Bringing God's Mercy into your own home.

Though I was never shown how to cook basmati rice in person.... except Prabhupada always says he is present whenever his personal instruction is passed on without alteration 😉 and the cookbooks follow his methods 👌✔✔✔

Everybody adds their own touch as well, I guess. Mine is using lukewarm water instead of hot or cold. You might use less or more salt than me. Also, the consciousness of the person is important because it goes in it - for example what they are thinking while sautéing the rice and stirring it in the ghee, being careful not to burn it by cooking it evenly. I like taking care and to me that is the secret to making good basmati rice. If one finds that part a chore then the cook is spoiling the preparation with bad vibes eg resentment instead of love.

One starts out by seeing all food as God-sent. So the food is honoured as Brahman. One is thinking "thank you Lord for providing this food, it all comes from You" or at least being aware that Mother Nature is one of God's Agents and that it isn't a random product of the material world, as scientists and atheists so blindly reason. They are thinking "All this is mine, let me enjoy", oblivious to where the food comes from.

One who at least sees food as being part of the Universal Whole is worshipping God in His impersonal aspect. It is not as powerful as offering to the personal form of the Lord as in bhakti-yoga wherein it becomes transformed into prasadam, nevertheless there is still spiritual benefit perhaps equivalent to partaking of the Host at Mass - well, you can do it every day instead of only at  the Church on Sundays.

Sometimes religion becomes institutionalised, thereby taking away power from the lay practitioner. Anyone can practice bhakti-yoga at home - you don't have to go to a temple to worship. And you can get your own "bread and wine, the flesh and blood of Christ" every day of the week by doing away with reliance on rubber-stamped "Representatives of The Church".

Instead, Christians are made slaves to the hierarchy. Before the invention of the Gutenberg press, people didn't even have access to their own Bibles! My, how that changed things - and delivered Christianity to the masses, freeing it from the constraints of the Roman Catholic Church.

'Thou protesteth too much'........

First Reef

(my first and only Wonkypedia article) 

A surf break at Point Leo, on the Mornington Peninsula, one of the closest surf beaches to Melbourne in Victoria, Australia known as First Reef^{[1][2][3][4][5]} or more colloquially just "The Reef". Until the 1970s there was little or no resident surfing population in Point Leo, so the Reef was mainly surfed by the few transient waveriders who were exploring the many breaks to be found in Westernport Bay.

One of only a few left-handers inside the bay, although it can be a fairly long wave on a big swell, it is more often just a short ride- a take-off peak, a bowl section and a shorebreak. It also "boasts" a very average right-hander that occasionally produces similar results but without the bowl, being more of a wall-type wave with several sections. One of three reefs between Suicide and Honeysuckle Points, First Reef is a sand and seaweed covered submerged igneous reef of fairly regular convex relief, extending perhaps a hundred metres out from the shorebreak where the waves eventually dissipate. Its versatile nature thus caters for beginners and average to experienced surfers alike, but probably is best known as a haven for goofy footers.

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1Early Surfers
• 2The first "wave"
• 3The second "wave"
• 4The "backwash"
• 5References

Early Surfers

The earliest surfers (using the term loosely to include all forms of the art) were probably body surfers, from when the Australian Army used the area for training during the Second World War,^[6] and afterwards by lifesavers who eventually formed the Point Leo Surf Lifesaving Club in 1955.^[7] Early use of wooden paddleboards was superseded in the 1960s by fibreglass surfboards which became popular as the newly introduced sport of surfing grew. Frequent visitors to the area included daytrippers from Melbourne and other towns close by, part-time residents with holiday houses, and regular campers over the summer season, some of whom surfed the reefs and shorebreaks up and down the beach.

Sporadically populated from the original settlement, for many post-war years the only residents were a couple of elderly retired people, a spinster Mrs Woodward and nearby a bachelor Mr Ashe, and the odd temporary janitor who tended the Point Leo Boat Club. For many years Point Leo was almost deserted apart fom the seasonal summer rush and the odd Surf Lifesaving Carnival. In the early-1970s, the resident surfing population was born with the arrival of two families: first the Treloar's, of who Wally Treloar took on the position of the Foreshore Ranger; and then the Clatworthy's, of who Colin ran the Milk Bar, almost tripling the number of residents to nearly 20 – and with it, producing a handful of the first full-time resident local surfers - Sam and Kay Treloar, and Mick, Andy, and Johnny Clatworthy. Apart from semi-permanent residents Bob Molck and Alan Bounds, scarcely any other surfers could be found during the week whilst the numbers would swell on weekends if the weather made conditions favourable for good surfing. As Point Leo became more and more popular, fanatic surfers increased in numbers. By the end of the decade, the situation had changed so much with the inundation of wave-hungry surfers from the explosion of this latest "hip fad", that those idyllic conditions are now seldom found, as if they have almost disappeared forever.

