Given the rising interest in sustainable living, more people than ever before are giving serious thought to their eating choices. This very interesting article in the Los Angles Times discusses the complexities of ethical eating along with related health issues. A number of authors and books and resources are mentioned.
I wrote down the following observations as I watched on TV the live Town Hall meeting President Obama had with University students in Strasbourg, France on April 3, 2009.
In the Town hall meeting in Strasbourg with students from many universities and colleges, Obama established himself as a world leader who will listen and engage the Europeans and rest of the world as equal partners in moving towards the future.
French, German, Hungarian, and even American university students were in the audience asking questions. President Obama was comfortable and confident in the exchange. There was clearly a lot of affection shown towards the American President by the students. In the last question, a student told Obama that his name meant “Peach” in Hungarian.
Obama emphasized that one of the gifts of youth is that youth is unburdened by biases of the past.
Obama’s initial talk was peppered with complimentary references to leaders of other countries and their insights. He called the French President a “good friend”. He referred to the Prime Minister of India as a “good and wise man”.
Obama also talked about countries like India and China and stated that as these countries grow, they will become bigger markets for U.S. and European goods. Comfortable in speaking with the European students, Obama said that Americans needed to change their perspective on Europe and Europe needed to do the same in order to forge a new partnership for the 21st century.
Obama seems destined to become one of the most popular American President in history, all around the world.
The Associated Press: Obama urges Europe’s youth to rise up, show way
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Problems are best resolved when we agree to discuss these together in a creative capacity to find useful insights that can benefit all parties.
Creativity is only possible when we conduct our discussion that avoids escalating patterns of polarization. Arguments can only be effective if and when we force ourselves not to get caught up and trapped in the right/wrong paradigm. An agreeable resolution will become feasible when the “right/wrong” paradigm gets transcended. If this doesn’t happen within a reasonable time, we should be wise to put off our discussion and observe silence for few days until we cool down.
We should take this time to train our mind to agree to listen to each others’ points of view and look for a resolution that provides more insights.
How do we get out from the trap of the “right/wrong” paradigm? This is not easy and we need the will-power to invoke the divine nature and open our mind to listen. We must determine to take a stand that our care for the others is much more important than the cheap payoff of winning the debate.
We must be willing to reach for something more fulfilling than the predictable mediocrity of proving ourselves right. And we need to have the courage to be the one willing to make this change, even in the face of those who desperately want to prove us wrong! When one of us rise above the right/wrong paradigm, the length of the pole will become smaller and ultimately the argument will likely end.
No matter how much someone else wants to “win,” if we refuse to enter into the world of right and wrong, we will not get trapped in any argument. But we should recognize the fact that we cannot rise above this paradigm and avoid an argument if we entertain the thought that the person is wrong. If we do, we will likely back in that right/wrong world again. This is tricky and it is a bit of a paradox. No amount of wanting an argument to stop will ever stop an argument, if our inner mind silently engages in judging the other person’s intentions.
We must take a stand that we will no longer participate in any endeavor that tears down others’ beliefs and thoughts. When those who want to fight can’t find a willing partner, they will be left only to face themselves. The argument will slowly disintegrate we will no longer be engaging in the losing game of arguing.
Let me conclude this with a prayer:
Sarve Bhavantu Sukinah,
Sarve Santu Niraamayaah
Sarve Bhadraani Pasyanthu,
Maa Kashchid Duhkha Bhak Bhave
Asatoma sadgamaya
Tamasoma jyotirgamaya
Mrityorma amrutamgamaya
OM Shanti Shanti Shantihi
Oh Lord! In Thee May all be Happy,
May All be Free From Misery
May All Realize Goodness,
May None Suffer Pain
Oh Lord! Lead Us From Untruth to Truth,
Lead Us From Darkness to Light
Lead Us From Death to Immortality,
OM PEACE! PEACE!! PEACE!!
