ANDHRA PRADESH FLOOD RELIEF WORK

Dear Friends

 

As you may aware about the situation in Andhra Pradesh, India, facing ravage floods causing havoc in an unimaginable scale. People were forced to move out their homes, trapped in water, submerged farms, loss of cattle, transport cut-off, disease outbreak and loss of lives. This extent of disaster in the region is unknown in living memory.  Sadly the situation is getting worst and we urge to come forward to re-establish a sense of normality for them.

  

We, FRIENDS RELIEF FUND working with local officials providing assistance to deliver bread and water for 10,000 people. This is just a start. With more help from friends we can stretch our wings to reach and help more numbers who are waiting out there.

 

Please pass this to everyone. It's time for us to HELP. I hope we can do our best to restore the situation.

 

EVERY LITTLE COUNTS!! PLEASE COME FORWARD.

 

For more information and how you can help!

 

PLEASE ATTACHED POSTER FOR MORE INFO

 

Please contact

 

Praveen Kumar Padarthi ( In the UK)

 

Mobile: 0044 77 250 56 458

email: kumar1415@gmail.com

 

Sekhar ( I India)

Mobile: 0091 97 032 230 59

 

 

Regards and thanks for you kind help

 

Praveen K Padarthi

 

Did you know?

Did you know that physics could tell you all this...

• The crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship material success as a preparation for his future career. Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
• There is only one road to human greatness: through the schools of hard knocks. Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
• I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
• With fame I become more and more stupid, which of course is a very common phenomenon. Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
• Of all the communities available to us, there is not one I would want to devote myself to except for the society of the true seekers, which has very few living members at any one time. Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
• Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited , wheras imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
• I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves- such an ethical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty…The ideals which have guided my way, and time after time have given me the energy to face life, have been Kindness, Beauty and Truth. Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
• Although I am a typical loner in my daily life, my awareness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has prevented me from feelings of isolation. Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
• I never worry about the future. It comes soon enough. Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
• In the last analysis everyone is a human being, whether he is an American or a German, a Jew or a Gentile. If it were possible to hold only this worthy point of view, I would be a happy man. Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
• Astatine is an element so rare that if you searched the entire planet you’d only find a lump the size of a sugar cube.
• When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch.
• The maximum speed that raindrops can fall at is around 18mph, depending on their size.
• If every star in the Milky Way was a grain of salt they would fill an Olympic sized swimming pool.
• 12 Astronauts have walked on the moon, between them bringing back 382 kilograms of rocks, pebbles, sand and dust.
• Whales talk to each other by making a loud clicking noise. The sound waves travel extremely well underwater and they can hear each other from 100 miles away.
• A TV screen shows 24 pictures a second. Because a fly sees 200 images a second, it would see TV as still pictures with darkness in between.
• Cats can see clearly in one-sixth the amount of light we humans would need. This is due to a special layer of cells at the back of their retinas, which acts like a mirror, reflecting light back to the retina's cells.
• In 1936 Professor Alfred Gaydon underwent surgery on his eyes after an accident. When his sight began to return he found that he could see ultra-violet light, which is normally beyond the visible spectrum of humans. This helped in his work as a physicist, but it did distort how he saw other colours!
• Because of thermal expansion the Eiffel Tower is 15cm taller in summer.
• Some people who have two or more different kinds of fillings in their teeth are able to hear high-power AM broadcast stations when located within a few hundred feet of the stations. In such cases, the strong radio waves act upon the teeth fillings in such a way that the electromagnetic oscillations get transformed to mechanical vibrations in the person's head, and these are heard as sound.
• The amount of sunlight reaching the earth's surface is 6,000 times the amount of energy used by all human beings worldwide. The total amount of fossil fuel used by humans since the start of civilization is equivalent to less than 30 days of sunshine.
• Tree crickets are called the poor man's thermometer because temperature directly affects their rate of activity. Count the number of chirps a cricket makes in 15 seconds, then add 37. The sum will be very close to the outside temperature in farenheit!
• The highest temperature ever recorded at the South Pole was minus 13 degrees centigrade.
• If our Sun were just inch in diameter, the nearest star would be 445 miles away.
• If the Sun were the size of a beach ball then Jupiter would be the size of a golf ball and the Earth would be as small as a pea.
• Neutron stars are so dense that a teaspoonful would weigh more than all the people on Earth!
• On average, airliners will get struck by lightning once every year.
• You weigh less if you stand at the equator than if you stood at the north pole. This is because the equator is actually further away from the centre of the earth, so the force of gravity is less.
• Engineers at NASA claim to have made the loudest noise ever: of 210 decibels. This is so loud that it can make holes in solid materials.
• The mass of the Earth increases every year because of 3,000 tonnes of meteorite debris that hits its surface from space.
• Who choked on their own invention? Hubert Cecil Booth, the inventor of the vacuum cleaner. In testing how it would work, he was sucking dirt by mouth through a piece of material and ended up with a lungful of dust!
• The microwave oven was invented by accident, when Percy Spencer found that his chocolate bar had been melted by an experiment he was running on radar systems. He immediately started experimenting successfully on microwaved popcorn.
• A supernova is the most energetic single event known in the Universe. Material is exploded into space at about 10,000 kilometres per second. All the stars in our galaxy (about 100,000,000,000) would have to shine for six months to produce the amount of energy released by just one supernova.
• The planet Venus’s day is longer than its year. It takes 225 ‘Earth’ days to rotate around the Sun (a Venusian year) and 243 ‘Earth’ days to rotate on its axis (a Venusian day).
• It takes the energy output of at least one power station to keep the traffic lights in the British Isles operating.
• One kilogram of butter stores as much energy between its atoms as the same quantity of TNT.
• Men are six times more likely to be struck by lightning than women.
• IBM's ASCI white supercomputer, the fastest computer in the world, weighs as much as 17 elephants and can do in one second what a calculator would take 10 million years to do.
• Do astronauts burp? Because you are weightless in space, the contents of your stomach float and tend to stay at the top of your stomach, under the rib cage and close to the valve at the top of your stomach. Because this valve isn't a complete closure (just a muscle that works with gravity), if you burp, it becomes a wet burp from the contents in your stomach. Gross!
• The Moon is gradually moving away from the Earth and the tides are to blame. Every year, the Moon moves a further 3.82cm from the Earth.
• Gold leaf is pure gold, but you can cover large areas with it very cheaply because it is very thin. Gold leaf is less than 0.00008 millimetres thick - which is only about 300 atoms thick.
• Every rainbow is unique - each rainbow is formed from light hitting your eye at a very precise angle. Someone standing next to you will see light coming from a slightly different angle than you and therefore see a different rainbow.
• A bolt of lightning contains enough energy to toast 160,000 pieces of bread. Unfortunately the bolt only takes 1/10,000 of a second – so turning the bread over might prove difficult.
• If 10 kilograms of matter spontaneously turned into energy there would be enough energy to power a 100 Watt light bulb for 300 million years - a harrowing thought for all weight watchers.

