The five extra commandments that Moses didn't bring down from the mountain:

The five extra commandments that Moses didn't bring down from the mountain

 

Art Buchwald's ghost took me to visit a Cecil B DeMille production. God came to me to discuss the five extra commandments that Moses didn't bring down from the mountain:

 

G - Did you see "Ten Commandments?"

I - Of course, I did! All Hindoos who could, must have seen it. They tried to give it an 'A' certificate but it didn't work

 

G - Don't get off the track. Do you remember the climatic scene?

 

I - It has three 'c's God, not two.

 

G - Whatever. Do you remember it? The climactic scence?

 

I - You mean the one in which Moses is descending from the mountain carrying the 10 Commandments: Who doesn't remember that? Who will forget that? We here in India were fascinated by it. Our Hindoo gods don't live atop mountains. They are supposed to be all around and within us. And they never issue commandments. It's all pretty confusing. That's why any Tom & Dick guru gets the better of us... That Paramount studio God was like what a God should be. Clear. Unequivocal. Forthright. Assertive. 'Thou shalt ' this and 'Thou shalt not' that! He sure never let any grass grow under his feet....Cecil B DeMille's orchestra put all it had in it... After the show, I trampled upon many dentures that had fallen off their owners' jaws because of all the din and vibration. Made me fill I was crushing bone China under my feet.

 

G - DeMille was not the music director. He was the producer. But unscatter your brains for the time I am visiting with you, will you? You're beginning to aggravate me with your asides. Just tell me do you remember, or, do you remember not?

I - Yes, Sir! I do. But why did you ask?

G - Well, too bad Moses didn't have a third hand and didn't know how to carry a load on his head llike you Hindoos do.

I - Now, it's your turn to gather your wits, God. How can I respond to your riddles? What do you mean "Moses didn't have a third hand? In the first place, you, God, never make any humans with three hands. Jerry Falwell would have mentioned it, if you had.

 

G - Oh, I did, I did, but I must have put them on a different planet in another solar system in a galaxy not too far from yours. Your Goddess Umä keeps frying ladles and ladles of planets for me to fill them up with Life. Keeps me so busy I never get a chance to visit one a second time. She takes her tips from that Dik Browne comic strip about that Viking, Hagar The Horrible...  But that's not the point. It's Moses; he up and took off with those two tablets. I tried to call him back, "Moses! Moses! come back and get this third tablet I am working on right now." But my voice was drowned in that defeaning musical score they played. Moses never heard me. That third tablet, carrying five more of my commandments is still lying there buried onn that mountain. It's your job to go get it.

 

I - Un-Un, God, not I! I am a DAD person. I have no passport, no visa, no money or time to go get it. My knees are buckling under my belly's weight. I can't stand the heat. My lust will not be able to withstand the charms of all those lovely Jewish ladies. Besides, they don't have the marmelos fruit tree over there in Israel. You know I am addicted to drink its juice every morning, lacing it with yogurt...All I have is a long white beard. And Mossad wouldn't be Mossad if it let any old man play Moses, just on the strength of a beard, would it? ...Why don't you just tell me what those five commandments are? I'll put them on my blog and the word will get around without missionaries having to set up churches and getting caught with young boys. That one, over there in LA, is now on the verge of selling all its properties to pay off all those child-abuse lawsuits..

G - Okay, smarty-pants. Haul out thy keyoard.

 

I - Aye, aye Cap'n! All hands! Action Stations, now!!

G - Thou shalt not mix sand with charcoal.

 

I - Er - Did I hear you right God? Sand? charcoal? What kind of commandment is that?

G - It's about Carbon and Silicon, you dumbo! Next!

Thou shalt not trade in Carbon. I have an IPR lock on that element. No one can trade in Carbon without paying royalty to me. I shall smite them with the latest WTO injunction

I - ...(tapping the keyboard)...Not trade in carbon, okay!

 

G - Thou shalt give up the Roman Script

I - God! Don't be that tough on humankind! How can it fight Al Quaeda if it can't use the Roman Script?

 

G - Next! Though Shalt stand up against the Grunch

I - Most of us don't even know who/what a Grunch is. 

 

G - Make a Google link to that Grunch page, you idiot! Next! Thou shalt not look for weapons of mass destruction anywhere because I have them all and will use them if you delay acting on the Climate Change crisis.

 

I - I like that, commandment God. Last I heard Tony Blair was trying to persuade David Lean to do a 'Lawrence of Arabia' with him riding a camel through Iran. You know he is out of a job. 

 

G - You mean Blair will go look for WMDs in Iraq some more?