Our desire to win an argument is embedded in our survival instinct. For many people, losing in a situation is truly a traumatic event. When life is viewed rigidly, options are seen as mutually exclusive. For someone to win, another has to lose.
In general, in an argument we like to take positions that are usually opposite to each other. While engaging in an argument we tend to think that we are always more “right” than those who take a different position. Arguments arise when we are not willing to consider others’ position as potentially being valid.
This is what is known as the right/wrong paradigm. The right/wrong paradigm can produce three possible outcomes: (1) proven right, (2) proven wrong, or (3) avoiding to be wrong.
While there may be a short term feeling of satisfaction when we think that we have convinced someone else is wrong, arguments rarely will lead us to long term gratification.
Everyone in an argument wants to be “right” and tries hard to avoid being “wrong.” This may explain why no one is actually listening.
It is inevitable that we like to choose one of these two options: We either feel obligated to forfeit our position, or we refuse to give in and will fight harder and harder.
The first option leads to resentment because though we gave in, we are not totally convinced of the other position. The winner also feels at a loss because the winner also was not fully “convinced.”
The second option leads to “polarization,” where two opposing parties find themselves in an egoistic self-fulfilling vicious cycle and take shelter at opposite ends of the “pole.” The more one party insists on a position, it encourages the other party to fight harder to be right and to resist being proven wrong.
After several cycles of this polarization, arguments escalate and can become hurtful. This is when people say and do things they later regret. There is certainly no winner here. In the world of “right/wrong,” there will be never any real winners. And if there can be no real winner, then why should we choose to get involved in a losing game?
Ultimately, we need to reflect on our desire to win an argument. Sometimes we can win an argument but lose our harmony and peace of mind. What to do?
Read Part 3!
Editor’s note: This exceptional three part article was written by Dr. Ram Chandran, one of the co-founders of the Advaitin List. I believe the article can be of great value to friends, co-workers, and lovers who find themselves arguing over many things. I have edited the original version only slightly to bring out the essential points of the articles which apply to all aspects of life.
Friends, are arguments with your spouse, co-workers, boss, your girl friend or boy friend, or your parents disturbing you? Are you and your neighbor getting into heated discussions on who worships the true God? Whatever the reason for the arguments that have taken away your peace of mind, help is on the way!
Here is a partial list of argument stoppers that we can all employ on a daily basis when facing potential conflict in a conversation.
1. You may be probably right.
2. What you have said is certainly one way of looking at it.
3. I am more than happy to take your point into consideration.
4. I want to take little more time and I do plan to get back to you.
5. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and I respect what you have said.
6. Let’s postpone and talk about this when both of us are calm.
7. I am able to see the subtlety of your thoughts.
8. I have come to the conclusion that arguing just isn’t worth it.
9. Let’s respect each other’s position and agree to disagree.
10. Our opinions may differ but we can gain more by listening.
11. There is some validity to what you are saying but we need more information to make a decision.
Of course, there are many more ways as well. Please share your favorite argument stopper line.
Keep in mind that most life situations are more complex. Constant arguments with a friend, spouse, lover, parent, neighbor, despite your sincerely wanting to stop may indicate more basic problems in the relationship that have to addressed. Unfortunately, there are no simple solutions. Still one can adopt the attitude of good will and doing what is in the best interest of all concerned.
Now read Part -2!
Traders in panic in Wall Street – Photo credit Bloomberg
No doubt that in the current economical context, many people are in panic around the world because of huge losses on the stock exchanges of the planet. Except a pinch of conscious business leaders, how many of them are considering this crisis with a spiritual approach, realising how predictable was the transformation we’re going through and, beyond economical issues, how global it is? Yet, for centuries, esoteric systems referred to some huge opening of consciousness after the millenium, lets’ see how incontrovertible is this profound change and how to participate to it individually and consciously.
According to the belief of the Mayan civilization, the world is organized upon a cyclic system: many centuries BC, the Maya calendar predicted the end of a cycle of 26 000 years in 2012 and the starting over a new one.
