Saturday, March 28, 2009

The science of the heart and Sri Ramana Maharshi

The modern science about the heart and the teachings of Indian sage Sri Ramana Maharshi have much in common. The similarity suggests Ramana experienced truths that science has caught up with 50 years later. Ramana used personal experience and the yogic sciences to map these inner realities. Modern scientific methods maps the heart’s biological and neurological structures. And surprise surprise, they are talking about the same things.

For years I’ve been studying science about the heart via the Heartmath Institute. Recently I discovered Sri Ramana’s teachings and saw how they directly align to the current heart science. This overlap is what I will attempt to bring forward here.

I’ve been traveling in south India, where I’m staying at the foot of the sacred mountain of Arunachala. This mountain is home of Sri Ramana Maharishi’s Ashram, in town of Tiruvannamalai (a.k.a. “Tiru”). Ramana lived here for over 50 years. He loved the mountain and considered it to be his teacher. Arunachala is said to be Shiva himself. The mountain is many caves where saints have meditated down through the ages.

Ramana was part of the Hindu yoga tradition. The yogic sciences map the human physiology thoroughly within a worldview that includes the Divine. The search for truth in pre-modern times was often done by scientists who wore monks robes instead of lab coats.

The Heartmath Institute has been at the front of an emerging field called ‘neurocardiology’, or how the brain wires to the heart. They say the heart functions as an organ of perception, picking up and processing the vibrations of the world and sending intuitively felt synopsis to the brain that we register as feelings.

The universe is electromagnetic and everything gives of waves of energy. The heart sends off waves of energy into the world around that can be measured by a ‘magnetometer.’ These waves carry information as a holonomic imprint of the content of a person’s consciousness.

Our experiences that somebody has a ‘good vibe’ or ‘bad vibe’ are literally, scientifically verifiably true. The Heartmath Institute has used a ‘magnetometer’ to measure the subtle electrical impulses that come off people. The heart is the most powerful electrical generator in the human body, creating 5000 times more charge than our brain. The squeezing and pumping the four quadrants of the heart creates a spiraling, vortex effect.

People with good vibes give off coherent waves, repeating waves with the same steady peaks and valleys of energy. People can get into synch, or biological entrainment, with others who are giving off this coherent pattern. Feeling love or gratitude gets our heart to start emanating coherent waves. People feeling anger give off incoherent and disordered waves.

If we start to listen to our hearts, or tune into the intuitive impressions, we can start to process actual information that our bodies are receiving. We do it all the time, anyway, but this process can be made conscious.

This information is spelled out further in the books The Heartmath Solution by Doc Childers, and The Biology of Transcendence, by Joe Pearce. There are web resources at www.heartmath.com. If you have a heart, or knows someone who does, this info will helpful.

In the ashram bookstore, I got a little book called Spiritual Heart by A.R. Natarajan, that gathers Ramana’s thoughts about the heart. The following quotes come from this book.

Ramana identified a spiritual heart located on the right side of our chests, two fingers pointed upward to the right of the mid-line. Ramana says “This heart is different from the physical heart; beating is the function of the latter. The former is the seat of spiritual experience.”

“Heart is usually understood to be the muscular organ lying on the left of the chest. The Bible says that a fool’s heart is on the left and a wise man’s on the right. Yoga Vasishta says that there are two hearts; one is the samvit; the other the blood vessel.

Disciple: “What is Heart?”
Master: “It is the center of the Self. The Self is the center of centers. The Heart represents the psychic center and not the physical center.”

Ramana says that “The yogi is engaged in cleansing the nadis. Then Kundalini, the primal power is awakened which is said to rise up from the coccyx to the head. The yogi is later advised to come down to the Heart as a final step.”

“The yogic chakras counting form the bottom to the top are various centers in the nervous system. They represent various steps manifesting different kinds of power of knowledge leading to the Sahasrara, the thousand petaled lotus, where is seated the supreme Shakti. But the Self that supports the whole movement of Shakti is not placed there, but supports it from the Heart center.”

“The Heart in the Upanishads is construed as “Hridayam” meaning: this is the center. That is, it is where the mind rises and subsides. That is the seat of Realisation.”

