Who is our True God and What is our True Religion?

Valentinian theology

Brief Summary of their teachings.

Valentinus- A Gnostic for All Seasons.

The analysis of Isha Upanishads- Aurobindo.

'V' refers to Valentinians and 'B' refers to Brahmans.

V.

The Godhead manifests itself through a process of self-unfolding in the subsequent multiplicity of being while maintaining its unity. He is the unknown true God or the Father.

B.

"The Purusha there and there, He am I." It is He who has become all things and beings. The Inhabitant of all forms. The Lord, the Purusha who both contains and inhabits the universe. He is called as Isha or Savitru.

V.

Valentinians believed that God is androgynous and frequently depicted him as a male-female dyad. This is related to the notion that God provides the universe with both form and substance. The feminine aspect of the deity is called Silence, Grace and Thought. She is also the active creative Thought that makes all subsequent states of being (or "Aeons") substantial. The masculine aspect of God is Depth, also called Ineffable and First Father.He is essentially passive, yet when moved to action by his feminine Thought, he gives the universe form.

B.

Samkhya recognizes two ultimate entities, Prakriti and Purusha. While the Prakriti is a single entity, the Samkhya admits a plurality of the Purushas in this world.

Samkhya Philosophy - Nature of Duality - Wikipedia

The male aspect is the Purusha and the female aspect is the Prakriti. It shouldn't be taken literally as male and female, it only means they are forms and substance.

V.

The origin of the universe is described as a process of emanation from the Godhead. The male and female aspects of the Father, acting in conjunction, manifested themselves in the Son. The Son is also often depicted by Valentinians as a male-female dyad. The Son manifests himself in twenty-six spiritual entities or Aeons arranged into male-female pairs. The arrangement and names of the Aeons will not be discussed here. They represent the energies immanent within Son and were seen as part of his personality. Together they constitute the Fullness (pleroma) of the Godhead.

B.

Even in Samkhya it is stated that Prakriti and Purusha transformed into twenty four constituents.

Samkhya Philosophy - The twenty six constituents - Wikiepdia

The Godhead of the Vedas can be worshiped in two ways i.e the Samshti swaroopa and vishruta swaroopa. In vishruta swaroopa they worship his individual sons (or Aeons) or part of his divine luster. In samashti swaroopa they worship his full pleroma or the complete fullness of Godhead including all his sons.

V.

Sophia sows the spiritual seed in all who hear the message. In some people the seed "falls on the path" and they do not respond at all. Such people are carnal by nature. In others the seed is choked by the thorns which are worldly concerns. They are hesitant and are unable to go beyond the level of rational explanations. Such people are dominated by their rational element or soul. In others, the seed was planted "in good earth" and they bear spiritual fruit. Such people are Gnostic or spiritual Christians.

B.

Even here they say that the seed to become "Sarvajnya" exists in all and everyone can achieve omniscience.

V.

Such a person is "in the world but not of it." They have already attained a spiritual existence such that, for them, the world has become the Fullness.

B.

Such persons are jivanmuktas, they are completely free and they are no longer bound to the forces of prakriti, they can leave their body whenever they want or they can live here for 100 years if it is required or even can reborn again by entering into a mother's womb without any fear of losing their spiritual knowledge once again.

V.

They believed that it was possible to lead a sinless existence through perfect knowledge (gnosis) of God's will. Sin was seen as an expression of ignorance. As it says in the Gospel of Philip, "The one who has knowledge is a free person. But the free person does not sin, for the one who sins is a slave of sin ".

B.

Ditto, same here. Only perfect knowledge & sympathy can give perfect help and these are impossible without oneness. He is equal in soul to honor & dishonor, respect & insult, because both come from himself to himself & not from another. Success & failure are equal to him, since he knows that both are equally necessary for the fulfillment of the divine intention. He will no more quarrel with them than with the cold of winter or the breath of the storm-blast. Neither will events bring to him grief or disappointment, fear or disgust with things, because he follows that divine will & purpose in himself & in others. He shrinks from no actions which the divine purpose demands or the divine impulse commands. He has no wish to kill, but he will not shrink from slaying when it is demanded.To men who are not free a conventional morality is an absolute necessity, for there must be a fixed standard to which they can appeal.

