The Idea of Right Action

Bhagavad Gita gives reference to "karma" - action, aligned with "dharma" - the laws of nature, at multiple places. The idea of "action" and then the "right action" as postulated in the Bhagavad Gita is pretty interesting and profound. In this article I discuss different dimensions of this philosophy.

A) Action without attachment to the Goal.
In this Krishna says, "You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of actions. Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing your duty"
In simple terms it means: Keep on performing your duties without expecting any reward in return, leading a selfless life.
Most of us today have forgotten about this part and always take things as business deals. Be it friendship, love or even marriage. We always impose conditions before doing anything so that we benefit from it in the end. Here the suggestion is to do away with the greed of the result of any action.
In this level, one can logically arrive to the efficacy of this formulation. Obviously, when you are not distracted by the future result that your action will take you to, and focus all your energy and attention to your task at hand, you would be able to be more organized and efficient at your task. This will by itself lead you to successful result.

B) Action - the only path to true wisdom.
In the next level, we are told that "the path of knowledge is the same as the path of action." What this means is that "the path of action," i.e, of what is called Right Action, when it is attained, merges with the path of knowledge. At this point, they become one and the same; but this is  because that action is no longer action, as we normally understand it, but something quite different: it is wisdom in activity and, ultimately, just wisdom. So we can see that in order to reach this path of wisdom, a man cannot be bound to the action he is carrying out, but must be immersed in the Law, and act from there. Right action is not an attitude of giving in order to receive, of sowing in order to reap. To understand this we have to break down our mental structure which is unable to conceive the reality of something for that "something" in it. If we take a certain path, we feel we have to get somewhere; if we make a sacrifice, we have to gain a reward; it we give, we feel that sooner or later we must receive something in return. This is the way we tend to think. But the Bhagavad Gita has totally a different formulation. It says that right action would put an end to the chain of exchanges, with cause and effect. It leads one to a kind of freedom, where one is closer to the truth, to the wisdom. There is nothing that action shall take to, which is any way near to the profundity of wisdom that action itself nurtures the person. It is the journey the person undertakes doing an action that beautifies his character with added insights and wisdom. The result of the action is just another outcome - a bonus, if you would. There many grander aspects of entering into an action per se. Attaining knowledge, wisdom, understanding, maturity, insight, etc are various other dimensions that linger from the process of entering into a right action. It is further said that without action, no wisdom is possible.
To explain this tenet, let me take up a small example. If I am to explain to my daughter what love is, I might explain all the definitions, theoretical frameworks, aspects, nature and ramification of this word. My child might be able to get a fair idea of the concept in a mental level. But it will be still be in the superficial level of just another intellectual concept, a shallow mental picture. It is only through her personal experience of what is love, by entering into an activity engaging her entire personality, experiencing the bliss of being in  love in relating to it, or experiencing the pain of not in love, from the level of mind, heart, body and soul, she will be able to for the first time taste what real love is all about. You might agree that this voluntary or involuntary engagement into an activity to really experience love is a necessity in the part of my daughter to really understand what love is, in its totality. Not just a partial understanding in the level of mental models. Same thing holds good in any aspect of life. An understanding which is based on borrowed ideas, without entering into self-action, remains superficial in the level of just mental models. That is just a partial view. That is by itself powerless and sterile. There is no potency, vitality or life in it. Life has to be lived, entering into activity, to experience and understand life, in its various aspects. One who has not seen, felt and trekked the Himalayas, will never even come close to what is known as the grandeur of the Himalayas.
In today's world of rampant commoditization, people think that they can buy anything and everything off the shelf. If one wants to have a good dinner, one immediately buys oneself an expensive dinner in a restaurant. But the person totally misses out the pleasure of growing the vegetables, washing and cutting them, cooking them, and really cherishes the profundity of the pleasure of eating and sharing the food, after ente ring into all these activities. One would be able to appreciate the difference in the quality of pleasure one derives in the second way, when compared to the first.
One has to really understand that even in the realm of interpersonal relationships this holds good. If one does not take deep interest into the other, and really enter into an internal activity to understand a person, his point of view, his pains and fears, his personality needs, his background, his interests, one will never even be able to relate to what the other is even trying to say. Most of the way we relate to others is very superficial. We never feel for the other. We relate to the other just in the mental and logical level, most of the times superimposing our own autobiography on the other person. Relating to another person in such superficial realm, we end up either loving, or hating him. One has to understand that such a stance is just an illusion. By this, one has to understand that he is not dealing with another individual, but just a projection of one's own self.

C) Being-ness over Having-ness - 
In the journey from "action" to the "right action", Krishna proposes the aspect of Being over Having. The state of being is prescribed to search for the "right action" for one own self. This right action for an individual is suited to the uniqueness of the individual. It helps the individual to express himself fully and bring the full expression of his unique individuality. In Sanskrit, the term used to denote this is "Swadharma". In the state of being, which precedes the state of doing, a person is asked to contemplate on his self, and use his reason, experience, understanding and other human faculties to break through the illusions both within and outside, and search for himself the right action - the right way of being. Only after this phase, one is asked to venture into the world of action. This phase of being-ness does not end when a person is in the domain of doing. He continues in this state, being centered in his "Swadharma", and keeps taking action. He is always centered and grounded.
The state of Being has two fold purpose. One is it allows the person to select which action to take, and which not to. This is a sense of discrimination one develops within. The second is that the person grounded in the state of being, even when performing the action, does not get distracted by the storm of the distractions of "having" from all the directions of the material world. He is tuned to the internal compass of "Swadharma".
This can be appreciated in the way Mother Earth manifests herself. Mother Earth or as she is known by the ancient Greeks as Gaia, is always in a state of tranquil inaction, in an outward realm. But she is always quietly serving thousands of seeds to nourish them in her womb, holding in her immense embrace the sparkle of the diamonds, the sheen of gold, the passion of throbbing geysers and hot springs, and innumerable life forms. Mother Earth does not enter into these activities to "have" something. She even does not proclaim for her actions to the universe.  Please note that the state of being-ness as is not about lethargy, in-action, and a dejected state of hopelessness. Rather it is a state of immense internal activity. The activity might not be visible to the material world. But there are lots of upheavals being crossed, battles being won, obstacles being overcome, in the is-ness of one's own inner self. This builds up the psychological capital which provides the strength and direction to oneself to relate to the world outside. Mother Earth in this case, always is in a state of "is-ness". This state of "is-ness" from outside looks like a life-less inertia. But in reality, from within, she is in endless activity grounded deep into love, concern and compassion. She does not have anything. She is just "IS". This awareness and appreciation of "Being-ness" brings into one's consciousness new depth of being alive, which would have otherwise fizzled out when man is vexed in the race of having and having. A person will be able to see the hidden beauty of life, which is camouflaged by the apparent commotion, dis-integration, contradictions and ugliness all prevalent on surface. This opens up avenues to appreciate and observe divinity from the everyday chores of one's existence. Being-ness attaches meaning to an action. This meaning crops from one's capacity of love, concern, passion, vitality and potency. In the state of "Being", one starts to recognize that, in spite of abominable ugliness of the world around, there is an undercurrent of beauty and melody and a serene composure joyously gurgling. The more he recognizes the harmony in which the life is woven, more he goes deeper - between the ridges of the tapestry and dives into the beauty gushing out from each deep pore of the fabric of life. He realizes that the true bliss is not having something or somebody. That pleasure of having is just momentarily. Eventually what one has, rusts, decays and die. Only what stays is what "is" 

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Karl Marx on "Being" and the sham of "Having"

Marx has given a beautiful analysis of the prevalent state of things in society on the aspect of "having" over "being". It goes as follows - 

That which exists for me through the medium of money, that which I can pay for (i.e, which money can buy), that I am, the possessor of the money. My own power is as great as the power of money. The properties of money are my own (the possessor's) properties and faculties. What I am and can do is, therefore, not at all determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy the most beautiful woman for myself.COnsequently, I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its power to repel, is annulled by money. As an individual I am lame, but money provides me with twenty four legs. Therefore, I am not lame. I am  a detestable, dishonorable, unscrupulous and stupid man, but money is honored and so also is its possessor. Money is the highest good, and so its possessor is good. Besides, money saves me the trouble of being dishonest; therefore, I am presumed honest. I am stupid, but since money is the real mind of all things, how should its possessor be stupid? Moreover, he can buy talented people for himself, and is not he who has power over the talented more talented than they? I who can have, through the power of money, everything for which the human heart longs, do I not possess all human abilities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their opposites? 

