Banaras, A Mystic Love Story

Banaras is not a destination its a journey of our lives. If you go to watch this movie for a ready-made solution or only to "kill" two hours, you may get disappointed. Banaras is aimed to create a thirst for something one is generally uncomfortable to explore.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

The state of No-mind

I reproduce a comment/question from a wise friend along with my observations. I am taking the liberty to post it here (rather than replying in the comments space) so all could see it.

Dear Mr.Singh,

I recently saw your movie and was extremely impressed by your deft handling of such a complex topic.

I've been exploring mysticism for a few years myself and have heard that one needs to drop the mind to realize the "no-mind".

Like you, I too am a techno marketer and find it difficult to balance the use of the mind in creating business strategies and then drop it while meditating.

What I do for a living requires intensive use of the mind and the thought process, while the investigation of the ultimate tool requires dropping the mind / thoughts all together.

How does one create "cunning" business strategies to outmanoeuvre competition and at the same time develop compassion.

Have you faced this dilemma and what has been your experience?

Would love to hear from you.


Anonymous



Dear sir,

I thank you for taking time out to write to me. I also wish you to succeed in all your quests.

In my mind you can never play a role honestly until you have known yourself.You can pretend to be a marketer but you will only play that role the way others expect you to.

Business, as we understand is “competition” and competition is primitive. It all is very Darwinian. And if you want to be a true winner, you have to be watchful and adaptive. But the destination of an evolved business should be excellence and not competition.


Yet business like any other living entity, needs to survive.You used the word “cunning” in the context of business strategy but you must remember that when you create business strategies you “become” the business. Business strategies need to be defined in complete awareness and there is no question of them being “cunning”. You do certain things, you win, you do some other things, you fail. There is nothing “cunning” or “wrong”. There are only the right things that need to be done.

However, you have a choice to play the kind of role you want to, for a kind of (business) entity you wish to. It’s completely your choice.

Sir, since you are already having the conflict all I can say is your level of awareness is changing. Conflict brings change. You are seeking non-movement of thought, a kind of transcending peace, but your role is bringing you a disturbance. You need to investigate the two and create harmony between them.


If you know me then you know that I left big companies so that I could live by my own value system, I could live my dream. Not that the companies I worked for in any way were wrong ( in fact some of them are the most reputed companies of our time) its just that I “grew” to become “non-fit” in those surroundings.


This is the clue to attaining a state of “no mind”. You have to align yourself to who you are. You have to continually work to end the conflict.This is how you will evolve and that’s how you will achieve the “no-mind”.


Let me also say that the peace thus attained shows on one’s face as also manifests in one’s work.


I do hope I have not sounded like a preacher, and if I did, please forgive me.

Sunday, August 19, 2007

God is not great..... by Christopher Hitchens

The case against religion.... and God


After I finished this book titled, God is not great,
I tried to fathom the unfathomable dissonance of a mind. I guess when someone as informed as Hitchens, enters a state of I-know-all, the outcome is a highly jumbled up and an opinionated product, nothing less than this book.


Hitchens attacks everyone and everything. He makes sniper attacks on Jesus, Mohammad, Moses, Buddha and every other prophet you can think of, and sprays bullets on the likes of Gandhi, mother Theresa and Martin Luther King. He declares all religions to be evil and all believers to be idiots, extremists or terrorists.

Religions, in time, become dogma and dogmas are not something to be proud. Hitchens is entitled to his opinion about individuals from his knowledge of right and wrong and there is little one can do change it.

Hitchens ridicules God and in fact negates his very existence. And that prompted me to write this article.

First and foremost, from what I could make out from his book, his mind is conditioned by the description of God as he may have interpreted from reading books. He may also be influenced by the disillusionment he may have personally experienced by living in the company of “masters” he may have chosen in the past or were chosen for him. He looks for a God of some higher order who has the capability to interfere with our actions, decide our fate and generally keep a watch on whatever we do. Will he be disappointed? I bet.

God is not something that can be captured even in imagination, leave alone being described. And it is very stupid of Hitchens to make presumptions about believer’s perception of God.

According to Hitchens, our world is completely explained by Charles Darwin and all the credit for our being here is given to “evolution”. While I have no quarrel with Darwin, I have a few questions for Hitchens.

The world (or any system) left on its own has tendency to move towards disorder (Law of thermodynamics. We experience this in our daily life, as we have to spend large sums of money in repairing and maintaining our belongings), implying that when we get a glimpse of some kind of “order” among chaos, it is manifest of some intelligence. Our species and all other species living on this planet are good examples of this.

Humans are more evolved than other species because they have the potential to “connect” and “see” the truth much beyond the capability of their sensory system. However, this transcendental experience, being tacit in nature, is beyond articulation and can not (is incapable to) be expressed or shared with others. And such people, who, even though have personally gone through such experience, when confronted by people like Hitchens to give sensory evidence of that experience, can only listen and smile.

Unchecked by his own reason, Hitchens goes after the idea of intelligent-design and uses some convoluted logic to explain our presence through evolution.

According to Hitchens “airplanes are, in their human-designed way,”evolving” and so in a different way are we”. Taking his argument further, if the airplane “evolution” is driven by human-intelligence what intelligence is driving the Darwinian evolution?

Hitchens should know that intelligence does manifest in other forms and can be replicated but never be created from nothing. If evolution is intelligent, then there must be a source for that intelligence. I wonder if Hitchens would like to propose a name for such a source.

Evolution is limited only to conscious entities. It is not applicable to the "material" world. Evolution is a process that is authored by some intelligence to ensure that it doesn’t have to keep looking over it.

Certain intelligence creates a universe with certain laws and replicates itself inside to create evolution, much as humans create airplane and replicate themselves inside the airplane. The laws of the universe do not evolve. Only the consciousness does.

And consciousness is a replication of the infinite intelligence that causes everything to emerge from nothingness. If that can be called God then he certainly is great.