Mira Prabhu's Blog, page 50
June 13, 2016
You Are The Peacemaker
You are the Peacemaker…thank you, Harsh Luthar!
Mahavira, the Jain prophet of nonviolence and an advocate for the principle of Ahimsa (Universal Love), said 2500 years ago that all beings have the natural desire to live and thrive.
Wanting to be safe, happy, and in a nurturing community is not unique to any particular country, culture, religion, or spiritual tradition. In fact, it is not even unique to human beings. Animals, birds, sea creatures, plants and trees, and all forms of life seek safety and nurturance.
Enjoying success at the expense of others and by harming others, including nature and the environment, cannot be sustained over the long term. This is a simple but an ancient truth.
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June 11, 2016
Writing theory? It’s not for writers, said William Faulkner QUOTES FOR WRITERS (and people who like quotes)
Technique comes from a clever mind…authentic expression from the heart…melding the two is good…here’s what William Faulkner has to say – thank you, Bridget Whelan!
Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.William Faulkner
New York’s First Female Crime Boss Started Her Own Crime School
Nicholas Rossis’ fascinating post about New York’s first female crime boss….”Mandelbaum was six feet tall and said to be between 200-300 pounds, giving her an imposing physical presence. But it was her formidable network that allowed her criminal power to grow. She was known to fastidiously bribe and pay off police, local politicians, and judges, who allowed her operation to become a criminal ring worth millions.” Read on!
Organized crime in New York is often portrayed as a boy’s game, but one of the first and most influential crime bosses in the history of the city was a Prussian immigrant known as “Mother” or “Marm” Mandelbaum.
Eric Grundhauser recently shared her fascinating story on Atlas Obscura, as did Sarah Breger in forward.com, based on Queen of Thieves: The True Story of “Marm” Mandelbaum and Her Gangs of New York” by J. North Conway.
The Queen of Fences
Mandelbaum as portrayed in a political cartoon (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-DIG-ppmsca-28344)
Marm (Fredericka) Mandelbaum, also called “The Queen of Fences,” was an imperious and powerful woman who became one of the most well-connected criminal figures of her day, buying stolen goods and reselling them, financing criminal endeavors, and even creating a school for young criminals.
Increasing restrictions against Jews in Germany brought Mandelbaum to…
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June 10, 2016
The Most Powerful Yoga
Nisargadatta Maharaja is known as the “Hammer” because his teachings were direct and forceful and woke so many out of their relative slumber…thanks for this post, Harsh Luthar!
Meet your own self. Be with your own self, listen to it, obey it, cherish it, keep it in mind ceaselessly.
You need no other guide. As long as your urge for truth affects your daily life, all is well with you.
Live your life without hurting anybody.
Harmlessness is a most powerful form of Yoga and it will take you speedily to your goal.
This is what I call nisarga yoga, the Natural yoga.
It is the art of living in peace and harmony, in friendliness and love.
The fruit of it is happiness, uncaused and endless.
Nisargadatta Maharaj in “I Am That”
Take Your Criticism and Love It!
During my years in Manhattan (pre-millennium), I joined a Writer’s Group…and found myself in the midst of tense and edgy folk mostly insecure about their work. One guy actually brazenly informed me that the only reason I had got a great literary agent in Manhattan was because I was Indian! (At the time, India apparently was “in” – or so he believed). Eventually I left the group and never found another. Today beta readers generously read my work and help me to “see” my work objectively…every serious writer or artist has to learn to love constructive criticism because it is what transforms a good writer/artist into a great one…and to find a group that truly supports us is something to be grateful for…now read on…
For five years, I had the great fortune to be a member of a dedicated Writer’s Critique Group. During that time, I line by line edited approximately 1,920,000 combined words for my four critique partners, and they each critiqued about 780,000 words for me. That’s a lot of words.
And did I ever learn a lot about writing!
