u/Ill_Advantage6095

I’m trying to build up a bigger rotation of vegetarian meals that are actually worth repeating, instead of recipes you make once and never bother with again.

What’s the meal you’ve made so many times that you could basically cook it on autopilot now?

Bonus points if it’s cheap, high protein, good for leftovers, or uses pretty normal ingredients.

Mine always seem to end up being the simple ones rather than anything fancy 😅

Shastra defines Bhagavan as the upadana karana and nimitta karana of the universe -- its material cause and its intelligent cause. Set the Sanskrit aside for a second: Is there a universe? Yes. Does that universe run on laws -- the kind reliable enough that we can predict outcomes before they happen? Also yes.

Drop a piece of wood and it falls. It has no say in the matter. Even dead matter obeys a law it didn't choose for itself. That lawfulness, that order, is exactly what shastra is calling Bhagavan. So far, none of this asks you to believe anything mystical -- you already accept a law-governed cosmos, you already accept that even wood submits to something beyond itself. So far we're using simple observation and not any faith.

The actual claim -- the only place this asks you to take a step you haven't already taken -- is this: is that material and intelligent cause actually intelligent? Is this cosmos not merely law-governed but literally the body of a conscious being, rather than a blind mechanism that just happens to look orderly?

That's the one question no telescope or equation settles for you either way. And shastra doesn't ask you to accept it on faith -- it asks you to investigate it: study the Vedas, apply discrimination, be patient with the process, and do it under the guidance of a guru who can actually walk you through the reasoning rather than just hand you a conclusion.

So "proof" here isn't a one-liner that can close the case, especially in a Reddit thread. It's closer to any serious field of study like science -- nobody masters it from a summary. You study it.

Praṇāms everyone 🙏

I made a post about this around a week ago, but thought I’d post once more because there’s been a nice development since then.

A few of us have recently started working through Swami Dayananda Saraswati’s Bhagavad Gītā Home Study Course together on an Advaita Vedanta Discord server. We’re still right at the beginning -- most of us are working through the introductory material and haven’t even reached Chapter 1 yet -- so if anyone has been wanting to study the Gītā systematically, you’re welcome to join us from the beginning.

We’ve also now been fortunate enough to have Swami Nityabodhananda agree to join us as a guest speaker in roughly two weeks. Swamiji studied directly under Swami Dayananda Saraswati, including his three-year residential Vedānta course, and he’ll be speaking to us about the importance of studying the Bhagavad Gītā and how to approach the study.

Afterwards we’ll continue working through the Home Study Course together at a manageable weekly pace.

Just reposting in case a few more people feel like jumping in and studying along with us. If you’re interested, check this link: https://discord.gg/3GhWnP94S

Hari Om 🙏

right.... so the bro in white (formerly boy in white) sends boyd and sara into a faraway tree to save them, boyd goes into a well and sara into the basement at the church... but, boyd gets the rope thrown down and then the old dude martin gives him that worm-illness that eventually 'my blood is your blood' he kills Mr Smiles

now, it makes the bro in white seem like he's bad here if we look at this chain like that, but then... fatima actually stops mr smiles from attackin, was it kenny ontop of the bus? and she even transforms into one so...

what if the BIW knew boyd would go there and intended on him getting infected so that everything would play out the way it did and fatima would become like, i dunno a hybrid or what ever the hell is going on?

there is underlying mechanics around how people transform into these things so they can live forever too, but i think fatima didn't use that technique, other wise the martin thing would have to happen a lot of times to get all those monsters...

anyway, thoughts?

Hi guys, we’ve just started a small group on our discord channel for focusing on Swami Dayananda’s Bhagavad Gita Home Study, which is available online for free.

It’s nothing formal — no scheduled meetings or anything like that. It’s just a self-paced group where we can discuss things we come across in the Gita and learn from each other.

We have people with varying levels of experience, from complete beginners to more experienced students, so everyone is welcome.

