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Sitaram's Interests
General
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If you click on this dazzling red gif link, you will visit my message board with over 1000 posts/essays/dialogues that I have created over the past 8 years.
You may have your own phpBB message board in a matter of minutes at
You scored as Existentialism. Your life is guided by the concept of Existentialism: You choose the meaning and purpose of your life.
?Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.?
?It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.?
--Jean-Paul Sartre
?It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.?
--Blaise Pascal
Initially, I created it in the hope that a few of my yahoo chat friends in Nigeria would take a great interest in it, learn to moderate and administer it, and take it over. Unfortunately, to date no one has taken an interest.
I thought such a message board would make a nice project for students to participate in. It would also have great appeal for people of African ancestry living outside of Africa.
If you find the message board of interest, you may join, and I shall make you a moderator, and direct you to flash tutorials which instruct in every aspect of phpbb message board administration, moderation and use. Just click on the link (above) and visit the message board. Click on the word “Join (free)” at the upper right. All you need to do is choose some screen name (nick, handle), choose a password, and enter your email address.
I do hope you can visit my profile/blog and sample my writings on literature, philosophy and spirituality.
The idea behind my project is very simple.
1.) Free message boards are available from
http://www.myfreeforum.org
supported by a very small amount of advertising.
2.) Learning to create and administer a message board offers a tremendous opportunity for anyone, in any part of the world, to network with others and also to gain a soapbox to the world to publicize their concerns.
3.) As a continent of developing nations, Africa can benefit tremendously from the technological tools which are available today. Learning to administer a message board is a great way to come up to speed with this new technology.
4.) As all nations and peoples become more fluent in such technology and more internationalized and multiculturalized then the entire world will benefit from an ever growing population of liberal, secular, enlightened peoples who work, not just for personal goals, not just for nationalistic goals, but for truly universal humanitarian goals.
5.) A message board allows people to engage in dialogue and get to know one another better. Message boards can promote friendships.
BUT.... it all depends upon YOU, the individual. If YOU find this of interest, then it is YOU who will make these message boards successful by devoting some time and effort each day to join the board, learn to moderate and administer it, and reach out to friends and family near and far, to increase membership and participation.
Please visit the Flash Tutorials and see how easy it is to learn how to create, administer and moderate a phpbb message board.
Nature is a temple where pillars, alive,
Sometimes emit indistinguishable words;
Man passes in there through forests of symbols
Which observe him with familiar looks.
Like lingering echoes that are mingled far off
In a one-ness tenebrous and profound,
Vast as the night and as the light of day,
Fragrances, colors, and sounds correspond.
There are fragrances fresh like the flesh of children,
Sweet like oboes, green like prairies
, And others, corrupt, rich and triumphant,
Having the expansion of infinite things,
Like ambergris, musk, benjamin, and incense.
Which sing of the transports of mind and sense.
Poetry, in its attempt to put beauty into words, is like the attempt of mathematics to express reality.
If a single integral is an area under a curve, and a double integral is the volume of a solid, then by analogy and extension, a triple integral must be the volume of some object in four-space.
The symbols and equations represent the reality as a model of that aspect of reality towards which they point, just as the poem points to some aspect of beauty.
We can express mathematically that which we cannot visualize.
We can create a world in which there is a beauty or a love greater than anything we could experience in the flesh, in reality.
Then, we are wounded by our own creation, since we are exiled from the picture of a paradise we have painted.
For me, Beauty, like Aristotle's God, is an unmoved mover, but a deity which is continually begotten by the human mind and imagination.
We human beings have the wonderful and terrible capacity to imagine a perfection greater than anything which could ever exist; not simply the best of all possible worlds, but a better than any possible world. This potency of our imagination is both our blessing and our curse.
What I say to you each day, these thoughts and sentences which drip as from some alchemist's alembic, drop by drop, day by day, like the squeezings from some ancient olive press: such thoughts are not my thoughts in the sense of the me you might sit with at a table and share a cup or glass. These words are from the virtual self I might have been, were I to be recast with infinite time and power, and an expansive consciousness of galactic proportions. The daily me is as mute as those flowers of Baudelaire. I can only give you familiar glances at the table, portentous of what I would like to say, but cannot.
