Category: Health

Mental Health for the whole world

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Ayurveda, Bhagavada Gita, Bliss, Climate change, consciousness, Covid-19, Enlightenment, Friends, Happiness, Health, Love, Maharishi Vastu, Mahatma Gandhi, meditation, Moksha, Music and Poetry, Nature, Positive Psychology, Positivity, self-development, spirituality, Transcendence, Transcendental Meditation, Veda, world peace, yoga, Yoga Sutras

I appreciate the discussion about mental health. In my next avatar or phase of life, I want to become some kind of a mental health practitioner.  A big cause of mental health may be financial insecurity in a capitalist world. …And the social inequalities and pressures and heartburn that causes. The pharma lobby and DSM lobby and many other money-making machines in the West are hard at work to not fully cure but mostly contain the problems. The Federal government has created a strategy to combat mental health issues, however it remains to be seen how effective it will be.

The human body and mind have many ailments arising from whatever thoughts or beliefs or practices etc. Patanjali’s yoga sutras provide the 8-limbed formula to get away from it all.  Different practitioners or gurus have emphasized different limbs to suit the times and their purpose. Mahatma Gandhi emphasized Yama and Niyamas to uplift hundreds of millions of Indian people out of colonization. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi used dhyana and samadhi to uplift millions of people from deep stress and anxiety of nuclear annihilation towards a vision of a permanent peace. Ramdev used Asana and Pranayama to uplift a billion people from all sorts of ailments.  But from personal stories one knows that any combination of these could cure eyesight, hypertension, and backache etc. Add to it Bhagavad Gita’s message that ‘you are neither born nor do you die’ that also reminds us of our true higher / Yogic self. That is the Truth (capital T) that alone can deliver strong healthy minds.

The language of health needs to change. We are becoming self-educated semi-experts at cancer and hypertension and diabetes and an infinite number of specific diseases and disorders and syndromes that may afflict us. The solution may lie in the language of Chitta vritti nirodha (yoga sutras) and balance of doshas and vikritis (Ayurveda) and harmony (classical / Gandharva music), … and activation of chakras and kundalini and more such vibrational and energetic constructs. The dualist and disease-naming language could be replaced by a more holistic joy-feeling language. As Chomsky famously said that the primary role of language is the self-talk or inner chatter, and not so much communication with others. If the inner monkey-mind chatter could be transformed to coherent silence and awareness, health will be a natural outcome. If health is what we want, a health-ful language may be a starting point.

A health-ful language should be beneficial to the health of body or mind. It should describe something corrective or beneficially effective, even though it may be unpleasant. It should speak to the helpful effects of clean air and water and surroundings. It should speak to what benefits and sustains life physically, mentally, and spiritually. It should make a positive contribution to a healthy condition.

With gratitude to all of you for reading it! 

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Be the god we are

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bliss, consciousness, Enlightenment, Happiness, Health, Leadership, Love, meditation, Moksha, Music and Poetry, Nature, Quantum Computing, self-development, spirituality, Sustainability, Transformation, Veda, Vedic Technology, world peace, yoga

Some day everyone will be able to see the god in themselves. Channels will open for god to act through them. Then they will become net exporters of happiness. Till then they will plod on in a desert view of life.  No one else can save anyone. Just turn on the light, and see that the riches of the kingdom are all within ourselves. A gu-ru helps drive away the darkness by turning of the light. Thus there is an infinite gratitude to them for providing the man-tra to roo the goo (make the darkness run away).  Thus also the saying: guru bin gyan kahan.  A most famous couplet says: whose feet should I touch if the guru and god are both standing on front of us? We should touch the feet of the guru because they help find the path to god. 

Read this over and over till the fever / fear breaks.  Western philosophy and psychology were born as reaction to the totalitarian vise of the Catholic Church on social and spiritual life. Throwing out Christ along with the church from western life has created a most devastating crisis of meaning in life.  The reduction ad infinitum to the ‘me and my’ as the sole domain of one’s Self is a mirage. Separation is a myth, says Ssdhguru. Western psychology is foundation-less, says Maharishi. 

