Can we tap the abundant energy of the Universe for our development?

The world is made of energy, say the scriptures. So then why do we need to burn up fossil fuels and play around with dangerous nuclear fuels to feed the needs of our world?

May be there is a way to tap all that abundant energy for our needs, without upsetting the delicate balance of nature and bringing untold suffering to all living beings. May be there is a way to fuel our development without leaving the planet as a trash bin for posterity.

I don't know, but we can do that only if we get rid of the "scientism" that has got ingrained in our mindsets. We need to accept that there is more mystery to the universe than we care to admit. We need to get out of our matter-entwined world view and think of the universe as energy, and then be open to explore ways to tap that energy.

The sages and yogis have shown us -- for ages -- that it is possible. But our "modern, scientific" mind refuses to accept the possibility, dismissing everything we cannot understand as humbug!

That needs to change for the planet to be saved.

And there is the question: do we really need all that we are craving for?

Can we live a life where we can do away with all the trash stuff that we're madly accumulating? Doing that will go a long way toward helping Earth from becoming a trash bin.

For both the things to happen we need to develop the right attitude and follow it through.

It is possible and we need to work to make it possible.

Civilization is under threat; we need to alter course -- fast!

A recent New Scientist article carried an alarming warning about the implications of global warming for the world and humanity, in much more clearer terms than anything I have read till now. It also included a link to an interactive map. The article says "Bangladesh, south India and Pakistan will be largely abandoned, though isolated communities will remain".

I feel bad that this ancient land will become a desert soon (there is a big 'if' here as many scientists still think these are alarmist views), but can't understand how we can avoid this unless we do something to change the competitive conspicous consumption and self aggrandizement that is sweeping the world. Many intervention techniques are being discussed by scientists all over the world to slow down and roll back global warming but I think they could invite disaster on the planet as they still do not understand the dynamics of this phenomenon and, more important, they are not trying to address the basic triggers -- human greed and ego -- that have brought this calamity on. 

I think while attempts to slow down global warming are welcome the main thrust of any effort to save the planet and civilization should be at changing the way humanity think and works, from a narrow, self-centred perspective to a broader all-inclusive one. Only such a back-to-nature approach is going to make any serious difference and help us prosper without endangering the very existence of future generations.

I believe it is the right time to start some kind of a worldwide movement that will work at the level of human consciousness to change the collective consciousness and impel humanity to go back to a lifestyle closer to nature. My dreams of an Vedic educational movement center around this but I am not sure if I am prepared enough to start on this. My fervent hope is that Himalayan sages are not unaware of this impending calamity and would be planning something drastic to keep the human civilization and life on earth from being thrown back to the stone ages.

But before any work at the level of consciousness can take effect, I guess the material scientists should be first given an opportunity to try and fail spectaculary in their efforts. Then and only then will the masses start to think of an alternative approach to life that is more harmonious than the current 'I can conquer nature' one that has been created and nurtured by modern science and education.

The educational initiative I dream of should be strong enough to take over from where Science failed and move humanity to a higher level of understanding,  or there is a great danger humanity could fall into the grip of ignorance and fall back to superstition and helplessness. I am still dreaming and trying to tap into my inner powers using the key that Panditji recently provided me. Hope I will be ready soon to start on this initiative.

Up close and personal with a Master

Searching for the ideal job has brought me back to Indraprastha. Delhi, that cradle and graveyard of many empires, seems more agreeable to me now that I have seen more of India! At least I am closer to the Himalayan masters here - closer for a person who still does not have access to the wonderful inner world.

Well, a couple of weeks back I took the opportunity to visit Allahabad and meet a great Yogi, Pandit Rajmani Tigunait. The trip also allowed me to get a glimpse of the great work that this great disciple of Swami Rama is doing among the underprivileged, in both India and Africa. I observed Panditji and found him a sharp observer, of both nature and man, and also a wonderful human being with great knowledge. The greatness of his vision is evident in his work in Cameroon, Africa, which is being spearheaded by his son, Ishan Tigunait -- another great soul who is highly focused on his work. 

