There are two major mobile network players in Kenya: Celtel and Safaricom.
Whilst I’m out here in Kenya, I’m using a Celtel SIM, and it turns out that Celtel Kenya’s parent firm, MTC Group has recently changed its name to Zain.
This was a name selected from a list of over 400 after extensive research was conducted across many countries and cultures, which validated its broad global appeal. In Arabic, Zain means “beautiful, good and wonderful.”
When you’re naming your next company or finding a suitable name for your business, who are you reaching out to, who are you serving, and when the company grows, are you sure that the name will make sense to those in other countries and cultures?
Also, when you’re selecting a suitable domain name for your business, consider this while you read our article on Descriptive Domain Names.
Laptops are brilliant for portability, yet can be great betrayers. I’m out in Kenya for a month, and relying on my laptop battery more than ever – you just don’t know when you’ll next get reliable access to a mains supply for recharging the laptop!
As part of the natural ageing process or due to active use, batteries eventually get worn down – sometimes even when not in use. Do you use a laptop? Here’s how you can get more life out of your laptop battery:
- Be Screen Smart: Lower the use of graphics by changing the screen resolution, shutting off fancy graphics drivers, and dimming your screen – this will all save battery juice.
- Turn Off All Unused Devices: If you’re not using connected USB devices, WiFi, or Bluetooth, disconnect them or turn them off. Also, minimise CD/DVD use, because optical drives are one of the worst at consuming power – they spin, taking power, even when not actively being used.
- Unplug When Charged: When the battery is fully charged, unplug it from the mains and let the laptop use it’s own battery, until all the juice runs out. The more you overcharge your battery, the smaller the amount of charge it will hold the next time.
- Add More RAM: Having more RAM allows you to process more, whereas relying on virtual memory which means hard drive use – hard drives tend to use much more power than your RAM sticks.
- Keep It Clean: Watch how your laptop operates more efficiently while it’s cooler! Your air vents can be cleaned out with a cloth or keyboard cleaner. Your battery’s metal contacts can be cleaned with a cloth moistened with alcohol – do this every few months and it’ll keep the transfer of power from your battery more efficient.
- Focus On One Thing At A Time: All the programs that run on your computer concurrently will add to the central processing unit load, which cuts down battery life. Aim to do one thing at a time while you’re on battery, rather than working on a spreadsheet, listening to an online radio show and letting your email client run in the background. Adopt this for your work in general – you’ll quickly recognise the power of focus!
- Defragment Regularly: Defragmenting takes all the various parts of a file on your computer and puts them next to each other, which means less work for your disk drive when locating files, and therefore less battery power used.
- Go Into Hibernation: Rather than putting your computer in standby mode, hibernating a PC will actually save it’s state as it is, and complete shut itself down. When you want to continue working, simply turn your computer on, and you can continue working where you left off.
So there you go – the power of portability, blended with battery smarts!
Whether you’re working on a common project, writing an article, or preparing a presentation, one of the coolest exercises you can do is to place your main thoughts about the topic into a mind map.
Last weekend I was preparing a presentation to deliver to a group of charitable individuals. This was to raise funds towards drilling a borehole in East Africa so that the communities there could get fresh clean drinking water without having to walk 7km each way every day to fetch water.
Before I created the PowerPoint presentation file, I logged onto my free account at www.Mind42.com and mapped out all my thoughts about what inspired our family to take on this project, how we’ve been collecting funds so far, and some details about the location where the borehole will be drilled. Click here to see an example of the mind map I created.
Having mapped these out, it was so simple to knock all the details into a PowerPoint presentation. The mind map served as a complete visual reminder about what I wanted to communicate.
Now here’s the cooler part. Through it’s collaboration feature, Mind42.com even allows you to share your mind map with your friends, colleagues and clients, so that you can work on this together, even if you are located in some of the remotest parts of the world. Try it out – see it revolutionise the way you remotely work on common tasks.
As you may be aware, we at Cynergise are very fond of Kavit Haria and the way he continues to serve through his work.