V.

Valentinians never rejected marriage and raising children. According to the Alexandrian teacher Theodotus, marriage was necessary so that those with the spiritual seed might be born.

B.

Same here. All this is for habitation by the Lord, whatsoever is individual universe of movement in the universal motion. By that renounced thou shouldst enjoy; lust not after any man's possession.

Doing verily works in this world one should wish to live a hundred years. Thus it is in thee and not otherwise than this; action cleaves not to a man.(This is how the Isha upanishad starts by stating the above.)

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They both have a different transpersonal psychology and they both don't believe in scientific realism and assert that the material world is only a state of mind.

The Gnostics took most of their ideas from the Neoplatonists and Plato. Neoplatonism and Gnosticism

Valentinian Monism

It is worth noting that Valentinianism shows an astonishing degree of similarity to another monistic system, the Advaita Vedanta school of Indian philosophy. In Advaita, the material world is an illusion (maya) attributed to ignorance (avidya) of the true reality. Through knowledge (jnana) of the ultimate reality (brahman), the world of multiplicity vanishes. True redemption (moksha) is the knowledge of one's true nature.

This raises the intriguing possibility of some kind of connection between the two. There was some awareness of Indian thought in the ancient Roman world. However, at the time of Valentinus, there was no systematic statement of Advaita thought. It is possible that Valentinus came into contact with some form of early Advaita Vedanta teaching. Advaita philosophy as it now stands was given its definitive form by Shankara in the 6th or 7th century AD. There also exists the possibility that he was influenced by Valentinian thought. Valentinians are known to have been active in the Middle East as late as the seventh century. It is possible that Valentinian missionaries or refugees may have made their way to India and come into contact with Shankara or his immediate predecessors. However, any connection between the two remains purely hypothetical. 

If mythology is strictly introduced and its importance is taken seriously then we cannot make a reconciliation between these two monistic systems and the Clement of Alexandria was right in distinguishing and separating Gnosticism from Brahmans and Sharamanas without making any connection it to Gnosticism.

But the similarities and commonalities are so compelling that it seems that in terms of transpersonal psychology and of the anthropomorphic Gods they are talking about the same thing.

It is inaccurate to think that the view espoused by Valentinians is similar to the view of Advaita by Shankara infact the view of the Valentinians go back to the view of the world as it existed when the Isha Upanishad was revealed and formulated, its the most ancient view of the world. Not a view which was formulated by Shankara in th 7th century, this view predates way before him.

What is interesting is that the secret teachings of Jesus are similar to the ancient monistic systems by which we can speculatively say that there exists a true supreme Godhead with his own numinous world.

Buddhism, Jainism, sikhism are divergent forms of this ancient monistic system and they all can be reduced into it. Now it appears that even the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions of the middle east can be reduced to this monistic religion.

The other deities like Ahura Mazda of Zoroastrianism, Egyptian Gods, and other Gods can be thought of as Gods of the other worlds who might not be aware of their origins from the supreme true Godhead due to ignorance.

This is purely hypothetical and related to comparative religion and leads to paganism.

Scientism and how this worldview closes other possible roads to reality.

In his collection Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (Harper & Row, 1963), Popper writes, "Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths; neither with the collection of observations, nor with the invention of experiments, but with the critical discussion of myths, and of magical techniques and practices. The scientific tradition is distinguished from the pre-scientific tradition in having two layers. Like the latter, it passes on its theories; but it also passes on a critical attitude towards them. The theories are passed on, not as dogmas, but rather with the challenge to discuss them and improve upon them."


The Logic of Scientific knowledge was given by Karl Popper and it is his philosophy of science which is the most accepted one in the scientific community and therefore it is important to understand his philosophical stands, Karl Popper was a falsificationist and a postpositivist. He opposed Logical Positivism, a view which rejected metaphysics and ontology statements as meaningless. He was not a positivist either because he opposed the distinction of phenomena and the actual thing in itself in science. According to Karl Popper falsification doesn't mean that metaphysical and ontological questions are meaningless, it just means they are unscientific but those statements might very well become scientific probably in the next century or in the future through paradigm shifts as described by Thomas Kuhn and therefore its not wrong to have a meaningful metaphysical speculation.

