#advait

[personallyoriented]

#understanding #selflove #problems #solutions #instagram #instagramposts #advait #wellwisher (at Patna: Heart of Bihar) https://www.instagram.com/p/CpS24PdPSMb/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[moishe-pipick]

[rainingmusic]

Om - Haqq al-Yaqin

[rastronomicals]

5:40 PM EDT June 10, 2024:

Om - "State of Non-Return" From the album Advaitic Songs (July 24, 2012)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

File under:    (D)evolved Doom with Sanskrit lyrics and Coptic      overtones

--

[astral-flight-adapter]

My first full album in this realm, and the source for this blog's name. The first side of this album is some of my favorite OM. I never get tired of the gradual buildup to that crashing wall of sound.

[itsmadhvi]

3 Transformative Personal Development Strategies from Advaita Vedanta

Who doesn’t want to grow personally? We all need help in finding the right way to develop ourselves. If that help comes from the ancient philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, we are fortunate. It teaches us valuable lessons. In this post, you will find three key strategies to aid your growth journey. If you find these tips useful, please share them. True growth happens when we share what we learn with…

[bhaskarlive]

Khushi Kapoor, Junaid Khan’s romantic film exploring ‘love, likes & everything’ to release in Feb 2025

Actors Khushi Kapoor and Junaid Khan are gearing up to make their mark on the big screen together in yet-to-be-titled romantic film, directed by Advait Chandan, which will be released on February 7, 2025.

The project promises to bring fresh chemistry and captivating performances for the audiences.

Source: bhaskarlive.in

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Insurance companies are making climate risk worse

Tomorrow (November 29), I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

Conservatives may deride the "reality-based community" as a drag on progress and commercial expansion, but even the most noxious pump-and-dump capitalism is supposed to remain tethered to reality by two unbreakable fetters: auditing and insurance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

No matter how much you value profit over ethics or human thriving, you still need honest books – even if you never show those books to the taxman or the marks. Even an outright scammer needs to know what's coming in and what's going out so they don't get caught in a liquidity trap (that is, "broke"), or overleveraged ("broke," again) exposed to market changes (you guessed it: "broke").

Unfortunately for capitalism, auditing is on its deathbed. The market is sewn up by the wildly corrupt and conflicted Big Four accounting firms that are the very definition of too big to fail/too big to jail. They keep cooking books on behalf of management to the detriment of investors. These double-entry fabrications conceal rot in giant, structurally important firms until they implode spectacularly and suddenly, leaving workers, suppliers, customers and investors in a state of utter higgeldy-piggeldy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/29/great-andersens-ghost/#mene-mene-bezzle

In helping corporations defraud institutional investors, auditors are facilitating mass scale millionaire-on-billionaire violence, and while that may seem like the kind of fight where you're happy to see either party lose, there are inevitably a lot of noncombatants in the blast radius. Since the Enron collapse, the entire accounting sector has turned to quicksand, which is a big deal, given that it's what industrial capitalism's foundations are anchored to. There's a reason my last novel was a thriller about forensic accounting and Big Tech:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

But accounting isn't the only bedrock that's been reduced to slurry here in capitalism's end-times. The insurance sector is meant to be an unshakably rational enterprise, imposing discipline on the rest of the economy. Sure, your company can do something stupid and reckless, but the insurance bill will be stonking, sufficient to consume the expected additional profits.

But the crash of 2008 made it clear that the largest insurance companies in the world were capable of the same wishful thinking, motivated reasoning, and short-termism that they were supposed to prevent in every other business. Without AIG – one of the largest insurers in the world – there would have been no Great Financial Crisis. The company knowingly underwrote hundreds of billions of dollars in junk bonds dressed up as AAA debt, and required a $180b bailout.

Still, many of us have nursed an ember of hope that the insurance sector would spur Big Finance and its pocket governments into taking the climate emergency seriously. When rising seas and wildfires and zoonotic plagues and famines and rolling refugee crises make cities, businesses, and homes uninsurable risks, then insurers will stop writing policies and the doom will become undeniable. Money talks, bullshit walks.

