Excerpt from the great treatise on Yoga – The Tree of Yoga (BKS Iyengar)

debzopinion — Tue, 18 May 2010 03:49:31 +0000

Part Two – The tree and its parts. Chapter: The bark.

Page 60

The five organs of perception come into contact with taste, sound,
touch, sight and smell, and send their impressions to the mind. Through
the mind they are stored in the well of memory. Memory longs for further
experiences and ignites the mind, which by-passes intelligence and
directly stimulates the organs of action to go in pursuit of these
experiences. Throughout this process, the intelligence tries to measure
the advantages and disadvantages so that it may balance the memory, the
mind and the organs of perception. But they do not listen to the
judicious advice of the intelligence. Because of past experiences of
pleasure, they thirst of more and more. Thus, demands and desires
increase. The desires tempt the mind for further enjoyment. Through
this repetitive enjoyment, the organs of action lose their potency
and are no longer capable of exciting the organs of perception or the
mind. One continues to hanker for past impressions, but fails to get
satisfaction. This breeds the seed of unhappiness. Here, the fifth
aspect of yoga, pratyahara, enters as a true friend to rescue the
unhappy person, so that he or she may find happiness in the delight of
the soul.

The mind, which until now had by-passed intelligence, approaches
intelligence for guidance. Then intelligence with its discriminative
faculty weighs right and wrong, and guides the mind not to depend
completely on memory and its impressions. This act of going against
the current of memory and mind is pratyahara. With the help of
intelligence, the senses commence an inner journey and return to their
point of origin. This process of weighing one’s instincts, thoughts
and actions is the practice of renunciation (vairagya). Detachment
from the affairs of the world and attachment towards the soul is
pratyahara. From now, energy is conserved and used when necessary
without hankering for repetitions. Memory experiences new and fresh
impressions, and is subdued, becoming subservient to consciousness.
It is consciousness which grasps intelligence (buddhi) and makes it
rest at the source of conscience (dharmendriya). Then impulsive
nature comes to an end, and intuitive insight flows freely.

The rotten Windows experience

debzopinion — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 08:43:53 +0000

Being a regular user of Windows, I never thought recovering from a boot problem could be a nightmare. My laptop came preinstalled with xp – I didn’t have an install CD and hadn’t configured what is called the “recovery console” on the boot menu. So, I checked out the internet resources, hoping for a free solution as the XP CD is quite expensive. In retrospect, I think that I should have avoided doing that because the solutions were impractical, requiring floppies. (I did not know then about the Recovery Console – perhaps some prominent website could have mentioned it as the first option, stating that it is available for free to burn on to a CD. But no such luck.) I tried to hack the problem with other freeware tools, and found that the lack of clear documentation, for non-geeks like me, made the task next to impossible. Sure enough, the tools were listed and available for download at a nominal cost, but there were no instructions on which errors one could look for or remove by using them.

The first jargon you come across is “bootdisk”. Today’s user takes a “disk” as meaning a CD. But beware!! They mean a 1.44 MB floppy disk. That’s your bootdisk! Even official support sites explain about creating boot floppies. Who, in this world, still uses a floppy disk, and which computer/laptop has a floppy drive? As if listening to music means having audio cassette tapes. The funny thing is that an alternative iso image is not available. Simple question – if boot floppy images for Windows XP are freely available, then why not a bootcd iso image? What would most people want?

In lieu of this solution, the answers on the net expect the reader to have knowledge of Windows internals! The first Great advice: use a DOS bootdisk and run a chkdsk. So, you search for it on the net and you do get a free dos – FreeDos! But it won’t run your chkdsk program. So, make an online purchase and get MS-DOS 6.0. This doesn’t help, except that chkdsk tells you to run scandisk instead. That doesn’t solve anything (and run from a USB drive, it scans the damned USB drive itself and not the hard disk). Next, try downloading boot floppies that are freely available and use magic (a few freeware tools) to create a boot cd out of them. In other words, continue harassing an already harassed user till he buys an XP CD or physically carries the computer to a support centre. Being in a place without good public internet facilities to keep experimenting, I was stuck with my standalone system. My Wubi installed linux software was of no use as the ntfs partition contained it. Finally, i gave up on Windows, recovered a few important files (with a useful NTFS reader tool), wiped out my hard disk and installed linux. As a near-zero cost alternative, it’s fantastic. Installation was not smooth but workable answers were easily available. This is very important.

Breathing is easier now!

Now, Windows 7 is out – the wait is over. But who was waiting?? Not I!

Note – Also worth?? mentioning is the advice you get by asking around – copy the files from the install CD (i.e. do a reinstall). This is a no-brainer that will require further upgrade to SP2 or SP3 (that’s hundreds of MB more). The word “fix” is rarely heard.

It's a beautiful life

Excerpt from the great treatise on Yoga – The Tree of Yoga (BKS Iyengar)

The rotten Windows experience