The book of the Apocalypse, refers to a chaos that St John calls “The Judgement day “ that will occur during “the End of the times”. This doesn’t mean the end of our planet because of our “sins” like Church wanted people to believe for centuries but, the original meaning of the word, a time for “Revelation”: time for people to transform the way they think, they behave and reveal their inner truth to live in a conscious way.
It’s been 5000 years that Sciences like Chinese medicine and Ayurveda are promoting a hollistic approach of human beings: we’re not just flesh and blood that can be opened, cut and sewed like rag dolls…but energetic systems to be considered globally: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual beings. Recently, the research in Quantic physics and the string theory are tending to proof the global nature of our “system”, including an energetic approach of what we call reality.
In the 19th century, Carl Gustav Jung and his concept of collective unconscious was a revolution in our approach as individual beings, showing how bounded we all are.
Compassionate thoughts are prayers toward the others and would, by a “boomerang effect” come back to us the way we threw them. Such as embezzlements… isn’t it M. Madoff ?…
Like is like, the law of attraction was already known through the famous “Do onto others as you would wish them do onto you”, our economy is paying the price of feckless decisions based only on a compulsive need for profit margin…
To bring back balance in our life, it’s becoming urgent to live in harmony: within ourselves, with the others and with the Universe, by adding some more common sense and ethic in our economics, politics, environmental issues …Integrity and respect have to be applied in our everyday life, both personal and professional and not just be abstract, political correct concepts.
According to esoteric systems, we’ve now almost entered the Era of the Aquarius that is not, like some people may think, the confabulation of a group of hippies of the 70’s, but a challenging period of time for humanity that gives us the opportunity to live this famous New Age predicted since centuries in many civilizations, beyond one religion or belief, through inner transformation…
Transformation within ourselves, to go to a higher level of consciousness, transforming old patterns, lead unto gold, sounds like an alchemical process to reach a certain Holly quest isn’t it?…
There are many tools to help us to operate this transformation. Some traditional ones like yoga, meditation and mantras help us to connect our higher self giving us a conscious awareness of what we’re living “here and now”. Other ones more contemporary, like psychology, give us the opportunity to face the shadow within us. Our ego builds a balance, a public character that plays a role in society, but in the back of this pseudo identity, it’s important to find out how much our reactions are conditioned by our fears and old patterns in order to operate changes and stop to live the same experiences over again, very often in pain and suffering…
As we’re all bounded, we attract what we are through the law of attraction. We can represent this unity by similarity with a diamond, a unique gem with many different facets: each one of them representing one person…If we apply that metaphor to our interpersonal experiences, in a very honest way, we can see how each person around us represents a part of our personality with both positives points and flaws. Very often, the characteristic of the person is shown to us in a exaggerate way in other to wake us up and oblige us to see what’s wrong within us!
This perspective really give us an interesting stand back that helps to “in-vestigate”: “what part of my personality is attracting that person/attribute/lack/experience…?”
Mirror, mirror on the wall… the other then becomes the reflection of our real “me”, free from the mask of the ego…
When we start to be aware of the transformation we have to proceed within ourselves, it becomes an everyday challenge, but Oh so rewarding!
“A lot of chaos is needed to create a butterfly”, thus spoke Zarathustra, we’re in the middle of the chaos, creating the butterfly depends on all of us…
This period of profound change, pushes us to reorganize our entire system in the doldrums, to clean it deeply, previous to a positive period of time unprecedented: no GDP can measure what’s really worth living in life. Today, I heard the speech of a politician asking for some more “moral capitalism”, It is definitely time for a more heart-based leadership…
“Be the change that you want to see around you” said the Mahatma Gandhi, let’s face the mirror and go for this challenging Armageddon.
NOTA: Two years after writing this article, an excellent book called “The Empathic Civilization” was published by economist Jeremy Rifkin, a real visionary. I highly recommend this book if you wish to go further with the topic of this post.