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Some Beautiful stories ...1

From the very beginning, girl's family objected strongly on her

dating this guy, saying that it has got to do with family

background, & that the girl will have to suffer for the rest of her life

if she

were to be with him.

Due to family's pressure, the couple quarreled very often. Though

the girl loved the guy deeply, she always asked him: "How deep is your

love for me?" As the guy is not good with his words, this often caused

the girl to be very upset. With that & the family's pressure, the girl

often vents her anger on him. As for him, he only endured it in

silence.

After a couple of years, the guy finally graduated & decided to

further his studies overseas. Before leaving, he proposed to the

girl:

"I'm not very good with words. But all I know is that I love you.

If you allow me, I will take care of you for the rest of my life. As

for your family, I'll try my best to talk them round. Will you marry

me?" The girl agreed, & with the guy's determination, the family finally

gave in & agreed to let them get married. So before he left, they

got engaged. The girl went out to the working society, whereas the guy

was overseas, continuing his studies. They sent their love through

emails & phone calls. Though it was hard, but both never thought of

giving

up.

One day, while the girl was on her way to work, she was knocked

down by a car that lost control. when she woke up, she saw her parents

beside her bed. She realized that she was badly injured. Seeing her

mum crying, she wanted to comfort her. But she realized that all

that could come out of her mouth was just a sigh. she had lost her

voice....

The doctor says that the impact on her brain has caused her to lose

her voice. Listening to her parents' comfort, but with nothing

coming out from her, she broke down. During the stay in hospital,

besides

silence cry,..it's still just silence cry that accompanied her.

Upon reaching home, everything seems to be the same. Except for the

ringing tone of the phone. Which pierced into her heart every time it

rang.

She does not wish to let the guy know & not wanting to be a burden to

him, she wrote a letter to him saying that she does not wish to wait any

longer.

With that, she sent the ring back to him. In return, the guy sent

millions & millions of reply, countless of phone calls,. . all the

girl could do, besides crying, is still crying.... The parents decided

to move away, hoping that she could eventually forget everything & be

happy.