 

I - No, God, I meant Iran! That's next on the U S, aka, Dick Cheney's list. I guess they're 'doing' all countries whose names begin with an 'I'. A decade or so ago, General Dynamics did a scenario that showed 300 sites in India where they needed to drop missles... You'll come to protect us, won't you, God?... That submarine man, Jimmy Carter, has a thing against Israel, too. Australia's John Howard wants to take out Indonesia.

 

When I looked up from the keyboard, God had disappeared. All I had was a 17" Cathode Ray Tube behind which was a cruddy magnetron. On the screen, was this message: "There's a sixth commandemnt but it's for you only: Thou shalt listen to the radio in moderation"

 

I - "Damn you!". I hit the [Send] button, vowing to look up 'Self-Exorcise, How To" so I could take care of A.B.'s ghost

---

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The major tragedy: electing Mr. Blair

Sent today to "World Have Your Say," BBC.com.

While I have to thank the BBC for bringing to me Jimmy Carter's "Tragedy for the World" statement today, I notice two subtle inaccuracies in presenting the report.

First off, the president said a 'major' tragedy while the presenter excluded this important adjective.

Second, the U S president said "Great Britain" and not the "Blair government"'s support.. as the presenter did.

I've attached 20 second clip that has the presnter's voice and Mr. Carter's voice so you can check that I am right.

I think few in the west who crow about what a wonderful democratic system they have realize that in democracies the citizens become responsible for the actions of their elected leaders.

President Carter is right to say that "Great Britain's" support to the U S government's adventure is a major trajedy for the world. What this implies to me is that the decision of the British people to elect Mr. Blair was the major tragedy that the world has had to suffer.

In a democracies there is responsibility, consequence and by extension culpability. The world really doesn't care who the nexy or part British primeminster or who the next or past U S president will be. These are 'democratic' countries - and collectivelty, therefore, their citizens are accountable

The British people could get a camel for Tony Blair so he can ride through Iran to look for weapons of mass destruction there. That would help the next U S president to start another adventure. But it is not they who will have to live with the fear of retaliatory retribution for these gratuitous tragedies that U K and U S cannot but 'collaterally' inflict upon te world to 'secure' their assets and their 'national interests'. The fear and anxiety for inflicting major trageies upon the world falls to the share of the democratic people of those countries whose people elect such dangerously foolish people as their representaives.

Mr Carter, the peanut farmer and habitat builder, has little feudal experience. He would otherwise know that the US U-K relationship is feudally formatted. And any feudal lord could tell him that in this format the 'masters' ends up getting controlled and manipulated by their subservient vassals. The United States, the world's largest borrower nation, has never had any truly independent foreign policy that was not disastrous. In fact, along with "Australia" and "Canada" it may be a separate political entity but even an unlettered Asian or African fool knows they are actually cultural extensions of Europe - a disaster zone' since its countries quarreled away their empires; the unfortunate people of Great Britain are now living at ground zero.

An 'Opinionated Review' of the book THE BLACK SWAN by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Review Title:
The Forbidden Fruit grows only on the Impossible tree

My opinion on Nassim Nicholas Taleb is based on a single 3 minute conversation I heard three days ago, May 8, on the BBC program Business Daily. In it Taleb explained what "The Black Swan" was all about.

Out of curosity, I also visited his webpage. My eye caught his unusually refreshing comment on being previously caliberated # 5 on the NYT best sellers' list, as well as his paranthetical admonitions to his "remarks and comments" link.

Towards the end of the May 8 BBC interview, Taleb validly mentioned the disaster of the Soviet Union that chose to plan itself on knowledge rather than the more desirable 'ignorance'. Perhaps, this opinionated 'review', too, will be acceptable to the author because it is offered with large quantities of ignorance about his thoughts and ideas.

His latest opus, The Black Swan, is clearly relevant to his cultural domain; and, considering that this domain  'crusades' around the globe energetically - often with disastrous success - proselytizing the various gospels of 'democracy', freedoms', 'markets' capitalism' one can argue that it is also germane to the 'formatting' of the guiding minds that presume to conduct the affairs on this planet.

But considering that new players  (notably China and India with their non-eurocentric languages, cultures and cognitive stances) who, in fact, happen to be more ancient, are economically impacting on this domain, we need to revisit the conditioned reflexes that have hitherto been guiding it.

Thanks to the Greek-German philosophy and thought, rationality, for example, is perceived to be in a kind of linear strait-jacket of sequenced causes and consequences. This has been shown to be highly inadequate and, in fact, irrational. It is for this reason that 'lateral' thinkers and 'Freakonomists' have sought to garb Taleb's 'randomness' in acceptable, precessional clothing.

Half a lifetime ago I had expressed my insights in these aphorisms:
REALITY CONFOUNDS EXPERIENCE and that
SERENDIPITY IS A GREAT HUMBLING BLOCK.