Stephen Hawking is a recent high profile advocate of positivism, at least in the physical sciences. In The Universe in a Nutshell (p. 31) he writes

Any sound scientific theory, whether of time or of any other concept, should in my opinion be based on the most workable philosophy of science: the positivist approach put forward by Karl Popper and others. According to this way of thinking, a scientific theory is a mathematical model that describes and codifies the observations we make. A good theory will describe a large range of phenomena on the basis of a few simple postulates and will make definite predictions that can be tested… If one takes the positivist position, as I do, one cannot say what time actually is. All one can do is describe what has been found to be a very good mathematical model for time and say what predictions it makes.

I appreciate it when many hold this kind of Positivism because it clearly shows that philosophy and ontology are irrelevant to science and there are some questions which science cannot address and give an authoritative answer to them.

[S]cience can stand on its own feet and does not need any help from rationalists, secular humanists, Marxists and similar religious movements; and ... non-scientific cultures, procedures and assumptions can also stand on their own feet and should be allowed to do so ... Science must be protected from ideologies; and societies, especially democratic societies, must be protected from science... In a democracy scientific institutions, research programmes, and suggestions must therefore be subjected to public control, there must be a separation of state and science just as there is a separation between state and religious institutions, and science should be taught as one view among many and not as the one and only road to truth and reality.


— Feyerabend, Against Method, p.viii

I oppose the views of Scientism, the positivist approach of science doesn't give us a complete understanding of the world around us and hence other roads to reality should be open for speculation and for criticism. The argument against Gods or against religion are very weak saying they probably don't exist or its very unlikely that they exist are not enough absolute evidence for ruling out the possibility for the existence of God.

My stance on this-


I am a realist and to me this universe exist independent of an observer and the reality described by scientific models are very much real as long as you are confined with in the simulation of your mind but they don't give answers for the questions asked about the actual physical system which we are describing, we cannot know what time and space actually is and we cannot either know what particles actually are but the paradigm shift here is that religion can provide answers to those questions.

I mean that just how we cannot show Australia or Antarctica if we only have half of the map of earth, (i.e the northern hemisphere) in the same way we need to have a different map in order to answer those ontological questions. It means we need to observe the universe using a fourth state of consciousness apart from the three awake, sleep and dream states. A fourth state means transcending from your own mind and perceiving the world. The observable world of science appears when we are completely awake and the world of religion appears when we are neither in awake and dream states and nor in deep sleep state. This would mean that the actual physical system might be only made up of five elements ( i.e Water, Fire, Space, Earth and Air) and it resolves the contradictions between scientific and religious worlds. Science will be irrelevant to religion and vise versa.


The method to have control over the four states of consciousness is called as Avastatreya (Avaste means states) and one can see one's own mind and intelligence in that fourth state and in this way it will be a self evidence that what we are observing is real and the one who has achieved such a state is a true philosopher because he doesn't speculate on the nature of things as it is like this or it is like that, he knows what exactly it "is" and that's the beauty of it.

Anonymous


@ Arindam is

The Atman is beyond Body, Mind, Intellect complex. It is Dhruk and not Dhrushya, it is the seer and not seen. The BMI are coming under 'seen' and realsing that I am the Seer is the knowledge.

It is taught in three different ways. It is beyond Pancha kosa , Avastatreya, and Sarirathreya.

Atman is different from Pancha Kosas- Body, Prana,Manas,Buddhi and beyond Ananda as a kosa.

And different from Wakeful,dream, Deep sleep state.

And different from Gross, subtle and Causal bodies.

The idea is Mind and Intellects are also different from Atma


The method to self-realize the five elements is called as Panchbootha Sakshatkar ( Panch- means five, bootha- means elements and Sakshatkar - means self-evidence) and you can realize that those five elements including time and space actually exists as it "is" and this is the real understanding of the ontology of matter, time and space.

 

If we do some research and search for genuine people who know that knowledge then we might learn them and observe them and it would resolve our conflicts between science and religion without in any way changing any of their claims and their model of world.

