What Happens After We Die?

  “When you die, you actually know you are dead because your consciousness continues to exist …” says Sam Parnia, director of the first critical care and resuscitation research lab in the world at New York’s NYU Langone Medical Center. Known with his AWARE research, his lab has been studying hundreds of people who had Near-Death Experience (NDE) – who were clinically dead but were brought back to life by resuscitation after a cardiac arrest. The time lapse in-between actual death and coming back to life varied in each case from a few seconds to more than 20 minutes .

Continue Reading

Cruising Life

A most asked question in the history of humanity is  “What is the meaning of life? What are we doing here?” For some, the meaning is finding food and shelter, for others it is success in work or a happy settlement, and for another, it is living on the impulse –seeking pleasure whatever that signifies individually (for example, going across town for the chocolate that I particularly like instead of finishing an important job for me and others, or perpetual travelling for somebody else who otherwise becomes restless and meaningless at home, seeking to supplant meaning by buying another house

Continue Reading

The 700th Anniversary of Dante the Grand Poet, Sommo Poeta

Italy is marking the 700th anniversary of the departure of Sommo Poeta — the Great Poet, Dante Alighieri  (1265 Florence-1321 Ravenna), and his masterwork, The Divine Comedy. He wrote this monumental epic poem at the age of 35 when he was exiled from his hometown of Florence to spend the rest of his life in Ravenna, until his death. In this timeless book, Dante sets out on a voyage to the other world where souls embark upon terminating life on earth, to be settled in the realms of Inferno, Purgatorio, or Paradiso  –hell, interworld, and heaven. As he passes through

Continue Reading

Goddess of the Rainbow

To love beauty is to see the light. The renown French author Victor Hugo (1802-1885) reflected on the bliss of beauty that strikes the eye, and said : To love beauty is to see light.  Nearly a century after Victor Hugo, Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968), the first man who traveled to space in 1961, expressed in awe as he gazed across the cosmos : Rays were blazing through the atmosphere of the earth, the horizon became bright orange, gradually passing into all colors of the rainbow: from light blue to dark blue, to violet and then to black. What an indescribable

Continue Reading

Seeking Small Acts of Goodwill

To do good, which, as we all know, is universal, is in the heart of being human. Yet we find it difficult to do even small acts of kindness like lending an ear to a distressed friend, greeting the gardener at the park, offering coffee to a subordinate, or paying attention to the needs of a family member whose presence we take for granted. Simply because we naturally live in our ego, self-occupied with primarily satisfying our own pleasure and achievement needs in professional, social and familial contexts. We are programmed to see ourselves in the center of the universe,

Continue Reading

A Precious Feat in the Jungle

“To live among today’s society and to influence others instead of being influenced by them  —now that’s a feat !” -Ostad Elahi In his pioneering book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) examines our susceptibility to outside manipulation, and tendency for self-deception. Our minds or mental spaces are lured by the media and the social influences of our milieu, which define our choices, snatch our attention and shift our values. Content management, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience all intervene with how we perceive, think, and make decisions; they blur our comprehension of the truth and ultimately influence who we really are. We

Continue Reading

Desiderata

    Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,  and remember what peace there may be in silence.  As far as possible, without surrender,  be on good terms with all persons.  Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others,  even to the dull and the ignorant;  they too have their story.  Avoid loud and aggressive persons;  they are vexatious to the spirit.  If you compare yourself with others,  you may become vain or bitter,  for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.  Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.  Keep interested in your

Continue Reading

Saint Francis d’Assisi and Reviving the Old Values

  The patron saint of ecology, Francis d’Assisi’s love of nature, and new ways of living together set forth by the eminent neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik Living in times of an unstoppable disease pervading the earth, it has become imperative to peruse our fragile relation with nature, and  to “collectively revive our old values”  says the eminent neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik : Crises are very common in the human condition. We have already known many epidemics which have forced cultural revolutions… With each epidemic, or natural disaster, there has been a cultural change. After the trauma, we are forced to discover new

Continue Reading

The Magical Light of the Eye

  Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.  The one of a kind artist and polymath, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), driven by his rigorous quest for knowing the truth pertaining the human body and the spirit, and its place in the universe, dedicated his life on his art and research. He amassed profound knowledge in anatomy, botany, mathematics, engineering and physics. The corpus of his work and scientific findings is preserved in nearly thousand drawings. Some of his rare  notebooks and masterpieces were exhibited at the Louvre Museum in 2019 to commemorate the 500th

Continue Reading

Looking for the Shepherd’s Star

  “We are obliged to change and rethink the whole civilization,” says Boris Cyrulnik, the eminent neuropsychiatrist known for his work on resilience and trauma. Our culture has lost the compass, we navigate by sight, jostled by events […] We must take a new direction because we have just understood that man is not above nature, he is in nature.  Physically, psychologically and spiritually we are much more sculpted than we think by our natural space. He focuses on healing the soul in his latest book, Souls and Seasons, and marks “psychological ecology” as the  crucial component of the remedy

Continue Reading

Site Footer