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Archive for September, 2011

Indra’s Lesson

There is a wonderful story in one of the Upanishads about the god Indra. Now, it happened at this time that a great monster had enclosed all the waters of the earth, so there was a terrible drought, and the world was in a very bad condition. It took Indra quite a while to realize that he had a box of thunderbolts and that all he had to do was drop a thunderbolt on the monster and blow him up. When he did that, the waters flowed, and the world was refreshed, and Indra said, “What a great boy am I.”
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The Valley of the Shadow of Death

We were at my Nana’s house watching TV when I had this strange feeling that the air was being sucked out of the room. I yelled for everyone to get down on the floor and I covered them with blankets. Then, all of the windows in the house exploded inward and there was this overpowering sound like a train coming toward us. I ran outside and stood in the driveway looking at what must have been an F4 tornado about half a mile in the distance. It was uprooting and destroying everything in it’s path and heading directly for me.

I was just staring at the blackness of the tornado as it ripped up houses and trees in its path. But I couldn’t move. My family was yelling at me to get out of the way and run but I was paralyzed with the insatiable curiosity of staring death in the face. It was just a few yards off and I marveled at the beauty of it and the perfection of nature.
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