If money is the bond which binds me to human life, and society to me, and which links  me with nature and man, is it not the bond of all bonds? Is it not, therefore also the universal agent of separation? It is the real means of both separation and union, the galvano-chemical power of society....

Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, co-founds and exchanges everything, it is the universal confusion and transposition of all things, the inverted world, the confusion and transposition of all natural and human qualities. 

He who can purchase bravery is brave, though a coward. Money is not exchanged for a particular quality, a particular thing, or a specific human faculty, but for the whole objective world of man and nature. Thus, from the standpoint of its possessor, it exchanges every quality and object of every other, even though they are contradictory. It is the fraternization of incompatibles; it forces contraries to embrace.

Let us assume man to be man, and his relation to the world to be a human one. Then love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust etc. If you wish to enjoy art you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you wish to influence other people you must be a person who really has a stimulating and encouraging effect upon others. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return, i.e, if you are not able, by the manifestation of yourself as a loving person, to make yourself a beloved person, then your love is impotent and a misfortune. 

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Interpretation of the Maha Mrityunjaya Mantra

Meaning of the 1st line - "Om Triambakam Yajamahe"

Honoring the threefold expression of life. According to Vedanta, everything in the manifest world, meaning everything that has form and phenomena, has a beginning (will, idea), a middle (love, nurturing, life, womb) and an end (full form, ripening, reaching to the full potential) to it. It is just the nature of life that everything that is born must die, and riding that wave of the beginnings, the middles and the endings, with effortlessness and balance, and enthusiasm, and appreciation, is the key to living a conscious life. 

Meaning of the 2nd line - "Sugandhim Pushtivardhanam"

If we do surrender to this flow of life, if we are not struggling all the time, if we are not resisting all the time, if we are not trying to impose our individualized ideas about how things should be, but really can have the awareness of how things are, then we experience "sugandhim pushtivardhanam" - which means we experience the sweet fragrance of life. If we begin to accept the beginnings, middles and endings of life, without a lot of resistance, then it is literally said by the yogis that we experience a sense of joyfulness, that we feel tangibly in our bodies, in our minds and in our hearts, in our souls, and that, a fragrance arises when our personal experience is in alignment with the experience of nature, with the experience of life, with the experience of divinity.

Meaning of the 3rd line - "Urva Rukamiva Bandhanat"

By surrendering to this three fold impulse, it encourages my mind and soul to bring to my awareness that what is nourishing to me and relinquish that is not. If we can maintain such a consciousness, we do not have to struggle so much. We can accept that nature is going through those cycles and we can be in alignment with those cycles, and that can bring us happiness and joy, at the right time. 

Meaning of the 4th line - "Mrityurmukshia mamritat"

Like a cucumber that falls off the vine when ripe, death falls of our awareness. We lose the attachment to mortality. We remember ourselves essentially as unbounded, infinite beings and if we can resonate in that plane of that existence, then, even as we are living in this world of beginnings, middles and endings, of form and phenomena, of births and deaths, and going through our cycles of individuality, there is another level of our awareness, that says, I am beyond it all. I am an expression of these births and deaths, but I am deeper than that. 

- By David Simon (Chopra Center of Well Being).

This is the most accurate interpretation of the Maha Mrityunjaya Mantra I have read or heard from any source. Thanks to Deepak Chopra and his league to have beautifully explained the crux of this ancient mantra.

Interestingly the same ideal of the trinity is expressed in all the major ancient civilizations -  

In ancient Egypt this cycle of life was known as - Osiris (birth, will), Isis (love, nurture), Horus (form)

In ancient Vedic traditions this was known as - Brahma (birth, will), Vishnu (love, nurture), Mahesh(form)

In ancient Christianity it was known as Father, Son and the Holy Spirit

Similar symbolisms have been created in the ancient Celts, Zorastrians too.

It is interesting to find the similarity in the philosophy of nature all across the world.

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Being Aware. Being Alive

To be able to relish any gift, the first and foremost thing we do is to open the wrapping which hides the gift. Same obviously applies in considering the gift of life too. The most interesting part of this gift of life is that it comes camouflaged with wrappers in multiple levels. It takes lot of effort, guidance, education and will to be able to peel out these layers of veils one by one, and be able to see life in its original beauty. I use this word - “life” to mean both man’s inner self, and the society, which forms an integral part of who man is.

Various philosophers have enquired into this process of peeling out the veils. This finds its crowning development in the writings Spinoza, Freud and in Marx. Most generally speaking it is about developing oneself in such a way as to come closest to the “model” of human nature or, in other words, to grow optimally according to the conditions of human existence and thus to become fully what one potentially is; to let reason or experience guide us to the understand of what norms are conducive to well being. Inner liberation - freedom from the shackles of greed and illusions - is inseparably tied to the optimal development of reason; that is to say, reason understood as the use of thought with the aim to know the world “as it is” and in contrast to “manipulating intelligence”, which is the use of thought for the purpose of satisfying one’s need. For example a person who is the prisoner of his irrational passions loses the capacity for objectivity and is necessarily at the mercy of his passions; he rationalizes when he believes he is expressing the truth. 

Two most far-reaching, eye-opening critical theories at the beginning of the latest phase of industrial society were those of Marx and of Freud. During his times, Marx showed the moving powers and the conflicts in the social-historical process. Freud aimed at the critical uncovering of the inner conflicts. Both worked for liberation of man, even though Marx’s concept was more comprehensive and less time-bound than Freud’s (which is non-applicable in the current society, in its original form). Interestingly both these theories also share the fate that they soon lost their most important quality, that of critical and thus liberating thought, and were transformed by most of their “faithful” adherents into ideologies, and their authors into idols. 

Similar experiment was tried by the Buddha in ancient India, as I have tried to explain in the following articles - 

http://criativ-mind.blogspot.in/2011/05/uniqueness-of-gautam-buddha.htmlhttp://criativ-mind.blogspot.in/2011/05/interesting-experiment-by-prince.htmlhttp://criativ-mind.blogspot.in/2011/05/on-pain.html

An optimal living, is not just about relishing the gift of life by being able to uncover it from the packaging of illusions. The idea becomes more serious when that gift is nothing but the man himself. It becomes of urgent attention when the existence of man depends on his uncovering of who he is, and what is his relation to the world outside. It needs immediate focus when the question is related to man’s own existence and the possibility of being alive optimally. 

Fromm states this beautifully in “The art of being” as follows - 

“The strength of man’s position in the world depends on the degree of adequacy of his perception of reality. The less adequate it is, the more disoriented and hence insecure he is and hence in need of idols to lean on and thus find security. The more adequate it is, the more can he stand on his own feet and have this center within himself. Man is like Antaeus, who charged himself with energy by touching Mother Earth, and who could be killed only when his enemy kept him long enough in the air.” 