But while insurers have begun to withdraw from the most climate-endangered places (or crank up premiums), the net effect is to decrease climate resilience and increase risk, creating a "climate risk doom loop" that Advait Arun lays out brilliantly for Phenomenal World:

https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-doom-loop/

Part of the problem is political: as people move into high-risk areas (flood-prone coastal cities, fire-threatened urban-wildlife interfaces), politicians are pulling out all the stops to keep insurers from disinvesting in these high-risk zones. They're loosening insurance regs, subsidizing policies, and imposing "disaster risk fees" on everyone in the region.

But the insurance companies themselves are simply not responding aggressively enough to the rising risk. Climate risk is correlated, after all: when everyone in a region is at flood risk, then everyone will be making a claim on the insurance company when the waters come. The insurance trick of spreading risk only works if the risks to everyone in that spread aren't correlated.

Perversely, insurance companies are heavily invested in fossil fuel companies, these being reliable money-spinners where an insurer can park and grow your premiums, on the assumption that most of the people in the risk pool won't file claims at the same time. But those same fossil-fuel assets produce the very correlated risk that could bring down the whole system.

The system is in trouble. US claims from "natural disasters" are topping $100b/year – up from $4.6b in 2000. Home insurance premiums are up (21%!), but it's not enough, especially in drowning Florida and Texas (which is also both roasting and freezing):

https://grist.org/economics/as-climate-risks-mount-the-insurance-safety-net-is-collapsing/

Insurers who put premiums up to cover this new risk run into a paradox: the higher premiums get, the more risk-tolerant customers get. When flood insurance is cheap, lots of homeowners will stump up for it and create a big, uncorrelated risk-pool. When premiums skyrocket, the only people who buy flood policies are homeowners who are dead certain their house is gonna get flooded out and soon. Now you have a risk pool consisting solely of highly correlated, high risk homes. The technical term for this in the insurance trade is: "bad."

But it gets worse: people who decide not to buy policies as prices go up may be doing their own "motivated reasoning" and "mispricing their risk." That is, they may decide, "If I can't afford to move, and I can't afford to sell my house because it's in a flood-zone, and I can't afford insurance, I guess that means I'm going to live here and be uninsured and hope for the best."

This is also bad. The amount of uninsured losses from US climate disaster "dwarfs" insured losses:

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/hurricanes-floods-bring-120-billion-insurance-losses-2022-2023-01-09/

Here's the doom-loop in a nutshell:

As carbon emissions continue to accumulate, more people are put at risk of climate disaster, while the damages from those disasters intensifies. Vulnerability will drive disinvestment, which in turn exacerbates vulnerability.

Also: the browner and poorer you are, the worse you have it: you are impacted "first and worst":

https://www.climaterealityproject.org/frontline-fenceline-communities

As Arun writes, "Tinkering with insurance markets will not solve their real issues—we must patch the gaping holes in the financial system itself." We have to end the loop that sees the poorest places least insured, and the loss of insurance leading to abandonment by people with money and agency, which zeroes out the budget for climate remediation and resiliency where it is most needed.

The insurance sector is part of the finance industry, and it is disinvesting in climate-endagered places and instead doubling down on its bets on fossil fuels. We can't rely on the insurance sector to discipline other industries by generating "price signals" about the true underlying climate risk. And insurance doesn't just invest in fossil fuels – they're also a major buyer of municipal and state bonds, which means they're part of the "bond vigilante" investors whose decisions constrain the ability of cities to raise and spend money for climate remediation.

When American cities, territories and regions can't float bonds, they historically get taken over and handed to an unelected "control board" who represents distant creditors, not citizens. This is especially true when the people who live in those places are Black or brown – think Puerto Rico or Detroit or Flint. These control board administrators make creditors whole by tearing the people apart.

