Another new song I’m working on, over at soundclick:

http://soundclick.com/share?songid=6819693

Have a listen and tell me what you think!

-D

Two new songs of mine, available at:

http://www.myspace.com/swamidigital
Or
http://www.soundclick.com/swamidigital

They are Seer of Sound and The Piper’s Children. Neither is completely finished, but they are both getting there. Feel free to review the songs, any comments on how to improve would be appreciated. You can post your reviews in the comments here.

-D

I am working on a few new posts.

• “Truth requires no prop to make it stand.” - Swami Vivekananda, On the relationship between logic, evidence, and faith in hindu spirituality.

• Reflections on the meaning of the word “Guru”

• A series of posts on the beginning of self inquiry.

Hopefully some of these should be up soon.

-D

Finally got my studio set up here in my new place.  Threw together this little musical sketch in five minutes just to demonstrate the instruments to a few visitors.

jamming63008.aif.ff.mp3

Fascinating fact of the day:

Interestingly enough, the world Juggernaut, meaning an unstoppable powerful force, was originally derived from the form of Lord Krishna worshiped in Puri: Jagganath. The name Jagganath means Lord of the Universe in Sanskrit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggernaut

Jai Jagganath!

Also, a bonus video of the Rath Yatra in Puri.

-D

Here is an excellent NYtimes editorial on globalization and its false presentation.
A short excerpt:

“The globalization paradigm has turned out to be very convenient for politicians. It allows them to blame foreigners for economic woes. It allows them to pretend that by rewriting trade deals, they can assuage economic anxiety. It allows them to treat economic and social change as a great mercantilist competition, with various teams competing for global supremacy, and with politicians starring as the commanding generals.

But there’s a problem with the way the globalization paradigm has evolved. It doesn’t really explain most of what is happening in the world.”

You will find an excellent online repository of many Hindu spiritual texts here:

http://www.celextel.org/

Translations of the Sri Bhagvad Gita, various Upanishads, and many stotras are available here, along with the original devanagari in pdf format.

New updates to this site have been a long time coming! Unfortunately, life has been very busy, and is still busy, but I should be putting some posts up here soon!

-D

Someone has started a wikipedia project to make the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda available online.  I have a copy that I bought from the Ramakrishna Mission in Delhi, but it would be wonderful to have such great literature available online.

See:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Works_of_Swami_Vivekananda 

I recently acquired a novation x-station 61 and Ableton Live 6.  The first thing I did was rework the song I made a while back, Contemplation.  I basically recorded the vocals again because the original recording quality was low, and tuned the mix a bit.  The new version is available on my myspace music page.  I am also working on two new songs, Mritunjaya and Rock Bottom.  Mritunjaya is about halfway done through vocal recording, but I am going to go back and redo the drum and bass lines, so it has alot of work to do.  Rock Bottom is still mostly a collection of riffs and an idea, but after I finish Mritunjaya, I’ll start working on that again.

-D