It does not believe in Numbers, nor in Proselytism.
As a matter of fact, The Vedas do not mention collective worship at all.
Those who disseminate Knowledge did so, free of cost, after evaluating the student’s aptitude.
Symbolism Of Lord Ganesh.
However a token was accepted, of the Teacher‘s choosing, from the students’ parents, either to make people understand that nothing must be gained free of cost or to test the skill-set and dedication of the Student.
Lord Krishna was asked to save Santipini’s son from a demon in the Ocean, as Guru dakshina.
By doing so, Lord Krishna acquired his famous Panchajanya.
Drona asked, nay punished Ekalaivya by asking for his Thumb, this is an exception, for this act his son Aswathama was cursed to roam as Chiranjeevi (ever living) in the forest.
Or the Gurus asked of their students to undertake a mission for the welfare of the Society.
But never they hankered after wealth for their efforts.
One must remember in the Vedic System of Life, the students were living with the Teacher in his household, partaking what was available;their parents, however rich were not permitted to offer anything.
Over a period of years the system of conveying the Vedic Thoughts, The Ithihasa, Ramayana, Mahabharata and others came into vogue.
When it started the preachers never accepted anything but were driven the noble thought of spreading the Good Word.
Over a period of time, this become an Industry where people , in the garb of disseminating knowledge have started making money and only money, with presenting facts that would suit the audience.
The system of negotiating Rates for Pravachana began.
Till some time back there was this habit of’ ‘taking the plate around’ among the audience to raise for some noble cause;later it degenerated into collecting money from the audience for the preacher!
Now with Media networks running wild to make quick buck by presenting miish mash of programmes called Religious, popular figures in the filed of preaching are called in.
What they do more is to advertise themselves, distort stories.Philosophy to suit TRP!
Nauseating is their naked lust for money and fame.
Worse is their treatment of people who attend their Pravachanas or Preaching, Kathas.
People come to their Pravachanas or Kathas to know more of the Subject.
They are treated with contempt,; the man does not even acknowledge you or at times if he inclined will tell you rudely’he has no time”
This applies all the Pravachanakarthas including Velukkudi Krishna who is the craze now.
He stares at you indifferently and keeps mum or looks at some body.
But hear his Pravachanas, you would believe he is embodiment of Knowledge, Wisdom,Eager to help people and, as irony would have it,Humble!
I recall Sri Kripanandavariar , great preacher asking people in the midst of a Lecture for their doubts and clearing them on the spot!
If one were to approach him later, he would patiently explain things till he was satisfied that you understood him!
Preachers of Hinduism, what you are doing is not Dharma and you are insulting Hinduism
Note.People might ask me why I have not said anything about Christian Preacher,..
Well…it is their profession sanctioned(?) by their Religion.
Nor I am saying anything about the self-styled Gurus, like Chandrasawmi,Baba Ramdev or the one who teaches the ‘Art of Living’ as if Hinduism teaches the ‘Science of Death!’
These guys should remember what would be their position that if Vedas, Bhagavad Gita, Ramayana, Mahabharata,Yoga had Copyright and IPR!
My son was telling me( he is a Believer, Agnostic and a Non believer, all rolled into one, don’t ask me how, he is-I do not tell him what he should,on occasions I used to suggest him when he is that state of Mind to enquire within;he also knows the essentials of Indian Thought and knows important Sruti by heart) and an hour ago asked my that Miracles happened in the past ,especially in Treta Yuga( an Indian Aeon) and people thought of God and He appeared and why they do not now,
In Indian Philosophy, unlike in other Philosophical Systems of the World, there is no such thing as ’Super Natural’
For a Hindu, everything in the Universe is natural, be it Rebirth, Good Actions producing good results, Bad, the bad.Clairvoyance and the like and God.
God would appear if one where to call out to Him..
Belief is the feeling that some thing or some event would be the same way as it has been in our experience..
Child believes that its Mother would take care of it.
This kind Belief turns into Faith when the Belief turns out to be true at all times in one’s experience.
