Iyya

HOW does one get hold of a swanky car when one doesn’t even own a bicycle? If one were to believe Rhonda Byrne’s best-selling recipe, all you need are three simple steps: Ask. Believe. Receive. No need for hard work. Forget luck and say good-bye to serendipity; “Just ask and you shall get” is the mantra promoted by the Australian TV-producer. She’s written what could well turn out to be the Mother of All Self-Help books. She attributes effortless wish-fulfilment to the socalled law of attraction: everything that happens to you, good or bad, you attract to yourself. Byrne claims that you can manipulate objective physical reality — the numbers in a lottery draw, the allotment sweepstakes of a car and even actions of total strangers — purely through your thoughts and feelings. And if you lose your car or fortune, blame your thoughts. You’re also advised to keep away from the failures and fatties of the world (who might taint your thoughts with their negativity). So be very careful, Mister, what you think. If, for instance, you say, “I’ll never have a great relationship,” you’ve just given an order to the universal genie: be prepared for a letter-bomb from your significant other. As a reviewer remarks, “Byrne’s book brings breathless pizzazz and a market-proven gimmick to a tired genre full of earnest bullet points and windy exhortations”. Also, her evocation of timeless wisdom and hidden conspiracies succeeds because it appeals to the masses yearning for magic, just as The Da Vinci Code did. The Secret also shamelessly plunders lives of historic figures such as Isaac Newton, Beethoven, Martin Luther King Jr and Albert Einstein for anecdotal ‘support’ of its just-ask-andreceive hypothesis. Mercifully, selfhelp experts marshalled by Byrne to promote the book sound a few caveats: while thoughts are powerful, it’s the feelings that these thoughts generate that actually attract things into your life. Also, in order to attract the things you want into your life, you are urged to follow the ‘three for three’ strategy: your thoughts, your feelings and your actions ostensibly have to fire simultaneously in the same direction. In the final analysis, Byrne’s book seems to have taken a cue from the theory of inflationary cosmology propounded by physicists like Alan Guth, which says that the universe is a free lunch; and that everything pops out of nothing!

Source: The Economic Times

EVERYONE is a genius — but only in hindsight. That’s one of the themes of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s new book called The Black Swan. An acclaimed expert on the science of uncertainty, Taleb analyses the impact of highly improbable events on our lives. Before the discovery of Australia, for example, people in the Old World were convinced that all swans were white. That piece of conventional wisdom went off the window the day they sighted the first black swan.
According to Taleb a Black Swan event has three main qualities: First, it’s an outlier — something that lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.
By that token, the BSP elephant’s recent electoral triumph is a Black Swan. Of course, it caught scribes and psephologists completely off-guard. But that’s hardly stopped them from holding forth on the rationale of the rainbow coalition! Conversely, the highly expected not happening is also a Black Swan. Taleb goes on to argue that a small number of Black Swans explain almost everything in our world from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our personal lives. More debatable is his corollary that as the world gets more complex, the effect of Black Swans is increasing, so that ordinary events which we study and discuss and try to predict from reading the newspapers, have become increasingly inconsequential.
Contrast this with the disruptive power of the Super-Swan or the Parama-Hamsa in Eastern tradition. He is not found in many places except one or two rare corners of the world, says the Hamsopanishad. These spiritual masters open your eyes to the miraculous nature of reality beyond conventional wisdom. The Indian swan or Hamsais also a religious pun that echoes to the great Advaitic insight Tat tvam asi (You are that) every time you breathe! For it’s compounded from the ingoing Aham (the individual I) and the outgoing Sa(the universal That). The Supreme Swan is one who realises the unity, the Lord tells Narada in the Upanishad. With no need for other rites and rituals, the stainless Parama-Hamsa soars over the worldly waters ever free.

Source: The Economic Times