Many people think that meditation is only useful for learning how to relax or others may associate it with religious or spiritual pursuits. Both of these views have a bit of validity but there is another aspect of meditation that is not generally well known. Meditation has the capacity to help one deepen one’s intuition and creativity.

In fact another name for meditation is “intuitional practice.” According to yoga and meditation masters, most human beings utilize only a fraction of their mental capacity. They remain engrossed in their conscious and subconscious minds but are unable to tap the powers of their “super conscious” mind. These yogis say that this super conscious mind (roughly equivalent to Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious mind) is the place where creativity and artistic expression originate.

All people enter this higher realm from time to time but their contact with it is often fleeting. When you practice meditation, and learn how to detach yourself from your physical surroundings and from the disturbances of your body, and go deeper into your inner mental world you will be at the gates of the more subtle layers of the mind and can enter this super conscious mind for longer periods.

The more you practice meditation the more “intuitive” you will become. It doesn’t happen immediately and may not even happen all of a sudden. It is a gradual process and that is why many people practice meditation and give it up thinking that nothing is happening.

How can you tell if you are making progress? Sometimes other people will notice the change in you and comment on it. This makes sense because we are often not the best judge of ourselves and it is difficult to see things that are very close to us. For example, when you grew as a child you were not able to see your physical growth, and probably were reminded of it by people who hadn’t seen you for a few months or a year.

Another way to know if you are making progress is that your feelings of love for others grows, and you become more large-hearted and service minded. As you feel better about yourself, it is natural that you will feel better about others.

But what about the creativity that I started off talking about? Well, if you are practicing some kind of artistic activity, that activity will get more subtle and become more fruitful as you get more established in meditation. In fact, even if you think you have meager artistic capacity, the constant practice of meditation can help you to develop talents that you would have never dreamed possible. So, try it out and get ready for some amazing results.

Fasting is one of the secrets of long life.  Your body, and your digestive organs in particular, are required to work and work without any vacation. You know that you require rest from your work or your school from time to time. In the same way, your digestive system needs a rest from time to time.

Periodic fasting provides the rest for your digestive system. It allows your digestive system to recuperate from the rough treatment that you may have given it by overeating or eating the wrong foods or eating at the wrong time.

In addition fasting also provides an opportunity to eliminate many toxins from your body. After fasting, you should take some lemon water with a bit of salt. This drink helps to flush the digestive system, eliminating waste material that might otherwise remain in the body if you didn’t fast.

Fasting also helps you to keep a balanced mind in spite of the attraction of the moon on the fluids of your body. That is why the yoga fasting system is timed in relation to the moon. The eleventh day after the new and full moons is the time when this attraction is very strong. If you fast during this period, then the emptiness of the stomach pulls down liquids that would otherwise rise up in your body under the attraction of the moon.

Finally, fasting also gives you a chance to save some time and use that time for spiritual pursuits. In order to eat, you may have to spend time shopping, cooking, cleaning and of course eating. If you fast, you can use that time to do meditation, practice yoga, read or do some other valuable pursuit.

This system of yogic fasting lasts from sunrise to sunrise. You begin at sunrise  and eat nothing until sunrise of the next day. If your body is strong you can also refrain from drinking anything. On the next day, you can break the fast with lemon water, as I have mentioned above, and then with fruit and other suitable food.

Some people think that fasting is difficult. If you prepare yourself for fasting it is not difficult. Prepare yourself physically by taking enough food and also plenty of liquids the day before. Prepare yourself mentally by deciding the night before fasting: “Tomorrow is fasting day, and I am not going to eat anything.”  If you take this mental determination prior to the fasting day, you will not be hungry during the fasting day. If you don’t make a prior determination, during the fasting day you will start to think “Maybe I should eat, and fast another day!” Decide before hand and you will be able to complete your fast.

All in all, fasting is one of the best practices for maintaining physical, mental and spiritual health. I highly recommend it.