Three quantum physicists won the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics for proving that there is no reality.  Some authors call Consciousness as the mother of all capital. That is an indirect compliment from the economic world to the real foundation of life. There is no ‘Me’.  Commercial forces will continue to do their magic of selling fool’s gold. Wisdom traditions of the East are a powerful antidote to the godless meaningless commercial world of the primacy of ‘individual’, realizing that the notion of an indivisible individual is a mirage that too will dissolve into a universal field just as the notion of an atom dissolved into a unitary Schrodinger’s quantum equation. Now there is another Nobel Prize for explicitly stating that there is no reality.

This is cause for celebration.  We have a serious responsibility to not take ourselves too seriously, quips Maharishi.  Just let the mind settle and it becomes consciousness. मन becomes आत्मन। Consciousness is everywhere, so it knows everything, and that makes it omnipotent and invincible. Its manifestation is unpredictable, uncertain and probabilistic.  Franklin quipped that the only two certainties as death and taxes. Let’s accept both equally. Let god flow freely through ourselves while we are still having this earthly manifestation.  We are just this moment. Have fun in this moment!

Thanks for reading. Comments are welcome 🙏

Maharishi International University (MIU): Epicenter of Peace

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bliss, consciousness, Enlightenment, Health, Leadership, meditation, MUM, Nature, Positivity, Sef-awareness, self-development, spirituality, Sustainability, Transcendence, Transcendental Meditation, Veda, Vedic Technology, world peace, yoga, Yoga Sutras

MIU’s Global Country of World Peace is a beautiful organization that embodies what we are:  peace-loving citizens of the world, who are not divided by political or governmental surface levels of difference. As Maharishi said: What we put our attention on grows stronger. We are coming together and experiencing that field of life which is the field of unity consciousness – the unified field of natural law. Vedic technologies of consciousness, that operate from this deepest level of natural law, are a million times are more powerful than nuclear technologies.

MIU launched an Institute for Permanent Peace (IPP) this month, for applying a scientifically validated Vedic approach to creating an environment for permanent world peace. It is urgently needed to mitigate an existential risk from local wars evolving into an uncontrollable global conflagration. The purpose can be achieved by the sustained group practice of Vedic technologies, including Transcendental Meditation™ and TM-Sidhis, to create coherence in global collective consciousness.  The square root of 1% of any population—about 10,000 for the world– practicing these technologies in a group is sufficient to form a lighthouse of peace and prosperity for the whole world. Over 50 demonstrations and 23 scientific published studies have documented the benefits of large group practice of TM and its related advanced techniques on society as a whole. In every case, this approach produced marked reductions in crime, social violence, terrorism, and war, and increased peace and positivity in society.

IPP is proposing the creation of a permanent coherence-creating group comprised of 10,000 specially- trained Vedic experts to perform yoga and yagya. Results will be measured and monitored by an independent board of scientists.  Global celebrities have expressed support for the project. IPP broke ground on a project to create Vastu housing for thousands of such Vedic experts to live on MIU’s campus in Fairfield, Iowa. 

Meeting with India’s finest actor Anupam Kher

Noted filmmaker David Lynch, founder of an international charity that has brought Transcendental Meditation to more than one million under-resourced children worldwide, has issued a challenge to the world’s philanthropists: use a fraction of your wealth to establish large groups of advanced peace-creating Vedic experts in Ukraine and other critical hotspots, and leave a legacy of world peace that will last for generations.  https://davidlynch.gusp.org/

Everything is perfect!

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bliss, consciousness, Enlightenment, Happiness, Health, meditation, Moksha, Positive Psychology, Sef-awareness, self-development, Transcendence, Transcendental Meditation, Veda, Vedic Technology, world peace, yoga, Yoga Sutras

Everything is perfect!

