The Spiritual Center Of the Earth (1999) | Hacker News Reader

The Spiritual Center Of the Earth (1999)

sfgate.com

42 pointsmariorz26 comments

I know I may be downmodded for saying this, but:

the kind of "Indian spirituality" you see outside India is totally different from the actual stuff. most gurus open their "ashrams" in the US exactly for the same reason most entrepreneurs want to move to silicon valley - more money and visibility. sadly, these "ashrams" aren't ashrams in the true sense, more like religious businesses.

The center of spiritual self-satisfaction is more like it. (Notice what paper this is appearing in.)

When the cloud of smug from SF meets the cloud of smug from DHH's acceptance speech, all hell will break loose!

Prepare... for the day before the day after tomorrow!

Actually, the center of the universe is on the campuses of the University of New Mexico, next to the guy who sells burrito cheese-burgers.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8601342@N03/sets/72157605272220...

"The Center of the Universe" at UNM. Nice photos. Fairly cool concept.

But what does it mean that the CoU is so rectilinear?

That the artist's budget was limited?

I've been in that; It's not as cool as it looks from the outside.

He meant the "Spirituality Marketing Center..." But what the hey. Close enough for spiritual work ;)

And of course, by "San Francisco" he meant "Bay Area", which of course means "California." Again: the energy (spirituality) looks pretty much the same from Dakshineswar.

"It used to be in India, but now it is San Francisco. All our gurus are moving there to open ashrams."

That made me laugh. Maybe I'm too cynical, but my explanation is a lot less noble than what the author implies...

Also note the date of the article. A good reminder that maybe a bit of humility and some critical thinking (in the sense in which it contrasts "automatic openness to new ideas") can be a good thing now and then.

note the date of the article

Ah, that explains a lot. I totally missed it.

The things attributed to the regular Indian folks appears very "made up" ...

In my experience, real things from regular Indian folks do too. Much of Indian culture is simply unbelievable :)

like? :) can you give examples? :)

Like the whole 'dunk Ganesha' thing, for one. Teams of young men group together and compete between groups to buy/build/decorate the grandest elephant man to dunk in local ponds and rivers. Thats surreal.

yeah, that is great fun. sometimes those are huuuuuuuuge, would take months to make and paint, only to be dunk in the sea. apart from polluting the water, its great fun.

Haha, I know I love it! But its very bizarre to an outsider stuck in a traffic jam because of the big elephants.

Yes I agree. A whole lot of rituals would seem funny/bizarre to westeners. An american friend of mine found "arranged" marriages very very strange, he couldn't comprehend it at all. But it has been working very well for centuries in India.

Similarly, when I came to US, I was shocked at the size of shopping malls, had never seen such mega malls in India (India does have big malls, but nothing compared to the ones in US). Also I found the pointless lawsuits very amusing (like the guy who sued his drycleaners for some 50 mil USD).

Well, I guess these differences is what makes life interesting :-)

Indeed :)

One of the blog entries of independent journalist Michael Yon describes an informal interview of a young Kurdish woman soon after the overthrow of Saddam.

Yon said that the Kurds had no material resources, but a can-do attitude. He described the young woman as extremely self-confident.

Asked about her plans for the future, she said she wanted to emigrate to France, hang out with the cool people there for a while, then move to San Francisco. (France and SF are respectively the number one and two tourist destinations, BTW.)

So, by "the spiritual center of the world," what the Indians in the article might have meant is that SF is the best place they know of for a person to live.

And I do not scoff at that notion.

Before I even read the article it reminded me of the spiritual center of the universe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Hill,_New_Zealand

Not really an article I'd mark as worth reading, but a little bit of ++ for daring to post something remotely to do with spirituality or religion.

So you're saying the author gets "a little bit of ++" for posting something that you don't think is worth reading, and on a topic that's seldom if ever appropriate on HN? That seems a bit odd. Maybe I'm just insufficiently enlightened.

-- on the article itself, ++ for being daring. (I neither up- nor down-voted, BTW.)

Maybe he means ++ in a pejorative way, like C++.

It's funny how we (americans) keep thinking that we are the center of the world ;)

San Francisco is a pretty cool guy. eh is famous for stuff and doesn't afraid of anything.

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