The day I spent in Prayag also allowed me to see how the disciples of Swami Rama lead their lives, quietly remembering God and working hard. 

One thing that impressed me while at the Himalayan International Institute's premises in Allahabad was the eco-cottages that Panditji was building for the group of disciples he was expecting to come over from America soon. He had created his own little city of those cottages and how charming they looked as the Sun slowly set over the Ganges!

But there is more to these cottages - they are made from a grass called 'Khus' that grows locally and are highly eco-friendly and at the same time comfortable. The creation of these cottages, Panditji explained, creates rural employment and once the seminars are over the material will be used to make houses for the homeless - houses which can last for 2 years. And the leftover material can be turned into compost. Panditji was taking pains to reduce the carbon footprint of his activities. And I was wondering how much it would help rural India if all our political parties and marriage shamiana makers started creating these eco-cottages. The savings in terms of money and the kick it will give to the rural economy are obvious. 

Also, while at the Institute I had the opportunity to closely observe the high level of pollution in the Ganga. The holy river flows right in front of the Institute. While taking a walk along its banks, I saw how polluted the waters were, especially as some bathing mela was in progress 2 miles upstream. And, least expected, I saw a dead body in remarkably preserved condition float by. And even more surprising, I saw local village people taking their bath in the river among all the filth.

Mother Ganges, when will you be free of this curse?

Stay tuned, I will be writing more on the great master, his disciples, their work and their knowledge here. And also about the nuggets of wisdom I managed to pick up during those few hours!

Cracking the cheap energy puzzle, finally!

Is this the future? Yes, MIT professor Daniel G. Nocera has found a way to replicate the photosynthesis reaction used by plants to make oxygen and hydrogen, to work in the real world - cheaply.
http://www.forbes.com/home/2008/07/30/nocera-solar-power-biz-energy-cz_jf_0731solar.html. Here is the article in Science journal
The experiments are still in their early stage, but Nocera's team has cracked the toughest part of it - the oxygen and hydrogen generation. This should be a landmark in mankind's quest for alternative energy. And if it really takes off, then we are in for an era of cheap and clean energy. Unbelievable but true!
Still the question remains. This won't be the end to all our environmental problems. With no more need to worry about greenhouse gases humans are going to increase their plundering of earth's riches and the pollution of its bounty to life. I am talking about the many chemicals and other stuff we create, use and release into the ecosystem in a day. Well, Nocera has helped us take a giant leap forward. Now each of use need to evaluate what we really need, and separate the need from the greed for building a really sustainable civilisation.

When we dumped those wood-fired stoves ...

The energy crisis made me think of how we used to live in our village - the women used firewood collected from the trees, especially the dried leaves and other matter from coconut trees, to cook food. As I grew up and the country progressed economically, the ease of getting a cooking gas connection increased and at the same time such a connection became affordable to more people. And then, people stopped using firewood - entirely. The results were immediately visible. The dried leaves and stubs from the coconut palms, and even the dried husks, suddenly had no takers. Earlier, people used to run to grab the dried coconut palm leaf or other parts that fell on the ground. Now those were left to rot on the ground. The immediate effect was the coconut groves became untidy and as soon as rain fell the decaying biomatter led to an increase in the number of millipedes and other such insects. More importantly, useful biofuels were being left to rot while the people were paying money to pay for LPG.
Of course, buring those firewoods is never a clean solution but they could easily have been turned into biogas. In fact, some people in my village were considering setting up biofuel plants when the whole thing was made irrelevant by the easy availability of cheap cooking gas.
And now, we have a problem - there is suddenly not enough of that gas and its price is climbing!
Who will we blame here? I don't know.
Maybe we should never have gone to exploiting natural gas reserves, considering the long-term and as yet unknown dangers that could create to life on earth. Does sucking out all that oil and gas make the earth prone more to earthquakes? I have heard such arguments and scientists dismiss them as baseless. But can we really say that? As more and more oil and gas is sucked out, wouldn't it create imbalances in the earth's crust? Isn't that simple logic?
And buring fossil fuels and petroleum products are adding so much of toxic substances to the air and water around, I am not sure what kind of consequences they would bring to life on earth in, say, 50 years. In fact, no one is sure.
Makes me think the simple village life that we had a couple of hundred years back was preferable to the toxic environment we have now, despite all the comforts of the modern life!

