Love - the Eternal and the most Blessed !

When it comes to music I usually prefer Love songs and when it comes to books I love to read all about romance, the late night dinners and the doorstep good night kisses... I guess most of us , just like me, love to live in a world of fantasy where things are so loving, everything so right and good.. Talking about love, I just remembered a conversation I had with a friend of mine. She was surprised or rather shocked to know that even in reality most of the American citizens are not virgins when they get married. Forget about the US, right now even in our own Bharath, with the thriving multi national culture, it'll be considered too much of an expectation for any man to ask for a virgin wife. I think we the late 20-30 group of women still doesn't know or rather have not widened our thoughts to include the differences between love, commitment, adjustment and the real love life. When for me, all these are different things, this friend of mine was having a hard time understanding the explanations I gave for the differences.

Marriage... does this word mean that we can never fall in love again?? I certainly don't think so.. As you grow old.. your preferences change.. your interest grow up along with you and in case your spouse is not able to meet or stand side by side along with them, there's every chance that you can fall in love again with some one who does that. My mom might think that this is infidelity, but I would say this is being practical. You just have one life to live with and so many of your dreams to be fulfilled. No one has the right to kill those, how much ever close the person is to you and at one point if its required that you need to move forward alone or holding a different pair of hands, its completely natural. After all, the life.. your life.. your dreams.. atleast you are worth it and have every right to live them.

Then where do you draw the line for good and bad, that's the question that came next against my thoughts. The line comes where you get involved with emotions like selfishness, untruthfulness, lust etc. I feel that if the reason for holding onto a different hand is coz you are completely in LOVE... the eternal and the most divine feeling, then its completely fine and obviously a great thing to do. But being the human kind as we are, we tend to decide this situation considering the amount of bank balances, the securities and the position title of the other half. This is where it becomes wrong and end of it all it spoils the purity of the relationship - MARRIAGE.. the blessing which God bestowed on us from the time he created this thing called the earth, the planets -- the whole creation in itself; so that never will there be a human who is a loner; who's deprived of the feeling of Love -- the feeling that makes you one with this whole creation in itself.

India... the country that always holds upto its family bondage, the country which is always looked upon for its culture, the country where girls are married to those unknown men chosen by the elders of the family tree, the country where divorce rates are currently on a very high end. I guess we have moved up in the trends, especially when it comes to relationships. Its true that every divorced individual is still considered as an outcast and a dare-devil, even in the high society group. But I would say what is the point in continuing a relationship when there is no love in it. All the spiritual leaders of today would say that setting right your close relationships is the only solution to all the physical and spiritual problems in your life; the close relationships with your parents, siblings, spouse and children. I also share the same belief that unless these close relationships are filled with love no person can be completely happy or successful in Life. This is the rule of nature; the rule of Life itself... But this rule doesn't tie us for life to any relationship and that is exactly where people are unable to distinguish, i guess.

The line is drawn in this rule also just like every other aspect of life. What the spiritual teachers are trying to tell is that we should develop the quality of love within ourselves.. and keep that love alive in and all around us. But that doesn't mean that we have to try and stick on to an already dead relationship, trying to convince ourselves that its still completely alive. Believe me, all the others around you are completely sure that you are just wasting your time and there's nothing that you are going to gain from this futile effort.

End of it all, as far as I am concerned LOVE is the only emotion that a human can feel to make her completely free and secured in this lifetime... the only emotion that can bring in most of the bliss in this small life... the emotion that make you fly out there in the limitless sky and swim out in the deepest of the oceans.....

I want to love... and to start with, I want to love myself.....!!!!!!

Grab your man's attention, buy him a pint of beer
ANI
Published on Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 02:04 in Lifestyle section

London: Forget wearing loads of make up and skimpy clothes, the best way to grab your man's attention has been found – buy him a pint of beer.
That’s the conclusion of a group of researchers, who have found that "beer goggles" really do work.

“Beer goggles” are considered to have distorted the "wearer''s' vision, making unattractive people appear beautiful, or at least passably attractive.

According to the study, a pint of beer actually makes men find other people more attractive.

Through the study, researchers are claiming that they have proved for the first time that men who had drunk alcohol tended to rate pictures of women higher than those who had not.

In fact, they have claimed that a pint and a half of beer can do the trick for most of us, and the effect is much more pronounced in men, in whom it may last for 24 hours.

The participants were arbitrarily given vodka and lime or a similar tasting non-alcoholic drink.