 

Yes there is something that science will never be able to explain it is called as Qualia(Universals). Qualia are aspects of our perception that don't exist in the external world, for example:- Colours, tastes, pain etc. In this following link Mapping pain in Brain the neurologists often use the word processing of pain but such an understanding of pain is incomplete, if they have such an authority over the complete understanding of the processing of pain then they should be able to understand the quantitative as well as the qualitative aspects of pain. What do I mean by qualitative aspects of pain is that neurologists should be able to completely understand and simulate the mechanisms that causes the subjective experience of pain, if they have such a complete understanding of the experience of pain then we can use the same mechanisms that are used in the cognitive processing of the Brain to be simulated in neural networks and enabling even machines to have subjective emotional experiences rather than just creating Philosophical zombies which mimic human behaviours but will not have an inner life of their own.

The point is our current understanding of Brain biochemistry doesn't provide any mechanisms what so ever to simulate the qualitative aspects of pain and other similar subjective experiences. This forms the hard-problem of consciousness as formulated by David Chalmers.

James Trefil notes that "it is the only major question in the sciences that we don't even know how to ask."

Therefore the cognitive processing of the Brain is not enough to account for the subjective experiences such as pain, redness, sweetness etc and these are the things which exist separately and independently from the physical objects and individuals who suffer from Lexical --> Gustatory Synesthesia are a perfect evidence that they arise from some form of cognitive processing and the point is that we need to understand the processing of these qualia which are non-physical in nature and only such a complete understanding of the cognitive processing in the Brain as well as the processing of qualia will give us a better understanding to solve the easy as well as the hard problems of cognitive processes of consciousness.

It seems to me that the different pathways of neurons that exist for different forms of pain indicates that the non-physical qualia have a casual effect on the physical world and it seems as though these neuronal pathways are just amplifiers to experience different forms and varieties of qualia. The Knowledge argument of qualia use a thought experiment called as Mary's room which indicates qualia represent some real knowledge and we need to have this knowledge in order to understand the complete cognitive processing of how the brain generates specific replies to specific sensory inputs.

If qualia are to be non-physical properties (which they must be in order to constitute an argument against physicalism), some argue that it is almost impossible to imagine how they could have a causal effect on the physical world. By redefining qualia as epiphenomenal, Jackson attempts to protect them from the demand of playing a causal role.

Later, however, he rejected epiphenomenalism. This, he argues, is due to the fact that when Mary first sees red, she says "wow," so it must be Mary's qualia that causes her to say "wow." This contradicts epiphenomenalism. Since the Mary's room thought experiment seems to create this contradiction, there must be something wrong with it. This is often referred to as the "there must be a reply" reply.

The positivist approach of Copenhagen Interpretation developed by Neils Bohr which is followed by majority of the orthodox physicists and the violation of the Bell's inequality theorem forces us to develop a different intuitive way of looking at reality. We are forced to believe that particles will not always have pre-determined values to physical quantities or attributes and the consequence of such a thinking leads us not to believe that particles will have attributes such a position, momentum, polarisation(in the case of a photon) until the particle is measured or observed through a detector extracting or accessing the precise information or the value of a physical attribute and more importantly this act of knowing or measuring will change the possible values that can be assigned to a quantum system destroying the delicate pattern of interference and Bohr was of the intention that we are not changing the physical nature of the quantum system, what we change is only the possible values that can be assigned to a quantum system.
 

This leads us to be skeptical

I mean to say if positivism forces us to believe that a particle can be separated from its actual physical nature from its measurable physical quantities such as position, momentum and polarisation, what understanding we really have about a particle, what it "is" physically? Does it mean that position, momentum, polarisation, mass, charge, spin etc are quantitative qualia which exist separately and independently from physical objects and exist only in our minds? If we can all experience the qualia of sweetness when we taste sugar and consider that the qualia sweetness is an universal what would prevent us to assert that even the mass and position of sugar molecules are an experience of a qualia which is universal to all of us.