Kavit Haria, founder of Young Drummers, has been playing the Tabla (Indian hand drums) for over 12 years and has trained with Pandit Sharda Sahai of the Benaras Gharana.
Now, Kavit is offering weekly term-time Tabla lessons for kids, and the classes this term kick off with a free Tabla lesson.
To promote these tabla classes, we have set up a 4-page website and promotional domain name that allows parents to get the information they need, register their children for the initial free lesson, and let their own friends know about it.
If you know of a parent in the North West part of London (England) whose kids would be up for learning a new art in a welcoming family environment, how about you ask them to visit www.FreeTablaLesson.com so that their kids can also get the benefit of a free Tabla lesson by Kavit Haria this month.
If you have any questions about these classes, please visit www.youngdrummers.com/faq
Spam can hit our inboxes throughout the day, creating annoying distractions that force us to have to scan it and delete it, where time could be better spent elsewhere.
According to statistics reported on page 6 of Singapore’s TODAY paper on August 13, 2007:
- 6 trillion business email messages were sent worldwide last year
- 49 minutes is spent on email each day by the average worker
- 4 hours is spent on email each day by the senior management worker
- 80 percent of email sent is actually spam
- 62 percent of workers check their business email at home or on holiday
- 10 points is the fall in IQ experienced by workers distracted by email (more than twice that found in cannabis studies)
You’ve checked out the stats, so would it be worth exploring how you could get a handle on your email? Here are two tricks that we have already started to use to help guard us from spam and spammer attacks:
(1) Turn Your Email Address Into An Image: When you need to display your email address on your website, you can protect it from being added to a bulk email list by displaying that email address as an image. Use Safe Mail that turns it into an image that looks like text, or check out Email Cover that turns your email address into a CAPTCHA image. These are both free services, and something that we’ll be using on ALL of our websites that display our email addresses.
(2) Use A Spam Blocker: If your email address is already trapped on bulk email lists, there are cool services that you can subscribe to that block out ALL emails that aren’t by known senders. All those messages by unknown sources that fall into your spam folder can be checked occasionally in case a genuine email arrives there, so don’t worry – new contacts can still reach you. This saves you tonnes of time by keeping your attention on those emails that consistently deserve your attention. The spam blocking service we use and highly recommend is Spam Arrest.
Articles have the power of driving massive amounts of traffic directly to your website.
Targeted traffic comes to your website in one of two forms. Either directly through the link to your site which sits in the ‘bio box’ at the bottom of the article, or because your website has risen up the search engine rankings because it has been linked from many other websites who have republished your article.
It takes a little skill to put together a decent article that the end viewer loves to read. It takes quite a bit more effort to have your article republished by many other webmasters, bloggers, and ezine editors.
A tool we use and highly recommend is Article Announcer, that submits your article to the world’s top article directories, which is then picked up by many publishers across the world who will help drive targeted traffic towards you.
When you visit a website, do you notice the small icon that sits to the left within your address bar? Take a look up where it says http://www.cynergise.com, and you’ll see an icon that identifies us. This small icon is known as the favicon. It also is the icon that is displayed when the site is bookmarked, and is what shows up in the tab if you use tabbed browsing.
This is another powerful way of branding your site, that confirms to your site visitor that they are indeed on the correct website.
There is a cool tool at http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/ that lets you create favicons from a picture for free, which you can then use on your very own website.
Ask your web designer to use this free tool to help you improve your site branding!
Flicking through a collection of pics and videos with my dad and brother earlier today, I came across a video of my very own cousin waking us up after a heavy night out drinking in Corfu back in 2002. Check out his terrific rendition of “Wake up, it’s a beautiful morning!”
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Who needs an alarm clock when you have this wiked pop idol knocking your hangover into next week!?
Conscious hip hop artist Common, embraces the art form’s core principles: storytelling and presenting music with a message.
Here, Common presents “A Dream”, and gets us thinking about the dreams that we’re all working towards.
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A second equally powerful tune by Common is “The Light”…
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Back in October 2006, I sent a wish out into the universe for some comfortable size 14 squash shoes.
Today they have arrived.
