I am not too much of a commercial movie buff, if I was it could have probably done this blog some good in the sense we could have watched a movie every other week and written a stupid review about how good or bad it was, get some traffic from the search engines for the millions of people who want to read about it, but lets put that aside for now.
Last weekend a couple of friends were over and they had not watched one of my favorite movies, Hair. The movie is based on the 1968 broadway musical, Hair and was released in 1979. The main story line is about a Vietnam draftee who decides to see a couple of places in America before he goes to war. The movie is anti-war, pro-freedom, talks about drugs, sex, some very good powerful music and dance.
The first time I watched hair, the magnificent synchronized dancing, visuals and a fascinating story line captivated me. But now after watching Hair for the second time I realized a couple of things that passed me by because of the above factors, the lyrics of some of the songs in the movie are extremely powerful.Let me start of with, “Easy to Be Hard”, at this point of time in the movie that really seems so contradictory to the characters they are playing.
How can people be so heartless
How can people be so cruel
Easy to be hard
Easy to be cold
How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to be proud
Easy to say no
And especially people
Who care about strangers
Who care about evil
And social injustice
Do you only
Care about the bleeding crowd?
How about a needing friend?
I need a friend
How can people be so heartless
You know I’m hung up on you
Easy to give in
Easy to help out
The next song is one of my personal favorites, its called “Walking in Space”
My body
Is walking in space
My soul is in orbit
With God face to face
Floating, flipping
Flying, tripping
Tripping from Pottsville to Mainline
Tripping from Mainline to Moonville
(Tripping from “Pot”sville to Starlight
Tripping from Starlight to Moonville)
On a rocket to
The Fourth Dimension
Total self awareness
The intention
Hair does have a very interesting storyline if you think its just a musical. Although the story is similar, but has quite a few differences from the broadway musical. The movie will make you laugh and the end is rather depressing. But on in all you really ned to watch hair, heres one of the dancing videos for you at the start of the movie.
When you think of a major city, what is the first thing that comes to your head? Traffic, pollution, money perhaps, fast food outlets, politics? Cities have a huge list of things to offer, but what about spirituality?
How can a place contributing to the rat race filled with ego and greed churn out someone spiritual or is it easy for someone to be spiritual in the city by giving up these desires with temptation lurking at any corner? How can you be spiritual in cities and in chaos?
Become the Lotus in a Pond
If you know that Gautama Buddha escaped from the chaos to meditate deep inside a forest, most spiritual souls have been know to escape to mountains, hills, forests to sit under trees for years lost in themselves.
In the last few years of his teaching Gautama Buddha gave us the Lotus Sutra, after observing how a lotus grows in ponds of filth and radiates its beauty among unclean waters he said one does not need to escape but can be beautiful even in the midst of turmoil.
How is this possible, how can you and I be calm when we are stuck in a traffic jam for hours together and packed like a bunch of sardines in a train? There is a way, so simple and beautiful that can help change the way we interact with each other in a more positive aspect.
It’s good to know that a chaotic city like Bombay (India) churned out a spiritual guru, Nisargadatta Maharaj, who after Ramana Maharishi, is the next follower of the philosophy of Advaita.
What is Advaita?
Advaita is the identity of the self and the whole, it is often called the monistic system of thought which consists of three levels of Truth.
The transcendental or the Pāramārthika level in which Brahman is the only reality and nothing else. (Brahman is the unchanging, infinite, immanent, and transcendent reality which is the Divine Ground of all matter, energy, time, space, being, and everything beyond in this Universe)
The pragmatic or the Vyāvahārika level in which both Jiva (living creatures or individual souls) and Ishvara (Controller or the Supreme controller, God) are true; here, the material world is completely true.
The apparent or the Prāthibhāsika level in which even material world reality is actually false, like illusion of a snake over a rope or a dream.
About Nisargadatta Maharaj
Maruti Shivrampant Kambli (Nisargadatta), was introduced to his Guru Sri Siddharameshwar Maharaj in 1933, this is Nisargadatta’s quotes on the meeting, “When I met my Guru, he told me: “You are not what you take yourself to be. Find out what you are. Watch the sense ‘I am’, find your real Self.””
I obeyed him, because I trusted him. I did as he told me. All my spare time I would spend looking at myself in silence. And what a difference it made, and how soon! My teacher told me to hold on to the sense ‘I am’ tenaciously and not to swerve from it even for a moment.
I did my best to follow his advice and in a comparatively short time I realized within myself the truth of his teaching. All I did was to remember his teaching, his face, his words constantly. This brought an end to the mind; in the stillness of the mind I saw myself as I am — unbound.
