Time

Time is not the clock. Clock is used to measure the time with numbers. Year, Month, Date, Hour, Minute, Second give us a certain feel that time had a start and definitely there will be an end. But we neither know the start nor the end. Time as such is just an experience of our life externally and a corresponding feeling of that situation internally. The experience of life keeps changing but it is repetitive. Perhaps Time is cyclical. Think about it, everything is cyclic – Day and night, the 4 seasons year after year.

If time was linear, the Earth would have been on a clean long endless straight super highway with no traffic jams and all our clocks would have been an infinitely long inch tapes instead of circular devices. So what makes time look linear. Our age. Our body ages linearly with cycles of time. Our experiences mature as we move along several cycles of time. Our response to the external forces are different each time based on our past.

If Time was not cyclical, we may never have the same or similar opportunity again in our life. We might as well live a life of repentance and guilt for our committed mistakes and never redeem ourself. It will be depressing and hopeless. Time will test you in cycles and time will give you the luxuries of life and take away in cycles, good and bad all of it in cycles. What will matter will be our reaction to the same or similar looking situation again. If God meant for you to learn empathy, you will be faced with that situation again and again until your perspective of the person is altered.

If time was really linear, we wouldn’t have to do the same thing over and over again. Same breakfast, lunch, dinner over and over again in cycle. Work, Money, Hobby, Vacation in cycles. Hindu belief is this cycle extends to birth and death, incarnations after incarnations.

So if Time really worked in cycles then is there a point in our life where one cycle ends and another cycle begins? Is this a point of hyper jump when we can slip out of the never ending Time cycle into another dimension where time comes to a standstill and we simply exist in harmony for ever without the need for anything in life, without even feeling the compulsion of the passing time? Is that the real freedom? Is that a hidden dimension we have glimpses of once a while without our knowledge and get pushed back into the cyclical Time to face our weaknesses and continue our learning. Do the events like Mahasivarathiri, contain these points of hyper jump?

Where do I begin? Where do I end? What time it really is? and What really is Time?

Only Time can tell!

Patanjali’s Keys to a Peaceful Mind

I came across a simple and profound line as I was reading one of the most loved literature in Spirituality – The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Translation and Commentary by Swami Satchitananda.

This sutra was powerful enough that it can stand alone by itself and be applicable to each and every one of us, regardless of what we are currently doing.

The Sutra goes:

By Cultivating attitudes of friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and disregard toward the wicked, the mind-stuff retains its undisturbed calmness.

Just 4 keys and we got our peace of mind all the time:

Friendliness:

By default we can set the state of our mind to Friendliness. If we find a happy person, who is better off, then instead of avoiding him/her out of Jealousy or shamefulness, we can become friendly. If we are friendly to a happy person, he/she is going to share the happiness and probably lift us to that state. Hey, if we are friendly to someone who has a car, he can give us a lift to work. Wouldn’t that make us happy? (and of course, It is not just about the happiness from money, but happiness in general).

Compassion:

Nobody wants to be unhappy. But at some point because of our ignorant choices we experience pain. To such a person, instead of blaming them for their pain, we can try to understand their pain and be compassionate to them. For example, we can be compassionate to a sick person, instead of pointing out his mistakes. He probably knows that already. There is no need to increase the pain.

Delight:

If we see a person like Mahatma Gandhi, we can be delighted. We can see the nice qualities they exhibit and try to adopt them to an extent in our life. This might come easy because, we are easily inspired by popular personalities.

Disregard:

No one is born wicked. We can always be Friendly or Compassionate or Delighted towards any person. But if we come across any wickedness, then the best thing to do is to disregard them. Any amount of advice will just fly off their head and may probably pull us into their rut.

We do not need to be associated to any form of religion or spiritual path in order to follow these for our peace of mind. A slow transformation of attitude of our mind with these 4 keys, is bound to do wonders.

If we practice this like riding a bicycle then we don’t need to remember them, it will just come to us automatically. No one can take away the peace of mind that we deserve.

Our Peace is our birthright.

Many Thanks to Sage Patanjali and Swami Satchitananda for a beautiful Commentary.

Price of Spirituality

How much would you like to pay for getting Spirituality?

This question is completely stupid and yet has to be answered.

When it comes to spirituality, you have only one thing to offer – Sincerity. That’s it. Nothing else is useful.

