Session 09 June 2009

Laura said:
I don't know if youtube is the place for this sort of thing or if it can carry a good quality video. Anybody know that?

Youtube supports 3 different modes: Normal Mode, Hi-Res and HD Mode.
Vimeo is a good one as well for non-commercial HD videos.

Also consider that you can offer the video file for download with a bittorrent stream or on one of the many free file-hosting services out there.
The quality of streamed videos is usually lower just because of the streaming aspect.

Domi
 
domi said:
Laura said:
As the Cs had said that the Sudarshen Kriya would be a useful thing for us to know and practice,

FYI: In doing some online searching, I am seeing it referred to as Sudarshan (with an 'a' at the end) Kriya.

Hmmm... that means Craig misspelled it for us. That's okay... maybe the Cs brand will be called "Sudarshen" and not "Sudarshan"?

Any take on Sri Sri Ravi Shankar from anybody?
 
domi said:
Laura said:
As the Cs had said that the Sudarshen Kriya would be a useful thing for us to know and practice,

FYI: In doing some online searching, I am seeing it referred to as Sudarshan (with an 'a' at the end) Kriya.

And in the pub of the "Art of living" it is written as "Sudarshan Kriya".
 
Avala said:
[quote author=Perceval]Avala, where do you live?

In Belgrade, Serbia
[/quote]


Pish and tosh, fwiw! ;D :P ;D

I'm with Bedower and Breton, if there it isn't we'r make one.


EDIT" mistakenly made two post, wanted one . . .
 
Laura said:
Like I said, I'm thinking about it. Since the main thing is the kriya... the breathing technique, and the Cs were clearly NOT happy with the rest of it, perhaps the thing to do is to make our own instructional video based on the Cs recommendations

That sounds like a very good idea to me, seeing that so many of us, don't have an AoL course anywhere near, and as Carcosa said, I'll trust a video from QFG way more!


3 April 1995

Q: … (L) You did tell us at one point that we could achieve a certain level of protection with stones, crystals, and so forth, is that correct?
A: Yes but crystals are "small potatoes."
Q: (L) Is there anything we can do with our thinking patterns or with our bodies, or anything we can do to accelerate the receiving of assistance?
A: Unite.

Could we somehow Unite mentally? Would there be any benefit in this? If say we unite on a specific day/time?
When writing this, it does sound a bit New-Age'ish ,I admit that.. :P
 
Helle said:
Could we somehow Unite mentally? Would there be any benefit in this? If say we unite on a specific day/time?
When writing this, it does sound a bit New-Age'ish ,I admit that.. :P

Isn't that what people do on this forum... every day? :P
 
Laura said:
Like I said, I'm thinking about it. Since the main thing is the kriya... the breathing technique, and the Cs were clearly NOT happy with the rest of it, perhaps the thing to do is to make our own instructional video based on the Cs recommendations. We'll bring this topic up at the next session... very soon, and get some resolution on the matter. As far as I can see, it ought to be free to everyone. Or at least, just a nominal fee for producing and mailing a quality video... I don't know if youtube is the place for this sort of thing or if it can carry a good quality video. Anybody know that?

I totally agree. When I saw the course pricing my heart sank. I can't afford it and I know plenty of others can't either, what's worse is that it isn't offered in places where it's needed and the way they go about 'protecting' it is clearly self-centered. However, the weight was lifted rather quickly since I know this group gets things done from an entirely different perspective and into an entirely different direction than is the usual course (no pun intended) for this world.

Looks like YouTube allows 1GB uploads now and they have a somewhat new video uploader tool and I've seen videos on the site with a HQ button for viewing a high quality version.
 
Breton said:
Well I just came through a heavy emotional feeling when I just read this new burst of obviously profound and pertinent information. I certainly feel privileged and thankful to be able to share in this.

I feel lacking, and weak about into putting it into proper practice, however. For example, I anticipate huge obstacles about getting to a course, or trying to arrange one in Finland. But we will do what we will do...

_Breton_

FWIW I found that there is a 'Art of Living' school in Finland : _http://www.artofliving.fi
And I found also many practitioners of kriya-yoga, but I'm not sure how beneficial this would be... This word...'kriya' is sure worth investigating... a lot of interesting stuff popping up when doing a search :cool2:
 
RyanX said:
Helle said:
Could we somehow Unite mentally? Would there be any benefit in this? If say we unite on a specific day/time?
When writing this, it does sound a bit New-Age'ish ,I admit that.. :P

Isn't that what people do on this forum... every day? :P


Yes indeed we unite in some kind of form here ;)

I was thinking more like.. (Oh this is hard to explain because my vocabulary of English words are so limited..)
- More in the line of 'eye-gazing' mentally, a meditation-like kinda state, everyone at the same time.