This is important to know that the Heart is the proper seat of our consciousness and after Kundalini rises, it should settle back downward into the Hridyam. Ramana says “By yogic practice one goes down, then rises up, wanders all through until the goal is reached; by jnana abhyas (cultivation of spiritual wisdom) one settles down directly in the center.” And also “(Some) yogis say that the current rising up the sahasrara ends there. That experience is not complete. For jnana, (knowledge of the Absolute), they must come to the Heart. Hridaya (heart) is the alpha and the omega.

It is important to note that Ramana’s ‘hridyam’ heart center isn’t the same as the anahata heart chakra. Ramana says
“Anahata is the chakra lying behind the heart. It is not samvit (the full energy of knowledge).”

Disciple: “What is the difference between the bound man and the one liberated?”
Maharshi: “Self-aware is one who lives in the Heart. When he moves about and deals with men and things, he knows that what he sees is not separate from the one Supreme Reality, the Brahman, which he realized in the Heart as his own Self, the Real.”

Ramana introduces us to a useful word in “sphurana” to describe the rustling, vibratory pleasure that comes when the heart center ‘scintillates with consciousness.” The following exchange talks of sphurana and a central Ramana technique for finding the self, repeatedly asking yourself “who am I?”

Disciple: “Does the inquiry ‘who am I?” lead to any spot on the body?”
Maharshi: Evidently, self-consciousness is in relation to the individual himself and therefore has to be experienced in his being, with a center in the body as the center of the experience. It resembles the dynamo of a machine, which gives rise to all sorts of electrical works. Not only does it maintain the life of the body and the activities of all it’s parts and organs, conscious and unconscious, but also the relation between the physical and the subtler planes on which the individual functions. Also, like the dynamo, it vibrates and can be felt by the calm mind that pays attention to it. It is known to the yogis and sadhakas by the name ‘sphurana’ which in ‘samadhi’ scintillates with consciousness.

Disciple: How to reach that Center, where what you call the Ultimate Consciousness- the I-I- arises? It it simply by thinking “Who am I?”
Maharshi: Yes, it will take you there. You must do it with a calm mind- mental calmness is essential.

Disciple: How does that consciousness manifest itself when the center- the Heart- is reached? Will I recognize it?
Maharshi: Certainly, as pure consciousness, free from all thought. It is pure, unbroken awareness of your Self, rather of Being- there is no mistaking it when it’s pure.

Disciple: Is the vibratory movement of the Center felt simultaneously with the experience of Pure Consciousness or before, ore after it?
M: The are both one and the same. But sphurana can be felt in a subtle way even when meditation has sufficiently stabilized and deepened, and the Ultimate Consciousness is very near, or during a great fright or shock, where the mind comes to a standstill. It draws attention to itself, so that the meditator’s mind, rendered sensitive by calmness, may become aware of it, gravitate towards it, and finally plunge into it, the Self.”

“This self is the eternal, immutable Self that ever throbs as ‘I’, ‘I’. It is not touched by birth and death; it is eternal. It is not confined to the physical body in which it stations itself; it is universal in its spread” writes MK Pandit, scholar sage of the highest order, in the book "Mighty Impersonality."
“Where is this Self to be found, is the next natural question. In the heart, is the answer. But it is made unambiguously clear that it is not the physiological heart on the left side of the body that is meant. The Heart that Maharshi speaks of is not the usual heart muscle. It is the spiritual heart which is two digits to the right of the center of the chest. it is not physical. It is in the subtle body and lends itself to be felt and experienced to the earnest inquirer in the course of his quest.

Is it the anahata of the science of the Tantra? No, says Bhagavan. The anahata center is not this spiritual heart. Is this spiritual heart a special concept of Maharshi or is there any scriptural support or evidence for it? Yes, there is, says the Mararshi. It is mentioned as the ojasthana in an old Ayurvedic text “Ashtanga Hridayam.” It is also referred to as ullam (meaning Lord, the same as Heart) in one of the verses of Saint Appar’s Thevaram.

In Sri Aurobindo’s Purna Yoga, for instance, the anahata is described as the emotional center; behind it, behind the cardiac center, there is the psychic center, the seat of the antaratman. It is the locus of the divine entity in man.”