When ordering these shoes through www.walktall.co.uk, I also picked up a pair of Columbia Slate Slides – wow, when I’m travelling out in the hotter parts of the world, these will be a TREAT to wear.
So, who’s up for a game of squash? Any takers? Badminton works for me too!
Los Angeles based Hip Hop group Karmacy communicate a dialogue between two brothers.
With a part gujarati conversation, they tell a story about how one brother wants to escape the boredom of Indian life to explore the girls and money of America and become a millionaire. The other brother asks him what’s the need?
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/_Sbp8opfosg" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]How often are we running outside ourselves and to other parts of the world to seek fame, fortune, excitement, love, and acceptance?
On the other hand, why hold back from travelling and exploring?
When we decide to venture out into the wider world, what’s the incentive, and what’s the intention? What are we expecting from the experience and what are our motives behind our actions?
Drawn out from they lyrics of “Blood Brothers” by Karmacy, you’ll find that “nomatter where I go, my soul is in the same place”.
So often I hear about individuals and organisations who are passionate about CREATING change. It’s even mentioned in the tail end of a What’s Bubbling post about social entrepreneurship.
It seems that so many people involved in the non-profit / charity sector are deeply addicted to “saving the world”. According to the Born on the Mountaintop experience, “You have the Save the World addiction when you believe you must make a positive impact on the world before you can feel completely acceptable”.
The problem with this is that you can’t actually CREATE change. Change happens whether you like it or not. Change is meant to happen, and it will take place whether you are a part of it or not. It’s happening all the time. You have no real control over it, or over the consequences of your actions.
Any action you take, whether it’s through thought, speech, or physical expression, will be a catalyst for change to occur in the world around you. The vibrations you emit when you take that action will attract the various entities together to bring rise to a specific situation.
This resulting situation could be a new school for underprivileged kids in a rough neighbourhood, could eliminate poverty throughout the third world, could result in the destruction of an entire rainforest in South America, or could even land you a windfall by winning this week’s national lottery.
You simply cannot take credit when this situation arises, nor can you take the blame for it.
Normally, whenever you’re unhappy about something in the world, or worried about an event that you fear will take place, you start to enforce change. You think you have the power! Ha!! Really you don’t. The only thing you can ever do is take specific action, and let go of the desired outcome. Keep your eyes and ears open, look deep inside, and discover your intention behind a specific action that you’re taking. Is it coming from the dark side (a form of anger, frustration, stress, greed, a need to protect your ego, or a desire to deceive)? Or is it coming from a place of compassion?
Do you want to build that new school in the run-down neighbourhood because you’re really angry that the local government just doesn’t care about the welfare of it’s community? Do you want to build the school so that you can be recognised as a “local hero”? Do you have a vested interest in the land where you’re proposing to build the school?
Or is your intention for building the school coming from a place where you genuinely and wholeheartedly feel for the quality of education that the kids in that neighbourhood currently receive? Can you feel deep within you the hardship that each and every one of these children are going through right here, right now? What’s really driving you to build that school? What’s your intention? Does your action arise from the dark side, or does it arise from a place of compassion?
Whether you take action with a dark intent, or with a compassionate intent, it may result in the very same outcome arising for you – the construction of that brand new school for underpriviledged kids. Congratulations! However, this very same initial action, whether through thought, speech, or physical expression, will simultaneously be the catalyst for other situations to occur in the world around you.
The other simultaneous situations that occur are determined by the actual INTENT of your initial action. If you have a dark intention for that initial action, it’ll bring rise to other events that may not necessarily serve you in the way you’d hoped. It’ll certainly plant the seeds that bring rise to not-so-pleasant circumstances in the future. If you have a compassionate intention for that initial action, chances are high that it’ll bring rise to other events that positively serve you in the future.
Fine, you may WANT to change the world. Honestly, you can’t. All you can do is patiently and innocently observe the wonder of the world around you. Focus on the things that you already find beautiful and the things that function well. Pay attention to these things, appreciate them, raise their value. For those things that shock you or make you feel uneasy, then rather than succumbing to the dark side and making a lot of unnecessary noise about forcing others to change, let your actions come from a place of compassionate intent, and through that wonderous place, take inspired action.
