Hindus from the United States

"Ayn Rand is a stupid piece of shit!"

"The first time I felt I was famous was when I went to the movies with my mom. I had gone to the loo, and someone in the bathroom said in a very loud voice, "Girl in stall No. 1 were you in Mystic Pizza? I paused and I said, yeah that was me."

"Sonia Mowlicker."

"I can’t tell you. I would say that if I did, I would have to kill you, but that wouldn’t be polite."

"I drove a bus down Sunset Boulevard once, and I didn’t kill anyone."

"How can you look at this and not see it as the symbol for the self-referencing nature of progressive evolution."

"I didn't know people had that much water in them!"

"I just wanted to sing on TV."

"When life gives you lemons, get tequila and salt."

"Sour patch kids gone wild."

"Let's give them something to talk about, other than H A I R!"

"I like singing in the street, so if you saw a little Indian kid walking on the street singing loudly, that was probably me."

"I would have Simon Cowell sing 'Shiny Happy People' by R.E.M. just to show his true personality."

"I hope she saw the passion, and no need to tell Mark Anthony about it."

"I learned the hula, so now I know how to shake my booty Hawaiian style."

"Thank you! Welcome to the Universe of Sanjaya!"

"I don't eat sugary cereal."

"I don't think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different."

"I feel as comfortable anywhere as I feel uncomfortable anywhere"

"I do think that the modern India does belong to writers who are living in India."

"New York is a lovely city. It is an easy city to go back to and an easy city to leave. Every time I go there I immediately make travel plans."

"The Indian diaspora is a wonderful place to write from and I am lucky to be part of it."

"In India, if you are from the elite, dogs are extremely important. The breed of the dog indicates your wealth, that you are westernized. The cook, another human being, is on a much lower level than your dog. You see this all the time."

"My grandfather always says that's what books are for," Ashoke said, using the opportunity to open the volume in his hands. “To travel without moving an inch."

"(What immigrant fiction has been the most important to you, both personally and as an inspiration for your own writing?) I don’t know what to make of the term “immigrant fiction.” Writers have always tended to write about the worlds they come from. And it just so happens that many writers originate from different parts of the world than the ones they end up living in, either by choice or by necessity or by circumstance, and therefore, write about those experiences. If certain books are to be termed immigrant fiction, what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn’t agree with me. Given the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction. Hawthorne writes about immigrants. So does Willa Cather. From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme."

"yet I know that expressing oneself necessarily means being different. The writer's voice is a singular one, solitary. Art is nothing other than the freedom to express oneself in any language, in whatever manner, dressed any which way."

"Books come to stand for various episodes in our lives, for certain idealisms, follies of belief, moments of love. Along the way they accumulate our marks, our stains, our innocent abuses—they come to wear our experience of them on their covers and bindings like wrinkles on our skin."

"Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do."

"I'm amazed at how fast the interest has grown in writing in English by writers of South Asian origin, whether they're living in India, living in South Asia, or they are expatriate writers living here or immigrant American writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and me. The size of the community of such writers and the body of work produced has happened so fast."

"Several years ago, I was told by a leading professor of "South Asian Studies" at a major University that I "should never report anything positive about the BJP" (Sangh Parivar combine) or I "would never find a job in American academia". A colleague of mine submitted a manuscript for publication to Oxford University Press, Delhi and the then editor of OUP informed her that it was a good manuscript but since it had passages that reflected positively on the Sangh Parivar they could not publish it. He said if she would remove the passages that were not critical of the Hindu Mahasabha and the BJP then OUP would consider publishing her book – otherwise it was against their policy. Amazing isn't it?"

"During the summer of 2000, a very public controversy arose surrounding the excavation of a 10th century Jain Temple in Fatehpur Sikri where the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) had unearthed a pit filled with numerous damaged, broken statues. The debate about this archeological find offers an example of not only the ideological gulf dividing social scientists in India, but is indicative of the manner in which opposing camps of scholars have been using the popular media to sensationalize their perspectives. After the newspapers reported about this particular excavation site, Prof. K.N. Panikkar, Prof. Romila Thapar, Prof. K.M. Shirmali, Prof. Harbans Mukhia from JNU and Prof. Ifran Habib from Alighar Muslim University and several Indian academics who never miss a chance to oppose, condemn, and ridicule the "Sangh Parivar" accused the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) of acting irresponsibly by excavating this destroyed Jain temple saying it was an example of "saffron archeology"."

"When I make presentations about India at teachers' conferences or in classrooms, the two most often asked questions are: "Why do women wear a 'dot' on their foreheads?" and "Why, when there is so much poverty in India, don't they eat all those cows?" These questions broach issues of relevance and correlating non-Western practices to similar experiences in the students' lives, within a context they can comprehend."

"Proposals to include Sanskrit in the course offerings were rejected numerous times by scholars who wanted to protect JNU from what they considered to be a majoritarian or Hindu Nationalist agenda. When I questioned Romila Thapar, a well known historian from JNU, about this issue in July 2000, she explained that if students want to learn Sanskrit, “there are so many Maths and Piths around where they can go”. She added that “most of the regional colleges have some kind of Sanskrit program”."

"For me, as a researcher, the level of condemnation and the condescension among historians in India was impressive and easy to document. Uncomfortably, even engaging the Indo-centric perspective as something worth discussing caused a few historians at JNU and NCERT to ask me if I was a fascist sympathizer. Numerous times, I was told that in their estimation the blossoming Indic orientation in the interpretation of history was invalid, dangerous. I was warned that anyone who considered issues broached by the BJP, such as the unequal implementation of secularism in the Indian context or possible changes in the narration of history, was obviously politically tainted, ideologically contaminated, or just plain misguided."

"One informant told me that, “Indian Marxist historiography was not a reaction to an overbearing nationalistic historiography. It simply took up the thread of colonial historiography, thus enjoying a position of dominance from the beginning. The thrust of their endeavour has been hostile to Indian nationhood from the beginning and without limitation.”"

"Dr. Arjun Dev had explained to me a few weeks earlier that it is forbidden to write negativly about Islam in NCERT textbooks because it can foment communalism. He went so far as to say that “anyone who writes bad things about Islam could be arrested”... "We are very careful not to write anything that could be construed as defamatory against Islam or any religion.""

"This comment is added as a caveat for scholars seeking to learn more about the Sangh Parivar. Don’t rely on secondary and tertiary sources, but have the document in your hand, rather than reading “critical analyses” about such politicized and sensitive issues."