After almost half an hour, they asked both the groups to rate the attractiveness of 20 male and 20 female faces on a seven-point scale.
People who had been drinking alcohol rated the faces about 10 per cent higher than the non-drinkers.

Next day, they observed that men who had drunk alcohol still gave pictures of women higher ratings than those who had not.

"The findings are important because of the role drink plays in, for example, unsafe sex,” The Telegraph quoted Dr Marcus Munafo, an experimental psychologist who led the study at Bristol University, as saying.

Experts believe that alcohol stimulates the striatum, an area of the brain that plays an important role in attraction.

Ladies Coupé - A Novel by Anita Nair

The story of a woman's search for strength and independence.

Akhilandeshwari, Akhila for short: forty-five and single, an income-tax clerk, and a woman who has never been allowed to live her own life - always the daughter, the sister, the aunt, the provider; until the day she gets herself a one-way ticket to the seaside town of Kanyakumari. Gloriously alone for the first time in her life, she is determined to break free of all that her conservative Tamil brahmin life has bound her to.

In the intimate atmosphere of the ladies coupé which she shares with five other women, Akhila gets to know her fellow travellers:

Janaki, a pampered wife and a confused mother;

Margaret Shanti, a chemistry teacher married to the poetry of elements and an insensitive tyrant who is too self-absorbed to recognize her needs;

Prabha Devi, the perfect daughter and wife, transformed for life by the glimpse of a swimming pool;

Fourteen-year-old Sheela, with her ability to perceive what others cannot;

And Marikolanthu, whose innocence was destroyed by one night of lust.

As she listens to the women's stories, Akhila is drawn into the most private moments of their lives, seeking in them a solution to the question that has been with her all her life:

"Can a woman stay single and be happy, or does a woman need a man to feel complete?"

Being One with The Divine

As a kid I always wanted to lead a spiritual life and I had infact believed, like any other person, that leading a spiritual life would mean leaving all comforts in life and becoming a sanyasi. I did try my best to become one, but life had other plans.. to teach me what exactly spirituality, in its essence, mean.

I would like to share a story about Buddha, which my spiritual teacher had told . Some kids at that time wanted to know from Buddha what exactly it felt for him to be an enlightened person. So they invited him to have food at their house and then served him lot of fruits. The kids posed their question to Buddha and was eagerly waiting for reply. Buddha took an orange, silently peeled off the outer skin and started eating it piece by piece. Once he ate his lunch, he looked at the kids and told " this is what enlightenment means to me. When I took the orange, " I was taking the orange"; When I was peeling it " I was peeling the orange"; When I took the piece and ate " I was tasting the orange - the flesh inside and its juice". He further told that his state helps him to enjoy what he is doing. There is no gibberish going on in the mind.

Enlightenment is the state where the mind stops. You can no more multi task as the senses become slow in their functioning. But, the same time, this is not a state of immobility. Its just that the brain would concentrate more on the exact action that is done on a particular time and that in turn creates a joy in the hearts. Every action would create bliss; every thing would look new. The mind would stop doing the Right-Wrong, Good-Bad, I-You analysis and as a result you stop judging every action; every person and every situation in life. When there is no judgement passed, there is scope for only one single emotion and that is bliss... the eternal bliss of being one with nature; to be more simple - feeling one with the computer you stare everyday at.

Talking about the computers, how many of us would really have taken the time to look carefully at the system monitor. Does that give us joy in anyway; I am sure the answer would be a big NO. But once enlightened, looking at the silver lining and the black screen would generate so much of joy in us that there would be no scope for boredom. I guess all of you who are reading this will be thinking that I am talking fantasy. NO!! This is sheer reality and it has been scientifically proven that Enlightenment, the altered state of consciousness is an altered state of Human Brain also. There are lot of spiritual organisations working solely with this motive - to make the mankind Enlightened.

If the next question is Why? the answer goes like this. The human life is supposed to be a cycle of births and deaths. According to Hindu mythology every human is a part of the divine light. And at the end of each life cycle, its required that all the light particulars merge with the divine and be one with it. For this to happen, there should not be any feelings attached with the life that is already spent - namely anger, fear, wish, desire etc. Enlightenment is a state that helps man to free the human mind and as a result it breaks the attached strings of life from the Soul.

I guess this is too big a topic for me to handle in a single go and so let me put a period on this here, leaving you to wonder how it would be like to experience the state of altered conciousness.... As for me, I am waiting for the day when Enlightenment happens to me. What about you? Are you willing to receive it?

Techno Park Trivandrum