Just as the caterpillar transforms into the magnificent butterfly, so too must you take only consistent inspired action and patiently welcome the changes that you’re destined to experience.
What will be the intention of YOUR actions today?
Right now, the sun is shining. Nothing special – it’s a gorgeous afternoon, and the light of the sun is penetrating through the large window and illuminating my whole bedroom. This morning the sun wasn’t shining. Nothing special – the clouds were hiding it, and it looked quite gloomy outside. Tonight the sun will stop shining. Nothing special – the Earth will have rotated so that we won’t be able to see the sun, and so we’ll be in darkness.
Interesting how the sun was still there, doing it’s job, radiating as it was meant to. The sun will continue doing it’s job, radiating as it’s meant to. The sun will continue shining. At times there will be clouds or the Earth covering it up, hiding it from our view, and although it will look like the sun has stopped shining, it’ll just be that our view of the sun has been obscured.
Our experience of the rest of the world is kind of like that. Everything that we could ever want, that we could ever hope to get, is permanently there. Everything that we hope never to get, to never be a victim of, is also permanently there. What happens is that our past actions cause certain things to be hidden from our present view.
Karmically speaking, our previously bound paap karma hides all the things that make us feel good, and reveals those very things that make us feel bad. In the same context, previously bound punya karma hides all the things that we could never want, and reveals the very things that make us feel better.
Of course all those bad things and those better things are just momentary. We want to remove all karma so that we can see our world as it is, completely unadulterated, being aware of all the good and all the not so good, without really reacting to it.
So the next time you’re looking for that perfect parking space, remember that it’s just there where you want it, even if it appears to be momentarily hidden. The next time you want to go on that playful date, remember that the right person is right in front of you, even if they appear to hidden from your life. The next time you want the sun to shine, remember that it will, although it may just be hiding behind the clouds.
Date: Friday 18th to Sunday 20th May 2007
Times: Depart at 12 noon from NW London, Return by 9pm to NW London
Location: The Abbey, Oxfordshire
Register: By contacting Malini at retreat@youngjains.org.uk or call 020 8907 7972 / 07816 627817
Early this summer, spend a dynamic weekend in the Oxfordshire countryside, as you encounter the warm, open-minded atmosphere of the Young Jains Residential Retreat.
Spanning across two and a half days of mind, body, and spiritual nourishment, this is your opportunity to immerse yourself in sessions that explore the foundations and lifestyle application of Jain Dharma, amongst a group of twenty curious and creative individuals just like you.
Take some time out to make new friends, build on existing friendships, and have fun within a playful setting where we will cook together, play games, and walk in nature.
Subsidised by Young Jains, your contribution is just £45 for Young Jains Student Members, £60 for Young Jains Members, and £75 for Non-members. With 12 people already signed up, be sure to contact Malini now to register for one of the 8 remaining places.
Get in touch with Malini at retreat@youngjains.org.uk or call 020 8907 7972 / 07816 627817 to request a registration form, or to have any questions about the retreat answered.
For more information, visit http://www.youngjains.org.uk/events/retreat/
If you think cafes are safe environments, you’re right. They’re amazing safe spaces in which you can feed off the buzz of energy that’s around you, take inspiration from all the other customers, and immerse yourself in creative work, and beautiful collaborative dialogue.
You can get very comfortable in such an environment, and when you’re so immersed in your work, without that awareness of what’s going on around you, thieves have a wonderful opportunity to operate.
This afternoon, I was sitting at Starbucks in Angel with a friend for a hot drink. As we were about to leave, he went to get his laptop bag and couldn’t find it. In it’s place was a scruffy empty black satchel, and on the table next to it a half opened sandwich.
The thief had stolen a sandwich (as none of the staff recognised that sandwich being paid for), sat at a potential hotspot where he / she wouldn’t be recognised, swiftly swapped bags (like you see in the films when they swap briefcases) and had taken the opportunity to run off with my friend’s bag, which contained his laptop and some important documents.