But thinking about it, I don't see any benefits of that. The exchange of knowledge going on here, is way more beneficial than any kind of group-meditation.
 
Laura said:
Hmmm... that means Craig misspelled it for us. That's okay... maybe the Cs brand will be called "Sudarshen" and not "Sudarshan"?

Any take on Sri Sri Ravi Shankar from anybody?

Well, now that you mention it, I did find this: http://www.deeshaa.org/is-sri-sri-ravi-shankar-a-con-man/

Atanu Dey said:
Is Sri Sri Ravi Shankar a Con Man?

My brother is a follower of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. Around May 2000, he wrote to me and asked me to check out the Art of Living website. He clearly wanted my opinion on the man. This was six years ago. Sri Sri Ravishankar has gone from strength to strength since then.

I wrote to my brother then and here is what I wrote:

My dear Baku,

I visited the site of art of living and looked at pretty much all of the things there. This is my opinion on the Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. (Not just once but twice Sri. I bet in a few years it will be Shri 108 times.)

First, whatever works for a person is what is important. So if sudarshan kriya works for you, that is great.

Second, breathing is at the core of pretty much most Indian meditation practices. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (henceforth abbreviated as SSRS) has repackaged a well-known breathing technique and commercialized it. To the extent that commercialization of anything — from candy to computers — brings benefits to both the provider and the consumer, it is a good thing. But one should be quite aware of the motive of the provider–it is motivated by the desire for commercial profit. That in itself does not make the good or service provided any less than what it is supposed to be. But the consumer should be aware that the provider does not work out of pure altruism.

The reason I am cautioning you about this is often a consumer may start attributing superior motives to a provider where none exists. And once you misjudge a person’s motives, you can make mistakes like putting them on pedestals, giving them all your money, accepting all that is said uncritically, etc.

Third I read some of the archives. Finding overworked and rehashed homilies was not too much of a surprise. I conjecture that SSRS is an intelligent person who knows the art of marketing. Many people search for answers to questions. These questions arise in all humans and there is nothing new about these. So over thousands of years, millions of people have asked these questions and some have given answers. Of the whole range and variety of answers that were accumulated over the thousands of years, you can pick and choose what suits you. In the present case, SSRS has picked his choice set of answers and presented them to the audience that he wants to appeal to.

Again I must caution you that my comments are my opinion and do not have an objective validity. What works for you is what matters, not what I think of the technique or some person. In fact, that is the crux of the matter. The mind is the ultimate and what happens to you is what your mind makes possible. If you believe that something is good for you (and indeed it is not bad to begin with), then it WILL be good for you. In medical terms, it is called the placebo effect.

I have asked myself what the secret of most of the “new age” gurus is. This is what I believe it is. First, they have to be charismatic. An image is very important. Whether it be Rajneesh or any other guru–a dashing figure is important. Then comes the presentation: long flowing hair and a beard is good. It adds to the mystique. Long hair is the substitute for a halo around a person.

Second, they have to be good marketers. A good marketer looks at what among the things on offer is most likely to sell. What, he asks, is it that the market demands? In our case, the market demands easy answers and quick results. (Diet gurus are also an example of this phenomenon.)

The essential requirement—the CORE—is that the answer has to be easy to comprehend. The masses are not brain surgeons. (They are more likely to need the attention of brain surgeons than be brain surgeons themselves.) Anything that would involve thinking is quite out of the question as a general technique. So you has to come up with something that your intended customer base is comfortable doing and go with that. That is the core, the part that will have the ’sound bite’ associated with it. Name it. The name has to be catchy and has to become a brand identifier. So you see “COKE IS IT” or Nike’s “JUST DO IT”.

The core then has to be packaged, put in wraps. That’s where the talk and the seminars and the reconstituted homilies and the books and the press briefings and the stories of superhuman feats come in. The website is the packaging in our post-modern world wide web world. It is the window dressing inviting a curious onlooker to step into the store.

The thing being sold has an intrinsic value which is not completely known to the prospective buyer. So the wrapping gives pointers to people who have endorsed it. So a great basketball player endorses coke or Nike shoes. The masses reason: “if MagicJ likes Nike, and he is much better than I am, I believe that Nike shoes are worth the $200 a pair; hence I will check them out.”

In our case, the window dressing that I found was a heavy emphasis on talks at UN and WHO. I can imagine what the reaction to this is: “Wow, he spoke to the general assembly of the UN? He must be good.” In truth, the UN is a large organisation.

I can also claim to have made presentations at the University of California at Berkeley to visiting delegations from foreign countries. Fact is that I sometimes speak to Korean tour groups who visit the university for a fee. One can speak to some group in some room at the UN building–and truthfully claim to have spoken at the UN.