With a new environment, the girl learns sign language & started a

new life. Telling herself everyday that she must forget the guy. One

day, her friend came & told her that he's back. She asked her friend not

to let him know what happened to her. Since then, there wasn't anymore

news of him.

A year has passed & her friend came with an envelope, containing a

invitation card for the guy's wedding. The girl was shattered. When

she open the letter, she saw her name in it instead. When she was

about to ask her friend what's going on, she saw the guy standing

in front of her.

He used sign language to tell her "I've spent a year to learn sign

language. Just to let you know that I've not forgotten our promise.

Let me have the chance to be your voice. I Love You." With that, he

slipped the ring back into her finger. The girl finally smiled.

Treat every relationship as if it's the last one, then you'll know

how to Give. Treat every moment as is it's the last day, then you'll

know how to treasure.

Treasure what you have right now, or else you will

regret one day..

"If you want something you never had,

do something you have never done!!!"

BUDDHISM AND THE CONQUEST OF SUFFERING

"May all that have life be delivered from suffering"
Gautama Buddha

Alone among the world's religions, Buddhism locates suffering at the heart of the world. Indeed according to Buddhism, existence is suffering (dukkha). The main question that Guatama (c.566 BC - c.480 BC), the traditional founder of Buddhism, sought to answer was: "Why do pain and suffering exist?"

Buddhism teaches compassion toward all sentient beings. By contrast, Christianity and its secular offshoot, Western science, cling to a very un-Darwinian form of human exceptionalism. According to the Biblical Book of Genesis, God put animals on earth purely to serve Man, who exists to serve God.

Early in the 21st century, there are an estimated 300 million Buddhists in the world. Central to Buddhist teaching are the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eight-fold Path.

THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS:

1. All is suffering (dukkha).
2. Suffering is caused by desire/attachment.
3. If one can eliminate desire/attachment, one can eliminate suffering.
4. The Noble Eight-fold Path can eliminate desire. Extremes of excessive self-indulgence (hedonism) and excessive self-mortification should be avoided.

THE NOBLE EIGHT-FOLD PATH:

1. Right Views.
   The true understanding of the four noble truths.
2. Right Intent.
   Right aspiration is the true desire to free oneself from attachment, ignorance, and hatefulness.
   [These first two are referred to as prajña, or wisdom.]
3. Right Speech.
   Right speech involves abstaining from lying, gossiping, or hurtful talk.
4. Right Conduct.
   Right action involves abstaining from hurtful behaviours, such as killing, stealing, and careless sex.
5. Right livelihood.
   Right livelihood means making your living in such a way as to avoid dishonesty and hurting others, including animals.
   [The above three are referred to as shila, or morality.]
6. Right Effort.
   Right effort is a matter of exerting oneself in regulating the content of one's mind: bad qualities should be abandoned and prevented from arising again; good qualities should be enacted and nurtured.
7. Right Mindfulness.
   Right mindfulness is the focusing of one's attention on one's body, feelings, thoughts, and consciousness in such a way as to overcome craving, hatred, and ignorance.
8. Right Concentration.
   Right concentration is meditating in such a way as to progressively realize a true understanding of imperfection, impermanence, and non-separateness.

The Theravada tradition of Buddhism teaches that everyone must individually seek salvation through their own efforts. To attain nirvana, one must relinquish earthly desires and live a monastic life. The Mahayana tradition teaches that salvation comes through the grace of bodhisattvas. Bodhisattvas defer their own enlightenment to help others, thus enabling many more living beings to attain salvation.

Buddhist universalism is best represented by the Mahayana tradition, which embraces the well-being of all sentient life.

The meaning of the term nirvana, literally "the blowing out" of existence, is not entirely clear. Nirvana is not a place like heaven, but rather an eternal state of being. It is the state in which the law of karma and the rebirth cycle come to an end - though Buddhist conceptions of personal (non-)identity make these notions problematic. Nirvana is the end of suffering; a state where there are no desires, and individual consciousness comes to an end. Attaining nirvana is to relinquish clinging, hatred, and ignorance. Its achievement entails full acceptance of imperfection, impermanence, and interconnectedness. Sometimes "nirvana" is used to refer either to Buddhist heaven or complete nothingness, but most Buddhists would not understand the term in this way.

* * *

UTILITARIANISM

Ethical utilitarians share the Buddhist focus on suffering. But only "negative" utilitarians identify the minimisation of suffering as the sole ethical goal of life. "Positive" utilitarians regard the maximisation of happiness as ethically valuable no less than the minimisation of pain.