Rita Minassian – www.ritaminasian.com
Over two years ago, I had started using Windows Live Writer with my wordpress blog. I even complimented Microsoft on making the Live Writer open enough to interface with other services like Google’s Blogger and also WordPress.com.
https://luthar.com/microsofts-counterpunch-to-google
I suggested that the strategy to be more compatible with blogging services other than simply Microsoft’s own was a way to create some goodwill in the technology community and remain competitive with Google.
For a while, Microsoft seemed to follow through on their open strategy. The Windows Live Writer was made compatible with not only other blogging services but also with the Firefox browser which competes directly with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Unfortunately, Microsoft’s early largess proved to be unsustainable. Windows Live Writer stopped being compatible with Firefox 3. At least that has been my experience. So much for Microsoft’s brave new vision to be more open to open source.
Now, in order to use Windows Live Writer, I have to use the Internet Explorer. I have not been doing that and instead am using wordpress’s own native menu which I am not fully used to.
Recently I thought about giving up and going back to Windows Live Writer by simply using the Internet Explorer. I may do that but don’t like to have my option of which browser to use restricted by the availability of a blogging client.
So I am experimenting with ScribeFire as my new blogging client as it is made especially for Firefox. I hope the learning curve will not be too steep. This post is written using ScribeFire. So far so good!
Technorati Tags: ScribeFire, Windows Live Writer, Firefox, Internet Explorer
We are working with village leadership in Samuthiram Village. This village is right next to Tiruvannamalai, at the foot of Arunachala Hill, about 2 KM from our house. We go though it almost every day going to and from Tiruvannamalai and Ramanasramam.
Samuthiram Village has many of the problems from this growing region without receiving much of the benefit from the growing region. These problems include increased crowding, increased disease, urban pollution and greatly increased land and living costs. Like most villages in India, there is much poverty with all its related problems. The additional problems from nearby growth just makes the village issues more severe.
This village is one that gets many westerners as temporary residents during the winter season, when people from around the world are coming to visit Ramanasramam. Contact with westerners has helped village leadership see that more is possible for the village. With the help of some of these western visitors, Quality of Life Trust was organized in 2006 as a means of accomplishing this work. Quality of Life Trust has since put in place a small village elder support project, funded by donations, which provides food and housing to abandoned elders, and an Eco San Toilet (a composting toilet) construction program, funded by BLESS, an NGO in Cuddalore.
I have written a bit about the Trust, see
. My wife Carol posted about a ceremony that Quality of Life held. This can be seen at http://infinitepie.wordpress.com/2008/05/19/our-vip-night-at-the-quality-of-life-trust/. See also their web site, http://www.qualityoflife.in/.The photos below are from a village meeting, where they gathered around my laptop for a show. It was set up on a table outside. Power was strung from a nearby house so we could power the external speakers.
To start, we played a slide show of photos taken at the recent village celebration. First the children, then their mothers and other adults gathered around the computer to see photos of themselves and their family and friends. Then we played a Tamil movie. Finally, we played a video of the celebration (mainly of a meeting with different people talking).
Before we came to live in India one thing we did to give us a tiny bit of flavor of India is to watch Indian movies. These photos remind me of one movie we saw where villagers gathered around a sheet, strung up as a movie screen, to watch a movie. One big difference, though, is that while viewing my laptop, no one broke out in song and dance, as they did in the movie.
Carol had the camera, and the village children love to have their photos taken.
Some of the girls climbed on a nearby truck to get a better view. The girls were not at all shy about climbing around on the truck, even while parents were trying to get them to stop.
Here is Carol sitting in a chair, surrounded by children. (They made sure that they brought chairs for us to use.)
Here the children are seated in front, with mainly village women standing behind.
The children naturally, once the movie was over, got bored and entertained themselves. There is construction going on nearby. (This is the case over much of this area, where many people are busy adding rooms that they will be able to rent to westerners during the next winter ‘season.’) So the children started carrying bricks over to where we were and finding different ways to play with them.