From gracious guests to looters and killers

I recently read somewhere in ancient India, whenever you took something from earth you said a prayer to Mother Earth that whatever you take grows back and enriches the biosphere. Just compare that with what is happening now. Human civilization has become a group of exploiters, digging ever deeper into earth to keep their greedy lifestyle going - from iron and oil to natural gas and even heat! Someone who is accustomed to the many economic theories and geological sciences will ask, what is wrong with that? The only trouble, they would argue, is that we may run out of many resources such as iron and oil, but we can either dig deeper or even spread our search to the neighbouring planets in the solar system.
The only problem with that argument is that we don't recognize earth and even the whole Universe as a living entity, which feels and reacts to changes around them. Such a shift in our viewpoint would mean a lot: for example, if we think of Earth as a living being much like us, it would follow that we are just robber barons trying to loot whatever she has. But if you advance the logic further, we could say we are staying on Mother Earth and enjoying whatever she offers us. In that case, we need to be gracious guests and not parasites. Because if we observe Nature, we can see that in most cases it is only a matter of time before an host organism gets tired of creatures in a mutualism, or symbiotic relationship, that turn parasites and kick them out.
We have turned parasites from guests, and we are plundering our host. But we forget that our host is immensely more powerful than all of us combined. If she just shakes her coat a bit violently, all of us will be no more! We are plundering on merrily as if there is no tomorrow. And we have created so-called sciences to backstop our greed. How long can this continue?
Every day, when I see the destruction around me cause in the name of development, I wonder where all this is going to end. I pray to the Himalayan masters, Divine Mother and Mother Earth to protect us from any calamities that are coming our way, and to show us the right path forward.

Needed - A New Paradigm Of Development

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced human civilisation cannot continue on our present path of development for too long. The paradigm of development we have, which encourages and is sustained by limitless and conspicous consumption of everything - including the animals that co-exist with us on this planet - is inherently flawed. We are leaving too much toxic debris around for us to continue far this way.We may invest in cleaner fuels, we may shun plastics... but all that is not going to do much other than postpone the inevitable for a few more years or, maybe, decades.
There needs to a new paradigm of development, and there needs to be strong political will to enforce it. Enforce it because there is no way a people bred on a culture of greed and self-aggrandisement can be made to wilfully adapt such a new paradigm for the common good.
There are several obstacles to achieving this. First, the new paradigm need to be drawn up by someone with enough foresight and perspicacity. Second, the political will cannot come from our current political system, with the leaders who rely on appeasement of the masses and who have mutualistic relations with businesses, which would be highly interested in continuing with the current paradigm.
If we can overcome these obstacles, then we can say with confidence that human civilisation will survive the crisis it is creating for itself. But it is a tall order, and if we fail, we are eternally doomed.

The Challenge We Face

A recent report says the huge amounts of carbon dioxide being added to the atmosphere due to human activity is making the ocean waters acidic. While that was known for some time, what is causing concern is that those waters, hitherto restricted to the depths of the big oceans, are now finding their way to the coastal shelves. And these acidic waters are thinning the shells of corals and other animals.
We have gone on polluting our air, water and other resources regardless of the fact that pollution is never confined to the area of pollution. We live in a connected eco-system and the pollutants and other toxins we add to one part of the earth will, sooner or later, find its way around the globe.
If we look at the pollution in some of our industrial cities and compare that with the serene air of the Himalayas or the Amazon, we may think only those living in highly polluted areas need to worry about the problem. Not so. Those pollutants are going to find their way to you, and affect to coming generations all over the earth.
We have been so short-sighted about this problem; and polluting and greedy businesses have glossed over it. But I read in a book about Swami Rama that the Himalayan sages were aware of it even at the beginning of the last century!
We had gone on polluting merrily and now we really do have a problem on our hands: we can continue to do what we do and condemn ourselves, the coming generations, and the whole ecosystem itself; or we can stop this madness and try to mend our ways.
But the second option would mean we change the way we live, and put an end to this conspicuous consumption we had taken for granted in the last 100 years. Are we up to the challenge?

