Meditating in the Himalayas

Last month the Chinese government released a new set of dietary guidelines which, if followed, could reduce the nation’s meat consumption by as much as 50%. Given that China boasts the world’s largest population at approximately 1.357 billion, a cutback of this size is bound to have a massive global impact. Fuelled by health concerns, China hopes with this recommendation to minimize or even prevent heart disease, diabetes, and other diet-related illnesses that have been publicly linked to meat consumption. Academy Award winning vegan director   James Cameron, inspired by this move, teamed up with former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to film a series of PSAs to encourage North Americans to do the same. The PSAs were shot on the set of the newest  Avatar  film, and while they are still yet to be released, the following promotional video has already gone viral: In addition to tackling the health concerns...

Unconfirmed quote of Guru Dev September 1945 It is said that in September 1945, when the Second World War was over, newspaper reporters wanted to know the reaction of Shankaracharya Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath (Guru Dev). Allegedly he gave them the following statement, parts of which match other published quotations of Guru Dev... “Real victory is that, after which there can never be a reverse. Nobody can call himself a victor forever merely by crushing an external foe, because such foes can spring up again. A real victory is achieved by bringing under control the internal foes. A check over the internal enemies is therefore the only way of conquering the external enemies forever, because we should bear in mind that it is our own internal enemies which create the external enemies. These inner enemies are ambition, anger, greed, false attachment, vanity and jealousy. It is this hexagon sitting inside us which makes a cat's paw (dup...

Soma, It’s Effects and How It’s Produced At MIU with Keith Wallace in the mid 70s, he played for his biology students every tape he had of Maharishi talking about Soma - the finest product of digestion.   Here is a transcript of one of those tapes: Maharishi : It’s very easy to understand about soma, hmm? A sickly nervous system does not produce that material from what we eat or drink, which will maintain the body for long time. An ineffective nervous system, inefficient, sick nervous system, the digestive ability is very much less, and therefore, whatever the system digests, is not good enough to make the body strong. When the health is more normal, then the digestive system produces more agreeable product from what we eat. If the nervous system is very normal, very, very normal, then the digestive system will be able to digest the whole value of what we eat. Whole food will be completely digested. That means, the finest of the relative particle will be so modified ...

After Guru Dev's Mahasamadhi, Brahmachari Mahesh (Maharishi) stayed in Uttarkashi before leaving to accompany an ailing lady from Calcutta (an 'aunt' said to be a wealthy widow, of a family of 'zamindar' - 'landlords', - who called Mahesh 'beta' - 'son' and whom he called 'mataji' - 'mother') to a medical facility near Bangalore in southern India. Swami Srikanta Bharathi of Sree Matha, Hariharapura, recalls: “One Krishna Iyer and his brother Narayana Iyer were running a small coffee hotel in Madanapalli Town. But there was no provision for travellers to stay overnight in that hotel.. After having his meal in that hotel, Mahesh asked the Iyers for a place to stay. Since there was no provision for lodging, they suggested that he may sleep on the steps, in the nearby temple. In the rain and cold of that place, it was not possible to stay outdoors. So the problem was serious. Mahesh saw a very small room next to the kitchen...

Published in the Washington Post 21 March 2016 A striking  new study  — but one that is bound to prove controversial — has provided a calculation of both the health benefits and the reductions in planetary greenhouse gases that might be achieved if the world shifted away from meat-based diets. The results, while theoretical in nature, certainly make a strong case for treating the food system, and animal agriculture in particular, as a key part of the climate change issue. Namely, the researchers find that shifting diets toward eating more plant-based foods on a global scale could reduce between 6 and 10 percent of mortality — saving millions of lives and billions of dollars — even as it also cuts out 29 to 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions linked to food by the year 2050. “Dietary change could have large health and environmental benefits,” says Marco Springmann, the lead author of the new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a...

Posted on Feb 5 2016 - 3:51pm by Sustainable Pulse Washington State University researchers have concluded that feeding a growing global population with sustainability goals in mind is possible. Their review of hundreds of published studies provides evidence that organic farming can produce sufficient yields, be profitable for farmers, protect and improve the environment and be safer for farm workers. The review study, “ Organic Agriculture in the 21st Century ,” is featured as the cover story for the February issue of the journal Nature Plants and was authored by John Reganold, WSU regents professor of soil science and agroecology, and doctoral candidate Jonathan Wachter. It is the first study to analyze 40 years of science comparing organic and conventional agriculture across the four goals of sustainability identified by the National Academy of Sciences: productivity, economics, environment and community well being. “Hundreds of scientific studies now show that organic ag...

"Himalayas will always remain Himalayas. They will always be on the top of the world. There are about 100 Purusha practicing Transcendental Meditation and living Purusha life of absolute brahmacharya. They are gaining command over Prakriti. Prakriti is the daivi shakti, which functions for the individual as the individual Purusha value inside - witnessing value, self-referral value ? and so the Purusha value increases in daily life. Himalayas will always be guiding light of purity, of affluence, of gaining authority in Nature. Uttarkashi has been a place where Guru Dev has been, and Guru Dev’s Guru Dev has been. It’s a fountainhead of Pure Knowledge. One cannot sing the glory of the Himalayas enough. Throughout the ages the Vedic literature is full of the glory of the Himalayas: Uttarkashi, Gangotri, Badrinath, Kedarnath, Rishikesh. A beautiful, beautiful fortune of the people takes them on pilgrimage- year after year thousands and thousands of people and they have a glimp...