes lying on the river bank led his kin and others to conclude that he had drowned.....Guru Nanak gave up his job and distributed all his belongings to poor....He sought the simplest possible path of 'Nam-simaran' – commemoration of His name, which beyond form and rites enabled man to enter into intimate communion with God. 'Those who condemn God's creatures condemn God Himself' is the underlying tone of many of his verses.