"The story of Pakistan’s past is intentionally written to be distinct from and often in direct contrast with interpretations of history found in India."

"Professor Mubarak Ali, a repected historian living in Lahore, asserts that Akbar has been systematically eliminated from most textbooks in Pakistan in order to "divert attention away from his 'misplaced' policies". Where they exist, discussions of Akbar are short and superficial..."

"For the past few decades in Pakistan, most educational reforms and curriculum policies have been politically and religiously driven, pedagogy being secondary. Denial and erasure are the primary tools of historiography as it is officially practiced in Pakistan. There is little room in the official historical narrative for questions or alternative points of view."

"Because they were not fully informed about the adventurism of their military leaders, they can only feel betrayed that somehow Pakistani politicians once again "grabbed diplomatic defeat from the jaws of military victory”."

"Pakistani textbooks have a particular problem when defining geographical space. The terms "South Asia" and "Subcontinent" have partially helped to solve this problem of the geo-historical identity of the area formally known as British India. However, it is quite difficult for Pakistani textbook writers to ignore the land now known as India when they discuss Islamic heroes and Muslim monuments in the Subcontinent. This reticence to recognize anything of importance in India, which is almost always referred to as "Bharat" in both English and Urdu versions of the textbooks, creates a difficult dilemma for historians writing about the Mughal Dynasties. It is interesting to note that M.A. Jinnah strongly protested the Congress’ appropriation of the appellation “India”, but Mountbattan dismissed his arguments."

"One of the more remarkable aspects of textbooks in Pakistan is their ability to completely eliminate cause and effect regarding the creation of Bangladesh. There is usually only a passing mention of the general elections called by Yahya Khan who is uniformly seen as a bad leader, a heavy drinking womanizer. There is nothing about the cancellation of the National Assembly, little about the military crackdown in Dhaka, less about the misfortunes of the Pakistani Army. The traumatic birth of Bangladesh is blamed on Indian cunning and incipient Bengali irridentalism.... “Eras and events deemed either irrelevant, hostile or inconvenient to the fulfillment of the Pakistan Movement are omitted”."

"Bangladesh is a majority Muslim country, with a significant, if shrinking Hindu minority—about twenty-five to thirty per cent at the time of Partition in 1947, but less than nine per cent remaining in 2003. The textbooks in Bangladesh are not predicated on an anti-Indian bias as are state sponsored textbooks in Pakistan. The social studies curriculum in Pakistan is premised on creating a national identity that is distinct from India, whereas Bangladeshi textbooks reflect a more pan-South Asian perspective, though completely Bengal-centric."

"Though there are some striking similarities, the situation regarding the politics of the historiography in Bangladesh is quite different than in Pakistan. In Bangladesh the textbooks were subjected to similar pressures as in Pakistan, with two military dictators during twenty-one years, both attempting to guide the historical narrative and hence, they believed, the political and psychological direction of the people. (4)"

"The system in Bangladesh is even more centralized than in Pakistan since all the textbooks and curriculum directives not only originate in Dhaka, but are also published by the National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB). Perhaps because of this, in Bangladesh there was a greater sense of us against them—as the years of military rule dragged on, 1975-1990. Textbooks in Bangladesh were altered by decree during that decade and a half, but selectively, not drastically. In contrast, in Pakistan, during the years of General Zia-ul Haq's dictatorship, 1977-1988, textbooks were completely altered to promote fundamentalist Islamic perspectives glorifying worldwide jihad. There was no scope for the textbook boards in the provinces of (West) Pakistan to impact the narrative as it emanated exclusively from Islamabad. (5)"

"More ominously, for Bangladeshis whose relatives were murdered, is the exclusion in the new BNP sponsored textbooks of the role played by the Jamaat-i-Islami and other fundamentalist organizations that supported razakars, Islamic terrorist squads implicated in the murders of intellectuals in Dhaka on December 14, 1971. The controversial sentences that blamed the Jamaat-i-Islami in the Awami League era text books were immediately expunged when the Jamaat-i-Islami came to power in a coalition government with the BNP. (20)"

"The new editions have re-embraced the view of Bangladeshi nationalism that was promoted by the military regimes. However, the BNP's efforts to vindicate the perpetrators of genocide have gone considerably further than even the former textbooks of Zia and Ershad's periods where the word "razakar" still appeared in reference to the murderers of the intellectuals on December 14, 1970. In 1996 era textbooks, the Awami League added "al-badars" and "al-shams" to the list of collaborators, specifically naming the "Jamaat-i-Islami" as culpable in the murder of the intellectuals. The new 2001 genre textbook leaves all of these names out of the narrative and simply blames the deaths of the intellectuals on themselves and on the Pakistani Army. After October 2001, eliminating references to razakars and certainly the Jamaat-i-Islami was an imperative since former razakars and members of the Jamaat are now part of the ruling coalition. ... An important impact of the omissions and extractions is that the genocidal excesses of the infamous collaborators, the razakars are ignored and thereby excused. This deflection of guilt by the Jamaat-i-Islami was one of the first orders of business for the BNP/Islamists political dispensation that came to power in October 2001."

"Among textbooks writers in Dhaka, Gandhi is sometimes given more respect than Jinnah, who is criticized because of his anti-Bengali stance."

"The manner in which the textbooks were gradually rewritten in Bangladesh is very different than the method of the BJP in India, where changes in the orientation of historiography have been implemented with media fanfare an broad consultation—a very public debate. In the very different political atmosphere of BNP/Islamist government controlled Bangladesh, changes were clandestinely implemented, with little public review."

"The most dramatic changes made by the two military rulers were the changes in the Constitution of Bangladesh. These religiously oriented alterations in the Constitution are there to stay. Once Islam has been declared the law of the land, even undemocratically, by military fiat, it can never be repealed, on threat of apostasy."