This Faith performs the seemingly impossible.
Faith is clothed as ‘Positive thoughts’ in modern parlance.
When one thinks he has Faith, he has lost it.
It should be as natural as breathing and to cite a daily example ‘the morning Ablutions’.
These things, you do not contemplate, analyse,but are Natural.
When one thinks he has Faith, he is aware of it and expects things to happen definitely.
But if this feeling is natural, you do not even for a second contemplate the desired result, because you are unconsciously convinced the that the desired result would be there and It is there for you..
Pu it simply, it is the Faith of the Child in its Mother.
In this sense, Faith does not perform Miracles,
It does , when one does and has the disposition of doing things naturally.
For people of the earlier Yugas, Miracles and Faith did not exist separately for them.
Faith was in their being and the result was embedded in that Feeling.
Hence they could do and see things which we, to-day call as Miracles .
He never thought it was faith, it was a natural feeling with him.
If he had Faith on Lord Krishna only because he believed Krishna to be God , Arjuna would not have called Krishna as ‘a Cowherd, Friend(yadava, Saket and in many instances ridiculed him(He apologized to Krishna in The Bhagavad Gita for this in The Viswaroopa chapter of the Srimad Bhagavad Gita)
Arjuna took Krishna as his friend and treated him accordingly and what we call Miracles to-day were there for him.
The moment Arjuna felt differently, he was routed.
There is a story in the Mahabharata which narrates this point.
After the passing away of Lord Krishna(the term Dehavyoha is to be used here), Arjuna’s wives were captured by ordinary Dacoits..
Arjuna got agitated and swore that he would finish the dacoits off , get his wives back and bragged that those dacois did not know the power of Arjuna and his Kandipa(Arjuna’s Bow)
Narada just smiled and accompanied Arjuna in this assault on the dacoits.
Arjuna’s Kandiva was ineffective , broken and he was squarely beaten by the dacoits.
He asked Narada what happened to him and his Kandiva.
Narada replied,
‘You forgot the essential part of You, Lord Krishna; so long He was apart of You naturally , you vanquished every one.
Now you are humiliated”
Arjuna yearns for Krishna and got his wives back after defeating the dacoits with his Kandiva.
So long as belief and Faith natural and a part of you, nothing is a Miracle.
You shall get whatever you want( so long it does not run contrary to Dharma(Righteousness)
This self belief is to be inculcated in the Children right from their infancy as it has been the case with Dhruv(Dhruva) or Prahlad.
Then there are no Mountains, only mole hills in Life.
( As water from Rains, in the form Rivulets, Streams. Ponds, Rivers ultimately reaches and get submerged in the Ocean and become a part of it,worship of all and any God ultimately reaches Kesava( Lord Vishnu)
After I finished posting the blog ‘ When Rama Realized he Was Brahman’. I recalled another one from the Puranas.
This incident explains the law of Karma(Please read my posts on this under Hinduism)
Lord Krishna spent a long time on the Earth during the Dwapara Yuga and the Devas were concerned about his absence from the Vaikunta, the Abode of Lord Vishnu.
They consulted the Great Dhurvasa Rishi and he consoled them saying the time for Krishna was fast approaching.
The Devas asked him,
‘No body can kill Krishna and we dare not ask him for Dehavyhoam (leaving the Body)
Dhurvasa smiled and told them to watch.
After the Mahabharata War was over, the Pandavas and what remained of the Kauravas , along with the Yadavas (Krishna’s Clan) , were sitting together and fooling around the banks of the River Yamuna.
All of them were drunk.
Lord Krishna’s son, Sambhavan, playful by nature, dressed himself as a pregnant woman and with his cronies approached a group of Seers(Rishis) and prostrated before them and requested,
‘Please Bless Me for Safe delivery’
The Rishis said,
‘We know, you are the son of Lord Krishna, yet, we Bless you with Safe Delivery of a Wooden ladle(உலக்கை ) and your Clan will be destroyed by it’
உலக்கை,Ulakkai
When Lord Krishna was told of it, he shrugged and said he could do nothing about it!