There is, therefore a bigger, more humbling picture that makes me reach out for a paradox and say, "Taleb is right in the essentials, but his argument appears to be flawed in the fundamentals." He can speak of - and listeners can benefit from his thoughts on - Randomness and Black Swans - but hardly any life, other then a miniscule segment of the human species, is apparently exercised by such things because it is more non-evaluatingly accepting of 'what is'.

Most humans, too, still show an affinity for the poetic than the factual version of what envelops their existence. It is in this spirit that I honor and, perhaps, advise Nassim Nicholas Taleb with these recalled words:
"Whelped by the 'wretched woman who counts her periods - mathematics - those sciences exclude, eliminate and terminate with prejudice. In the Empire of Reality, where abstractions casually crystalize and fantasies freely roam, the Forbidden Fruit grows only on the Impossible tree."
Vyôm Akhil  4:50 PM (IST) 5/11/2007

--

Buckminster Fuller: Honorary Hindu

I was quoted in Hinduism Today's Buckminster Fuller obituary. full text below, in case they remove it from their site. - Vyom Akhil

VISIONARY MASTER OF STRUCTURE
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
ABROAD SPACESHIP EARTH 1895-1983

"It was in 1927 that I had this really extraordinary experience, the only one that ever happened to me that was really and utterly mystical. At that time Henry Ford was exhibiting his Model A down at the Armory, having switched from the Model T. So I walked down from Belmont Avenue to Michigan Avenue when suddenly I found myself with my feet not touching pavement; I found myself in a sort of sparking kind of sphere. I couldn't believe it. And heard a voice, such as I had never heard ever before, saying, "From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth." I couldn't believe I was not touching the ground that I was hearing this extraordinary thing. It was after that I started writing feverishly. I said, "I think I must write everything down because I was thinking the truth."

The man is R. Buckminster Fuller - half-blind, near-deaf inventor, mathematician, historian, planetary architect, visionary and one of the few souls on the earth who talked with Albert Einstein on that intimidating mathematical wavelength where mass divinizes at the speed of light. He visited India several times, befriended Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi and relished the esoteric teachings of yogic seer Sri Aurobindo. Hindus who dialogued with him personally, such as architect Vyom Akhil, happily welcome the sagely octogenarian as an "honorary Hindu." Fuller, to them, was one of the few great science minds that unequivocably insisted on the Vedic view that God, creation and energy are one.

To most though "Bucky" remains that infatuated lover of the triangle. It was he who sired those unearthly-looking, sky-bubbles called "geodesic domes," made from four-sided crystal-like triangles called tetrahedrons, "nature's purest shape," he insisted. Famous for "enclosing the greatest volume with the least surface." 300,000 domes have mushroomed up around the world - from the Arctic tundra, to downtown Moscow, to Hawaii where a 120-footer was assembled in 32 hours.

By the time he died at 87 in 1983, this salty New Englander was something akin to what the Japanese claim as a "national living treasure," a person of such extraordinary worth - such as a great monk or calligraphy master - they are deemed irreplaceable. Bucky became an international treasure, prized as an oracle of sorts. Nation jealously ballied him about the globe like the Kohinoor diamond ever desirous for his dazzling ability to diagnose their economic dilemmas as though he were a hundred years in the future advising them where advanced intelligence and technology would best lead them. He talked spontaneously - in nuclear-charged thought clusters - with ever the look of a giant dam about to burst. Sometimes, so inspired by his own ideas, he would carry on until one person was left and the sun was rising.

Through glasses uselessly thick, he squinted before halls of world leaders commanding they trash medieval building designs - especially the cube - that exacted criminal waste of resources and labor. For structural support, use the triangle more - employ tensegrity (tension integrity) geometry instead of primitive right angles. The sun, sea urchin, crystal and universe use the efficient tetrahedron. Wake up! Be economical. He told nations to re-envision themselves synergistically part of a larger organism, earth. He tutored them to give up laying down bigger concrete roads. Use the air more, and accelerated rail technology like Japan. Cities as we know them - underoxygenated, swarming bogs of human mass - are obsolete, created by a manufacturing frenzy that needed everybody at ear and eye range. Sophisticated communications have obviated that need; factories and assembly plants can return to rural settings, allowing the human instinct to congregate for educative/cultural ends.

Education is the future industry on the planet, he saw. Invest in it. Specialization - insular, myopic and distorting - will give way to cross-bred engineers. "Scientists who once said they brought order out of chaos," will discover that all that was chaotic was their own mind, he repeated. Science will again glorify the "exquisite orderliness and comprehensive integrity of nature." To individuals he advised to guard against organized religion and all forms of dogma; listen instead to the inner voice fearlessly. He prophesied all major enlightened change on the planet will come from private initiative - unencumbered individuals who dare manifest inner calling - and not from government, which he saw in its present form suffocated by self-serving inertia. Women, more intuitive than men he felt, will emerge as the guiding influence in a warless world awakened from an eon of aggression mentality, male-dominated. He insisted there was no energy crisis - "The only crisis is an ignorance crisis" and saw wind and solar power would emerge the best energy sources.

