Anaahata - The Heart Chakra

For long we have heard much about the heart centre in Kundalini Yoga. It is called the Anaahata Chakra. Anaahata means the "Not-struck sound".

How does the Heart or Love Chakra sound, without a sound!? 

The best explanation is here. From Ishwar-ji, who else 🙏❤️🙏

The Third Eye

॥ महामृत्युञ्जयमन्त्रम् ॥

ॐ त्र्यम्बकं यजामहे 

सुगन्धिं पुष्टिवर्धनम्   ।

उर्वारुकमिव बन्धनात्

मृत्योर्मुक्षीय मामृतात्   ॥

This is a lofty prayer taught by sadhus and mahatmas as a powerful chant to ward off disease and death. It is one of the most famous prayers to Lord Shiva, known as the Great Destroyer also. 

Meaning (my translation) :

Om! We worship the Three-eyed Lord

Who grants us the fragrance of life, Enhances our nourishment by nature, 

Oh Lord! Release us from the bondage of death which is akin to a cucumber falling off naturally from its creeper; 

but not from our immortality as we are made in Your image! 

I have recently developed a new interpretation of the Three-eyed Lord and this prayer. 

Shiva has three eyes. Usually they are called sun, moon and agni. 

वन्दे सूर्य-शशाङ्क-वह्नि-नयनम् वन्दे शिवं शङ्करम् 

It is often seen that the two eyes of God (Vishnu, Shiva...) are called the sun and the moon. This is our way of connecting these celestial objects as reminders of God. 

Shiva's third eye is called agni because when He opens it in anger, He burns down everything. That is what happened to Manmatha when he was chartered by the gods to go help Parvati in her propitiating Shiva when she was seeking His hand. Manmatha with the help of Vasanta (spring) tried to smite Shiva with his arrows of love. Shiva wasn't pleased when disturbed in His meditation and opened His third eye which instantly burned Manmatha down. 

But here is my new interpretation. All creation - man and nature included- is a projection of God's creative intelligence. We call creation the Leela or sport of Ishwara which may be loosely translated as God. 

This paradigm of creation is human-centric because all our perception is anyway human-centric, including our conception of God. 

Man experiences three realities in this creation:

One is energy. There is no creation without energy. The most powerful symbol of energy is the sun.

Energy is key to all material activity as well as material transformation. In fact matter is another manifestation of energy at various levels. There is a very great amount of energy stored in every atom. Even man can function only by using his physical energy in this world. (पुष्टिवर्धनम्) 

Creation is also life. Life is nourished by nature. Nature is the magical interplay of the five elements to create this biological and physiological world and its sustenance. Famously this is compared to the moon. Natural to life is attraction, nourishment, co-habitation and procreation. This is a key aspect or Ishwara's Leela. (सुगन्धिम्) 

The third and most important in the human-centric creation is what we call awareness, intelligence, and the experience of will. This is what differentiates man as the pinnacle of the life order and what makes him an image of God (अमृतम्). This awareness of one's soul or the immortal component of our existence is what makes a man seeker. The realised masters tell us everyone is making this same journey to discover one's immortality, whichever path we take. Sooner or later each one gets there. This is the inherent motive-force in man. This I call Agni or fire. Remember man differentiated himself from all other forms of life by making fire. He uses fire to sustain himself. He offers fire worship to invoke God.  

अग्निमीळे पुरोहितम् 

 So when I think of the Three-eyed God (त्र्यम्बकम्) I know he gives me energy (पुष्टिवर्धनम्) , he gives me life (सुगन्धिम्), and he gives me the fire of intelligence (अमृतम्) to seek my path back to God. 

Glory to the Three-eyed God! 

Glory to Ishwar-ji! 

Postscript: This concept is clearly discussed in the Bhagavadgita. Krishna explains it in detail in the 15th Chapter which is called Purushottama Yoga. It discusses creation, Ishwara and the path back to Ishwara. 

