Dreaming In Indian Pdf

[Wesley Godinez]

LinkedInand 3rd parties use essential and non-essential cookies to provide, secure, analyze and improve our Services, and to show you relevant ads (including professional and job ads) on and off LinkedIn. Learn more in our Cookie Policy.

Sometimes I feel like I have become a nobody. Who am I without Gymnastics? But what I often forget is that 12 years ago, when I started gymnastics, I was a nobody then too. It took me all these years to build what I have become today. This is something most people forget or overlook. Especially when starting afresh. Everything is going to take time. But one day, before you even know it you will get there.

I was only a little girl, who saw something ( the Delhi commonwealth games ) and was inspired to do the same. Just a small girl with big dreams of representing her country. And after 8 years of hard work I was back on the commonwealth stage, in 2018. But this time not as a spectator, rather as a competitor. I had achieved what I had set out to achieve.

It is so easy for us to forget our dreams. Regardless of wether they are big or small, it is important to have dreams. It is only then that we keep reminding ourselves of where we want to go in life and what we want to achieve. When I first landed in London a month ago, I completely forgot what I told myself. It was not until people asked me why I chose London to attend my university, that I realised, I was living my dream. I may have forgotten it, but I believe somewhere deep down I always worked towards getting here.

It is easy to get carried away with what everyone else out there is doing, but in the end everything depends on us. The one thing I learned from being a rhythmic gymnast is that we are our only competitor. When I was out there on the mat it was just me. I only had to be better than I did from the previous competition. And I could achieve everything that I dreamed of. So keep dreaming and do not forget those dreams until you have achieved them!

RECENTLY AN intensive study in The New York Times concluded that two bottlenecks hindered economic progress in Asia. The first was the increasing population resulting from better medical care. The second was the failure to distribute equitably the benefits of investment in industry and agriculture. For centuries the West attempted to exploit Eastern civilization. Now it tries to explain it away with facile economic analysis.

Looking at an Asian religious festival, or at the eyes of a peasant planting rice in a lagoon shows the futility of explaining Asian society with Western ideas. What does "medical care" mean to people who believe in reincarnation and bodily deprivation? What does "industry" mean to people who still spin thread by hand? Western observers nevertheless continue to foist their models on Asian society. More tragically, they attempt to make the society conform to their models.

Louis Malle traveled to India with different expectations. After realizing the limitations of his bourgeois concerns with upper-middle-class love affairs, he divorced his wife and left France torn by the political riots of May 1968. Financed by the British Broadcasting Corporation and given a free reign by the Indian government to film whatever he wanted, he made Phantom India, a seven-segment television documentary. As the filming progressed he felt his own perspective becoming more and more insignificant when confronted with the vast panorama of life and death, food and hunger of the India countryside.

Consequently he decided to film India with as little personal intrusion as possible, letting the landscapes and people speak for themselves. At the same time in his laconic French accent Malle narrates his reaction to what he sees and his problems filming. The result is a successful amalgam that is both about the subcontinent and the difficulties of a Westerner trying to understand it.

MALLE'S MAIN concern is the interrelation between politics and the primitive in India. He starts his journey outside Madras looking at two women on their knees shearing bits of grass with little spades. "As so often in India, you can look at a scene in two ways," he says: He sees the beautiful harmony of these women with the earth; then he senses that they are forced to scratch a crop from practically barren ground for their livelihood. He discovers similar naturalistic and political significance in most Indian scenes.

Everyday occurrences here seem like atavistic ritual, mythical folklore and abject cruelty. He watches a group of Indian fishermen pull their small nets along the shore, hearing the hypnotic harmony of their voices all shouting in an unknown language. Sitting outside a Hindu Temple he finds a senile old man who says with wonderful pride that he works there as a "holy water carrier." He sees two Muslim men, their bodies blackened with soot, dancing at midday on a deserted street of a small village. Driving along a highway he stops to film vultures stripping a dead water buffalo of its flesh, burrowing into its eyes and mouth. His images of vitality alternately excite and disgust us.