Sri Ramana talked a lot about residing in the Self, the great being, the divine consciousness, God, the larger I. He called this the Heart. And now we find that the physical heart in the body is related to a uniting point in the body where different realms of consciousness come together in a holonomic intersection.

The highest Vedantic vision of the Divine is a ‘field’. Krishna says in the Gita “I am the field and the knower of the field.” Quantum physics says that beneath matter is a sub-manifest realm where the information and energy and and consciousness and potential exists in a unified field. This appears to be where Ramana spent a lot of his time, fully plugged into the Unified Field that he called the Heart, the Self, God. Deepak Chopra spoke eloquently on this subject at 2005 conference of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. That talk called “Deepak Chopra on Action for the Future” is on-line from IONS “Shift-in-Action” program.

This vision of a unified field of consciousness as Self perfectly lines up to the best models physics can come up with. So Ramana got that to. So we might want to just look at his vision, his other ideas and say, since he got the heart right, what else was he saying?

Ramana’s life also demonstrated the positive effects of being heart centered. He was nice to everybody: the monkeys, the dogs, the poor people who came to see him. He went out of his way to be compassionate and kind to everybody. He had an open door policy, and people came to see him at all hours for decades. There are lovely stories about his relationship with animals. He mediated disputes between warring tribes of monkeys. He bandaged up a young monkey who was getting harassed by the other monkeys, and conceived the other monkeys to play nice. Clearly, Ramana’s heart worked in a big way.

May our hearts be as big as Ramana so that we’re strong enough to heal our planet.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

With “no condoms” stance, Pope molests Africa

The Catholic Church should just stop offering sex tips or edicts for a century or two. Really, all credibility on sexual issues is gone, and their reactionary ignorant public policy endangers humanity’s long-term survival.

On a recent tour in Africa, Pope Benedict says that condoms were not the answer to Africa’s AIDS problem, and could make the problem worse. This is a sinful lie that will cause death to poor people.

Every time there is a big international conference on world population, the Catholic Church has been there and blocked birth control. If the Earth ends up an overpopulated hell, the Infallible Popes will be partially to blame.

An Inuit village in Alaska recently sued the church for sending a known pedophile priest to “serve” their community.

See, it’s a theme. The Catholic Church is unhealthy about sexual issues and needs to stop screwing up public policy.

The Church should either shut up, or get help and become healthy. The Catholic Church could hire a consulting team of modern experts in healthy sexual human behavoir and just adopt their recommendations. Seriously. We’ll forgive you. Just apologize and rebrand and join the 21st century. And pay the pedophile lawsuits by selling some of that land and billion dollars worth of silverware.

The Catholic Church has been unhealthy about sexual issues since they demanded priests couldn’t marry so that the church would inherit the property of the aristocratic brethren. This gambit worked, and the church is the world’s largest landowner. But it’s left an organization befouled by scandal.

As arcane as this history sounds, it affect real people’s lives. Just a few weeks ago, a friend went looking for condoms in Calcutta and couldn’t find them! She was trying to help a young India woman acquire them to protect her and her lover. She had to search high and low. They were very, very difficult to find and the pharmacist was reluctant to sell them to her because she was a woman. This is madness. Calcutta needs free condoms to be as common as cows in the street. All our environmental problems are made much more difficult by the surging growing of world population.

Calcutta is where Mother Teresa did such saintly work all the while supporting the Church’s sexual rules. Mother Teresa did great work helping the poor after they were already born and poor, but didn’t act to turn off the flood at the spigot. And that was immoral of Mother Teresa. It is immoral to force the world’s poor people to have babies they can’t support properly.
But hey, thanks for helping with the problem that you helped create.

The Pope insists on prudish lectures to the world about the ins and outs of doing it. As a monastic Catholic, the Pope probably gave up having sex with women many years ago, and so probably doesn’t have much experience with condoms. That’s OK. But don’t teach about what you don’t know. I wouldn’t never lecture people on the proper way to fix a car’s engine.

The Christian community has long been plagued by a false morality on sexual issues. By taking easy, high-horse stances on difficult issues, Christians side with the past, society and the powerful. But complex moral issues have two sides, and sometimes we need to pick the lesser of two evils. Premarital sex with condoms is better than unplanned pregnancy any day.