I simply followed instruction which was to focus the mind on pure being ‘I am’, and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, with nothing but the ‘I am’ in my mind and soon peace and joy and a deep all-embracing love became my normal state. In it all disappeared — myself, my Guru, the life I lived, the world around me. Only peace remained and unfathomable silence.
So people in the midst of turmoil and chaos, can find themselves in the I am philosophy, Nisargadatta Maharaj has left us with some wonderful sayings from his book, I Am That,
“My advice to you is very simple – just remember yourself, ‘I am’, it is enough to heal your mind and take you beyond, just have some trust. I don’t mislead you. Why should I? Do I want anything from you? I wish you well – such is my nature. Why should I mislead you? Common sense too will tell you that to fulfill a desire you must keep your mind on it. If you want to know your true nature, you must have yourself in mind all the time, until the secret of your being stands revealed.”
How I applied the “I am” philosophy in a Mega City
If you have ever visited or heard of Bombay or Mumbai you would know that its one of the most populated cities in the world. The trains here are packed like a can of sardines, except sometimes people actually fall out of the train because they are so full.
For nearly half a decade travelling in these trains need a bunch of preparation, from entering it, to finding a place to sit or stand, to avoid the sweat of other people falling onto you all can take a toll on your emotional state, and it’s quite common to see fights taking place.
Every time I was in the train I would close my eyes and vanish. I used to have my music in my ears and I was no longer in a train where its jam packed and hot. I used to imagine myself on the mountains with cool breeze blowing, I used to be in a trance like state.
The philosophy of “I Am” had really struck a chord with me, to question where each action stems from, with is this who “I am”. Instead of loosing my cool like some of the others, instead of the pushing or shoving, I used to find a corner by the and just stay still through my 40-minute journey every day.
Adopting the “I Am” isn’t easy, especially in testing times, when you’re loosing your cool you really don’t want to internalize at that point of time. So to start of with easier choices that you aren’t very emotional about.
To be extremely honest Nisargadatta Maharaj’s “I Am” is far more and deeper than what I have stated here. To get a more wholesome experience of the philosophy I found this video that will give you a wholesome idea of his teachings.
This video on Nisargadatta Maharaj will help you stay spiritual in cities and in chaos:
In 1948 a German zoologist H.M. Peters was studying spiders and faced a problem. The Spiders weaved their nests between 2AM and 5AM in the morning. He questioned a friend Dr. Peter Witt, a German born Swiss pharmacologist, what they could do to get the spiders to weave webs during feasible day times.
According to Rainer Foelix, in his book “Biology of Spiders”, Dr. Witt prescribed amphetamine. Unfortunately or fortunately that didn’t work. The spiders continued to build in those early morning hours although, the drugged spider’s webs were amazingly different as compared to the sober spiders.
Finding the outcome of the experiment very interesting, Dr. Witt performed more experiments on the spiders with other drugs like LSD, mescaline, and caffeine. The forms of webs depended on which substance they were given.
“Then Witt tried mescaline, strychnine, caffeine, and others. Low-dosed caffeinated spiders produced a smaller but wider web with a normal spiral but radii at over sized angles. At higher doses, like with the other drugs, web regularity got distorted. Only with low doses of the hallucinogen LSD-25 did the spiders spin webs of greater regularity,” R. Foelix, Biology of Spiders.
They also tended to look much the same for each specific drug they were given. Because of these findings. Dr. Witt proposed that law enforcement could identify confiscated drugs in a cheaper manner than traditional chemical analysis.
Another interesting take on the web change is the increase of the spiders body weight after consuming one hundred and fifty mg/kg of psilocybin per os, 1 g/kg of mescaline per os, or a 30% increase in body weight made spiders build webs the following day with a shorter thread.
The weight increase also caused a thicker thread measured as higher nitrogen content per meter thread. This can be explained by assuming that the heavier spider has to build a thicker thread to hold its own weight while it has not enough material to build it of equal length.
Removal of weight led only after 3 and more days to a return to thread thickness and length of control webs. However, these heavier spiders repeated their web-building at a normal frequency. You can read more of the drugged spiders weight and webs.
Sound is a vibration that resonates with the soul, which can be felt in every cell of our body. Sound has the power to heal not only on a physical level but also on emotional and spiritual levels.
The Tibetan Singing bowls, which are standing bells, rather than hanging inverted or attached to a handle, that rest on the bottom surface. The sides and rim of singing bowls vibrate to produce deep and soothing sound.