If you take the example of Ramana Maharishi, he didn’t go to any organization for learning some kind of meditation. He just took five rupees from his house, left the place and went to Tiruvannamalai, tore off his clothes and sat in meditation until he got realized. After all this the Maharishi describes enlightenment as

“Now nothing can disturb me anymore”

Yes, no talk of any form of God or any promise of nice comfortable Heaven. Tell me, if any of us can be like what he was? If someone spits on you, would you be quiet? Ramana not only stayed quiet but he forgave the one who did it. He just did absolutely nothing. That’s enlightenment and you cannot act enlightenment.

If you really have that inner call to seek, that enthusiasm then with all sincerity you can sit and do any form of Beginner’s meditation. The internet is full of simple instructions to begin meditation, like Zazen, Vipassana, Mindfulness. The point is if you have that sincerity, you can pick any of these and just sit in Meditation.

After a while when you need to go higher up, you will be automatically guided to a form of meditation that suits you well. Definitely, wait for that to happen, wait for all indications to point in that direction. Some people don’t even need that. They are gifted and they get the guidance directly from inside, just like how Ramana did.

Now to learn that specific form of Meditation, you have to pay a little bit for the effort that they have taken to travel to where you live and facilitate it for you. It is exactly like training yourself into a technique. It is like going to an institute to learn Java in order to Program. You pay the fees, you learn and then you get out. That’s it. But Programming itself is more of Problem solving than just putting together some Java syntaxes. All those who know Java are not great Programmers, Great Programmers are never restricted by one Language.

With whatever limited tools you have, you bring out unlimited possibilities. The fees is only for the technique learned that’s it. After that the only acceptable form of fees is “Sincerity” to your “Self”.

Eat Right, but how?

We confuse ourselves when someone says Eat Right. The common misunderstanding is:

1. Be Vegetarian.

2. Count the calories of what you eat and burn the excess on treadmill. Some even use scale to exactly calculate the calories.

3. Eat less and less and less.

4. Eat whatever dish made out of healthy food items even though they don’t taste at all and look really obscure. Maintain this list of healthy food and be obsessed with only eating that, resulting in more paranoia.

And probably a lot more that I cannot think of right now.

The spirit of eating right is in the eating.

While what you eat is equally important, it is useless if you don’t know how well to eat it.

So let’s clear the misconception and let’s try to eat right, the right way.

1. Be a Vegetarian by choice and not by force. Vegetarianism is born out of compassion towards other living beings. Until you feel that naturally, do not be so.

2. Eat at the speed of the body and not hog at the speed of the mind. Chew nicely and when you do that, you will eat at the speed of the body. You will listen to the body and naturally eat less. No need to count calories, because the body will tell you what it needs now when you listen. You will notice, you will be filling your plate with less food as you go.

3. Time table eating can bore the heck out of you. Eat normally, what you wish, at the speed of the body, 3 times a day. Fasting can purify your body and senses, but don’t be obsessed with it, do it only if you can.

4. Do not drink water atleast 30 minutes before you eat, while you eat and atleast 30 minutes after you eat. Water douses the digestive fire and can affect digestion. But don’t forget to drink water the other times to flush out the toxins.

5. Eat what you feel is tasty. Because the digestive fire is induced more with tasty and nice aromatic food.

6. Do not eat/cook emotionally. You will attach all that emotions and thoughts to the food and affect your digestion. Not only that, but it can also affect your thoughts, character and personality. Don’t ask me how, but they do. So Eat/Cook the food in silence.

7. Eat Consciously. By this I mean, that watch what you are eating without judging the food or yourself. Because at some point we get carried away and do what everyone does, “Top up” with more food. If we watch then we will refrain from doing that. This will leave a gap in the stomach which is good as it will be easy to rotate and digest the food.

8. If you believe in God, then offer the food to God and eat it. Just do it mentally with a loving heart, don’t need to place the food at the altar every time. This particular point needs deeper understanding, beyond just the rules of dogmatic religion.

These are just simple guidelines for normal people who lead normal lives.

Food is the best medicine for your body. Eat less and you will be  sick, Eat more you will still be sick.

The Car that should be a Steering Wheel

Ego is just an instrument called Steering wheel. But Ego thinks of itself as the Car and makes one believe that this Car is special and there is nothing beyond the needs and fancies of the Car that is better.

