I just got back from a visit to India and a highlight was the three days I spent at the Ramanashram in Tiruvannamalai. I felt the presence of Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi everywhere. And I also felt viscerally what I am about to share with you. I love war movies and…

I have long held that philanthropy in the West is imbued with a healthy dose of self-interest and lot of self-aggrandizement. The tax code favors huge donations and worthy institutions cater to your every whim if they sense that they can peel away some of your moolah. There was an…

In my younger days I greatly enjoyed going to horror movies. Friday the 13th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street and many of their ilk and their spinoffs and sequels were all grist for the mill. I recognized that they were not really ‘horror’ movies. …

Has it ever occurred to you that there will be a ‘last time’ you do anything you enjoy? There will be a last time you hug your child, a last time you smoke your favorite pipe, a last time you drink your single malt at night. Many such ‘last times’…

There are some things that you are told repeatedly. You are told them so often that you don’t question them anymore. They are almost ‘revealed truth’. You are told to see the glass as half full, not as half empty. You are told that every problem is an opportunity in…

A Creativity and Personal Mastery (CPM) alum asked me to elaborate on Appreciation and Gratitude for current times. Many alums are feeling quite far from grateful, and some are even scared. This is unfortunate. It is also contrary to the spirit of CPM. We see a small sliver of a…

Physics was my first love and I still stand in awe of the great minds that developed subjects like Quantum Mechanics and Cosmology. And, increasingly, what physicists are discovering has eerie similarity to what mystics have proclaimed for centuries. It will be fun to explore physics and consciousness and the…

A Mind-blowing Idea (Part 2) In my last blog I pointed out that the world we see and think we live in is an appearance. Deep down there is simply a mess of sub-atomic particles — collectively called fermions — whose interactions are governed by fundamental messenger particles called bosons. All kinds of strange stuff…

I was a physics major at college and have fond memories of that period. I maintain that there is no subject like physics to show you that what you see, think and feel cannot be trusted and what is ‘real’ is very different from what you think it is. Books…