Do we really understand what it means to bring people together and what does it take?

In the February 20th democrats debate, Senator Hillary Clinton said, "It is not enough to say, "Let's come together." And then she said, "After Bush leaves the Whitehouse, we need to do the hard work of not just bringing the people together but overcoming a lot of the entrenched opposition to a lot of ideas that both of us believe in."

It's not enough to bring people together? Yes, if we think 'bringing people together' means asking everyone to show up in a room at a particular time. That is a literal and superficial way of understanding the task of bringing people together, which is expected from those who are entrenched in the Washington style of politics.

Bringing people together is not a single act. It is a process.

A process that involves helping people to get up from the two sided see-saw they are sitting on which forces them to be either up or down to sit down in a circle with multiple perspectives.

A process that involves helping people to disengage from framing issues too narrowly that polarizes the discussion from the very beginning and engage people to frame issues in a broader context that allows for finding common ground.

A process that involves avoiding negative biases and assuming that everyone has some value to contribute.

Bringing people together is a process that is rooted in the belief that if you give people a genuine chance to rally around a higher purpose, they will take it up in a heartbeat.

So bringing people together is not merely the first step. When people go through this process and finally arrive at a place, they have already resolved their conflicts and built on their common purpose. The final assembly is to merely celebrate the victory of unity. Bringing people together is the solution.

Posted by Ragu at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (59)

I saw
a tiny pigeon
having fun,
fluttering its tinier wings
through the glass door
of my patio.
It landed on top
of a thin stick
to stop
and rest for a few seconds.

If the apple sapling
that I planted a year ago
along with the stick
for its support
has not yielded any fruits
is not an issue
for the pigeon,

I can rest too.

Posted by Ragu at 06:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

Many people who have achieved something great say that if you truly want something, you should just believe that you can get it and throw yourself at it and you will succeed. Every single time I heard this message, I always concentrated on the second half of the message, "to believe and work hard". Only now I am beginning to see that the real secret is the first part, "If you truly want something."

I realized that I have never truly wanted anything. Everything that I think, speak and do in my life is actually to find out what I truly want. But even this quest to find out truly what I want is not a consistent, compelling want. It is there sometimes and not there many times. So the first thing I need to do is give continuity to wanting to find out what I truly want. Without the continuity, I am not able to hold together what I am getting out of this quest. All the insights, understanding, skills etc that I am getting in this quest are being squandered away like water poured in a pot with holes.

So I come upon the same insights again and again and wonder why they are not helping me to a point where I start doubting the insights themselves. I am not getting the benefit of the treasures of my quest because they come and I let them go. I have to hold them together so that one insight stays with me long enough to merge with another until something gets formed that is big enough and cannot pass through the holes (as some holes are bound to be there anyway).

It is absolutely clear now that whatever practices I have committed to must become the container within which everything else happens. Only then I will able to hold on to what I learn and earn. Meditation, Yoga, Mindfullness, Service, Creativity and Happiness are my practices. I am spontaneously attracted towards them. These are the tools of my quest. I need to sharpen them, oil them and use them every day on my body, mind and spirit. Perhaps this will mend the holes between my body, mind and spirit and create a container that can start holding the wisdom and merits I collect in my journey. Sooner or later I will find out what I truly want and without forcing myself I will naturally believe that I can get it, will effortlessly put in my effort and allow myself to succeed without getting in my own way.

Posted by Ragu at 06:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (108748) | TrackBacks (0)

Centre for Sustainable Agriculture - PRESS RELEASE

"ENABAVI VILLAGE GOES GM-FREE – SAYS THAT FOOD SECURITY HAS NOT SUFFERED BY SHIFTING TO ORGANIC"

October 11, 2006, Eenabavi (Warangal district): While an international rice conference in Delhi is discussing the inevitability of genetically modified rice in ensuring national food security in India, Village Eenabavi in Warangal district declared itself GM-Free on October 11 th, 2006. Supported by organizations like CROPS, Centre for World Solidarity and Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, this small village in the heartland of farmer suicides in Andhra Pradesh is into its third year of chemical-free agriculture and is proving to the world that food security can indeed be secured without any chemical or GM solutions. On 11 th October, all the farmers in the village took an oath to remain GM-Free and organic.

Eenabavi is probably the first modern-day farming village that has gone completely organic, without the use of any chemical fertilizers or pesticides and without any GM seeds, to secure prosperity for each farming family in the village. This village which had gone down the intensive agriculture path, realized the folly of such agriculture around five years ago and decided to try out alternatives. Beginning with NPM (Non Pesticidal Management of crops), the farmers then decided to give up chemical fertilizers too.

