Begin your day with salutation to the sun

Found this image floating about on facebook (where else?) and thought of sharing it here.


If you are short of time for exercise then try these for size. One cycle of Surya Namaskar contains a set of 12 poses to be performed in continuation, which apart from giving your body a complete stretch, also activate various endocrinal glands.
12 such 'cycles' if performed properly can also be quite tiring, and expend energy.

For more information:
Wiki on Surya_Namaskara
art of living sun-salutation

Let's Celebrate Lurkers' Day

How about celebrating Facebook Lurkers' Day? On that day nobody will post anything anywhere on Facebook. Everyone will only lurk on other friends' fb pages and groups. In this day and age of social media, a Lurkers Day is so apt. Celebration will be online and worldwide. The idea is to create awareness about the existence of the poor silent souls known as Lurkers.

This day the vociferous, the narcissistic, the vocal amongst us who keep clattering away at the keyboard, shall refrain from posting our witty remarks and high quality images, and experience the feelings of our friends who lurk. We shall experience their feelings of lurk and weightlessness as we silently float in cyberspace along walls, on the edge of groups, occasionally stumbling on the mass of words and sharp image corners. Traveling along our friends' timelines, we shall silently absorb facts about our friends' history, geography, political leanings, sleeping hours, the smarmy images they share, and what they do for fun.

How will we know that people lurked? Well, nobody will post anything. And since no one can stay away from facebook for even an hour, they will have no option but to lurk!

This idea can be expanded to organize Blog Lurkers' Day, Yahoogroups Lurkers' Day and so on.

Mud pack delivery?

Couldn't resist clicking this. The juxtaposition of these two elements made my morning. 

To believe or not to believe in a heaven?

I came across an interesting article recently, while browsing through some online news sites. The article describes the Near Death Experience of a Harvard Neurosurgeon while he was in a coma, with his cortex apparently shut down. Dr. Eben Alexander saw, or sensed, pink fluffy clouds, angels, and a darkness brimming with light that made him not afraid but happy. Out of the coma, Dr. Alexander now believes not only in heaven but also an afterlife.

I find this somewhat hard to believe. The good doctor says he can vouch for a physical heaven, but how do we know that it is really there in the material sense? If so is it a blackhole? because that is a little like what this doctor describes- "darkness brimming with light". The description also reminded me a little of the film Avatar.

But more importantly, how far do we really understand the functioning of the human brain? From what I understand of the article, it is the cortex that is can produce hallucinations. Can we conclusively say that another part of the brain does not take over (that function) if the cortex is shut down? 

Poet William Blake' saw "A heaven in a wildflower" and as long as we live that is probably the heaven to look out for.  

However the article has raised many questions. What are your thoughts on this?