Past and Present Life Asian Link

He felt a deep affinity with Asia, studied and wrote about it extensively, especially in his final treatise, Critical Path. "Humanity and civilization came from Indonesia," sailed northward up to India and Japan and around the globe, he taught. He studied Sri Aurobindo, excitedly underlined his most stirring cosmic passages and read them to Western audiences. He met India's dignitaries and Kashmir's heir prince Karan Singh. Nehru once sat in Fuller's presence for an hour and a half and never spoke a word until the end when he numaskared and confided, "I read everything of yours I can find," Indira Gandhi cried at Fuller later said she Einstein were the only two people so devoid of selfish ambition that he could see they received help from Higher Force. He believed in telepathy. His daughter, before she died at four, would speak out his thoughts. "There is something like telepathy going on around us which I am convinced will ultimately be identified as ultra-ultra-high frequency electromagnetic waves." To a Melanesian island chief. Fuller confided that he remembers being a Maori navigator/priest in a past life. (A keen sailor in this life, he named his sloop Naga after the Indian snake god.)

When he passed from earthscape in 1983, he was giving a major keynote address every three days, had been in print, radio or on TV 90,000 times, had indelibly etched his "spaceship earth" global-family mentality into the hearts of the children of the dawning millennium and gifted the planet thousands of drawings, inventions and visions of how to practically rebuild and pattern itself when it commits to livingry, not weaponry, intelligently sharing, not fighting for, the world's manifold resources.

"God is a Verb, Not a Noun!"

Born in Massachusetts to a rugged line of individualists, abolitionists, Transcendentalists - his aunt was editor of Emerson's writings - "Bucky" was eight when the Wright Brothers flew their plane at Kitty Hawk, "environment" still meant your home and the universe was divided into Euclidean cubes. Numbers came easy to Fuller. He could orchestrate symphonies of digits in any key - calculus, vector geometry or quantum physics. Harvard added little to his mathematical mind. Bored, he left - actually got himself dismissed for rendezvousing with a beautiful showdancer in New York City during exams. Meeting Einstein was thrilling. "He had an aura, an almost mystical aura around him," Fuller recalls and revered E=MC2 more than the mass=energy master himself. E=MC2 to the young, rebellious engineering maverick was sunlight direct from God, finally come to burn into oblivion a moldy and nescient Newtonian world, paralyzed by a belief that "a body persists in a state of rest unless it is compelled to change..." Nonsense! Fuller, like Einstein, had wormed into the core of matter with the numbers screw and found that at the center of molecular life, light, atomic energy, was in furious motion. "Newton was a noun and Einstein a verb," Fuller yodelled. "Non-simultaneous physical universe is energy and energy equals mass times the second power of the speed of light. No exceptions. Fission verified Einstein's hypothesis. Change is normal! Thank you Albert," he barked with a bit of the pit-bull aggression that gained him a quarterback spot in high school football.

Mass. accelerated at the speed of light, energizes. "There are no solids!" Fuller fumed. All form is pure energy particles dancing at various speeds - rocks are slow dancers, gasses faster, thoughts faster. God the fastest. Einstein told friends his E=MC2 Close Encounter with God imparted a "cosmic religious sense," as he politely phrased it. Fuller teased the shy math rishi for so timidly tailoring such an earth-shattering realization. Fuller wasn't afraid of the scientific materialists or God-is-an-old man-in-the-sky Christians. If God dances, say it! "God is a verb, an abstract love-momentumed gyrocompass, not a noun - proper or improper," he bellowed to a deaf world just diving into World War II. To sense God gyrating at the core of form in titanic mechanical precision, speed and horsepower was explosive - an appreciation that Fuller, once a cotton-mill millwright, could totally appreciate. "...God, loving, not the abstract in love commanded or entreated, is knowledge dynamic, not legislative code, not proclamation law, not academic dogma, nor ecclesiastic canon. Yes, God is a verb, the most active, connoting the vast harmonic reordering of the universe from unleashed chaos of energy." His God-in-furious-motion universe clearly resonates the image of Shiva Nataraja, the Cosmic Dancer who pulsates all form from inside the atomic core of form.

