the Sadguru notes

Ever since I'd seen Sadguru Jaggi Vasudev on NDTV's Walk The Talk I'd been interested in his personality.. From time to time I'd discuss him with a colleague at work and I knew about his Isha Foundation.. Suddenly I got a chance to do a one week three hours a day course from Isha Foundation and that too in Bangalore -- which meant I could do this 6--9AM everyday for six days and wouldnt have to go to Coimbatore etc. for the course...I was soundly encouraged by Shalu since she'd heard me mumble stuff from time to time that she roughly mapped to this sort of stuff and she wanted me to go check it out...Prior to enrolling myself I once more checked out some of his videos on Youtube -- for eg this one where he is so effective in convincing that if you want to change figure out what you want to grow within you (focus on a constructive program) rather than despairing when you dont meet with 100% success with the approach of removing your faults...And so I joined...

The course of course is usually not carried out by the Sadguru in person but thanks to multimedia technologies, the Sadguru now has a distance education program! Most of the time he speaks via a pre-recorded video : A reasonably smart audience asks the typical questions one would think of asking and for others there is a local teacher who you can approach...

At least for someone like me -- a middle class Indian, who went to an English school and whose formal education completely followed the Western model and system of knowledge (incl studying in the USA) -- the Sadguru is unbelievably charismatic... I'd tried to listen to some other Gurus earlier but wasnt sufficiently motivated even though they had some of the same traits -- poise, smiling eyes, equanimity -- and I realize why now.. This Sadguru is much more 'normal' (likes driving a Landrover -- now a Tata as he pointed out in a video -- speeds too, doesnt come across as self-righteous), is significantly smarter and is a much more effective and structured communicator when it comes down to explaining stuff even though spiritually what he has figured out is probably the same as the other Gurus..

Day Zero: On the first day the Sadguru motivates Yoga..Yoga is not a 'physical exercise' (he emphasizes) although it can have good side-effects; it is fundamentally a technology to make sure physical, mental and life forces that define you are in allignment or in sync and furthermore that its not your mind and body that takes away your life force (which happens whenever fulfilling your mind or body's routines or fiats/desires stresses you out) but it is your life force that drives your mind and body. The body is simple and unambiguous about what it wants; it is the mind that is constantly changing and throwing your life off-gear and confusing you. The solution is not to quell desire -- Desire literally makes the world go round -- all the good things, activities, human creations, are the outcome of desire so how can it be bad? (This seems to contradict Buddha's concept of desire; I think.) But of course unfulfilled desire is what stresses us out and causes unhappiness... So understanding the nature of desire is key: Desire has only one nature: It wants more of what you think is good -- thats all. For some it could be knowledge for some it is money whatever...By its very nature desire is never satiated; will always want more ==> So desire seeks the infinite.. A minimal necessary pre-condition to have a go at 'happiness' therefore would seem to be that one has to be in a situation where attaining the infinite is at least a possibility, a potential....But if one thinks about it, when one defines oneself in terms of body and mind (by mind he means 'knowledge' of the analytical kind and the ordinary experiential kind) one's definition of oneself is inherently finite (can we count to infinity or represent infinity even? its all defined in limits) .. Therefore if the mind and body determine our fate then one is doomed to finiteness and the infinite potential desire longs for is guaranteed to be unavailable... This is where the life-force (something within you other than mind and body) comes in -- Awareness of the life-force and getting it to be the driver or your mind and body so that this life-force may even determine what you want to do is the focus of Yoga -- Why? Because empirically there have been tons of Yogic practitioners who have claimed to experience the inifinite and there is an unwavering consistency across their descriptions (in writings and utterings) of what that experienced infinity (ananda etc) is.... Maybe its not the only way to get to this inifinity but it is certainly one way... That is the reason one must at least aspire to do Yoga...

Any more descriptions of subsequent days probably may make even lesser sense than the above -- I think one has to do actually go through those days to get a fair idea of what this Inner Engineering stuff is about

Collaborative governance for India

Just came across this: http://punetech.com/tweet-for-pune — pretty cool.

I have often felt that a mashup of:
(a) Wikipedia like interface (for an ‘archival slowly evolving knowledge base’) edited by the community
(b) Something automated that essentially crawls news updates as well as tweets etc.
(c) Combined with an editorial blog for a community-nominated ‘owner’
would be a very useful combination. Say we have one for each district of India. So for each district or some other granularity there is a Wiki page, a blog, a tweets-page, an automated news page (something that can be built using the likes of BOSS at Yahoo for free) and so on.

There could be special subsections (just like news, tweets etc) even for updates on recent searchable district-based RTI Applications (an OCR module may be useful) and response threads as well as updates on NREGA scheme. The ease of uploading photos etc can be used further.

Wonder what folks think about this… One issue, it seems, may be that if we want free hosting then it will have to be in one of the silos of Wikipedia or Google Apps or whatever —

But the current Pune Governance Wikia is a promising start! For starters Bangaloreans can populate http://government.wikia.com/wiki/Bangalore -- See http://government.wikia.com/wiki/Pune for starters