They had a Wooden ladle delivered after nine months, and to ensure that it was destroyed, they broke it into pieces and immersed it in the river.
The bottom portion ,made of iron was swallowed by a Shark and it was caught by a Fisherman.
While seasoning the Fish, the fisherman found the iron piece and sold it to a Hunter.
The Hunter , his fixed it to the tip of his Arrow.
After some time, the same group was engaged in a drinking bout at the same place.
Salliya, the Man who drove and deserted Karna in the Battle field at a crucial juncture was there.
Salliya was the Father in Law of Karna.
Lord Krishna.
One among the gathering remarked,
‘Look,here is a fellow who deserted his king and relative at a critical time, who was on the losing side ,eating and drinking with us, the Victors’
Salliya retorted saying , ‘A bunch of Herdsman need not talk about a Kshatriya’
And a Battle of words soon became a full-fledged fight among all.
They went on attacking each other.
As they had no Arms,they plucked the ‘கோரைப்புல்’-Nut Grass around them and attacked each other with the Nut Grass,
As soon as they plucked them they became the Wooden Ladles and killed those attacked with them.
Barring Krishna, the Yadava Clan was wiped out.
(The Immersed wooden pieces , on reaching the shores , grew into Nut Grass and became weapons; that is the reason why Nut Grass is not used in Religious Ceremonies but Kusa Grass is used).
Some time later when Lord Krishna was roaming the Forests , he became tired and rested under a Tree, lying in a Fetal Position.
The Hunter saw, what looked like a Deer from a distance’ sent an Arrow.
It struck Krishna at the Center of His Foot and He lay dying.
The Hunter , on reaching Krishna begged for Mercy and felt remorse.
Krishna said to him,
” Don’t worry, it is not your fault.
During Ramavataras Rama,, I killed Vaali, hiding behind a Tree.
Now I am repaying it.
I fulfilled my duty of serving Lakshmana who served me as a younger brother during Ramavatar, as Bala rama as my elder brother in this Avatar as Krishna and breathed his last.
Even God can not escape the Law of Karma, once born!
True, those who climb mountains climb despite hazards and payments start all over again for the sheer pleasure of it.
Edmund Hillary put it better, when he asked why he kept on climbing Mountains,
‘Because it is there”
Appears to be true.
But they too need Money to climb mountains and they go in for some other jobs or for sponsors for expenses.
So Money is needed.
The point is we do get pleasure in doing what we want to and we perform better,yet if the basic needs are not met you can not do do or work what gives you pleasure.
The crux is the result of the Work.
If the work is appreciated by others and if the work is creative and not destroyed we work better.
So work or performance Pleasure and efficiency is determined by the results it produces.
Yet the results of work is not determined by our efforts or work alone.
It has other factors to influence the results, like the other factors , environment and people.
Even a simple task like brushing one’s teeth assumes and needs other factors like Gravity,paste being available at a given time and most imp importantly one should be alive.
These factors, agents are not in one’s control and as such the outcome of any work depends heavily on these external factors.
The best one can do is to efficiently manage the one factor in one’s control, that is Himself.
If one were to worry about the other factors like others’ opinion and other factors,the very thought will impair on’e efficiency, thus lowering the chances of the work being completed successfully and as a result the pleasure one can derive.
Therefore to improve efficiency and derive pleasure out of work is to change the mind-set into one of detached attachment.
An action that is performed is non action when there is no involvement or motivation.
An action that is performed with the results in mind are Actions, which may cause disappointments when one is not appreciated or the work is destroyed.
Non action is an action is one where one performs an action or work because it has to be done without bothering about the consequences .
Here there is action and yet there is no anticipation of results and consequently no disappointment; if it is appreciated or remains for some time you are Happy, it is a Bonus.
This is the way one has to approach to work to be Happy and be more efficient.
One should be careful in understanding this thought as this does not mean non involvement or irresponsibility.