If you’re interested, feel free to join us, the Discord invite for our Advaita Vedanta server is here and we will place you into the study group: https://discord.gg/3GhWnP94S

The video is original content. I didn’t want to just dump a link here and disappear, so genuinely feel free to get involved with it.

Ask questions, disagree with me, challenge something I’ve said, add your own perspective, or just share whatever the video brought up for you. I’m not really interested in making content that just gets watched and forgotten -- I’d much rather it actually start a discussion.

So if you’ve got feedback, a different interpretation, something you think I’ve missed, or even just a thought that came to mind while watching, drop it in the comments. I’ll be reading them and I’m more than happy to engage with respect. 🙏

"If I can handle these two realities: one is getting exactly what I wanted (very rare), and the other getting more than what I wanted; if I can handle this very dispassionately, with a proper attitude, then I can perhaps retain that attitude when I face less than what I expected, without a big, self-esteem-damaging judgment about myself. Because in every action, this reality lies buried.

Therefore, I have an attitude in keeping with my understanding that every action is fraught with this third result, and also the fourth result: the opposite. When these two come, I can retain the same healthy attitude of certain objectivity. Of course, these are unpleasant. I'm not going to be apathetic; I'm not going to be much less happy, but I can take them without a sense of failure. That is understanding. That is attitude, an attitude born of understanding.

No attitude is abiding, lasting, or real without understanding. Understanding of topics which are relevant to what we are talking about means one has to know the background topics. Proper understanding of the relevant topics accounts for proper attitude. No understanding, inadequate understanding, or improper understanding of the background topics amounts to having an improper attitude, leading to a self-damaging judgment about oneself.

Life is full of these unpleasant situations. I have a new neighbor, an unpleasant situation. Or my old neighbor is no more, an unpleasant situation. Maybe a pleasant situation is no more there. I need to handle all these situations with a certain objectivity. For all this, we need to understand a number of relevant topics. Understanding the relevant topics is commanding proper attitude. We'll talk about those topics next time."

TL;DR: Life is comfortably navigable when approached with the right attitude, which stems directly from the right understanding. Cultivating a proper understanding of life's foundational realities is the essence of Karma Yoga. Therefore, studying the Shastra (such as the Bhagavad Gita) is essential—it is how we become skilled in Karma Yoga and, eventually, in Jnana Yoga to arrive at Self-knowledge. Whether for navigating duty (Karma/Dharma) or seeking ultimate knowledge, Shastric study is the key to success. This study is undertaken through three distinct stages: Shravana (listening), Manana (reflecting), and Nididhyasana (assimilating).

The sthula sharira gets its energy through a process that starts with eating food, breaking it down into basic building blocks, and having those building blocks enter the cells and travel into the mitochondria. Inside the mitochondria, two-carbon acetyl-CoA molecules get broken down into CO2, which is what we breathe out. That breakdown kicks loose spare electrons, which get passed down the electron transport chain. As that happens, hydrogen ions get pumped out of the cell and pool up outside the membrane, building a concentration gradient. Because of that gradient, the ions want to flow back in, so they pass through a specialised turbine of sorts, ATP synthase, and that spinning is what re-energises ADP back into ATP, the actual currency that powers the cell. So in a way, the human body runs on electricity, just not the raw, large-scale kind you'd find in a wire.

Now bring in the scriptural side. At the paramarthika level, the teaching is that there's no solid jada sitting there to build anything out of in the first place. This entire world, including the body just described, is kalpita, a rendering, a projection, and what's powering that projection, what makes it feel real and navigable, is mulavidya, root ignorance. Put those two together and what you get is a scientific-sounding description of prana. Prana is what's feeding the antahkarana and running all these bodily processes, but it's doing that with a totally different, far subtler order of "electricity" than anything running through plastic, insulation, wiring, or a circuit board.

The standard answer to the AI question leans entirely on that gap. A computer has none of this: no living cells generating their own charge to feed a mind and body they're themselves woven into. So even a machine that perfectly simulated mitochondrial respiration, down to the last electron, still wouldn't obviously be sentient, because it would be mimicking the biochemistry without the prana actually running through it.