The first "wave"

There were a number of "surfers" in the early days – the term had a broad scope of definition ranging from wooden paddleboard riders, bodysurfers, lilo and tyre tube wannabe's as well as the later polyurethane and fibreglass boardriders. The P.L.S.L.C. (Point Leo Surf Lifesaving Club) ran lifesaving drills and competitions in the 50's and 60's which incorporated surf-riding skills as part of rescue procedures, although the art of surfing was not yet widely recognised as such.

In the early 60's and 70's there were a number of adventurous early surfers i.e. Mick and Andy Mansour, Sandy McKendricks, Max Bryant, Dennis aka Little "D", some guy called Nicko (perhaps Little D's oder brother) , and Flinders pioneer local Archie Cairns Jnr, the trio of brightly-coloured red surf-skiers Joe, Cyril, and Vaughn (all of who have surfbreaks named after them at nearby Flinders)... and the legendary veteran, teeth-gritting, sandshoe-wearing "Old Man Weir".

Next came an influx of regional "locals" who increasingly frequented the oft-performing surfbreaks, from Melbourne suburbs, Phillip Island (and even the odd West Coaster) - Paul Pascoe from South Africa, Warren Partington, Mick Marchant, Ron Roozen, Dale Evans, John Jolly, brothers Barry and Paul Talman, Alan (Wally) Tiballs, Graeme Hannel, Cameron Jones, Hewey, Ammitzbol, Maggot, Piercy, the Schaeffer brothers Mick and Dave, oh and the Trickle Brothers etc. Whenever the swell got too big for the beaches facing Bass Strait there would be in invasion of Sorrento and Portsea crew like the Parky bros Mick and Kieth, Septic, Coker, Danny Foley, Zac, Zulu, Andy Batten, etc., but more often at Pines or The Point as they handled any size wave. 

Many long-term campers spawned young surfers as well - Robbie and Gus Tankard, Ian Treloar, Gary and Wayne New, Kelly and Danny Pritchard, Evelyn Vanderaa and siblings Sonia and Leonard, Karen Young and of course Ian 'Mumbles' Mulligan.

A decade or more later, and best known by the tell-tale nickname of "Reefers" (perhaps from their predilection with marijuana use?) the main group of year-round surfers was made up of teenagers and young adults, mostly from Frankston/Seaford who started coming down for the weekends in the early-to-mid-1970s, often sleeping overnight in their panel vans and station wagons to catch the best of the early morning's surf the next day.

Although predominantly surfed by goofy-footers, First Reef attracted aspiring surfers in all forms, giving it a "cosmopolitan" atmosphere unlike any other local break - with goofies, naturals, kneeboarders, mat riders, young and old, male and female, beginners and experienced - and occasionally even the odd bodysurfer. This lent itself to a "carnival" type atmosphere like nowhere else in Westernport Bay, more relaxed and hassle-free than the more dangerous breaks with exposed basalt rocks and often bigger, more powerful waves. On hot summer days when the soft, sandy beach was packed, the overcrowding actually made surfing almost dangerous from the sheer risk of being run over by a wanna-be "surfer" not quite in control of their craft.

The second "wave"

Come the 1980s, an even younger bunch of kids (again mainly from around the Frankston area, it being the most populated city nearby) carless due to age, began hitchhiking down and often wagging school, hanging out at the local store, smoking, skating, clowning around and generally causing much harmless trouble (like sleeping in the empty ice box during winter). Most of them later joined and competed in surf comps in the newly formed Reef Riders Club, a splinter group that broke away from the original surfrider's club (from their homeground at the other main surf break, Suicide Point) unhappy with the way their soon-to-be "arch-rivals" were running things.

