Soma Purana

At yoga I know most of the people and others know me. We all feel the affection and warmth towards each other and look forward to seeing each other. I don't know a thing about them, but may be because we don't know anyone's financial status or education or anything else, there are no hangups, no judgment. It is just pure human to human warmness. Can't we be like that in general, not judging others or comparing with others but be kind and loving towards each other no matter what? 

I have seen bright lights, big screens but never saw before bright screens several stories high. With all that light in the city, it felt like the daytime. You could read a book comfortably in the street. May be I haven't been to NYC in recent years and with all the wall street boom and technology things have changed drastically. 

When my mother stayed with us in West Windsor for two years many years ago she would go for her walks everyday and hardly encounter people. I once took her to NYC in train. After we landed in Penn Station, she was dumbfounded. She asked me where did all these come from? She probably thought rest of America was like West Windsor. In NYC yesterday, I had the similar feeling. The crowd was like the twice the size I had seen before in NYC. I asked Raghu where did all these comes from? He said it is little bit more than usual and around 20% are tourists due to the holiday season.

Went to The Christmas Spectacular with the Rockettes last night. What an amazing show!!! Perfection to the tiniest detail. Among all performances I have seen in my life, this one ranks right at the top. Never, never miss seeing the Rockettes at least once in a lifetime. Radio City Music Hall is breathtaking. The NY crowd on almost the last day of the year is exhilarating! No wonder NYC is the greatest city in the world.

http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/mit-challenge/

For the first time, did back to back two Bikram classes today, 8am to 9:30am and 10am to 11:30am. Months ago, I had to sit out some postures even in a single class. Today, I managed through all the postures in both classes. I felt I was sweating more in the 2nd class. But I did not feel super tired or anything. The second class felt just like the first class. I thought I would have to lie down when I came back, but don't feel tired at all. May be the feeling will come later, I don't know.

I stopped taking water bottle to the Bikram yoga. I found out I didn't need water. If it is there I would drink which is just a distraction and can only create discomfort in certain poses. I have been practicing total stillness in the postures and out of the postures. This does wonders in yoga practice. I still try to fix the towel when it gets crooked in some of the standing postures (like Triangle). I want to try to stop doing it and practice with crooked towel if it gets crooked.

I have seen many students do fixed firm quite easily. This was impossible for me for the first 7 months. Suddenly, in the eighth month, I was able to go down, and now I am comfortable with it. That does not mean I am doing it perfectly. It just means I now need to find out what little things I am doing wrong and fine tune it. Look at the picture below. For me it is bringing the knees closer, pushing the buttocks into the floor, creating that perfect human bridge. Never let the knees come off the ground.

One of the hardest (for me). Look at the picture below. I haven't seen anyone with such perfection. Neeraja is pretty good in this pose. The fundamental aspect most students ignore is locking the knee. Chin with shoulder and stretching and kicking are the next important aspects. Breathing cosciously, slowly, fully is, of course, paramount in all poses - that is a given. Instructors inform as long as you lock the knee, focus on breathing, stretch and kick with chin on the shoulder you get 100% of the benefit even if you don't look as good as in this picture.

Inspired by Sadhguru, I was thinking about this subject. A person might say he feels God rains misery especially on him. Let us take an example. Say, you are walking carrying an open container with sugar in the street. Suddenly it rains. All your sugar is destroyed and you feel miserable. Did the rain cause misery to you? Well a farmer who was awaiting rains is thankful it rained. The township folks are happy that lakes will get some water now. So, the rain is not the source of the misery. Rain happens. It does not have a purpose to cause misery to some or to cause joy to some. It is just a result of nature. You feel miserable because you saw another person who was also carrying sugar was not affected because he covered the sugar container. So the cause of the misery is he covered the sugar and you did not. You learned from this and the next time you covered the sugar. After rain, you still miserable because you got wet and another did not because the other person was wearing ...

One of my friends threw away his TV, a working, expensive TV. I asked him why he did that. He explained that he was spending too much time watching TV, he was kind of addicted to it. That affected his mind, he felt he was wasting to much of his time. It affected his marriage also. He finally decided, the only he won't TV is if there is no TV. That is why he threw it out. When I was young I used to watch too many movies in theaters and I would always feel bad particularly when I watched like two movies in a single day. I have been spending for little over a year now taking lots of MOOC courses learning a variety of subjects in the field of biology/genetics, physics, philosophy, and so on. So far, seeking knowledge has not created a headache or guilt. Perhaps even an activity such as this could cause tension if it reduces the attention I could pay to my work or family.

26-100 is the largest lecture hall in MIT. It is made immortal by the world famous teacher Walter Lewin. It is rare he won't mention 26-100 in everyone of his lectures. All MIT undergrads would have had 26-100 in their freshman/sophomore years. I want to make it a point to visit this famous room when I visit MIT. I have myself got entrenched (in a virtual sense)  in this room in the last few months as I pursued Lewin's Classical Mechanics MOOC.