"A professor in the History Department at Dhaka University told me about his experiences during the months after the Pakistani Army took control of the country. When the bloodbath began in March, he and his family, along with many other Dhaka professionals fled to their ancestral villages hoping to escape the violence. For a few months, during the monsoon, the Pakistani junta declared an amnesty of sorts and made announcements asking scholars and professionals to return to Dhaka—to their posts in classrooms and hospitals. Promises were made that they would not be arrested. There had been a definite lull in the violence during the summer and many people decided to return to their jobs. This professor, with whom I spoke with a length, told rae that in April he and his family had gone to the home of his wife's relatives in a village in the northern part of the country. Since many professors had been targeted during the early weeks of the crackdown, there had been a mass exodus from the university campuses, which were seen as hot beds of secessionists. In July of 1971, with promises of security, many returned to their homes on the campus of Dhaka University. While on a barge, crossing a river on their way back to Dhaka my friend and his family encountered several Pakistani soldiers. Since the professor spoke Urdu they struck up a conversation. The professor was initially worried that he might be arrested or killed, but soon the soldiers waylaid their fears because, as they explained to the professor and his family, they had been "sent to kill Hindus". The professor and his family were Muslim. The soldiers complained that "for the past few months they had not been able to find many Hindus". He confided to the professor that he felt frustrated that "the Pakistani government had sent them to East Pakistan to kill Hindus" but he found mostly Muslims. He added that he "didn't mind killing Hindus but killin g Muslims was against [his] religious beliefs". Needless to say, the professor was relieved, if horrified by the implications."

"I interviewed numerous Hindus in Dhaka and Mymensingh who told me stories of how their lives were continually in danger. Controversial as it may be, they also told me that their daughters are often kidnapped, "forcibly converted and married to Muslim boys". They explained that, once converted, even by force", there is nothing they can do, because if the girls want to come home" and return to their ancestral religion they are then "accused of apostasy and run the risk of being murdered by the decree of a fatwa. Because of these pressures, the Hindu population of Bangladesh continues to shrink annually."

"Of all the students I have taught at The University of Texas at Austin, which were thousands, Yvette Rosser understood India the best."

"My bill would allow people to become an apprentice as a painter, as a glazier, as an electrician, to work for a small business, for a union doing private work, and really develop the skills to have meaningful work in either the public sector or the private sector."

"Bernie Sanders & I introduced the Bezos Act a month ago asking billion dollar companies to pay for their employees’ public benefits. We urged Mr. Bezos to raise wages to $15. The beltway economists crucified us. But Mr. Bezos listened. Today thousands of workers are better off."

"Even when 1 in 8 Americans are still food insecure, the USDA wants to strip SNAP benefits from 755,000 Americans over the next few years. Instead of making it harder for people to put food on the table, we should be making sure that nobody goes hungry."

"Note to Republicans: If we raised the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit, and created jobs in the areas left behind, then Americans wouldn’t need nutritional assistance to feed their families."

"Ending our support of Saudi Arabia isn’t about political gamesmanship. It’s about basic humanity. It’s about doing everything to stop the bombing in Yemen so we can get food and medicine to the hundreds of thousands of children who are at immediate risk of starving to death."

"I’m sure you know that apps are collecting your location data but are you aware that they are also selling this information to third parties? We need an Internet Bill of Rights so people know where their data is being used and how it’s being stored."

"Young activists like Greta Thunberg know that the climate crisis we face today was allowed to happen because corporations didn’t care enough about the health of our planet to place any roadblocks on their profits. We must give young people the reins and let them lead on climate."

"Our demand for restraint in foreign policy must be stronger than defense contractor lobbyists. Our demand for criminal justice reform must be stronger than the prison-industrial complex."

"Sarah Kliff spent the last year looking at over 1000 ER bills and has found outrageous facility fees, high costs for OTC drugs, and charges for simply sitting in the waiting room. Medicare for All would take these excess costs out of the equation..."

"Our demand for the Green New Deal must be stronger than fossil fuel lobbyists. Our demand for Medicare for All must be stronger than Big Pharma lobbyists. Our demand for Net Neutrality must be stronger than ISP lobbyists."

"After the ball drops on New Year’s Eve, 20 states will raise their minimum wages. This could not have been done without the amazing work of local activists, unions, and the @FightFor15. In 2019, we are going to push for a $15/hour federal minimum wage."

"When progressives remain silent and don’t talk about why the war in Syria is illegal, then into the void step in neocons like Lindsey Graham. Any wonder that our nation remains mired in endless war. Let’s have the guts to stand for responsible withdrawal."

"Here’s something that the mainstream media has left out when talking about Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from Syria: Congress never authorized sending troops to Syria. In fact, the UN also never approved. Our troops in Syria are in violation of domestic and international law."

"To lead in the 21st century, America needs a foreign policy rooted in diplomacy and restraint. We should follow the words of John Quincy Adams, whose Independence Day speech from almost two centuries ago still rings true today. "...Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy..." Full text JQA speech"

"The federal minimum wage hasn't gone up in nine years, and in that time the real value has dropped more than a dollar. That's why I support a $15/hr minimum wage."

"We are supporting Saudi Arabia while they inflict unthinkable human rights violations on the Yemeni people. Congress must do its job and stop providing military support and arm sales to the Saudi government."

"One member of Congress is already laying the groundwork for a new consensus plan to give everyone a job... most notably, it does not rely solely on public-sector jobs to fill gaps in the market. Instead, Khanna’s plan is based on a program used in Germany that combines increased public-sector work with subsidized private-sector jobs to achieve full employment. Khanna’s plan would work by allowing businesses to take on up to 15 jobs subsidized by the federal government at 120% of the cost of labor and 150% for unionized jobs. The extra money would go toward additional costs for increased employment like training and workspaces."

"We’re impressed by the ability of Eastern religions like Hinduism to meet science head-on, agreeing in many respects about important topics, such as the age and size of the universe. Today, Hindu culture is one of the last remaining enclaves of a universal-minded religion."

"You can take brass and polish a thousand years. It's never going to be gold. You cannot take a donkey and train for a hundred years. It never could be a horse."

"In the 1990s, the late Arvind Ghosh would write pamphlets lambasting the impotence of the RSS to save Hindu girls in Kashmir. His knowledge of significant anecdotes was impressive and his writing lively, but unfortunately, this kind and generous man was into conspiratorial thinking..."

"Or as Arvind Ghosh puts it with some hyperbole, it is the Sangh Parivar’s strategy to “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory”, to ruin projects which were bound to bring success if only they were pursued with firmness and conviction."

"In India, it is not uncommon that books critical of Islam are banned, for example, .... Arvind Ghosh’s The Koran and the Kafir, yet another annotated enumeration of Quranic injunctions which may adversely affect the relations between Muslims and unbelievers."

"Travel is always surprising. You can never read enough about a destination in a book to understand or to see what it's like until you get there. So, I tend to reserve my judgment about places because every time I've gone to different places I've been surprised. And I love that."

"India looks like a jewel from Space."

"A is just a pile of stuff."

"A park ranger once questioned the appropriateness of the telescopes, saying, "The sky is not a part of the park," to which Dobson replied, "No, but the park is part of the sky.""