I do believe that breathing techniques are very common. They are also very effective — otherwise they would not be so commonly endorsed by various schools of thought. Vipassna is also a breathing technique that claims its lineage to the Buddha himself. What SSRS has done is what a few dozen Indian gurus have done and will no doubt continue to do–packaging of what already exists. In the US, that simple core wrapped in a few hours of homilies sells for $250 (with a concession for students.) I don’t know what it costs in India but my conjecture is that since the willingness to pay is lower in India, it will sell for somewhat lower.

This has been a long reaction to your simple request that I should have a look at the web site of Art of Living.

Yours affectionately,
Nu

Well, it was a personal letter. But since I spent a lot of time on the usenet, I posted it on the newsgroup soc.culture.Indian a few months later. Some liked it; some saw red; some argued that I was being unfair. Here are some of my responses to the discussions that follow: (The quoted bits are in blue below)

“Well, again. Art of living foundation is non profit. So he is not making any money out of it.”

Being non-profit is neither necessary nor sufficient for an enterprise to be good and useful. I suppose you are for-profit entity and yet I would guess that the work you do adds value to society, just as the work of the corner shopkeeper or the baker who are also in it for profit. Hence it is not necessary to be non-profit to help improve welfare.

Many entities who are non-profit are distinctly harmful to society. For instance, most terrorists organizations are non-profit. Clearly being non-profit is not sufficient for human welfare.

Regarding The Art of Living – I fully endorse the venture. I have nothing against businesses. I endorse the corporate objective of Hewlett-Packard (whose first corporate directive is “To make a profit”; then come the other objectives that are all worthy – but would make no difference if the first objective were not met) too.

Whether SSRS is making money or not is a matter of definition. It can be empirically determined.

“I am not saying that he is enlightened as his followers claim He is an ordinary man. But his breathing technique is different from what others teach and i know people who have benefited from it.”

I support fully all ventures that give value for money as long as they don’t cheat the vulnerable. For instance, mass advertising aimed at children should be banned. But adults should be free to dispose of their property (wealth and income) any which way they wish. If someone wants to pay $400 to learn how to do breathing exercises, they evidently value it at least as much and therefore the trade is welfare improving.

“How can you make an impression just by visiting a website. I do agree with you that he knows marketing and he is certainly not enlightened. But that does not make him a con man.”

It was just an impression – and I made it very clear in my letter that I was expressing my opinion and it was not an objective and dispassionate evaluation that a court of law would accept as coming from an acknowledged expert.

I am not sure where you got the impression that I claimed that he is a con man. I am not willing to question his motives. Perhaps he is a genuine altruist and all the hype that surrounds his organization is not his doing. Or perhaps he is a snake-oil salesman who preys on the gullible. In any event, unless he engages in patently immoral activities, he is presumed as good and useful to society as any other business.

I believe that people like Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and Deepak Chopra are useful to India in general. They are not perfect but neither are they any worse than Bill Gates – they are doing what they like, they provide some value, and if in that they also make money – good for them. SSRS and Deepak Chopra actually increase the awareness about Indian philosophy abroad. They are in a sense cultural ambassadors. Which is why I hope they are not jerks. SSRS and DC don’t belong to the same league as good old Jiddu Krishnamurty, of course. JK was something else. Too celebral for the average guy on the streets. But then JK did not have the marketing savvy (nor did he want to have) that SSRS and DC have.

Marketing makes all the difference. How else can there be multibillion dollar enterprises selling caramelized caffeinated water? If sugar water can be profitably sold, why not a tried and tested breathing technique?

“Ravi Shankar is no Ramana or Ramakrishna. But he is nevertheless a great man whose meditation technique has benefited people.”

Depends on your definition of ‘great’ I suppose. My informal ranking is thus:

1. Enlightened (and Great, Good, Useful)
2. Great (and Good, Useful)
3. Good (and Useful)
4. Useful

In “Enlightened” I would put the historical Buddha, Ramakrishna Paramhansa, Mahavira, and a few others.

Great would include Einstein, Newton, Shakespeare, Tagore, Krishnamurty, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Darwin, and many more.

Good would include many people who have invented stuff that have benefited mankind – from the inventors of dynamite to penicillin.

The useful category is for the rest of us – you and me and a few billion others. We don’t do anything really harmful such as killing others. Some of us are known – as Sri Sri Ravi Shankars and Deepak Chopras. Some make big bucks – such as Gates. But most are merely useful and mostly harmless.

(I am not including the negative side of the scale here: that would include Stalin, Bush, bin Laden, Hitler, the founders of the monotheistic faiths, and so on.)

I believe that Ravi Shankar falls in the “Useful” category.

[Also see these posts on SSRS.]