The "backwash"

Whether it was crazy weather patterns from global warming, or sea valley silting and shifting seagrass beds from dredging the North Arm and altered tidal circulation - or a combination of all or any of these - no-one knows quite why - but for whatever reason the surf in the bay pretty much just stopped working as much after the 1970s, and everyone serious about their surfing moved their focus to the "Beaches" - the coast area from Cape Schanck to Port Phillip Heads that was exposed to Bass Strait, getting all the swell that had mysteriously disappeared. Point Leo stopped being the hub of surfing on the Peninsula, and both the Reefers and the Pointers found themselves holding their surf competitions more and more away from their home territory. This was actually a good thing because the rapid growth had over-saturated most of the Bay surf spots to the extent that the lousy surf conditions forced a kind of much-needed "evacuation", a purging of sorts. It still gets really crowded when the swell is huge, but that's more a result of the Beaches closing out and being unsurfable than a renewed interest by everyone in wanting to surf the Bay a lot again.

Flat Earth Theory. Get off the drugs now, idiot.

https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/home/index.php/featured/maps

Here's your easy guide to find great Flat Earth maps ha ha ha

NASA's International Space Station is a hoax, they didn't land on the Moon, Elvis is still alive hee hee hee

An exercise in rational thinking.. if a plane only needs x000 litres of aviation fuel to fly the 8,000 or so kilometres from Perth to Tierra del Feugo (South America)..... by crossing the South pole... according to Flat Earth theory the plane would run out of fuel and crash... because it has to fly diagonally (ha ha ha) the longer distance from one corner of the map to the other.. Flat Earth theory says that Antarctica is the edge of the map/earth.

Aviation fuel is very expensive. Airline companies make their biggest profit margins by reducing fuel costs. By climbing high into the thin atmosphere where lower gravity and wind resistance saves fuel consumption, and by altering their flight patterns to follow jet streams, trade winds, and local and upper atmosphere weather conditions, they don't always (but nearly almost always) take the shortest route possible. Furthermore, to reduce weight the airplane is only filled with enough fuel to make the journey plus an extra percentage to accommodate holdups circling before landing, changing weather patterns, and other unforseen factors.


Flat Earthers fall flat on their faces when it comes to explaining the economics of flight paths. If the Earth was flat, planes would be falling out of the sky and thousands of people would be dying every day, failing to reach their destinations. It's not 32,000 km from Hobart to Tierra del Fuego, and Quantas only puts enough fuel in to go 10,000 kms. Derr.

Oh and did I forget to mention, when they take off the compass points South, not North. Double derr.

Is History Fake ?

                 (from a fb post 23 Feb, 2014)

It is a well-documented and albeit controversial theory of where and when the Aryans invaded India from the north. There is considerable controversy about Indo/European and Indo/Aryan ancestry and migration. Perhaps it is more accurately deemed a White Supremacist myth,  postulated by recent Christian historians to promote Caucasian superiority and discredit the indigenous people of India. There is in fact no such thing as a race of Aryans, just as there isn't a race of Accountants!  The word 'arya' denotes the quality of lightness, specifically in consciousness and certainly not the hair or skin colour of how 'Aryans' are commonly portrayed. Little is known in the West about 'The History of India' before the successive invasions of the Aryan, Muslim and British Empires. Ancient history as we now know it, is based on evidence. When there is an absence of evidence before a certain time, then that time period is called pre-history. Sounds simple enough.

At the humourous risk of sounding like I'm talking about Cavemen, I'm going to make the assertion that Vedic knowledge is prehistoric. I'm suggesting that the model I was taught in High School - that Mesopotamia was the 'Cradle of Civilisation' -  and indeed was taught in educational institutions around the world at that time, was based on a flawed assumption. Current thinking is that there was no single 'cradle', but several civilisations that developed independently of which the Near Eastern Neolithic was the first. Some of the other known independent 'cradles' are the Indus River of the Indian Subcontinent, Yellow River in China, and the Peruvian and Mesoamerican cultures. Scholars and historians have commonly used writing (amongst various criteria) as a definition of 'civilisation', which is arguably a flawed categorisation as it presumes that earlier cultures lacked sophistication- rather than having no need for writing!

Modern science proposes that various civilisations invented writing as they 'developed'. Consider this widely accepted idea though: prior to this, the tradition in ancient cultures all around the world was to pass on knowledge orally (because they all possessed powerful memories). However, apart from Quarrel and Hypocrisy, another one of the symptoms of the current age Kali Yuga, which began roughly 5,000 years ago, is poor memory. As the faculty of memory diminished, the need arose to write things down so that they wouldn't forget. We all know what that's like.

