The main goal of life is being fully present in every moment and let go of obsessive thoughts. The National Science Foundation estimates that the average person has about 12,000 thoughts per day and approximately 4.4 million thoughts per year. We spend most of our time thinking the same repetitive and often negative thoughts instead of savoring each morsel that life has to offer. 95% of our thoughts are exactly the same day after day, and they keep us imprisoned into our minds.

Most of our time, we live in a fantasy world created by our imagination which constantly revives images from our past or creates visions of future. With advancement of modern technology, we spend hours staring at the TV sets, browsing the Internet, checking our emails, or immersed into virtual reality.

Are you fully present and awaken?

Waves rise from the ocean and return to the ocean. A wave remains a wave until it real­izes its true nature that it is not a wave but water.  Similarly, when one realizes that he or she is not this physical body but the spiritual being residing inside the physical body,  one transcends physical body and immediately be­comes one with the Spirit. As a physical body, one is mortal, limited by a form, with color, gender, and temperament. But as a part of the Spirit, one is free, immortal, and limit­less. This is called Nirvana or salvation.

From Gita Chapters

The image is based on “The Great Wave of Kanagawa” – a woodblock print by the Japanese artist Hokusai (1829–32).

Mold your face into Buddha’s face.

Form your body into Buddha’s body.

Shape your soul into the image of the Buddha.

Smile.

The seed of the Buddha-essence is blossoming.

Emanate your inner Buddha nature.

Radiate light, bliss, and joy.

Be fully present in the moment.

Breathe in happiness and breathe out love and compassion.

You are on the path to awakening…

Before Sokei-an came to America, when he was just beginning his study of Zen, his teacher arranged a meeting for him with Soyen Shaku.

The master, having heard he was a wood carver, asked, “How long have you been studying art?”

“Six years,” replied Sokei-an.

“Carve me a Buddha,” said Soyen Shaku.

Sokei-an returned a couple of weeks later with a wooden statue of the Buddha.

“What’s this?” exclaimed Shaku, and threw it out the window into a pond.

It seemed unkind, Sokei-an would later explain, but it was not: “He’d meant for me to carve the Buddha in myself.”

From “One Bird, One Stone: 108 American Zen Stories“ by Sean Murphy.

The Question of the Day

How can we carve the Buddha within? 

According to Georg Lichtenberg, a German scientist (1742 –1799), “knowledge is a tool, not a purpose.” People try to understand God, birth, death, eternity, reincarnation, spirit, and meaning of life, but these things are not open for understanding. “People know so little because they spend time on insignificant things such as how water becomes frozen, or a new theory of numbers, or how viruses can transmit illnesses.” (Georg Lichtenberg, “The Waste Books.”)

Many people consider that the most important thing in life is knowledge.  Our educational system is based on transferring information to our children and testing them on memorization and retention of facts, dates, numbers, formulas, quotes, and literary excerpts.

Lichtenberg underlines that “how to live your life is the only real knowledge.”  All scholastic knowledge seekers remind Lichtenberg a butterfly which flies to the flame of a candle, burns, and extinguishes the light.

Lichtenberg suggests that “we ought not to lie down to sleep without being able to say we have learned something that day,”  but what knowledge could be considered worthy and important?

Step 1. “The advancement of our scientific or otherwise useful knowledge.” Mere acquisition and collection of data are not as important as expansion, creativity, imagination, productivity, composition, improvement, amelioration, and progression.

Before going to sleep, ponder whether you created something new and useful today.  If not, think about what you could do tomorrow.   

Step 2. ”The rectification of an error in which we have long been involved.” 

Ask yourself a question: how can we overcome my weaknesses and errors?

Step 3. “The acquisition of certainty in many things about which we were for long uncertain and of a clear conception of that which was unclear to us.”
Try to recognize what you don’t understand in your life which hinders your progress.

Step 4. “Knowledge of important truths.”  People are so overwhelmed with all these insignificant events, encounters, and conversations.  We should learn to recognize the most important truth about our lives and follow it through without wasting our time on dealing with problems which are not essential for our physical, spiritual, and moral development.

Live a purposeful life. Don’t waste your time on listening for hours to news, reading newspapers, watching mindless movies and shows, recycling knowledge produced by others. Be creator, not only a consumer. Each day create something new, produce something extraordinary, change environment you live in for the better, and discover beauty around you.

How do we perceive blind people?  We usually imagine them confined in a pitch-black universe, but as Jorges Luis Borges writes, “the world of the blind is not the night that people imagine” (a lecture “Blindness” from “Everything and Nothing”).  The blind people perceive the whole symphony of sounds and able to “see” with their ears and hands.

The latest developments in neuro-technology help to create life changing applications for blind people.  I am sure you remember a blind Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge in Star Trek, who is wearing a visor (interestingly, created from an air filter of the Honda automobile). In the later movies, he has ocular prosthetic implants.