"Can we, by now, square science with religion? In particular, can we square relativity and quantum mechanics with Swami Vivekananda's Advaita Vedanta? Since there cannot be two worlds - one for the scientists and one for the mystics - it must be that their descriptions are of the same world but from different points of view. Can we, from the vantage point of the Swami's Advaita (non-dualism), see both points of view? Swami Vivekananda said that science and religion would meet and shake hands. Can we see things from his vantage point? Since the notion of maya or apparition as the first cause of our physics is central to the swami's Advaita, I have chosen as "The Equations of Maya". Can we find them in our physics? According to the philosophy of the Advaita Vedantins, as the swami himself has said, there cannot be two existences, only one. And maya is, as it were, a veil or screen through which that oneness (the Absolute) is seen as this Universe of plurality and change.""

"The importance of a telescope is not how big it is, it's not how well made it is, it's how many people less fortunate than you got to look through it."

"In the absence of time we are left with the changeless, since change can take place only in time. And since smallness and dividedness can exist only in space, in the absence of space we are left with the infinite, the undivided."

"For many years Newton's view swept the field. But why don't corpuscles collide?"

"[A]t the hands of Huygens, Young, and Frensnel, Euler's notion that light might be a ... began to gain ground."

"But how could the ether be sufficiently rigid to transmit the vibrations at the speed of light and yet let the planets pass through it?"

"Then came Faraday... Space was filled with fields, and the fields were filled with energy. ...Maxwell suggested ...light was an electromagnetic wave... through the luminiferous ether."

"Then came Michelson and Morley. ...Then came Planck and Einstein. Light... was quantized... energy... Planck's constant times the (E=hv)."

"[S]peed of the photons... is independent of the observer's motion... So Einstein thought... who needs the ether? The photons, like fish out of water, were without the luminiferous ether..."

"Einstein put time into our geometry with space (where it belongs) so... "Matter tells space-time how to bend and space-time tells matter how to move" [Ref: Wheeler]. ...Swami Vivekananda ...suggested to Tesla ...winter ...1895-96 ...matter is ... (E=m). Matter is wound up against space-time and space-time is wound up against [matter]."

"In the four dimensional... space-time... separation between the emission... and the absorption events of the photons goes to zero, and even the fish are gone. ...What we see as a light-year away, we see as a year ago, because the time comes in squared with a minus sign."

"Energy is... the nature of... underlying existence showing through in space and time... it... remains constant."

"[O]nly the quality of the energy... usableness... gets degraded. ...[[Entropy (thermodynamics)|[E]ntropy]] is a measure of this ..."

"[T]he first and second laws of thermodynamics... laws doesn't mean edicts, but ally statements about how matter behaves. Physics is about how matter behaves... [[Entropy (thermodynamics)|[E]ntropy]] tends to go up."

"Negative entropy is a measure of the usableness of the energy. and the of large moving objects is completely usable. energy is not, because [of] the [scrambled] directions of... motions of... particles... That's... . ...[T]emperature is... kinetic energy of the molecules."

"When you panic stop... the of your... moving vehicle gets scrambled to heat by in... brake drums... brake shoes... tire[s] and road. ...[I]f, instead... the energy had been run into a ... you could... use... it to restart your car."

"[O]rganisms live in this cascade of increasing entropy by directing... the increase through their forms. ...[N]egative entropy is food."

"[F]ormation of galaxies and stars would [also]... be impossible except in this cascade of increasing entropy."

"Galaxies are formed when clouds of fall together... The clouds, unlike the stars, are large with respect to the spaces between them... So the [cloud] particles of each collide... and... scramble their motions to . ...energy of falling is transformed to heat. ...[T]he entropy has gone up."

"Stars are not hot because of ... [but] because [of]... energy of falling... transformed to . The heat [of]... fusion... keeps them from collapsing farther and... getting too hot. But it's... temporary."

"The observable Universe has a border... fifteen billion light years distant in all directions, imposed... by... "the expansion." ...At [the border distant objects] ...are estimated ...receding at the speed of light. ...[T]his apparent "expansion" ...imposes a border ...because things receding faster than ...light are not observable. ...[I]f the rate of expansion ...increased, the border would ...be closer."

"Radiation] of matter near the border... would be red-shifted (lowered in frequency)... But if the energy of the radiation of... particles is lowered, so too is the energy of the particles... and therefore also their . (...Einstein's 1905 equations ...)"

"[R]adiation... through a field of low-mass particles would be so often picked up and reradiated that it would be thermalized to 3° Kelvin and... appear as the background radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson in 1965."

"[I]f the mass of the particles approaches zero, their must... approach zero... [B]y Heisenberg's uncertainty principle... if we... know the momentum... we cannot know that it's at the border... its position."

"[I]f the particles... recycle by "tunneling" back into the observable Universe as (with its ... restored)... the entropy of the... Universe might not increase."

"I like to make fun of the Big Bang. I'm allergic to the Big Bang."

"The Big Bang people wanted to get everything out of nothing. They want us to believe that nothing made everything out of nothing."

"You can't persuade a kid that nothing made everything out of nothing. ...It's impossible to get everything out of nothing."

"[E]ven if you did get nothing to make everything out of nothing, you still have the difficulty that it's in a black hole. Getting it out of a black hole is the second impossibility. We now have impossibility squared."

"[T]here's a 3rd impossibility. In order to get this stuff out of a black hole, it's going to come out half matter and half antimatter, because the... fireball has to be all , and when radiation cools off to material particles... 50/50 matter and antimatter. ...So now it's impossibility cubed. Do I need to any further?"

"[W]e used to consider that no matter how many evidences in favor of your model, [if] you have... one evidence against you, and you're dead."

"So I have to replace the Big Bang. ...[L]et's confine ourselves to the observational evidence, and since there is no observational evidence for Creation, we'll leave it out. Now that leaves out the Big Bang people, the mini bang people, the steady-state people, The people... almost everybody."

"So if we confine ourselves to the observational evidence... all those distant galaxies appear to be running away from us, and the farther away we look, the faster they appear to be running away... [A]lthough the simplest explanation is long ago there was this explosion... all we know is... the ... something that happens in radiation."

"But if you don't know about that... when a fire engine is coming toward you the bell has a high pitch, and when goes past you it goes away with a low pitch. Ding, ding, ding... The reason that it slurs like that, is because the fire engine missed you."

