Ravi S. Iyer: Spiritual

My recent Facebook post shared this post about an ancient Narasimha avatar carving in Kaiyuan temple in Quanzhou, China:  https://www.facebook.com/thebharatpost/posts/a-fascinating-cultural-link-is-drawing-attention-to-a-rare-carving-of-narasimha-/1323013913019340/ The share comments of  my above mentioned recent Facebook post  are given below. Very interesting! More background from the wiki page for the Kaiyuan Temple (Quanzhou), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiyuan_Temple_(Quanzhou) : The temple is also one of few in China to contain Hindu monuments, left there by traders from Southern India. --- end wiki extract --- Quanzhou is a port city in the Southeastern coastal part of China. As per Gemini AI: In the "distant past"—specifically during the Song (960–1279) and Yuan (1271–1368) dynasties—Quanzhou was effectively the center of the maritime world. Because of its location, it was the primary destination for Tamil merchants and other South Indian traders who crossed ...

Last updated on 27 April 2026 My last spiritual update post was in end Jan. this year. Here's a short update to that. The Dissolve into God Sadhana (DIGS) is going on well. Regular prayer to Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba is also going on well. Some notes I had made over the past few months are given below. Feel the lasting truth break. I can have this break when I need a break from activity that is straining me mentally. This can be a long session of software development work which is becoming difficult like a long unsuccessful debugging or trial and error session. I have had partial success with this approach. Quite a few times, I take this break, which I also refer to as DIGS break. While I have not timed it, the impression I have is that after around half an hour of such a break, my mental tiredness reduces significantly. But sometimes I have failed in the attempted DIGS break. My mind does not settle into it. So I then typically unwind (the mind) and relax by doing something el...

Contents of my recent Facebook post are given below. Today Facebook showed me this 8 years old post of mine. While I rarely write on spirituality nowadays, I decided to share it along with some info. about the related book, as it may be of interest to any readers contemplating on self-publishing their first spiritual book. The book in the shared post was my first effort at publishing or rather self-publishing a book. Initially I explored a local printer in Puttaparthi - the pics in the shared post are of the local printer printed book (cover page and book printing in general was not very good). Later I moved to self-publishing the book through Pothi.com and Notion Press (both provided much better printing of the book including cover page). Note that I published the ebook as free download and the printed book at not-for-profit minimal price. The big takeaway for me from this effort was that even now years after I self-published it and moved on to other stuff, that book is around and se...

Last updated on 12 April 2026 After a gap of 50 years, human beings have gone beyond the earth's orbit, orbited the moon and are safely back on earth - Artemis II. Astounding feat! Congratulations to the NASA led Artemis II mission. The crew are: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen. That is a first in my adult lifetime as I was around 10 years old in December 1972 when Apollo 17 mission happened which was the last previous 'crewed' mission that went beyond low Earth orbit. I don't recall being aware of it at the time, though surely I would have read about it, seen it on TV, or been told about it then. It just did not leave a strong enough mark on my brain for me to recall it now over 50 years later. "During their lunar flyby, the (Artemis II) crew set the record for human distance from Earth, 252,756 miles (406,771 km), breaking Apollo 13's record of 248,655 miles (400,171 km).", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_II. Saw thes...