Fuller sometimes referred to God as "the greater integrity" and especially liked the word synergy - cooperative action of a whole organism not predicted by the local behavior of its parts - and found it as applicable for the God/universe as for a new chrome/nickel/steel alloy, alluding to his Navy days as a creative shipbuilding engineer. "The universe is the comprehensive apriori synergetic integral, aggregate system embracing all men's consciously apprehended and communicated experiences and continually operates in comprehensive, co-ordinate patterning," he wrote in No More Secondhand God. Basically, the entire universe is interconnected, permeated by a harmonizing principle, rita (universal) dharma, in Hindu parlance. "The common man ascribes all behaviors unpredicted by his statistical probabilities to "luck' and "miracle,'" Fuller noted. To him this was caveman ignorance. His God-synergized universe operates strictly on the sophisticated mechanics of karma, action and reaction, not luck - a generator of an action ultimately but faithfully receiving its reaction because the action never fully disconnected from the sender.

Two years before Fuller died, he wrote this heartfelt epistle to his fellow humans: "The effective decisions can only be made by the independently thinking and adequately informed human individuals and their telepathetically intercommunicated wisdom - the wisdom of the majority of all such human individuals - qualifying for continuance in Universe as local cosmic problem-solvers - in love with the truth and in individually spontaneous self-commitment to absolute faith in the wisdom, integrity, and love of God who seems to wish Earthian humans to survive."

Article copyright Himalayan Academy. Posted on their website, Hinduism Today, "Affirming the Sanatana Dharma and Recording the History of a Billion-Strong Global Religion in Renaissance," here: http://www.hinduismtoday.com/archives/1991/10/1991-10-04.shtml

A Geodesic Mosque for the 20th Century

from inside outside magazing, oct/nov 1984, pp20--22, a description of a Mosque I built in the 1970's. - Vyom

When the 5,000 Muslims of Jittursuguds, a small town (pop. 50,000) on the Bombay-Calcutta mainline in Orissa's Sambalpur district, empowered their community's president for 1975-77 Sadr-e-Birideri Mohammed Zatur Haji Saheb Samad, to organise the rebuilding of their old mosque, no one had an inkling that Allah had settled for the latest in 20th century architecture. At the end of his term, as the Haji Saheti ceremoniously handed them the key to their new mosque, the Brethren found glass substituting for plaster, aluminum instead of brick and mortar and 'see-through' structural elements of steel frames in the place of rock and boulder, a feature which made them aptly rename the edifice as Masjid-e-Hadeed.

And to their unexpected delight, the Faithful also discovered that the mosque no longer 'belonged' only to those who came in to pray five times a day! Proud Jharsuguidians, most of them Hindus, never fail to show off Masjid-e-Hadeed to their out of town guests with proprietary elan. And the mosque marvelers return impressed.

Exulted Dilip Panda, Orissa PWD's new, silver haired, Canada trained, Chief Engineer, when he first saw it, 'I didn't realise you could do such things here. It's a show piece all right!" And, when she chanced upon it during a private visit to India in 1981, Ms. G. Kunze, a Vienna trained UN official, wowed, "First Konarsk! And now this--a mosque with a geodesic dome in the land of the Hindu Lord Kagarinam!) Buckminster Fuller's ideas do get around for sure."

Said Dr. V V Jayaraman, sober professor who has the civil engineering department of the University College of Engineering at Burla, "The mosque is on the annual alumni itinerary of study tours. We were most happy to have provided encouragement to the architect."

Thread-like struts and octet truss

To the uninitiated visitor, though, Masjid-e-Hadeed, with its 'woven' rather than 'hewn' look, is straight out of Ripley's Believe it Or Not. Three of its walls are transparent! The massive roof, with its aluminum dome, appears as if floating unsupported. From the outside, the slender struts of the octet truss--no thicker than a child's little finger--with which the entire rectilinear portion is made, bemuse the eye and one has to peer through the intricacies to peep inside. On the inside, with the thread-like struts in silhouette, the truss acquires the texture of gossamer and muslin to subdue the harsh daylight coming in through the transparent glazing in which the walls are encased. The honeycombed mirror ceiling and the dome's aluminum diffuse and distribute this subdued light to create a cool, clean, quiet, crepuscular suffusion within the praying sanctum. Stained glass, used on the seven sliding doors and on the northern and southern friezes, lends a pleasing, bewitching hue to the hush, its luminescent, multicoloured glow casting a miasmatic spell.

The octet truss of the west wall, on the outside, is covered with only 35 mm of cement mortar; and, on the inside, it is clad in beige "Cali-Clad' to lend the marble and gold Imam's mihrab a solemn sobriety. A decorative chandelier is suspended within the concavity of the dome and its inner rim has panels on which words from the Koran are inscribed. The flooring is of light green mosaic ties with traditional motifs.