The Positive Side of $130 Oil

Oil hitting $130 a barrel may be worrying for the economy but I think there is a silver lining there. This would surely spur the big corporations and governments to act faster on alternative energy sources - and with the current expanding consciousness about the environment, we can confidently hope those alternative energy sources will also be greener. That last 100-150 years of development - powered mostly by fossil fuels - has already burdened nature with toxins that may take hundreds of years to clean up. We need to make a start somewhere to reduce and roll back the amount of those toxins. At the very worst, this kind of galloping oil prices can push the world's economy into a recession, and cut down on the huge amount of pollution we create daily.

At the same time, I have read reports of US politicians threatening to punish China and India over over-use of dirty fuels. I agree that what India and China are doing is a bad thing, but that is because these Asian nations are now following the crassly materialist path of development shown by the West. And man for man, people in these countries pollute less and consume less -- at least four fith less than the average American. So who should be punished?!

A School of Vedic Culture and Religion

Sorry, I have been away for some time. But I will be updating this blog more frequently now. Last few days I have been reading up on Sri Vidya and tantra, especially the book 'At the Eleventh Hour: The Biography of Swami Rama' made a deep impression on me. The more I read it (I have read Swami Rama's 'Living With The Himalayan Masters' earlier), the more I feel humanity is hurtling down the path of destruction, and India, which had traditionally acted as a counterveiling force to the materialistic tendencies in the world has now switched sides, adding to the momentum of the destructive forces. The answer seems to lie in resurrecting the Vedic culture, not the Vedic culture that have come to us through the filter of Hindu priests, but in the original, unadulterated teachings of the Himalayan sages.
Those teachings are eternal - Sanatana - and hold valid for today's world as much as they did when they were first taught. It seems the competitive consumption we are indulging in, without regard to the impact on nature, is taking us to certain doom - unless we decide to apply the brakes now. But for that, the world intelligentsia and opinion leaders need to back a new way of living centred not on conspicuous consumption, but on sensitivity and respect to nature. If they don't, a new breed of more perspicacious opinion leaders and intelligentsia need to be created. That is where we need a School of Vedic Culture and Religion. The faster that is set up, the better.

For once, let us respect the humble farmer

So, as a civilisation, we are going back to where we started from. Our current way of life simply cannot be sustained in the long run, and we will need to go back to how we lived. It may sound terrifying to some who are accustomed to the conveniences of our modern urban civilisation. But it needn't be. We may not have to go back to the way our ancestors lived probably 500 years ago; but we will have to learn to live in a more sustainable, closer-to-nature way.

And I realise, as we try to get closer to nature, the thankless task our ancestors did for a living - farming - would be much in demand. And for once, the humble farmer would be recognized and rewarded. Yes, rewarded. And in more ways than one.

I am talking about carbon trading. I am trying to find out right now if there is any mechanism already in existence by which individual farmers can be get money for their contribution to reducing carbon emissions. If any of you reading this blog know of any, please do write in. As of now, I haven't found any.

Back to the future!

Today I read an article in Fortune magazine about how stock markets might never be the same, after the recent crash. Many of those rules that a few generations of human beings went by when it came to stock market investing may now have to change. Well, I think we need to change almost all the rules by which we, as a civilisation, live including the rules that define success and the whole orientation of our progress.
That is because we cannot keep on adding stress to our ecosystem the way we have been doing for the last few decades. The choice before us is stark: reform or perish.
It seems to me the ancient system of life that the sages of India, and other lands, preached and by which our scriptures say our ancestors lived will need to be reviewed. But that is easier said than done. For hundreds of years we have got accustomed to a life powered by animals or machines, and have allowed our faculties to atrophy.
An ancient way of life doesn't mean going back to the bullock cart age. Rather, I would characterise it as living in perfect harmony with nature and creation, while using our currently untapped latent powers to make life easier for us, instead of using the hazardous route of machines and fossil fuels to do it.
More on this later. Stay tuned!