One radical form of utilitarianism is abolitionism. Abolitionists believe that biotechnology should be used to abolish suffering altogether - though not all abolitionists are utilitarians. Given the accelerating revolution in biotechnology, the abolitionist project is the logical implication of a utilitarian ethic. Even so, the creation of a truly cruelty-free world entails a disconcertingly ambitious technological solution. To achieve a world without suffering, it will be necessary to rewrite the vertebrate genome and redesign the global ecosystem. Any cross-species enterprise of this magnitude is beyond our current technological capabilities. Yet some kind of paradise-engineering is foreseeable in the coming era of quantum supercomputing allied to nanorobotics. Critically, too, genetically-engineered vatfood can potentially deliver global veganism more effectively than appeals to compassion alone.

These distinctions might seem academic. Most people are not avowedly utilitarians in their code of ethical values. Moreover the term "utilitarian" itself is pedestrian. It conveys no sense of moral urgency. But a rough-and-ready utilitarian ethic is widespread in contemporary secular society. Even professed anti-utilitarians normally rely on (indirectly) utilitarian arguments by appealing to the bad consequences that would allegedly follow for our well-being from the [mis-]application of a utilitarian ethic.

* * *

BUDDHISM VERSUS UTILITARIANISM

Setting aside differences of metaphysic, how closely do the core values of utilitarians/abolitionists and Buddhists coincide? If suffering and its abolition are central to life on Earth, can differences between the two traditions be resolved to questions of means, not ends?

Perhaps. But these differences of means are substantial. Most Buddhists would challenge the idea that technology offers an escape-route from the pain of earthly existence. Despite the cumulative success stories of scientific medicine, it would seem the advances of modern technology haven't left human beings any happier on average than our ancestors on the African savannah. Indeed the incidence of clinical depression, anxiety disorders, suicide, drug abuse, marital breakdown and other "objective" indices of distress is rising in Western consumer capitalist society as a whole. The track-record of technological science to date is not encouraging. Opponents of scientific utopianism envisage that its application will yield - at best - some type of "Brave New World".

Abolitionists respond that only enlightened biotechnology can ever deliver the world from suffering. Unless the biological substrates of unpleasantness are eradicated, then suffering is genetically preordained by the biochemistry of the human brain. All Darwinian humans periodically go through periods of distress ["dukkha"]. Its intensity and duration varies. But its spectre is never absent. Endowing their vehicles with a capacity to suffer enhanced the inclusive fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. A heritable capacity to undergo all sorts of nasty states, conditionally activated, has been genetically adaptive. So even devout Buddhists undergo pain, sorrow and malaise in the course of their lives. A Buddhist lifestyle and meditational disciplines may offer palliative relief. Yet under the yoke of a Darwinian genome, no pursuit of a "Noble Eight-fold Path" can re-set our emotional thermostats, redesign our gene expression profiles, and dismantle the "hedonic treadmill" of Darwinian life. In evolutionary history, primate mothers who weren't anxiety-ridden, "attached" to their children, and desirous of their success left less copies of their genes than their malaise-ridden, un-Buddhist-like counterparts.

Moreover, with a traditional neural architecture, it's notable that desire-driven "hyper-dopaminergic" people, who have the greatest range and intensity of appetites, tend to be the least unhappy - though their lives can still be blighted by disappointment and loss. By contrast, the extinction of desire experienced by many contemporary humans is more akin to apathy and withdrawal than illumination - not enlightenment and consequent nirvana but instead a condition of melancholia or anhedonia: emptiness in the sense of an absence of meaning. This isn't the kind of extinction of desire Buddhists have in mind. Yet it's unclear if Buddhism offers a solution to, say, anhedonia - the incapacity to feel happiness or anticipate reward - characteristic of many depressives.

Looking to the future, the new technologies of post-genomic healthcare promise effectively unlimited joy, meaning and motivation - or serenity. If we so desire, a rich hyper-spirituality can be awakened, too, even in the otherwise spiritually barren. Intelligence can be pharmacologically and genetically amplified, as can lifespans, perhaps indefinitely; and also, more counter-intuitively, compassion. In future, genetic engineering will allow control over archaic emotions and eventually the creation of whole new categories of experience in state-spaces of consciousness hitherto unknown.

More prosaically, but more importantly from an ethical point of view, the reproductive revolution of "designer babies" will enable us to choose how much - or how little - suffering we bring into the world when we decide on the genetic-make-up of our children. Gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-being can be the destiny of our offspring from conception, depending on which dial-settings we favour. If we so choose, we can abolish the soul-polluting nastiness of Darwinian life altogether. Dukkha can be consigned to historical oblivion; and replaced by a post-Darwinian era of mental superhealth.