During the last century people were stirred by slogans such as “making the world safe for democracy” and by demands for “self-determination.”  As a result, presently most of the countries of the world now have political democracies and countries that were once colonies of stronger nations are now “free.” Yet despite all of this “democracy” and “freedom” something is amiss and we are by no means living in paradise

What is wrong? Being allowed to vote in an election every few years is the not the be-all or end-all of human aspirations. A person may have the right to vote in an election that will determine who will be the president of his or her country, but that same person may have no voice whatsoever in vital matters concerning his or her economic life. Similarly, countries that have been granted nominal political independence often remain under the economic yoke of their former colonizers.

Political democracy becomes a farce in countries where there is vast economic inequality because wealthy people are able to put their weight behind candidates who will support selfish interests.  Political democracy today is not a question of “majority rule” or “one person, one vote” but is simply a game in which the elected government usually reflects the desires of a wealthy minority.

In the 21st century, simply demanding democracy will not be enough. It is time to make demands for economic democracy and social justice. Economic democracy means that in addition to being able to vote for political leaders, people will also have a right to elect the managing boards and the directors of the enterprises where they are employed and have a say in the economic life of their immediate locality.

How useful is it to be able to vote for the president of your country but not to have any role in choosing the directors of your workplace? Maybe the directors of your workplace are ready to close down your factory or office if it is deemed in the greater interests of stockholders living in a distant locality. Some years back, I remember listening to a BBC broadcast, and it was all about an auto plant in England that was about to be closed by a board of directors located in Frankfurt, Germany. The workers in that plant were able to elect members of parliament, but had no chance to participate in deliberations about the future of their jobs.

In order to bring about economic democracy the structure of economic ownership and organization around the world has to undergo a big change. Today most enterprises in our society are corporations with stockholders.  It is a type of absentee ownership. The people who own the shares usually are not the same people who work and live in the communities where the enterprises are located.

If we want economic democracy then we have to reorganize medium and large industries as cooperatives rather than corporations.  The owners of the shares would be the people who work in those enterprises, not investors living in other localities. Establishing worker owned and managed cooperatives will be a big step towards economic democracy and expand the scope of human freedom. This kind of change would be truly revolutionary.

Today we hear about various “revolutions.” But in the immediate aftermath of most of these revolutions life goes on as it did before. One government is changed with another. Perhaps the people get a greater role to participate, but economic life remains undemocratic and unchanged.  The day has already come, as the Occupy movements show, when the crowds on the street will not be satisfied with this kind of superficial change and will demand their economic as well as political rights.

Now that mass consciousness is beginning to change, it is important for progressives to offer solutions to the problems caused by a lopsided economic system.  Indeed, people who look at protest movements sometimes say “We know what you are against, but what are you for?”

In this spirit, I would like to offer what could be one part of a comprehensive program that would bring about a more healthy economic system, and it is something which might seem controversial and far-fetched today, but hopefully will become the norm in the future.  I think it is time to put limits on the accumulation of individually owned wealth.

When it comes to alleviating poverty and correcting social inequalities liberals have always talked about things such as a proper minimum wage and a social safety net, in the form of healthcare, unemployment insurance and other measures.  They say that no one should be allowed to fall under the poverty line, that there should be a floor in our collective house which no one is allowed to slip under.

This is certainly a noble concept, one which I support, but the glaring social inequalities and economic injustice which has brought the demonstrators out on the streets can never be solved only by concentrating our efforts on traditional anti-poverty legislation aimed at shoring up the floor of the economic system.  Rather it is more important to start thinking about putting a ceiling on our economic house.

The ceiling that I talk about is a ceiling on individual wealth accumulation.  Presently the sky is the limit. Anyone can accumulate as much wealth as he or she possibly can. Selfish accumulation of wealth, we are told, is the engine that drives the economic system, and that one day the wealth that is accumulated by the people at the top will trickle down to everyone else.