He further says later in the same book - “.....becoming aware of truth has a liberating effect; it releases energy and de-fogs one’s mind. As a result, one is more independent, has one’s center in oneself, an dis more alive. One may fully realize that nothing in reality can be changed, but one has succeeded in living an dying as a human person and not a sheep. If avoidance of pain and maximal comfort are supreme values, then indeed illusions are preferable to the truth. If, one the other hand, we consider that every man, at nay time in history, is born with the potential of being a full man and that, furthermore, with his death the one chance given to him is over, then indeed much can be said for the personal value of shedding illusions and thus attaining an optimum of personal fulfillment. In addition, the more seeing individuals will become, the more likely it is that they can produce changes - social, and individual ones - at the earliest possible moment, rather than, as is often the case, waiting until the chances for change have disappeared because their mind, their courage, their will have become atrophied....This is not primarily a question of intelligence, education, or age. It is essentially a matter of character; more specifically, of the degree of personal independence from irrational authorities and idols of all kinds that one has achieved.”

One discovers answers to one's existential problems only when one feels that they are burning and that it is a matter of life and death to solve them. If nothing is of burning interest, one's reason and one's critical faculty operate on a low level of activity it appears then that one lacks the faculty to observe.

Being able to live life with total mindfulness, with application of reason, love and productive activities to be able to realize the truth hiding behind the innumerable veils of illusions, by being more aware and alive, is the most momentous vantage point that humanity is endowed with. This makes humanity so special, and being alive as a human so unique and precious. 

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Authority, freedom, will and whim

The contemporary society is obsessed with freedom. Freedom is most of the times mistaken to being restricted by one's whim. There is deep difference between whim and will. Beautifully articulated by Erich Fromm in his book, "The Art of Being", he says - 

"Following whim is, in fact the result of deep inner passivity blended with a wish to avoid boredom. Will is based on activity, whim on passivity..A whim is any desire that emerges spontaneously, without any structural connection with the whole personality and its goals...The desire itself - even even the most fleeting or irrational one - today requires its fulfillment; to disregard it or even to postpone it is experienced as an infringement of one's freedom!.....The chief rationalization for the obsession of arbitrariness is the concept of antiauthoritarianism. To be sure, the fight against authoritarians was and still is of great positive significance. But antiauthoritarianism can and has become a rationalization for narcissistic self indulgence, for a childish sybaritic life of unimpaired pleasure. Fear of authoritarianism serves to rationalize a kind of madness, a desire to escape the reality. Reality imposes its law on man, laws that can only escape in dreams or in states of trance - or in insanity" 

In my inclination to personal freedom, and my abhorrence to authority, it might have appeared to the reader that I vote for that arbitrary relativism. This article is to clarify that confusion. It is not that the ideal way of being is to do what subjectively one feels. It is not about basing our thoughts and action by our own value judgement, totally devoid of the laws of nature, or the "truth". One has to first know the truth, using his reason, to snap himself free from the illusions of the mind, society and other conditionings. Once a man is able to see the truth, then it is his prerogative to express his unique potentialities through spontaneous activities, based on love. 

So, to some extent authority is mandatory. This is because unless man knows what is truth, he has to be directed to the truth. This has to be done through proper education, contemplation, and practice - using his reason, emotions, and the whole personality. This is a personal process which man has to undergo. It is about knowing the truth, and following the same. Once man is centered with this central axis, he is eligible to exercise his will. It is very important, as Fromm has put forward, to develop the sense of discrimination between whim and will. To be able to develop this understanding one needs to undergo a directed process. 

The essence is to find the balance, and develop the discrimination where and in what dose authority has to be applied with total freedom to exercise one's own will. This typically is very relevant in the realm of leadership in any form - either parenting, or in a typical corporate world, or in say a social context. Man has to be aware when and what form of authority that needs to be exercised. The bottomline is that authority might be needed to nourish, develop and grow a person to be able to enable that person to know what is right and wrong. The idea is about educating and guiding a person to lead him to the truth. Doing this, the leader has to be aware that he does not stifles and chokes to death the individuality of the person being led.

Leadership is about being like an artists trying to make a clay sculpture. He knows how and when and where the right pressure has to be put on the clay to mould it to a beautiful idol. In doing so, he allows the unique characteristic of the clay to add that special sheen and texture to the idol. Although the conception of the idol is the imagination of the artist, he does not kill the individuality of the clay, and allows the clay to express its own self. In no instance does the clay-smith disdains the existence of the clay, and collaborates with the unique and independent existence of the clay, to bring to form his imagination.

Mankind has to defend himself and his offsprings from this whimsical fantasy which is termed as freedom and independence, in the contemporary world. Imagine what will happen if a sharp sword is handed to a baby. Having said that one also has to keep in mind that one cannot act as a sadist, trying to control, subdue and manipulate the subordinate using him just as a means to his own personal ends. The idea is not about being soft. None of the masters of the like of Buddha, Spinoza, Socrates, Plato etc were softies. They were ruthless to be centered with the ideal. But at the same time, they gave space for the optimum development of the unique faculties of humanity. It is of prime importance to understand and appreciate this balance between authority and freedom, between will and whim.

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Life and Work of Erich Fromm

