A lengthening list of US, European and Asian corporate executives agree. Senior staff of companies including Microsoft, Citibank, IBM, Merrill Lynch and Zee TV experience Vipassana as a powerful human-resources tool. Special Vipassana courses are being organized worldwide for business executives and government administrators.

Vipassana means “to see things as they really are” in the ancient Indian Pali language. A practical, universal tool to purify the mind, some call Vipassana a technology for inner peace. Others describe it is a deep surgical operation of the mind. An objective study of mind-matter interaction, Vipassana has nothing to do with any religion, cult, dogma or blind belief. Vipassana enhances the overall quality of life, as I have discovered from practicing it for more than 10 years. 

Vipassana is taught in residential courses – from the beginners’ 10-day regimen to 45-day and 60-day courses for advanced students. Completing a course demands discipline, will power and following such rules as not communicating with fellow students and the outside world for the duration of the course. The rule of silence until the penultimate day of the course is to calm and quiet the chattering mind and turn attention inward. 

Happily, continuing a millennium-old tradition, no fee is charged for Vipassana courses, not even for board and lodging. Expenses are met solely through voluntary donations and services of previous students. Vegetarian buffets and simple, comfortable accommodation are provided in centers that are usually green, eco-friendly expanses. 

The technique was practiced back in the mists of time before being rediscovered by Gautama Buddha, who practiced it to reach enlightenment. Vipassana then disappeared again, and was lost to India 500 years after his passing. But a chain of teachers in Burma preserved the technique in its purity for 2,500 years. 

This volition to share merit earned helps to reduce the ego, the apparent “I” that the Vipassana student experiences as merely a mass of constantly changing mind-matter phenomena. Experiencing that impermanent nature of reality within changes one’s outlook to life and fellow beings. Wisdom and compassion rise to the surface. 

Sylvia Clute, a former attorney-general candidate in Virginia, described how Vipassana helps her combat stress: “I am not attached to the actions of others, so I don’t create conflict by responding negatively.” 

Besides realizing its potential to reduce conflict and enhance teamwork, corporate leaders experience how Vipassana increases efficiency, patience and self-dependency and progressively eliminates such negativities as anger, jealousy, and depression. 

Certainly, it takes work. Changing habits is tough and takes time. Besides an annual retreat, Vipassana students are required to practice at home twice daily for an hour each. But those benefiting realize the commitment as an investment paying dividends for a lifetime. Veteran Indian industrialist Arun Toshniwal says: “After practicing Vipassana for over 25 years, I find that my capacity for work and clarity of thinking [have] increased. I gain time. Our staff attends Vipassana courses with paid leave.” 

Toshniwal is also an authorized Vipassana teacher, one among more than 600 trained assistants appointed to conduct courses voluntarily on behalf of Satya Narayan Goenka, 78, and his wife Ilaichidevi Goenka, Vipassana’s principal teachers. 

“Goenkaji”, as Mr Goenka is known outside India, is a retired business tycoon from Myanmar who settled in Mumbai with a large, happy joint family. “Having been in the rat race of making money from a young age, I know full well how much tension and misery a business person goes through,” he says. “Vipassana helps gain the mental wealth without which the material wealth becomes meaningless.” 

Goenkaji was authorized to teach Vipassana in 1969 by his teacher, Sayagyi U Ba Khin, independent Burma’s first accountant general. “The time clock of Vipassana has struck,” U Ba Khin declared when Goenkaji started teaching Vipassana in India, the land of its origin. U Ba Khin conducted Vipassana courses in his office premises to remove corruption in the Burmese government. 

U Ba Khin professed an ancient prophecy that Vipassana would return to India and from there spread throughout the world. Indeed, either with or without the prophecy, Vipassana has spread rapidly since 1969, mostly by word of mouth, in cultures as diverse as Britain, Russia, Japan, Mongolia, Brazil, Iran, Thailand, China and Scandinavia. In India, the central government and some provincial governments offer paid leave for their staffs to learn the discipline. Courses are organized for prison inmates, students of technological powerhouses, and scientists at the Bhaba Atomic Research Center, a nerve center of India’s nuclear program. Leading business schools such as Symbiosis send entire batches of management trainees for Vipassana courses. 

Goenkaji conducted the first executive course in the United States in April 2002 in Massachusetts as part of a grueling 24,000-kilometer road odyssey across North America in which he conducted courses and addressed the public, the media and the United Nations as well as leading institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“The moment a defilement arises in the mind, misery too instantly arises. When one starts experiencing this reality within oneself through Vipassana, a change automatically starts coming for the better,” Goenkaji says. He was a keynote speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2000. 