Trickle-down economics is a myth. Around the world a small number of people own and control a disproportionate amount of wealth. This unequal distribution of wealth leads to all kinds of social and economic problems including poverty, starvation, crime, social disruption, and more.  The greed of a few is not healthy for the wider society.

The solution to this problem is not to enact a maximum wage bill or even a maximum income bill. Such measures would only address part of the problem, and leave a few people with their wealth intact. Rather it is time for a more drastic measure: establish the upper limit on individual wealth holdings, and to confiscate and redistribute the excess wealth.

If you have read this far, you might think that I am a raving lunatic. If a wealth cap was even proposed the super-rich would be up in arms.  They can barely stand it when someone even suggests that their taxes be raised a little, what to speak of confiscation and redistribution.

Not only do the rich and super rich go ballistic when anyone raises the wealth issue in public, but middle class people in the USA also take their side. A lot of people really believe that one day they too will be very wealthy and fight for the rights of the wealthiest few to continue grabbing all that they can.

I am well aware that the proposal to cap wealth in this country or anywhere else is not something that will be easily adopted, but sooner or later, when people come to their senses and really understand the root causes of our present economic problems, I am confident that they will whole heartedly agree with the Indian philosopher and activist, P.R. Sarkar who in 1959 declared “No individual should be allowed to accumulate any physical wealth without the clear permission and approval of the collective society.”

Dada Vedaprajinananda is a meditation teacher and singer-songwriter. He lives at the Ananda Liina Spiritual Community in Urbana (www.anandaliina.org)  and is active in the Occupy movement (www.occupyCU.org) .

President Obama’s healthcare law has sparked a lot of debate in the U.S., and predictably his critics on the right have used it to weigh in against the dangers of “Big Government.”

For many of Obama’s opponents, the possibility that the government might help people to get affordable medical care is a catastrophe signaling the end of “freedom” in America.    “Once all of you are now looking to Washington to stay alive, they’ve got you,” says Republican Rick Santorum.

Santorum and others believe that an unfettered free market will provide the goods and services that people need, and that the main enemy of freedom and prosperity is the government. They have nothing bad to say about the rich individuals and corporations who acquire vast amounts of wealth while their fellow citizens are jobless, homeless and without medical care.

All of this is of course predictable and even understandable given the right wing’s belief in Adam Smith’s notion that the individual pursuit of selfish interests will bring about the well-being of society and their nostalgia for Thomas Jefferson’s America, when a weak government presided over a sparsely populated rural country.

What is surprising is to find the same kind of rhetoric on the left.  I recently attended the Left Forum in New York City. The Left Forum is a yearly meeting of diverse individuals and organizations ranging from anarchists to liberals.  This year the Forum was colored by the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the focus was on finding an alternative to capitalism. I somehow got the idea that for the Left, the enemy is clearly the capitalists, the one percent of the population which has amassed as much wealth as the remaining 99%.

I was wrong. I attended a panel meeting and one professor identified government as the “enemy.” When the question and answer period came I questioned him on this and said, “Aren’t the capitalists the enemy?”  He replied by giving the example of the New England community where he resided, saying that its “town meeting” style of government is the ideal form of government and that big government is the problem.

Maybe local government in New England can be trusted to give provide a fair shake to everyone, but what about a local government in the Deep South, where African Americans have been tormented for years at the hands of their white neighbors? I didn’t get a chance to ask him this.

Actually, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the professor’s position. Karl Marx himself believed that the state would wither away in some distant future. Anarchists too, who were well represented at the Left Forum, also despise government.

So it seems that some people on both the left and right of the political spectrum have idealistic visions of society that prevent them from seeing things for what they are.  I am not convinced by Rick Santorum or by the professor at the Left Forum either. I think the Wall Street occupiers got it right when they pointed to the “one per cent” as the enemy of social well-being. Any ethical government which can correct this problem will certainly get my vote.