Jayakumar Balasubramanian

Author: Paul Brunton Price: 450 INR Understanding spiritual history of India is not all that easy. It traces back more than 3500 years in time and most of the contemporary interpretations exist in deteriorated form. The current state of affair is so pathetic -- sometimes makes one feel spirituality is worthless. At the same time, developing deeper connection with spirituality is very critical in order to achieve harmony within. Especially in the current materialistic environment, human beings have become more cynical, thereby closing all doors of self realization. In the current setup spirituality needs to be approached from a western, critical perspective where it can be learnt by applying logic. The book 'A search in secret India' is one such spiritual account written by a westerner with an analytical approach. For present day Indians it provides a simple, logical but very insightful journey into spirituality. The book starts with the author Paul Brunton, a British embarks on

Please read my previous posts about Landmark Forum ( Part I and Part II) before reading this one. In the past few weeks, I have been getting multiple comments for my posts about Landmark forum. Here is the summary of those comments: The landmark forum provides spiritual dimension to an individual. It helps the attendees to lead a peaceful life with full of self-expression. Why are you commenting on it? Today's world is filled with misery, where people are selling anything and everything. If we can tolerate a phone-call from a credit card salesperson, why not a spiritual/self development course like Landmark forum, Art-of-living etc? I think the commentors didn't completely understand the point I was trying to convey. It is not my intention to criticize these organizations or courses and say they are of no use. My take is to learn, understand and internalize them and practice in real life. Also understand that 'transformation' is a journey, rather than an instant capsu

I understood quite a lot of things by observing people who attend landmark forum. Primarily the educated, upper-middle class, urban population attend this and they don't have any clue of what life is all about. The materialistic life style has taken toll totally, which makes them live a miserable life with wrong perceptions, notions and beliefs. Suddenly they realize that the situation it out of control and start thinking about 'one-stop' solution for all their problems. They look for one 'thread' on which they can hang on for rest of their life and forget their worries. The start identifying the thread by attending course like: Landmark forum, Art of living, Ramdev yoga and then getting associated with them. Other examples include: Kanchi ashram,ISKCON, Saibaba ashram, Aurobindo ahsram, Amritanandamayi etc. In a way all these organizations and courses teach almost the same universal values like: humility, responsibility, community service, treating everybody equal,

It’s been 6 months since I attended Landmark Forum in Bangalore. For people who don't know what this is all about please check out this link . I have mixed opinions about the course. Let me share my first set of thoughts about this course. Let me explain the course structure first. It’s basically a three day plus one evening course primarily focused on personal transformation. Each day starts about 9 AM in the morning (sharp) and goes on till 11 PM in the night, with grueling sessions. Each day has only very few break in between, that too at odd timings (11 AM, 3 PM and 7 PM). A well trained ‘forum leader' will be leading the course for about 400 participants. He has a pre-defined courseware and speaks non-stop for all the three days. These leaders are extremely smart people and ruthless in expressing their viewpoints. The landmark education forum has internal methods of identifying, coaching and grooming these leaders. Coming to the course contents, it’s completely a westerniz

Its been two years I have been practicing Yoga. Typically I spend about 45 minutes which includes about 20 asanas followed by some pranayama breathing techniques. In this post I am sharing some of my personal experiences. Its completely 'Experiential' The first point I learned about Yoga is -- its completely experiential. No matter how many books, articles, blogs anyone read, it just can't even come closer to the real experience one gets while performing Yoga. Its hard for anyone to believe this as we are more used the traditional way of learning (reading/writing/sharing). For example, if somebody some information about a book, I will at least get 20% of what he is trying to say. The 20% can be "quantified" because the knowledge a book provides itself finite. In case of yoga, the paradigm is totally different as the performer is connecting to infinite knowledge within himself. I know I am sounding abstract and confused -- thats what I call it 'experiential'