The consequences of this way of thinking are even more radical than may appear so far. Consider a photon polarized in a 45° state and we ask the question ‘Is this photon horizontally or vertically polarized? But this is surely a meaningless question: the polarization is neither pointing upwards nor from side to side; it is pointing at an angle. It might make some sense to say that it is pointing partly up and down and partly from side to side (i.e. it is in a superposition of an H and a V state), but it is certainly not doing either one of these or the other. To ask this question is as meaningless as asking if a banana is either an apple or an orange. Thus, when we say that we ‘measure’ the HV polarization of a 45° photon, we are using the word in a rather different sense from the normal one. When we measure, say, the length of a piece of string, we have no problem in assuming thatthe string has some value of length before we put it on the ruler, but a quantum measurement is in general quite different. As we saw above, it alters the state of the system in such a way as to give reality to a quantity that was indefinable in its previous context. Now consider the implications of this way of thinking for measurements of particle position. Most of us tend to assume that a particle always has to be ‘somewhere’ even when it is not being observed, but this is not true in the quantum context: if a particle is in a state where its position is unknown, then to think about it even having a position is just as meaningless as ascribing H or V polarization to a particle in a 45° state. It is meaningless to say that the particle has passed through one slit or the other when an interference pattern is formed. Similarly, it is wrong to think that an electron in an atom is at any single point within it. However, just as the 45° state can be thought of as a superposition of H and V, we can think of the wave function as representing a superposition of possible positions, the contributions to the superposition from any point being weighted according to the size of the wave function at that point...............

.................Consider the set-up shown in Figure 8.5. As before, a 45o photon passes through an HV polarizer, but instead of being detected, the two paths possible are brought together so that they can interfere in a manner similar to that in the two-slit experiment. Just as in that experiment, we do not know which path the photon passes along, so we cannot attribute reality to either. The consequence is that the 45o polarization is reconstructed by the addition of the H and V components – as we can demonstrate by passing the photon through another ±45o polarizer and observing that all the photons emerge in the +45o channel as in Figure 8.5. If, however, we had placed a detector in one of the paths and between the two polarizers, we would either have detected the particle or we would not, so we would know that its polarization was either H or V; it turns out that in such a case, it is impossible in practice to reconstruct the original state and the emerging photons are either H or V. We are led to the conclusion that the act of detection is an essential part of the measuring process and is responsible for placing the photon into an H or V state. This is consistent with the positivist approach outlined earlier, because in the absence of detection we do not know that the photon possesses polarization so we should not assume that it does.

Figure 8.5 Light split into two components by an HV polarizer can be reunited by a second polarizer facing in the opposite direction (marked as VH). If the crystals are set up carefully so that the two paths through the apparatus are identical, the light emerging on the right has the same polarization as that incident on the left. This is also true for individual photons, a fact that is difficult to reconcile with the idea of measurement changing the photon’s state of polarization.

...............However, the Copenhagen approach goes further and denies the reality of anything other than the changes that occur in the classical apparatus: only the life or death of the

cat or the ‘permanent marks on a photographic plate’ are real. The polarization state of the photon is an idealistic concept extrapolated from the results of our observations and no greater reality should be attributed to it. From this point of view, the function of quantum physics is to make statistical predictions about the outcome of experiments and we should not attribute any truth-value to any conclusions we may draw about the nature of the quantum system itself.........

...........An experiment illustrating the same principle, though not involving polarization measurements, was suggested by Einstein and co-workers in 1935. They concluded,

If, without in any way disturbing the system, we can predict with certainty (i.e. with probability equal to unity) the value of a physical quantity, then there exists an element of physical reality corresponding to this physical quantity.

How then does conventional quantum theory treat a situation such as the measurement of the polarization of photon pairs? Shortly after Einstein’s paper came out, Bohr published a response, the key phrase of which was ‘There is essentially the question of an influence on the very conditions that define the possible types of prediction regarding the future behaviour of the system’ (Bohr’s italics). Applying this to the two-photon case, Bohr is saying that if we alter the orientation of one of the polarizers, we are not affecting the photons physically, but are only changing the attributes (i.e. the allowed values of the polarization) that we can assign to the system.....

....Whether or not we find this satisfactory depends strongly on our own ideas and prejudices. It certainly did not satisfy Einstein, whose reaction was that Bohr’s position was logically possible, but ‘so very contrary to my scientific instinct that I cannot forego my search for a more complete conception’. No such ‘complete conception’ has yet emerged to command a consensus in the scientific community.