Of course, the positive feedback was nice, and it was delightful to know when things were going well. But the real joy, the most valuable feedback was the constructive criticism. I craved the ugly, gritty details. I wanted to be nitpicked and challenged. I longed to improve and grow as a writer, and to accomplish that, I needed to know everything I was doing wrong. Each correction, negative comment, and suggestion was a precious gift that someone cared enough (about me) to write down and share.
As writers, we are usually too close to our books to…
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June 8, 2016
10 Life Lessons From Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali…great man! “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” sort of sums him up for me…so graceful and unique as a person, and yet when it was called for, he stung like a bee…thank you for a great post!
Delivered with the kind of swagger and charisma that’s impossible to replicate, Muhammad Ali dropped some seriously smart life lessons over the years. Take some notes.
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June 5, 2016
Monday Funnies…
Aunty Acid makes up for all the socially correct humans on our planet who are too scared to speak their minds for fear of retribution!!! Thanks, Chris Graham, for a good laugh on Monday morning!
Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog
Source: Aunty Acid on Facebook
Entertain the Reader
Tell a good story and entertain the reader. Good fiction is about more than following the rules–you have to tell a good story that readers can’t put down.
Source: Entertain the Reader
June 4, 2016
Advaita-Vedanta and Sri Ramana: By Dr. Harsh K. Luthar
“Self-Realization in Advaita refers to the recognition of our innate state of awareness which by its very nature is that of perfection and freedom. The ancients called it the Heart. It is also referred to as Sat-Chit-Ananda or Knowledge, Consciousness, and Bliss.” Read on….and thanks for a great post, Harsh Luthar!
Advaita is a Sanskrit term and means “not two”. It refers to the philosophy of nondualism. There is a lot of literature on Advaita Vedanta that can be found in any good library and, of course, the Internet.
Excellent and reliable information on classical Advaita-Vedanta and the saints associated with that tradition can be found at the following links.
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June 2, 2016
My friend Joe And The Karma of a Drowning Man…
Joe was my oldest friend in Manhattan; he died recently, in his nineties. A professor of economics who’d taught at Ivy League Colleges, Joe confessed to me when we first met way back in the 1990’s that in his days of youthful rebellion, he had come under the influence of a Russian Communist and been indoctrinated into that philosophy.
My own interest in mysticism baffled Joe. How can you follow such a heartless path, Mira? He asked me once, when I mentioned I was heading out of town for a meditation retreat. Surprised, I asked what he meant. Oh, Joe said, this friend of mine told me a story—a true story, mind you!—about two Buddhist monks who were walking past a river. A man was drowning in the river and screaming for help. One monk said to the other: “Hey, jump in and save him! I can’t swim.” The other shrugged. “It’s his karma,” he said nonchalantly. “Let him drown.” And they both walked on. “You see?” Joe said righteously. “Don’t tell me it’s not a selfish path!”
I was stunned; you see, I had fallen into a passionate love affair with eastern mysticism in my teens, and as I kept studying, practicing and contemplating the great truths, my affair was growing more intense and powerful. “No,” I said to Joe, “according to the teachings, this is not how true monks would behave. Your Communist friend was either spinning you a yarn, or he’d been spun a yarn himself, which, prior to investigation, he was regurgitating on to you.”
Joe looked at me curiously. “What would your version of the same story be like, Mira?”
“Two monks are passing a river when they see a drowning man,” I said. “One says to the other, ‘Jump in and save him! I can’t swim!’ The second monk dives into the water and rescues the man, who thanks them. He explains he got a cramp while swimming—he was in truth a champion swimmer. The monks resume their journey to their monastery. “Funny, that man’s karma, eh?” one says to the other. “To be a strong swimmer and then to almost drown because of a cramp! Fellow must have done something in the past to have gotten into that mess. Good thing we were passing by…it was our karma to save him.” His friend shrugs and smiles. “Yes,” he agrees. “Karma on both ends of the stick. That’s how this world spins.”