Author: Potharaju Ravindra Price: 160 INR About a year back I read the book ‘Success Vs Joy’ by Geeth Sethi. Two things stand out about this book; its simple language and the overwhelming effect it has on an individual’s thought process. Built along similar lines is the book ‘Give me back my guitar’. In this book author Ravi talks about mind control, inspiration and energy management. The joy of reading and re-reading such books is in the inspiration and support that they provide by telling you just three words: Follow your dream. And just as success vs. joy, give me back my guitar is also blessed with the use of simple and unambiguous language which makes it a pleasure to read. The first thing about the book that interested me was the title itself -- What is this topic all about? Who is going to give the guitar to whom? But, when I started reading the book I found that the book is all the nursery parables that we have all read and enjoyed being modified to suit the pre

Very recently Mr. Bhattathiri left his article as a comment to one of my blogs. The article titled ‘American justice department upheld Indian yoga and meditation’ briefly talks about the background and scientific aspects of Yoga. As per his request I am publishing the article below. I am planning to write a separate article on yoga with more in-depth details. Stay tuned! Let me bow to Indian Maharishi Patanjali with folded hands, who helped in removing the impurities of the mind through his writings on Yoga, impurities of speech through his writings on grammar, and impurities of body through his writings on Ayurveda. The American justice dept have recently approved the power of yoga and meditation via a recent judgment in the American court. "Man Who Slapped Wife Sentenced to Yoga, its Anger Management, Says Judge." First there was house arrest. Now there's yoga. A judge ordered a man convicted of slapping his wife to take a yoga class as part of his one-year probation. &

In my blog titled ‘Am I proud to be an Indian?’ I briefly touched upon Indian’s glorious past and the abundant knowledge in Vedas and Upanishads. Having said that it is very difficult to interpret Vedas and understand the real meaning. This is mainly because the language of Sanskrit is much more complex than any other languages and each word conveys many meanings. But my simple question was ‘If we have so much of knowledge and intellectual wealth, why can’t we use them for welfare of human beings?’. To my surprise, recently I found one classic example for this. Before getting into the details let me give some background information. One of my very close friends is working for an IT company in Bangalore and couple of months back they celebrated ‘technology day’ in their organization. They invited Mr. Satish Chandra (who has supposedly demonstrated power generation using Vedic methods) for a guest lecture. I also got to know from my friend that he has proved that the output energy

Last week was very special for me as I got an opportunity to attend the ‘Art of living part –I’ course. Last year I attended the ‘Sri Sri Yoga’ course organized by the same organization and you can find more details on my blog titled ‘Yoga – An integrated solution’ . In this blog I am going to share my experiences and learning from the AOL course. Before getting into the course details, let me give some background information. Dr.Stephen covey in his ‘seven habits of highly effective people’ talks about four important dimensions for human development. They are physical, mental, spiritual and emotional (social) dimensions. He had arrived at these dimensions based on his thirty years of research in the human development, psychology and character building. In order to have an ‘inclusive’ growth, human beings need to develop themselves in all four dimensions. In his book Dr. Covey strongly advocates for having a strong character in order to be effective. This character centric growth wi

It’s been almost a year since I have started performing yoga. My journey of yoga started off with taking up the ‘Sri Sri Yoga’ course thought by ‘Art of living’ foundation. Also I got some theoretical knowledge by reading the book ‘yoga and prayanama for health’ . Performing Yoga has become part of my life now. Even though benefits need to be experienced rather than writing it, I thought of share my personal thoughts about yoga in a series of blogs. I am not going to give a ‘spiritual’ explanation of yoga but more of ‘common sense’ approach in this blog. Human system can be classified into three parts namely body, mind and subconscious mind and it is important to understand these things before getting into understanding of yoga. The mind is the ‘active’ entity which helps us to think day to day activities. The subconscious mind is a ‘passive’ and responsible for ‘non-rational’ behavior of human beings. It is always active and keeps recording the happenings around. This recording metho