The era of mature genomic medicine is still decades away, perhaps longer. Buddhists are surely right to stress how desire and attachment as experienced today often lead to heartbreak. But when heartbreak becomes genetically impossible, it will be safe to follow one's heart's desire without limit. More generally, an absence of desire is a recipe for personal and social stagnation, whereas an abundance of desires is a precondition of intellectual dynamism and social progress.

Control over our emotions nonetheless strikes many bioconservatives as a frightening prospect, evoking images of enslavement rather than empowerment. So it's worth recalling how some early social commentators feared that the discovery of anaesthesia gave doctors too much power over their patient. The use of anaesthetics for painless surgery allegedly robbed the individual of his or her autonomy and the capacity to act as a rational agent, reducing the patient "to a corpse". In a contemporary context, investing a quasi-priestly caste of physicians with the sole lawful power to grant - or withhold - pleasure-giving, pain-relieving prescription drugs undoubtedly does magnify the scope for abuses of authority.

Whatever the risks of abuse, our technologies of pain-eradication are too valuable to renounce, even if this option were sociologically realistic. Right now, of course, the vision of life without suffering still strikes many non-Buddhists (and even Buddhists) as fanciful. Life-long happiness seems no more likely than the prospect of effective "pain killers" or pain-free surgery struck our early Victorian forebears. For the most part, we are possessed by the deep unspoken feeling that "what has always been was always meant to be". Status quo bias has deep cultural roots. Even classical utilitarians may find it difficult to believe that suffering could be eradicated in the foreseeable future in the same way as, say, smallpox. Yet it is hard to underestimate the ramifications of rewriting the vertebrate genome as the millennium unfolds. The abolition of the biological substrates of suffering promises to mark a major discontinuity in the development of life on Earth. Our genetically enriched descendants may regard existence without "dukkha" - the abolition of suffering - as the ethical foundation of any civilised society.

23 Brilliant Doubts - Unanswered

1.If all the nations in the world are in debt(am not joking. even US has got debts), where did all the money go? (weird) 2.When dog food is new and improved tasting, who tests it? (to be given a thought) 3.What is the speed of darkness? (absurd) 4.If the "black box" flight recorder is never damaged during a plane crash, why isn't the whole airplane made out of that stuff? (very good thinking) 5.Who copyrighted the copyright symbol? (who knows) 6.Can you cry under water? (let me try) 7.Why do people say, "you've been working like a dog" when dogs just sit around all day? (i think they meant something else) 8.Why are the numbers on a calculator and a phone reversed? (God knows) 9.Do fish ever get thirsty? (let me ask and tell) 10.Can you get cornered in a round room? (by ones eyes) 12.Why do birds not fall out of trees when they sleep? (tonight i will stay and watch) 13.What came first, the fruit or the color orange? (seed) 14.If corn oil is made from corn, and vegetable oil is made from vegetables, then what is baby oil made from? (No comments) 15.What should one call a male ladybird? (No comments) 16.If a person suffered from amnesia and then was cured would they remember that they forgot? (can somebody help ) 17.Can you blow a balloon up under water? (yes u can) 18.Why is it called a "building" when it is already built? (strange isnt it) 19.If you were traveling at the speed of sound and you turned on your radio would you be ! able to hear it? (got to think scientifically) 20.If you're traveling at the speed of light and you turn your headlights on, what happens? (i don't have a chance to try) 21.Why is it called a TV set when theres only one? (very nice) 22.If a person owns a piece of land do they own it all the way down to the core of the earth? (this is nice) 23.Why do most cars have speedometers that go up to at least 130 when you legally can't go that fast on any road? (stupid, break the law)

I Wonder Why?

I wonder why?

I wonder why I trip and fall

when the path is crystal clear

I wonder why I built this wall

and who and what to fear

I wonder why I sit and stall

before I stand and cheer

And it's a wonder why

I am here at all

Oh my, I wonder why

I wonder why

I wonder why I reach for you

then you vanish in the air

I wonder why you're free to choose

and still you wander there

I wonder why you're being blue

and if you are aware

That you're wonderful anywhere at all

Oh my, I wonder why,

I wonder why

I wonder why we love to hate what we will only miss

I wonder why, we celebrate a kill over a kiss

I wonder why we've twised fate until it looks like this

And it's a wondrous day if we exist at all

Oh my, I wonder why,

I wonder why

And I wonder why I wonder why.....