Ego is devastating when you don’t watch it, But Ego is so funny and weak when you begin watching it.

Begin watching your Ego and see how Funny and weak it is.

Ego is a tiny little force that you use to move around this universe in this life.

Ego grows and identifies itself with a person’s desires and needs – of wealth, of hunger, of sex (male or female), of creativity, of religion, of profession and in fact everything down to what underwear you are wearing at the physical level and to the thoughts and emotions at the mental level.

Funny thing is if you say I don’t have ego, your ego grows by saying that.

If you remain identified with your ego, you will be pulled wherever your ego wants to pull you working through your senses. This is the only way the ego can feel alive and strong, by fulfilling its desires.

Now let’s say you have concluded that ego is bad and you can kill it and control it by suppressing your desires and shall we say “skillfully letting it go”. Ego doesn’t go away. Ego now plots different other ways to make itself feel strong and wanted.

Ego tries the negative way. It uses anger, jealousy, lust and emotions to keep its identity (People who say are on a diet, are usually vulnerable to such emotions). Because once it begins to bring out the negativity in you, you begin to feel guilty and that guilt is so strong an imprint that Ego will hold on to you using that force. You feel horrible while the Ego feels awesome because now it is revived in a different way.

Everything conjured by the mind as thoughts is the work of Ego, just to keep itself as the master.

Don’t do anything. Just be yourself. Begin watching the Ego. When someone glorifies you, see that your ego is getting massaged. When someone hurts you, see that your ego is getting hurt. The beautiful thing is that if you just remain and identify yourself as that witness, you will see that the ego is the one that needs all of it. It needs praises to grow, it also needs hurts to grow. Ego doesn’t care whether it is praises or hurts. It will use anything currently available for the sake of its growth.

But once you become the pure witness, completely detached from the ego, you will see that the ego will slowly let go off its hold on you. Ego will bow down and just become the instrument called steering wheel. You are no longer elated by praises and hurt by emotions. But beware, ego will try to use your weakest moments to come back up and gain its strength. But as long as you know that it is just your weakest moment (like you are feeling sleepy) then you will awake inside.

All you have to do now is find out the driver and request that to take hold of your car and live life in love.

Ego’s job was to just write this. The essence does not belong to it.

The White Wall

Ananda is a student of class 10 in his village. He paints very well. He wants to learn to paint from a great painter from his village Shiva. But Shiva was no ordinary painter and he doesn’t teach painting for money, which is an advantage for Ananda since he cannot afford the money. But Shiva only teaches to the one who passes his test.

On a nice sunny morning, after breakfast Ananda walks to Shiva’s house situated in a nice green farm. It was a simple hut with only the basic necessities. Shiva grew all that is needed for himself to eat. He only painted for others, there was not a single painting in his house.

Ananda knocks the door. Shiva opens it and greets him with a friendly smile, as if he knew he was coming.

Ananda politely bows down and asks “I am a school boy, I am interested in painting and I come here in humility to learn more in painting.”

Shiva let him in and spoke “This is the test my boy. Here is a white wall. You have as much time as you like. If you paint the most beautiful thing that you can think of, then I will accept you as my student.”

Ananda was very hopeful that he can paint his best.

Ananda was very good in painting nature.

On the first day he began painting mountains, rocks and houses around them. He sat there looking at it intensely for the whole day. He did not leave home. Seeing the boy’s dedication Shiva offered him some food and water. He ate and remained watching it unmoved, adjusting the painting, as the night fell.

Shiva said “My dear boy, I keep the door open. You can leave home and come back next day when you feel like”, as he slept.

Ananda was staring at the wall for too long and he forgot he had to leave home. He slept there on the floor.

He woke up the next day and with a flash of inspiration, began painting a river on this painting. It needed a water body. He continued to stay there and work on the painting.

On the third day, he added a nice orange shade to the subjects on the painting to show the light from the sunrise in his painting.

On the fourth day, he added some flying leaves, flower petals, and flowing hair and clothes of men and women to show the presence of a light breeze.

On the fifth day, he felt his painting was not complete. He wasn’t sure if it was the most beautiful. He sat there contemplating. He stopped painting now.

