never give up....

Albert Einstein did not speak until he was 4-years-old and did not read until he was 7. His parents thought he was "sub-normal," and one of his teachers described him as "mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in foolish dreams." He was expelled from school and was refused admittance to the Zurich Polytechnic School.He did eventually learn to speak and read. Even to do a little math.

Winston Churchill failed sixth grade. He was subsequently defeated in every election for public office until he became Prime Minister at the age of 62. He later wrote, "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never -in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never, Never, Never, Never give up.''

As a young man, Abraham Lincoln went to war a captain and returned a private. Afterwards, he was a failure as a businessman. As a lawyer in Springfield, he was too impractical and temperamental to be a success. He turned to politics and was defeated in his first try for the legislature, again defeated in his first attempt to be nominated for congress, defeated in his application to be commissioner of the General Land Office, defeated in the senatorial election of 1854, defeated in his efforts for the vice-presidency in 1856, and defeated in the senatorial election of 1858. He later became the 16th President of the United States of America.

Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because "he lacked imagination and had no good ideas." He went bankrupt several times before he built Disneyland. In fact, the proposed park was rejected by the city of Anaheim on the grounds that it would only attract riffraff.

Henry Ford could not read nor write, failed and went broke five times in business before he succeeded.

As an inventor, Thomas Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?" Edison replied, "I didn't fail a thousand times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps." Thomas Edison's teachers said he was "too stupid to learn anything." He was fired from his first two jobs for being "non-productive."

R. H. Macy failed seven times before his store in New York City caught on.

Louis Pasteur was only a mediocre pupil in undergraduate studies and ranked 15th out of 22 students in chemistry.

Van Gogh sold only one painting during his life. And this, to the sister of one of his friends, for 400 francs (approximately $50). This didn't stop him from completing over 800 paintings.

F. W. Woolworth was not allowed to wait on customers when he worked in a dry goods store because, his boss said, "he didn't have enough sense.

"When Bell telephone was struggling to get started, its owners offered all their rights to Western Union for $100,000. The offer was disdainfully rejected with the pronouncement, "What use could this company make of an electrical toy." And how many people have a telephone today?

Sigmund Freud was booed from the podium when he first presented his ideas to the scientific community of Europe. He returned to his office and kept on writing.

Rocket scientist Robert Goddard found his ideas bitterly rejected by his scientific peers on the grounds that rocket propulsion would not work in the rarefied atmosphere of outer space.

An expert said of Vince Lombardi: "He possesses minimal football knowledge and lacks motivation." Lombardi would later write, "It's not whether you get knocked down; it's whether you get back up."

After Carl Lewis won the gold medal for the long jump in the 1996 Olympic games, he was asked to what he attributed his longevity, having competed for almost 20 years. He said, "Remembering that you have both wins and losses along the way. I don't take either one too seriously."

Babe Ruth is famous for his past home run record, but for decades he also held the record for strikeouts. He hit 714 home runs and struck out 1,330 times in his career (about which he said, "Every strike out brings me closer to the next home run.").

Hank Aaron went 0 for 5 his first time at bat with the Milwaukee Braves.

Stan Smith was rejected as a ball boy for a Davis Cup tennis match because he was "too awkward and clumsy." He went on to clumsily win Wimbledon and the US Open...and eight Davis Cups.

Tom Landry, Chuck Noll, Bill Walsh, and Jimmy Johnson accounted for 11 of the 19 Super Bowl victories from 1974 to 1993. They also share the distinction of having the worst records of first-season head coaches in NFL history - they didn't win a single game.

Johnny Unitas's first pass in the NFL was intercepted and returned for a touchdown. Joe Montana's first pass was also intercepted. And while we're on quarterbacks, during his first season Troy Aikman threw twice as many interceptions (18) as touchdowns (9) . . . oh, and he didn't win a single game. You think there's a lesson here?

Charles Schultz had every cartoon he submitted rejected by his high school yearbook staff. Oh, and Walt Disney wouldn't hire him.

After Fred Astaire's first screen test, the memo from the testing director of MGM, dated 1933, read, "Can't act. Can't sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little." He kept that memo over the fire place in his Beverly Hills home.Astaire once observed that "when you're experimenting, you have to try so many things before you choose what you want, that you may go days getting nothing but exhaustion." And here is the reward for perseverance: "The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it's considered to be your style."

After his first audition, Sidney Poitier was told by the casting director, "Why don't you stop wasting people's time and go out and become a dishwasher or something?" It was at that moment, recalls Poitier, that he decided to devote his life to acting.

When Lucille Ball began studying to be actress in 1927, she was told by the head instructor of the John Murray Anderson Drama School, "Try any other profession.

"The first time Jerry Seinfeld walked on-stage at a comedy club as a professional comic, he looked out at the audience, froze, and forgot the English language. He stumbled through "a minute-and a half" of material and was jeered offstage. He returned the following night and closed his set to wild applause.