However, even sci-fi movies couldn’t imagine that humans could see with their tongues. The Brainport Vision Device enables blind people to perceive the environment with their tongues.  A camera is mounted on the head of a blind person and signals are transmitted to a credit-card size plate to the tongue. Hundreds of electrodes tingle the tongue and send signals to the brain. The brain has to be retrained to interpret shape, size, location and motion of objects in their environment. Watch an amazing video of Erik Weihenmayer. With the vision device, he can read, walk, and even rock climb.

A company called Second Sight has developed a retinal implant that gives blind people a limited degree of vision. This device consists of a digital camera built into a pair of glasses, a video-processing microchip, a radio transmitter and a receiver, and a retinal implant with 60 electrodes. I am sure in the near future the bionic retinas will look similar to Geordi La Forge’s ocular prosthetic implants.

T.V.Raman, a Google engineer who lost his eyesight at the age of 14, developed a Rubik’s Cube covered in Braille, a software program that can read aloud complex mathematical formulas and a version of Google’s search service tailored for blind users. Now, he is modifying a touch-screen phone for blind people.

The bionic vision brings light to blind people and the new applications make computers and cell phones more accessible for them.

The question of the day:

Have you ever tried to walk blindfolded? 

Ajit Kambil defines five stages in development of the online applications:  Web 1.0 – The Basic Publishing and Transaction Medium; Web 2.0 – The Social and Co-created Web; Web 3.0 – The Semantic and Intelligent Web; Web 4.0 – The Mobile, Machine and Object Web, and Web 4.0 – the Sensory-Emotive Web.  Today I would like to discuss the Sensory-Emotive Web which represents  the future of  web development.

Soon we’ll have computers greeting us, discussing news, reminding us about our schedule for the day and helping us with our work.  Do you remember a computer Hal 9000 from a movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”?

“Have you been doing some more work? . . . May I see them? . . . That’s a very nice rendering, Dave. I think you’ve improved a great deal. Can you hold it a bit closer? . . .

“By the way. do you mind if I ask you a personal question? . . . Well, forgive me for being so inquisitive, but during the past few weeks I’ve wondered whether you might be having some second thoughts about the mission. . . Well…it’s rather difficult to define. Perhaps I’m just projecting my own concern about it…”  [The quotes are from "2011: A Space Odyssey"]

The great example of Sensory-Emotive Web is a website “We Feel Fine.”  Enter the website, click on one of the floating bubbles, and you will get a quote from a recent blog entry from around the world. The color of the particles corresponds with the type of expressed feeling – bright colors express happy thoughts and dark particles represent negative emotions. The diameter of the particle represents the length of the sentence.  When I look at these swirling colorful particles, I just wonder how many people emotionally rely on the Internet and send to the digital void their inner most sacred feelings and thoughts.

“I feel very fortunate… It’s a perfect time to embark on this new chapter of my life…I feel exhausted… Good friends are like stars, you don’t always see them, but you know they’re always there.”  [The quotes from a website “We Feel Fine”]

Why do people write blogs?

The personal blog entries are exposed to millions of strangers, crawling data-collecting search engines, and spammers. So why do people write blogs?  Why do they pour incredibly personal details of their lives into cyberspace in a feeble hope to receive several comments from complete strangers?

I would say that there are several reasons for writing blogs: pleasure, therapy, education, artistic expression, and business.

Pleasure – some people just like to write and share their ideas for free.

Therapy – some people use blogs as a therapeutic tool helping them to overcome sadness, loneliness,

betrayal, broken hear, terrible illness, loss of a loved one, etc.

Education – some people use blogs as an educational tool.

Artistic expression – some artists, graphic designers, and photographers are using blogs to post their creative work.

Business – there are some people who get paid for writing blogs, and a blog can be a marketing tool helping to promote ideas, products, and brands.

Blogs make the Internet more personal, touchy-feely, and informative.  Some of the most popular blog posts are usually filled with strong personal emotions. People don’t like to read boring college textbook-like blog entries. It’s predicted that in the future the Internet would be even more emotionally driven and personal.

The question of the day:

What do you think about the sensory-emotive web?

Why are we praying or meditating? Why are we looking for spiritual teachers, gurus, and enlightened beings? Science tries to convince us that all our religious experiences are controlled by several areas of the brain that form the biological foundations of religious belief.  Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Canada created a “God helmet,” an experimental apparatus that contains electrodes which create a weak but complex magnetic field over the brain’s right-hemisphere parietal and temporal lobes.

The temporal lobes control our auditory and visual perceptions, problem solving, memory, language, and emotional responses. The temporal lobes stimulated by magnetic fields create illusions as being in the presence of a spirit, having a profound feeling of cosmic bliss, out-of-body or near-death experiences, being one with God, but much more often, it’s a simple sense of a presence, or a vision of an angel, or a deceased being, and other paranormal phenomena.

