Arunachala Ramanula Vaibhavam by Chaganti

About ten years ago an Australian man at Ramanasramam asked if I would meet with a group of Australian devotees and talk to them about Ramana Maharshi. I agreed, but when I turned up, I discovered that it was going to be a formal interview with him, with the Australian devotees as an audience.
Our dialogue covered a wide variety of topics. Because the interviewer, John David, seemed to have very little knowledge of Bhagavan’s life or teachings, much of the interview was spent correcting many of the wrong ideas he seemed to have. When I read the transcript later, I realised that, serendipitously, this format of going back to basics and correcting his erroneous beliefs had turned the interview into an ideal presentation of the life and teachings of Bhagavan for people who knew little or nothing about them. For years I had it posted on my old site as a recommended read for people who were new to Bhagavan.

When the interview was over, John David told me that he didn’t accept my explanations of Bhagavan’s teachings on the mind. He wanted me to debate them publicly with a western vedantic scholar he knew, but I refused. Instead, I expanded the edited transcript of our conversation by several pages in an attempt to convey a more detailed presentation of what Bhagavan’s teachings on the mind really were.

Forest Creation Series

Chapter 1

At Afforestt, we went open source in 2015 and released textual documentation for all our forests creation projects worldwide. However, soon we realised that not everything could be covered and communicated in text alone. So in 2020, we decided to run a Kickstarter campaign to create video documentation of the methodology in different languages. We are incredibly grateful for the wholehearted support we got from people across the globe. This is the first video tutorial out of the many we will be making and publishing in the future. We have explained the generic methodology of creating forests in these tutorial videos. We believe that if there is any evidence of a forest ecosystem having existed in a particular region, even before humans inhabited it, then we can recreate the same forest ecosystems using this methodology. We hope you like these videos and find them helpful in bringing back our lost forests.

Chapter 2

This video talks about forest surveys and reading the natural landscape. We record natural patterns found in nature and understand the structure of forests, terrain, vegetation types, microhabitats, guilds and species combinations. A forest survey helps us better understand the region and make sense of how they can be mimicked and recreated in the most authentic way while recreating these forests.
Forest survey is not a one-time process. It needs to be a continuous process by visiting the forest in different seasons and building and updating our database. For example, we did this forest survey in August to get a glimpse of how the forest appears during this season.

Chapter 3

This video talks in-depth about how to procure seedlings for our forest by developing seedlings, procuring them from authentic nurseries, or setting up a small nursery ourselves.
We made this video at the Edible Routes foundation Nursery based in Delhi and run by our friends Somil Daga and Fazal Rashid. For more details, visit www.edibleroutes.com.
The procurement of healthy seedlings of various species is vital to creating healthy forests. It is critical that the seeds we procure to grow seedlings are from different mother trees growing in old-growth forests. This will ensure genetic diversity in our forests while making them more resilient and biodiverse.

Chapter 4

This video talks in detail about how to have preliminary checks and to know if our site is ready for creating a forest or not. Before starting any execution and bringing our seedlings on-site, we must do a site readiness check. If followed correctly, execution and ground implementation becomes much smoother.