After Harrison Ford's first performance as a hotel bellhop in the film Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, the studio vice-president called him in to his office. "Sit down kid," the studio head said, "I want to tell you a story. The first time Tony Curtis was ever in a movie he delivered a bag of groceries. We took one look at him and knew he was a movie star." Ford replied, "I thought you were spossed to think that he was a grocery delivery boy." The vice president dismissed Ford with "You ain't got it kid , you ain't got it ... now get out of here."

Woody Allen: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. Eighty percent of success is showing up."

Michael Caine's headmaster told him, "You will be a laborer all your life.Charlie Chaplin was initially rejected by Hollywood studio chiefs because his pantomime was considered "nonsense."

Decca Records turned down a recording contract with The Beatles with the evaluation, "We don't like their sound. Groups of guitars are on their way out." After Decca rejected the Beatles, Columbia records followed suit.

In 1954, Jimmy Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, fired Elvis Presley after one performance. He told Presley, "You ain't goin' nowhere, son. You ought to go back to drivin' a truck.

"Beethoven handled the violin awkwardly and preferred playing his own compositions instead of improving his technique. His teacher called him "hopeless as a composer." And, of course, you know that he wrote five of his greatest symphonies while completely deaf.

Leo Tolstoy flunked out of college. He was described as both "unable and unwilling to learn." No doubt a slow developer.

Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, was encouraged to find work as a servant by her family.

Emily Dickinson had only seven poems published in her lifetime.

18 publishers turned down Richard Bach's story about a "soaring eagle." Macmillan finally published Jonathan Livingston Seagull in 1970. By 1975 it had sold more than 7 million copies in the U.S. alone.

Jack London received six hundred rejection slips before he sold his first story.

21 publishers rejected Richard Hooker's humorous war novel, M*A*S*H. He had worked on it for seven years.

27 publishers rejected Dr. Seuss's first book, "To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street."

reality check

Ramesh is all sweet and caring when he talks to his wife, but it is only on the surface. If he looks inside , there is deep resentment and hatred for her nagging ways.

What really manifests in their shared space.....it is only his resentment and hatred. So it is with all our life...our inner dialogues at various moments are in stark contrast to what we project outside with various people.

In our various intearctions outside, we are in PERFORMANCE mode.We are not ourselves.We wear masks and become the people we would like to project ourselves as in the perception of our audiences.We show different sides to different people.

Can you see this burden we carry day in and day out?

It is in the gap between what we are and what we project ourselves to be that misery arises.

And our worlds become dull, lethargic expressions.

awakening 2 suffering

There are so many things we try to DO....we create activity and use knowledge systems to achieve our objectives.Technical knowledges and skills are important but they are not the only thing.Merely being technically competent cannot achieve success.

State is more important than skill for success.

And to achieve a manifesting state of success, we have to awaken to our fundamental suffering...This awakening leads to a series of processes finally culminating in awakening of action, distinctly different from activity.At such a moment , we are in flow....and life is full of joy, love and YES, success.....

We bypass this fundamental and struggle to achieve in the outside world.

and life remains an eternal struggle....joy, happiness and success eluding us everytime inspite of our constant endeavours.

if we are looking for something we acknowledge we have yet to experience, it calls for extraordinary responses from us..not mere knowledge and memory reactions from accumulated reservoirs of conditioning.

experiencing versus understanding

Understanding is an intellectual exercise.It does not help to alleviate pain from its roots.It merely manages the pain through an understanding of it. By doing it we escape experiencing the pain just as it is, without any defence, alibis, excuses, justifications, projections and so on.

Pain just IS.

And we have to JUST experience it, not explain it.It is just there all the time across a host of events and people.

And when we experience, teh miracle happens for "the nature of experience is bliss". It is independent of the content of experience.

healing

when you hurt one person, you hurt all of humanity, when you heal one person, you heal all of humanity.

- Shahrukh Khan, quoting from the Quran

All of us like to look at a huge problem and are more often than not overwhelmed.

It starts and ends within each of us , influencing our behaviour to each other.What emerges in the collective is a mere reflection of what is within us...are we oriented towards healing ourselves and others or correcting others and strengthening our positionalities.Our hurts and fears make us unconsciosuly violent.

If the soil around a tree is poisoned, no amount of polishing the fruit can rid it of its toxicity.Cosmetic changes are passe, let us address the need for changes deep within us.

words from the Master

Q) "What can we do as individuals in the face of inhuman violence, terrorism?

"We wake up to another day’s revenge, retribution and rancor. The violence and brutality that surrounds us is the result of the destructive effect of fragmentation – one individual against another, one group against another, religiously, socially, culturally and economically. We are brothers and sisters, children of the same mother, inheritors of the same collective destiny.