It is only through the wine press and alembic of the written word that the portrait of our virtual self emerges in a painful pointillism of points and viewpoints, arranged and rearranged upon a canvas stretched, and framed just in time for our funeral.
I awaken at ungodly hours which such thoughts as these, fleeting, and I must arise and attempt to capture them in words, or, like timid unicorns sensing lust, they will elude their author.
There are conversations with the dead which may be overheard only in seminars with are soliloquies and monologues. There are attentions which span epochs. Such seminars as these are not infested with the plagues of ego and sophistry.
Quotable Sitaram
Let us say that Divinity is Consciousness; Consciousness is divine,
imagination is an aspect of consciousness, and within the realm of
imagination dwell all things, and at imagination's borders, all
impossibilities, absurdities, unicorns and horned rabbits, await admission
and entrance. Hence, Imagination is the threshhold of existence, and the
unimaginable is non-being.
Let us look about in the world, and behold all the anguish and bitterness in
people's hearts concerning the uncertaintity of why the universe exists,
why we are in it to suffer, desire, and aspire and what is the relationship
between our own personal individuality and that ultimate cause of All:
THIS is RELIGION.
The Perennial Anguish and Bitterness of Religion - Page 211
Someone who wallows in "physical proofs" and the material world, and
desires for food and sex, is forever banished from reaching the spiritual
realms. They do not have the "spiritualized" vision which Lord Krishna
grants to Arjuna, to allow Arjuna to see the Universal Form. That is why,
the spiritual can NEVER by arrived at by logic or argument, but only by
faith and devotion, which is a GIFT, by God's grace or kripa. The spiritual
is arrived at by BHAKTI, devotion, not syllogistic reasoning. Certainly it is
possibly to apply logic to anything, even theology. Logic is NECESSARY,
but not SUFFICIENT.
Humans (and the institutions that they found or inheret) are inherently
flawed (and yet contain that which is Divine). So my advice is summed up
in title of my post "Temple in your mind/ Tirth in your heart" namely,
listen to your own heart, find the Divinity within. Use the externals of
temple/gurus/ satsang as necessary, but do not seek perfection in other
people. Seek perfection in yourself, in the midst of your own
imperfections.
from A Crisis of Parampara/Lineage/Succession - Page 272
Happiness through sense pleasure is an illusion. You will always feel an
emptiness and a dissatisfaction. Only when you turn your attention to the
ultimate cause of that emptiness and dissatisfaction will you begin your
journey on the road to peace.
This perennial emptiness and dissatisfaction in the aftermath of all
enjoyments and indulgence is the real point which lies at the heart of your
dilemma, and not moral issues of what is right or wrong in your actions.
The physical world is a process of BECOMING; it is not BEING. As long as
there IS a physical world, as long as we are born repeatedly into physical
bodies, then nothing can be COMPLETE but rather everything is
BECOMING.
The NOW moment is always filled with NEEDS. This is the source of our
suffering.
from Teenage Girl Questions Sexual Morality - Page 293
Even if foolishness exists in the world, foolishness can still be a powerful
force.. and can have distructive effects and therefore needs and deserves
to be studied in its own right.
There is never any shortage of finger-pointers... to blame others... except
when we make a fist to resort to violence, and then, all ten fingers are
pointing at OURSELVES, or... very rarely, when a philosopher raises one
finger in the air, to say "Aha!" at some new insight, in which case only one
finger in the world is pointing upwards, directing the world's attention
away from self and towards higher things....
"Zen Koan practice is an attempt to break through the noise of the
rational mind's lust for comprehension and reach the silence of simply
Being." - Sitaram
The real treasure, the only treasure, is non-attachment and the realization
of the futility of the fulfillment of any and every gratification. This does
not mean that we cease to gratify desires, but only that we cease to view
gratification as our goal.
The only truly miraculous power which any religion or belief can possibly
possess is the power to transform the inner nature, the inner self of an
individual believer.
