posted September 16, 2007 09:38 AM         

In Sanskrit language:

Satyam = truth
Shivam = lord Shiva
Sundaram = beautiful.

i.e.

quote:

---

God is the truth, truth is God and God is beautiful.

---

WARNING: Mild nudity in this video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwZzudhXBOg

Zeenat is a libran I think. One of my all time favourite videos

posted September 16, 2007 05:25 PM         

Wish I cud awake myself to a beautiful voice every morning.

Mine bad.
She is a scorpio. Nov 19th ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeenat_Aman

In the movie she is scarred on one side. Hence u only see one side of her. The guy says "if the girls voice is so beautiful, how beautiful her body must be". He marries her and learns the truth, and can't stand the ugliness. I can't remember what happens in the end.

posted September 16, 2007 05:56 PM         

Thanks for posting~ *watching*

posted September 16, 2007 07:12 PM         

satyam and mithyA

The Sanskrit word for "truth" is satyam and this is also the word for reality. The only reality is brahman. Ignorance is ignoring (literally "turning away from") this truth through identifying ourselves with a body, mind, belief, cause or whatever. We mistakenly take these things to be real in their own right instead of simply a form of one essential reality.

Another frequently used metaphor in Advaita is that of clay and a pot made from the clay. The clay exists before the pot is made. Whilst the pot is in use to hold something, it is still clay. And after the pot has been broken, the clay is still there. Advaita defines "real" as being that which exists in or transcends all three periods of time (i.e. past, present and future) - trikAlAtIta, so that it is only actually the clay that is real by this definition. Yet whilst the clay is in the form of the pot, it would not be true to say that the pot does not exist. Clearly it has some reality but it cannot be described as real according to the definition. But neither is it false, since we can use it to carry water about, while the clay in the form of an amorphous lump is not much use for this purpose. The pot's reality is entirely dependent upon the clay and, moreover, it is always clay and nothing but clay whether it is in the form of the pot or not. Thus the pot has a "dependent reality." There is no English word to describe this – the Sanskrit word that is used is mithyA.

Similarly, the world did not exist a few billion years ago and will be swallowed up by the sun in few more. The reality upon which it depends is Brahman. Brahman exists before during and after the world. The world too, whilst it exists, is nothing but Brahman in essence. Brahman is the only reality; the world is neither completely real nor completely unreal – it is mithyA. And the same applies to every "thing" in the world, be it people, houses, minds, concepts, emotions etc.

posted September 16, 2007 07:57 PM         

Silverstone

Shivam also means auspicious in sanskrit. Some people on planet earth thinks whatever happens happens for the best. The rising sun, is beautiful to them. So is the setting sun. She must have got the glimpse of God reality somtime in her life
How else will you explain that being a poor temple cleaner (in that video), she is ecstatic when dawn comes. Unaffected by poverty, diseases and hunger around her she is well balanced.

Cool!!!

posted September 16, 2007 11:18 PM         

Thanks, Mannu.

posted September 16, 2007 11:49 PM         

quote:

---

she is ecstatic when dawn comes. Unaffected by poverty, diseases and hunger around her she is well balanced.

---

posted September 18, 2007 01:47 AM         

by Antonio T. DeNicolas, PhD
The goal of all inquiry is experience, (anubhava)…Brahma Sutra Bhashya. I. 1.2.

Introduction
Integration Through Correct (Contextual) Interpretation

It is an obvious phenomenon of our times that Eastern thought (or its semblance) has become as much a part of the "in" culture of America as "woman's lib," or the war in Vietnam. From slick magazines to the most prestigious universities, American culture is swamped with Eastern information or misinformation, depending how critical the eye of the beholder. It is obvious that the demand for Eastern thought has increased at an alarming rate in the last few years; alarming in the sense that the supply cannot and has not been adequate (in quality if not in quantity) to the demand. While the number, of those translating and spreading information about the East has increased considerably in the last few years, the number of those qualified people who "understand" both East and West has not. Some scientists, for example, when writing about modern physical theories use Eastern philosophy non-critically and in a "metaphorical" way to express their own insights. Even eminent scholars, pressed by the needs of the times, take to writing about logic, theory of knowledge, language, religion or mysticism, East and West, in ways which exhibit a very inadequate understanding and mastery of the whole range of Western and Eastern philosophy. The result has been the dissemination of misinformation and the perpetuation of misunderstanding on an international scale, thereby impeding the development of an efficient integration of the ways of doing philosophy and religion in the West and the East. The world, for example, has been declared to be an illusion. The "no-thinking" state of Zen has reached the public as a "not-thinking" attitude. The discipline of intuitive experience has been translated as "the spontaneity of doing what you want without any responsibility," and if these states are too concrete, one can always escape any kind of effort by wrapping one's own discipline into ephemeral and meaningless (therefore effortless) great sounding words, like cosmic consciousness, the All-soul, the universal self, the Spirit, the Absolute – which mean everything and do nothing.