What we do to another, we do to ourselves.

Why then do we behave as though we are inhuman warring tribal factions? How can we hunt or kill another? Is not the experience of pain same for all? Do not all living beings dread fear? How then can we perpetrate violence and pain on another? Will we today take the time to teach our children that division in any name whether sacred or secular is a crime? Will we tell them that we are human beings and not labels that divide us? Will we in this moment of crisis mould their young minds to be citizens of the world and not narrow bigots?

Ideological differences are at the root of the violence that is robbing sanity and endangering survival. When we become concerned with our own individual survival, with the survival of our group, our belief, we are being divisive and threaten the actual survival of the whole.Let us have a deeper insight into truth. The violence and conflict we are witnessing is a dramatization of the unspeakable inner violence of humanity. We are not individuals, separate. What happens to us happens to all of humanity, all of life. Physically we might live isolated in our secluded homes, screening our domestic violence from the eyes of the world but psychologically we are inseparable from the whole of mankind. The poisonous fumes of our inner turbulence seep through the collective consciousness of humanity. The violence within us, between parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters and at work is the very source of danger and destruction.

Let each one of us respond with a sense of immediacy.

Let all of us, the atheist and the God fearing, the peasant at the plough and the mother beside the cradle, the office goer and the laborer, let us all own responsibility for what is happening around us. What ‘can’ we do as individuals now? What ‘must’ we as individuals do now?How can each of us be content to see some heroes and professionals sacrificing their lives to protect the safety of others while we remain passive onlookers watching the drama of terror unfold right in front of our eyes?

The specialists, whether from the armed forces or the political systems can alleviate the pain of the moment. They can remove the symptom but the cause of the violence lies simmering within our consciousness. It lurks as conflict, suppressed anger, divisiveness and spite within every one of us. Until this issue is addressed, violence would continue to unfold in the world’s nations in one name or the other. The real solution therefore is to turn our attention inward, can we recognize the violence within and give way to peace. Even if 10 million among us who belong to a nation of 1 billion will get into peace, violence will subside. If 10 millions will move into a higher state of consciousness, a state of total inner non-violence, peace and wellbeing would be possible. Though the causes of violence would continue to exist, they will not translate into acts of violence. We are the triggers of violence or peace. We cannot return to business as usual without steering away from our own inner strife.The destiny of every human being known and unknown is tied up with us. In the crucible of terror that surrounds us, let us recast ourselves into a new generation of human beings. Let us move from the dark night of division towards the dawn of co-operation and Oneness. There is light at the end of the tunnel.

- Sri Bhagavan

(from www.breakthru.co.in)

out of the box...

I think it was Phyllis Mitchell who urged us to contemplate "What is our age if we did not know our age".......

A great eye and life process opener...

We try to fit in our lives into concepts we already know.Predictable and condfitioned reactions are the order of the day.

We hold on to known tenets because of the illusion of security it offers us.

It is the domain of the unknown that is beckoning us now.

Maybe it has a lot more on offer.

Knowledge is a product of conditioned processes.

Intelligence is our ability to tune in to universal processes, our sense of connectedness with the universe around and within us.

Being knowledgeable does not imply being intelligent.Infact knowledge can be an impediment to intelligence more often than not. The tribals exhibit much greater natural intelligence than knowledgeable people.

Let not knowledge limit us..let us break free into domains of intelligence...Life demands a response in intelligence, not in knowledge.

decision making

We normally take decisions when they are forced on us. Our disturbances influence our decisions - they are reactive in nature. It has been traditionally advised to let the disturbamce subside which would enable a solution to emerge in calm and tranquil conditions.

There will always be things which demand immediate attention in life.

However, if we closely observe, our whole life is architectured by the pain within us. The edifice of our achievements is anchored in our traumas. When we become aware of this, the edifices start crumbling , this is a transient phase leading on to a celebration of creation in joy and love. The transient phase could be frightening - as illusionary concepts come crashing down.Long held security paradigms get shaken - this is an opportunity for the shift of security into more certain domains - the core aspects of existence, rather than in shifting ideals and concepts.

The next few years present this opportunity to man as fundamental existential paradigms undergo a sea change in their manifests.the rate of change will be very high and demands the highest integrity from each of us.

While bandaging the symptoms, please go deeper - into roots of issues; it is a back to basics time for all humanity as far as inner world aspects go.

correcting vs healing

at a time when sparks are flying and blame games rampant, it is a time to see whether we are looking to merely correct or looking to heal.Correcting emerges from a positionality of the mind and is violent in its expression, the key objective being to prove. "I am right and you are wrong" more often than not.

Healing on the other hand is like a balm, it rectifies but in compassion.The underlying sense of connectedness is not lost...and there is a personal sense of stake in holistic improvisation of situations.

Correcting more often than not adds fuel to the fire, provoking it into inflammation - healing is assertive yet compassionate.

dangers...

