Meditating in the Himalayas

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...