Life and Work of Erich Fromm by  Rainer Funk Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Orthodox Jewish parents. He died on March 18, 1980, in Locarno, Switzerland. The world in which Fromm was brought up was directed to traditional learning, to the perfection of man, to spiritual values--goals that were just opposed to the cliché of a successful Jew at that time. His mother, Rosa Krause, had an uncle, a brother of her father, who was a great Talmudist in Posen. He spent his last years in the Liebigstr. 27 in Frankfurt am Main, where Erich Fromm grew up, and became his first Talmudic teacher. When he was 16 he joined a group of students around Nehemia Nobel, the rabbi of the synagogue at Boerneplatz in Frankfurt. Nobel was a gifted preacher and mystic. When Fromm graduated from the Woehler-Gymnasium in Frankfurt he started to study law at Frankfurt University; but law did not really satisfy him enough because he didn't want to become a lawyer. In 1919 he went to the University of Heidelberg and began to study sociology with Alfred Weber (Max Weber’s brother), philosophy with Heinrich Rickert and psychology with Karl Jaspers. In addition to these teachers at the University of Heidelberg, Fromm was deeply influenced between 1920 and 1925 by another Talmudic teacher, Salmon Baruch Rabinkov. „Herr Rabinkov”, as he was referred to by everybody, was a Russian-born Talmudic teacher, an adherent of Habad Hasidism from Lithuania. Although Rabinkov impressed Fromm much more than his teachers at the university Fromm admired his doctoral father Alfred Weber as „a man of great intellectual power, of great integrity and of hard political conviction for freedom.“ (Fromm, 1979d, p. 20.) From the very beginning, Fromm’s sociological interest actually was a social-psychological one, addressed to the question of what causes people to think, feel and behave in a uniform way. This was also the focus of his 1922 dissertation under Alfred Weber (cf. Fromm, 1989b): Fromm examined the social psychological function of Jewish law in the community life of the diaspora Jews--the Karaites, in Reform Judaism and in Hasidism. Fromms main interest was a socio-psychological although even at the time of his dissertation he didn't have a developed psychological concept with which he could grasp the psychic function of the religious ethos and other forms of solidarity within the Jewish community. Religious and non-religious teachings and teachers had a great influence on Fromm. But there was already very early also another major interest, expressed in the psychologically oriented connoted question: „How is it possible?“ His sympathy for the prophets and their messianic visions of the harmonious coexistence of all nations was profoundly shaken by the First World War. „When the war ended in 1918, I was a deeply troubled young man who was obsessed by the question of how war was possible, by the wish to understand the irrationality of human mass behavior, by a passionate desire for peace and international understanding. More, I had become deeply suspicious of all official ideologies and declarations, and filled with the conviction ‘of all one must doubt.’“ (Fromm, 1962a, pp. 6-7) Six years later, psychoanalysis offered Fromm an answer to the question „How is it possible?“ Fromm was introduced to psychoanalysis by his friend Frieda Reichmann, with whom he opened a psychoanalytically oriented sanatorium in Heidelberg in 1924. She conducted his first didactic analysis, and in 1926 they were married. He had further analyses with Wilhelm Wittemberg in Munich, with Karl Landauer in Frankfurt and with Hanns Sachs in Berlin, where Fromm also finished training in 1930 and opened his own practice. His social psychologically focused interest continued and brought him into contact with the Freudian Marxists Siegfried Bernfeld and Wilhelm Reich at the Berlin Institute. At the same time that Fromm opened his practice in Berlin, he was appointed by Max Horkheimer to the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt—later known as the “Frankfurt School”--as its chief expert in all questions of psychology and social psychology. Here Fromm became intensively involved with Marxist theories and worked for years--in addition to his practice as therapist--on a socialpsychological field-research project on the unconscious attitudes of working people professing to be politically leftist (cf. Fromm, 1980a). That Fromm’s socialpsychological interest originated in his religious upbringing is evident from his Talmudic teachers as well as from his studies in sociology and his dissertation on Jewish law. But seven years after he had finished his dissertation, Freudian psychoanalysis permitted him a new formulation of his social psychological interest in the language of Freud's theory of the formation of psychic impulses. Fromm's main interest is in the libidinal structure of the human being as a socialized being. Thus it is mainly a question of those passionate strivings and the unconscious of the socialized individual, as these factors make themselves evident when the unconscious of society is itself the object of study. Then there is a libidinous structure of society, which can be recognized as independent from the socioeconomic situation, since the life experience of the group is determined by the economic, social and political conditions. This means that society has not only a certain economic, social, political and intellectual-cultural structure, but also a libidinal one specific to it. When Fromm embraced the idea of a socially molded unconscious or an unconscious of society by which each individual is to a large extent predetermined, he defined the correlation of individual and society anew. It was no longer valid to say „here I am and there is society;“ but rather, „I am primarily a reflection of society, in that my unconscious is socially determined and I therefore reflect and realize the secret expectations, requirements, wishes, fears, and strivings of society in my own passionate strivings.“ In reality, none of the following—not the apparent separation of society and individual, not the apparent separation of conscious and unconscious, not the apparent separation of society and unconscious--actually exist. All of these dimensions are in the social unconscious of every single human being. This new approach shifts the perspective to the recognition of the dynamics of the unconscious on a social scale and finally leads Fromm completely to downplay Freudian instinct theory in order to avoid giving a predominant position to insights into the this singular libidinal structure, which is not very relevant to the dynamics of the social unconscious. At the end of Escape from Freedom (1941a) Fromm summarizes his new formulations: „We believe that man is primarily a social being, and not, as Freud assumes, primarily self-sufficient and only secondarily in need of others in order to satisfy his instinctual needs. In this sense, we believe that individual psychology is fundamentally social psychology or, in Sullivan's terms, the psychology of interpersonal relationships; the key problem of psychology is that of the particular kind of relatedness of the individual toward the world, not that of satisfaction or frustration of single instinctual desires.“ (1941a, p. 290) This re-vision of psychoanalysis also manifested itself in new terminology. Since Fromm used the concept of character for his social psychological insights, he called drive theory “characterology”; drive structure became “character structure,” instinctual impulses became “character traits” or simply “passionate strivings”; drive itself is conceptualized as “psychological need”, libidinal instinct is now called “psychological” or “existential need” (in contrast to instinctive or physiological needs); the libidinal structure of a society became the “social character,” and instead of libido, Fromm, similarly to Jung, now spoke of “psychic energy.” When one surveys Fromm’s numerous subsequent writings, one notices that all of his later works are far-reaching explications and modifications that illustrate his very specific approach to the individual as a social being. This holds true for Fromm’s concept in the thirties of the authoritarian character (developed ten years before Adorno et al. published Authoritarian Personality) and also for his later discoveries. In the forties and fifties he described the „marketing character“ and the „organization man“ (as Fromm’s analysand David Riesman did in sociological terms), and in the sixties he discovered a new orientation of social character: necrophilia, the passion to be attracted by all that is dead and without life (Fromm, 1973a). The foundation for these discoveries was laid in the early thirties when Fromm developed his own sociopsychological approach to man and society. The coming of the Nazis to power in 1933 forced the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research to emigrate, first to Geneva, Switzerland, and then, in 1934, to Columbia University in New York. After a rather long illness, during which he stayed at Davos, Switzerland, Fromm accepted an invitation from the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute to give a series of lectures in 1933. When the Institute for Social Research found its new home in New York, Fromm moved there and resumed work at the institute while also continuing his psychoanalytic practice. From 1935 to 1939, he was a visiting professor at Columbia. His connection with the Institute for Social Research continued into the late thirties, when Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse came out against his reformulation of the Freudian theory of drives, the latter eventually denouncing him as a „neo-Freudian revisionist“ (Marcuse 1955, p. 238). During the Second World War, Fromm tried to enlighten the American public concerning the real intentions of Nazism. In 1943, he and others founded the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology, and from 1946 to 1950 he was chairman of the faculty and chairman of the institute’s training committee. Throughout the forties Fromm taught extensively. From 1945 to 1947, he was a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, and in 1948-49, he was a visiting professor at Yale. From 1941 to 1949, he also was a member of the faculty of Bennington College in Vermont, and in 1948 he became an adjunct professor of psychoanalysis at New York University. Fromm was married a second time in 1944, to Henny Gurland, a German photographer who witnessed Frankfurt School-member Walter Benjamin’s suicide while fleeing from Nazi-occupied France to Spain in 1940. In 1940 Fromm became an American citizen. On the advice of a physician, who stated that his ailing wife would benefit from a more favorable climate, they moved from Bennington to Mexico in 1950. In Mexico Fromm became a professor at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City, where he established the psychoanalytic section at the medical school. He taught there until 1965, when he became a professor emeritus. Henny died in 1952, and Fromm married Annis Freeman in 1953. Annis was two years younger than Fromm. She was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in Alabama. Trained in anthropology, she was most interested in his social approach to psychology. She planned their house in Cuernavaca, Morelos, where they lived from 1957 to 1974, when they moved to Switzerland. In addition to his teaching duties in Mexico, Fromm attended to his responsibilities at the William Alanson White Institute in New York, held a position as a professor of psychology at Michigan State University from 1957 to 1961, and was an adjunct professor of psychology at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University after 1962. Despite his extensive teaching activities, he kept up his psychoanalytic practice for more than forty-five years, remained active as a supervisor and teacher of psychoanalysis, and participated in social psychological fieldwork in Mexico. Since childhood, Fromm had been passionately interested in politics, and in the middle fifties he joined the American Socialist Party and attempted (fruitlessly, as it turned out) to provide it with a new program. Although he recognized that he was temperamentally unsuited to practical politics, he did considerable work to enlighten the American people about the current possibilities and intentions of the Soviet Union. Fromm taught a socialist humanism that rejected both Western capitalism and Soviet Communist socialism and sympathized with the Yugoslav „Praxis“ group’s interpretation of socialism. His strongest political interest was the international peace movement. In this, he was motivated by the insight that the present historical situation will decide whether humanity will take rational hold of its destiny or fall victim to destruction through nuclear war. Fromm was a cofounder of SANE, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, the most important American peace movement, which not only fought against the atomic arms race but also against the war in Vietnam. His last important political activity was his work on behalf of antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy during the 1968 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination (see Fromm 1994b). After 1965, Fromm increasingly concentrated on his writing. Beginning in 1968, he spent the summer months in the exceptionally benign climate of the Tessin, Switzerland, where he moved permanently in 1974. He and Annis took up residence in Muralto, far from the hectic pace of modern life, and it was there that Fromm died on March 18, 1980. Solitude and retirement on the Lago Maggiore did not lessen Fromm’s interest in contemporary problems, a fact that is evidenced clearly by his literary productivity during the last years of his life. As one surveys Fromm’s literary output, one is struck by the variety and breadth of his interests and research. 1941 Fromm published his first important monograph in social psychology, Escape from Freedom. Based on an analysis of the relation between Protestantism and the development of early capitalism, the work demonstrates the modern individual’s incapacity to value his “freedom from“ as a „freedom to.“ Instead, Fromm wrote, the modern individual attempts to escape from freedom by placing himself in authoritarian relations of dependency, becoming in the process destructive and conformist. The book’s insights into the contemporary situation in Nazi Germany made a considerable impression on the American public. In the forties Fromm developed a characterology that widens the perspective of Freudian libido theory and its narrow human image, while simultaneously indicating the ethical relevance of the various character orientations. The results of this research found expression in Fromm’s important work, Man for Himself--An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (1947a). The Sane Society, published in 1955, develops further the themes of Escape from Freedom (1941a) and Man for Himself (1947a). Written from the viewpoint of a humanistic ethic, the book points to the socioeconomic reasons that prevent the realization of the human project. His analysis of the modern capitalist and bureaucratic social structure lays bare the universal phenomenon of alienation that can be overcome only if economic, political, and cultural conditions are fundamentally changed in the direction of a democratic and humanist socialism. In addition to these three works, with their abundant observations and discoveries, Fromm wrote a number of monographs during the fifties and sixties in which the horizons of his thought emerge more clearly. In 1950, he published a shorter work, Psychoanalysis and Religion, in which he discusses his understanding of a humanistic religion as influenced by psychoanalysis and Buddhism in greater detail. The Forgotten Language, a discussion of fairy tales, myths, and dreams as universal and revelatory phenomena of human existence, appeared the following year, in 1951. Fromm’s bestseller was the short book, The Art of Loving. Using the concept of „productive love,“ Fromm shows the consequences of a humanistic ethics for the understanding of self-love, love of one’s neighbor, and love of one’s fellow human being. Fromm paid tribute to Freud and Marx in three further books (1959a, 1961b, 1962a), while at the same time attempting to define his position in relation to these seminal modern thinkers. Marx’s Concept of Man (1961b) is of special significance because it drew the attention of the American public to Marx’s early writings, which were published in this book in English for the first time. The importance of religion for a successful human existence and the future of man is clarified in two works, the essay „Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism“ (1960a) and You Shall Be As Gods (1966a), a „radical interpretation of the Old Testament and its tradition“ that pleads the cause of a nontheistic religion. Fromm develops a historical-philosophical perspective that views the Old Testament account of God and man as a process in the course of which man comes increasingly into his own. Thus God as an idea becomes identical with man’s complete „being at home with himself,“ and belief in a revealed God is understood as a stage on the path toward a „humanistic religion“ that develops in and through itself. Subsequently, Fromm focused on two problems, one of which is the historically decisive question of whether man will once again become the master of his creations, or whether he will perish in an overly technological industrial world. Fromm’s writings on politics, especially on nuclear weapons and the peace movement (1960b, 1961a), and his The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology (1968a), which can be considered a continuation of The Sane Society (1955a), address this question. The second problem relates to the decay of the individual and of humanity as a species. Using the types of nonproductive life he had previously explicated (1947a, 1964a), Fromm presents a systematic treatment of the polarity of possible orientations on the basis of character. The related questions concerning the antithesis of instinct and character, the inherent human destructive instinct postulated by behavioral research, and the skepticism concerning the human being’s potential goodness that this view entails (and the doubt this skepticism casts on humanism) guided Fromm’s research for five years. The results of his work over this period are summarized in The Anatomy ofHuman Destructiveness (1973a). His last major publication, To Have or to Be? (1976a), attempts to synthesize the insights of social psychology with those of humanistic religion and ethics. Fromm identifies two fundamentally antithetical orientations of human existence--having and being--and links his abundant insights into the individual and social psyche to the tradition of humanistic religion and of significant historical figures. Fromm believed that responsible scientific work could not ignore the ends of its activity or refuse to synthesize insights from a variety of disciplines. Neither could it be neutral toward the ethical relevance of its findings. Science therefore requires a frame of orientation that is ultimately not deducible from the insights of any single discipline.