Birthday जन्मदिनशुभेच्छा song

जन्मदिनमिदम् अयि प्रिय सखे / सखि ।

Today is your birthday, oh my dear friend!  (man/woman respectively) 

शं तनोतु ते सर्वदा मुदम् ॥ १ ॥

May your prosperity and happiness increase always! 

प्रार्थयामहे भव शतायुषी ।

We pray that you live to be a hundred! 

इश्वरः सदा त्वां च रक्षतु || २ ||

May God always protect you! 

राष्ट्रसेवया कीर्तिमार्जय  |

By serving the nation, earn your fame! 

जीवनं तव भवतु सार्थकम् || ३ ||

May your life be fruitful and fulfilled! 

Composed by Pujya Swami Tejomayananda, Chinmaya Mission

(Sung in Yaman, May versions on You Tube) 

The Inner Infinity

There is no way I can describe my inner infinity. But here is a try. 

Of endless brightness, a golden pink glow is my inner sky. 

With no dimension, pure consciousness, am I. 

In total bliss, in His love, I fly. 

Radiant, fragrant, resonant, 

Blissful, overflowing love - 

To describe is beyond my ability. 

Simply totally alive, eternal, all seeing, inner eye. 

An invisible switch that I can apply

To step into the sunny reality of I and my, 

Or to fly in His infinite inner endless sky. 

ಕೊಂಬೆಗಳ ಮಧ್ಯ ಕಿರಣಗಳ ಇಣುಕು

(ಡಾ. ರೋಹಿತ ಶಾಸ್ತ್ರಿಅವರ ಛಾಯಾಗ್ರಹಣ, ಮೈಸೂರು)

ಮಾನವನ ಮನಸಿನಲಿ

ತರತರದ ತೊಂದರೆಯ

ತೊಡಕುಗಳ ತಳಮಳದಿ

ತಿಳಿಯಾಗಿ ತೆಳುವಾಗಿ

ತೋರ್ಪ ಆಶಾಕಿರಣ

ದಾರಿದೀಪವೊ ನಿನಗೆ

ದುಗುಡಮತಿಯೇ!

Song on Cauvery (written same day on 2016)

My song on Cauvery:

Oh Cauvery! Goddess of the South! 

Blest are we that you descended on earth. 

Born in the verdant hills, with mist-kissed tresses, 

You frolick in dense forests and fertile fields, 

It is not just sweet water 

that you give us, Mother, 

You are our life breath. 

Every grain of rice we eat, 

Every drop of milk we drink, 

Every fruit, root and leaf,

Nourishes us with your sweetness. 

You harbour no malice. 

You give freely to all. 

But you have us as your children. 

We cannot but fight. 

We tear, burn and destroy. 

We want to starve each other. 

Did you feed us this greed? This hate? 

Will your waters douse

The raging flames of our fate!? 

Or will you just dry up

And return to heaven

Before it is too late?

How I fixed my desktop mic problem

I realized early on during the lockdown that I would be doing a lot of webinars and video conferences. My MacBook Pro is excellent. My mobile phone Oneplus 7T is very good especially its front facing HD camera. But I wanted a Windows PC also to have this facility.

My HP All-in-One is very good but I had broken off the audio 3.5mm jack in the headset socket some time ago inadvertently. So the audio was disabled. The broken bit stays inside the socket and even an expert couldn't retrieve it. 

So??? 

I did the following:

1. Reinstalled Windows 10 and upgraded the RAM to 8GB. Total cost of parts and services ₹2400.- But still audio dead. 

2. Connected my Fenda 330BT 2.1 speaker system via Bluetooth to HP. It works well but I still had no mic and no headphone functionality.

3. Bought the USB to mic+headphone adapter as shown in the pic for₹289.- on Amazon.

     It arrived today. I inadvertently dropped the green item while opening the box. It promptly broke up😧but luckily only the case was broken but not the PCB or Jack's inside. I applied a cello tape solution and I connected it to the HP PC. 

