Meditation, whose ultimate goal is to take you beyond all sensory experiences has been found to reduce physical ailments like asthma and depression and help even in anger management. Researchers of meditation have also found higher mental activity, a sort that has not been in neuroscience literature, happening in long term meditators.
Now new research done on meditating Tibetan Buddhist monks in India show how the basic responses of the brain can be overridden

However, the monks – who carried out “one-point” meditation, where they focus attention on a single object or thought – were able to focus on one image. Monks who had undergone the longest and most intense meditative training were able to focus their attention on just one of the images for up to 12 minutes. Olivia Carter, of the University of Queensland, said: “The monks showed they were able to block out external information.
“This is an initial step in understanding how their brains work. “It would now be good to carry out further tests using imaging techniques to see exactly what the differences are in the brains of the monks.”
She said that could direct researchers to a broader understanding of how meditation influences what happens in the brain when someone is deciding whether to give something their attention, and what happens when they choose not to dwell on bad news, or to calm down. Ms Carter added: “Buddhist monks often report that if something negative happens they are able to digest it and move on.
“People who use meditation, including the Dalai Lama have said that the ability to control and direct your thoughts can be very beneficial in terms of mental health.” Dr Toby Collins, of the Oxford Centre for the Science of the Mind, told the BBC News website: “Meditation is a way of tapping into a process of manipulating brain activity.” He said the idea that meditation trained the brain to attend to just one thing at a time fitted in with previous research. He added: “How that’s done, we don’t yet know. But studies using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) can show what’s happening in the brain.” [ Meditation ‘brain training’ clues]

Whenever I watch a TV channel, I have this urge to flip through all the channels. Now I know what I need to do to get focus.

Here is a sample of what is being taught about Hinduism in Bay Area schools

• Bindis symbolize the caste system
• Godess Parvati is the chief of all elves that roam the earth
• During religious festivals Indians play with colors made with urine and cow dung

San Jose Mercury News has a profile of Mona Vijaykar, an Indian mom who is fighting all this

Vijaykar has tried tackling the problem in a grass-roots way: by contacting teachers and asking to speak to their classes about India and Hinduism, explaining the significance of ancient Indian languages or the origin of religious customs.
Vijaykar said many of the teachers she’s spoken with complain about the lack of resources on world religions and are hungry for information. She recalls a teacher at her son’s former school, Redwood Middle School in Saratoga, who invited Vijaykar to class several years ago to add to her lesson on India and world religions. Vijaykar remembers being outraged by a handout on various forms of the Hindu god.
The handout — produced by Teacher Created Materials, an education publishing company in Westminster — listed Parvati as a goddess who is “chief of all of the elves” that roam the Earth. Company officials didn’t return requests for interviews.
“They might as well be talking about fairies in a fairy tale,” Vijaykar said. “It makes the religion sound silly and stupid. And it’s plain wrong.”
Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard University, had a similar reaction: “Elves? That’s just false. That’s ridiculous.”[COUNTERING STEREOTYPES]

The Bay Area has a large number of Hindus and if you are one of them, it is time you looked at what your child is learning about your religion in school.

It is hard not to notice two contrasting stories that have run side by side during the past week. One is the story about the violent protests in the Muslim world triggered by a report in Newsweek (which the magazine has now retracted) that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo Bay desecrated a Koran by throwing it into a toilet. In Afghanistan alone, at least 16 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in anti-American rioting that has been linked to that report. I certainly hope that Newsweek story is incorrect, because it would be outrageous if U.S. interrogators behaved that way.
That said, though, in the same newspapers one can read the latest reports from Iraq, where Baathist and jihadist suicide bombers have killed 400 Iraqi Muslims in the past month – most of them Shiite and Kurdish civilians shopping in markets, walking in funerals, going to mosques or volunteering to join the police.
Yet these mass murders – this desecration and dismemberment of real Muslims by other Muslims – have not prompted a single protest march anywhere in the Muslim world. And I have not read of a single fatwa issued by any Muslim cleric outside Iraq condemning these indiscriminate mass murders of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds by these jihadist suicide bombers, many of whom, according to a Washington Post report, are coming from Saudi Arabia. [Outrage and Silence]

True, also when Hindu Gods are desecrated in Saudi Arabia, it is just a law and order problem. But selective outrage is a global problem.

Once my father called up on Good Friday and I was at work and he wondered why it was not a holiday in United States which is a Christian majority country. I explained the absence of religious holidays here.