But that answer quietly assumes the sthula sharira is somehow more real, more buildable, than a circuit board, that flesh is one kind of stuff and silicon another, and only one of them happens to come pre-loaded with life. Push one level deeper and that assumption dissolves. If everything, prana included, the sthula sharira included, and yes, the copper and silicon of a processor too, is equally kalpita, equally chit modified by avidya into appearance, then neither substance is raw material sitting around waiting to be assembled into something. There's no independently existing jada anywhere for anyone to arrange. And this isn't only true of what human hands build; it's true even of Ishvara's relationship to the universe. Ishvara doesn't create the way an engineer creates, taking independent parts and fitting them together into a machine. Vivarta vada says He appears as the world; the world is a modification of His own being, not a construction assembled from materials outside Him. If even the one cause capable of producing anything doesn't manufacture in that sense, the whole idea of arranging parts to produce sentience breaks down at a far more basic level than biology versus electronics.

That also means the sharp line people draw between a "physical body," assembled from atoms, and a "subtle body," made of mind-stuff, isn't really where the line is. Both are kalpita. Both are consciousness modified into appearance. The physical stuff you can touch and wire together was never raw, independent matter to begin with; it's already subtle in this deeper sense, and no amount of clever arranging turns jada into chit, because arranging is itself a jada-on-jada operation, one appearance rearranging another. So it was never really "bodies being made" at all, not the ones grown from a womb, and certainly not the ones soldered together on a bench. Minds and bodies appear through that medium; their reality is borrowed and flimsy, mithya, and they operate only for as long as that ordering holds them up.

What does hold them up, then, if not arrangement? Ishvara's ordering, the specific configuration of antahkarana, prana, and sharira that becomes the seat for chidabhasa, the reflection of consciousness, is something conferred through that ordering and the karma it carries, not something that switches on automatically once the parts happen to be in the right shape. A human being wiring together a processor is jada arranging jada, with none of that sanction behind it. You can build the outer shell. You can, in principle, even build a shell that behaves exactly like a living one. But you can't, by that act, also secure the thing that would operate through it, because the shell itself was never independently substantial. It's jada, and it's kalpita, from the first transistor to the last. That's the missing piece. It isn't an ingredient a better engineer could someday track down. It's a missing kind of cause altogether, one that arranging matter, however precisely, was never going to reach.

just a notification for anyone who may be interested, new series started from beginning for mundaka has commences, view it here:

https://www.yogamalika.org/freetalks/

mundaka 01 is available in revision (last week) and 02 is available this week, rotation will happen in a few days.

thats all,

hari om

If we had a vacuum in a lab setting with a hypothetical 1x Na and 1x Cl, there is no ions so there will be no electrostatic attraction until they covalently bond, right? once Na lends an electron to Cl, now we have ions, and also an ionic bond... an ionic bond with covalent characteristics, right? so... is it true then that ionic bonds and covalent bonds aren't really strict categories but more like ends of a spectrum? for example a diamond representing the extreme covalent bonds? but strictly speaking, covalent and ionic are characteristics?

so... i'm being taught to group bonds as ionic or covalent bonds but i am beginning to not like this by my third week... seems to be it's a bit of a convention, seems to be more of a continuum or a spectrum scaling from low to high ionic 'characteristics'..

seems all bonds are covalent bonds, but sometimes the electronegativity is so lop-sided one seems to "steal" an electron, but really speaking it's just a super, super greedy covalent bond that ends up creating a polarity and then, it locks itself even harder into it's new molecular form by now being electrostatically charged....

so rather than ionic bond being a second type of bond, i think it's just a covalent bond that is so electronegatively charged that it holds itself in place with a covalent bond but also, electrostatic charge of, for example... Na+ and Cl-, they're covalently bonded and also the electronegativity is huge so they're electrostatically attracted creating that super strong bond ionic bonds are defined as having...

thoughts?