“The World doesn’t want to be saved. It wants to be loved, that’s how we save it.
XoXoXo
Mind Over Matter: Self-help guru Tony Robbins says fire walking helps you do what you’ve been putting off in your and break through. After 12 hours at Tony’s “Unleash the Power Within” seminar, it’s 12:30 a.m. and the burning coals have been laid is Oprah up for the challenge? Watch Oprah and Sheri Salata, president of Harpo and the Oprah Winfrey Network, as they psych themselves up for some fire walking!
Preview Oprah Walks on Fire | Oprah Winfrey Network
Karma is not just a belief system; it is a precise science.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZX8QSdJ9go
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS1CJKgAkME
1. All of nature obeys laws
The law of karma is: For every action there is equal and opposite reaction. In the Bible, it is phrased as: As you sow, so shall you reap.
Doubts About Karma
2. Why not action-reaction in one life?
Somebody may ask, “Why should I suffer now for my actions in a previous life? Why so much delay?” Different seeds fructify after different time durations. Grains harvest after two or three months, some fruit seeds produce fruits after twenty years and some seeds may even take hundred years to fructify. Every action that we do is like a seed sown. The seed will fructify and we cannot escape the result. One may say, “I don’t like this fruit, I don’t want it.” But one will be forced to eat the fruit, even if it is thorny. The reactions will come, but different types of karma seeds (actions) have different time durations after which they fructify.
Why do different actions give reactions after different time durations?
There is a saying, “The mills of God grind slow but they grind exceedingly fine.”
So, every single action will be accounted for, sooner or later. The Srimad Bhagavatam gives the example: if we have a cowshed with thousand calves and if we leave a mother cow there, she will easily find out where her calf is among those thousands.
She has this mystical ability. Similarly, our karma will find us among the millions of people on this planet There may be thousands of people going on the road but only one of them meets with an accident. It is not by chance, it’s by karma. Thereby, the law of karma works exceedingly fine; it may be slow to act, but no one can escape.
2. Why are the ignorant not excused?
Once a person driving on a bike came across a red signal and slowed down. Then he saw a buffalo walking confidently without considering the signal. Seeing this, he also started, and immediately, the traffic policeman stopped and fined him. He asked the policeman, “You didn’t fine the buffalo, why me?” The policeman replied, “Because you are a bigger buffalo!”
The buffalo does not have the intelligence to understand the law, but we human beings do. If we are driving, it is not the government’s duty to educate us about the laws of the state. It is our duty to learn the state laws. Similarly, if we are living in this world taking air, water, sunlight and food from nature, we need to follow the rules laid down by God.
If one stays at a hotel, eats, sleeps and watches TV, and so on, then obviously he will have to pay for all the facilities provided by the hotel for his comfort. If the bill is not paid, a few reminders will come. And if the bill is still not paid, severe reactions are sure to come. At that time, one can’t take the stance that “I did not know that I have to pay the bill for staying at the hotel.”
Similarly, it is not for material nature to teach us our duties. When we take human birth, it is for us to learn the laws of karma. After jumping from the top of a 10-story building and breaking his bones, a child cannot say, “I didn’t know that if I jump from a 10-storied building, I will fall down and break my bones”. The law of gravity will not excuse him. Just as the law of gravity is impartial and inexorable, so is the law of karma.
Another important point to note is that ignorance is not an excuse for sin; rather, ignorance is the consequence of sin. For example, when a person commits a crime, he is put in a jail. In a standard jail, often there are reformers who give good counsel to the prisoners so that they will become good citizens. But if in the jail also, the prisoner acts criminally and starts beating the other co-prisoners, counselors and guards, then he will be taken from the normal prison cell and put in a dark dungeon where he will be given food from the window and nobody will come to give him counsel. Why is that? Because he rejected the opportunity for counseling earlier, now he is put in a place where he gets no counseling.
Similarly, if today somebody is born in a social situation or in a cultural environment where that person never gets to know about the law of karma, then that’s because he has, by his past action shown God and the material energy, the superintendent, “I am not interested in knowing about your laws; I don’t care. I will do whatever I want.” That’s why he is put in a place where he has no opportunity for getting to know about God. Of course, God is not just a judge; he is also a loving father. Therefore, God’s mercy is greater than His justice.
3. Why do natural calamities kill thousands of innocent people?
Let’s consider a less-known incident during the tsunami disaster that happened in the Indian subcontinent a few years ago.
On the morning of that disaster, just before the tsunami struck, some scuba divers went scuba diving into the ocean to look for jewels. When they went under water, they suddenly felt a force pushing them upwards. They struggled to resist the force till it subsided. Then they went deeper under water, did their work, came back to the surface of the ocean and swam back to the coastline – only to find that there was no coast line! While they were under the water, the tsunami had devastated everything.
Just consider, the tsunami killed those who were on the land, but those who were under the water were unharmed! If these Scuba divers had ventured into the ocean a little later or a little earlier, they would have been on the surface when the killer wave hit. However, by their karma they were not supposed to die at that time, so although they were closest to the tsunami, they did not die.
Another even more amazing example: During an earthquake in Gujarat, there was a mother who had a small baby sucking on her breast. Suddenly the earthquake struck and a column of the roof fell on the mother. The mother died on the spot. Almost twenty-four hour later, when the rescue workers worked their way down to the debris, they found the mother dead and the infant moving his hands and legs holding on to his mother’s breast. The infant is so tender that one small blow can prove fatal for him, yet there it was safe amidst a quake that proved fatal for many healthy adults.
