TED Community » Raja Choudhury

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Consciousness, mysticism, Indian wisdom, evolution, noetics, history and achieving altered states of consciousness

An idea worth spreading

Re-imagining Indian Wisdom: What can Indian Wisdom offer today’s hyper-connected, social networked, quantum entangled, zero field, multiversed, dissatisfying world?

Talk to me about

Consciousness, Indian Wisdom, History of Wisdom, Altered States, Exploration, Design, Architecture, Music, Movies and anything in-between

People don't know that I'm good at

Culinary delights....I love food - cooking and eating

Comments

• TEDCred score: +3.20 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +1

  A comment on Conversation: Is Nationalism a 21st Century Ethic - Isn't Nationalism more like Racism or Sexism than Patriotism?

  Sep 4 2012: When Koesller wrote his seminal book "The Ghost in the Machine" in 1967, he coined the term "Holon" to describe something that is simultaneously a whole and a part. This is probably the most integral philosophy we have today (as continued by Ken WIlber in his AQAL framework and others) where the more we expand our consciousness out of of the subset or meta group we belong to the more we see them as holons or sets within sets. It takes conscious effort to remove yourself from your tribe, your neighborhood, your favorite sports team, you city, your country, your ethnicity, your religion until finally you get to your world and then even further to the Omega Point of a universal consciousness. This can only occur in a society which encourages contemplation and philosophy and even meditation. Perhaps we need to encourage more people to be contemplative (as Sam Harris suggests) and then we will see beyond our little and belittling tags and definitions. For me personally I have always found myself a Citizen of a City (London, New York, New Delhi) and then the World - countries are so 20th century.
  
  PS There are now 206 sovereign states in the world and many more vying for statehood. I guess we will become like the US where every city is incorporated by itself and is a semi-autonomous being....

• A comment on Conversation: Consciousness is the abnormal state of a living organism. "Sleeping" (unconsciousness) is the normal state.

  Sep 2 2012: The entire biological purpose of consciousness is to perpetuate our DNA by being able to feed, procreate and protect our DNA as it continues to live on in new life forms (read make a living). The fact we spend 2/3rds of our lives awake defeats the argument for unconsciousness being the natural state. The accident that occurred in human beings is that due to our vast memory reserves and analytical pattern recognitions skills in our genetic makeup, we suddenly found ourselves with time on our hands for superfluous creative and philosophical adventures. We got carried away with our cognitive tools and started to "Imagine" other ways of living. And that did not just apply to art, cities, farming etc but to even larger spheres of imagination like life beyond our selves and death....We need our unconscious state for two main reasons - to recharge our mental batteries with down time and to tune in to the source of our consciousness which seems to takes us back to our limbic and reptilian natures - God is one giant anaconda after all called Ronin!
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: A UFO lands in your home's garden with all it's lights on and the ramp descends. No one exits . Would you enter ? Why - Why Not

  Sep 2 2012: It's a red pill - blue pill type question like Neo had to answer in the Matrix. One road is uncertain and leads down the rabbit hole and the other is like playing an ostrich with its head in the sand with guns primed waiting and hoping for benign engagement. Take the road less travelled I say and step right in. You never know. Joseph Campbell once said that given a choice between a direct religious experience and a lecture about one, Americans would always choose the lecture.....choose the experience!

• A comment on Conversation: Implementing a Star Trek Economy

  Sep 2 2012: God god! You socialist/communist/fascist evil monger!!! Just kidding. The world has been driven by capitalism and consumerism for the past 100 years and until we completely eat our own legs and have nothing left to stand on, we will continue to foster a competitive, exploitative, dystopian way of life. I think the world, unfortunately, needs a rude awakening - as Roddenberry wrote about in the pre-Star Trek myth - they had a massive war that nearly wiped out mankind - before we can actually begin to address this. Perhaps future generations will be able to realize and attain this, and our job at this time is just to imagine that future and keep trying to design and accomplish it in small ways everywhere over and over again....
• +2

  A comment on Conversation: Do you find it difficult to engage in intellectual conversations with people in general?

  Sep 2 2012: Anyone with a rich inner life has to live two parallel lives. One where you get to spend time with your peers, intellectual equals and people with interests beyond the mundane - for this you will need to find groups of old friends, new groups to join, attend workshops and seminars, do classes and spend time at philosopher and literary hangouts, watch PBS, join meetups, etc. The second is the life one leads with the rest of the world - family, wife's friends, social contacts at work - and though it takes training and skill to appear normal in their eyes - it is worth pursuing while once in a while being the go-to guy for intelligent conversation. By increasing your EQ and your empathy towards others you will find both lives more interesting and enriched as you might just learn something you never knew by hanging out with more socially inclined people - most intelligent people have a slightly lower EQ. Live both lives well and maintain a rich inner life always so that when you need to, you can retreat and hang out with your one true best friend - your self!
• +6

  A comment on Conversation: Why do people who have many advantages in life struggle with ongoing happiness whilst others with far less to be happy about are happier?