I believe that there is no purpose of evolution, except to get better at being ourselves, and escaping from the physical manifestation and its pains from contact with objects.

I have been off tea and coffee for the last almost 20 years since I first went to a Vipassana 10-day retreat, and the teacher asked us to eschew these and other intoxicants for the ten days and ideally forever. I think from there and my decade long practice of Vipassana brought me to the understanding that we are ourselves the ultimate reality. Then during the last decade, being in Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s University, brought for me the idea of unbounded unified consciousness as the Vedantic nondual reality. It made complete sense during progressively deeper and longer and advanced sessions of Transcendence. All this while we have been eating and drinking non-agitating foods to purify our nervous systems to experience the oneness within our own selves. I have been amused by the growth in these soft-toxin businesses such as coffee and tea. I heard about the Oxford Circle of scientists using Assamese tea and then creating the dominance of the Scientistic Revolution in the service of the British East India company. The poor tea-pickers from Darjeeling will be tickled to learn that their tea was instrumental in creating the scientistic paradigm as we know it.

Just a few days ago, I chanced upon a young Argentinian man named Mattias de Stefano, who speaks about the unbounded consciousness as being the ultimate dimension, and then goes on to describe up to 9 dimensions. The second dimension produces a duality, which is mostly a thought system. The third dimension provides a neutral level also, and physicality appears. Time appears when we rise to perceive the fourth dimensions. Our 3-4 dimensional (space-time) body is a projection of our high-dimensional self. This is like a small 2-dimensional picture is a projection of our 3-dimensional body. At the fifth and sixth dimension we are pure energy, and later on pure vibrations that are the creator of all reality. At the seventh dimension, there are seven laws of existence represented through the seven chakras. At the eighth dimension, existence is the field of infinite correlations, the unbounded universe that contains everything. We are not of the universe, or in the universe, … we are the universe. A the ninth dimension, we are pure void, like a black hole, which provides the context in which the universe appears. That resonates so much with Buddha’s teaching.  

Two things from here: The first thing is that I find Mattias’ message very similar to that of Maharishi’s. Maharishi also had the baffling ability of speaking about the dynamics of the unmanifest consciousness. ‘How did he know?’, the world wondered. But that did not stop people from following him and using his descriptions of reality, that was tested through thousands of experiments published in over 700 scientific publications. In particular, I am extremely interested in Maharishi’s theory of collective consciousness. This Super-Radiance effect, that can only be understood from a consciousness-as-a-field paradigm, has been statistically proven and published beyond reasonable doubt (over 50 journal publications).

The second fascinating thing from this Argentinian young man is to hear what else he says. He speaks about his past lives, going back thousands of years, in great detail, with specific locations and names and what happened. He reports living in civilizations from across the various galaxies, tens of thousands of years ago. He is reporting solar systems with 2 or 3 suns with planets facing a night-time of only 2 or 3 hours. That means a lot of what we see and do could be biologically different in a different solar system. Many civilizations arise and die, and this one too will die, he says. The important thing from us is to raise our perceptions to the highest levels. If we die of consciousness (nothing left to do) then we do not return to the lower dimensional existence. Instead if we die of time, we will be back. One particular metaphor caught my attention: We are the spider that creates the web. We are not the web. We certainly are not an object caught in the web. The day we realize that we are totally liberated. We are the creator.

He says, that everything is perfect as it is. There is no purpose to existence. The path is the way. Have fun!