"There was one farmer in the village who bought and sowed Bt Cotton with very bad results. All around us, we find other farmers suffering with losses from Bt Cotton. It was in that context, that we decided that we do not need any GM crops in our village and we have all taken an oath not to purchase or sow any GM seeds and not to consume any GM foods. We have healthy organic foods from our own lands that taste a lot better than conventionally grown crops. Our own health has improved after we shifted to organic farming", explained Mr Ittaboina Venkatadri, a leading farmer in the village.

Anjamma, another farmer, added that there have been no decreases in productivity of crops like paddy in the village, even after the shift to organic farming. She pointed out that the cost of cultivation has come down to negligible levels, enhancing the net incomes of farmers.

The farmers here grow a variety of crops without the use of chemicals including paddy, chilli, vegetables, cotton, tobacco, maize etc. The village is also experimenting with the System of Rice Intensification [SRI] and the results have been positive so far.

Unlike most other villages caught in agrarian distress across the country, the villagers here want their children to continue with ecological farming and firmly believe that farming is the most viable livelihood possible for them. The farmers here are also willing to spread knowledge and skills about ecological agriculture and a Farmer Resource Centre run by the farmers of Eenabavi was inaugurated on this occasion by Shri Vijay Kumar, IAS, Chief Executive Officer of Indira Kranthi Patham in Andhra Pradesh. The meeting on October 11th was attended by around 700 farmers from neighboring villages.

See the full story in Down To Earth magazine May Issue. Here is a PDF version of it.

For more information, contact:

Kavitha Kuruganti
Centre for Sustainable Agriculture
12-13-445, Street # 1, Tarnaka
Secunderabad 500 017

Phone: +91-9393001550

Posted by Ragu at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (155) | TrackBacks (0)

I watched the documentary An Inconvenient Truth two days back.

Whenever I have been exposed to information that point to some deep-rooted, human created, large-scale diseases in the world, my first reaction had always been anger.

Much of my current knowledge in economics and politics is a result of my anger pushing me to know more about the issues and do something about them. But beyond increasing my knowledge, I have managed to do very little. In spite of investing a lot of time, energy and some money into seeking changes in the world, my ROI is barely breaking even. May be it is negative.

I wonder whether my individual ROI is indicative of the collective ROI of all the groups and organizations that seek major changes in economics and politics.

After watching An Inconvenient Truth, I decided not to give in to anger. I decided not to passionately talk about the movie to anyone, not to email ten of my friends to see it and not to pick an argument with my wife middle of the night about whether I should participate in some protest group (I had done all of this previously).

Anger is a ‘high on energy and low on efficiency’ fuel. It is also a very narrow filter to look at the world. In the past, if I am sitting with a person who I think is one of the agents of a social disease, I would not even think of wanting to know anything about his family, his interest in art, his last vacation etc. My entire focus would be on getting him to see my point of view on an issue. He would cease to be a full human being and reduce to another misguided mind to be contested.

I don’t want to identify with the good guys and against the bad guys anymore. Both are within me and I don’t want to strengthen their presence within and outside of me by perpetuating a relationship with them (for or against).

When I throw away anger, the next reaction I see within and outside of myself is a sense of hopelessness or despair. Al Gore says at one point in the documentary that many people go from denial to despair without passing through any action. I seem to have started with anger and gone to despair after passing through a low ROI path created by my anger.

It is clear that I need to stand somewhere in between low efficiency fuels (like anger or utopian hope) and no energy states (like despair) and ACT.

Love, compassion, turning the other cheek and other such saintly weapons take time to manufacture. While I am building those capacities, where else in the middle could I stand? I am looking for a place where it becomes possible for me to relate to myself and others in a broader context. A place that allows me to focus first on people and then on projects, first on subjective needs and then on objective goals.

This place doesn’t seem to naturally exist. I need to create it. And all that I have to create it is my presence – the presence of my body, mind, heart and spirit. How I am present with these will decide how I present these to others.

Exposing an inconvenient truth perhaps will only increase the inconvenience. Pushing it aggressively will only push people to denial or anger or despair. There is no doubt that for any real change to happen, one must begin with truth. What exactly to do with it is the crucial question.

Can I live a truth so totally that it is impossible for others not to see it in me? If people can see a truth in me and see that it is helping my survival and growth, then revealing that with more detail might actually create curiosity instead of inconvenience.

In one of the scenes, Gore is driving a big SUV and not a hybrid (or perhaps it is an oxymoronic hybrid-SUV).

I have immense respect for Gore for having put himself in the line and spreading global warning about global warming. But I am not able to relate to such efforts anymore.

It is not possible to point to darkness and expect anyone to see it when we are in darkness. It is far easier to attract attention to a light in the darkness. The attraction happens by itself without any persuasion.