He emphasizes the political implications in similar scenes. He shows us beautiful young women, Untouchables, who carry bowls of cement to a construction site. He sees uneducated and illiterate Brahmins collecting the fruits of their offices as priests. Wisely he refrains from a theoretical explanation of economic and social unequality. Looking across a field of bricks hand-made by laborers paid a few rupees a day he asks, "Need anymore be said about this... Doesn't this explain it all?"

THE SHOTS I LIKE best are those when Malle catches the essence of something non-western, showing a way of life so different it could come from another planet. In a religious demonstration in Madras hundreds of worshippers pull an enormous chariot through the streets and thousands follow. Frantically everyone waves his arms like a traffic policeman trying to direct the procession, but without any Western overriding compulsion for order. In fact the chariot seems to move itself. In another scene a group of villagers stand in front of their huts staring at the camera. It is impossible to know what they feel or hope. Their dark eyes seem expectant, urgent, yet resigned.

The most telling of these incidents is Malle's view of a group of mechanics trying to fix a flat tire. Ten of them jump on and off the tire trying to fit it to a rim that is too large. They don't understand that technology will not allow certain possibilities. Similarly, at the site of a derailed train Malle highlights another strange mixture of men and machines; dozens of workmen pile rocks under the wheels, forming a ramp for the train to move onto the track.

When Malle does put order into these diverse events it is more a reflection than a theory. He lets Indian politicians discuss splits within the Communist party, and films Indian gurus praying in isolation. He takes these themes to their furthest extremes by showing political problems in the slums of Bombay and the primitive beauty in natural village communes isolated from the Indian mainstream. These polarities bring some conclusions to the sequence of scenes.

But it is just as well that these attempts are only half-hearted. Any resolution of the material into an overriding significance would violate Malle's own admission of ignorance, and his refusal to patronize Indian civilization. Surely this vast culture has its own order which no Westerner can penetrate in two months. And surely there is no need to simplify or compromise it. Perhaps on his journey Malle learned the Indian virtue of humility. With all the wisdom of a grey-haired, bright-eyed maharaja he says we can only look at this foreign culture and beyond that "we are prisoners of our civilization, dreaming India."

Although the scientific community did not recognize lucid dreaming until 1978, the history of this unique dreaming experience reaches back thousands of years, and potentially into the Paleolithic Era. However, the first verifiable documentation of lucid dreaming originated in the East thousands of years ago.

The first known textual description of lucid dreaming dates to before 1000 BCE from the Upanishads, the Hindu oral tradition of spiritual lessons, philosophy and proverbs. The Vigyan Bhairav Tantra is another ancient Hindu tract that describes how best to direct consciousness within the dream and vision states of sleep. In the early centuries, Indian influence spread to the mountainous region of Tibet, where the animistic tradition of Bonpo maintains that lucid dreaming has been used in their meditations for over 12000 years.

The textual legacy that has survived the cultural fusion of this shamanic practice with Buddhism is the Tibetan Book of the Dead, conservatively dated to the 8th century. The partial translation of this esoteric track in 1935 by Walter Y. Evans-Wentz was the first time a Western audience, primarily historians and occultists, learned of these ancient practices. These ancient dream practices later influenced dream scholars in the 20th century, especially with the Humanistic and Transpersonal schools of American psychology.

Despite these strong classic beginnings, the study of lucid dreaming became stifled by the dominant religious atmosphere after the rise of Imperial Rome. Judea-Christian culture came to hold a suspicion about dreams, as theologians opined that that some dreams had access to higher truths, but others were false.

This misconception of dreams is probably the single greatest reason why Western culture still ignores dreams and why many superstitions about dreams persist. In many Christian cultures today, for instance, lucid dreaming is still associated with satanism and witchcraft.

In the seventeenth century, lucid dreams began to surface again, this time couched within the European culture of reason. Many dreamers shelved old superstitions and began to look inward again (or at least talk about such explorations openly). Pierre Gassendi and Thomas Reid are two Enlightenment era philosophers who discussed having waking-life levels of scrutiny and cognition within their dreams.

3a8082e126