On the sixth day, he began to think there are too many things in his painting. He began erasing them one by one and continued to do so.

Shiva began to smile now, as if he knew what was happening in his mind and where he was going to get.

At the end of seventh day, Ananda erased the whole painting and turned to Shiva and bowed down to his feet.

Shiva calmly asked “What happened? Why did you erase all that you did for 7 days?”

Ananda got up with tears in his eyes “O master of masters! The most beautiful painting in the world, does not come from me. It is the white wall itself that is beautiful and only that can bring out a perfect painting from me! I do not know anything!”

Shiva held him up with tears of joy in his eyes.

“My boy, you have passed the test. I will teach you the art of listening to the beautiful white wall, which alone can tell you what to paint on it.”

Who is Ram?

Mythology says there used be a person named Ram and his life history has been written as Ramayana. But, Who really is Ram?

Ram is not a single person. Ram is the quality of infinite goodness that is possible in every one of us. Ram is there, where there is no Ravan. Ravan is the manifestation of suppressed badness.

The song goes “Mann se Ravan jo nikale, Ram uske mann mein hain”

“The one who removes Ravan from his heart will have Ram in him”.

Again it is foolish to think Ram and Ravan are just persons. Ram and Ravan are personification of Good and Bad.

So how do you remove Ravan? By going to temple and Pray to the idol of Ram, offer him flowers, fruits and some money. Make prasad and distribute it to people who are dieting?

NO!

By watching your negative/bad thoughts that arise in your mind, without judging yourself, the thoughts move away from you like a cloud. What remains after that is a shining goodness. You can be a great person performing good deeds and helping people and all that, but it is useless if there are bad thoughts in you that you haven’t let go. They grow in you, in the back of your mind, suppressed and one day when Ram is sleeping, they rise in you with all its powers and bring out the Ten headed monstrous Ravan from you. Ram is needed here in all his greatness to slay this suppressed Ravan.

Let the bad thoughts get away from you, slowly and not allow the Ravan to grow. Ram is already there in your heart permanently, he will just shine freely when there is no Ravan in you.

Here is a more modern analogy – With Ravan, even 1TB of Ram will feel like 256MB, but without Ravan, even 1TB of Ram will feel like infinite TB of Ram 

Godmen Filter

At some point People become frustrated with their life with too many emotional setbacks. They begin the search for the meaning and purpose of life and become vulnerable. The pitfall is, they end up going behind fake Godmen, due to their ignorance. There are real saints but unfortunately people get trapped into the intellectual posers who call themselves Godmen. Here are a few tips that I got to know, if you want to differentiate the posers from real saints:

1. Saints don’t advertise themselves. They don’t promise you abundant money, fruitful career, successful life and all that. They help people silently, unaware of them. They don’t want praise, nor any attention. How many know of Saints in Rags around the Tiruvannamalai Hill? I never knew and I have never even been to that place yet!

2. They definitely don’t sell you spirituality as a package deal. If they teach you meditation, it is something that they got from their masters and most certainly they will not teach you anything but what you need. Usually the fees you pay for these, go to administration and some charity work, not for glorifying themselves more. There were days when a saint used to teach meditation for 5 rupees to sincere seekers.

3. Their definition of spirituality is realizing your real self. That’s it. Not gaining some supernatural powers.

4. They definitely don’t cure you of diseases. They will ask you to go to a doctor instead. They might help you, but they won’t say that they will cure you, using some kind of special powers that they have. Nope.

One lady approached a particular saint and said, “God came in my dream and said that you can cure my disease”. The saint said, “Mother, God didn’t come in my dream and tell this, so I suggest you to please see a good doctor”.

Sometimes there may be exceptions, but it is not realistic and practical to generalize these exceptions to all cases.

5. They do not force you into changing your habits. They would say you will change gradually by yourself. They don’t ask you to wear a marking on your forehead, or wear a particular bead mala or change your dressing style or grow long hair/beard or even change your diet or pray to a particular God. They don’t care if you are an atheist or even if you eat “Beef”, they will teach you meditation just as it should be taught.

A thief came to a Zen master asking him to help him to get out of this awful thing he was doing – stealing. The master just said, continue stealing, but whenever you do, be aware of what you are doing. The thief brought in awareness, and he just couldn’t steal anymore.