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The article is taken from the site
http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_6.3/funk.htm

Happy Women's Day!

Today is international women's day. On this auspicious day, I take this opportunity to express my respect, gratitude, appreciation and affection for Women in form, and in spirit.

I celebrate the following forms of a woman, which makes womanhood so very venerated in this world. I have tried to depict these forms through the ancient Greek Goddesses.

1. VENUS - 

Venus is an ancient Greek Goddess. She stands for Beauty. Beauty is that what inspires life. To experience the same one can see the role played by a flower for instance. A beautiful flower placed on the table lifts the consciousness of one, to touch the ethereal world of beauty and inspiration. You remove the flower, things are not the same again. Beauty inspires mankind to take that extra step, do that bit more, make that unique difference, try to be be that bit more. It stretches life, and lifts it up to an exalted place. 

2. ATHENA - 

Athena is also an ancient Greek Goddess. She stands for strength, courage, wisdom, inspiration, just warfare, mathematics, skill, and art. Minerva is the Roman incarnation of Athena. Saraswati is the Vedic incarnation of Athena. She stands for that woman of wisdom, who has more to give to the world than just inspiration of beauty. She is that nourisher of the mankind with the knowledge, and wisdom. She also stands as the warrior - for a cause. She is the next level of relating to women. She is power - Shakti.

3. DEMETER - 

Demeter is the ancient Greek Goddess of harvest. She presides over the grains and the fertility of the earth. Her Roman equivalent is Ceres. She stands for the Mother. In Vedic framework she is also known as Durga. Woman has been primarily related as the Mother in most of the Vedic Myths. This is the most exalted state of womanhood, which gives it the highest place in creation. In this symbol, woman is related to as Earth, the provider, the nourisher, the acceptor. This is the next higher level of relating to women. Here she stands for the unconditional love of the Mother.

4. HERA - 

She is the ancient Greek Goddess of destruction of what is not as per the natural laws. She destroys the ignorance, and creates the place for the birth of new form in wisdom. Kali is the Vedic equivalent. She is the elder. She knows what is right and what is wrong. She destroys the wrong. She does not allow the sin to flourish. 

In the current material and male dominated world, hardly there is even a will to relate to women beyond the level of Venus. This has its skewed ramifications. Most of the times women are related to just a thing of beauty and fragility. Although no one voices these prejudices against women vocally, but this attitude is very clear in the sub-conscious state of humanity. That is unfortunate. More than any cunning ploy of the bastion of males, I feel it is just ignorance of the majority. Humanity is just too much tied with what it can see and touch. In that physical realm it is next to impossible to even relate to anything as divine as womanhood. One needs to really grow up, to relate to women as women, and give them their rightful respect, affection and gratitude.

Womanhood has not only to be acknowledged and respected in forms - as people around us as Mother, sisters, friends, colleagues, wife, daughter, etc, but also she has to be related in the realm of non-form, as the spirit of womanhood, in the form of nature, earth, acceptance, being receptive, understanding, caring, giving, nourishing, mentoring, protecting, guiding, loving etc.

Today is not just another day. Today is the day when the entire planet stands in ovation for that indomitable spirit of womanhood! 

I bow before thee on this auspicious day!