It is a false morality that stops contraception. It claims the moral high ground, but hurts the poor. The “stop condoms” approach seeks to prevent sex, but mostly harms the vulnerable. Stopping abortion may protect a living fetus, but robs women of reproductive rights that give them self-determination. Forcing young women to bear babies they don’t want is more immoral than abortion. In all these issues, the minor moral benefit of the prudish approach is outweighed by the harm caused to the innocent.

And when did ignorance of the human reproductive pipes become a sacred value? An unscientific willful ignorance is the enemy of a sustainable world civilization. We have fifty odd years of scientific research into sexuality to help us with these murky topics. No need to listen to the Pope on this issue.

Fundamentalists Christians have long postured as protectors of a prudish heterosexual hegemony. Jesus said “Don’t worry about the speck of sawdust in your neighbors eye when you have a log in your own eye.” We’ve got bigger fish to fry than people making love before marriage: planetary survival, global warming, overpopulation, AIDS, endless wars, outdated authoritarian secret societies.

I always marvel that Christians dig in on sexual issues as the outrages that they’ll get worked up about. Really, sex you don’t approve of. Not Guantanamo, or modern-day slavery, or famine caused by export crops, or the broken sky. Really, that’s the issue. I think they choose sex issues to jump on because it seems an easy to explain cultural issue and it doesn’t rock the pro-corporate boat.

Dear Catholic friends, I apologize for mocking things you hold sacred. I do it because you need it and we need you to regain your moral clarity for the healing of the world.

Planetary survival depends on family planning. That makes it moral. It is immoral for Catholic Church to kill the planet from overpopulation because of failure to adopt modern approaches to family planning. Maybe Catholic ‘family non-planning methods’ worked to refill the pews, but today, those methods are a danger to everyone.

Condoms should be a sacrament, as they honor life, health, responsibility, intelligence and care for the poor.

Maybe in a few years the Pope will be blessing cargo planes of condoms heading for Africa.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Eco-lessons from “The City that the Earth Needs

Two million trees planted to transform a desert. Gift economy restaurants serving lunch. A method for sun-baked bricks that’s rebuilding Afghanistan. These are just some of the amazing things achieved by Auroville.

Auroville is an experimental city in south India that just had its 41st birthday on February 28th. Auroville is a living role model for planetary sustainability. Aurovilians seem reluctant to testify of their accomplishments, lest they draw even more lookie-loo tourists. However, I feel that the world need to be inspired by Auroville’s example of vision and design, and so I intend to spill the beans about this truly amazing, real life ecological city.

Auroville has the benefit that it already exists. As the eco-proverb says “it’s not impossible if it already exists.” Auroville role models a good example and a scout forward into the New World that we should seek to build.

Auroville began with the vision and will power of a French spiritual teacher called the Mother. She was the head of spiritual community centered around the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, in south India, in the former French colony of Pondicherry. The Mother was Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator and successor after he left his body in 1950. The long story of these great teachers can be started at Wikipedia and deepened with the book Beyond Man, (or Beyond The Human Species, in gender-neutral American editions) by Georges Van Vrekhem, an Aurovilian resident.

The Mother envisioned creating “the city that the Earth needs” to model human unity and right relationship to the Divine Consciousness. To live as an Aurovilian, no special religion or creed is required, only that people agree to be “Willing Servitors of the Divine Consciousness” as they perceive it. “It’s important to be ‘willing’. We are all servitors whether we know it or not, but getting to understand that and then surrender to It, and being willing to align to It, that is what is required for the New World” comments Bhavana Dee, an American who came to Auroville in 1973, one of Auroville’s 2000 full-fledged community members.

Perhaps Auroville’s most useful lesson is in the power of a vision to manifest. Auroville probably seemed unlikely to succeed at the beginning. Yet, 41 years later, here it is. So I offer the Auroville Equation for success of a vision: Strong vision, plus time, plus dedicated workers, plus Divine Support, equals fulfillment.