I have a stereo collar mic from Sony bought many years ago (helps HD recording on my DSLR and PC etc.)

Connected it to the PC. Started Audacity. It works! It records in stereo! 

I have headphones I can connect to the other port on the USB adapter. I am. All set now for Audio and Video conferences! 👍👍👍

Old Tirupati video

 

No Math

Have you thought about it? The word माया (māyā), which describes the world we live in, comes from the Sanskrit verb मीय् which means to measure.

So the world of math is our world. I have been mouthing a pet theory for many years now, which says that EVERYTHING in this creation has a self-limit switch. So everything has a "measurable" limit of performance, magnitude, or duration. 

Well I thought this morning, are there things amidst us which don't allow arithmetic? 

Sure! 

1. At some. point, lies DON'T ADD UP. 

2. You cannot SUBTRACT from the time on your hands. You can only change what you do.

3. Mountains don't multiply. In fact I think they don't like to multiply. 

4. You cannot divide a fountain. You can only replace it with several smaller ones, but not divide it as it is. At least an honourable, self-respecting one, not one that has sprung from a leaky garden hose. I mean a grand one like this in Geneva.... 😊

The Archer Pose :आकर्णधनुरासनम्

Happy Teacher's Day!

What makes a great teacher? A question that is relevant on 5 Sept.

1. The teacher loves to teach.

2. The teacher constantly invents new ways to teach.

3. The teacher knows the student's capacity.

4. The teacher wants the student to progress.

5. The teacher shows the way, but lets the student walk the way. .

6. The teacher reminds the student of the goal.

7. The teacher inspires by example.

8. The teacher is the face of a tradition where he was also once a student.

9. The teacher instills reverence for learning.

10. The teacher likes the student to excel him and take the knowledge tradition forward.

Bhagavan Krishna is the best teacher known to me.

Happy Teacher's Day!

Rangoli

Business Dharma (धर्म)

I was recently trying to convey to a colleague why we find it so hard to build a successful business even for great products. It is typical for a technology company to study existing products in any space and come up with a better gizmo. This is true not only for gadgets and medical devices and such systems. It is true for business software, service solutions of all kinds, offshore tech. services, consumer products and even businesses like restaurants. 

The problem starts with thinking that a better gizmo creates instant demand. Come on, after all, customers aren't stupid, right? The moment they see a better box, they would know it. They are EXPECTED to know what's good for them, after all.

Well, my response to this hypothesis is, SORRY, IT'S PLAIN WRONG. You see,  even the customer is a human being. He thinks and acts based on emotions, felt needs, changing priorities, circumstances, pride, prestige, insecurity, fear, doubt, and peer pressure. Therefore the way he perceives your product is a very complex emotional mind-scape and very very few marketers get it right. Remember that the Bollywood moghul, Raj Kapoor, famously said that he didn't understand why Bobby succeeded, and why Mera Naam Joker flopped. He had the best sense what the public wanted, and yet he failed.

The great businesses do not hesitate to engage with customers. This is true before we make a product, and even more important on an ongoing basis after we launch products. This is not just advertising and publicity but serious voice of the customer and mind of the customer thing. Even Steve Jobs, who went with his instinct for what the customer wants and didn't believe in focus groups and such, conceded it was the most important thing for a business to live in the immersive world of its customer to understand his psychology intuitively. 

The best products in any space are not the most feature-rich or most elaborately engineered. The value proposition is not a simple price-benefit equation but a complex dance between the seller and buyer that is multi-layered. 

I could illustrate this with the example of the iPhone, of which I was one of the earliest customers in 2007. The iPhone addressed the customer's need for consuming the benefits of the connected digital world without the hassle of a clunky box called the PC. It met the need for a reliable and efficient hand held device that was wireless phone, music player, camera and browser with email. The result was that at $800, a pricey little device put in your hands did so many things so well and cost as a replacement much less than the cost of a number of boxes you would have used otherwise. Add to it convenience and pride of ownership.