If we look deep within, we are currently nothing but hurts, fears, anger and such other which surface at the drop of the hat.The triggers maybe different but our underlying dissatisfaction, discontent and sense of melancholy are residually intrinsic. With this content within us, we are a source of individual and collective danger for those around us.

We share with the world what we have, we cannot share anything else. As unhappy people, we share unhappiness. each of us is harbouring a reservoir of pain within ' we call its' manifests through different names. It is our trauma and pain which architecturing our lives and creating our universes.

This pain has been elaborately managed over ages. It is slowly but surely acquiring unmanageable proportions in what I perceive to be an aspect of grace. It is when something becomes unmanageable that we are forced to look within.

Management is stress, it is not a free life....Relief from various stresses is teh need of the hour , not mere management of it. Management is bandaging, handling...

It is cosmetic and palliative...

The pain within us has to express itself - the platforms of expression may differ; if today it is the terror attack, tomorrow it maybe a epidemic outbreak...

Each of us has to address the pain within...and resolve it, not merely manage it..

this is the way forward for humanity.....

thought is the creator

terrorism is riding on the back of misguided religious and spiritual interpretation and wreaking havoc..Please let us also not fall into the trap..

The Gita defines ACTIOn as against mind created conditioned activity..we cannot selectively use it indiscriminately..we need action and not activity and action emerges in visions beyond realms of the mind..instead of us using the mind, the conditioned mind is today using us wherever we may be..

To me, this is the root of all terror...it begins in the mind..we should guard ourselves against the vicious trap we can fall into..becoming the very entities we so much resent..the laws of karma stipulate that we become what we hate or what we fear unconsciously.

Yes , we need to ACT, but action is very different from activity in spiritual realms.

Terrorism is a product of deep rooted positionality processes of the mind..if we carefully observe history, the contents of the mind have never changed..the mahabharat, the ramayan,the bible , the Quran and many other have episodes of brothers fighting each other, terrorizing situations for the masses, abuse of humanity and other aspects time and again...The universe is a multi-media classroom and is repeatedly trying to show us our erroneous ways..we always tackle symptoms and never go to the roots..without intending to create fear, I feel people have an opportunity to rise to the challenges within themselves which are manifesting outside.The universe is a tough, yet compassionate teacher and we can expect the lessons to continue until we learn and grow as humans...

needless to add, my shares are not in a argumentative or confontationalist mode but my life experiences in disaster management and human crises at individual and collective levels have thought me unforgettable lessons..

God bless each of you..take care...

redefining terror

I believe each of us in india and maybe elsewhere today has a challenge - to rise above reactive pettiness or to transcend into relams of real healing and peace creation.

India is a concept , an idea that represents amongst the highest ideals of co-existence and acceptance. I am proud of being born into this idea as conceived by the visionaries of yore. The greater the vision , the greater the challenges in achieving it.But then, challenges should not deter us, weaken us. States of dis-ease require medication, treatment, surgeries and healing. Hurts within humans and teh pain within are the cause of strife outside. Each of us who are able to transcend that hurt within are helping win the war on humanity's collective suffering.

I do not believe for a moment that India has ever been weak.Acceptance demands understanding beyond superficial symptoms asnd India as a collective has demonstrated this.

There are dips and pauses as in any process but the trend in wholly consonant with the highest spiritual ideals as espoused in various wisdom of the world.

I identify with this heritage and see myself as a global citizen. If you take the history of India, we have never been an aggressor. We have embraced even our attackers and inetgerated them into our culture.We have lost battles but won wars.

This can be either of two things - we are too weak or we are mature in our understanding. I feel aligned with the latter.I beleive India and Indians have a destiny to fulfil and the sacrifices we are called on to make in the realization of this destiny would naturally be greater. I see India playing a global role today, something which would evolve into a leadership position it has to take on.The birth pangs are natural.

I connect to my higher vision and see myself as a critical player in its actualization.

While battles are going on, I am relating to the fundamental war within every human - the war on inner strife and conflict..It is easy to behave as every one else and compromise our standards. Genius and Excellence have always come at a price and lessons learnt the hard way.

I know the war will be won.....The terror seeds within each of us would be destroyed and the seeds of genuine peace, not managed peace created..silencing anyone does not transform them - if at all it strengthens them; a rubber ball bounces higher each time it is hit on the ground.Symptomatic repressions are not the need of the hour , sustainable solutions are at the very root.....

The content of the mind has never changed . The Mahabharat and the Bible and the Quran all indicate strife and terror and rift.Its a cosmic opportunity today in realms of grace to declutch ourselves from the tyranny of the mind; management processes are rendered impotent.

This is the only solution for humanity..........and it starts and ends within each of us...We are either weapons of breakthrough or breakdown...we are at cosmic crossroads....