Progress is the only aim of life

Is life a big riddle? I don’t think so. The only purpose of life is progress – to evolve. In all ways. When you see around, there are some people who are more evolved than others. You can make out that. By evolution, I don’t mean a person who has more knowledge or money. But wisdom. Knowledge applied and absorbed. A person who is more spiritually evolved than others is simply so, because of his/her actions. Actions which leads towards freedom, emancipation and wisdom. In the great epic, the Bhagwad Gita, Lord Krishna mentions of three ways in which a person progresses towards God realization. They are : through your actions (karma), through knowledge (jnana) and through prayer (bhakti). All these roads lead to the same point, which is God. And when I say progress in life, it’s towards achieving God realization. We have to remove our weaknesses and amplify our strengths. As we move towards perfection (God), we move one step towards liberation.

Liberation from what? To dissolve our cycle of repeated births and deaths. Once we get to that purely refined state we eliminate rebirth. We become one with God. Till then we have to keep on learning. And take births till our evolution is complete. There have been many wise people in the history of Earth who have achieved this goal. And they have passed on the knowledge down the generations. Different religions prescribe different ways. But all point towards one ultimate truth, which is God. There have been prophets throughout history who have brought the message of God. In fact Lord Krishna says that, when evil proliferates, he takes birth in human form to eradicate it. In his next avatar, he will be half man and half machine (Kalki) Evil is a minority phenomenon. It really doesn’t really exist, because one who is evil is actually at the lower scale of human evolution.

But there have been people in the history who were murderers, but with a change of heart, went on to realize God. Hence, you really don’t have to wait for many births. You can do it in this lifetime. It’s entirely up to you. All it take is courage and wisdom. Daily add new learning's to your internal database. Learn, Reflect and Act. Thus daily you will add on to yourself. You have to make progress step by step and work towards perfection. If you do this diligently, one day you will become a refined soul like the great ones. Remember to share your wisdom with others. From normal to Godliness. That is the only aim. Keep on keeping on. Listen to that inner voice of yours which will guide you in the right direction. Never go against your conscience. Be good. Do good, And all that you do will automatically come back to you. If it doesn’t, persevere. It will, one day.

Even if you don’t consciously progress, you will, without your knowledge. Look around you. There is progress everywhere. For example, in technology. Imagine what you were using ten years ago and what you are using today. The chips inside the computers are becoming more and more powerful, giving them astonishing capabilities. Computers will assist us in our spiritual evolution. Already they help us to b more efficent and accurate. They will help us with insights, sing analytics. Such insights can be classified as a type of wisdom. With the advent of Big Data and associated analytics, Computers are embracing a whole range of new inputs and collating it to give us the information that we seek. Technology today is all-pervasive. And very soon you will find them giving us sermons in the church instead of a priest or calling the people for their daily prayers and soon assist everyone with whatever it is that the are after. Shortcut to evolution.

Plenty of it coming everyone’s way …

Guru30

Trust in yourself

If there is one thing that can be deemed to be the most important aspect of life, it can be summed up in one word: ‘Trust’. First trust yourself. Do not play games. It’s very essential to believe in yourself. You are like a beacon for the rest of the world or I must say Universe, to be more appropriate. You radiate energy. Every single moment. Never listen to anyone who tries to put you down. You are not inferior to anyone, neither are you superior. All are born equal. We all come from the Universe and we shall all return back once our tenure on this planet is completed. Like Richard Bach says in his book ‘There is only one way to know whether your mission on Earth is complete. If you are alive, it isn’t.’ We are all born with a mission. To serve others, in whatever way we can. All of us do that to a certain extent. Our goal should be to multiply the effort. The more we reach out to the better.

Technology today helps us to reach out more people than we could have imagined a 100 years ago at the speed of light. There are social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc. where we can post our thoughts to be immediately received by people. Isn’t that exciting? Our goal of serving more people is enabled by technology. The mobile phone is another wonderful tool to reach out people. We can have multiple level conversations by using tools like Snapchat, Wechat etc. Technology is getting faster and better. In today’s world, hardly anyone is left out. Even people living in rural areas are now connected. You don’t really need a full fledged computer to stay in touch. A smartphone or even a low end mobile (with SMS facility) will do. If you have a GPRS connection, then accessing the internet can become easy. You can send mails, browse and access social networking sites.