International Conference on Consciousness-Based Leadership and Management – summary report

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Ayurveda, Bhagavada Gita, Bliss, Business, Climate change, consciousness, Happiness, Health, Leadership, MUM, Music and Poetry, Positive Psychology, Quantum Computing, Sef-awareness, spirituality, Sustainability, Technology, Transcendence, Vedic Technology, world peace, yoga

Maharishi International University (Fairfield, Iowa, USA) organized a three-day International Conference on Consciousness-Based Leadership and Management, from May 21-23 2021, for mapping the path to Oneness and a flourishing humanity. The event was co-sponsored by the International Academy of Management through its Management, Spirituality and Religion (MSR) interest group. More than 1100 attendees from almost 400 cities around the world registered for the event. The event had 90+ speakers including Dr Tony Nader, Dr Robert Quinn, Dr. Subhash Kak, Dr. Anil Gupta, and other reputed professors from top institutions from the US, India, UK, Germany, Europe, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Indonesia, Equador, South Africa, and more. They also represented a wide range of fields including Management, Leadership, Music, Medicine, Computer Science, Quantum physics, Vedas, Ayurveda, Arts, Psychology, Consciousness, Sustainability, and more. They participated in 15 sessions of integral conversations and research presentations of 90 minutes each over three days. Our feedback surveys showed consistently high ratings and comments. Every session aimed to produce one or two principles towards a flourishing humanity.  We sincerely thank our board of advisors, which included Drs. Chris Laszlo, Judi Neal, Sharda Nandram, Satinder Dhiman, Kathryn Pavlovich, and Cathy DuBois, for their guidance and counsel in making this event a great success. We also wish to thank all the speaker and presenters for being a part of this journey.

There is a great demand for videos for replays and we have been working on editing them and making them available. Here is a wonderful playlist called Consciousness-Based leadership @ MIU, comprising of seven keynote and panel conversations, each of which is about 60-90 minutes long. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs4GvULvBU44jIFWP4IaDCXb61lgLMk3Y

Here is a brief summary of the videos. The opening keynote conversation with Dr. Tony Nader lays out how consciousness is primary, which is a new paradigm with increasingly greater explanatory power. Then there is the transcendental keynote conversation where they lay out the benefits of transcendence, its neuroscience, and the path ahead.  Then there is the quantum and technological conversation where we discuss how quantum world leads us to different ways of leading and organizing, from an unboundarized and uncontainerized view of ourselves as the field of consciousness. Then there is the organizational cultural conversation where we discuss positive scholarship away from deficit and towards flourishing, and from workplace spirituality to global consciousness, as the organizing metaphors.  Then there is the panel conversation on Dialogic approaches where we begin with asserting that our words have more power than we think, in bringing about a harmonious world.  Then there is the panel conversation on the future of management education, where we agreed that the future is consciousness-based education, based on empathy and fairness and justice.  Then there is a panel on Vedic approaches to Oneness, beginning with Bhagavad Gita, and including other traditions towards unboundedness and self-transformation.

In addition, Here is the play list of about 25 pre-recorded short (7-8 minute each) research presentations by the authors themselves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io4mRLsEMjg&list=PLs4GvULvBU44ng3DX6qbDegNsS9lzzCCm

 Would appreciate if you could enjoy these videos, and post your comments.

Wish you a blissful and flourishing life!

Anil Maheshwari, Conference Organizer and Co-Chair

We are more than we think

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bliss, consciousness, Enlightenment, Happiness, Health, Leadership, Love, meditation, Moksha, Music and Poetry, Nature, Positive Psychology, Positivity, Sef-awareness, self-development, Sustainability, Transcendental Meditation, Transformation, Veda, Vedic Technology, world peace, yoga, Yoga Sutras

Our thinking is limited to things one can think about. Some of those things are sense objects and some are mental objects. Our perceptions and feelings are difficult to think about. Our being is beyond thinking. 

We know more than we can tell. That is tacit knowledge. Our words have more power than we think. These could be words spoken with others or with oneself. This is our latent power. 

We exist in more ways than we can tell: The body, the mind, the intellect, the spirit, the soul. We are the unbounded Brahman.  At some level of thinking all these things vanish. We become no-thing. No-thing is actually everything. But there is no way to think about everything.

We have more than we know. We have all the laws of nature within us. We exist in conformance with, and are the manifestation, of all the laws of nature. We permeate every part of every galaxy. 

