An incident few months back improved my perspective of this world, especially our Indian society, with so many traditional practices which people blindly follow. Lot of these practices have changed to suite the needs and interests of people. Without knowing the true intent of such practices, following them can be of no use. Deep thoughts can actually give you some startling insights about the acute thinking of our ancestors, and many of the practices can actually hold sensible even in today's context. But more challenge lies in refining the practices to know what would have been exactly done when such a tradition began to be followed.
I attended a lecture by a person claiming to be doing research on "Life" and "Regression Therapy". He eventually started talking about meditation and the feeling of a replenished self after meditating. The next day, in a biochemistry class, my professor tried to give a scientific background to this aspect, which made me start thinking more about our traditions. He said, "when we meditate, we try to control the thinking process and try to streamline our thinking, by which brain cells get some rest as we start to use these cells in a more focused manner. This leads to replenishment of the energy within these cells eventually making us feel fresh".
A beautiful explanation to Cosmic Energy. If we start thinking parellely for other practices, we may actually start following many, more sincerely than how we do now.We have a practice of applying 'vibhoothi' to our forehead almost daily. People consider it as a protective shield bestowed by GOD himself. But the real fact can be very simple yet highly insightful. Take for instance why we are not allowed to cut nails after it gets dark, or the famous "pathu paathram", where our elders take so much care not to mix up easily degradable things like rice with longstanding things like ghee, or much more complicated things like caste system or the emergence of 'untouchables', every single aspect of our ancestral society had been conceived keeping in mind varied factors. But sadly things have been blown out of proportion and vaguely misinterpreted when being passed from one generation to another. More pathetic is when we don't even try to think about why elders tell us to do certain things. Either we do it just for the sake of respect, or we don't, also for the same reason.
Now is the time when the larger portion of the society is getting a kind of exposure that our previous generation were far behind from experiencing. There is more option to dig out reasons connecting popular beliefs and myths. Its always better to do things after we understand their real purpose. Coming out with rationalizations for a practice may enlighten even our elders and can exempt us from some really hard practices which can have no real sense in today's world. Start donning your thinking caps and lets enlighten ourselves as well as those around us. Some of them can even prove to be viable business solutions for our budding entrepreneurs.
I attended a lecture by a person claiming to be doing research on "Life" and "Regression Therapy". He eventually started talking about meditation and the feeling of a replenished self after meditating. The next day, in a biochemistry class, my professor tried to give a scientific background to this aspect, which made me start thinking more about our traditions. He said, "when we meditate, we try to control the thinking process and try to streamline our thinking, by which brain cells get some rest as we start to use these cells in a more focused manner. This leads to replenishment of the energy within these cells eventually making us feel fresh".
A beautiful explanation to Cosmic Energy. If we start thinking parellely for other practices, we may actually start following many, more sincerely than how we do now.We have a practice of applying 'vibhoothi' to our forehead almost daily. People consider it as a protective shield bestowed by GOD himself. But the real fact can be very simple yet highly insightful. Take for instance why we are not allowed to cut nails after it gets dark, or the famous "pathu paathram", where our elders take so much care not to mix up easily degradable things like rice with longstanding things like ghee, or much more complicated things like caste system or the emergence of 'untouchables', every single aspect of our ancestral society had been conceived keeping in mind varied factors. But sadly things have been blown out of proportion and vaguely misinterpreted when being passed from one generation to another. More pathetic is when we don't even try to think about why elders tell us to do certain things. Either we do it just for the sake of respect, or we don't, also for the same reason.
Now is the time when the larger portion of the society is getting a kind of exposure that our previous generation were far behind from experiencing. There is more option to dig out reasons connecting popular beliefs and myths. Its always better to do things after we understand their real purpose. Coming out with rationalizations for a practice may enlighten even our elders and can exempt us from some really hard practices which can have no real sense in today's world. Start donning your thinking caps and lets enlighten ourselves as well as those around us. Some of them can even prove to be viable business solutions for our budding entrepreneurs.
Thats really a nice point chandru. But one point is that not all of our elders themselves know the reason behind the traditional practices. That may be one reason behind the traditional practices getting diminished as time goes. The elders are not able to reason out and justify the practices they want the youngsters to follow.
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