In sum, there is too much talk and too little understanding. The danger lies in that the true need, which has prompted the interest in Eastern thought, could be fogged out of existence by the polluting fumes of misinformation and clouded thinking. I do not propose to attempt an instant solution to this problem; rather, I would like to bring forward the epistemological context within which philosophical statements from both East and West can be meaningful. Without such a context, statements made by Eastern philosophy about the Self, Reality, and Experience are either meaningless (i.e., they have no self-sufficient reason in our Western universes of discourse), or empty, (i.e., they are only conceptual projections of some particular Western philosophical system without empirical content).

In order to avoid the trap of over-generalization, we shall confine ourselves to statements about the Self (Brahman), Reality (Sat), and Experience (anubhava), made by the great Indian philosopher Sankara (A.D. 788-820).

Implicit in Sankara's analysis are several presuppositions about the philosophical activity, and the role of interpretation. Instead of being taken as arbitrary, however, these presuppositions are based on a conditioned discipline of doing philosophy which looks for the contextual reasons within which presuppositions appear. The key to this conditioned discipline lies in the following statement: the beginning of knowledge is the realization that interpretation stands for interpretation; the end of knowledge is the decision that interpretation stands for something, or is the interpretation of something.

I
I choose Sankara because in many ways he furnishes a most important perspective on the Indian way of doing philosophy. To understand him is to understand not only the Advaita Vedanta system he sponsored, but also the whole of Indian philosophy – Vedic, Upanisadic, Samkhya, Yoga, Buddhist, and so on.

Sankara's philosophy may be summarized, somewhat paradoxically, in the following manner:

1. Reality is One, Indivisible; let us name it Brahman. The world is "false." All "atomic" entities, like souls, bodies, subjects, objects, are only non-differentiated Brahman (the Real).

The foregoing statement, however, though put in positive terms, is negative and void in the sense that no one knows it. It can only be experienced (anubhava) as an intuition. It therefore does not lie within the scope of philosophical inquiry but is rather the origin and end of all philosophical inquiry beyond philosophy, i.e. discourse, but not beyond the philosopher.

2. Philosophical inquiry is concerned with the logical multiplicity of linguistic superimpositions (adyasa) between the subject and the object.* Thus, the subject is superimposed on the object in such remarks as "That I am," or "This is mine," whereas, when we say "I suffer," or "I wish," the object is superimposed on the subject.

*Superimposition, says Sankara, is the apparent presentation to consciousness, by way of remembrance, of something previously observed in some other thing.

In order to clarify the above statement, which pronounces negatively on everything that language claims as "real," Sankara makes his own philosophical positive statement, thus:

3. Reality is non-dual (a-dvaita). (It should be noticed that he does not affirm the unity, but denies the multiplicity.)

4. Philosophical inquiry – understood as the activity of doing philosophy – may, however, lead to intuitive-experience (anubhava) or to the realization of non-differentiated Unity (Brahman).
http://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/i_es/i_es_denic_self_frameset.htm

posted September 18, 2007 01:55 AM         

1. Real may mean "natural," as opposed to "artificial": a natural or a man-made lake; a real ruby or a synthetic one.

2. Real may mean "genuine," as opposed to "fraudulent" or "fake," as when speaking of "a real Picasso," or "real jewels."

3. Real may also mean "lasting," or "permanent," as when we speak of a "real satisfaction" as opposed to a temporary satiation of desires, or a "real peace" as opposed to a temporary cessation of hostilities. In this sense of the word "real," one must be aware of the fact that something more is implied than the bare state of affairs itself (ontology), and that a system of values (axiology) is also involved. For example, if war is fighting and fighting has stopped, is that not peace? And since the cessation of fighting is an actual state of affairs, is not the peace real peace? The fact, too evident, that we do not consider it so indicates that more than a mere description of the situation is involved in this sense of the term "real"; a system of values is also involved. The settlement of the war in Vietnam speaks for itself.

4. Real may also mean "non-imaginary" or "non-illusory," like real water instead of water seen in a mirage, or a real dagger instead of the one Macbeth thinks he sees before him.

5. Real may also mean "existent," as does in Sanskrit the word sat. Although this is not to say much, it seems to rule out purely fictitious entities. The common criterion for "existent" is "experienceable."

Sankara's use of the word "real" (sat) is a combination of the third, fourth and fifth senses suggested above: for something to be "real" it must be experienceable, nonillusory or nonimaginary, and, stable, lasting or permanent.

With this in mind let us go back to the first claim of Sankara's philosophy as stated in the summary:

In the Balabodhini', attributed to him, Sankara boldly states his claim:

Being is living, but thinking is only image-making. Life stops being life when turned into images.

slokardhena pravaksyami yad ukta' granthakotibhih brahma satyam jagan mithya jivo brahmaiva naparah.

"With half a sloka (stanza) I will declare what has been said in thousands of volumes; Brahman is real, the world is false, the atomic individual self is only Brahman, nothing else."