This video is very old (1976) and in B&W.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSF651SRBLs This amazing what Iyengar can do at 59.

Very impressed with what I hear... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_EckS3qrVE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDdUNeKTJWg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfSxB27Nexc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChTnwpkCMhg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J-cYxxHQGQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjWU9l1mWsU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMkOhmjJhk0  truly loved this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoIXz3KcwME  truly loved this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHyYZy3kj0s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyuT8ZlY_xA  This would be very useful for a company that is launching a an ambitious project to make it happen. I am beginning to love this mystic's experiential teachings.

This is black and white video, an hour long, made in 1976. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSF651SRBLs "Yoga is a complete subjugation or sublimation of waves of thought." "...in order to win this oscillations of mind..." What is health? In another interview ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCjEyjXO_Xw ) Iyengar lists different aspects of health, conquest of the body, conquest of the brain, conquest of the indriyas, conquest of the mind, conquest of the intelligence, conquest of the consciousness, conquest of the conscious. Until all these are conquered, one does not have holistic health, only compartments of health. " ...doing yoga comfortably..." "there are four types of practitioners, mild, average, intense, and keenly vehement." "Yoga is coming back to India." Amazing! It started in India thousands of years ago but it languished. It is the western involvement that is still changing yoga and the wind is now blowing in Indi...

I just watched  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JqYzcieCfM Brandy Lyn Winfield is awesome! I did see a few Bikram postures and many others are beyond Bikram. One thing I do recognize is her coolness and amazing smile through all the postures. Brandy is the 2010 US and World female Yoga champion. Jessica, my yoga teacher, keeps telling us to be still and relax in the yoga positions. This is a very difficult thing to do! Eventually one can, as Brandy aptly demonstrates. I think, Yoga is a state of mind more than anything. It is not contorting asanas or hard work or staying in the pain. I can say there is yoga in what Brandy does. Another outstanding yoga is by Kasper van den Winjngaard http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLBOsOt3qtc Kasper was 2010 world male champion. Look how still he is in these postures.

I read about recent UN sponsored World Happiness Report 2013. Happiness is hard to measure. As an emotion it is transient. As a measure of one's feeling about the general level of happiness with one's life as a whole, it is more stable. Bhutan was the first country that promoted the idea of setting country's policies with the intent to raise the index of happiness of its people. John Stuart Mill, an English Pholosopher in 1800s said " “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." I take it from this statement that Mill means that somehow being "Socrates" is more wholesome than being fat, dumb, and always happy. The fool might disagree with this. Only the person who is evaluated can say whether he is happy with his life. Of course, his criteria depends on his own values and character. The level of happiness of an individual is not entirely in the individual...

During the MOOC lull, I picked up to read an old book "The Assassins" by Elia Kazan. I have lost all interest in watching TV, many days I haven't watched a single minute of TV (today, for instance). I have mixed feelings about this book. All the same, it is thousand times better than watching meaningless TV shows.  I received a mail about and signed up for the MOOC course " How Viruses Cause Disease!" In the mail there was a statement, I thought I should repeat here  "... stimulating their brain with exposure to real science, rather than   watching yet another vapid, IQ-lowering reality show, and continuing the psychological descent into the twitching mass of consumerist jelly that is the product of the modern media enterprise..." I absolutely agree with the statement. Back to the book... Don't expect lots of murders, violence as the title might suggest.  Elia Kazan was a very famous movie maker  (directed famous movies Street Car Named D...

I got certificate recently for What a Plant Knows. I have also completed Georgia Inst of Tech Coursera course Applications of Engineering Mechanics, MIT EdX course Introduction to Philosophy and UAustin EdX course Take Your Medicine - The Impact of Drug Development and expecting the certificates soon. Once that is completed, I will update the MOCC Completion table (another post).

Pari is in India for 6 weeks. She left a week ago. I have started some cooking following various old recipe books. So far so good. My experience running the dishwasher was disastrous. I put dishwashing liquid in some compartment that said "Dry something.." At the end I had whole lot of soapy stuffy all around the dishwasher outside. I ran the dishwasher again.

The only MOOC in the remaining days is my Classical Mechanics by Walter Lewin of MIT.  Only three more lectures and the Final are remaining. 1 through 32 lectures, 10 quizzes, 3 midterms are already done. This has been a real tough course but an amazing experience! The Final is in early January and not much is left in the rest of December. I have had at one time 5 courses running in parallel so this is going to be somewhat boring next couple of weeks. I am planning to work my Calculus 2 preparation which I will be teaching at MCCC starting January 21, 2014.