Masjid-e-Hadeed's unusual azangah is atop a giant icosahedron with easy approach steps welded to its steel edges. A small geodesic canopy, filled with loudspeakers, shelters the muezzin whose call to prayer reaches the farthest corners of the town. The huge dome, surrounded by an angle iron service frame, is made from one-hundred, self-locking ridged aluminum diamond shapes. The dome is topped off by a dodecahedron which conceals a vent through which hot air can escape. The mosque has a single minar after the fashion of the holy mosque in Mecca. It rises up majestically in a crescent shape from the corbets of the octet parapet. One only wishes there was more space around the mosque so that the proportional harmony of all its parts could also be perceived by the visitor, as well as the devotee.

Even though Masjid-e-Hadeed was built very recently, it has already found a place in local legend and lore. Vyom Akhil, its architect, believes that the concepts and techniques used for its construction can have much wider applications in the design and building of the enclosures need in our country.

Architect's comments

Initially, a brick and lime mortar, flat roofed, 4x7 metre mosque of uncertain age was to be strengthened for a dome. When it was impossible to do so without access to the old foundations, the problem became less simple. The expertise--equal to building anew--and the inconvenience would have yielded no extra space for the growing population.

The restated problem required the maximising the praying space by building around the old mosque. But then, trench digging would have endangered the old mosque as well as the neighbouring houses. There was no adequate bedrock under the ground and the soil was known to have a tendency to swell up during the monsoon and contract in the summer.

The Sadr-e-Biradari showed exemplary boldness (and faith in the will of Allah) in accepting the octet truss as the structural solution to the problem. The strength, economy, speed and precision of the concept as it became evident during its execution further encouraged the community to accept an unconventional, yet highly functional decor. Even the dome, initially desired in reinforced concrete, could eventually be executed with a lighter material. Lastly, the satisfying success of the project helped forge durable human bonds amongst all concerned.

Client

The Muslim community of the township of Jharsuguda, District Sambalpur, Orissa. Sadr-e-Bradan, Haji Mohammed Zahar Samad.

Connection + Method = Wealth (inspired by W = 2E + I)

In Geosocial Revolution, Buckminster Fuller proposed a formula for wealth, W= 2E + I (where W is wealth, E is energy and I is intellect).

Inspired by this, I propose that Bhakti (connection), Yûkti (method) and Samriddhi (wealth) may be concatenated to form the acronym BhaYûSh, expressing the formula Bhakti + Yûkti = Samriddhi, or Connection + Method = Wealth.

Further encouraged, I coin Svä-Synt, an acronym for Svädhyäya (a successful, three-decade-old, self-empowering community movement), and Syntegrity (Coined by Stafford Beer, author of Beyond Dispute).

Wisdom and Weapons

A friend sent along his son's bar Mitzvah speech, comparing Superman to Moses and Aaron, which took me back to Sanskrit. I like it. Then almost everything needs to me to render it in English in keyboard script. I hate that part. But here it is:

Translation: In front, to lead me I have the four vedas, but behind, on my shoulder, I have the bow and the quiver. I am thus equipped with wisdom and weapons (Shaashtra and shashtra); I shall, therefore, prevail.

I like that Sanskrit calls weapons 'shashtra' and wisdom/scriture/knowledge etc "Shaashtra". The resonance is terrific and onomatopaic shhhhh..; but also as always having a 'tra' sound as well.

About the latter "tra" one of the meanings in the dictionary is "there are eighteen of them...names.. in which the sages have shown the actions and duties that are of benefit"....

Then there is the unusual use of the word shaapa (shapadapi). Usually it means a curse but here it means the "power of knowledge" (perhaps, to cause mental anguish/pain").

The Vedas also instruct, "youth is worthy of a bow," and the Upanishads have this litany of attributes that deserve to be called youthful.

In fact there is a monograph-booklet by Shäshtri Pändûranga Åthävalé on them in Hindi. It was, of course, eye-openingly inspiring to me when I first read it. In fact, I used it for a series of Sunday lectures I was invited to give to one of the local classes that practice a form of yoga that is reinvented by a local genius.

The Bar Mitzvah boy and all children everywhere, are rightful claimants to all that humankind, in its various variants - Jewish, Hindu etc - has.

Free radicals and complex diseases

With their locations, this shloka (I may not have rendered it accurately) speaks of the five named airs in our body. In very recent 'western' understandings, minute quanities of toxic gaseous excreta from our body's cellular factories is spoken of as "free radicals" and the Devil in chief being the highly reactive ozone--the same stuff that, as a layer, protects us from cosmic radiation. Various foods, e.g. tomatoes, are recommended to keep these free radicals in check.