Traditionally, singing bowls were used throughout Asia as part of Bön (Lhasa dialect, the word bon means ‘religion’ and is the oldest spiritual tradition of Tibet.) and Tantric Buddhist Sadhana.
Chinese Buddhists use the singing bowl to accompany the wooden fish during chanting, striking it when a particular phrase in a sutra is sung.
In Japan and Vietnam, singing bowls are similarly used during chanting and may also mark the passage of time or signal a change in activity. Today they are used for meditation, relaxation, chakra balancing, health care, personal well-being and also in religious practices.
Our Experience with the Tibetan Singing Bowl
The moment I began to use the singing bowl, I knew it had a deeper purpose, you start off by banging the stick on the side of the bowl, then you rub the stick around the bowl in such a way that you take control of the vibration and by rotating this vibration around the bowl with speed and altitude of the friction you can create different frequencies and sound.
But what was more interesting is the way your body reacts to the vibrations that are flowing in through your hand. The feeling of peace descending through you as you churn the bowl and focus on the sound and the control of the vibrations in your hand. It seems so magical its pretty unbelievable what the bowl can do to you.
The Old and the New:
Traditionally, antique singing bowls were made of Panchaloga (meaning five metals in Sanskrit), a bronze alloy of copper, tin, zinc and iron and other metals. Antiques often include silver, gold and nickel, they produce multiphonic and polyharmonic overtones which are unique to the antique instruments.
The subtle yet complex multiple harmonic frequencies are a special quality of the high quality bronze alloy. Singing bowls are no longer made in the traditional way and is considered a lost art.
Antique singing bowls are highly prized and collected worldwide. Their popularity is due to their fine craftsmanship and remarkable sound. The aging process seems to improve the tone and centuries old antiques produce an incredibly rich and beautiful sound.
While the new singing bowls are made from industrial quality metal, mainly copper and are exported widely from Nepal and India. New singing bowls and crystal bowls do not produce the warm and complex tone of fine antiques. They sound like clear and simple bells, without the warm undertones and bright harmonic overtones for which antiques are famous.
Benefits of Tibetan Singing Bowls
“If we accept that sound is vibration and we know that vibration touches every part of our physical being, then we understand that sound is heard not only through our ears but through every cell in our bodies. One reason sound heals on a physical level is because it so deeply touches and transforms us on the emotional and spiritual planes. Sound can redress imbalances on every level of physiologic functioning and can play a positive role in the treatment of virtually any medical disorder.” ~ Dr. Mitchell Gaynor, director of Medical Oncology and Integrative Medicine, the Cornell Cancer Prevention Center in New York.
When there is a blockage in the flow of energy in our body, it leads to diseases as a particular organ or tissue has stopped vibrating at a healthy frequency. This imbalance, in parts where it is required, can be restored using the sound frequencies created by Tibetan singing bowls.
Modern medicine is beginning to understand the effect of sound healing using vibrations and frequencies. Dr. David Simon, the medical director of the Deepak Chopra Center in California, found the sound from Tibetan Singing Bowls as well as chanting chemically metabolized into ’endogenous opiates’, that act on the body as internal painkillers and healing agents.
The harmonic resonance of Tibetan singing bowls also help to reduce stress and pain, balance energy and induce meditative states.
When you come across a genius online, its very difficult to not blog about it. But as usual get ready for your jaw-dropping experience my friends because Ron Mueck is a genius when it comes to sculpture, a hyper realist sculptor. He reproduces the minute detail of the human body, depicting different stages of human life.
If you do not know the meaning of that, at the end of the show your brain is going to define it.
A Video on Ron Mueck’s Work:
Who is Ron Mueck?
Ron Mueck working on spooning couple
Ron Mueck was born in 1958, his Australian parents were toy makers.
Mueck’s early career was as a model maker and puppeteer for 15 years on television catering to children. He then started creating special effects for the 1986 film Labyrinth and also contributed the voice of Ludo.
Mueck moved on to establish his own company in London, making photo-realistic props and animatronics for the advertising industry. Although highly detailed, these props were usually designed to be photographed from one specific angle hiding the mess of construction seen from the other side.
Mueck increasingly wanted to produce realistic sculptures which looked perfect from all angles. He then started his own company in London, making models to be photographed for advertisements. Now he’s creating on his own and showcasing his work in places such as the Royal Academy, the Millennium Dome in London and the Venice Biennale and not to forget his art can be photographed from any angle.
I am not too much of a commercial movie buff, if I was it could have probably done this blog some good in the sense we could have watched a movie every other week and written a stupid review about how good or bad it was, get some traffic from the search engines for the millions of people who want to read about it, but lets put that aside for now.