We are beyond qualities, beyond names, beyond words, beyond language. We transcend and include all of those. We are silence in dynamism, wholeness in motion. We are naturally blissful, like the earth is grassfull and the sky is starfull. 

We are naturally full, or fullness, or wholeness. We just need to be aware of it at every moment. We are a wave flowing and rising and falling. Particle wise, we are at best a little boat that rises and ebbs with the waves. The life force naturally flows through us in its own rhythm.

As Pascal said, the Heart has its reasons, that Reason has no knowledge of. Nurture your own heart. Be with those that nurture your heart. Let your heart swell with joy. Share the joy with the others. And you will get 10x in return. And the whole world will be one big happy family!

High Consciousness Leader and Manager

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bliss, Business, Climate change, consciousness, Happiness, Health, Leadership, meditation, MUM, Positive Psychology, Sef-awareness, self-development, spirituality, Sustainability, Transcendence, Vedic Technology, world peace

High Consciousness Manager:  through Transcendence and Development of Consciousness

Spring is in the air, and that means time to experience the beauty of the flourishing environment as we wake up from winter. What things are fresh in your mind?

Grand challenges facing the world require a higher level of consciousness to experience and operate from a level of total inter-connectedness of life. Business organizations are undergoing revolutionary changes from exponential development of technologies of production distribution and consumption. Managers need to adapt to Artificial Intelligence systems that have been doubling in capacity every 3-6 months. Managers need to evolve rapidly to engage with the opportunities and threats posed by this rapidly evolving socio-technical environment. They need to develop the capabilities of empathizing and synergizing, visioning and transforming. Managers need to rapidly unlearn self-limiting beliefs and tap into their own unbounded potential and that of their teams. 

In essence, managers need to develop a higher level of consciousness, beyond that of the superficial and the observable. They need to learn to transcend their ordinary states of consciousness (waking, dreaming and sleeping) and access the higher states of consciousness where one can experience the pure unbounded Self, the source of infinite potential, within oneself. Our V-theory of Transcendence models a wide range of techniques to transcend surface reality. Research has shown that through transcendence, individuals can experience expanded awareness, along with creativity and bliss for more effective action and well-being.  The ability to raise consciousness around themselves will be a key role for the new manager. Research has also shown that transcendence by groups can create coherence in collective consciousness. This may be key to development of pro social and environmental behaviors towards Oneness and Flourishing in the world. 

We are organizing a conference on Consciousness-Based Leadership and Management to bring together diverse perspectives for Oneness and a flourishing world. We welcome you to join almost 100 academics and globally renowned speakers in this incredible 3-day AOM-MSR-cosponsored leadership event, focused on  Mapping the Path to a Flourishing Humanity. Be a part of conversation while creating meaningful connections with other global leaders.  Sign up for the conference for FREE today: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/international-conference-on-consciousness-based-leadership-and-management-tickets-139942478721

#leadership #consciousness #management #flourishing

Life is a donut!

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Ayurveda, Bliss, consciousness, Enlightenment, Happiness, Health, meditation, Moksha, Positive Psychology, Positivity, Sef-awareness, self-development, spirituality, Transformation, Vedic Technology, world peace, yoga, Yoga Sutras

Life is a donut. 🍩 (or doughnut).

We are donuts. Our bodies are donuts. Bodies have a hollow tube running through them. When the hollow tube remains flowing and clean, our bodies are healthy. The moment it clogs, diseases appear. Our life is also like a donut with a hollow hollow tube through it.  The upper side of the donut is the absolute, the unbounded cosmos. The bottom part of the donut is the relative, bounded by resting on the earth. Both sides are essential. So long as the hole in this donut connects the absolute with the relative, the mind functions well and remains healthy. Life gets into unbounded flow at some times, while remains engaged in specific chores at other times. 