- Quantum Physics

 A Beginner’s Guide by

Alastair I. M. Rae

If this is the case then the question of why the act of measurement changes the quantum system in such a way that it is impossible to simultaneously detect the precise information of position of a wavicle and also to observe the delicate interference being formed on the screen is not a problem  of nature it is more of a problem of processes of perception in the mind. A limitation on the mathematical relationships of position and momentum quale processing during the processing of perception in the mind of a subjective observer.

Below experiment shows that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the Bohr's argument that the detector induces random kicks to the electrons which causes the interference pattern to be destroyed cannot account for such a phenomena we need a new perspective to it.

Quantum Entanglement and the philosophical debates behind it.

The revisionist picture of the Bohr-Einstein debates stems partly from a suggestion made in 1991 by Marlan Scully, Berthold-Georg Englert, and Herbert Walther of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany. These researchers proposed using atoms as quantum objects in a version of Young's two-slit experiment. Atoms have an important advantage over simpler particles, such as photons or electrons: they have a variety of internal states, including a ground state (lowest energy state) and a series of excited states. These different states, the German team reckoned, could be used to track the atom's path.

Seven years later, Gerhard Rempe and his colleagues at the University of Konstanz, also in Germany, brought the experiment to life – and made a surprising discovery. Their technique involved cooling atoms of rubidium down to within a hair's breadth of absolute zero. (Cold atoms have long wavelengths, which make their interference patterns easier to observe.) Then they split a beam of the atoms using thin barriers of pure laser light. When the two beams were combined, they created the familiar double-slit interference pattern. Next, Rempe and his colleagues looked to see which path the atoms followed. The atoms going down one path were left alone, but those on the other path were nudged into a higher energy state by a pulse of microwaves (short wavelength radio waves). Following this treatment, the atoms, in their internal states, carried a record of which way they'd gone.

The crucial factor in this version of the double-slit experiment is that the microwaves have hardly any momentum of their own, so they can cause virtually no change to the atom's momentum – nowhere near enough to smear out the interference pattern. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle can't possibly play a significant hand in the outcome. Yet with the microwaves turned on so that we can tell which way the atoms went, the interference pattern suddenly vanishes. Bohr had argued that when such a pattern is lost, it happens because a measuring device gives random kicks to the particles. But there aren't any random kicks to speak of in the rubidium atom experiment; at most, the microwaves deliver momentum taps ten thousand times too small to destroy the interference bands. Yet, destroyed the bands are. It isn't that the uncertainty principle is proved wrong, but there's no way it can account for the results.

The only reason momentum kicks seemed to explain the classic double slit experiment discussed by Bohr and Einstein turns out to be a fortunate conspiracy of numbers. There's a mechanism at work far deeper than random jolts and uncertainty. What destroys the interference pattern is the very act of trying to get information about which paths is followed.

Stanford online courses

I received this mail from my University, Sign up now for your interested courses which will begin on this January. 

"Standford is offering amazing online courses starting this Jan. Those who successfully complete the course will receive a statement of accomplishment. The courses are CS 101, Machine Learning, Software as a service, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, Game theory, Probablistic Graphical Models, Cryptography, Design and Analysis of Algorithm.

To sign up, all you have to do is enter your name and email address and Stanford will send you the links to webinar and course materials when the course starts. We hope you make good use of your holidays during Jan – Feb and sign up for atleast 4 courses that you are interested in!

We have given a summary and video from the instructor in this post. Have a look at the following online courses. They would really be useful. Click Read more to find out the course details.

CS 101:

CS101 teaches the essential ideas of Computer Science for a zero-prior-experience audience. Computers can appear very complicated, but in reality, computers work within just a few, simple patterns. CS101 demystifies and brings those patterns to life, which is useful for anyone using computers today.

In CS101, students play and experiment with short bits of “computer code” to bring to life to the power and limitations of computers. Everything works within the browser, so there is no extra software to download or install. CS101 also provides a general background on computers today: what is a computer, what is hardware, what is software, what is the internet. No previous experience is required other than the ability to use a web browser.

Sign Up: http://www.cs101-class.org/

Machine Learning:

Machine learning is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. In the past decade, machine learning has given us self-driving cars, practical speech recognition, effective web search, and a vastly improved understanding of the human genome. Machine learning is so pervasive today that you probably use it dozens of times a day without knowing it. Many researchers also think it is the best way to make progress towards human-level AI.