"So radiation does a similar thing. If something is coming toward you, the s are shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum. That's the high energy end of the spectrum, which corresponds to the high pitch of the bell on the fire engine... [W]hen it goes away, the radiation is shifted to the lower end... the red end of the spectrum. That's called ed."

"[W]hat we see... is that... the radiation from all those distant galaxies is redshifted, and the farther away they appear to be... the more redshifted... [T]he usual interpretation... is that they're going away. ...So that they would be approaching the speed of light ...at about 15 billion s away. About 15 billion light-years away... their radiation would go to zero energy because of redshifting."

"Now if we consider the region just... this side of where they would go to zero energy... we see... the redshift of the radiation means that the energy of the particles is extremely low. The way we find... the energy of a particle is... its radiation..."

"The reason we write equations... is because it's just as easy to translate them into Japanese, or Russian... German... French or English, and I'll translate them into English."

"S^2 = x^2 - t^2This is Einstein's 1905 geometry. All he noticed was that distances are not objective. How far it is from New York to Chicago depends on how fast you're going by when you look at it. And lengths of time are not objective. What you call a minute or an hour depends upon how fast you're going by when you look at the clock."

"Suppose we have two space ships [travelling opposite directions]... These people see those clocks [in the other spaceship] are spinning around too fast. These people [in the opposing spaceship] see those clocks [in the first spaceship] are spinning around too fast. After they've passed each other these people see those clocks have slowed down, and those people see those [other] clocks have slowed down. Now whose clocks have slowed down? There is no such thing as how fast a clock is going."

"I know. You'll say, "I'm going to go along with the damned clock. That's entirely arbitrary, and the rest of the universe is not going along with your damned clock anyway."

"Einstein knew that distances... and lengths of time are not objective, and he wanted to know what is objective. The S, this is objectiveS^2 = x^2 - t^2The spacetime separation between here-now and there-then is objective. The spacetime separation between two events, here-now and there-then. That's objective. So this [x] is the distance between here and there, and this [t] is the time between now and then."

"Now what Einstein's geometry pointed out is that the time comes in squared with a minus sign. ...[R]emember ...Euclid's geometry... every time you square something it's got a plus sign. No, it's got a minus sign. ...You have to subtract the time separation from the space separation, and if they're equal, this [S] goes to zero."

"[I]f a light beam can get from here-now to there-then, or from there-then to here-now, then the distance [x] between here and there is equal to the time [t] between now and then, and the total separation goes to zero."

"E = mNow this is E = m. You already heard it with the c^2 on there, but that's just how many s equals a . When Einstein found out they were measuring the same thing in grams as in ergs, he has to know how many ergs makes a gram, and an erg is the kinetic energy of a 2 gram beetle walking 1 centimeter per second and running into your shoe. ...The gram is the energy of the Hiroshima bomb, and he had to know how many beetles... to get rid of Berkeley. ...[T]hat's what the c^2 is all about, 9 times 10^{20}. ...The kinetic energy of 9 times 10^{20} 2 gram beetles walking 1 centimeter per second would vaporize Berkeley."

"E = mSo this... says that what we call matter, was just potential energy. Now we got both these [spacetime and energy equations] in 1905."

"\triangle x\;\triangle mv \ge \hbarThis we got from Heisenberg in 1927, but he blames it on Einstein. Heisenberg says, ....for more than three ...months they tried to describe the track of an electron across the , which they can see. They tried to describe it in quantum mechanics, and they couldn't ...These are the biggest shots in quantum mechanics, and they couldn't do it. Heisenberg, Bohr and Schrödinger... couldn't do it. ...[H]eisenberg said, then I remembered and suggested what Einstein had ...[said] earlier, "Theory must first say what can be observed" and when I looked at the problem from that side, I had the uncertainty relation."

"\triangle x\;\triangle mv \ge \hbarSo what this says is that the product of our uncertainty in where something is [\triangle x], and our uncertainty in what it's doing, [\triangle mv] its momentum, can never be less than this little guy [\hbar] whom we don't have to know anything about... because he doesn't get bigger or smaller... 2 doesn't get bigger or smaller and π doesn't get bigger or smaller in flat space. ...[W]hat this says is that our uncertainty here [\triangle x] multiplied by our uncertainty here [\triangle mv] cannot go to zero. ...Your uncertainty can't go to zero. ...So if you know where something is, you can't know what it's doing, and if you know what it's doing, you can't know where it's doing it. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

"Now back to the border... where the radiation as seen by us approaches zero. The energy of the particles approaches zero. If the energy of the particles approaches zero, [E = m] the mass of the particles approaches zero. If the mass of the particles approaches zero, [\triangle x\;\triangle mv \ge \hbar] the momentum of the particles approaches zero. The momentum is the mass multiplied by the velocity... If the momentum approaches zero, our uncertainty in the momentum approaches zero. You can't have a big mistake about nothing. ...If the uncertainty in the momentum approaches zero, the uncertainty in where they are [\triangle x] goes to totality, and they can recycle back anywhere. I don't see any way to avoid that, understanding physics the way we understand it now. You would have to change the physics to get out of the mess."

"So as I see it, the stuff recycles from the border."

"So there is this question which... everybody fails to ask me about it. How come it recycles as and not as iron? ...As seen by us, if the mass is going very very low, then the size of the particles has to get very big because things are wound up against electricity by being small, and if their size goes bigger then their mass goes down, or if their mass goes down, their size gets bigger. So way out there, as seen by us, the mass is going down, the sizes are getting bigger and the molecules can't hold together. The atoms can't hold together, and they come back as s and electrons."

"I'm going to give you my one-liner. The universe is made out of s and electrons. It talks French and knows how to spell it. I really don't think that people who believe in intelligent design have even smelled the problem. It's made out of protons and electrons, and it talks French and knows how to spell it."

"[W]hat is the evidence that it recycles from the border? There's a lot of evidence now. ...The Hubble telescope was asked to look to see about the between ... 3C 273 is a quasar... close enough to us so that the light reaches us... and can't get into the atmosphere, so we asked [the Hubble telescope] to look at it and see if there are any clouds of between 3C 273 and ourselves that are going away from us at different speeds... [T]he Hubble telescope said that there are a whole block of clouds of hydrogen between 3C 273 and ourselves going away at different speeds, and so each one makes a shadow in the spectra and there are a whole lot of shadows. That's called the Lyman-alpha forest. So that's an old piece of evidence, and the Hubble telescope also said that there's more than enough in the intergalactic voids to make all the known galaxies."

