Row Row Row your boat ...

I'm not familiar with any English nursery rhymes since I was born and raised in China.  Becoming a father in the states has exposed me to quite a few tunes.

My daughter was recently given a "play-along" nursery rhymes book.   The first song is "Row row row your boat".  I have heard it before, but this time the lyrics took on a whole new level of meaning.  Here's the simple lyrics:

Row Row Row Your Boat, Gently Down The Stream, Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily, Life Is But A Dream!

Perhaps we should all take a moment and remind ourselves to be gentle with our actions in life, and be happy while doing it, because life after all, is just a dream as pointed out by the convergence of physical and metaphysical philosophies.

Photo Credit: Rusky Mist (2) by Karl Williams

Meditations from the Mat - Yamas

I've started practicing yoga since end of 2010.  It is one of the most beneficial activity that I've adopted into my life.  I felt natural in many of the yoga poses as they reminded me of playtime in my childhood.

This year, I received a book as a gift from a dear friend who's also a practicing yogi.  It's titled "Meditations from the Mat".  This book presented the practicing of yoga from a 8-limb perspective, and it is in the form of a journal where the author created a passage for each day.

I've just finished the chapters in Yamas and Niyamas, the don'ts and do's of a yogi.  Though they are ancient doctrines, the author had interprete them from a modern perspective, which makes it easier for aspired yogis like myself to adopt.

While learning about the Yamas, the author suggested to go over the 5 aspects of Yamas during decision making process and contemplation.  They are "non-violence", "non-stealing", "truthfullness", "non-hoarding", and "moderation".  It's not easy to adhere to all the Yamas in every moment, but I tried to remind myself as often as possible, so that I can be conscious of my choices and their impacts.  There were times when I couldn't remember 1 or 2 of the Yamas, and I feel that perhaps that is an indicator of what I need to work on more.

"Moderation" is the one Yama that I had troubled with the most.  Perhaps it has something to do with the culture I was brought up in, or perhaps it's a habit passed down from my parents, there are too many times when I over indulged on pleasing the senses or emotions.  It'll be a work in progress for a while.  Becoming aware of it, at least, is a good start.

As far as Niyamas go, I have even more work to do.

The start of understanding

In the past few years, I've learned with a novice understanding in quantum mechanics that the world we see and experience has a fundamental underlying truth.  Many questions can be theoretically explained by this truth, and modern scientists have made giant leaps in proving this idea mathematically.  When I started taking interest in eastern philosophy, I was amazed to also learn that the thousand-year-old school of thought have already point to the same idea that modern scientists have just began to realize.

This understanding has changed me profoundly as a person.  I'll try my best to explain why and how here, because I'm at no means understands it all. As a matter of fact, I barely scratched the surface of it. This blog will serve as a road map to help me see where I came about along the way.

So what is this truth? It is actually surprisingly simple.  Everything is fundamentally a form of energy vibrating.  The variety of frequency resulted in the kaleidoscope of the world we experience through our senses, including the realm of existence that we might not able to sense.   This idea was very profound to me because I felt that it provided baseline answers or at least clues to questions across a spectrum of studies, and has the potential to unify them.

This blog will not dive into the scientific study of the concept, instead, I intent on journaling from the spiritual and my personal growth aspect.  For those who's interested, please look into "String Theory" by theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku.  For explanation on the link between quantum physicist and consciousness check out the film Quantum Activist by Dr. Amit Goswami.  For spirituality from a biologist point of view, check out the lectures by Dr. Bruce Lipton.


photo credit:

O(@-@)O by Bunnawath ( B-FOTO )

Individual and global consciousness

Sam and I had a discussion on consciousness today after watching the film "3 magic words".   It is a documentary on spirituality. We both agreed that the film presented good concepts, but it didn't provide any in-depth / detail material information to support the concept.  It is basically a composite of brief sound bites from different people around the subject.

Sam described her idea of consciousness as experiencing of individual life, and sub-consciousness as being deep seeded emotions from the experience.  I agree with her to some extend, but feel that there are more to consciousness than just individual experiences, and same goes to sub-consciousness.  The main reason I feel "more" is because I believe that our individual consciousness has a connection to the universal consciousness.  The connection can be very subtle to very perceptible base on the individual.  Since we can look at individual experience as individual consciousness, we can look at our collective experience from a particular frame (be it community, national, global) as collective consciousness of that frame, and the totality of universal experience as universal consciousness.  To go a step further, perhaps the concept of multiverse would contribute to multi-dimensional consciousness.  Are we getting closer to supra-consciousness?

Since we linked consciousness to experiences, and experiences are manifestation of potentiality, a stronger connection to the higher consciousness is certainly beneficial to the individual in the form of a channel to a broader potentiality.  A good analogy to conceptualize this idea is to imagine our individual consciousness as streams, rivers, ponds, or lakes.  All of which can have a connection to a bigger source, which would enhance the livelihood of the origin.

The film prompts audience to accept the responsibility of being God as God lives within.  It raises a concern that some people wouldn't want to be God, because they don't want to feel responsible for the darkness in humanity or they don't feel that they are holy enough for this qualification.  First of all, it's nonsense to push the burden on God for humanity's dark nature.  Without going into the idea of free will, it is just plainly irresponsible.  Secondly, while it is certainly very difficult to be completely selfless as we're strongly binded to the physical perception,  it should not be so much about becoming "holy" before accepting "being God" than it is about accepting the potentiality of it while also accepting the shortcomings of being human.


Namaste

Photo credit: Softness by Thanes G.