When we eat too much or eat junk stuff, our body’s hollow tube begins to clog. When we don’t flush it down it with enough water the tube clogs. Similarly if we take in too much data and information we need time and energy to digest it. Undigested information clogs the hollow tube. The connection between the top and the bottom of the donut gets clogged. The donut becomes more like a pancake. At that point, the view is mostly of the relative side of life, the bottom of the pancake, and the view of the top is totally obscured.  Yogic techniques such as pratyaahara are ways to unclog our mind. Meditation helps to reopen the hollow tube of the mind and makes the pancake back into a donut. Attention of the mind goes round and round in the donut in a self-referral manner, even as it connects with the infinity above and the minuscule stuff below.  

A donut can be fresh thick soft and sweet. It can be glazed and have toppings, and be of different sizes. Similarly our life can be fresh expansive smiling joyful and grateful. It can have its idiosyncracies and passions and wisdom. OR else life can be short brutal nasty dour fearful stale and putrefying. 

Be a fresh donut 🍩everyday.  

Social Business for a Post-Covid Compassionate World

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Bliss, Business, consciousness, Enlightenment, Happiness, Health, Leadership, Love, Mahatma Gandhi, Nature, Positivity, Sef-awareness, self-development, spirituality, Sustainability, Transformation, world peace

Nobel Peace laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus (Grameen Bank) delivered a beautiful bold talk this morning to the International Humanistic Management Association. Here is the link to the video, https://youtu.be/WFwK8bzIKW0 … and a summary of my notes.

The global economic machine is broken. Coronavirus has done us a favor. We should create a bank for rural entrepreneurs. Call it emerging, or potential sector instead of an informal sector. Young people should not have to go to cities and face harassment. Rural economy should not be a footnote to the urban economy. These are social businesses. More than 50% of people work in the informal sector. Urban economy consumes rural labor and makes money for themselves. Rural economy should not become a footnote to urban economy. Distance has become unimportant. The business idea has become important. We don’t want to go back to the old economy. We want to go forward and design a new world.

This is a crisis, but also a great opportunity to create global social businesses for coronavirus solutions. Globalization has deepened. e.g. the same virus impacts everyone. The narrow view is about how to make money. There are only a few companies who own a chunk of medicine business. The medicine solution should be for the benefit of the people, not to make a profit.

Rural areas don’t need to wait for urban buyers. We will process our produce here. We are not at the mercy of the urban buyers. We will deal on equal terms. Governments have not done much for the informal sector. Bangladesh has Ministry of Labor at all levels of the government. We will create our own chambers of commerce. Rural social businesses have full rights.

Academics have had a big role in creating this misery. We have contaminated the young minds with wrong ideas about a selfish world. There are social businesses that are not motivated by private interest but by common interest. We have to take care of the future of the world and our children and grandchildren. Social businesses can be in rural areas as well as urban areas.

How to get the economic machine to come out of coma, and put it to good use? We are pouring trillions of dollars into the machine, so the money is there. We should not pour into the fossil fuel industry. We should move into a new world. Scaling up is not a problem because the money is there. Invest in the companies that are solving the problem. Anyone who can help lead to this new world will win Nobel Prizes. Business education should not be only to make money for others. That is the conventional MBA for a soldier (general, gladiators) to make money for corporations. The alternative is the social MBA. Its purpose is to solve social problems of the world in the fastest way. How to inspire people to do that. This is a good time to start a social MBA program.

Covid19 Survey – US vs India

by Dr. Anil K Maheshwari, posted in Ayurveda, consciousness, Covid-19, Data Analytics, Happiness, Health, meditation, Nature, Positive Psychology, Sef-awareness, self-development, Transcendence, Transcendental Meditation, yoga, Yoga Sutras

Covid-19 virus has unleashed mayhem in the world, and it has caused many deaths. The pattern of deaths has, however, been uneven. As of the date of publishing (May 18, 2020), there have been 30 times more deaths from #Covid19 in the US (90,000 deaths) than in India (3,000 deaths), even though the US has only one-fourth the population of India. I was curious to find out why it was so.