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Copy Right © All rights reserved - Samrat Kar

Favorite Quotes

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back– Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“Why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world–to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.”
—Ayn Rand

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
—Oscar Wilde

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
—Theodore Roosevelt

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
—Marianne Williamson

“To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one’s self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived—this is to have succeeded.”
—Bessie Anderson Stanley (frequently misattributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson)

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
—Margaret Mead

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
—Mahatma Gandhi

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift,
And rational mind is a faithful servant.
We have created a society that honors the servant
and has forgotten the gift.
- Albert Einstein


"How can you preserve your love? How can you make it last as long as possible? By not throwing yourself on the person you are falling in love with and devouring them. Because when all the excitement has passed, weariness will soon set in, and you will lose your inspiration and your joy, like someone who has eaten too much and has no more interest in food. But humans always seem to be in a hurry to destroy anything that can bring more beauty and meaning to their lives. They will sacrifice a love that brings them every blessing, that brings them heaven, for the sake of a few minutes’ pleasure. Why do they not try putting off the physical expression of their love, so that they can make the feeling of wonder they are experiencing last as long as possible? But no, they feel an attraction, and they have to quickly put an end to it.
But what happens then? Even when they marry and have children, they carry on living together out of habit, to respect convention, to make a good impression on their friends and relatives, but inside they have already left each other a long time ago. It is the subtler sensations that sustain love, that prolong life and make it beautiful. That is where the true elixir of eternal life is to be found." 

- Omraan Mikhail Aivanhow

The less you are, and the less you express your life, the more you have and greater is your alienated life. every thing an economist takes from you in a way of life, and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth.
- Karl Marx

A kite requires a person holding on to the string. So do ships which often require anchors while the next journey is planned! And so too souls, bodies - in all their glory!
- Shamit Bagchi


A person who is oriented towards being is centered and grounded in Love, reason and productive activity. These are one's own psychic forces that arise and grow only to the extent that they are practiced; they cannot be consumed, bought, or possessed like objects of having, but can only be practiced, exercised, ventured upon, performed. In contradistinction to objects of having - which are expended when they are used up - love, reason, and productive activity grow and increase when they are shared and used.
Orientation towards being always means that one's purpose in life is oriented toward one's own psychic forces. One recognizes, becomes acquainted with, and assimilates the fact that the unknown and the strange in oneself, and in external world, are characteristics of one's own self. By learning this, one attains a greater and more comprehensive relationship with one's self and one's environment.
- Erich Fromm

"Love" is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves, without any insistence that they satisfy you.
- Dr. Wayne Dyer.

There are friends and then there are angels... I feel every human I have ever met or interacted with (online or offline) for a considerable time is an angel in diguise and all others are friends, potential angels! - SHAMIT BAGCHI

Good items come from intuition, hunches, conversations with friends, other research, reading, head scratching, day-dreaming, and group or individual narrative interviews.
SHAMIT BAGCHI

The secret of attraction is to love yourself. Attractive people judge neither themselves nor others. They are open to gestures of love. They think about love, and express their love in every action. They know that love is not a mere sentiment, but the ultimate truth at the heart of the universe.
-Deepak Chopra

Don't aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue..as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a course greater than oneself
- Viktor Frankl

Strange as it may seem, life becomes serene and enjoyable precisely when selfish pleasure and personal success are no longer the guiding goals. When self loses itself in a transcendent purpose, it becomes largely invulnerable to the fears and setbacks of ordinary existence. Psychic energy becomes focused on goals that are meaningful, that advance order and complexity, that will continue to have an effect in the consciousness of new generations long after our departure from this world, even after we are long forgotten.
- Csikszentmihalyi Mihaly

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it.
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Society needs to return to spiritual values, not to offset the material but to make it fully productive. Mankind needs to return to spiritual values, for it needs compassion. It needs the deep experience that the "Thou" and the "I" are one, which all higher religions share".
-Peter F. Drucker

Humans are fundamentally good!
- Sandor Teszler


"The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another...Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others; but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardor which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice"
- Adam Smith
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759

It's good to have money and the things that money can buy, but it's good, too, to check up once in a while and make sure you haven't lost the things that money can't buy.
-George Horace Lorime

A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave - Paulo Coelho

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

As we grow up, we learn that even the one person that wasn't supposed to ever let us down, probably will. You'll have your heart broken and you'll break others' hearts. You'll fight with your best friend or maybe even fall in love with them, and you'll cry because time is flying by. So take too many pictures, laugh too much, forgive freely, and love like you've never been hurt. Life comes with no guarantees, no time outs, no second chances. you just have to live life to the fullest, tell someone what they mean to you and tell someone off, speak out, dance in the pouring rain, hold someone's hand, comfort a friend, fall asleep watching the sun come up, stay up late, be a flirt, and smile until your face hurts. Don't be afraid to take chances or fall in love and most of all, live in the moment because every second you spend angry or upset is a second of happiness you can never get back.
- Anurag Maherchandani

Do what you love or you will be forced to love what you do
- Anurag Maherchandani

Love is the only way to grasp another humanb being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and deatures in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.
- Viktor Frankl
Man's Search for Meaning

Just what is needed is to Give, Love, Care, Experience and Express!
And Life's all riches are yours....
- SAMRAT KAR

There is a desirability of an “uncluttered mind” – a perspective that is not distracted by the transitory events of the day. The uncluttered mind must constantly remove those obstacles that block vision and scan to identify those issues and trends that are truly important.
-John Gardner.

There are two kinds of truth, deep truth and shallow truth, and the function of Science is to eliminate the deep truth.
- Neils Bohr.


Anyone who love in the expectation of being loved in return is wasting their time. Love for the sake of love itself
- Paulo Coelho

I create; therefore I am.
-John Seely Brown

When we speak of a calm state of mind or peace of mind, we shouldn't confuse that with an insensitive state of apathy. Having a calm or peaceful state of mind doesn't mean being spaced out or completely empty. Peace of mind or a calm state of mind is rooted in affection and compassion and is sensitive and responsive to others.
- The Dalai Lama

Good character is more to be praised than outstanding talent. Most talents are to some extent a gift. Good Character, by contrast, is not given to us. We have to build it piece by piece...by thought, choice, courage, and determination.
- John Luther

Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.
-Unknown

If we are looking for a purpose broader than our interests, soemthing that will allow us to see our lives as possessing significance beyond the narrow confines of our own conscious states, one obvious solution is to take up the ethical point of view. The ethical point of view does require us to go beyond a personal point of view to the standpoint of an impartial spectator. Thus looking at things ethically is a way of transcending our inward looking concerns and identifying ourselves with the most o bjective point of view possible - with, as Sidgwick puts it, "The Point of view of the universe"
- Peter Singer

You will never be as young as you are now. Play, love, care, give, create, teach, kiss, hug, read, sing, dance, jump, laugh, smile, travel, pray, forgive, listen, help, write, express....hurry up...time is passing by...just 100 years at max you will be alive!
- Samrat Kar

Warriors of light keep the spark in their eyes.
They are in the world, are part of other people’s lives, and began their journey without a rucksack and sandals. They are often cowards. They don’t always act right.
Warriors of light suffer over useless things, have some petty attitudes, and at times feel they are incapable of growing. They frequently believe they are unworthy of any blessing or miracle.
Warriors of light are not always sure what they are doing here. Often they stay up all night thinking that their lives have no meaning.
Every warrior of light has felt the fear of joining in battle. Every warrior of light has once lost faith in the future.
Every warrior of light has once trodden a path that was not his/her. Every warrior of light has once felt that he/she was not a warrior of light. Every warrior of light has once failed in his/her spiritual obligations.
That is what makes them warriors of light; because they have has been through all this and have not lost the hope of becoming better.
That is why they are warriors of light.
Because they make mistakes.
Because they wonder.
Because they look for a reason – and they will certainly find one.
- Paulo Coelho

The deepest confusions, unresolved conflicts and anxieties of life when they overwhelm us they automatically catapult us closest to the divine or the perceived divine! Better to do it consciously than unconsciously!!
- Shamit Bagchi.