I don’t remember who sat in the seat behind my friend, and nobody I questioned in the cafe could remember what that person looked like. We were all so immersed in our own conversations, that weren’t aware of what else was going on.
This incident prompted me to take a look at additional security measures myself, and on the Microsoft, you’ll find an article about “How to protect your laptop from thieves”
I’m still going to keep going to cafes to immerse in creative work – it’s an environment in which I thrive in! Only now, my eyes and ears will be more open than they have ever been before.
Last Wednesday (28th Feb 2007), I was placed on the guest list of top jazz saxophonist Courtney Pine’s gig at the Jazz Cafe, Camden, London, by my good friend bassist Darren Taylor.
What a phenomenal gig! A prime example of hours and hours of determination packed into two hours of passionate delivery.
Check out this video of a gig that Courtney, Darren and the band played at Falmouth Princess Pavillion. Darren’s on the double bass behind Courtney – you can see that he’s having a wiked time!
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For more on Courtney, visit www.courtneypine.co.uk
On the night, Courtney also played a sax tribute to Lynden David Hall – here’s the late Lynden’s very own Sexy Cinderella:
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A Buddhist monk walks up to a burrito stand and asks…
“Make me one with everything”
The vendor says, “That’ll be £2.50 please”.
The Buddhist hands him a ten pound note, and asks for his change, to which the vendor replies:
“My dear sir, change must come from within!”
—
There’s something about a burrito that gives it a buzz – check out www.buzzburrito.com/masterclass to find out what the big deal is about the burrito this weekend.
Are you like how I’ve been first thing in the morning? Before even having breakfast, do you just jump out of bed and load up your computer to check your email? You think that in those few hours between when you closed your computer before you went to sleep, and when you turn on your computer in the morning when you wake up that there will be something SO IMPORTANT that it becomes your priority of the day? Get real!
How about if you get to the office – what’s the first thing you do? Load up your computer, check your telephone voicemails, and trawl through your emails? What, like there’s something SO CRITICAL that you just HAVE to read it right away? Get real!
If there’s something so dramatically urgent, the right person will find a way to track you down.
Check out this brilliant video where Gregory Mantell interviews Julie Morgenstern who suggests spending the first hour of your workday email-free.
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A brilliant supporting article on this topic can be found at Geek to Live.com
What is your Most Important Task (MIT) of the day, and how wonderful would it feel if you got it completed before you peeked at even one email?
Pujyashree Chitrabhanuji is coming to town! That’s right, in March 2007, for just a few days, Pujyashree Chitrabhanu is in London, giving us the opportunity to spend time with an individual that has had and who continues to have a tremendous impact, in spreading the messages of Jain Dharma to the wider world outside India.
There are a series of events taking place from Tuesday 6th to Sunday 11th March in and around London, and I highly recommend you get to as many of them as you can. For those understanding English only, I suggest you check out the event that Young Jains is hosting on Saturday 10th March – details at TwelveFacets.com
What a wonderful chance to learn in person from someone who has so eloquently written about the twelve bhavnas, which are the ancient reflections on everyday reality. His book Twelve Facets of Reality has been instrumental in my current exploration and approach to overcoming inner desires, working towards freedom from the cycles of birth and rebirth, with the ultimate aim of abundant, infinite, eternal bliss – a.k.a. Moksha!
Scratchy throat. Hmmm, nothing quite like honey, lemon and hot water to soothe the throat.
Don’t forget to add grated ginger to the mix!
At the beginning of this year, I jetted out to India for a week because my dad’s uncle had suddenly passed away. It was worthwhile spending time with the family out there and being there for my little cousins.
I later found out that two blind people had been given the gift of sight, because my dad’s uncle had his eyes donated.
Although inspired to sign up as an organ donor, I forgot to do it, until a leaflet jumped up at me whilst I was sorting out some paperwork today.
Immediately I visited www.uktransplant.org.uk, and within minutes I was registered to have any of my organs donated when I pass on. Easy peasy! When I’m dead, I won’t be needing my body, so someone else might as well make use of the useful bits.
Did you know that thanks to the miracle of cornea transplantation, more than 2,000 people in the UK have their sight restored every year?