Auroville’s clearest victory has been the marvelous job at reforestation. Two million trees have been planted, restoring the forests clear cut by the British and French Imperialists. When Auroville began, the landscape was a desert. Erosion caused huge gullies. Auroville sits on a plateau that tilts slightly towards nearby sea, and all the topsoil had long ago washed into the Bay of Bengal. Today Auroville is a green oasis in the India subcontinent still plagued by desertification. The trees keep Auroville a little cooler than neighboring areas, though it still tropically hot most of the year.

During my first trip to India, I stayed in Auroville for a month. I assumed that all India was blessed with trees and Nature. Later, traveling throughout India, I was repeatedly shocked by denuded landscapes, dusty and rocky ground, the trees gone, the landscapes picked clean by goat herds and impoverished humans. Goats nibble down to the root, killing off the plants with an toxin in their saliva. Only pricker bushes make it, creating a dry, un-diverse, thorny ecosystem.

Aurovilians planted many trees and gardens in the beginning only to see the goats pass through and chew up two months work. So they developed methods for dealing with this problem, such as capturing a goat and charging a fee to release it to the owner, hiring local people as watchmen and fencing properties with thorny bushes. They even tried weaving baskets around each baby tree! Auroville’s successful reforestation and ecological restoration offers a role model to the world, showing that humanity can stop and reverse the planetary trend to desertification.

Aurovilians invented a new kind of brick that doesn’t need firing to harden. Instead, to the mud 5% cement is added and then the bricks are compressed at high pressure and then left to sun-bake until rock hard. This low-carbon technology has been exported widely, particularly into Afghanistan.

Auroville is experimenting with different economic models like gift economies and collectivism. The Mother said that Auroville should have no money. Aurovillians have struggled to embody this vision, and have obeyed the spirit of the law, though perhaps not yet the letter. To run a complex economy, to allow outsiders to visit, money is needed. There is an Auroville account system which acts as a debit card. For example, I paid in $80 dollars, got an account number and a card, and then was able to pay for events, guest house bills, yoga classes, and espresso at Solar Kitchen’s cafe from that account.

A gift economy is a really delightful idea whose time has come. Here’s an concrete example of a gift economy. I ate lunch at the Indus Valley Restaurant. There was a donation box and people gave what they could or felt was the right amount. There was no waitstaff or menus or checks. Workers put the food was put out buffet style, and I served myself a delicious meal of spicy Gujerati Indian vegetarian food. I gave a 100 rupee note, about 2$. A similar meal cost me 30 rupees days earlier at another restaurant. This made me a profitable guest. Leaving I saw a hungry looking Indian young man eating who I imagine gave much less. But we balanced out, and the restaurant has been running successfully for four years.

Another example of the gift economy is the Tsunamika project. After the 2004 tsunami, an Aurovilian design unit created an economic project to help traumatized women from the local villages. They trained the women to make little dolls call Tsunamika, which they gave away, gift economy style. They’ve made over 2 million dolls and given these women financial stability and purpose in their lives. Tsunamika founder tells of a Paris fashion company who wanted a large quantity to put one Tsunamika with every garment they sold that year. In aggressive emails, he wrote trying to barter for a good price. She responded, you don’t understand, you can have as many as you want, for whatever you want to pay. Eventually, the fashionista got clear on the concept, they agreed he would pay for shipping, and he got thousands of dolls. Months later he showed up, with awe, a changed heart and a big check in his hand and said to the founder “I’ve negotiated all my life, but you really took the rug out from under me.”

Auroville also offers a solution to the eco-problem of energy inefficient McMansions. Here the houses are modest, yet beautiful. Yet people have a vibrant community life, and so can live well outside their private home. The private house doesn’t need to be as big if the public space is inviting.

Some of Auroville’s innovations are less material though no less useful. Auroville was created with the idea of actualizing Human Unity. Today Auroville is populated by people from around the world. There are hundreds of Europeans and Americans. There are lots of Koreans both living here and coming as guests. 45 nationalities are represented. Founded at the height of the Cold War, Auroville forged a brave path outside the divisive framework of nationalism and geopolitics. Today, progress toward world unity has been made because of the Internet and global trade and issues of planetary survival. But long before the Internet, Auroville was saying “We are One Big Human Family.”

Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual ideas were Earth-positive. Many religions view the Earth as a second rate stopover on the way to the big Pie-in-the-Sky. Some Hindu philosophy says all this Earth is illusion, only Brahman is real. Sri Aurobindo said that the Earth is Brahman too, that Matter is also part of the Oneness. There is no running away. The job of humanity was to make the Earth and ourselves reflect and become the Divine. We are to bring Heaven onto Earth. This philosophy empowered hundreds of industrious spiritual people to work for 40 years in south India to create heavenly Auroville.

To look at the pictures of the early days, one gets a sense of dedicated spiritual hippies beautifully in-shape from working hard in the sun. Handsome bearded men construct palm-roofed buildings and women carry babies in slings. An Aurovilian challenges my use of the word hippie, saying “Not everyone was a hippie by any means. The Indian devotees and businessmen, the engineers and architects. Many were ‘straight’ and the hippies became straight quickly as they worked to settle the land.” Still, there is an Aquarian vibe that’s part of Auroville’s DNA. Auroville is on a visionary adventure to build a New World based on Love, Consciousness and World Unity. Sounds good, I say! Bring it on!

So if you want to join the Auroville community and be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness, you can. Check out Auroville.org. Or visit as a guest in the Dec-Feb when the weather is best, though also busy, so book reservations. Or visit in Sept-Dec, when it’s quite wet with monsoon rains, but still interesting. Or visit in July-Sept when it’s hot and humid, but there is a distinct sense of actual community. One can participate in the ecological restoration by volunteering to plant trees at Sadhana Forest. College students can visit and earn credit with the Living Routes program. Auroville does have a problem of Indian tour buses unloading on weekends swarming the Visitors Center. So while guests are welcome as an integral part of the Aurovilian economy, there is ambivalence to living in a fishbowl. Hence Aurovilian’s desire to “lay-low” and not testify to the planet of their achievements. I encourage guests to come if they can promise to be polite to the locals and be receptive to their higher spiritual selves

Perhaps Auroville’s greatest attribute is an activist willingness to step boldly forward into the task of creating a New World. We need this spirit of creative innovation of design and intention. Auroville is an living example of the ‘bright green environmentalism, advocated for by Worldchanging.com and described in the following article from What Is Enlightenment magazine.

“Bright green environmentalism is less about the problems and limitations we need to overcome than “the tools, models and ideas” that already exist for overcoming them. It forgoes the bleakness of protest and dissent for the energizing confidence of constructive solutions. As Bruce Sterling said in his first Viridian design speech, “The future is already here, it’s just not well distributed yet.”

Indeed, the future is already partially built in Auroville.

I will close with an Auroville-style prayer. May Auroville’s good example inspire planetary transformation. May the Divine Consciousness swiftly and easily manifest a New Age of sustainability, truth and beauty.

Monday, March 9, 2009

Photos from Auroville and Pondcherry



Auroville's Birthday is February 28th, and that morning they had a meditation in the amphitheater near the Matramandir temple. Dawn came up blue and quiet as a several hundred people meditated. For a few minutes they played a recording of the Mother reading the Auroville Charter in many languages. Auroville is to have no dogmas, but to be an Aurovillian one must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.



This is the roof of my guesthouse Verite. Here you see the solar panels, and the roof of Verite's main hall, site of events and mystical kirtan and so forth.




This is Verite's windmill. The rudder of the windmill is decorated with Sri Aurobindo's symbol, which like the Star of David, united triangles, only here it's elongated in the middle into a square, with a lotus to symbolize the enlightened consciousness that arises out of the muddy pond of Creation.



This is a schoolyard garden at the New Creation School. Bamboo has been well-employed as the sides.




In Pondicherry, fishermen head out before dawn, to take advantage of the hours before the sun blares upon the skin like a toaster oven. Their boats are sometimes very primitive, curved logs tied together into canoes, paddled out.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

a poem of Sri Aurobindo about "Goethe"

I found this poem of Sri Aurobindo in his book "Colllected Poems" about the amazing philosopher and naturalist Goethe, who I learned to love through the book by Stephen Buhner called "The Secret Teaching of Plants."


Goethe


A perfect face amid barbarian faces,

A perfect voice of sweet and serious rhyme,

Traveller with calm, inimitable paces,

Critic with judgement absolute to all time,

A complete strength when men were maimed and weak,

German obscured the spirit of a Greek.