There are thousands of people who are minimizing use of plastic, installing solar power, buying from local farms, investing in socially responsible companies, volunteering their time when they can to help others, being kind to others, instilling values in their children, cutting down on TV, spending time with nature, doing simple spiritual practices at home, inviting neighbors for dinner… none of these will ever feature in a large-scale change policy produced by a think-tank but they get three cheers everyday in hundreds of feel-pools.

The place between anger and despair doesn’t look like a think-tank. It looks more and more like a feel-pool. And it surely feels convenient.

Posted by Ragu at 03:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (41) | TrackBacks (0)

I usually take a shower in the bigger bathroom in my house which has a bath tub. In spite of Nisha's frequent complaint that I spend more time taking shower and waste water, I do not listen to her. A few days back, I happened to take a shower in the smaller stand-in shower without a bath tub. In this one, the time it takes for the water to fall from the shower head and reach the drain is very little because the shower area is just 2.5 x 2 feet. Usually, in the bigger bathroom, the water falls on the tub and flows some distance on the tub and reaches the drain. The shortening of the time it takes for water to drain in the smaller bathroom and the increased sound of water draining created a sudden, acute awareness in me of the amount of water I am using, and wasting. For about a week now, I am spending alomst half the time I usually spend in the bathroom and surely am saving a lot of water.

When cause and effect are sperated by time and distance I am not able to perceive the impact of my actions. Trying to see the logical sequence of all causes and effects even in a day can be very complex and tedious. Which means cognitively and intellectually we do not have the capacity to perceive and understand most of the causes and effects we give raise to whenever they are sperated by time and distance even by a day and a mile.

Of course we usually get around this difficulty by selectively remembering data and inventing a logic that looks consistent with the data that we have selected. Once we establish such a logic, the importance we give to it becomes greater than what is actually happeing in our lives. If our logic is actually accurate and powerful, we should be able to predict our future!

If we cannot trust in our abilty to perceive and undersand causes and effects, what can we do to minimize the harm and maximize the benefits of our thoughts, feelings and actions?

I think we can do it by paying attention to what we need in a given moment and not give into what we want. Having established a long habit of needing what we want (that is, making our desires into necessities), we have lost the ability to look into what we really need. What we really need might be less or more than what we desire. We will never know unless we check our desires.

In the case of taking a shower, the joy of a warm shower massage (the want) is not as important as a clean, odorless body (the need) on a daily basis. So less is good.

In the case of helping tsunami victims on the field, the comfort of a 9 to 5 job (the want) is not as important as long hours of sleepless service (the need). So more is good.

The need is always informed by the immediate reality. The want is always informed by unfulfilled desires of the past and expected desires of the future.

I want to break the habit of needing what I want and start wanting what I need.

I may end up with less than what I can handle and more than what I can imagine.

Posted by Ragu at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

We believe in the powerlessness of our ignorance and hence we vehemently hold on to whatever we think we know. Since our ignorance is always more than what we think we know, we come to identify with our ignorance and think of ourselves as ignorant. "I am ignorant," which means "I am powerless". Therefore, automatically we associate knowledge with power. The more we know, we believe the more power we will have.

We regulate all our internal physical functions just fine without even having to think about them, let alone know about them. But we do not want to consider this as a sign of our natural state of intelligence, natural state of power. We separate ourselves into body and mind say that our body may have the intelligence to govern itself but we are mostly ignorant. That is, we clearly identify our being fully with our mind and looking at ourselves and the world through its limitations, come to believe in the powerlessness of our ignorance. Therefore, whatever seems to explain something, that piece of knowledge becomes precious because it represents power. Our urge to believe in something that seems to remove our ignorance and all the beliefs that the urge gives rise to, come primarily from our belief in the powerlessness of our own ignorance.

What if our natural state of being is a state of intelligence and power and not of ignorance and powerlessness? If we stop looking at intelligence conceptually, stop dividing it into body intellegence and mind intelligence, we could then drop all beliefs and fully be who we are. If we are fully present with all our intelligence (not hold on to the belief of powerlessness) then whatever thinking, feeling and doing are necessary will happen through us every moment.

We believe in beliefs.

We believe that beliefs are necessary to live, to make commitments, to take decisions.

Perhaps all we need is - to be.

Thinking, feeling and doing comes from being. But we reverse it and want to BE through thinking, through feelings, through doing.

Maybe we have the very meaning of 'to believe' wrong. What if is it simply to 'be and live'? "I believe" then becomes a complete sentence. It becomes a simple statement that refers to the intelligent aliveness of my presence. To say that I believe "in something" is to reduce my being to the limits of that something because, however grandly conceptualized that something might be, it is still a concept, a thought - something that orginates from my being.