In this class, you will learn about the most effective machine learning techniques, and gain practice implementing them and getting them to work for yourself. More importantly, you’ll learn about not only the theoretical underpinnings of learning, but also gain the practical know-how needed to quickly and powerfully apply these techniques to new problems. Finally, you’ll learn about some of Silicon Valley’s best practices in innovation as it pertains to machine learning and AI.

Sign Up: http://jan2012.ml-class.org/

Software Engineering for Software as a Service:

This course teaches the engineering fundamentals for long-lived software using the highly-productive Agile development method for Software as a Service (SaaS) using Ruby on Rails. Agile developers continuously refine and refactor a working but incomplete prototype until the customer is happy with result, with the customer offering continuous feedback.

Agile emphasizes user stories to validate customer requirements; test-driven development to reduce mistakes; biweekly iterations of new software releases; and velocity to measure progress. We will introduce all these elements of the Agile development cycle, and go through one iteration by adding features to a simple app and deploying it on the cloud using tools like Github, Cucumber, RSpec, RCov, Pivotal Tracker, and Heroku.

Sign Up: http://www.saas-class.org

Human-Computer Interfaces:

In this course, you will learn how to design technologies that bring people joy, rather than frustration.You’ll learn several technique for rapidly prototyping and evaluating multiple interface alternatives — and why rapid prototyping and comparative evaluation are essential to excellent interaction design. You’ll learn how to conduct fieldwork with people to help you get design ideas. How to make paper prototypes and low-fidelity mock-ups that are interactive — and how to use these designs to get feedback from other stakeholders like your teammates, clients, and users. You’ll learn principles of visual design so that you can effectively organize and present information with your interfaces. You’ll learn principles of perception and cognition that inform effective interaction design. And you’ll learn how to perform and analyze controlled experiments online.

In many cases, we’ll use Web design as the anchoring domain. A lot of the examples will come from the Web, and we’ll talk just a bit about Web technologies in particular. When we do so, it will be to support the main goal of this course, which is helping you build human-centered design skills, so that you have the principles and methods to create excellent interfaces with any technology.

Sign up: http://www.hci-class.org/

Natural Language Processing:

We are offering this course on Natural Language Processing free and online to students worldwide, January – March 2012,continuing Stanford’s exciting forays into large scale online instruction. Students have access to screencast lecture videos, are given quiz questions, assignments and exams, receive regular feedback on progress, and can participate in a discussion forum.

Those who successfully complete the course will receive a statement of accomplishment. Taught by Professors Jurafsky and Manning, the curriculum draws from Stanford’s courses in Natural Language Processing. You will need a decent internet connection for accessing course materials, but should be able to watch the videos on your smartphone.

Sign Up: http://www.nlp-class.org

Game Theory:

Popularized by movies such as “A Beautiful Mind“, game theory is the mathematical modeling of strategic interaction among rational (and irrational) agents. Beyond what we call ‘games’ in common language, such as chess, poker, soccer, etc., it includes the modeling of conflict among nations, political campaigns, competition among firms, and trading behavior in markets such as the NYSE. How could you begin to model eBay, Google keyword auctions, and peer to peer file-sharing networks, without accounting for the incentives of the people using them?

The course will provide the basics: representing games and strategies, the extensive form (which computer scientists call game trees), Bayesian games (modeling things like auctions), repeated and stochastic games, and more. We’ll include a variety of examples including classic games and a few applications.

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Probabilistic Graphical Models:

Uncertainty is unavoidable in real-world applications: we can almost never predict with certainty what will happen in the future, and even in the present and the past, many important aspects of the world are not observed with certainty. Probability theory gives us the basic foundation to model our beliefs about the different possible states of the world, and to update these beliefs as new evidence is obtained. These beliefs can be combined with individual preferences to help guide our actions, and even in selecting which observations to make. While probability theory has existed since the 17th century, our ability to use it effectively on large problems involving many inter-related variables is fairly recent, and is due largely to the development of a framework known as Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs).