"[I]n recent times we found there's... dozens of galaxies that are only a few hundred million years old, and they couldn't possibly be as old as the Big Bang theory says they should be. ...So there's a lot of observational evidence... on my side that says no to the Big Bang model."

"There's another problem. The Big Bang people always thought that the background radiation that... Penzias and Wilson discovered in 1965 was the proof of their theory. Well, you can't prove a theory. You can disprove it, and it's been disproven several times."

"[H]ow do I get the background radiation? It turns out that way out near the border, where the mass of the particles is very low, all radiation going through a field of low mass particles gets so often picked up and re-radiated that it gets thermalized to 3°K. ...[T]he amount of 3K background radiation that we get in this model corresponds to what we measure, and the Big Bang gets about 1% of what they predict."

"The fun part is this. We have a rule against machines... because the entropy tends to a maximum. ...Entropy is a measure of the scrambledness of the energy... and it's easier to scramble an egg than to unscramble it. ...So the rule is that entropy, the scrambledness of the energy tends to go up, and does not tend to go down, and for that reason you can't have a perpetual motion machine that takes energy in a more scrambled state and runs it out in a less scrambled state. It always goes the other way. It gets it in a less scrambled state and dumps it out scrambled."

"[I]n my model the stuff recycles from the border as brand new spaced all out... and that's the lowest state of entropy known to man. Hydrogen all spaced out is the lowest state of entropy, and then it falls together by gravity and the entropy goes up, and all these other things happen and the entropy keeps going up and going up. ...[W]hen it recycles from the border the negative entropy is back in."

"Long ago there were some physicists who said that the whole universe was made out of energy. We Europeans were so retarded that we didn't notice... energy until 1845. But there were some physicists who... probably 5,000 years ago said the whole universe is made out of energy, and their name for the universe was... "the changing"... [T]hey said if the universe is the changing, there has to be something with respect to which it changes. So there has to be a changeless underneath, and if it's not in time it can't be in space, so it has to be changeless, infinite and undivided. Then their problem was, if what exists is changeless and what we see is changing, how the hell do you do that? ...[T]hey said it could only be by mistake. You can't change the changeless, but you could mistake the changeless for the changing. So they said, we'll have to study mistakes."

"In order to mistake one thing for another you have 3 things to do. ...[Y]ou have to fail to see what it was. That's the veiling power of your mistake. Then you have to jump to the conclusion that it was something else. That you do on your own hoofs. That's called the projecting power of the mistake. But... you had to see the thing in the first place, or you would have never made the mistake that way. In order to mistake your friend for a ghost, you had to see your friend. Your friend shows through in the ghost. So those old physicists said the changeless has to show through in our physics. That's inertia. The infinite has to show... That's the in the miniscule particles. And the undivided has to show... and that's why they all fall together by gravity."

"Now it's not as though we Europeans had another explanation for any of this. We don't! ...We have only an explanation of how things fall, not why they fall; and how they coast, not why they coast; and that they are made of electricity and not why they're made of electricity. Those old physicists had the why answer on this."

"So if you ask what's beyond the observable universe, and the observable universe... is due to a mistake... and you want to know what's beyond the mistake, it's the changeless, the infinite, the undivided."

"All we see is that things are moving away from each other, but if you see from the center of an observational universe, as seen by you they're going away from you. ...[R]edshift is not an actual thing. This is not an actual model of the universe. It's not a model of an actual universe, it's a model of an observational universe... [T]hat's the difference between this model and all of the other cosmological models. All the other cosmological models have taken the universe to be actual. What do we mean by actual? We mean that it arises by a process in physics. Since universes are fairly well known not to arise by processes in physics, I don't think that we have any actual universes. I think we're stuck with observational physics. I think this stuff that we wrote on the board is about an observational universe, not about an actual universe."

"I asked 3 astronomers in the last 25 or 30 years... When a cluster of stars is formed out of a cloud of dusty , what proportion of this stuff makes into the stars, and what proportion is blown away by the stellar wind? ...[T]he first 2 ...said they don't have an immediate answer... but they thought that between 1 and 10% would make it into the stars, and between 90 and 99% would be blown away. ...[T]he 3rd man ...in more recent time ...said 95% ...is blown away, and in some cases more and in some cases less. So... what is all this ? It's blown away from when the stars were formed. ...[W]hen a galaxy is formed, it's just a cluster of stars and 99 or 95%... of this stuff is going to be blown away. Now that's what we see. Vera Rubin measured this for ... around it is all the rest of this stuff which is 10 times as much as we see in the galaxy... So the is perfectly ordinary matter..."

"[I]n recent times we've discovered... that about 1/2 of the neutron stars that we know about have from the galaxy. ...Now these are neutron stars with a density of 100,000 battle ships in a one pint jar, and they're about 10 or 12 miles in diameter and they weigh a hell of a lot, and they're leaving the galaxy, and they're , and they're too bloody small for you to find. ...They're not going to shine for you."

"I think that the is ordinary matter. I don't think we need any fancy stuff like the Big Bang people need. The Big Bang people needed all that fancy stuff because their inflationary models said that it has to be in there... [T]hen they ran into this difficulty... If there's all that extra stuff in here, out of which and could be made, then the Big Bang model is wrong. ...If all this extra matter is ordinary matter, then the helium abundance is not ok for the Big Bang model! So then they had to invent that this dark matter responds only to gravity. I was having dinner with a physicist... I said in that case why didn't it fall into the galaxy? ...[H]e said, "It can't fall into anything without getting rid of its gravitational energy, and it has no way to do that." So what's the use of the dark matter? It can't do anything. ...[T]hat's the problem with the dark matter..."

"[T]he dark matter that they invented said that the universe should be not expanding so fast. ...So then they had to invent the to make it speed up. ...[I]f you want to invent all these things you can get out of any model."

"One of the troubles of the Big Bang is they invented the initial conditions so that it would come out like this. Well, that's not usually the name of the game. ...You're supposed to look to see what the initial ingredients might have been. ...I don't take seriously dark energy and dark matter. Dark matter, as I see it... we already know that we see only a little bit of the universe that's out there. Vera Rubin measured it a long time ago. We know where it is, and I have a good idea what it is."

"I have a feeling... that the physicists are going to have to learn to read, because the... physicists have taught... that thisE = mmeans that matter can be converted to energy... and that's not this equation. That would be E + m = \text{a concept}. If mass goes down the energy goes up. If the energy goes down, the mass goes up. There's only one way to write that E + m = k, and that's not Einstein's equation... and Einstein never took it the other way. He always took it the way he wrote it. ...I don't think he ever saw how it was taught in school. If you were teaching... and Einstein is visiting... are you going to talk relativity?"

