Entries by tag: hinduism
Contemporary Western postural yoga projects an authenticity and unbroken ancient heritage onto the yogic tradition, while mourning the commodification, secularization and denuding of that tradition by the West. Such lamentation belies the fact that modern postural yoga is a creature of fabrication and reinvention.
--Farah Godrej
It’s fantastic to look at people and see that they really, deep down, are enlightened. They’re It. They’re faces of the divine.
And they look at you, and they say ‘oh no, but I’m not divine. I’m just ordinary little me.’ You look at them in a funny way, and here you see the buddha nature looking out of their eyes, straight at you, and saying it’s not, and saying it quite sincerely.
And that’s why, when you get up against a great guru, the Zen master, or whatever, he has a funny look in his eyes. When you say ‘I have a problem, guru. I’m really mixed up, I don’t understand,’ he looks at you in this queer way, and you think ‘oh dear me, he’s reading my most secret thoughts. He’s seeing all the awful things I am, all my cowardice, all my shortcomings.’
But that’s not what he’s looking at. He’s giving you a funny look for quite another reason altogether. He’s giving you a funny look because he sees in you the Brahman, the Godhead, just claiming it’s ‘poor little me’.
~ Alan Watts, Lectures on Zen/Spiritual Alchemy
And they look at you, and they say ‘oh no, but I’m not divine. I’m just ordinary little me.’ You look at them in a funny way, and here you see the buddha nature looking out of their eyes, straight at you, and saying it’s not, and saying it quite sincerely.
And that’s why, when you get up against a great guru, the Zen master, or whatever, he has a funny look in his eyes. When you say ‘I have a problem, guru. I’m really mixed up, I don’t understand,’ he looks at you in this queer way, and you think ‘oh dear me, he’s reading my most secret thoughts. He’s seeing all the awful things I am, all my cowardice, all my shortcomings.’
But that’s not what he’s looking at. He’s giving you a funny look for quite another reason altogether. He’s giving you a funny look because he sees in you the Brahman, the Godhead, just claiming it’s ‘poor little me’.
~ Alan Watts, Lectures on Zen/Spiritual Alchemy
When Shiva the Great Yogin chooses
to become the Lord of the Dance, Nataraja,
the universe appears as Consciousness
in its most ecstatic forms:
as art and play, as knowledge and beauty,
as the very embodiment of awareness
in the form of the Self.
—From Clothed in Consciousness:
Nataraja in the Tantric Tradition
by Dr. Douglas Brooks
Grace just comes: you don’t earn it, you don’t deserve it, and you can’t pay it back. It’s lila, the play that comes, as Krsna puts it in the Bhagavadgita, ‘by rare chance.’ You can say ‘thank you’ and you can offer your gifts. The best gift, of course, is yourself.
--Dr. Gopala Aiyar Sundaramoorthy
(Here: http://rajanaka.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-black-swan.html)
--Dr. Gopala Aiyar Sundaramoorthy
(Here: http://rajanaka.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-black-swan.html)
In Ayurveda, “Traditionally, one method of administering Ashwagandha and milk was to boil them together.” According to (Heather) Zwickey, investigations into herbal remedies rarely take into account how the herb has been administered throughout the tradition of the medicine’s life cycle, such as mixing it with water, tea, or oil. While many consumers today may consume the herb with water or no liquid at all, researchers know that Ashwagandha (Withania somnifera) has typically been taken with an anupana substance. It is believed to aid in the digestion and effectiveness of the plant.
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My kitten is named Shakti, for the feminine divine. In Hindu mythical imagery she is usually pictured as a voluptuous female human, often with four arms, sometimes with a sword, sometimes riding a lion. Shiva is the masculine divine, the blue guy wearing leopard or tiger fur, with a snake in his hair or around his arm. The cosmic union (or sacred marriage) of the two is often seen as one person, half blue god and half brown goddess....though sometimes the images are more sexually explicit, with Shakti sitting in Shiva's lap, his legs folded in lotus while hers are wrapped around him. No explicit sexual images here, but I did find some interesting stuff.
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