All the modern e-commerce we talk of, social media, You Tube, everything we take for granted today stemmed from that one successful mapping of a consumer psychology. This is called in Hinduism काम. 

Once we have a grip on the psychology, we move on to firmer ground. This is the technology piece.  So if I want to make a sugarless sweet drink for example, or the most comfortable uncrumple-able cotton shirt or the best mobile phone experience, I can go to the design board and work on the science and technology of how to make the features and specifications tick. I can measure what it needs to be. This is hard. But this technology piece seems at least a predictable thing. So it is like कर्म Karma theory. Cause-effect, input-output. 

But it can be a complex equation too, and getting it right, doing failure analysis, and stacking the quality function deployment equation for most competitive positioning, is a scientific game and we need to play here smartly. Here also, customer-driven measurements like conjoint analysis are needed. I have seen big and small businesses fail here, in their hurry to get to the market, showing a lack of fortitude to work the harder details like safety and reliability, and a rush to impress investors and please salesmen.

So OK, we understood the customer psychology, we designed with the best technology, and our product is ready. Does it guarantee success in terms of market share, profits and growth? This is economics. This economics bit is called अर्थ.

Economics is the tricky piece. The reason for the failure of economics world over is that people are thrilled to be unpredictable and don't care for the economist's predictions. Ask any lady who goes to a saree shop and sees about 25 sarees just for a lark and walks out without buying anything. 

In the '90s, Steve Jobs failed. His ideas were well before his time. I know someone who had invested all his savings in Apple stock and lost everything in mid '90s. He came back to India to start from scratch. Imagine if he had held on to Apple stock till today. 

Every attractive advertisement for mutual funds begins by saying one should be smart and invest in mutual funds. But the last bit says, "please note past performance is no indicator of future results and all risks are the investor's alone." This should show us how unpredictable market success is. 

The fact that market success is not a direct function of either technology or psychology as we understood it in the first instance makes for the world of business we are in. So many experts and economists make a living explaining why you went wrong, all with a perfect 20/20 vision of the past. All their glib talk stops when you ask them, "tell me, what will succeed next? Can you tell me what is the winning formula for the next business success?" Their humming and hawing starts and they hastily collect their cheque and walk out. 

The wheel of all business activity or business धर्म goes round these three - psychology= काम, technology= कर्म, and economics=अर्थ. I have quoted the traditional Hindu terms for these three aspects, and used the nearest equivalents in English. Economics is a word associated with micro and macro behaviour and does not exactly represent business uncertainties I am talking of. Maybe one can come up with a better word.

So in summary, what I am saying here is that unless we do a good job of understanding psychology, we won't get technology right. And even after we get psychology and technology right, the vagaries of the market place may stop us from achieving the business or economic success we planned for. We have to be humble enough to accept this, and focus on what we can do right = engage with customers constantly and understand them. And use all the technology to come up with the best product or service. And keep engaged, and not give up easily. May be that will give us better economics. But the wheel moves on. 

Post-edit: There can be a question. Even if this model works for businesses like milk biscuits and soaps, which are B2C, i.e. we address the consumer and meet his needs, does it apply to B2B or a business to business situation? Like selling advertising space to a tyre manufacturer who supplies tyres to car manufacturers? Where does psychology come in there? 

Ask any seasoned campaigner in this space. Buyer or Seller. He will tell you how much psychology played a role in choices and decisions.  It may be a simple price game or spec game sometimes. But the relationship built over time and the projected success or failure of the relationship or business alliance will be a clincher. That is the logic behind giving freebies, inducements and such. I don't mean this in a corrupt way. Eventually, in a Dharmic way, we can conduct our transactions by focussing on the psychology and architecting the technology. Communication is the current that runs through all this, and one cannot emphasise too much this: how well we communicate will determine the positive momentum in any B2B relationship also.