Venky Devanarayanan

“There is a wonderful story in the yogic lore. One day, one gnana yogi, one bhakthi yogi, one karma yogi, and one kriya yogi were walking together. Usually these four people can never be together, because gnana yogi has total disdain for every other yoga; it is the yoga of intelligence. Normally, an intellectual person, a thinking person has complete disdain for everybody else. A bhakthi yogi, full of emotion and love, thinks all this gnana, karma and kriya yoga is just a waste of time. Just love God and it will happen. The karma yogi thinks that everybody is lazy and that they have all kinds of fancy philosophies; what needs to be done is work. One must work and work and work. The kriya yogi just laughs at everything. The whole existence is energy. If you don’t transform your energy, whether you long for God or you long for anything, nothing is going to happen. So they can’t be together, but today they were walking together. Then it started to rain. They were in the forest and it started raining. They started running, looking for shelter, and there they found an ancient temple which just had a roof, no walls on the sides. In the center, there was a Linga. So these people went inside the temple for shelter. The storm became more and more furious and it started blowing in torrents. The fury of the storm was getting into the temple so they went closer and closer and closer to the Linga. There was no other way to be because it was just blasting them from all sides. Then it became very furious. There was no other place; the only way they could get some protection was for all four to hug the Linga. Suddenly they felt something enormous happening. A huge presence, a fifth presence was there. Then all of them said, “Why now? For so many years we have pursued You and nothing happened; why now?” Then Shiva said, “At last the four of you got together. I have been waiting for this to happen for a long time.”
― Sadhguru, Mystic's Musings

“Faith is a strange creature,” Schuster said. “Like a falcon that nests year after year in the same place, but then flies away, sometimes for years, only to return again, stronger than ever.”
― Mark T. Sullivan, Beneath a Scarlet Sky

“It seems that often when problems arise, our outlook becomes narrow. All of our attention may be focused on worrying about the problem, and we may have a sense that we’re the only one that is going through such difficulties. This can lead to a kind of self-absorption that can make the problem seem very intense. When this happens, I think that seeing things from a wider perspective can definitely help—realizing, for instance, that there are many other people who have gone through similar experiences, and even worse experiences. This practice of shifting perspective can even be helpful in certain illnesses or when in pain. At the time the pain arises it is of course often very difficult, at that moment, to do formal meditation practices to calm the mind. But if you can make comparisons, view your situation from a different perspective, somehow something happens. If you only look at that one event, then it appears bigger and bigger. If you focus too closely, too intensely, on a problem when it occurs, it appears uncontrollable. But if you compare that event with some other greater event, look at the same problem from a distance, then it appears smaller and less overwhelming.”
― Dalai Lama XIV, The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living

“At present the meat industry not only inflicts untold misery on billions of sentient beings but is also one of the chief causes of global warming, one of the main consumers of antibiotics and poison, and one of the foremost polluters of air, land, and water. According to a 2013 report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, it takes nearly four thousand gallons of fresh water to produce a little over two pounds of beef, compared to the seventy-five gallons needed to produce the same weight of potatoes.11”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century