The first game seemed to be ‘chairs.’ You can see to the right of the photo below girls sitting on chairs made from piling bricks, with different kids making different designs. Most of the time they got bricks by bringing them from the construction site. Sometimes, while their neighbor was not looking or busy doing something else, they would quickly grab bricks from an adjoining ‘chair.’
After a while, one girl changed the game from ‘chairs’ to ‘houses.’ After this, they all started to build houses.
The performance was over. We all went home and went to bed. Now I hear that the villagers want to do it again. Only this time, just a movie, not a boring video of a bunch of adults talking. I sure wish these Tamil movies had English subtitles.
On August 29, 2006, I stated the following on Google’s APPs strategy and gave advice on what they needed to do.
“Google needs to follow Microsoft’s lead in offering its own premium services for a fee to add another dimension to its ad based revenue model. Google has indicated that it will indeed release a fee-based version of its service aimed at larger companies offering more data storage and technical support. Hey, but what about me Google? I am not a large company but I would like Google’s premium service and I would be willing to pay for it.”
“… So why is it that Google is not offering its premium services to loyal customers that want it? Why should Google’s premium service be only reserved for large enterprises? What would Google have to lose by having a two tiered structure of services like Microsoft does. Premium and Regular. They certainly would have a lot to gain. First, it is potentially another way to generate revenues independent of the ad based model. Second, having satisfied customers with increasing good will for Google is going to add to their future success.”
For the complete article, please see Google Should Diversify Its Strategy
Almost a year after I made the recommendations on strategy, Google indeed expanded its premium services to individuals. I assume that Google’s strategy to offer premium services to individual users must have already been in the works last year when I wrote my post. Either that or someone at Google read my blog and probably thought that it was a pretty reasonable request and easy to comply with.
So to test the new Google service, I paid my 50 bucks a year fee and got a Google Apps Premier Edition account and have been playing with it a bit.
Here are some things I noticed.
1. I was expecting to get 10 Gigabytes of storage in my premium G-mail account. However, when I look at my brand new G-mail Inbox, I am getting the following message.
“You are currently using 0 MB (0%) of your 25600 MB.”
Evidently, Google has increased the storage available to their Premier Edition users to 25 Gigabytes. Great!
2. Overall, I am pretty happy with the Google docs and like the flexibility it gives me to access documents and spreadsheets from any computer with an Internet connection. The collaboration features allowing mutliple authors to edit documents from various places of the world are a boon to international scholars, researchers, professors, students, and others involved in group projects.
3. However, while Google docs can read Word 2003 files, and store them, it does not seem compatible with Word 2007. Evidently, the new .docx formats from Office 2007 cannot be read by Google docs. I have gotten over this problem by using the feature in Word 2007 that allows for saving a Word document in the old .doc format in Word 97-2003. Saving a Word document in this format allows it to be read by Google docs.
4. In order to have secure Google Apps or G-mail sessions one has to be alert and not use HTTP but HTTPS access only via https://mail.google.com/a/. Unfortunately, many organizations have users who are not tech savvy and will not remember to use HTTPS. If security of data and having encrypted e-mail is critical for a company, there may be some reluctance in using Google APPs. Google needs a simple solution to this issue which forces the use of HTTPS for their Premier Edition users automatically.
Of course, having HTTPS and a secure connection on all the time is more expensive in processing power and may slow things down a bit on the Google servers. Perhaps that is a challenge. On the other hand, this is a reasonable expectation on part of the paying customers of the Google Apps Premier Editon.
To their credit, Google management just bought security software maker Postini. It’s clear that Google will be adding more security features to Google APPs Premier Edition making it attractive to both corporate customers and individual users.
Security on the Internet is a very high priority today and users will pay a premium for it. Overall, I would have to give Google APPs strategy a high grade of A-. Not perfect but pretty good and headed in the right direction.
Luthar.com 
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