On The Internet! Take the Self Improvement Tour
Sankara Saranam
Sankara Saranam Quick Facts
Main Areas: Ontology, the highest branch of philosophy, dealing with absolute being, or infinite reality. Sankara’s ontological theory of self reveals that all human spirituality reduces to increasing the intuitive faculty of the spine and brain, through energy conservation (asceticism) and looking within (intuition, pranayama), resulting in an expanding sense of self that transcends divisional conditioning and identifies with everyone and everything.Best Sellers: God Without Religion
Career Focus: Author, teacher, soil (carbon) farmer
Affiliation: The Pranayama Institute, Whirlwind Community, Cool Planet Technology
Sankara Saranam is a writer, philosopher, lecturer, and tireless proponent of pranayama. He traveled extensively in India and Israel researching and writing on spiritual issues. His first book, Yoga and Judaism (Astrologue, 1997), showed that the Hebrew Prophets were practitioners of various systems of asceticism and pranayama (sense-introversion). His most recent work, the multi-award winning God Without Religion, seeks to balance the world's divergent and divisive cultural views of God with a scientific method of personal introspection and pranayama.
An ascetic and mystic, Sankara Saranam founded The Pranayama Institute as an expression of his ideal to make pranayama techniques available worldwide at no cost to students.
S. Saranam graduated from Columbia University magna cum laude as a student of religion. He has a master's degree in Eastern texts and Sanskrit from St. John's College. He is also a poet, composer, singer, and classically trained guitarist. S. Saranam currently lives with his wife and son in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Favorite Quotes & Thoughts from Sankara Saranam
Marches on Washington affirm the very seat of centralized power they seek to influence.
Creationists’ sudden inclination to combat global warming serves as a reminder that some people have to fool themselves to do the right thing.
Since the belief in Christianity injures the intelligence, character, and sense of justice, I won’t believe in it even if I am going to hell. In fact, I am convinced that believing in it is a source of hell, and that disbelief avoids earning it.
These days, people are in need of insurance to protect against bad insurance policies.
The people who claim to know nothing usually don’t.
If a little knowledge is dangerous, less is even more dangerous.
A society without intellectuals becomes all expletives and no question marks.
The intellect provides for more unity than religious feeling, which is why religions routinely splinter with intellectual disagreement.
The intellect is an organ of perception, much like any other. It perceives proper interpretations of events and proper associations between variables, but it also perceives other intellects.
The road to hell is pave with ignorance, which happens to have birthed quite a few good intentions.
When Christians, Buddhists, and such are reminded that another billion humans call themselves likewise, it often isn’t taken as a compliment to the pervasiveness of their religions. Instead, it is depressing enough to incite counter-reminders of how misguided most sub-sects are. From this, we can safely conclude that a humanity of just Christians, for instance, might be as or more divided within itself than it is today.
A True Believing Mormon is an idiot listening to a fool taught by a liar.
If the Fourth Estate is not at odds with the other three, then there was obviously an estate sale.
It is one of life’s tragicomedic ironies that the more people doubt their memories, the less they doubt their decisions.
Whatever you decide in life, first decide to include others in the decision-making process.
In the public eye, we are guilty until proven guilty, after which we are innocent unless proven innocent.
Tears are the proper expression of the upward pressure of the heart. If that pressure moved downward instead, the “tears” would take the form of sexual violence and domination of others.
Knowledge is not an organ of sense perception but an organ of properly understanding perceptions.
Language is the paved roads of the mind, beyond which lies rougher, unexplored terrain.
Human communication is primarily accomplished through sound simply because the ear is the strongest human sense organ. Similarly, dog communication is largely accomplished through scent. The written language of canines is in urine spots.
An audio book cuts out the weak middle-men of the eyes. In fact, all books are really audio books since printed books are converted by the mind into audio ones.
The words, phrases, and expressions of language are cookie cutters chopping thought into presentable shapes.
It is amazing to consider millions of people sheepishly and unquestioningly praying and chanting in languages in which they cannot think.
Today’s American patriots tend toward such jingoism that they take great offense at the slightest intimation than the American civil war was any less bloody, any less gruesome, any less inhuman or historic than the French one.
The tragedy of the human race is not that everyone is ignorant in at least one subject, but that nearly everyone is ignorant in the subject of humans.
Constipation was one of philosophy’s first friends.
Philosophy is indestructible because one must employ it to attack it.
Studying philosophy is like sports commentating; one can know everything about the game and its history, and yet not play it.
Philosophy is finally concerned with the centralization of power in the philosopher.
Exercise is a modern invention designed to counteract the effects of other modern inventions and as such must be tallied as time wasted by modern inventions.
If a law strictly enforced would theoretically put millions in prison, it is not a good law regardless of the actions it seeks to curb.
It is a bad augury for democracy to consider that the knowledge of one hundred third graders combined does not add up to a single fourth grader.
Machines were not made to free humanity. That is a colossal fallacy. They were made because they could be made. They were then used to avoid freeing humanity.