Why, early this morning, did I think of Joe and his skewed notions of mysticism? Because last evening a friend and I were discussing social media and she said she was very careful whom she “friended”—there were too many trolls and weirdos out there, she said darkly, and one had to be exceedingly careful.
I explained that as an indie writer, I had had no choice but to dive into social media. I told her a ‘friend’ had ‘unfriended’ me because she objected to my sharing posts regarding the horrific situation in Gaza. I had explained to her that, regardless who was committing crimes against humanity, I would stand against them. My philosophy is Advaita-Vedanta, which reveals to the committed seeker that we are One. How could a follower of Advaita endorse the evil of racism by staying silent?
Now this friend said to me: Gaza isn’t your business, Mira. You are here to become enlightened. Why bother with worldly matters?
Oh, I thought, here we go again. So I told her about the Two Truths, or the concept of Absolute and Relative Reality. (https://miraprabhu.wordpress.com/2015/09/04/two-great-truths-absolute-and-relative-reality-real-and-unreal).
Each of us is the Divine in human flesh, I explained—just as my own gurus had explained to me. Each of us straddles both Absolute and Relative. If we choose to enter the inner path, all the more reason to show compassion to those who are suffering—as long as our activism does not embitter us to the extent that we lose sight of our own primary goal, which is permanent freedom from desire and fear (Ramana Maharshi’s simple definition of the state of enlightenment). Conflicting expressions crossed her mobile face. “If your mother or sister or best friend was one of those being bombed to hell in Gaza or any place else,” I asked then, “would you still consider your interference there a “worldly matter”?
She shook her head. Then she told me that a while back in Rishikesh she had encountered a sadhu—a wild man who claimed to worship Goddess Kali, but who was regularly beating up on his young wife. The traumatized woman was imprisoned in a tent—lest people saw her battered state. My friend decided to rescue her; on the pretext of taking her to the hospital to treat her cold, she got the woman out of the tent. Unfortunately the sadhu went along too! It was in the auto driving to the hospital that he realized my friend was planning to steal his victim away to friends engaged in social work. When the rickshaw stopped at a traffic intersection, he grabbed hold of his wife, jumped out, and dragged her quickly away.
Since she was heading back to Europe the next day, my friend called the people who had offered to help take care of the battered woman and begged them to rescue her as soon as possible. It was too painful for her to further investigate, so she never found out that poor woman’s fate. “So many people warned me not to get involved,” she said, “but I could not bear to see what was happening. I failed, miserably, and most likely he bashed her up even more afterwards. Still, I did what I had to do.”
I then told her about how, as a teenager, I had diverted a drunk by screaming at him when he was about to kill his pregnant wife. The drunk had swung around and hit me on the jaw, which hurt like hell, but by diverting his attention, I managed to save the woman and her unborn child.
On and on we went, swapping stories about how we had “interfered” in worldly matters and mostly failed in achieving the results we had hoped for. I ended by telling her that Eckhart Tolle’s advice was perfect for me: to straddle both realms (Absolute and Relative), and she agreed.
Many genuine seekers believe they should not get involved in the suffering of others. Yes, the relative world is indeed illusion. It is not ‘real’ as defined by Advaita-Vedanta, where the word means ‘that which is permanent and lasting.’ Today I am convinced that life is nothing but a stream of karmic consequences, individual and collective, unfurling at a rapid speed and deceiving us into believing it is all real—just as a movie, made up of tens of thousands of single shots rolls on, giving us the impression of a continuous reality. And yet we are too a part of this relative dream. For those serious on this path, it is critical first to distinguish between what is real and what is unreal—in other words, the Dreamer must learn how to step out of the Dream; but when things go drastically wrong in the dream, he or she must also learn how to step back in and play his or her role as a force for justice and peace.
Photo Credit: Berndt Kalidas Flory
Greetings from Arunachala, Shiva in the form of a mountain, who promises to destroy our egoic mind so that we can experience our true nature, which is the blissful and immortal Self!
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