Does the “God helmet” prove that all our spiritual experiences are mere illusions created by disruption of electrical activity in our brain? Could we consider that the temporal lobes are the origin of our spiritual experiences?  Or maybe the “God helmet” only confirms that some individuals with highly developed temporal lobes have a capability to feel the energy of immaterial entities and communicate with them.

Not all people susceptible to experience a presence of God even with the helmet. Richard Dawkins, famous for his criticism of creationism and intelligence design, volunteered to participate in one of Michael Persinger’s experiments – in an attempt to experience God, but felt only being “pleasantly relaxed.” He was “deeply disappointed” that he did not experience “communion with the universe.” Michael Persinger explained that there is a continuum of the temporal lobe sensitivity from people who are not sensitive to those who are very sensitive, an extreme being a temporal epileptic. In the case of Dawkins, his temporal sensitivity is much lower than of the other people. (From BBC science documentary series Horizon.)

Pehr Granqvis, a psychologist at Uppsala University in Sweden,  used a double-blind to replicate Michael Persinger’s experiment in 2004. Granqvist found that the magnetic fields had no effect on the subjects, so maybe viewing the helmet as a high-tech gizmo and Michael Persinger’s questioners caused highly sensitive people to have strange paranormal experiences. However, Persinger argues that he uses double-blind protocols and the Swedish group did not expose the subjects to magnetic fields for long enough to produce a paranormal effect.

This is yet another example of a constant conflict between science and religion.

The Stone Meditation Exercise

In Jewish mystical tradition, stones represent eternal knowing and remembering. It is customary to place stones on a grave site in memory of the deceased.  In the legend of Prometheus, “begetter of the human race, stones  retain a human redolence.”  Stones have a close spiritual connection to humans and display a twofold movement of rising and falling. Humans are born of God and return to God.  Stones fall from Haven and once transmuted, they rise to the sky (Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionary of Symbols).

Find a stone which has an unusual shape or color, is pleasant on touch or has some meaning for you.  Sit comfortably in front of the stone. Make a conscious effort to let go of any preconceived knowledge about stones in general. Imagine that you are looking at it as a curious child for the first time and perceiving it as an amazing object without any name, label or meaning.  At some point, you will feel that the stone and you are united with one energy field.  Feel this oneness with all objects, creatures and human beings. We are all ONE.

Your questions of the day:

In the future, can scientists create artificial intelligence capable to have the same religious experiences as humans do?

“When you look for the bad, expecting it, you will get it. When you know you will find the good—you will get that….” This is a quote from “Pollyanna” (1913) by the American writer Eleanor H. Porter. The Pollyanna principle or Pollyannaism became a derogatory term for dreamers and excessive optimists, but what if we all use the Glad Game as a survival tool in our everyday stressful life? The Glad Game consists of finding something about everything to be glad about–no matter what it is. The Glad Game uses the positive affirmations teaching us to retrain our brains and substitute angry and bitter thoughts with loving and optimistic ones. Every cloud has a silver lining, and it is always possible to get something positive out of a situation, no matter how complicated or hurtful it might seem. Pollyanna should become a compliment and Pollyannaism – a way of life.

The Glad Game Exercise
You are expecting a doll for your birthday, and they bring you a pair of crutches.
“Just be glad because you don’t–NEED–’EM!”
“And the harder ’tis [to play the Glad Game], the more fun ’tis to get ‘em out; only–only sometimes it’s almost too hard–like when your father goes to Heaven, and there isn’t anybody but a Ladies’ Aid left.”

Your question of the day:
How to deal with a horrible illness or a loss of a loved one when it’s almost too hard to bear?

Read Polyanna e-book at The Project Gutenberg.

Kundalini is often associated with a serpent because in Sanskrit it means “that which is coiled.”  Kundalini is energy that lays dormant at the base of a spine and once awakened it becomes an intense force rising through the body in spiral motions, eventually, opening a crown, unfolding a thousand-petal doorway, awakening a deep sense of connection with the divine essence, and revealing the ultimate mystery of creation itself.

Kundalini Exercise “Awakening a Serpent”or “Sufi Grind”

Sit with your legs crossed in a relaxed lotus pose.  Hold your knees or shins and start grinding your stomach in large circular motions counter clockwise for 3 minutes. Switch after half the time to a clockwise movement. Visualize a dormant energy awakening slowly, moving upwards, and filling your whole being with cosmic energy, cleansing you of illness, and giving you radiant health and vitality.

Your question of the day:

What does a serpent symbol mean?

Be Inspired. Be Enlightened. Live in Awe and Gratitude.

Namaste.