Change is Coming to Planet Earth…


“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order” Carl Jung

There appears to be a tremendous increase in incidence of negative news in our lives over the recent past. Natural disasters, climate change, violence, financial crisis have run havoc in people’s lives – better monitoring and live media coverage notwithstanding. The 2004 Tsunami killing over 200,000 people, Cyclone Nargis leaving 100,000 dead, deadly Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake in China that rendered over 4.5 million homeless. Similarly, the impact of climate change has been alarming – worldwide, the proportion of hurricanes reaching categories 4 or 5 has risen from 20% in the 1970s to 35% in the 1990s; the increased frequency of extreme local weather like the 2003 heat wave across Europe that killed over 30,000 people; the receding glaciers (according to the UN, Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 possibly impacting over two billion people); the increasing deterioration of ecosystem and the ensuing diseases with newer mutants of viruses; and the disappearing bee colonies, impacting agricultural produce in many developed countries. Then there’s the destruction caused by social strife – the reduction in rainfall in Darfur has turned millions of hectares of already marginal land into desert, leading to one of the largest social conflicts. Simultaneously, we still have about half of world’s population living below incomes of US$2 per day (World Bank, 2001). Violence emanating from wars, terrorism, religious fanaticism, and social-strife has been enormous – over 10,000 people died or got injured from terrorist attacks during 2008; the number of casualties from Iraq war alone is estimated to have topped a million; over 200,000 people killed and over two million displaced in Darfur. Finally, there’s the recent economic crisis, worst since the great depression – adding despair to millions. The global chaos and despondency is all around us.

“You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Based on numerous spiritual scriptures, it appears the time for a new world order to be born…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Global challenges, Personal mastery, Self-growth, Spiritual | Comments Off on Change is Coming to Planet Earth…

The Most Fascinating Movie of Our Lives!


One fish said to the other, “Do you believe in this ocean that they talk about?” So goes an ancient Chinese saying and I think it well illustrates how narrow our vision of the world and the universe can be. We see the world from our limited perceptual framework. Despite an overwhelming evolution of the human race, an average human mind is severely restricted by what it can perceive through the senses. What we can hear is limited by the frequencies our ears can process; dogs can hear many higher frequencies and hence have a very different perception of the sounds out there. Our sight is limited by the light frequencies our eyes can relate to; since pit vipers can sense heat from infrared rays (like night vision goggles), they must view the same world very differently. If we had a different receiver mechanism, we would be hearing other frequencies and seeing differently. From our knowledge of science, we know so many things are just not what they appear – earth is not flat, the ground below us is not stationery; the sun doesn’t rise in the east and doesn’t set in the west.

The fact is we are seeing and hearing what we can and not what the reality is. The world out there is an unprocessed and formless data, waiting to be interpreted by us. The human nervous system takes in only the minutest proportion, less than one part per billion, of the total energy vibrating in the environment. As Marshall Glickman describes, “Research shows that each conscious moment is actually comprised of many much smaller and unconscious “mini” moments, each appearing and disappearing rapidly.” According to Buddhist texts, it takes 17 mind-moments for a cognitive experience to register. As this happens real quickly, we register uninterrupted awareness – no different from a movie that seems continuous even though it’s made of several rapidly flashed still photos. We are so engrossed in this fascinating movie that we are unable to step aside to distinguish between the movie and the…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Self-growth, Spiritual | 2 Comments

Personal Change and World Peace!


Three of the biggest long-term challenges facing our world today are wars/ terrorism, poverty, and climate change. Although at varying levels, and in some ways interrelated, each of these has already disrupted our lives and holds substantial potential to escalate and truly threaten the survival of the human race. In light of the recent events in Mumbai, here is an article I had written for the Sunday Times of India, focusing on one of the fundamental aspects related to creating long-term world peace.

Wars and violence have been an integral part of our civilizations. However, in recent times, spurred by terrorism, world peace is threatened at an unprecedented scale. A quick search shows over 10,000 people died or got injured from terrorist attacks during 2008 itself. Similarly, the number of casualties from Iraq war alone is estimated to have topped a million. As one wonders about the root cause of this extraordinary violence, some of the obvious reasons that come to mind include – religious differences, socio-economic inequality, technology and ease of communication, and globalization of arms trade and people mobility. However, underlying all these seems to be a more fundamental and longer-term issue – and that’s the deeper emotional issue of anger and hatred. It originates at an individual level and as it spreads and gains acceptance among a wider group, it has the potential to get substantially amplified. It doesn’t matter where the violence is directed, anger and hatred remain at the very core of it.