"Einstein never changed it, the way he put it in his words. He said toward the end of his life, ..."Matter had fallen out of the physics... as a fundamental concept." We're left only with energy. ...That's going to have to be cleaned up. The physicists can't be this retarded permanently."

"S^2 = x^2 - t^2S is zero only if x is equal to t. If x is equal to t then S is always zero. ...[O]ur evidence that the universe is out there and inde-god damned-pendent of us, is that we look out there and see it... [T]he equation says that... the separation of every event that you've seen... and your seeing of that event has always been zero. ...[W]e knew it was like that when we're dreaming. We didn't know that it's better than that when we're awake."

"I'm not responsible for any of those equations. ...I'm just your tour guide."

"I give these talks in Hollywood... at the church in the Vedanta center... There are all these monks lying around and... people ask me questions... So I tell them, "I'm just your tour guide. I'm here to tell you where you are and how you got here. If you want to get out, talk to the people in orange.""

"[T]he way I understand it from those old physicists is that there's something underneath which we didn't notice, and... they said... they have an answer for why inertia shows, why gravity shows, why electricity shows. We have no answer at Caltech. We know how things fall... how they coast... how they're electrical. We don't know why. ...[T]hose old physicists gave us a way of looking at this thing that says why. If you mistake one thing for another, the one thing has to show, and they said what's underneath has to be changeless, infinite and undivided... [T]he... [unchanging] that shows through is inertia, the infinite is the electrical energy and... gravity is the undivided showing through."

"It shows through in us too. Everybody runs after peace and security. That's running after the changeless. Everybody runs after freedom. That's running after the infinite, and everybody runs after happiness. We all get married and have children... and you're restricted to the pursuit of happiness, not to its attainment. It's written."

"[I]f this whole thing is due to a mistake, there's a reason why it's made out of frustration. ...My model says that the universe is going to be made out of frustration."

"I was asked to give a talk... [by] the lady at the pretzel farm in Sierra... You understand a pretzel farm, where all those folded s are? ...[T]he lady ...asked me to give a talk on frustration. ...I said I was walking down through ... in Los Angeles in the winter... the rainy season, and there's this little stream of water coming along beside me... I was thinking that the poets say it will be happy when it reaches the sea. But the poets are wrong... The sea is trying desperately to get to the center of the earth, and the rocks are in the way, and it gets frustrated. ...So the rocks are trying desperately to get to the center of the earth, and the iron of the earth's core is in the way, and the rocks get frustrated. And the iron at the earth's core is trying desperately to fall into the sun, and its inertia is in the way, and it goes round and round... 18 miles a second, and it gets frustrated. And the sun is trying desperately to get to the center of the galaxy, and its inertia, the way it goes around 150 miles a second, and it gets frustrated. And the galaxy has been trying to merge with all the rest of the matter of the observable universe, but the expansion is in the way, and it gets frustrated. And the expansion has been trying to reduce the density of the universe, but the recycling is in the way, and it gets frustrated."

"Now if the universe weren't made out of frustration, it couldn't go on like this. Cheer up. There's no way out of it."

"[T]here's nothing invariant about how it [the universe] looks to all of us. There are a lot of us and it looks different to a whole bunch of us... But if you ask... the fundamental questions what's underneath, then I think it comes out the same. ...[T]he changeless, the infinite and the undivided, and if there's no other way to do this except making mistakes, but you're not required to make a mistake. I think it's time to fire me."

"I didn't create a telescope. ...I'm famous for being too retarded to make an . You're supposed to do something to get famous for it! But we... weren't going to do photography. We just wanted to see what's out there and we made a 24 incher, that's more than 13 foot , and we've run it for more than 80,000 miles in the public parks and in Indian reservations, up to Canada and down to Mexico. But we weren't going to do photography. We din't need to track things across the sky, so we never did all that. ...So the people who need to be blamed are the people who invented those equatorial mounts. You should get on their case, not mine, because that's an invention. What we did is not an invention."

"They were going to give me an award for public service in astronomy in the East Bay Astronomical Society, so... they sweet talk you in front of the crowd: "The Dobsonian Revolution..." So I got up and said, "All the previous revolutions were run with the cannons on Dobsonian mounts!""

"We were in the monastary and it must have been in our curriculum to grind telescope mirrors, and these were just gallon jug bottoms, just little 5 1/2 incher things, and I was doing them under water so as not to make a stir... but we had enough stir anyway."

"Why would I need a newer type telescope. Our older type telescopes do everything I need... There are a lot of people who like to invent... harder ways to do things. I let them do it."

"It's high time... that the amateurs did something else besides taking pictures with those 4 and 6 inchers, and looking at the pictures in the daytime with their s. They're not going to see them with their cone cells through the telescope. They're going to see them with their s, and the rod cells are wired the wrong way. For this whole bunch of cells there is only one wire to the brain, and for this whole bunch [in the other eye] there's only one wire to the brain. So your resolution is between this bunch and this bunch... so if you want to see what those pictures look like, take them in the closet and turn out the light, and damn it all, they look just like what you see through the eyepiece. Don't think I don't do all these things. I do."

"It's virtually impossible to entertain me at a . I've had to aim that [24 inch] telescope for the public for... a lot... 4,000 nights... so I've seen most of those things from 7 to 10 thousand feet through a 24 incher... and my eyes are no longer as young as they used to be."

"I used to be able to see the middle star in the through our 24 incher. So we were up on 5,000 ft in the Sierra and there was this young lady and... I noticed her pupils were very big, so I asked her to... see if she could see the central star... So she calls out there are two stars inside and there are two... in the nebulosity, and she calls out the . That's all you see through the 120... [I]t makes a lot of difference what's between your eyepiece and your brain... and I don't have very good eyes."

"When I was in Boston when... 3 years old, some big kid rubbed mud in my eyes till it was behind the eyeballs, and the doctors thought I would be blind. Mother said it took one whole week for the mud to ooze out from underneath my eyeballs. ...So I don't have a straight horizon in my right eye, but my brain reads my left eye. ...I've had 87 years to get used to it, and my brain knows which eye to read. ...But if I'm not careful, I can see, once in a while, this picture intrude ..."

"If the amateurs don't get their telescopes out for the public, nobody will! The professionals make telescopes for the professionals. We sidewalk astronomers make telescopes for the rest of you."

