Satsang

Jai Jai Guruji

Pandit Nikhil Banerjee, sitar, Raag Malkauns, Part 1 and Excerpt

"My approach to music is very deep. I do not compromise. Indian music is based on spiritualism and was practiced and learned to know the Supreme Truth. A musician must lift up the souls of the listeners and take them towards Space. This is the history of Indian music."-Pt. Nikhil Banerjee

Toshio Matsumoto - Atman - 1975

Toshio Matsumoto (松本 俊夫, Matsumoto Toshio?) (born March 25, 1932) is a Japanese film director and video artist. He was born in Nagoya, Aichi, Japan and graduated from Tokyo University in 1955.

His first short was Ginrin, which he made in 1955, however his most famous film is Funeral Parade of Roses (aka Bara no soretsu). Funeral Parade of Roses influenced Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange heavily. The film was a retelling of Oedipus Rex, featuring a transsexual (portrayed by Peter) trying to move up in the world of the Japanese gay bars.

Matsumoto has published many books of photography and is currently a professor and dean of Arts at the Kyoto University of Art and Design. He was also the President of the Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences.

(This film is intense and could give sensitive people a headache or a fit)

Life After Poincaré: A Grigori Perelman Story

He has been called "the cleverest man in the world" and shook academia to its foundations when he announced that he had solved a fiendish mathematical problem that had baffled the planet's best brains for a century.

Yet Grigory Perelman, a 43 year-old Russian mathematician, has spurned plaudits and wealth to subsist like a hermit.

He lives in a two-bedroom flat with his elderly mother in a dilapidated Soviet-era tower block in St Petersburg and last week he proved again - in spectacular fashion - that he rejects society's norms.

Picking up the telephone, the bearded genius, who is jobless, found himself being offered an academic prize worth $US1million.

He politely but tersely told the American institute offering it that he would have to consider whether he wanted to accept the money or not.

"He said he would let me know at some point," said Jim Carlson, the president of the Clay Mathematics Institute. "He did not give a sense of timing but I do not expect it will be tomorrow.

"It is not every day that a person even entertains turning down a million dollars."

The Russian has refused high honours before. In 2006, he was offered and declined the Fields Medal, the mathematical world's equivalent of a Nobel Prize. He said he was "not interested in money or fame" and did not want "everybody looking at me like I'm a creature in a zoo".

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Bon Ceremony

Bön (Tibetan: བོན་; Wylie: bon; Lhasa dialect IPA: [pʰø̃̀(n)]) is the oldest spiritual tradition of Tibet. Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, has recently recognized the Bön tradition as the fifth principal spiritual school of Tibet, along with the Nyingma, Sakya, Kagyu, and Gelug schools of Buddhism, despite the long historical competition of influences between the Bön tradition and Buddhism in Tibet.

The syllable -po or -pa is appended to a noun in Tibetan to designate a person who is from that place or performs that action; "Bönpo" thus means a follower of the Bön tradition, "Nyingmapa" a follower of the Nyingma tradition, and so on. (The feminine parallels are -mo and -ma, but these are not generally appended to the names of the Tibetan religious traditions.)

Often described as the shamanistic and animistic tradition of the Himalayas prior to Buddhism's rise to prominence in the 7th century, more recent research and disclosures have demonstrated that both the religion and the Bönpo are significantly more rich and textured culturally than was initially thought by pioneering Western scholars.[citation needed] Some scholars do not accept the tradition that separates Bön from Buddhism; Christopher Beckwith calls it "one of the two types of Tibetan Buddhism" and writes that "despite continuing popular belief in the existence of a non-Buddhist religion known as Bön during the Tibetan Empire period, there is not a shred of evidence to support the idea... Although different in some respects from the other sects, it was already very definitely a form of Buddhism."