My own experience tells me that free radical mismanagement precurses nearly all dis-eases. Aside from foods, physical activity--and running is just one of them--even as it generates some toxicity in the muscles, also helps manage these free radicals. What makes more sense to me is be benignly dismissive about the names people give to complex processes, cancer, diabetes and so on. in any case, what is being identified are symptoms. Current efforts mounted to 'cure' symptoms will fail, as they do not understand processes nor treat them holistically (they are constituents of a larger whole).

While this approach fattens the multinational pharmaceuticals and the health industry, their remedies cause more diseases down the line. The late Aldous Huxley (whose brother Julian was an important biologist) once said, "What does not have a single cause, cannot have a single cure." Most life is so evolved and organized as 'creatures' that, barring accidents, there is little likelihood of single-cause failures.

Synergetics can be a bridge between Veda and Tantra

The name of one of the (2-vol) great books is Synergetics: The geometry of thinking. To get rid of the accommodative defects in the quantum and relativity theories, the super strings theory is being devised and sought to be established. In all this, those adepts (scholars/academics) of Vaastu and Tantra who are familiar with the definition of Tantra which says that it it "three-filamented" will surely hear a resonating echo.

(The following sentence, a very complex one, is very difficult to translate; in fact it took a very learned man a few readings to understand what I was getting at. Don't blame me if it comes out garbled).

This should make the Veda-approved-organ Vaastu, to also become a Tantra-approved organ and then become the bridge between Veda and Tantra, thereby freeing the latter from the grip of its contrary votaries (worshippers). Vaastu can then become the confluencing domain where the two Sanaatani streams meet and at this place the devout can resolve to act with determination (to give back to humanity the nobility of life and thought that is programmed into it but lies dormant owing to the 'wisdom' that today we find corrupted to the point where it is worse than ignorance).

Buckminster Fuller: Vyas Purohit of Kalyaana-Tantra

My life has been slightly illuminated by the light of many great souls. But of this one (Buckminster Fuller) I believe not only to be a mantra-drishta (The Seer of the trihedral divinity-mantra-of the Mind) in this recent Era, but I have been fortunate to be face to face with Kalyaana-Tantra's (Common good system) Vyas (presiding) purohit (a special priest; the word literally means "One who is able to see what is good for the city/community"). One who, with his Nishta (dedicated integrity) , mridu (sweet/loving), and aastikaacharan (divine/affirming actions), is able to always and constantly "reduce to ashes" (dispel) all fears, delusions, poor self-esteem and withdral is, in my perception worthy to be called a Bhaarateeya (Indian/Hindoo). Upon this personal benchmark, he was, to me a true Indian/Hindoo. (The Hindi alliterative punch in the words "Bhaya Bharanti Bheeruta Bhiti Bhasmibhoota Bhaarateeya" cannot be rendered in English).


- From the dedication I wrote for a pilgrimalogue I wrote. Not in this extract and nowhere in the four page dedication is Bucminster Fuller mentioned by name. This is a discontinued practice of showing honor.

Jagannath Odissi's land of dancing prayers

I drafted this as part of my feedback to the one-laptop-per-child OLPC team. I include it here, as first drafted, with pictures.

During a drought in Bihar state, a religious relief organization thought it'd go in and dig wells. It wanted the locals to discard their doles-dependency habit. It asked they do some token manual work at the well-sites. The locals said, "You've come to do good. Then do good. Don't tell us what we have to do."

There are many more examples but I shall pass them to tell you how I encountered and - countered - this mindset in a village. The villagers said, "Look the government has done nothing here in all these years." I said, "You're stupid if you're waiting for the government. You should consider yourselves lucky that you've been left alone, untouched by this corrupt and corrupting machenry that you call the government.

They - "How can we do anything. We don't know anything. We are ignorant. We have no learning."

I - "F**k the learning" (That's the translation of what went across not the exact words) "Let me look at your heads and behinds. I want to see your horns and tails."

They - "But we don't have horns and tails. We are not hoofed animals. We're human beings."

I - "That's it! Didn't you know that our religion says you belong to the one and only known "Doing Category"? All the other forms of life are in the "suffering catogries" (Karma Yoni - Bhog Yoni). So now, you start the doing and the learning will happen. I am simply here to jump-start you guys. I am not going to do any other thing here except drink lots of tea, talk and play with your children. Settled?"

They said, "If you say so.!"...

By the end of it all several months later, during which I visited them infrequently, what followed was nothing sort of a 'world-first' kind of miracle of precasting and assembly....

The villagers even borrowed a camera from the neighboring village to take pictures of what they were doing because I told them I wasn't there to take pictures. If they wanted to keep a record of what they were doing for posterity that was their funeral not mine ...

On assembly day, they wanted me to be there for them; said my presence would be a great help. I agreed with feigned reluctance and on the condition that I'll sit there with my back to their site, playing with their kids and drink. No one was to approach me to ask a question or seek help....

