if you’re sitting on the fence:
Commitment is a line you must cross....it is the difference between dreaming and doing.......
Henry David Thoreau: Whenever I have read any part of the Vedas, I have felt that some unearthly and unknown light illuminated me. In the great teaching of the Vedas, there is no touch of sectarianism. It is of all ages, climbs, and nationalities and is the royal road for the attainment of the Great Knowledge. When I read it, I feel that I am under the spangled heavens of a summer night.
I’m very excited to take a group to India for yoga and pilgrimage! It’s happening January 30th -February 11th 2009. We’ve realized that travel agents are charging us more so we’re booking our tickets on our own through www.expedia.com, www.travelocity.com, www.orbitz.com or the like.
Here’s quotations on India and the culture starting with my own....
What i love about india is that it’s still a living breathing timeless culture. If i want to know about ancient Greece, it’s hard to go to modern Greece and find somebody worshipping Zeus & to ask them questions. If i want to know about the ancient Egyptian culture I’m left merely speculating looking at tombs or museum artifacts. I love the fact that India is a portal into another time. You can find people who still speak & write in sanskrit, practice the rituals, the meditation, the medicine, the holidays, the cooking, the astrology, the dance, of course the asanas, and so much more of the ancient world-i always feel as if I’m transported into another time zone worlds away from the strip malls that surround me.-Raghunath
“Nearly all the philisophical and mathematical doctrines attributed to Pythagoras are derived from India.” Ludwig von Schroder
Keith Bellows, VP - National Geographic Society : "There are some parts of the world that, once visited, get into your heart and won’t go. For me, India is such a place. When I first visited, I was stunned by the richness of the land, by its lush beauty and exotic architecture, by its ability to overload the senses with the pure, concentrated intensity of its colors, smells, tastes, and sounds... I had been seeing the world in black & white and, when brought face-to-face with India, experienced everything re-rendered in brilliant technicolor."
"If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions, I should point to India -Max Mueller
"In India, I found a race of mortals living upon the Earth, but not adhering to it, inhabiting cities, but not being fixed to them, possessing everything, but possessed by nothing"
Apollonius Tyanaeus quotes (Neo-Pythagorean)
Civilizations have arisen in other parts of the world. In ancient and modern times, wonderful ideas have been carried forward from one race to another...But mark you, my friends, it has been always with the blast of war trumpets and the march of embattled cohorts. Each idea had to be soaked in a deluge of blood..... Each word of power had to be followed by the groans of millions, by the wails of orphans, by the tears of widows. This, many other nations have taught; but India for thousands of years peacefully existed. Here activity prevailed when even Greece did not exist... Even earlier, when history has no record, and tradition dares not peer into the gloom of that intense past, even from until now, ideas after ideas have marched out from her, but every word has been spoken with a blessing behind it and peace before it. We, of all nations of the world, have never been a conquering race, and that blessing is on our head, and therefore we live....!"
Swami Vivekananda, Great Indian Philosopher
"We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made!"
Albert Einstein
Mark Twain, American Author: "India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. Our most valuable and most astrictive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only!"
"So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked."
"In religion, India is the only millionaire... the One land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for all the shows of all the rest of the globe combined."