Anger is a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure, or hostility. It is an emotional state that may range from minor irritation to intense rage. It can be caused by any number of triggers – someone cutting our lane on the freeway, someone saying hurtful things to us, someone doing things that appear unjust and so forth. Often, the underlying factor bringing up anger is a sense of lack of control – a perceived threat to getting what we want. This desire for control maybe inborn or may grow through our childhood and other…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Global challenges, Personal mastery | 3 Comments

Madly in Love…


They say marriages are made in heaven. At the time of marriage, all couples seem ecstatic about their relationship and sound crazy about each other. They all express that relationship to be the best thing that ever happened to them and they are willing to walk on water to please each other. However, as time passes, some things begin to change. Somewhere down the road, the intensity of that love begins to wane; for some, all it takes is the honeymoon trip for the feeling of disappointment to surface. Consequently, many marriages eventually go through a significant deterioration in the relationship. Some of the stats are scary – in many western societies, one out of every two marriages results in divorce; and, in some, only a third of all second marriages survive. While the numbers currently look much better for Asia, the trends are equally alarming. What happens to all those beautiful marriages? Where do we go wrong in our relationships? There are obviously many perspectives to this, but let me point out a few key aspects related particularly to our emotional make-up that are at play here and how we can learn to deal with them. First, it’s the limitation of our emotional intelligence – our inability to understand and manage our own emotions and that of our partner. How well do we know ourselves, our triggers, our filters, our hot spots? How deftly can we read our partners’ feelings and emotions? Even if we can understand the partner’s emotions, what choices do we make in reacting to them? At the start of the relationship, all mannerisms of our partner seem so adorable – over time, as the magic of initial infatuation begins to wear off, many of the same habits begin to annoy us. Because of our limited emotional bandwidth, and consequent impatience and discomfort with giving space to the partner, we have the tendency to want the partner to be identical to us – in our likes and dislikes, behavior patterns, parenting style and so forth….

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Relationships | 4 Comments

Reinventing Ourselves in Times of Trouble


In the background of how the current economic and financial crisis is impacting individual lives and families, a leading Indian newspaper had recently asked me to write a short piece on some thoughts around reinventing ourselves in such challenging situations. The same is reproduced below.

Every time we are faced with a real personal crisis — loss of job, onset of a terminal illness, divorce or financial crisis — some of the questions that cross our mind are: Why did this happen to me? Will it ever get better? How will this impact my social position? It is only natural to start feeling down and feel anxious about the future. However, people who have weathered such storms, and whom I have had the opportunity to meet during my corporate career and my life coaching practice, usually say that the crisis was the best thing that happened to them. It made them to get off their treadmill of maddening activity and do some real soul searching towards creating a better and happier future.

Drawing from those experiences, it may be useful to look at ways of dealing with such crises in multiple dimensions.

First, it is critical to maintain a healthy sense of optimism about the future — not because we want to psyche ourselves into positive thinking but because things do get better from points of high pessimism. Surveys of people faced with a personal crisis demonstrate that the same people generally feel much better about themselves and life in general just a year after the initial event. It is equally important to have a strong sense of self-belief — the belief that not only will things get better, but that I will also have a meaningful role to play in it. As Graham Bell said, “When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us.”

If the crisis involves some form of financial impact, it may be useful to also…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Global challenges, Self-growth | 3 Comments

Maslow’s Hierarchy Revisited…the Eastern Way!


Reading through some of the ancient Vedic texts, I was amazed to notice some uncanny similarities between Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs and the text’s description of the sequence of psychophysical energy centers in our body. Even though the two theories are drawn from very different perspectives, and during substantially different time periods, it was their curious similarities and differences as well as the resultant implications for personal growth that got me energized to write this piece.

You are probably quite familiar with Abraham Maslow’s work – a theory in psychology, written in a paper published in 1943, which set out five fundamental human needs and their hierarchical nature. Maslow studied what he called exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass, along with the healthiest one percent of his college student population, to postulate this theory. As you will notice from the pyramid below, the five needs are physiological needs, safety needs, belonging needs, esteem needs and self-actualization needs. A key aspect of the model is the hierarchical nature of these needs. The lower the needs in the hierarchy, the more fundamental they are and the more a person will tend to abandon the higher needs in order to pay attention to sufficiently meeting the lower needs. For example, when we are ill, we care little for what others think about us – all we want is to get better. The first four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called “deficiency needs”; if they are not met, the body gives no indication of it physically, but the individual feels anxious and tense. Maslow believed that while the deficiency needs may be seen as “basic”, and can be met and neutralized (i.e. they stop being motivators in one’s life), self-actualization is a “being” or “growth” need and hence can be an enduring motivation and a driver for long-term behavior.

Let’s now briefly examine the concept of the psychophysical energy centers in our body….

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Personal mastery, Self-growth, Spiritual | 5 Comments

Where is Our Mind Located…and its Powerful Significance!


When our mind is at peace, our bodies look relaxed. When we are physically hurt, we become more prone to experiencing unpleasant feelings. Feelings of joy reflect on our faces as do feelings of anger and anxiety. Every time we are scared, our bodies go stiff. If the brain is the nerve center of our thoughts, and the heart of our emotions, how does our body so well reflect what we are thinking/ feeling at any time? Is it possible that our minds reside throughout the body and not just in the brain? Also, if we didn’t have some degree of innate intelligence all through our body, how could we experience sensations everywhere?