If I refuse to reduce my being to the limits of my thoughts and continue to fully be and live in every moment, then my dynamic existence cannot be reduced to a static noun called belief. To be and live fully is not to have any beliefs because "to have beliefs" is an impossibility. To have beliefs, there should be someone larger than the beliefs to have them. But the very creation of a belief happens through a process of reducing the fullness of a being to the smallness of the thing of belief. The moment that transfer happens, it is the belief that has the being. So one can either be and live or be had by beliefs.

One could ask, "If a belief has us, then how come we seem to have many beliefs?" Well, if we examine how we actually live, we do not operate from all our beliefs at the same time. At any given moment, one or a few related beliefs govern us. Which is why, even though we say we believe in love and nonviolence, at the time we hate or act violently, the belief in love and non-violence are not available to us. It is never a case that a person has a number of beliefs and at any given moment, could examine which belief is suitable for the moment and choose it. Whenever a person says he is acting out of his belief, he is really acting out of choicelessness. "I choose to believe in this or that" is a false statement. Any choice, by definition, must allow at the least two possibilities: for and against. If I really cannot say no, then my yes is not a choice. The moment I believe in something, then the belief controls me and reduces me to its limitations.

Adyashanti said, "Faith is a witholding of conclusion so that what is can arise." So to really have faith, to really believe is to simply, fully be with one's internal and external reality (the something that is going on inside and outside) without wanting to arrive at a conceptual conclusion of them through the process of defining and making a belief out of them.

Posted by Ragu at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (14820) | TrackBacks (0)

Recently I went to India for a month to visit my folks. Perhaps due to the vipassana course I had taken earlier and due to my new found daily meditation practice, I experienced something new: Many times, before I would say or do something, I could detect the real motiviation behind it. My need to be nice or impress someone or feel superior or avoid a confrontation etc came to my awareness a fraction of a second before I acted out and remained while I was in action.

Most of the time, I did not or could not allow the awareness to stop myself. And a couple of times I tried, the situation became awkward - I became speechless or actionless making peope wonder what is going on with me. It looks like self-awareness, in the beginning, could make people disoriented. Perhaps with practice, the time available for awareness and observation - the gap between impulse and action - would increase and allow one to make instantaneous changes to ones thoughts and actions.

Have you ever caught yourself with an un-wholesome thought (selfish or narrow thought) to say or do something and managed to change it in time with something that is wholesome? Please share.

Posted by Ragu at 03:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (4149) | TrackBacks (0)

I, I am discovering for some time now, is a fiction authored by many people and environments. For a long time in my life, I have worked intensely to make my story better as if the only purpose of life is to create a perfect 'story of I' that I can read in my death bed. Fortunately, a series of life experiences – good, bad and extraordinary – have helped me understand that real living is ever new, ever in the now and always unique and mysterious. But to experience life in the now, I is the biggest barrier. The story of I is my identity that I carry around, mostly unconsciously, wherever I go. And it makes sure that it is being served, enriched, expanded every second. My identity exists for its own sake and it doesn’t really care what it takes to serve itself.

So, the big question is: How can I detach from the story of I and stop being a fiction. And make every thought, feeling and breath fresh and alive with the creative force called Life?

I have sought the answer in scores of books, dialogues and contemplations. No matter how intelligent my knowledge is, it has not helped one bit in jumping out of the story of I. I figured that it is time for action-based seeking. So what do I act upon? Well, without too much analysis, I decided to focus on my habits. I can see clearly that the story of I gets stronger through my self-reinforcing habits. In fact, my identity is nothing but a collection of habits. Good or bad, my habits prevent me from living in the now. While it is an easy decision to get rid of my bad habits, it is tempting to keep my good habits. But I recognize that they serve my identity at least as much as they help me. So ideally I would like to get rid of all my habits. But habits are hard wired and I may not be able to totally get rid of them in the short term. Therefore, the option is to gain control over them. Gaining control over my bad habits will help me keep them in check when they surface. And gaining control over my good habits will help me take advantage of the knowledge, skills etc that come from my good habits and yet be able to make them serve me and not the other way.

There is another powerful inspiration to work on my habits: I have seen that the best way to bring change in the world is to change oneself. The more I work on my habits and live in the now, the more powerful are my messages to the world.

So by changing my habits, I can change the world – beginning with myself. That is exactly what I have begun to do.

This blog, “Changing the world, one habit at a time” will be a growing story pitted against the story of my identity. Here I will present my difficulties, failures and small, everyday successes in becoming a new author of a new I. My hope is that you would not be able to hold the status of an audience for long.

Posted by Ragu at 01:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)