Life and Coffee

A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university lecturer. Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life. Offering his guests coffee, the lecturer went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups: porcelain, plastic glass, some plain-looking and some expensive and exquisite, telling them to help themselves to hot coffee.

When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the lecturer said: “If you noticed, all the nice-looking, expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is but normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the better cups and are eyeing each other’s cups.”

“Now, if Life is coffee, then the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, but the equality of Life doesn’t change.” “Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee in it.” So pls, don’t let the cups drive you…enjoy the coffee instead.

Source: Unknown
Via: Serendipity

Moment of Zen

By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.
– Socrates

Tom Judd’s Everyday

Tom Judd drew a page everyday for a year, check out the finished 365 pages of his creative work at
http://www.tomjuddseveryday.com/

I would just go at it whenever I had a spare moment in my day and had something I needed to write or draw. Some of the drawings are observational and some are just plain weird.
– Tom Judd

Lateral Thinking

Two fathers and two sons were seated round a table. There were four apples on the table. Each of them took one apple and ate it entirely yet there was still one apple left on the table. How was this possible?

Worth a 1000 words: Pennie lou

Caravan
by Pennie lou

The Nirvana of Black Pepper

For me nirvana is not an ideal state that one reaches to escape the cycle of birth and death, rather a guarantee of survival of a species for as long as earth can sustain life. Black pepper, the King of Spices, is one such species that is, in my opinion, in a present state of Nirvana. To understand what I mean by that, we are going to dive into history a little, to follow the amazing story of this spice.

The Dharma of black pepper is to have a warming, sharp, hot and biting taste which appealed to human beings. Its discovery, over 4000 years back, in the forests of the Malabar cost in the southern state of Kerala in India, started a chain of events that has led to the way the world is today. This is the karma of black pepper. Arab traders, who frequented the Kerala coast, were responsible for introducing pepper to Europe. Early Greeks used pepper mostly in their medicines, but it was the Romans who integrated it into their food, and spread the use of pepper through out their vast empire.

Pepper was so precious back then, that it was even used as a substitute for currency and gold. The demand for it, and its high value, led to events such as Columbus and Vasco de Gama setting sail in opposite directs to find a sea route to India, in order to take the control of pepper away from the Arabs. These two monumental events in the timeline of our history, is the reason the world is the way it is today. If the karmic influence of pepper did not exist, then these two events would probably never have taken place when it did, and the present as we know it would have been something else.

All this eventually led to peppers value decreasing, even though demand has increased, and today it is common to see pepper on almost all dining tables around the world. By reaching this state, pepper has guaranteed its survival, for as long as we exist on this planet, and as long as the planet exists with us in it, all this by still maintaining it’s state as the King of Spices. Next time you use a pepper shaker or a pepper grinder, realize you are dealing with a spice that is the very reason for your existence, and the state of the world as it is, and a spice in a state of nirvana.

Read more about the fascinating history of pepper in The Encyclopedia of Spices.

Did you Know

that safron comes from the dried stigmas of the saffron crocus, and it takes 75,000 blossoms or 225,000 hand-picked stigmas to make a single pound. This makes it the world’s most expensive spice.

Another interesting fact about saffron is that it contains a poison that acts on the central nervous system and damages the kidneys. Large doses can have severe effects; 10 to 12 grams is a fatal dose for human beings! [source]

Worth a 1000 words: Cris Benton

Shoreline, Salt Evaporation Pond
by Cris Benton

Moment of Zen

Nirvana is a state of pure blissful knowledge… It has nothing to do with the individual. The ego or its separation is an illusion. Indeed in a certain sense two “I”‘s are identical namely when one disregards all special contentsâ€â€Â? their Karma. The goal of man is to preserve his Karma and to develop it further… when man dies his Karma lives and creates for itself another carrier.
– Erwin Schrödinger

This great physicist, famous for pioneering quantum physics, and the Schrödinger’s Cat proposal, had another side to him which dwelled on the mysteries of life. He was also the author of a book, “What is Life?”

The Million Dollar Project

I came across Steve Palina’s Million Dollar Project in a post from Alvin at lifecoachesblog.com about a week back. At first I was skeptical, but then I started to wonder about the effects of multiple minds working in parallel on a single intention, and whether this leads to some kind of propagation of thought through a medium that is invisible to us, eventually creating a unified mind.

It caught my interest, however, still being skeptical; I decided to wait for a positive sign from Alvin’s own test of the Million Dollar Project before I joined the experiment. The positive sign finally came in a post he made yesterday, and as a result my test starts today, and I am going to give it a try for the next 30 days, and post my progress here.

The project requires one to take at least 60 seconds in a day to think about the following intention:

“In an easy and relaxed manner, in a healthy and positive way, in its own perfect time, for the highest good of all, I intend $1,000,000 to come into my life and into the lives of everyone who holds this intention.”

I have a feeling more than my far fetched idea of a unified mind, this has got more to do with meditating on a single intention, that the focus of ones mind becomes that intention, and as a result one would unintentionally think of making money on every action they take. Just a thought, let’s see how this turns out.