Who I am is what I "do". Who I am is what I "create". Who I am is what I "contribute". Who I am is what I "read". Who I am is what I "write". Who I am is what I "speak". Who I am is what I "dream". Who I am is what I "feel". Who I am is what I "synthesize". Hence I am a verb.
- Samrat Kar

A worthwhile dream, brings with it, its own share of responsibilities....which keeps you awake the whole night...busy creating a new world..a world that you are proud of..and the one you are contributing to create
- Samrat Kar

Love is not finding the right person,
But creating the right relationship.
It is not how much love we have in the beginning,
But how much love we build until we die -
Brick by brick, creating lovely memories!
- Samrat Kar

Love is Grace - an Attitude - a Stance - a Poise - a way of Life - Beyond Life itself!
- Samrat Kar

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
- Lao Tzu

All thought draws life from contacts and exchanges.
- Fernand Braudel.

Leading effectively means expanding your awareness in order to meet the needs of others.There is nothing great or morally good about it.It is just more feasible doing that way.Given the limited attention we have,it certainly makes sense to steer the attention away from self,and direct it to others' needs so that no part of our attention gets wasted in nurturing our own ego.
- Samrat Kar

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way
- Viktor Frankl

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom
- Viktor Frankl

What is to give light must endure burning.
- Viktor Frankl

"In the end, the aggressors always destroyed themselves,
Making way for others who knew how to co-operate and get along.
Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival,
Than it is a triumph of co-operation and creativity"
-- Fritjof Capra

Happiness is directly proportional to the quality of relationships a person shares. Relationships with fellow humans, flora and fauna and institutions alike
- Samrat Kar

By discounting the whole notion of spiritual awakening, atheists make a claim to false knowledge. They haven’t walked the walk, yet somehow they know, with dead certainty, that Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Confucius, Zoroaster, Saint Paul, Rumi, Kabir, the Prophet Muhammad, Rabindranath Tagore, and countless others aren’t just wrong; they are stupid and blinkered compared to any everyday atheist today. I have my doubts. The atheists I’ve met went through a period of personal disillusion with religion, and on that basis alone they became atheists. Could anything be more subjective for a crowd that decries subjectivity? Could anything be more idiosyncratic for a group that claims to represent universal reason?
- Deepak Chopra

Although illusory, Love brings to ones consciousness a profound ineffability and specialness for the subject being loved.
- Samrat Kar

I Dream. I Write. I Pray. I Read. I see Light.
Transiently I live in this world and be with people - play, speak, share, listen, love, hate, get hurt, sometimes liked and loved -
And then I get back to the reality -
My Dreams, my Poems, my Prayers, my Books, my Light!
- Samrat Kar.

It becomes so very easy, when life becomes a solo journey solely in the pursuit of learning - in all its forms - what life has to offer - in terms of books, life situations, people, institutions, relationships, etc, etc...
- Samrat Kar

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else..
- Leonardo Da Vinci

If you're really listening...If you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world. Your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; Its purpose is to burst open again and again so it can hold ever more wonder! --Andrew Harvey

Life is nothing but a journey - a constant change, a constant transit, a constant inconstancy, a constant creation, a symphony being played - continuous modulations of tones - That makes life so beautiful - A continuous dance - till the music stops, and death embraces us in her peaceful presence.
- Samrat Kar

It is not that important what you do, but that you are doing something meaningful; something that makes a difference - a positive difference!
- Samrat Kar

Stay mad, but behave like normal people. Run the risk of being different, but learn to do so without attracting attention.
- Paulo Coelho [Aleph]

For me happiness is about being engaged in something meaningful, something creative, something difficult, something enjoyable, something relevant, something worthwhile, something inspiring, something which allows me to use and grow my innate talents, something that reflects what I stand for, and who am I.
- Samrat Kar

Live becomes worth living only when one is constantly surrounded by creative, lofty, happy and inspirational ideas, people, events, and actions.
- Samrat Kar

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I have ever encountered to help me make big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride,all fear of embarrassment of failure - these things just fall away in the face of death,leaving what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the traps of thinking you have something to lose. You already are naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
- Steve jobs

Love is just a word until someone comes along and gives it meaning. Dream is also just a word until you decide to fight for it with all your enthusiasm and commitment.
- Paulo Coelho

I also find it odd how people so often slip words like “merely” and “nothing but” into statements about our origins. Humans are apes. So too we are mammals. We are vertebrates. We are pulpy, throbbing colonies of tens of trillions of cells. We are all of these things, but we are not “merely” these things. And we are, in addition to all these things, something unique, something unprecedented, something transcendent. We are something truly new under the sun, with uncharted and perhaps limitless potential. We are the first and only species whose fate has rested in its own hands, and not just in the hands of chemistry and instinct. On the great Darwinian stage we
call Earth, I would argue there has not been an upheaval as big as us since the origin of life itself. When I think about what we are and what we may yet achieve, I can’t see any place for snide little “merelies.”
Dr. V. S. Ramachandran

“When you want to build a ship, then do not drum the men together in order to procure wood, to give instructions or to distribute the work but teach them the longing for the wide endless sea.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I also find it odd how people so often slip words like “merely” and “nothing but” into statements about our origins. Humans are apes. So too we are mammals. We are vertebrates. We are pulpy, throbbing colonies of tens of trillions of cells. We are all of these things, but we are not “merely” these things. And we are, in addition to all these things, something unique, something unprecedented, something transcendent. We are something truly new under the sun, with uncharted and perhaps limitless potential. We are the first and only species whose fate has rested in its own hands, and not just in the hands of chemistry and instinct. On the great Darwinian stage we
call Earth, I would argue there has not been an upheaval as big as us since the origin of life itself. When I think about what we are and what we may yet achieve, I can’t see any place for snide little “merelies.”
- Dr. V. S. Ramachandran

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods;
There is a rapture on the lonely shore;
There is a society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more...
- Lord Byron

Rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness .... give me the truth
- Into the Wild

Your task is not to seek for Love, but merely to seek and find barriers within yourself that you have built against Love
- Rumi

Love is not primarily "caused" by a specific object, but a lingering quality in a person which is only actualized by a certain "object". Hatred is a passionate wish for destruction; love is a passionate affirmation of an "object"; it is not an "affect" but an active striving and inner relatedness, the aim of which is the happiness, growth and freedom of its object....Exclusive love is a contradiction in itself. The kind of love which can only be experienced with regards to just one person demonstrates not love but a sado-masochistic attachment.
- Erich Fromm in his book "The Fear of Freedom"

The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience,but is an instinct. It appeared more beautiful to live low and fare hard in many respects. I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind...
- from the book "into the wild"

When I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish,they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to.
- from Thoreau's Walden, in the chapter titled "higher laws"

...so many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security,conformity and conservatism,all of which may appear to give one peace of mind,but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences,and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endless changing horizon,for each day to have a new different sun....you are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships.God has placed it all around us.It is in everything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living (reaching out to nature and its grandeur)...deliberate living - conscious attention to your immediate environment and its concerns,example a job,a task,a book;anything requiring efficient concentration. Circumstance has no value.it is how one relates to a situation that has value.all true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you.
The great holiness of food, the vital heat.
Positivism,the insurpassable Joy of the Life Aesthetic.
Absolute truth and honesty. Reality.Independence. Finality. Consistency.
- taken from the book - into the wild.

While a realist is not incapacitated in his social functioning, his view of reality is so distorted because of its lack of depth and perspective that he is apt to err when more than manipulation of immediately given data and short range aims are involved. "Realism" seems to be the very opposite of insanity and yet it is only its complement.
- Erich Fromm in the book - "man for himself"

"Only as we go out in love which seeks to help and serve, do we transcend ourselves and develop that consciousness which embodies the awareness of our essential unity with others."
-N.Ram

Resolve to be in love every moment of the day, no matter what. The crux of every philosophy is jut one - be in love, active love, Manas Love, Love emanating from Nous, from Buddhi. At the same time, beware of the disintegrated form of love coming out from the physical levels of Kama Manas and below (Linga, Prana, Stula). They are disintegrated form of that once pristine love of the Nous, of Buddhi. They have lost their erstwhile wings. They will just flutter and then die in a moment. They are transient. What is the truth is just that one love - The love emanating from the Nous - The Manas Love. Be grounded in that every moment of your attention.
Glimpses of The Manas Love - Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr, Jesus, Moses, Buddha, Mohammad.
- Samrat Kar.