"I was in ... and they've had star parties on the dark of the moon... probably for 100 years... Run off to the wilderness with their telescopes so they can lick their chops and go to bed. And now on the next week, when there is a quarter moon, they have a public star party in the old in Seattle, and they blame that one on me. But they get quite a number of telescopes... and several hundred people looking... A lot of amateurs do this kind of thing now. We sidewalk astronomers used to do it on every clear night, but... I can't do that any more. They run me all over the place in a plane."

"[Y]ou need to make telescopes so you can see what's going on out there. You can't see it any other way. Watching TV doesn't do it. They get all mixed up when they run the TV, and they get you all mixed up if you're not careful."

"A specific type of Alt-Az mount is called a Dobsonian mount, named after John Dobson... a cofounder of the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers in 1967 and an avid promoter of bringing the wonders of astronomy to the people. ...The Dobsonian mount is simple (two basic pieces - tube and base), stable, and low cost."

"[A] side to Dobson’s work that makes... scientists, uncomfortable."

"Dobson believes scientists are making a mistake by limiting themselves to conventional measurements of space and time. Such... he insists, have hit a roadblock. Researchers should, he says, add philosophy and metaphysics into their equations."

"Dobson tried this argument out on the physics department at , referring to his model of the universe... "I’ll admit... this is way out in left field." ...[P]rofessors and students fidgeted through the lecture. Several walked out... Afterward came... "What you’re talking about isn’t physics." "Nobody is going to listen... until you can come up with... numbers.""

"He is portrayed as a galactic Pied Piper, luring followers with enthusiasm and charm, coaxing them on a journey to the heavens."

"Dobson’s original design is fundamentally excellent. What I have done is taken Dobson’s concepts and tried to realize their full potential."

"Dobson is a visionary. With his home-built telescopes, he smashed traditional "small" expectations for amateur instruments. ...John Dobson pointed the way to today’s dream telescopes."

"The true Dobsonian—the telescope held by friction alone—was invented by John Lowry Dobson. Born in China in 1915 to missionary parents, it fell to Dobson to reduce the alt-azimuth telescope to its essentials. ...[H]is family returned to San Francisco in 1927."

"[A] lecture by changed the direction of young Dobson’s life, sending him on a quest for "the reality behind the universe" under the Swami’s instruction. The Swami advised returning to school, and in 1943, Dobson graduated with degrees in chemistry and mathematics. He immediately found work at Berkeley, later transferring to Caltech and then to the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory."

"In 1944, Dobson quit his job and entered a monastery as a monk of the . At the monastery, Swami Ashokananda assigned him the task of uniting the ancient thinking of India with and astronomy... that deal most closely with the "first cause" of the universe."

"In 1956, Dobson built his first telescope. The mirror was made from a 12inch disk of glass using the instructions found in Allyn Thompson's Making Your Own Telescope. The sight of the moon through this instrument helped him decide that everyone in the world had to see the heavens through a telescope."

"In 1958, Dobson was transferred to the ’s monastery in Sacramento, where he... surreptitiously built telescopes... At night Dobson trundled his reflectors... around the... neighborhood and taught local children... to build telescopes. But monastery rules forbade leaving the monastery... without permission, and in 1967, after 23 years... Dobson was expelled. ...[H]e had constructed fifteen 12-inch and two 18-inch telescopes from scavenged junk."

"Dobson returned to San Francisco... [E]very clear night, he rolled his 12-inch Stellatrope to the corner... and showed the heavens to anyone who would look. One... passersby... arranged for him to begin teaching telescope making and astronomy at the Jewish Community Center, and later at the and the ."

"[T]wo... friends insisted... he join them in forming... the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers. This club met at [Dobson's same corner] and brought telescopes... During the 70s and 80s, the[y] toured national parks... showing tens of thousands... their universe..."

"Big, thin mirrors, the sling support, Teflon-on-Formica bearings, and the practical alt-azimuth mount are Dobson’s contributions."

"Nearly a million people have looked through Dobson's telescopes, which he constructs from castoff pieces of plywood... scraps of two-by-fours, cardboard centers of hose reels, chunks of cereal boxes and s from old ships."

"Says legendary comet-hunter David Levy, borrowing... from Bob Summerfield... of Astronomy To Go, a traveling star lab: "Newton made telescopes for astronomers to observe the universe; John Dobson makes telescopes for the rest of us.""

"Dobson's invention is... a system of making and mounting one. {...he uses the same type of reflecting telescope devised by Sir Isaac Newton ...) Dobson's mirrors are thin, light and cheap... made from the bottoms of glass gallon jugs instead of optical glass. ...[H]is mount that made weights unnecessary. Where an eight-inch amateur telescope with accessor[ies]... can cost $2,400, a basic eight-inch... can be made... for $200."

"The Hindu, or Vedic, concept of time is cyclical. There are cycles within cycles within cycles."

"True ancient Hindu cosmology was "dismantled" by Europeans in order to bring it into line with the biblical time scale. This happened during the 18th and 19th centuries. They tried to fit everything within five thousand years."

"Hinduism, the Eternal Way or Sanatana Dharma, has no beginning, therefore will certainly have no end. It was never created, and therefore it cannot be destroyed. It is a God-centric religion. The center of it is God. All of the other religions are prophet-centric. It is the only religion that has such breadth and depth. Hinduism contains the deities and the sanctified temples, the esoteric knowledge of inner states of consciousness, yoga and the disciplines of meditation."

"From the Hindu perspective, all oflife is sacred, and performing our duty is dhanna. Dhanna is a rich tenn that means "way of righteousness, religion and fulfillment of duty." From this lofty view, every deed is a part of our religious practice. Everything we do is an act of worship and faith."

"Defining hardcore is like defining falling in love -- definitions really miss the point. You don't need a definition to know if you're in love or not -- you just know it. You just feel real hardcore when you experience it."

"Each of us who takes spiritual matters seriously finds in the course of time the path wherein his spiritual aspirations and needs find their truest satisfaction. It was because I found mine in the spiritual outlook of the Upanishads and the Gita more completely than anywhere else that I wished to be a member of the Hindu community and thus afford those I loved the opportunity to develop freely and naturally in the midst of the atmosphere that had these great scriptures as their basis."

"A new caste system, based on race and power, would become firmly established with the German “Aryan” as Brahman and Kshatriya, the other European races as Vaishya, and the non-European peoples as the Shudras of the world."