When we think about how people work,the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze – that all people care about is money, and the moment we give people money, we can direct them to work one way, we can direct them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work and what the labor market looks like.
At the same time, if you think about it, there’s all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it’s all about frostbite and difficulty to walk and difficulty of breathing – cold, challenging circumstances.And if people were just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, “This was a terrible mistake. I’ll never do it again.” (Laughter) ”Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.” But instead, people go down, and after they recover, they go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there’s all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways.
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came to visit me. This was a student that was one of my students a few years earlier. And he came one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: He said that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank. This was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard on this presentation – graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, ”Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled.” And the guy was deeply depressed.Now at the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch that made him quite depressed.
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor.And to start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said,”Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We’ll pay you three dollars for it.” And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?” If they said yes, we gave them another one. And when they finished, we asked them, ”Do you want to build another one?” for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point people said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put them under the table. And we told them that at the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.
There was another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again. And you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again. There’s something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating. So in the second condition of this experiment, that’s exactly what we did. We asked people, “Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?” And if they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, “Do you want to build another one for $2.70?” And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And when they finished that, we said, “Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?” And if they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycleof them building and us destroying in front of their eyes.
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happenedwas that people built many more Bionicles — they built 11 versus seven – in the meaningful condition versus the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point out that this was not a big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.
Now we had another version of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn’t put people in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they just don’t understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it’s important.
)ஆறு மனமே ஆறு அந்த ஆண்டவன் கட்டளை ஆறு
ஆறு மனமே ஆறு அந்த ஆண்டவன் கட்டளை ஆறு
தேர்ந்து மனிதன் வாழும் வகைக்கு தெய்வத்தின் கட்டளை ஆறு
தெய்வத்தின் கட்டளை ஆறு
ஆறு மனமே ஆறு அந்த ஆண்டவன் கட்டளை ஆறு
ஒன்றே சொல்வார் ஒன்றே செய்வார் உள்ளத்தில் உள்ளது அமைதி
இன்பத்தில் துன்பம் துன்பத்தில் இன்பம் இறைவன் வகுத்த நியதி
ஒன்றே சொல்வார் ஒன்றே செய்வார் உள்ளத்தில் உள்ளது அமைதி
இன்பத்தில் துன்பம் துன்பத்தில் இன்பம் இறைவன் வகுத்த நியதி
சொல்லுக்குச் செய்கை பொன்னாகும் வரும் துன்பத்தில் இன்பம் பட்டாகும்
சொல்லுக்குச் செய்கை பொன்னாகும் வரும் துன்பத்தில் இன்பம் பட்டாகும் – இந்த
இரண்டு கட்டளை அறிந்த மனதில் எல்லா நன்மையும் உண்டாகும்
எல்லா நன்மையும் உண்டாகும்”) Tamil.
An action is worth thousand words.
When one does there is no necessity for words.
Nor does one to need to communicate and the action earns approbation beyond words.
Bhisma, The Grand Sire of the Bharata Clan, was felled by the arrow of Arjuna in the Epic Battle of Mahabharata.
He was in acute discomfort, the countless arrows being uneven on the ground.
He was awaiting the Northern Path, or The Uttarayan of The Sun to leave the mortal coil.
He looked around his Clan, including Arjuna and Lord Krishna and fixed his eyes on Krishna.
Krishna looked at Arjuna.
Arjuna extracted a string of arrows and arrayed them evenly, had Bhishma lifted,placed on this bed and Bhishma was comfortable, the level being even.
He was thirsty and no amount of water could quench his thirst.
Arjuna sent an arrow down the earth near Bhishma’s head, and out came Ganges,The River Ganga, Mother of Devavrta,now known as Bhishma.
Bhishma was quenched of his thirst and his yearning to see his mother before his death.
When The Heart communicates there is no need for words.
Compare this with
“கண்ணொடு கண் நோக்கொக்கின் வாய்ச்சொற்கள் என்ன பயனும் இல’
(If Eyes were to communicate, words are of no use)