Postscript: I occasionally receive emails from the devotees of SSRS (I use that word advisedly since now SSRS has been elevated to the position of a minor deity by some of his followers.) These emails basically advise me to enroll in an Art of Living course because then I too would see the light and convert from my evidently uninformed view which makes me consider SSRS to be merely useful instead of being an enlightened being. I guess my enlightenment will be postponed due to my reluctance to enroll. So be it.
 
Breton said:
Well I just came through a heavy emotional feeling when I just read this new burst of obviously profound and pertinent information. I certainly feel privileged and thankful to be able to share in this.

I feel lacking, and weak about into putting it into proper practice, however. For example, I anticipate huge obstacles about getting to a course, or trying to arrange one in Finland. But we will do what we will do...

_Breton_

I know what you mean. I composed the following right after reading the new session:

Ok....just read the latest on Kriya etc, and I so understand why some will be thinking the dead are blessed if my nightmares and hunches (and what I'm reading of Wave 7, which is awesome and spooky by the way) are even kinda close.

Is it possible, probable or even a good idea to 'get rid' of MS and all the other health issues? Am I missing something important and what could that be?

At this point I don't see a future in any kind of physical manner really, and that makes me question if I'm missing something major.

God, I hope this makes some kind of sense. All the physical issues just frustrate me to no end....


Does this frustration with health issues in face of whats to come ring a bell with anyone else? When I first read about the French plane going down, I had an instant image in my mind of it being 'unzipped' in the air by a comet fragment explosion....and now we see the PTB restricted access to any information on same....and it just hit me between the eyes that all the Work I've done and detoxing etc may be for nothing....on the one hand its enough to make me turn to the "laugh at the irony of the situation and keep going" decision, on the other its so frustrating I could just toss up my arms and say "Heck with it!" :curse: :cry:


Thoughts?

I'm posting this before I talk myself out of it, which is happening lots lately. :-[
 
A: Yes. And teach them when where and how to use those emotions for change. Overcoming emotions so that one is not affected by what is out there and inside is little more than becoming an automaton.

I was thinking that emotions could, at a stretch, be likened a little to an internal traffic light. If this light is working properly it is an essential tool to navigate this reality correctly. But for most people their "traffic light" is all messed up, all the wiring is partially burned out or crossed. Wrong lights go off at the wrong time, sometimes the green shows when the red should etc. and sometimes they all flash in chaos together. This naturally causes a lot of problems for the person who tries to rely on it for navigation. Two solutions seem possible: either turn off the traffic light altogether (or find a way to ignore it) or recalibrate it so that it runs correctly and gives accurate signals.

These breathing techniques can apparently be useful in shutting off the chaotic working of the lights, but that is not enough because they must be recalibrated. What is needed is for the traffic light to receive accurate data input in order to then begin working in the right way, and that's where knowledge input comes in.
 
One of the solutions can be that video can be made in higher quality and then converted to something like DIVX of about 500Mb, that subsequently can be lowered to 200Mb or even 20 Mb, (for people with very bad internet) and then those versions can be uploaded to some of the file sharing sites like rapidshare or mediafire.

Then people can download it from there.

Rapidshare have policy, which I know for sure, to deleting unauthorized videos, but this is work of Laura and QFG and their authorship.


Advantages will be that download will be easier; watching will be easier (almost any computer had some program for that (such as "rad light" or "divx player").

People will have those materials on their hard discs (their own computers,I think that this is important) instead on some remote server who knows where on the world web (like for "youtube") and in that way, spreading and multiplying is much easier, you just burn it and give CD to your friend to watch it, or to give some other interested friend.
 
Laura said:
As far as I can see, it ought to be free to everyone. Or at least, just a nominal fee for producing and mailing a quality video... I don't know if youtube is the place for this sort of thing or if it can carry a good quality video. Anybody know that?
Alternatively: (edit: in addition to the first step suggested in post above. second step would be a third alternative)

1. Carry it on your site if enough space for file. Con: Bandwidth usage.
2. Distribute it as a file using bittorrent, choosing some suitable tracker somewhere. Con: Slow in the beginning before enough people carry/share/seed it.
 
Gimpy said:
and it just hit me between the eyes that all the Work I've done and detoxing etc may be for nothing....on the one hand its enough to make me turn to the "laugh at the irony of the situation and keep going" decision, on the other its so frustrating I could just toss up my arms and say "Heck with it!"

I totally understand where you're coming from Gimpy!

I guess the key is, to not get 'lost' in ONLY healthissues, or let an issue totally consume one's mind, but to always stay alert for whatever it is that's coming our way, allthough it does sound kind of scary at times.

I don't believe all your effort and work has been for nothing :)

Clearly a detoxified body will make you stronger and more able to face what is to come!
 
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