We conducted a quick 5-minute survey with a simple One-big-question of rank-ordering 9 factors in terms of their importance in causing this huge differential in death rates in the US and India. The 9 factors were: Demography (older population in the US); Sickness (high chronic conditions in the US); Immunity (Indian soil; Yoga, pranayama etc); Culture (greater social cohesion and family support in India); Public Policy (how seriously each country mounted a unified approach); Resources (availability of medical equipment); Genetics (difference in two populations); Diet (more vegetarians in India); Measurement (less reliable data from India). There was a None-of-the above option too. In addition, we added two question on their expectations of the way forward. One was about how long it will take to come out of Covid19 situation into normalcy. And the other was about what might be the markers for returning to normalcy.

We did convenience sampling using social media contacts of the researcher who should be in a position to compare and express their perceptions. 66 respondents from US, India, and other countries, filled out survey. Of the 66 respondents 60% were resident in India, 29% in the US, and 11% in other countries. The respondents including 55% from the researcher’s own age cohort of 55-64 years, while 42% were younger. A couple of respondents were over 65 years. The respondents were 71% male and 29% female.

Here are the main results (see bar chart below). Demographics (Older population) in the US was perceived to be the major cause of higher deaths from Covid-19 in the US than in India. Public policy choices and higher rates of Chronic sickness in the US were also identified as the next important causes for higher deaths in the US compared with India. Higher levels of Immunity was ranked highest as the major reason for lower death rates in India. Culture, Diet and Genetics received only moderate support. Surprisingly, availability of resources was ranked as least important cause.

66 Respondents’ ranking of 9 factors to explain differential death rates in USA and India

Moving forward, half the people (48%) said that it will take 1-2 years to return to normalcy. 31% of respondents said it will take less than one year, while 21% said it will take more than 2 years (see pie-chart below). US residents were twice as likely as Indian residents to think that it might take 2 or more years. For return to normalcy, the preferred enablers were availability of a tried and tested vaccine and a tested cure for Covid19, in that order (see bar graph below). Declining death rates were a lesser important marker, while availability of resources such as PPE was considered the least important marker.

66 Respondents’ expectations of time frame for return to normalcy
66 Respondents’ ranking of factors for return to normalcy

Here below is some more granular analysis.

Age: Respondents in 55-64 years ranked Public policy and Measurement issues higher, while those in 35-44 age group ranked Immunity and Culture (social cohesion) higher, as factors for explaining the differential death rates.

Gender: Male respondents ranked Demographics (aging population) and Measurement issues higher, while Female respondents prioritized Immunity, Diet, and Availability of resources.

Location: Respondents living in Rest of the World (11% of total) ranked Public policy choices and Measurement issues by a wider margin than those living within the US and India. Indian residents ranked Immunity and Culture (social cohesion) as more important. US residents ranked Public policy and availability of Resources as more important issues.

Additional comments from Respondents: One respondent wrote that it may be taboo in the Indian culture to report Covid death from a social stigma perspective. One reported that there is greater resilience to pain in India. One reported that traditional Indian homes include a central space to grow Ayurvedic plants such as Tulsi. Some reported that the cause as well as cure for Covid19 were unclear and should be thoroughly investigated.

Summary: This survey shows that there are different perceptions of what has caused dramatically lower death rates reported in India compared to the US. Development of immunity is considered the best ameliorating factor. An effective public health policy could be another.

Lessons learned: Healthy holistic lifestyle including Yoga Sutras based practices such as asanas, pranayama, and meditation are among the best ways to a create a strong platform of immunity on which specific vaccines can work effectively! In fact, the development of a special vaccine for Covid-19 is essentially a way to increase immunity against this specific virus.

Covid-19 is a very important world-transforming, life-and-death matter. Please write to us as to what you think. If you wish, you may also take 5 minutes to fill out this survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/CovidAKM . Thank you!