Yet there is still a serious shortage of donated corneas. Will you consider cornea donation when you sign up – and give the gift of sight?
From a comment at Alex Kjerulf’s blog post about Global Belly Laugh Day, I picked up a link to the following video showing a baby laughing from the depths of it’s soul.
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When was the last time you laughed this purely?
Inspired by the layout of Monopoly, this Jain twist to the game gives all teams the chance to shine out with their knowledge and understanding of Jain Dharma, in a typically warm, supportive, and light-hearted Young Jains setting.
Facilitated by the creator of Jainopoly, Deepa M Shah used quizzes and party games to elicit the qualities required to playfully embrace the often challenging life we come across in our every waking moment.
My personal favourite game involved coming into a circle, catching a tennis ball from someone, and then whilst throwing it to someone else, shouting out a Jain word or phrase. Then, remembering who you threw the ball to, the next time a ball would come your way, throwing it to that same person, shouting out the same phrase as last time.
For me this really helped me build focus, awareness, attentiveness, vigilance, and persistence to keep going, even in moments when the ball dropped. Repeating that one phrase helped keep the main thing the main thing.
The lesson was: if the ball drops, and you go to pick it up, don’t forget to stay alert for the next ball coming your way, otherwise it’ll hit you on the head! It may be better to let the ball roll away rather than get knocked out by trying to do it all. Alternatively, let all the tennis balls come to you, pick up the one you dropped, and with all the tennis balls in your hand, continue the game by releasing each ball out to the group one at a time.
Recently I have found myself following my usual habit pattern of taking on loads of projects, and can sense myself collapsing soon by trying to meet all these expectations I’ve been overloading myself with. I have one of two options to relieve this pressure:
- Release some of the projects into the world so that other people receive the opportunity to take them on, whilst I can focus on the projects that I need to be working on the most.
- Continue to oversee all the projects, focusing only on what I’m uniquely qualified to do, and then delegate all the other tasks and sections of each project to other talented individuals who generate much greater value than what I could do on my own.
I do like the sound of the second option, and it gives me the opportunity to be involved in projects that really mean a lot to me, whilst offering the chance for others to get involved. As it is, I love collaborating with other creative individuals, so what a great way to stop hoarding and continue GIVING!
If you’re reading this and fancy working with me on one of the projects I’m currently immersed in, get in touch, and I’ll fill you in on what you can get involved with. It’ll be interesting to explore the special talents you can bring to the mix.
What a truly educational and fulfilling Wednesday evening!
In today’s class, Harshadbhai gave us the low-down on Mahavira and Early Jainism. He started the class by showing the Timeline of India and putting Jainism into temporal perspective.
Here are the key messages (fused with my prior knowledge and experience) that I took away from the class:
- Anekantvad: Every being has the right to have their own belief. This doesn’t mean that you have to accept EVERYTHING. Rather it indicates that you can respect other people’s views, and allow them to respect yours. Afterall, our view of the world is only limited by what we know to be true, and the biggest hurt is created when we do everything in our power to defend that view. What if, although your view may be different, it actually complements the view of the other person? What synergistic solution could you both create, rather than putting up the barriers?
- Ahimsa: Every being has the right to exist without fear of being killed or harmed in some way. However, Ahimsa doesn’t mean inaction. By all means, take action if you’re faced with an adverse situation and the need to protect yourself and others arises. Be pragmatic about it in a minimal-violent way. Wherever possible, do it in an absolutely non-violent way. It’s been said that sitting back and allowing injustice to take place is a cowardly act and is in itself an act of violence – although I’m still unsure of where I sit with this (i.e. if life’s about just observing situations that arise, with equanimity, without getting caught up in delight or anger towards it, then if you’re detached from witnessing an unjust act, is action really necessary?). Gandhi objected to wrong activity that he witnessed, and carried out that objection with minimal violence.