Each of us holds a piece of the puzzle, an aspect of the truth: the fool and
the philosopher; the begger and the king; the harlot and the renunciate.
The Truth is too big for any one person, or to be put in "layman's terms".
God's Party Game of Souls
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Have no doubt, that just as your spiritually ripe questions appear on this
page, they also echo through those infinite universes, those countless
worlds, through the hearts of those myriads of sentient beings. That is
why you are beyond birth and death. It is the very nature of
Consciousness itself.
Religions are many, languages are many, races are many, but grief is
one, joy is one, love is one, birth is one, death is one. From the one,
comes many, but many never diminish the One.
from A Mother Grieves the Death of Her Son - Page 165
It is most fitting that a rainbow be chosen in the Old Testament as symbol
of the covenant between God and man: no two people see the same
rainbow, and one can never arrive at its source, no matter how long one
journeys.
The REAL omnipotence and omnipresence of God lies in God's ability and
willingness to BE to each individual, for each individual who turns towards
God with sincerity, hope and expectancy, to BE that Truth, to REVEAL that
One Truth, in all of its manifold diversity, to IMPART that Truth to that
individual, in the fullest measure which that person is able to comprehend,
and in sufficient measure for what that individual needs at any given
moment in their life.
One of the fundamental messages of our modern Democracies is that
Truth lies not simply in the consensus of the majority, but also in the
sheltered sovereignty of that small minority who hear the beat of a
different drummer and march accordingly.
If three people say "apple" or "stone" or "water", we know that they are
all talking about the same thing; such is the nature of language. Moses
said "I", Pharaoh said "I", and God said "I", so if God can say "I" and man
can say "I", then what is the difference between the divine "I" and the
mortal "I"?
The purpose of CONSCIOUSNESS, (being alive and having a soul and self
awareness) is no more benefited by a gluttonous orgy of physical
pleasures, than it is by a ghoulishly morbid torture chamber of unending
pain.
Each of us is a complex sum total of our life experiences, triumphs and
frustrations. As some sage in India might say "God wears many masks of
Good and Evil." Perhaps the Universe is a reflection of God, or perhaps
human concepts of God are a reflection of ourselves and the Universe.
But certainly humanity reflects all of this, itself donning many masks of
Good and Evil, kaleidoscopically, as we metamorphosize from sinner to
saint, back to sinner, struggling in this Divine Drama to emerge from the
pupa of our egos and spread our wings of selflessness and equanimity.
We read a line a thousand times. We look and do not see. Then, suddenly,
one day, we read and see and understand, as if we had never read
before. The verse has always been the same. It is we who have changed,
ripened, become ready, receptive.
Some make iconoclasm their idol. Others use image and symbol to reach
beyond to the nameless and formless which is beyond time, the Akal
Purakh of the Adi Granth.
But cynicism never fails to make its regular pilgrimage to the citadels of
Orthodoxy, their to make its abominable offering and sacrifice on the altar
of Reason.
If I am ugly, yet I know that beauty exists.
If I am foolish, yet I know there is Wisdom.
If I am mortal, yet I know there is something Eternal.
If I am unclean, it is Purity which teaches me of my uncleanliness.
If I am sinful, yet I am not so sinful as to say there is nothing Holy.
When we dwell as pedestrians in a land, we behold the scenery from the
most intimate detail and perspective, but that very closeness and intimacy
in perspective prevents us from seeing symmetry, intention and design
on a grander scale, bearing profounder implications. If we ascend to a
mountain peak, we lose discernment of much of the finer details, but we
can begin to recognize the "lay of the land" and its geography. From an
orbiting space station, we can perceive global structure. And from vantage
point of another galaxy, we may comprehend cosmic design.
Expressions of our TRUE SELF are fleeting. But, when captured
UNDISTORTED in words, they are EVERLASTING. In singing the words of
the Lord's Katah (Sacred Scripture), we strive for the UNDISTORTED
Image of the Lord's Lila (Passtimes). When we truly become a PART of
that Lila, we need not return here in rebirth to this world. Then, we dwell
eternally in the Lila itself, we BECOME the Lila.
from The Undistorted Image of the Lord's Passtimes - Page 93
Whatever path we choose, whatever scripture, whatever Name of God,
with form or formless, we must become the very embodiment of that
scripture, that Name, that Form. It must become as natural as our breath
and it must flow from every pour like our sweat. And when we pass
through a room, our presence and passing should leave that fragrance of
divinity.