This is the real doom loop: insurers pull out of poor places threatened by climate disasters. They invest in the fossil fuels that worsen those disasters. They join with bond vigilantes to force disinvestment from infrastructure maintenance and resiliency in those places. Then, the next climate disaster creates more uninsured losses. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Finance and insurance are betting heavily on climate risk modeling – not to avert this crisis, but to ensure that their finances remain intact though it. What's more, it won't work. As climate effects get bigger, they get less predictable – and harder to avoid. The point of insurance is spreading risk, not reducing it. We shouldn't and can't rely on insurance creating price-signals to reduce our climate risk.

But the climate doom-loop can be put in reverse – not by market spending, but by public spending. As Arun writes, we need to create "a global investment architecture that is safe for spending":

https://tanjasail.wordpress.com/2023/10/06/a-world-safe-for-spending/

Public investment in emissions reduction and resiliency can offset climate risk, by reducing future global warming and by making places better prepared to endure the weather and other events that are locked in by past emissions. A just transition will "loosen liquidity constraints on investment in communities made vulnerable by the financial system."

Austerity is a bad investment strategy. Failure to maintain and improve infrastructure doesn't just shift costs into the future, it increases those costs far in excess of any rational discount based on the time value of money. Public institutions should discipline markets, not the other way around. Don't give Wall Street a veto over our climate spending. A National Investment Authority could subordinate markets to human thriving:

https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/industrial-policy-requires-public-not-just-private-equity/

Insurance need not be pitted against human survival. Saving the cities and regions whose bonds are held by insurance companies is good for those companies: "Breaking the climate risk doom loop is the best disaster insurance policy money can buy."

I found Arun's work to be especially bracing because of the book I'm touring now, The Lost Cause, a solarpunk novel set in a world in which vast public investment is being made to address the climate emergency that is everywhere and all at once:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

There is something profoundly hopeful about the belief that we can do something about these foreseeable disasters – rather than remaining frozen in place until the disaster is upon us and it's too late. As Rebecca Solnit says, inhabiting this place in your imagination is "Completely delightful. Neither utopian nor dystopian, it portrays life in SoCal in a future woven from our successes (Green New Deal!), failures (climate chaos anyway), and unresolved conflicts (old MAGA dudes). I loved it."

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/28/re-re-reinsurance/#useless-price-signals

[personallyoriented]

#problems #solutions #advait #instagram #motivationalposts #liberation #reelsinstagram #postsinstagram (at Patna: Heart of Bihar) https://www.instagram.com/p/CpQC1wtJdhu/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[dimensional-tourist]

“Many seekers, when they begin to understand, on an intellectual level, that all of this is as a dream, quickly come up with the question, "Well then, how do I get out of the dream?", as if that is the next logical step…. as if the mind thinking is the one realizing that this is a dream, is not itself illusory, part of the dream. Anything that can arise here in the dream, including thoughts like these and characters like the one you call ‘yourself’ are necessarily themselves dream thoughts and dream characters.

Nisargadatta Maharaj stated:

"The very idea of going beyond the dream is illusory. Why go anywhere? Just realize that you are dreaming a dream you call the world, and stop looking for ways out. The dream is not your problem. Your problem is that you like one part of the dream and not another. When you have seen the dream as a dream, you have done all that needs to be done." But just because ‘these minds,' here in the dream, are conditioned to think in terms of dualism does not mean they are not capable of thinking otherwise. Just that it is a very unusual and sometimes awkward transition requiring much stretching of boundaries.