The biggest mistake humanity made was to have an Industrial Revolution without Industrial Strength contraception.
Leave it to humans to brand their mystics sitting atop a rock, and not their astronauts sitting atop a rocket, insane.
Machines were not made to free humanity. That is a colossal fallacy. They were made because they could be made. They were then used to avoid freeing humanity.
The biggest mistake humanity made was to have an Industrial Revolution without Industrial Strength contraception.
Leave it to humans to brand their mystics sitting atop a rock, and not their astronauts sitting atop a rocket, insane.
‘World history,’ ‘European history,’ ‘Chinese history,’ and the like are artificial distinctions. All history is really your history.
The best thing you can do if you want your children to be rich is to not have anymore.
Modern conservatives are hypocrites. In avoiding the centralization of political power, they facilitate the centralization of corporate power, which in turn freely exercises its centralized political power.
Christianity: The nightmare that this world may not be so bad after all.
The only lies people don’t like are the ones concerning them.
When Hitler played his hand, he was a monster. When he showed his hand, he was prophetic.
One of the first lies that men concertedly developed to get regular sex was marriage. It backfired.
If a person is lying with his body, he’s probably lying with his mouth.
Knowing this world, “you only live once” is probably yet another empty promise.
Jugglers are a mystery. Isn’t life enough?
Spoiled by the good stuff, I only accept praise from myself.
Prayer is a form of self-reflection people trick themselves into performing.
If you aspire to pray, think.
If I prayed, which I don’t, I’d pray to never have cause to pray again.
Workers need not “unite” in any abstract sense in order to regain their power. All they need to do is stop working.
In the 80’s and 90’s, the right wing intimidated the press. Realizing the waste and inefficiency involved, it bought the press.
Presidents must be presumed to be guilty of being fully informed unless proven ignorant.
In the 80’s and 90’s, the right wing intimidated the press. Realizing the waste and inefficiency involved, it bought the press.
Presidents must be presumed to be guilty of being fully informed unless proven ignorant.
In the 80’s and 90’s, the right wing intimidated the press. Realizing the waste and inefficiency involved, it bought the press.
Presidents must be presumed to be guilty of being fully informed unless proven ignorant.
In the 80’s and 90’s, the right wing intimidated the press. Realizing the waste and inefficiency involved, it bought the press.
Presidents must be presumed to be guilty of being fully informed unless proven ignorant.
Leave the holier-than-thou alone! It’s the poor sod’s last defense against insatiable cravings.
Besides procreating, the only thing nature apparently wants from us is to die.
Prayer definitely works. The only issue is finding something that works until prayer works.
When in doubt, doubt. Decisiveness is often dangerous.
Nixon: When the President does it, that means that it’s not illegal.
Bush: When the President does it, that means that it’s too illegal.
People overeat not because they’re trying to feel full, but to fulfill.
Find something worth dying for, but just make sure it won’t kill you.
People who take death too seriously don’t take life seriously enough.
A racist may write a book, but books themselves never discriminate.
Few good things in this world can be distanced from the sun.
In the world of literature, revelation is a cheap trick.
There is no such thing as writer’s block. But there is budding writer’s block.
The fact that though there is, in reality, no personal god and yet loneliness is effectively solved by devotion to a personal god proves that the solution to loneliness is within each person.
It is a shame that though quantity of life is undoubtedly limited, though quality may not be, most people fret over quantity to the detriment of quality.
If you want to live long, will to live long.
Loneliness is a spiritual, not social, disease.
Christianity aptly compares its church to a fisherman, cheating fish with the false promise of a heavenly worm. And like Christians, only the fish that can’t learn from the experiences of other fish are caught.
Real philosophers would rather be agreed with than loved.
Love is a form of warmth, not necessarily superior or preferable to its other forms in food, clothing, shelter and bitter herbs.
Love slow to come is slow to go.
Religions do a great service to the books, movies, and lifestyles they forbid.
Love affairs work so long as you don’t live with the person.
Women are bolder in affairs of love than men because love is Nature’s procreating trigger to women, not men.
Zealotry is extinguished by indifference. If zealots are not faced with an equally zealous adversary, they must imagine one.
Zealots love their answer so much they ignore the question.
The greater the insecurity, the greater the zealotry.
The zealous need to convince their quota of people before bedtime to remain convinced the next day.
If you would be a prophet, converse with teenagers.
Of thieves, we forgive only the wealthy ones.
Puritans pontificating about sexual excess in society apparently have very little sex; if they had a bit more they’d discover that sex has its own built in shut-off valve.
My solemn and sincere prayer this holiday season is that monotheists world over get laid more frequently.
If only the fanatic Christmas-defenders were Christians, virtuously suffering in silence like they’re suppose to.
Freud did much to recast sin in new language, but I think I preferred sinners to psycho-babblers.
Combine America’s brand of Christianity and slavery to corporations, and you get the motto: see no chain, hear no chain.
Getting Started With Sankara Saranam
Go to godwithoutreligion.com and pranayama.org and sankarasaranam.net. Read God Without Religion.