Have no doubt! Whenever Dharma declines, my voice will arise. My voice
is the Voice of Ram. My voice is the Voice of Krishna. My voice is the
voice of Buddha, Nanak, and Rumi. My voice is the voice which echoes the
eternal unchanging message of Dharma and Rta whose vibrations the
Rishis echoed in the Vedas. I shall pass away, but these Words will never
pass away. This Voice and these Words will arise in every persecution, in
every holocaust, in every tyranny and oppression of individual religious
freedom of expression. And have no doubt that the history of this Voice
and these Words is the Divine Lila of the Lord.
from In What Way is Guru Bramha, Vishnu and Maheshwara? - Page 153
It is by THOUGHT, and EQUANIMITY that we transcend the unpleasant
physical realties of our mundane corporeal existence. Mind makes
suffering. Mind makes all things, in a way, all things that matter.
from Consatantly marvel in wonder at the ordinariness of it all! - Page 361
Perhaps one of the greatest religious truths ever stated is simply that 'The
Judgement of God is a Mystery to Man". Who can know or say, in the
ultimate scheme of things, after all the eternities of time have played
themselves out, what is the value and purpose of any single human life
and effort. Who can say what constitutes victory and defeat?
Let us hope that the power of the offering of our will and ego and self, or
even the gesture of such an offering, is in itself so pure and powerful that
it transcends all dogma and doctrine, that even the flame of such an
intention and resignation is fiery enough to burn away any sin of human
frailty." - Sitaram
Perhaps that Compassionate Lord of the Vineyard, who paid the penny
wage to those who labored only the final hour of the day, will also have
compassion upon those who labored in the heat of the afternoon, but fell
weakened before the close of day.
All the universe is consciousness, all consciousness is a mirror. When you
look into that universal mirror of consciousness, and see your own
reflection, you see Saguna Brahman. Once you see THROUGH that
reflection, you experience Nirguna Brahman. If you ultimately unite with
Nirguna Brahman, which is reabsorption of jiva into Brahmajyoti, the
cessation of rebirth. This is Moksha.
Do we not all have wounds and doubts to be healed by a nurturing and
comforting Parental song at our bedside; existential wounds of the
coldness of the Infinite Universe and the obscene absurdity of daily life,
society and governments?
The human problems which we deal with are unchanging. No matter how
fast computer chips might become, patience will always be a virtue. The
more powerful and effective weapons and missiles become, the more
essential it is to learn meekness and nonviolent methods of resolving
disputes. No matter what progress science makes in birth control, genetics
and cloning, our primordial sexual desires will always present a profound
challenge to us as a source of temptation, misconduct and addictive
behavior. No matter how many continents or planets we conquer and
colonize, we will always have to face the emptiness and loneliness of a
Universe in which we seem out-of-place and extraneous. No matter how
wise and ancient we become, medically and genetically extending our life
span indefinitely, there will always remain buried somewhere deep within
us a weeping child seeking the consoling love of a heavenly parent.
A theory or hypothesis is a "story" which is SO GOOD that it HAS to be
true, and if it isn't true, then a Universe should be created in which it
BECOMES true. Faith is telling that story, and hearing it, again and again,
with perennial freshness and joy. In the heart of the devotee, Ram is
always returning to Ayodiya; there is always a "Festival of Lights"
When Individual Self perishes; Universal Self is Born. Only when your
particular individual self perishes may that Universal Self be born in its
stead.
The universe is born of passion (rajas),
sustained by purity (sattva) and ends in gloom (tamas). But the course of the sentient being who inhabits the world is just the reverse: leaving the gloom of material existence, journeying through realms of purity, and arriving at that passionless passion called compassion. - Sitaram (Jan. 2002)
