Offbeat Spirituality

It began with a small idea in the 1960s that mankind should send something in space. The journey was unpredictable, but the possibilities were unlimited. Over 7,900 people worked together on a single craft that was launched in 1977 to study the universe. Named 'Voyager', it did things no one predicted, found scenes no one expected, and has outlived its inventors. On 14th February 1990, it took this photo of earth from elsewhere in the universe, at a distance of 6 billion kilometers. From that vantage point, Earth was just a point of light about a pixel in size. Our home, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives, the place of your joy and suffering, everything there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. This is how minuscule we are.  P.S. Its not much to see, but if you search 'pale blue dot' on Google, you can see some varieties of this photograph.  

Sit, breathe, watch your thoughts – the daily practice of mindful meditation is not as simple as it seems. If done with focus, it helps in more ways than one can imagine. For example, some patients with chronic pain have used mindfulness to manage their suffering. Mindfulness doesn’t make the pain go away, but it certainly makes it manageable, pushing it to a place where it can be dealt with.   What is meditation? For years, scientists have used techniques to study the effects of meditation. In an experiment done by BBC , a patient’s MRI was conducted in which she was first asked to let her mind wander and later meditate. The technology captured her mind waves in both the scenario, with the right one showing significant reduction in the thoughts during and after meditation. This shows the physically consistent proof of the benefits of meditation. One of the major advantages of mindfulness it that it helps to reduce the ‘me bit’ of a personality. Called ego in common language, it