Posting Blogs and yoga eulogies

Dear Sumant,

While posting the blog I realized that this might be the 405^th blog I am posting! Yeah! Not bad in three and half years since I started blogging. That means now if I read each posting each day it will take more than a year to read through all. I am not sure if it’s the correct number because I deleted a few of my posting but they may number less than 3 I believe. Most of the postings are there and tells what mood I was in and what I believed in at that point of time. So when I look back I can see if I am really improving as an individual moreover they are fun and can give you a glimpse of that particular day of our life which if not documented is surely go down in the history of my life as some day. So now I am trying to post each day to make them memorable.

I do think about the 15,000 letter Darwin wrote and 17,000 pages of Voltaire work and wonder wouldn’t it be cool to just past those numbers!! There are people on Amazon who have written product reviews for more than 10,000 items. However getting into number trap is easy and I must avoid it for my own balance and happiness.

I am seriously considering doing Vipasana Meditation at Rockford, Illinois. 10 days of no speaking, writing, reading just meditating sounds real good to me. I know of only two people in real life who have done this, one is Tulika in ST and other is Bob at shawnee dharma both gave a very positive feedback about the program.

Today was ok, I did study some 501 stuff, finished the grading and went to Roy’s house to ask some question related to measure theory. The 2^nd theorem on Measurability is that the measure of Union of countable number of set is less that the sum of the measures of each set. The way indexes were used were not clear to me and they are still kind of vague to me. Roy gave me some idea about similar kind of notation being used in Tensors. It is using the double indexes in union of sets. Other thing I learned that a function is continuous if its inverse image is continuous. Similarly a function is measurable if its inverse image is measurable. There are 4 sets of equivalent definitions are given for a function defined over an extended real value domain.

Other things I did today was to go to Carbondale library to return “Buddha in my backpack”. Somehow I missed it among the pack of books I returned last time. Fortunately this gave me time to finish the book before the due date which was today. I got few more books from library. Three things I am really happy about these days is my ability to stick to yoga, blogging and reading. Today I just exercises from day 14 instead of day 13 as I wanted to try the dhanurasana. I was able to do it as I followed the instructions from the book. I remember doing many of these asanas when in my childhood we used to watch Brhamchari’s yoga program in the morning but now I have a book which makes it easy to know which all asanas should be performed and how many I need to learn, before that I had a vague idea of yoga as some collection of exercises. The tree of life by Iyengar really opened my eyes about the spiritual connection of yoga. Even though I don’t watch television now the controversy regarding Yoga on CNN didn’t escape me. I saw the clipping on you tube. Already yoga is practiced by millions of people here and especially women and as the old adage goes “If you educate a man you educate only one person if you educate a woman you educate the whole family”. Yoga is just not an exercise it’s a whole mind body system and you cannot just practice it like another exercise because it’s not that fast. Each time you stretch yourself you have to feel the stretch in your body. You have to sit still to catch up your breadth and becoming aware of yourself. Whereas in other systems you try to remove your mind by inundating your consciousness with loud rhythmic music till you are tired enough to think of nothing else but a good nap. That’s enough writing for today

Best Regards

Sumant Sumant