What we learn from incidents like these is that although natural calamities kill in mass, they don’t kill blindly. Only those who have the kind of karma for which they have to die at that particular time will be killed. This is an example of mass karma.
Mass karma involves a group of people who have done different kinds of bad karmas. The reaction of their karma is that they are all supposed to die. But material nature gives that reaction to many people efficiently in one stroke through a calamity. For example, all such people may be brought together in one airplane and that airplane will crash. The person who is not supposed to die will not be on that flight perhaps because his car broke down on the way to the airport and he missed the flight.
In this way, the knowledge of the law of karma helps us to make sense out of our suffering and face it with calmness.
Secondly, it helps us prepare for the future with confidence. It is not that just by knowing about karma, we will become free from suffering. But we become like a sick patient who has understood what the disease is and how to cure it. The pain is still there, but it is going to decrease. But for the person who doesn’t know the cure, his pain is just going to increase and, on top of that, he will be feeling helpless and dejected. But a knowledgeable person knows sooner or later all the sufferings will come to an end.
W Somerset Maugham, in his book The Razor’s edge writes, “Has it occurred to you that transmigration is at once an explanation and justification of the evil of the world. If the evil we suffer is the result of sins committed in our past lives, we can bear them with resignation and hope that if in this one we strive towards virtue, our future lives will be less afflicted.” Thereby, the science of karma is not a science of condemnation, it is science of redemption. It’s message is not “You are sinful, suffer.” But it’s message is, “Whatever be your past karma for which you are suffering now, just surrender to God and His grace will come upon you and you will be saved.”
I am not a believer that in catastrophic weather events (tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis) or in airplane crashes it happens because all are sinners. Life isn’t perfect: events happen and sometimes good people find themselves in bad events. What I do believe in though are the seven deadly sins pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth and over along period of time causes your body disease.
The author Lawrence Durrell4 wrote The Alexandria Quartet of which the first book, Justine, was published in 1957. Set in the Egypt’s second city during the 1930s and 40s, the series explores the subject of love, but its central narrative is about relativity and chronology.
It appears to be Durrell’s main thesis that disparities in latitude or longitude and measures of time will result in a completely different human experience. Is it particular to business or is Durrell’s hypothesis a universal for the human condition? Is being in the wrong place but the right time a factor in business success or failure?
This is not the question that the great American singer and musician Dr John5 asked when he sang one of his most famous songs, Right Place Wrong Time, but perhaps it should be the anthem for many companies:
I been in the right place
But it must have been the wrong time
I’d have said the right thing
But I must have used the wrong line
I’d a took the right road
But I must have took a wrong turn
Would have made the right move
But I made it at the wrong time
I been on the right road
But I must have used the wrong car
My head was in a good place
And I wonder what it’s bad for
Preview YouTube video Dr. John & Eric Clapton – Right Place, Wrong Time 1996
Dr. John & Eric Clapton – Right Place, Wrong Time 1996
Timing is crucial for business even when management gets it wrong. Place and awareness of what is gong on in other locales is also crucial. You may only serve the domestic market, but if you are reliant on stable international commodity prices or continuity of global supply chains, any shock to these assumptions may result in failure.
For fast high street branded food outlets, whether Beyonce is a judge on a TV talent(less) show may be more important than the London Stock Exchange’s electronic trading platform going belly up.
Dr. Granville Dharmawardena of the University of Colombo writes that psychologists often speak of the mind and the body as two separate entities for convenience, but most acknowledge that they are intimately entwined. Yet none knows exactly how or how intimately. So the mind body problem keeps stubbornly resisting a definite solution. Philosopher John Searle (Mills Professor of Philosophy, University of California, and Berkley) says that today’s philosophers are reluctant to tackle such big problems as how people have been trying to understand their relationship to the universe.All these refer to the elusive relationship between the body and the mind referred to more generally as the brain-mind problem. The brain-mind relationship has baffled mankind for a very long time. One main reason for this is that it was not considered as a candidate for scientific study until recently.
Psychology and related sciences were able to continue for many years by either ignoring the brain entirely or at best treating it as a black box whose rules of operation could be understood without reference to its internal contents or composition.
The human brain without doubt is the most complex organ in the known universe. It is physical and biological. Therefore, it has to be amenable to scientific probing without the intervention of such considerations as the Gödel’s theorem, which states that there are statements in mathematical systems which are true but cannot be proven within those systems.
Consciousness on the other hand is neither physical nor biological. Therefore, it is a more elusive subject to deal with and Gödel’s considerations may have a role to play there. Attempts to understand brain and consciousness have been mostly based on restrictive Newtonian classical science and exclusively the material realm composed of matter.
Although the powers of understanding of human senses and the scope of Newtonian science are limited to three spatial dimensions, the scope of our universe is not limited to three dimensions. In fact, news theories hypothesize there are eleven dimensions.
Many of the natural phenomena happening within our universe transcend the three dimension scene. Therefore, it is not possible to assume that the mechanisms of operation of the brain and consciousness remain imprisoned within the confines of Isaac Newton’s three dimensional material universe. Just as the Earth was proved not to be the center of the universe, our current theories that govern our physical universe such as Einstein’s gravity theory and others may become obsolete in our understanding of reality.