This framework, which spans methods such as Bayesian networks and Markov random fields, uses ideas from discrete data structures in computer science to efficiently encode and manipulate probability distributions over high-dimensional spaces, often involving hundreds or even many thousands of variables. These methods have been used in an enormous range of application domains, which include: web search, medical and fault diagnosis, image understanding, reconstruction of biological networks, speech recognition, natural language processing, decoding of messages sent over a noisy communication channel, robot navigation, and many more. The PGM framework provides an essential tool for anyone who wants to learn how to reason coherently from limited and noisy observations.

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Design and Analysis of Algorithms 

In this course you will learn several fundamental principles of algorithm design. You’ll learn the divide-and-conquer design paradigm, with applications to fast sorting, searching, and multiplication. You’ll learn several blazingly fast primitives for computing on graphs, such as how to compute connectivity information and shortest paths. Finally, we’ll study how allowing the computer to “flip coins” can lead to elegant and practical algorithms and data structures. Learn the answers to questions such as: How do data structures like heaps, hash tables, bloom filters, and balanced search trees actually work, anyway? How come QuickSort runs so fast? What can graph algorithms tell us about the structure of the Web and social networks? Did my 3rd-grade teacher explain only a suboptimal algorithm for multiplying two numbers?

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Innocence

     
                 I think this is one of the best song of Avril from her album "The Best Damn Thing". I would be surprised if it doesn't find a place in your favorites list. 

The Glory Of Gayathri (Maha Bramhana)

Devudu Prathistana

                                                                                                

The Glory of Gayatri is a divine novel by the Kannada scholar Devudu Narasimha Shastry.

Along with this book(Maha Bramhana), the other two books namely Maha Darshana and Maha Kshatriya forms the trilogy(Maha Bramhana, Maha Darshana, Maha Khastriya) which bought great Honor to the scholar.  

  

Among the three, the novel Maha Darshana stands aside as the best novel according to me, though many would disagree with that since Maha Bramhana is a great work too.

  

Maha Darshana is the story of Yajnavalkya Maharshi and how god gave the famous Ishavasya Upanishad to the world through his means. God himself said to him saying "You'll write two books one consisting of a description about me and the other one will be your autobiography and I will always reveal myself to those who make a complete righteous attempt in studying these two Upanishads".

The novel Maha Darshana is almost like an Upanishad and hence the reason for me to stress individually on this. It includes a narration of Yajnavalkya's life as well as the truth hidden in his Upanishad.

Another reason why I loved this book is that it consists of many hidden secrets which not only help you to just read the scripture as it is but also a way to reveal the Upanishads or a way to explore or experience the truth for yourself provided if you can get the necessary guidance from someone who has mastered in it and its a knowledge based novel which provides great wisdom and insight into the vedic culture that was prevailing during ancient times. It is a must read book if you really want to know the basic philosophy behind the Vedic culture. Similar thoughts can be found in the Stoic school of Greek philosophers but this is very unique.

It feels like that your mind has gone into a new realm and it is not surprising if it takes some time for you to come to normal terms after reading this book.

I would love to bring this amazing work out to the public but unfortunately this book is not available in the English version yet and therefore I'm forced to introduce you to an another work of the same author which was the first novel that he wrote among the three books.

I hope the English version gives the same efficacy and touch as the Kannada version did. The Translator has made immense effort to keep the theme of the novel to its appreciable standards as intended by the author of the book.

                The Glory of Gayathri(Maha Bramhana) is a story of the origin of Gayatri Mantra. The author who saw the power of this mantra in his times thought of making aware of its origin to the public and in this way his desire to write this novel spurned. This form of Sun worship should be compulsorily carried out three times a day, but first you should be deserved to get the rights to perform this worship. This is not the only form of Sun worship which is available there are other ways of doing it too and I look forward to post them in the future. You'll comprehend what I mean by Sun worship once you have read this book. All the answers to your queries and the necessary introduction is provided in the reconstructed book itself.

I hope the readers find it interesting as I did and I also hope that it at least adds something to your World-view if it doesn't change it completely. I pray to God so that he stimulate your mind to comprehend the truth of it. Who knows what god has in store for you.

              

 I have uploaded the Introduction and Appendix chapters to Google docs. I hope the link works, all the best!!

Introduction

Appendix