About material hapiness

To borrow from Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, material happiness is limited. You bore of it quickly. If you have plenty of money, especially money you have not made yourself, you are still not happy. You can be creative about spending money up to a point. I find honesty and creativity makes one happy in the long run.

About Gurus

India has plenty of Gurus. India is famous and also notorious about Gurus. As soon some Guru becomes prominent, he/she is marked. People start digging for information about the Guru and try to slander him. Now even with all the gossips that come with a Guru, people follow him in crazy numbers. And I had always wondered why. They look so silly paying respects to someone with a shady reputation and who does fake magic tricks. But now I have come to an understanding that a Guru is not about being a perfect human himself but he helps you live your life better. Its kind of like teaching any other subject. Moreover, the paths to spirituality follows no rules. That is why Valmiki who was a robber became a saint who wrote the Ramayan. But as saint, did he rob? And do we care? If he robbed from you, yes you will. Because your Guru is supposed to make your life better not worse.

Why a philosophical blog?

I and some others began realizing around this time that I am getting wiser. I have been meditating a bit lately and hey, wisdom hit me. And some good friends suggested I should write about it. But I am not verbose enough for typical publishing media. Being a mathematician, I know profound ideas can be expressed in a few words. So writing for regular media does not give me the freedom I want to express as I would like to. Blogging works for me. Now my precious ideas may get lost in the muck of internet freedom writing but there is no other alternative I know that allows me this freedom. This sounds a bit egotistical but humility that hides wisdom serves no purpose for me these days. Remember I did become wiser lately.
The first idea we will look at today is about Negativity.
All my life I have been told to avoid negative people. Recently, I decided to focus my attention on negativity. I found positive people are the ones who speak and act positively. They do not seem jealous, angry, trivial, egotistical, etc. But deep down in their minds there are all these feeling too. But they learn how to control their negativity and output positively. So there are no positive people really except that there are people who have better self control. Knowing this has helped me have more empathy towards negative people. The universe holds a lot of emotions that is within all of us and our control is processing of these universal emotions within us.
Another thing people advise a lot about is about "Success and failure". People generally say do not take to heart your failures and be sporting etc. But I say every failure changes you in a bad way. You believe a little less in yourself. The only way to avoid this is if you fail, set your sights on a future win way more grander than today's failure. And goddamn it, Win! Then you will survive and thrive too.
Signing off until later ...........
Philosophically yours,
Maya