- Anarambha: Avoid starting anything unnecessary. As I understand it, parigraha (the desire to own) leads to arambha (the starting of an unnecessary act). Also, I wonder if this lines up with the Taoist principle of Wu Wei, which is non-doing / non-action. According to Wei Wu Wei, the philosophy of non-dual action, when wu-wei (non-action) is done, nothing is left undone. It’s about following the flow of nature, without trying, behaving completely naturally and in tune with the natural order of things. From a karmic viewpoint, it’s about letting karma come to fruition, without forcing specific situations to take place, and so by not fighting and controlling situations, you embrace what you experience fully, and bind no further karma – so long as you have no raag (attraction) or dwesh (aversion) to it. This philosophy kind of sheds a whole new light on the general message in society that “you MUST make plans and make them work to be successful in life!” What do you think? Should you force life down a certain path, or should you just be an observer of whatever comes up for you in life? How do YOU see the game being played?
- Samayik: This is not so much about the ritualistic 48 minutes sat down in complete isolation, in one spot, reading religious books, praying, worshipping, reciting rosary, or doing meditation. No way! It’s actually about coming closer to the true beautiful reality of our soul, whereby you express ZERO excitement (raag / attraction), and ZERO anger (dwesh / aversion) to any situation that you come to experience in your life. It’s just about equanimity, and practicing equanimity. It’s about observing yourself and the world around you, clearly responding to it, but not reacting to it. It’s about letting karma come to fruition, without binding more karma on top. So samayik as a ritual is INCREDIBLY helpful for us to come closer to our soul, because it keeps us focused on what reality is, penetrating through all the layers of distractions and delusions that hold us back from the truth.
- Aparigraha: Restraining the desire to accumulate more and more. When you want something enough, chances are that you’re going to do what it takes to get it. You might fight someone for it, you might kill for it, you might steal, you might tell a lie to get it, you might negatively influence someone to get it for you. You might even harm yourself to get it. All these things, in the name of accumulation, you’ll do, and as you do them, you bind more karma, that of course keeps you tied up in the cycle of birth and rebirth. Beyond non-accumulation is non-possession. What if you have something, and you hold onto it so tightly because you’re afraid of losing it. Grabbing hold of it, not letting it go, is a result of a deep fear of change that you have within you. You anticipate change, and fear it. You hold so tightly onto things, onto people, because you don’t want it to change, and you end up suffocating these very people. So Aparigraha is not just about restraining your desire for accumulation. Aparigraha is also about not being possessive about what you do have, and releasing it from your grip so that it can flow naturally. There’s a story about two little boys playing in the garden. They see a pair of incredible butterflies, and walk closer to them. The first boy reaches out and catches a butterfly in his hand. The second boy does the same. The first boy, not wanting to lose this butterfly clenches his fist so that the butterfly doesn’t escape. Oops, too late – he’s just crushed it. The physical shell of the butterfly is still there, but he’s squeezed the life out of it. He wanted to keep it forever and now it’s no more. The second boy, however, faces his palm upwards and opens his hand. The butterfly floats out and playfully returns to the palm of his hand within moments. Have you noticed that when you want something enough, but you don’t obsess over how to get it, that before you know it, the very thing you want comes flooding into your life? There’s a brief personal example of that at my post on Travelling Alone But Never Lonely.
- Ahimsa and the Environment: Wow, for me probably the biggest lesson of all! You know what, I’ll let Harshadbhai fill you in on this one. Read the full transcript of Dr Harshad Sanghrajka’s talk about ‘Ahimsa and the Environment’ given on Ahimsa Day at the House of Commons on 1st November 2006. In essence, if we gave enough importance to the elements of nature (earth, water, wind, fire, etc..) as we do to ourselves, then we’d understand that they are also life forms (types of Jiva). By us practicing ahimsa towards the elements, and have restraint in our activity with these life forms, then we wouldn’t be crying so much today about the state of the environment, pollution, and the ozone layer. Seriously, check out the link to his article – you’ll get it!
Following the class, a bunch of us went down for a social at a local place called Spice Rack on Honeypot Lane in Queensbury – the food there is terrific! We talked about our various professions, about yoga & meditation, about 6.30am walks, about the ‘Jain Jigsaw Puzzle’ and about what we each want to get from the classes.
Looking forward to week 3 of the Foundation in Jain Studies course…