Furiously disputed by the indigenous peoples of India (as they have 'inside information', where folk-lore has it that the Veda were in existence from at least 6000BC and not the 1500BC that the West guesses they were compiled) the current Western viewpoint of the History of India credits the 'Aryan Invasion' with the development of the Vedas and Hinduism as we know it today, because THEY WERE THE FIRST to write it all down... but it wasn't just an isolated incident. It was happening everywhere out of necessity.

All over the globe, civilisations everywhere that previously relied on the established oral tradition had to find a way to record their knowledge as their memories faltered. From the ancient hieroglyphics of the Egyptians, and the separately developed South American Incas; to the multi-character glyphs of the Orient; and the (no caveman jokes please!) Early European and Australian Aborigine cave paintings - all these cultures independently developed pictorial/written recordings at around the same period, roughly five thousand years ago. I'm suggesting that things were going BACKWARD, not FORWARD, as modern materialistic society would have us believe.

(Curiously this 'advent of writing'  coincides with the astrological Great Age of Gemini which ended about six thousand years ago (c.6000 - 4000BC) which rules the hands and communication. No-one knows how long the Chinese existed before records were kept. The Australian Aborigines, as far as we can tell, migrated in at least two or three waves, from at least forty thousand years ago to eighty or a hundred and twenty thousand depending on your leaning.)

This FORWARD PROGRESSION concept of human development is fabricated to fit in with the Darwinian theory. Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle if I'm gonna fall for that theoretical pseudo-science. Hang on a sec - no I won't (insert your own caveman joke HERE). Sure, we've made wonderful advances in medicine, technology, the arts etc yet at the same time millions of  people in society are becoming increasingly alienated from natural lifestyles,  billions of people are still suffering all over the world, and we've managed to wipe out a huge fraction of species of life in our relentless pursuit of PROGRESS.

Time for ... (?)

[ although I can claim authorship for this (it took me quite a while cos I get a bit OCD about spelling and grammar) I must confess that the ideas aren't really mine. I've just taken bits I've read from various sources and tried to correlate it into one congruous piece. I'll try to add more later ]

Indology schmology

https://controversialhistory.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/is-gautama-buddha-avatar-of-vishnu.html

This has to be one of the jewels in the lotus on the Internet. It exposes, among other things, the fabricated history of India and how it has been systematically re-written, altered and corrupted by European Historians, mostly British and German Christians. This false 'knowledge' is taught in educational institutions around the world to this day and is only now being challenged thanks largely to the internet spreading this exposure. Racist Eurocentric White Supremacist Indologists - they even created a whole new branch of 'science' to deal with the task - have moved forward the dates of the Vedas by centuries, sometimes millenia, so that they post-date the Biblical Flood in an attempt to maintain their superior roost on the Perch of Spiritual Hierarchy. Not only do they mess with the ancient Sanskrit texts  they also misinterpret them and change what they say – spectacularly capping that off with the whole meaning being lost in translation.

Kama Sutra - a sex manual, right? That's exactly what they would have you believe. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's actually about how to NOT achieve orgasm. Instead it describes in detail, complete with illustrations (I know what you're thinking!) how to develop higher spiritual awareness using the yogic technique of avoiding temptation to raise the kundalini up through the chakras by not succumbing to the urge to gratify the senses. Tantra Yoga or something (don't know much about it). So these "expert" Indologists twist the meaning and make it look like some sort of perverted orgiastic ritual. Far from it!

Oh, let's not forget yogis flying around on magic carpets, snake charmers playing their pungis (an oboe-like wind instrument) and the famous Indian Rope Trick where a rope is magically made to rise up vertically, the Magi's assistant then to climb up it and subsequently disappear into the heavens. Harems, hookahs and hashish! And don't forget that the idiot Hindus are all vegetarians! And they worship inanimate stone statues as being God! Fools and idolaters! Superstitious morons! Their Gods are really Satan in disguise!  We'll show them who is superior - us with our One and Only True God!

I may sound irreverent, having a go at Chritianity. I'm not. I'm criticising the Eurocentric Christian White Supremacists, otherwise known as Historians, who blasphemously create a false account of India and its history because it challenges their dubious religious superiority.

As with everything on the net, please read it with due skepticism. Skepticism is a good thing, a mark of intelligence where gullibility will falter. And of course I don't endorse all of the views expressed by all of the authors on this or any other blog. I hope you enjoy your reading.

Quincunctial map of Earth. (Notice Antarctica cut up into 4 quarters in the corners.)