There has now been extensive research on the presence of mind in our bodies, that suggests that the neuropeptides, chemical substances that form the communication network of our emotions, are present not just in the brain but everywhere in the body. As Dr. Cadence Pert, chief of brain biochemistry at National Institute of Mental Health in the US writes, “These findings go beyond the often-mentioned concept of power of mind over body. Indeed, the more we know about neuropeptides, the harder it is to think in the traditional terms of a mind and a body. It makes more and more sense to speak of a single integrated entity, a body-mind”. So, while the brain remains the primary analyzer, our mind is not located there and is instead more like an information-processing field spread across the body. Every cell in our body is capable of feeling; every cell can express emotion. No wonder then, people’s thoughts, emotions and expressions sometimes change after undergoing an organ transplant.

Once we recognize that feelings are essentially felt in the entire body, it is easy to appreciate how emotional problems can manifest into physical disease. As Marshall Glickman writes, “Neuroscientists have learnt that there is a sophisticated communication network between the various cells throughout the brain…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Self-growth, Spiritual | 4 Comments

The Olympics, Transcending Ourselves, and Personal Mastery


“The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well” – The Olympic Creed

The underlying emphasis in the above message seems to be based on a human being’s journey towards overcoming one’s own limitations and achieving personal peak performance – in a way, somehow transcending oneself. Watching the Olympics over the last few days has brought to fore the ability of certain individuals to do this with uncanny consistency. While Michael Phelps, Tiger Woods, and Roger Federer are great recent examples of this in sports, various individuals like Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, and Neil Armstrong have achieved this state at the very highest levels, in other fields as well.

In this post, I have attempted to capture what I believe are some of the most critical ingredients for achieving this level of peak performance in any type of profession or vocation we maybe engaged in.

Is it your calling?

For starters, is it a job or a career or your calling that you are pursuing? A detailed study of attitudes and general orientation towards work, done in 1997 by Dr. Amy Wrzesniewski, a professor of business at the New York University, showed workers broadly divided into three groups – those who saw their work as a job, those as a career, and those as their calling. The people in the first group are in employment because they really need the monthly paycheck and may be willing to move to another organization for higher salary. The second group is focused on building a career – for them it’s more about the position, growth, and the prestige. However, they may get disenchanted when the string of promotions stop. Finally, there is a small percentage of people engaged in what is their true calling…

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Posted by Rajiv Vij | Leadership, Personal mastery, Self-growth | 2 Comments

Attachment, Suffering, Ignorance and Personal Mastery


Enough and more has been written about attachment being the primary source of human suffering – attachment to money, fame, power, relationships and so on. Buddhism has strong grounding in it, Hinduism talks at length about it. Simultaneously, most spiritual scriptures also talk about the journey of self-awareness, leading to gaining knowledge about the ultimate truth about one self.

One of the things I have been lately wondering about is the sequencing of what comes first – detachment or self-knowledge? Does one lead to the other? Further, are the two related in some manner? What all does the context of detachment encompass – ambition, money, relationships?

My sense, based on coaching engagements with a wide diversity of individuals, coupled with my personal experiences, is that it’s the journey of self-awareness and gaining knowledge about the truth of our existence that is at the core of overcoming our daily frustrations, anxiety, regrets and suffering. As we embark on this journey, it allows us to get closer to our inner selves, the true selves. As we become aware of how our world is created by our perceptions, it moves us towards realizing that we are not our minds; even though we find it hard to not be controlled by our minds. As William Blake said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite”. It initiates us into becoming an observer to our conditioned minds and witness the games the mind plays – how the mind stays focused (and anxious) of the imaginary future, or the regrets of the past, keeps us closed to several opportunities for love and sharing, loves to remind us what we don’t have rather than encourage us to feel grateful for what we have. This then leads to the question of who are we then? As we search for the answers and begin to appreciate the truth about our reality and the manifestation of that reality in multiple forms, including our current existence, we move significantly forward…

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The Cycle of Karma…and How Come Nice Guys Don’t Always Get The Top Job?


Must be their karma? Many a time when we are faced with an unusually challenging situation or get a windfall, we tell ourselves, “Oh, this must be our karma”. In India, where the word karma and its related concepts originated around 5th century BC, often times the contentment on the faces of the financially poor people is explained as their reconciliation with their karma. It appears the word karma is often used to describe the correlation between one’s past deeds and one’s current or future circumstances. While that’s a fairly accurate expression of the concept of karma, here are some additional insights into the subtleties of what it is and how we can better apply it to our lives.

The ancient Indian literature on karma brings it forth as the notion of a cyclic process of our every action or intention leading to lasting impressions on our psyche, that in turn impact our future behavior (action or intention), leading to new lasting impressions being formed. As Chip Hartranft explains in his book on the teachings of Patanjali (an Indian sage who lived in the 6th century BC), any kind of volitional body or mind movement, physical or mental, constitutes a kind of karma. Each action, or even intent, leaves an impression in the deepest part of our psyche and comes up in the future at the time of a related thought or action. This is how our childhood impressions of relationships, role of parents, money, success, social conformity etc. create an inner perceptual map that shows up to determine our response in relation to similar issues in the future. The outcome of that behavior, in turn, creates new inner impressions, thus continuing the cycle of latent impressions and activation. As Eckhart Tolle illustrates in his recent book “A new Earth”, this cycle can also be explained through a scientific principle. As Newton’s third law of motion states, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Since this law applies to all types of energy forces, it must apply…

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