Organizations such as Spirit in Business, which invited Goenkaji to address a seminar during his North American tour, wants to enhance management principles. Founded in Amsterdam and with bases in the US, Spirit in Business (SiB) forged an alliance of companies such as American Express, Verizon and Forbes, senior corporate leaders from Videophone, Goldman Sachs, HP, universities such as Case Western Reserve’s Weatherhead School of Management and the Copenhagen Business School, and thought leaders such as Peter Senge, Daniel Goldman, David Cooperrider and the Dalai Lama. Its aim is to “explore, promote and celebrate the reconnection of ethics, values and spirit in business leadership”. 

“Vipassana is an art of living through continuous self-improvement,” says Rahul Vaid, a partner in Pacesetter Capital. “It has helped me immensely in adverse conditions, in being tolerant to others and taking positive action as opposed to blind reaction.” 

Nancy Stevens, a leading investment adviser and a former vice president of Wells Fargo, says Vipassana helped calm her in the face of client anxiety and market conditions. “The most important thing that I took away from the course was surrendering to the process and letting it unfold – contrary to my business training of being in ‘attack mode’.” 

Stevens’ realization highlights conventional business strategies turning to pragmatic wisdom: the obvious need to develop and harness the power of a balanced mind. 

by Raja M (an independent writer and Vipassana practitioner based in Mumbai.)

“For centuries, people and researchers believed that it was impossible for human beings to live their lives without sustenance, and that their vision would be destroyed by looking straight at the sun.”

Normally, how long can an average human being survive without food or water? Or without sleep? The answer would probably be: a few days. 

Is there a possibility that a human being can procure necessary nutrients and energy directly from the sun energy and get rid of the need to eat or drink water?

There indeed is one such man, now becoming well-known as Sun Yogi, who has discovered a unique method of absorbing energy directly from the chief source of energy in our world: the sun. Armed with this less known Indian system, he is travelling barefoot across the country to spread the message of ‘Universal Unity, Peace and Brotherhood’. He has already logged in 62,000 km.

Born Umashankar in 1967 in Midnapore, West Bengal, he developed an early interest in yoga and religion. A Calcutta university graduate with a diploma in electronics, he was managing his electronics shop when in 1995 he decided to chuck it all up and headed for the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry in search of real knowledge. 

During his stay at the ashram, the Sun Yogi recalls: “I spent every morning meditating on a rock at the beach looking at the sun’s reflection in the sea. It was very soothing. Gradually, I started gazing directly at the rising sun. Later, I could concentrate on the sun even when it rose higher in the sky. The harsh brightness disappeared after continued meditation and now the sun appears to me as a clear hazy ring with soft blue sky inside.”

As days passed by, he started experiencing seven bright colours radiating from the sun, slowly reaching closer to the ground. And he felt the sun’s cosmic energy embracing his body from within. One day after a particularly exhilarating experience, when he returned to the ashram, to his surprise he noticed that his body rejected food and he didn’t feel hungry! Realisation dawned on him that during his sun meditations, he was somehow able to absorb energy directly from the sun. 

Initially, he started skipping breakfast. Six months later, he stopped taking dinner. From August 17 to December 7, 1996, Sun Yogi stopped eating and sleeping altogether. Yet, his weight remained the same and he continued his daily routine without feeling tired or exhausted or noticing any health problem. 

A simple, amiable man with child-like nature, this is how Sun Yogi explains his discovery: “It made me believe that looking directly at the sun is a way of charging one’s body cells with kinetic energy.” As for essential vitamins and minerals, he claims that as they are present in the air, he just inhales them directly from the surroundings.

People who have watched him at close quarters, authenticate his claims. Says D.R. Kaarthikeyan, former CBI director: “I met Sun Yogi at the Yoga Centre of Annamalai University. He stayed with me for a period of 48 hours and I saw him eating or drinking nothing.” 

Ben Horen from England who co-founded the Ananda Society with a project in Himachal Pradesh, has been so impressed with Sun Yogi that he has created a link (www.anandaproject.org/sunyogi) on their website on him and his work. Writes Ben: “I have witnessed him living with no food, water or sleep, spending part of each day staring at the sun as if it was as soft as the moon. Many times I have watched him enter samadhi during meditation, and I have felt him stop his pulse through sheer concentration. He does not seem to feel the cold—he sits barechested at night when I am feeling cold wearing thick woollens.”

Sun Yogi now teaches Sun Yoga to whosoever cares to learn. It is easy, he says, and most people can pick up in a few sittings. What are the benefits? “I believe that almost all the ailments that our body develops are because of eating.” Living increasingly on sun energy, you will stay healthy and the ageing process will slow down, if not reverse altogether. An additional therapy he teaches is acupressure, which is easy to learn and use.