"Love should be a reality in your life, not just a poem, not just a dream. It has to be actualized. It is never too late to experience love for the first time.

Learn to love. Very few people know how to love. They all know that love is needed, they all know that without love life is meaningless, but they don't know how to love." -- Osho

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The three layer constituency of Love

The following excerpt is taken from the book "Death to Deathlessness, Talk #17" by Osho - 

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There are three layers of the human individual: his physiology, the body; his psychology, the mind; and his being, his eternal self. Love can exist on all the three planes, but its qualities will be different. On the plane of physiology, body, it is simply sexuality. You can call it love, because the word ‘love’ seems to be poetic, beautiful. But ninety-nine percent of people are calling their sex, love. Sex is biological, physiological. Your chemistry, your hormones — everything material is involved in it.

You fall in love with a woman or a man. Can you exactly describe why this woman attracted you? Certainly you cannot see her self, you have not seen your own self yet. You cannot see her psychology either, because to read somebody’s mind is not an easy job. So what have you found in the woman? Something in your physiology, in your chemistry, in your hormones, is attracted to the woman’s hormones, her physiology, her chemistry. This is not a love affair; this is a chemical affair.

Just think: the woman you have fallen in love with goes to our doctor, gets her sex changed, starts growing a beard and mustache. Will you be still loving her? Nothing has changed, only chemistry, hormones. Where has your love gone?

Only one percent of people know a little bit deeper. Poets, painters, musicians, dancers, singers have a sensitivity that they can feel beyond the body. They can feel the beauties of the mind, the sensitivities of the heart, because they live on that plane themselves.

Remember it as a ground rule: Wherever you live, you cannot see beyond that. If you live in your body, if you think you are only your body, you can be attracted only to somebody’s body. This is the physiological stage of love. But a musician, a painter, a poet, lives on a different plane. He does not think, he feels. And because he lives in his heart, he can feel the other person’s heart. That is ordinarily called love. It is rare. I am saying only one percent perhaps, once in a while.

Why are many people not moving to the second plane because it is tremendously beautiful? But there is a problem: anything very beautiful is also very delicate. It is not hardware, it is made of very fragile glass. And once a mirror has fallen and broken, then there is no way to put it together. People are afraid to get so much involved that they reach to the delicate layers of love, because at that stage love is tremendously beautiful but also tremendously changing.

Sentiments are not stones, they are like roseflowers. It is better to have a plastic roseflower, because it will be there always, and every day you can give it a shower and it will be fresh. You can put some French perfume on it. If its color fades you can paint it again. Plastic is one of the most indestructible things in the world. It is stable, permanent; hence people stop at the physiological. It is superficial, but it is stable.

Poets are known, artists are known to fall in love almost every day. Their love is like a roseflower. While it is there it is so fragrant, so alive, dancing in the wind, in the rain, in the sun, asserting its beauty. But by the evening it may be gone, and you cannot do anything to prevent it. The deeper love of the heart is just like a breeze that comes into your room, brings its freshness, coolness, and then it is gone. You cannot catch hold of the wind in your fist.

Very few people are so courageous as to live with a moment-to-moment, changing life. Hence, they have decided to fall into a love on which they can depend. I don’t know which kind of love you know — most probably the first kind, perhaps, the second kind. And you are afraid that if you reach your being, what will happen to your love? Certainly it will be gone — but you will not be a loser. A new kind of love will arise which arises only perhaps to one person in millions. That love can only be called lovingness.

The first love should be called sex. The second love should be called love. The third should be called lovingness — a quality, unaddressed — not possessive and not allowing anybody else to possess you. That loving quality is such a radical revolution that even to conceive it is very difficult.

Journalists have been asking me, “Why are there so many women here?” Obviously, the question is relevant, and they are shocked when I answer them. They were not expecting the answer. I have said to them, “I am a man.” They looked at me, unbelieving. I said, “It is natural that many more women will be here, for the simple reason that whatsoever they have known in their life before was either sex, or in rare cases, perhaps a few moments of love. But they have never come to know the taste of lovingness.” I have told these journalists, “Even the men you see here have grown many feminine qualities in them which have been repressed in the outside society.”

From the very beginning a boy is told, “You are a boy, not a girl. Behave like a boy! Tears are okay for a girl, but not for you. Be manly.” So every boy goes on cutting his feminine qualities. And all that is beautiful is feminine. So finally what is left is just a barbarous animal. His whole function is to reproduce children. The girl is not allowed to have anything with manly qualities. If she wants to climb a tree she will be stopped immediately, “This is for boys, not for girls!” Strange! If the girl has the desire to climb the tree, that is enough proof that she should be allowed.

All old societies have created different clothes for men and for women. This is not right; because each man is also a woman. He has come from two sources: his father and his mother. Both have contributed to his being. And each woman is also a man. We have destroyed both. The woman has lost all courage, adventure, reasoning, logic, because those are thought to be the qualities of a man. And the man has lost grace, sensitivity, compassion, kindness. Both have become half. This is one of the greatest problems we have to solve — at least for our people. 

My sannyasins have to be both: half man, half woman. That will make them richer. They will have all the qualities that are available to human beings, not only half. At the point of being, you simply have a fragrance of lovingness. The journalists have asked me, “Do you love Sheela?” I said, “Of course. But I love so many women that I don’t know even their names. And not only women — I love so many men, because they are also half woman.” In one million sannyasins around the world, I cannot point to a single person and say, “This is the person I love.” I can simply say, “I love.” Whoever is ready to receive my love...it is available. So don’t be afraid. Your fear is right: what you think of as love will be gone, but what will come in its place is immense, infinite. You will be able to love without being attached. You will be able to love many people because to love one person is to keep yourself poor. That one person can give a certain experience of love, but to love many people....

You will be amazed that every person gives you a new feeling, a new song, a new ecstasy. Hence, I am against marriage. In my vision, marriages in the commune should be dissolved. People can live together their whole life if they want, but that is not a legal necessity. People should be moving, having as many experiences of love as possible. They should not be possessive. Possessiveness destroys love. And they should not be possessed, because that again destroys your love.

All human beings are worthy of being loved. There is no need to be tethered to one person for your whole life. That is one of the reasons why all the people around the world look so bored. Why can’t they laugh like you? Why can’t they dance like you? They are chained with invisible chains: marriage, family, husband, wife, children. They are burdened with all kinds of duties, responsibilities, sacrifices. And you want them to smile and laugh and dance and rejoice? You are asking the impossible. Make people’s love free, make people non-possessive. But this can happen only if in your meditation you discover your being. It is nothing to practice.

I am not saying to you, “Tonight you go to some other woman just as a practice.” You will not get anything, and you may lose your wife. And in the morning you will look silly. It is not a question of practicing, it is a question of discovering your being. With the discovery of being follows the quality of impersonal lovingness. Then you simply love. And it goes on spreading. First, it is human beings, then soon animals, birds, trees, mountains, stars. A day comes when this whole existence is your beloved. That is our potential. And anybody who is not achieving it is wasting his life.

Yes, you will have to lose a few things, but they are worthless. You will be gaining so much that you will never think again of what you have lost. A pure impersonal lovingness which can penetrate into anybody’s being — that is the outcome of meditativeness, of silence, of diving deep within your own being. I am simply trying to persuade you. Don’t be afraid of losing what you have

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