The day food is sold...

The pace of urbanisation all around the world is picking up fast as every nation worth its salt is trying to emulate America in consumption and life style. But no one seems to care about the ravages this is causing to our ecology. A recent report I read somewhere said our drinking water sources are getting contaminated by, among other things, antibiotics and other drugs, affecting animals and, possibly, humans.
The problem is worse than anyone can imagine. And however hard we try to brush it under the carpet, it is going to come back with more force. Imagine this, our kids will not be able to drink safe drinking water. Fresh, natural water will be a misnomer. Where will this lead us? Extinction? I don't know, but if not that, then we will have to live as a condemned species, what with all the toxins we are adding to our ecosystem.
Isn't it time we took our single-pointed focus off conspicuous consumption and our misplaced benchmarks of fine living and try to reorient ourselves to a more holistic, harmless and inclusive lifestyle?
Someone who I highly respect once told me: It is written by Sage Vyasa that the day when food is sold that will be the worst day for humans and creation. Now, we can easily dismiss him and his ilk as old-fashioned, religious fellows. But, come to think of it, isn't it true? Can't we trace all our problems to our greed for money, so much so that we are even selling food and allowing commercial interests to lock up food and water resources in their quest for profit? Aren't those the things we should make available to all creation for free?

Lofty Ideals, But Will It Really Help?

The more I think of it, the more I am convinced that the objective of life is not money; it is to help people - spiritually, mentally and physically. Well, it is a lofty motive, and one that has been conveniently misused by many to hide their profit-taking activities. Look at the world's richest men. All of them are falling over each other to finance charities. Of course, they are doing service to humanity and the planet. But look at it this way: they have ravaged the environment and the lives of many poor people in trying to amass those fortunes that they now propose to spend on the well being of those very people and environment.

The ravaries we are inflicting on this planet in our quest to amass those riches, simply put, cannot be healed by ploughing back a part of that money into welfare schemes. The motives may be good but they effort being put in won't save this planet. Unless we decide to take a look at this whole question of conspicuous consumption and material satisfaction.

I know it all sounds too abstract. But this is something we need to look at very carefully, and soon.

At what cost this expansion?

As much as I wanted to post regularly to this blog, my time pressures haven't allowed me to. But I will make up for that soon. As for my experience of Mumbai, yes, I like it; but I also am amazed at the scant regard for life - human and otherwise - that this city has. In the first two weeks since I landed here, I have seen more dead bodies than I have in my entire life. And life goes on ...
Well, the city is booming, thanks to the economy. And the people are good, far nicer than the arrogant and vily crowd you will meet in Delhi. But the cost to the environment due to this expansion can't be ignored. Vast creeks and marshlands are being filled up, mangroves are being levelled, and urban sprawls are springing up everywhere. How long can this go on?
I meet people around me who love this life - they just are too happy with the conveniences and gadgets that this urban life and superstores bring. But I wonder how long this expansion can go on without PERMANENTLY damaging the planet.
Of course, I may sound quirky to voice this idea but I can't avoid doing that. There will be price to pay for this wanton destruction and I really worry about that day of comeuppance.

Finally, In Mumbai - And A New Beginning!

So now I am in Mumbai, the great business hub of India, thanks to my former editor and mentor who is now the top man in a leading business newspaper here. Well, first impressions are the best, they say. And I should say I liked Mumbai far, far better than dry and lifeless Delhi with its extreme climate and rude people. I now regret not having taken up a job in Mumbai several years back, turned off by the crowds I confronted here on my first day - a huge jolt for my small-town sense about crowds!
Okay, the place I stay in is in Navi Mumbai, and while I like the place I am also appalled by the environmental degradation that human development is causing all around. Which is why I think I will devote this blog to that cause and also to examine similar such existential issues from a cosmic standpoint - at least from a standpoint more removed from the rush of happenings taking place around me.