Sun Yogi has over 40,000 students from India and abroad practising his yoga under him. Every year he holds an International Spiritual Conference in his native place in West Bengal and has centres in Kolkata, Port Blair and Saharanpur. He has also founded K.G.K. Gurukulam, an educational/ training institute for yoga and related subjects in Vedaraniyam in Tamil Nadu. 

Sun Yogi’s life can be called Surya Namaskar, a true salute to the sun. 

http://www.sunyoga.info/

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In November of 2002 there were some flyers put up around school (American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, ACTCM), about an Indian man, Hira Ratan Manek (HRM), coming to lecture in Berkeley, CA. The flyer was preaching this man’s ability to store the sun’s energy in his brain; it was also advertised that HRM hadn’t eaten food in seven years.  At the time I was certainly caught up in the ‘supernatural’ and the quest of ‘enlightenment’. Along with many Bay Area individuals; I owned the tapes, the books and the scented oils. I burned incense, I took classes, and although I had not taken classes on burning incense, I certainly believed there was more to life than meets the eye. What is the goal? Why are we here? Who am I? 

I didn’t go to the lecture. These far eastern guru types are a dime a dozen, and there was a playoff soccer match at Stanford I was looking forward to watching. Some of my classmates went to HRM’s lecture; their feeling was that he was genuine. He lectured on world peace, struggling and suffering. He spoke of hungers; does your hunger control you or do you control your hungers? Not just hungers for food but hungers in general. Why do we make the choices we make? What drives us to complicate things so?  World peace begins with the individual, until the person finds peace of mind, there will be no peace.  HRM said if we could exist without hunger, then we would have no suffering.   He shared his thoughts that one way to experience peace was to embrace the sun.  His formula was simple, stand on the earth and stare directly at the sun for 10 seconds with an addition of 10 seconds each day.  In 6 months your hungers would be under control and understood. Stand there for 10 months you would never have the need for food again. Not only that, but, you would not have to stare at the sun again. After 44 minutes of sungazing one would be ‘full’, energized, just like a solar charged battery. There was no need to continue the practice; so, within a year HRM was preaching anyone could reach an incredible level freedom. 

Some of the information I read about the effects of sungazing included: a decrease in irritability, anger and frustration; an increase in memory and immunity; not to mention bold claims of complete awareness and relief from all disease.   Hey now, where do I sign up?  I was open to anything that could potentially decrease my frustrations regarding taxes and increase my ability to remember my neighbors name.  Apparently (according to HRM) the brain is able to store solar energy, therefore creating the capability to access a larger percentage of our mind. I am told we use about 6-12% of our brain’s capacity (Einstein used about 20%), through the practice of sungazing imagine utilizing over 50% of your brain.   With that kind of power I might be able to balance my check book and discuss a recent film at the same time.

Well, I’m game. While I am here on Earth I might as well taste the tastes of life. Stare directly into the sun during sunrise or sunset, if he says it will be ok, bring it on. My parents and teachers have shared with me many of their ‘no’s’ in life: no smoking, no drinking, no speeding, no sex, no, no, no.  I am sure the ‘don’t stare into the sun, it will burn your eyes!’ was on the list. In fact, the fear of burning ones eyes seems relatively universal. Ironically enough while the ‘no drinking’ and ‘no sex’ suggestions didn’t seem to stick, the ‘don’t stare at the sun’ has had some real staying power. People don’t seem to have any trouble pouring poison (alcohol) down their throats, but one mention of staring directly into the sun and many people stop listening. 

I’m in, if HRM’s eyes were ok, maybe mine would be fine as well (in fact, his lecture mentioned the ability of sungazing to heal many visual impairments). I lugged myself out of bed; walked a few blocks away to Holly Park, stared at the rising sun for 10 seconds and went back to bed. The next day I gazed for 20 seconds, then 30 then 40.  As I increased the amount of time staring into the sun certain physical sensations were beyond words, and my mental acuity was certainly changing.   Sungazing became an obsession, for the next few months I traveled a fair amount, there were occasions where I would get up at 4:30am, hike an hour in the chill of the approaching dawn to a ridge to stare at the sunrise for 3 minutes. Crazy.  

Is this conceivable? Could the problem of world hunger have such a simple solution? Could it actually be possible to live without food? For years people were ostracized for stating the world was round. For centuries scientists have been locked away, doctors have been put in jail, and witches have been hunted. What are we all afraid of? 

by Mason Howe Dwinell