They asked me to 'break the cocount' (meaning I should propitiate the gods and things will go auspiciously). I said, if you guys want to listen to me, nix on my breaking the coconut. Let the guy who worked the hardest do it...

After it was all over, this is how they complimented me: "You're smart. You made us do everything. You know, had you been supervising, we'd've been tense and would've made a few more mistakes than we did. I said: No, no, I didn't make you do anything. You all did it on your own. Get this into your heads. All I did was drink tea and play with your kids.."

India rising against the prevailing dispensation

Tools and Materials for Home-Study of Sanskrit

An excellent list, more details here: http://imp.lss.wisc.edu/~gbuhnema/homes.html

American Sanskrit Institute
California Institute of Integral Studies
Devanagari Script
Intelligent Internet Ready Languages
Mailing List to Learn Sanskrit
Samskrit Education Society, Chennai
Samskrita Bharati's Home Page
Samskrt.com
Sanskrit Declensions (German)
Sanskrit Grammarian
Sanskrit Library
Sanskrit Tutor
Sanskrit Word Declensions
Sanskrit on the Radio
Titus Project

Eight Things to Focus On

Inspired by Jay Baldwin's book on Bucky, I urged a young audience:

In order to live a life doing projects, there are eight things you need to focus on:

1. Comprehensive Alertness: Look for problems that need to be solved. For that you need to be comprehensively, all-around alert. If you are ever bored, or uninterested, it's a sign that an important part of your mind is asleep.

2. Omni-directional Sensitivity: Learn all there is to know about the problem using the maximum utilization of all the resources you have in as less a time as possible.

3. Focused Learning is a powerful tool. Attend to what Nature is trying to do., Opposing it is futile, inefficient and is an old-mode-way of regarding the world. You may have to investigate and experiment. Total commitment is essential.

4. Back-up Support: If you are really committed to solving the problem and have no immediate "takers" to your solution, you might have to find a second job to finance your search for them. When Sûbeer Bhätiä developed "Hotmail" he had to go around to several companies before he could find someone to put up venture capital for it. The same happened to Trevor Bayliss who found no immediate takers for his brilliant idea of a wind-up radio, which needs no electricity, batteries or solar power. There is an Oxford professor who is still waiting for his idea to emerge out. He has developed a method of making and delivering a pair of vision-correcting spectacles to anyone anywhere without the hassle of locating an ophthalmologist. It bypasses the urban-located, expensive delivery system.

5. Multiple Skills: Remember, in Nature, specialization is for insects, not human beings. They have to be good at a variety of tasks. This is how Nature has designed us. Go for a specialization if you have to, but be aware of the risks. If you do not avoid excessive specialization you run the risk of becoming obsolete.

6. Proof of Concept: This is the time when you transfer your work from your think-tank to your do-tank. Can you demonstrate that you have solved the problem? Your solution should satisfy not just you and your admirers but also skeptics.

7. Calmness to Opposition: People who lay out money for your idea will invariably say: "It will require too much money." You can calmly ask, "What will it cost if we don't do it?” The answer is the true cost. In competition, your goal is inclusion.

8. Patience: Project work does not come every day, or, in regular intervals, or is available on demand. Innovations have their own gestation rate. You can't hurry a rose by opening the bud with a screwdriver. Remember that the whole Universe will take some time to accommodate the change you are planning to bring about.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, a thinker who lived in the United States in the 19th century wrote some very inspiring essays. In one he says, “If a man……….. make a better mouse-trap,………… tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door”. Here is success as well as relevance! Aim for it!



-- From a speech I made to LARAMBHÄ COLLEGE, Larambhä. - 40th Annual Day Celebrations Feb. 21, ‘04

An Economics of Abundance

“The natural world has this principle of abundance, you know, life is kind of an abundant thing and in the material world we'd have double entry book keeping which says if I give you something then it's gone. But the world of ideas in the natural world doesn’t really quite operate in the same way that the warehouse with the ledger book operates. And, also, the nature of information in the nature of these complex systems causes us to have to re-examine our economics because we have an economics of abundance instead of an economics of scarcity”

- Bill Joy, Co-founder, Sun Micro Systems in a BBC Global Business interview in the 6 part series titled “Future Perfect”

Reminds me of a Sanskrit saying, "Throw one grain of rice at the Earth, and you get one hundred grains back."

You begin with zero, and you end with zero

Buckminster Fuller wrote, "I'm a throwaway."

All this breathing and circulating is happening, what is life to you? Life is a connective matrix of memories and experience, and the intelligence that you derive from them. Krishna guarantees that you will get them in your next life, nothing is going to be lost. Krishna compares your body to a pair of clothes that you change, nothing more.

You begin with zero, and you end with zero. Sunya, Sunya.

So why worry?