There was something puzzling about the Indian government’s decision to declare a three-day state mourning for Pope John Paul II, Karol Jozef Wojtyla. Did it try to appear more Christian than Christians, or more “secular” than the rest? I am all for showing respect to the dead, irrespective of their creed, faith or colour. However, the Indian government’s decision raises some interesting questions. Did it declare a state mourning because the Pope was a head of state?
Does the death of a sovereign of an artificial state of less than 1,000 people deserve it? Vatican is a “state” whose head, the Pope, is elected by an electoral college consisting of 117 voting cardinals

Saudi religious police have destroyed a clandestine makeshift Hindu temple in an old district of Riyadh and deported three worshippers found there, a newspaper reported today (March 26, 2005).
“They were surprised to find that one room had been converted into a Hindu temple,” it said.
A caretaker who was found in the worshipping area ignored the religious police orders to stop performing his religious rituals, the paper added.
He was deported along with two other men who arrived on the scene to worship. [Makeshift Hindu temple razed; worshippers deported]

Question: Doesn’t Saudi Arabia make noises about Muslim persecution in India ?
Answer: They do. But who said that they have to provide freedom to minorities in Saudi Arabia. Be happy those guys came back with all their body parts intact.
Question: Shouldn’t India raise this issue with Saudi authorities ?
Answer: It might offend them. Also it might put a haddi in our secular kabab.
Question: Narendra Modi was denied a US visa because he was accused of persecuting minorities, so by the same game, shouldn’t all Saudi Royals be denied American visa from now ?
Answer: Saudis have oil and they are no pushovers like India.

Visiting Bali, Aneeta Sundararaj, a storyteller, discovered that Balinese people seem to be practicing the tenets of Hinduism properly.

While scholars try to portray a confrontational relationship between Buddhism and Hinduism, many facts point to the fact that they just co-existed. The book I am reading, Massacre at the Palace: The Doomed Royal Dynasty of Nepal has some information on the relations between Hindus and Buddhists in Nepal.
The Newars of Nepal developed a kind of Buddhism quite different from that practiced elsewhere. As Buddhists they were allowed to eat meat including buffalo and the pig. The Newars could have a Brahmin as a priest and Hindus would worship in Buddhist shrines. The Shiva temple at Pashupathinath has a strict prohibition on entry by non-Hindus, but Newars are allowed to enter.
There is a festival of the Hindus involving a Kumari, who is considered a living godess. In Indrajatra, she is pulled on a chariot through various parts of Kathmandu and she gives blessings to the King who is considered a partial reincarnation of Vishnu. This Kumari who features prominently in the Hindu festival is chosen from the Buddhist priestly clan of Sakyas (the same clan as Buddha).

Every other day there seems to be a story on meditation and yoga in the United States. Meditation has been found in scientific experiments to reduce hypertension as well as even alter the brain structure. Now Yoga alongwith some mantra meditation is used to cure anger of juveniles in a detention center.

“I got hooked on it and now I go every Friday,” the darkskinned girl says. “I didn’t really know you could find such a calm place in your body. It’s like you go off somewhere else; it’s like I’m not even in my body, like you go floating off the ground up in the sky. It’s really awesome.”
“(Gina) was really, really ADD at first,” Lord says, referring to attention-deficit disorder. “She could not even stop talking in the middle of a pose. She was incapable of closing her mouth, and now she is quiet in class. That’s a huge, huge change.”
After nearly an hour of poses, Lord directs the girls onto their backs for the “corpse” pose. She turns off the lights, hands out blue washcloths for the girls to cover their eyes and starts a new tape of Indian music. As the girls lie silently, muscles unclenched and hands open, a woman on the tape lightly chants the mantra, Om namah Shivaya (“I honor my higher self”). Some of the girls move their lips along with the words.
“Don’t pay attention to any sounds,” Lord purrs. “Focus on the mantra. If a thought comes into your mind, just pretend it’s a little butterfly floating across the blue sky of your mind. . . . Repeat this mantra whenever you need it. The mantra is a tool.” [Yoga Gives Young Offenders Tools Against Trouble]

The other day I chanced on a blog called the Great Separation which had an entry titled Christians in India Threatened with Death by Hindu Fundamentalists. Christians are about 24 million people, a numerically large number. So were all those Christians threatened by Hindu Fundamentalists ? No, on reading the entry, this title was put by the site owner based on an article whose title was “Christian Adivasi victims of violence and forced