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Ekadasi Fasting

Fasting is an act of restrainting from desire to eat. Eating is done to supply energy to the body to do various physical work to fulfill desires of life, including the desire to procreate.

Desires are subtle thoughts that are fulfilled upong manifestion giving the completeness of happiness. However, after fulfullment we again wish "once more" the happiness to be experienced.  This is why we take rebirth, but alas we end up in a visicious eternal loop of birth and rebirth.This eternal loop of suffering depletes our "Energy" and so called as "Paapa" or sin.

To redeem from this sin or loop of suffering, one has to have an attitude to have contentment in life as well as the awareness of laws of karma.

According to law of karma, every action leads to several chain reactions of actions and all of these actions depletes Energy.  To fuel the actions, we need to generate "luck" energy to fulfill desires. Thus we undergo cycles of poverty and richness through life-times.

The number 10 or "Dasa" is a number of completion. The desire to experience once more is "Eka", the aspect of rebirth (10 + 1 = 11). Vishnu is the Cosmic intelligence that helps get reedemed from this cycles of life through awareful living.

Ekadasi is observed in every 14 days of the moon cycle. Moon represents the mind and its waning and waxing represents the continuous depletion and generation of Energy for the mind's functionality. Avoiding grains on the Ekadesi days and undergoing fasting, conserves Energy and also increases the Awareness to be "Birthless".

All souls (personality with a bundle of desires) uses grain's energy to get into a cellular body. Therefore grains are symbolically avoided to get  "Birthlessness".

Suggested readings:

http://kksongs.org/calendar/ekadasi.html

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Namaste or Hand shake -a Microbial Dark Matter?

President Barack Obama appears to be a fan of the fist bump, which scientists in Wales are saying are more hygienic than handshakes.

Through one handshake almost 100 million bacteria are transferred from another individual reports the American Journal of Infection Control in their August 2014 journal (42 (2014) 916-7 A more hygienic alternative to the handshake

The researchers Dr. David Whitworth and Sara at Aberystwyth University, UK says that handshake has the potential to transmit infectious organisms directly between individuals.

They developed an experimental model to show that transfer of bacteria during greeting exchange dramatically reduced to 10 million in fist bump compared with a 10 fold high during handshake.

Is there a way to greet someone without any transfer of any infectious bacteria? Yes. Namaste.

When foreigners saw Indians greeting others without touching anyone by doing Namaste with folded hands, they misunderstood that Indians were practicing untouchability. In the name of education, the Indians were then confused to believe that Indian cultural tradition was merely a superstition without any scientific rationality.

Many modern Indians think they are cultured if they do the hand shake   and feel low in doing the highly scientific hygienic Namaste.

Namaste also conveys the Universal message to respect everyone as equal and love as oneself.

This is done both at the emotional and intellectual level of understanding by gesturing by both the left and right brain controlled hands put together as Namaste.

Stay tuned for the next you-tube part to understanding the scientific reason behind eating with our hands and not the western style of eating with spoons and forks.

Why eat with hands

Also Indians eating with hands vs spoons and fork is ridiculed as uncivilized gestures without understanding the scientific reasons behind it.

Medical research since 2000 throws light about One of the great recent discoveries in modern biology was that the human body contains 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells. But much of that bacteria is still a puzzle to scientists. (see reference for these exact same words)

It is estimated by scientists that roughly half of bacteria living in human bodies is difficult to replicate for scientific research -- which is why biologists call it "microbial dark matter."

One of the largest human- associated microbial habitats is the skin,  where bacterial density may be as high as 10 million cells per square centimeter of skin. The average phylotype richness observed on a single palm surface was also
3 times higher than the richness observed in a molecular survey of
forearm skin  and elbow skin.

A typical hand surface harbored >150 unique species-level bacterial phylotypes, and we identified a total of 4,742 unique phylotypes across all of the hands examined.

Although there was a core set of bacterial taxa commonly found on the palm surface, we observed pronounced intra- and interpersonal variation in bacterial community composition: hands from the same individual shared only 17% of their phylotypes, with different individuals sharing only 13%.
 Women had significantly higher diversity than men.

The most abundant genera (Proprionibacterium, 31.6% of all sequences; Streptococcus, 17.2%; Staphylococcus, 8.3%; Coryne-bacterium, 4.3%; and Lactobacillus, 3.1%) were found on nearly all palm surfaces sampled.

We observed a total of 4,742 distinct bacterial phylo-types across the 102 palm surfaces sampled, and only 5 phylotypes were shared across all of the hands sampled. On average, the communities found on any pair of palm surfaces shared only 13% of their phylotypes.

The influence of sex, handedness, and washing on the diversity of hand surface bacteria.