It is interesting that most Advaitic teachers do not talk of 'the one’. The word Advaita means 'not two’ and that is the phrase that is used. To say 'God' and creation, or un-manifested source and the manifestation, or what-Is and the dream, are 'not two' seems at first a little awkward, but it is used this way to address a certain maddening confusion that can arise, in which 'oneness' can be taken to represent the dualistic opposite of separation. In phenomenon, the manifestation, one half of a dualistic pair cannot exist without the other; so in that sense, one can think there has to be separation in order for there to be oneness. But beyond dualism, in unitive consciousness, unity and separation are 'not two’ consciousness and the manifestation are 'not two’ there is only unity; *separation has never existed.”*

David Carse

[santmat]

Reincarnation: Thoughts Are Like Seeds That Sprout Into Words and Deeds

"Accumulated thoughts of living beings cause births and deaths for them again and again

"In the world, there are as many thoughts as the living beings. The truth is that every person has numerous thoughts. It is by virtue of his thoughts that he attains either salvation or transmigration. Salvation will come only when all thoughts would come to an end. That is why the scriptures declare that the hoarded or accumulated thoughts of living beings cause births and deaths for them again and again.

"The thoughts are of various types and each thought has its hidden import. The thoughts which are soaked in attachment and illusion, form the basis of transmigration. But the thoughts which are immersed in selfless service (seva), lead one to salvation. The flow of thoughts in the mind knows no end. Not a single moment passes without those, so much so, that during sleep even, they occur in the form of dreams. What are those thoughts? Desire for anything assumes the form of a thought. The moment a desire to attain something or the other, arises in the mind, that very moment, man is thrown into an ocean of thoughts. These very thoughts become the basis of resolutions and options which cause one to enter into different forms after death. Whatever the nature of thought at the time of death determines the next form or birth for that soul...

"All the doubts and desires should be made to merge with the Shabd or Word [the Divine Current of Light and Sound], to get rid of horrible consequences of innumerable births and transmigration. Except for the desire to recite Naam, no other desire should take hold of the mind... By remembering the Lord, one attains God-realization and when this stage is reached, then there is no need to resort to any other means of attaining salvation [moksha]."

-- The Second Spiritual Master, in,

The Shri Paramhans Advait Mat Granth

Commentary: Above, excerpted from a huge, authoritative collection of satsang discourses, provides one with valuable insight into the mechanics of thought and desires, this process of creating reality. Here, a "law of attraction" is not solely dedicated to a materialistic life confined to the physical plane. One is instructed to remember God, to practice Remembrance (Simran) of God's Name, and merge one's attention (Surat) into the Positive or God-Power of the Inner Light and Sound (Shabd), rising above the ocean of forms, thoughts, desires, karmas, the creation of countless lives and deaths, with the goal being moksha, getting off the wheel of transmigration/reincarnation. Thoughts are like seeds that sprout into words and deeds.

"Watch your thoughts; they become words.

Watch your words; they become actions.

Watch your actions; they become habits.

Watch your habits; they become character.

Watch your character; for it becomes your destiny." (Upanishads)

"Today's karmas become the fate of tomorrow. According to our last life actions, our mental tendencies are formed in this life. Because of our pure actions we will have the desire to seek the association of Sants and to meditate." (Swami Vyasanand)

[gurnazarora]

Gurnaz was in Delhi. She hadn't heard from Viraj, but she figured if he was planning on coming to see her, he would have said something by now. She had spent all day working on this Delhi wedding for a much too sweet young woman by the name of Roohi and her nerdy husband to be Advait. They had evidently found their way to one another... through arranged marriage? Gurnaz wasn't one to judge, but she knew it wasn't for her. She had to hand it to the bride and groom though. They had definitely fooled her when they met. They looked just as smitten with one another as a couple who had been together for years. After some crazy meetings with vendors and suppliers and caterers, Gurnaz was ready to head back to her suite and pop open the bottle of wine she'd purchased. She wished she could have gone to home, but she wasn't here on a personal visit. This was a business trip which meant she needed to be able to meet with her clients somewhere nice, somewhere neutral. Plus, she wasn't exactly here long enough to settle back in at home. She had to be ready to leave for her next adventure. She made it back to her suite and sighed contently, glad to be done for the day.