  Aug 14 2012: In a recent study at Columbia on "Subjective Wellbeing" - the new name for Happiness - Jeffrey Sachs verified that Happiness is not that clear cut anymore as you have outlined above. You can't say that 600 million Indians who earn less than a dollar a day, have no toilets or clean water, rarely have electricity, no real healthcare are actually happy when you see them smile.They have developed a survival mechanism that is accepting of their lot - but that can't be defined as happiness. It is also a myth that people who are economically well off are unhappy - they may struggle with purpose or meaning or dissatisfaction or depression in life - but they are not by any subjective standards, unhappy. People from lower economic strata tend to appear happier as survival mechanisms for coping with their situation make them so but they suffer equally if not in greater numbers from chronic diseases, stress, envy, jealousy, self-abuse and more. Genuinely happy people tend to have a few traits in common - whether they are well off or not - they tend to be genuinely compassionate and kind, they always seek the good of others, they are positive people, they have practices that help them stay detached (meditation, prayer, nature, family time), they see beauty and magic around them, they realize that life has ups and down and they remain balanced, they laugh and smile a lot and they tend to exude a loving joyful kindness. This is true of millionaires and paupers. So if you read or listen to Matthieu Ricard or Sachs then you will realize that happiness is subjective and not an issue necessarily of class or wealth or lack thereof. It can actually be cultivated or trained for by anyone.

• A comment on Conversation: The Relentless Learner has become the most important person in the worldwide search for talent. How can we identify them?

  Jul 29 2012: The relentless learner is not a new phenomenon. The renaiscance was filled with men (unfortunately mostly men) who dabbled in many subjects and expanded their learning. If it was not for relentless learners we would not have the Royal Society or Science or Architecture or Design or any field of study as we know it today. The problem today is excessive specialization whereby one cannot be a gentle(wo)man scholar anymore and dabble in many subjects while being rewarded by regular grants and expeditions funding to go off and explore further. Now you have to be a part of an academic institution or corporation or non-profit org or a journalist/author/filmmaker. So if that is the reality then there lies the answer - become a member of a fraternity that still supports learning and research. If that does not work - finance your vision to learn on Kickstarter.com or Indigogo.com or do it part time at night while holding down a job until you get the recognition or good fortune or funding you deserve...

• A comment on Conversation: If the universe is expanding - what is it expanding into?

  Jul 26 2012: Quoted from Wiki Answers - I think this isa very good answer:
  "There is no 'edge' to our Universe; even if you were able to somehow able to travel faster than light, and go beyond our observable universe, you would never encounter an edge, no matter how far you looked. Likewise, the Earth is finite in size, but there is no edge to the Earth; it's a curved surface. Mathematicians would call this a 2-dimensional surface of positive curvature, embedded in 3 dimensions---you can travel around the earth, and eventually end up where you start. The universe works the same way, except that it is a three-dimensional curved surface embedded in four (spatial) dimensions. Just like we can't find the center of the Earth anywhere on its surface, there is no center to the Universe that we can find, because we are stuck on its 3-dimensional surface; the center is in a higher dimension. (I know that sounds bizarre!)"
  
  Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_on_the_other_side_of_the_universe#ixzz21jvUUXiI
• +2

  A reply on Conversation: Does crowd-sourcing Innovation and ideas encourage real Innovation or a culture of collective mediocriity, focus groups and slick presenters

  Jul 24 2012: You must read Quiet by Susan Cain - she was on TED as well - has a great history of innovations and i inventions developed by introverted individuals away from the maddening crowd. I think that of course innovation can occur in groups - particularly groups of talented individuals from different specializations - and I also think that platforms like TED or EDGE are critical for making knowledge available to the widest number of potential innovators - but I think true brilliance does come from pottering away at an equation or a design or a problem by oneself or in small groups. Crowds are ideal for funding, sharing and marketing....
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: Is there a practical way to get large scale collaboration between the many different online learning services?

  Jul 23 2012: We can try a Wikipedia - Wikimedia Commons type model that pools all known courses online into a single site for reviewing, rating and sharing. The courses could be tiered from free Wiki style courses to paid premium courses and/or degree programs - like the Photosearch/Stock Footage companies provide. This new site would have to be a non-profit collaboration site or organization with global standards and a global body of volunteers editing, reviewing and monitoring it for abuse. It can be "open" until the point of transaction or direct experience.