Let’s come back to the topic of Trust’. When you send a mail, you don’t assume that it won’t be delivered. When you are viewing a profile on LinkedIn, you don’t think that somebody is watching you. Likewise when you are chatting, you know that others are not privy to your conversation. We trust technology to be safe. But still we hear about hacking and other maladies. Are we living in a secure world? Before I tell you the truth, let’s look at what makes technology possible. It’s a combination of hardware and software, the latter being more prominent. You see when you buy software, you are just buying bits and bytes. It’s invisible. You can’t touch it or see it. However you can see how it works. Now let’s say you bought Microsoft Windows. There is no way for you to know what those millions of lines of software code contains. Maybe they contain easter eggs plated by some upset programmer. So to answer your question whether we live in a secure world, the truth is ‘No’.

This  doesn’t imply that we be paranoid. To a lot of extent, software works as it is advertised. Most of the websites provide secure credentials to protect your data. The number of websites, apps etc. that are safe are more compared to those that aren’t. But you never know what will happen tomorrow. For example, what will happen to me, if my laptop crashes tomorrow and I lose all that data on it. Especially when I haven’t backed it up. So now we come back to the question, do we trust technology? Yes to a great extent. 90% if you ask me. It’s the same when we deal with people. Do we trust all of them. If your answer is ‘Yes’ you are probably naïve and if your answer is ‘No’ you are a pessimist. But the most important part of al this is to trust yourself unconditionally. You are the master of your fate. You are the captain of your soul. So go ahead and do whatever you believe in. Have firm faith. and this time it should not be 90%. Make it 100% and things will materialize.

Promise.

Guru30

Tech Predictions - 2014

Welcome to 2014! Here are my technology predictions for this year:

1. Cloud computing will take off. Hybrid clouds to be in vogue. More people will embrace cloud as they realize the hidden potential and value in them. The IaaS scene will be invaded by Telecom providers and vendors like Amazon, Microsoft and Google will move to PaaS. The migration won’t be completed in 2014 although this year the initiation is bound to happen.
2. Big Data (Hadoop and SQL Hadoop) will emerge as a mainstream tool for analyzing thousands of records and identify the pin in the haystack. Big Data by itself is not useful, but when coupled with analytics will be a force to contend with. BigData will mostly be used with NoSQL repositories.
3. Mobile and BYOD to double this year. As companies try to tackle the management challenges when facing security issues, they would increase number of helpdesk personnel to manage the same. Independent vendors can note the need of automated programs for this space. Right now there are not many players.
4. Wearable computing to see new entrants competing with the likes of Google and Samsung and would come out with innovative products. Like Google Glass and Samsung Gear, there will be new entrants especially in healthcare.
5. Intranets to get a major facelift in terms of new interface and integration. Sharepoint and web based intranets to excel. Company core data will be transformed for consumption on the intranet. Integration with all other value adding applications is imminent.
6. Ecommerce to become more verticalised. Many vendors would emerge as specialty vendors selling more than their wares. Ecommerce companies will partner with each other to fill in the gaps and there will be some consolidation in this space. Sales will rocket - 150% is my guess.
7. Laptops and Notebooks to make a comeback. They were really never going to be replaced with Tablets. Tablets are complimentary. PC sales would increase compared to the dismal figures of 2013. Revival of office computing, as more take on to Tablets after office hours.
8. Internet of things (Sensors etc) will start seeing more software vendors which offer a variety of programs to monitor the same. This will pave the way for Big Data revolution. Although sound analytics will be required to make decisions based on the Internet of things. The whole earth will become one big interconnected place.
9. Security will be a major concern among management. As hackers get more sophisticated, there will be newer tools besides antivirus which can deal with different attack vectors. Malware in all its forms will be tackled and sites would become more secure. The ghost of NSA would still lurk in the minds of people.
10. New super chips to make appearance. For example Graphene based chips, although I doubt if production of such chips would start in 2014. Chips with more cores and GPU capability to invade the scene. Low power chips and SSDD to become more prevalent.

That’s my list for this year.

Happy 2014 to all of you.

Many Thanks.

Guru30