That is to say, there is only one Reality. Whatever reality is displayed by discrete things, i.e., the world as divided into subjects and objects, originates in that one Reality. That which language claims is really, not being identified with that one Reality, is false (mithya) or only apparently real; it is an illusion. It should be clear from this quotation that the world is not held to be fictitious or non-existent; the world is sensed, felt, perceived.*

*The word mithya brings out this meaning more clearly than is indicated in the translation. Mithya is a contraction of mithuya, derived from the root mith which means either (1) "unite" or "couple," (2) "meet" or "engage" (in altercation), or (3) "alternate." The word mithya comes from the third sense, and is used adverbially (often with respect to a person's behavior) as meaning "inadvertedly," "contrarily," "improperly," or "incorrectly." This sense is extended to a nominal form meaning "false" in the sense of "mistaken," that is, "taken or perceived incorrectly." "incomplete."

Sankara's claim applies to linguistic judgments and the criteria for those judgments which determine certain kinds of concepts, such as the spatiotemporal boundaries of a false atomicity – the particularity of concrete things. If Reality is unitary, then the plurality of the world is claimed mistakenly; certain arbitrary criteria which the use of language imposes upon experience are mistakenly taken to be really experienced.

Sankara's philosophical inquiry therefore turns to an examination of the powerful maya of language (what Wittgenstein called the "bewitchment of language") in order to free his inquiry from dominance of the false notion of the separate existence of things.1

The goal of this task, for Sankara, was to realize the Real: a fullness of experience which is untranslatable as an eidos – beyond language, space, time, thought and difference. The main purpose of that positive goal is to orient the mind. Its pragmatic success is beyond language. For Sankara, it is indicated in an intuitive self-revelation of Reality itself which does not depend upon perception and other criteria of knowledge.2

This intuition of totality and non-differentiation is the concrete result of a movement of thought losing itself in the depths of undifferentiated consciousness. The statement "Tat tvam asi,"3 "Thou art that," shows a movement of thought from one ontological level (of particularity), through another (of universality), to yet another (of unity), where in the attainment of the latter negates the distinctions between the former. One begins with individual consciousness (tvam), passes on to universal consciousness (tat) and arrives at non-differentiated consciousness which overcomes the separated reality of both the individual and the universal, and which constitutes their ground.4 This method of stripping away contradictory elements of individuation in order to arrive at the underlying non-differentiated Unity is called jahad-ajahad-laksana. This is what Sankara has in mind as the aim of his philosophical inquiry. And to this we now turn.
http://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/i_es/i_es_denic_self_frameset.htm

posted October 04, 2007 11:36 AM         

The singer is India's Nightingale Lata Mangeshkar. The video link, as provided by Mannu above is again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwZzudhXBOg

Singer, Lata Mangeshkar’s voice:

Ishwar satya hai
Satya hi Shiv hai
Shiv hi sundar hai
Jaago uth kar dekho
Jeevan jyot ujaagar hai
God is truth
Truth is indeed God
God is indeed beautiful
Rise up, (all ye people), and behold…
The light of life is lit…

Satyam Shivam sundaram, satyam Shivam sundaram
Satyam Shivam sundaram, sundaram, aah, aah aah
Satyam Shivam sundaram, satyam Shivam sundaram

Truth is God is Beauty (several times)

--CHORUS--
(Ishwar satya hai)

--FEMALE--
Sundaram

--CHORUS--
(Satya hi Shiv hai)

--FEMALE--
Sundaram

--CHORUS--
(Shiv hi sundar hai)

--FEMALE--
Aah aah aah aah

--CHORUS--
(Satyam Shivam sundaram)

--FEMALE--
Satyam Shivam sundaram, satyam Shivam sundaram

Raam avadh mein
Rama in avadh (present day Lucknow),
Raam avadh mein, kaashi mein Shiv kanhaa vrindaavan mein
Rama in avadh, Shiv in Kashi (present day Benaras), and Krishna in Vrindavan
Dayaa karo Prabhu, dekho inko – 2
Shower your kindness, Lord, that I may see them
Har ghar ke aangan mein
In every household
Radha Mohan sharanam
Radha lies at the feet of Mohan (Krishna)
Satyam Shivam sundaram, aah
Satya is Shiv is Beauty

--CHORUS--
Satyam Shivam sundaram

--FEMALE--
Aah aah, aah aah aah aah, aah aah aah, oh oh oh, aah aah aah

Ek soorya hai
There is but one Sun
Ek soorya hai, ek gagan hai, ek hi dharti mata
There is but one Sun, one sky, indeed one earth
Dayaa karo Prabhu, ek bane sab – 2
Shower your kindness, Lord, that we all become one
Sab ka ek se naata
And have one relation (of brotherhood, love, etc.)
Radha Mohan sharanam
Radha lies at the feet of Mohan (Krishna) [not very sure about this line.]
Satyam Shivam sundaram, aah
Truth is God is Beauty.
--CHORUS--
(Satyam Shivam sundaram)

--FEMALE--
Ishwar satya hai

--CHORUS--
(Satyam Shivam sundaram)

--FEMALE--
Satya hi Shiv hai, Shiv hi sundar hai, aah aah
Satyam Shivam sundaram, aah satyam Shivam sundaram

--CHORUS--
(Satyam Shivam sundaram - 4)

posted October 05, 2007 04:09 PM         

Such a beautiful, beautiful voice!