[rastronomicals]

9:27 AM EDT July 22, 2024:

Om - "Addis" From the album Advaitic Songs (July 24, 2012)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

File under:    (D)evolved Doom with Sanskrit lyrics and Coptic      overtones

[proudhinduforever]

Sanatani Saints

Part 3

Shri Samartha Ramdas

We will look into the life of Shri Samartha Ramdas who was a prominent Sanatani saint, poet, and spiritual leader in Maharashtra.

Early Life and Renunciation:

Shri Ramdas or previously Narayan was born into a Marathi Deshastha Rigvedi Brahmin family to Suryajipant and Ranubai Thosar. His father was thought to have been a devotee of the Vedic deity, Surya. Ramdas had an elder brother named Gangadhar. His father died when Narayan was only seven years of age. He turned into a sadhaka after the demise of his father and would often be noticed to be engrossed in thoughts about the divine.

As per legend, Narayan fled his wedding ceremony in Asangao near Jamb, at age 12, upon hearing a pandit (Hindu priest) chant the word 'Saawadhaana!' (Beware!) during a customary Hindu wedding ritual. He is believed to have walked over 200 km along the banks of Godavari river to Panchavati, a Hindu pilgrimage town near Nashik. He later moved to Taakli near Nashik at the confluence of Godavari and Nandini river. At Taakli, he spent the next twelve years as an ascetic in complete devotion to Rama. During this period, he adhered to a rigorous daily routine and devoted most of his time to meditation, worship and exercise. As per legend, he once blessed a widow lady of a long married life, without knowing that her husband has just died. It is said that he was able to give life back to the dead body of her husband and this act of miracle made him very famous in Nashik. He is thought to have attained enlightenment at the age of 24. He adopted the name Ramdas around this period. He later had an idol of Hanuman made from cowdung installed at Taakli.

His contribution to Freedom movement and literary works:

Unlike the saints subscribing to Warkari tradition, Ramdas is not considered to embrace pacifism. His writings include strong expressions encouraging militant means to counter the barbaric Islamic invaders. He endorsed significance of physical strength and knowledge towards individual development. He expressed his admiration for warriors and highlighted their role in safeguarding the society. He was of the opinion that saints must not withdraw from society but instead actively engage towards social and moral transformation. He aimed to resuscitate the Hindu culture after its disintegration over several centuries owing to consistent foreign occupation. He also called for unity among the Marathas to preserve and promote the local culture. Samartha Ramdas Swami served an inspiration for a number of Indian thinkers, historians and social reformers such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Keshav Hedgewar, Vishwanath Rajwade ,Ramchandra Ranade, and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Tilak derived inspiration from Ramdas when devising aggressive strategies to counter the British colonial rule. Ramdas had a profound influence on Keshav Hedgewar, the founder of Hindu nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. He is also recognized for his role as a Guru to the Maratha king Shivaji Maharaj, inspiring him with principles of governance, spirituality, and valor.

Below are some of his notable literary works:

Manache Shlok (co-written by Kalyan Swami)

Dasbodh

Shree Maruti Stotra

Aatmaaram

11-Laghu Kavita

Shadripu Nirupan

Maan Panchak

Chaturthmaan

Raamayan (Marathi-Teeka)

His Teachings:

Ramdas was an exponent of Bhakti Yoga or the path of devotion. According to him, total devotion to Rama brings about spiritual evolution. His definition of "Bhakti" was in accordance with the philosophy of Advait Vedant. In Chapter 4 of his literary work Dasbodh, he describes Nice levels of devotion / communion - starting from listening / comprehending (श्रवण) to Surrender of oneself or being One with Self (आत्मनिवेदन) - the later being the core tenet of Advait Vedant - where the sense of separate "I" dissolves into non-duality. He encouraged the participation of women in religious work and offered them positions of authority.

Ramdas Swami is a revered spiritual figure in Maharashtra and remains relevant to contemporary society in Maharashtra.

🙏🙏 jai jai Raghuveera Samartha 🙏🙏