It is not wrong for someone to teach meditation to people in large numbers. But the General public should understand that, meditation is like a medicine. The medicine should be had only as per prescription. The Doctor may prescribe the same medicine to all for common ailments, but people have to understand that the effects will vary depending on the level of ailment that they have. Beyond that, only case by case basis will work.

You will need patience. After all Spirituality is about speeding up evolution to realize your true self and evolution is a slow process. Just beware of fake Godmen and move on with your life.

The Shiva Trilogy

I just stumbled upon this book called “The Immortals of Meluha”. May be I am too late to the party, but I visited the website, found out a little about the book and read the free first chapter.

After reading the first chapter, I felt the narration, though based on ancient mythology, feels very modern and I really liked the pace and the way the story is unfold. The concept is very good, just read the “About Shiva” section of the website to get an understanding. I like the Author’s (Amish) belief that Ram and Shiva were just Humans who rose to Godhood of Vishnu and Mahadeva.

If any of you are reading this currently or have read it already, do let me know your comments. I am planning to grab this book, the next time I hit crossword or order it online.

What is Life?

Is it possible to define Life? or describe it?

A lot of us have attempted it. In fact every one of the 6 billion odd people of the world can describe life in their own words and each one can be interpreted in innumerable number of ways by the same 6 billion odd people. Any one that begins to describe life, uses one aspect of it depending on his/her speciality. A physicist view of life is entirely different from that of a politician or a priest. In all cases, they have a view of life and then they begin to live according to their views and their society influenced ambitions.

The basis of misunderstanding of life is just this. To have a view of life and then living that view. Because it is in our nature to try and understand everything with known factors and just live by that well known popular definition.

Let us take an example of a sweet dish, say Gulaab Jamun. Describe it. A Round, brownish sweet flour based dish in dripping sugar based solution. You can then break down to its constituents, recipe and list down the calorie value. Let’s say you took 1 hour to do all that. That would be your extensive description of Gulaab Jamun and you may even write a Wiki page for that. But to someone who has not had Gulaab Jamun in their life, all of this means nothing. They are just mere words of description which he/she can interpret and imagine in his own ways. Now serve one of this to this person. The person eats it and declares whether he/she likes it or not. But now, he also knows what a Gulaab Jamun is. No description is needed but somehow the moment he ate the Jamun, he knows what it is.

Life can only be created by another life. We owe our life to our parents. The tree that stands tall and big owes it to the seed from the fruit of another tree just like it. If you go back in the reverse, you will find that all known lives are only created through another life. We can trace this back till the point where the Universe existed as just primordial life substance.

According to Big Bang theory the Universe came out of an infinitely dense point of nothing. According to String theory this known Universe is just a result of collision between two other parallel universes. Whatever it may be, the Universe in the beginning was just a hot molten primordial life substance. The primordial life is the one that has evolved itself into various life forms as it exists in the universe now. Imagine that moment of heat when the whole Universe is densely packed in just a square inch or so. Earth, Sun, Moon, Planets, Galaxies, Stars, nebulae everything is contained in that one square inch of primordial life.

When that primordial life expands into what it is now, do you think Earth is a different object from Moon? Do you think the star in a distant Galaxy is separate from the stone lying on Earth? Physically they look separate, but their origin is nothing but that life substance. Now what about us. Humans. We didn’t jump from somewhere into this Universe. We evolved from the same life substance as this primordial life. Hence we aren’t separate either. If you keep thinking in this terms you will understand that the whole Universe is nothing but just this life substance evolved/manifested into various forms.

I cannot call this a creation because everything was just there and only evolution and manifestation of life is happening.

Life evolves itself and manifests itself into various forms because it wants to know its limitlessness by manifesting into infinite forms. It wants to live all of its possibilities, through the various life forms including us. In that sense the Human form is a stage in evolution which is able to perceive and experience this life in the most advanced way possible. So if you think about it, it is not us that are living our lives but it is Life itself living the life to experience and know itself with the help of this manifestation called Humans.

Whatever you do in life, be it good or bad and whatever you experience, pleasure or pain, you are just being an instrument for life to experience those various characteristics. When this instrument is no longer fit to experience life, life dissolves it in itself. If the life that is manifested inside the instrument has more desires to experience the life, it manifests again by being born as another life form, not just human but any life form. This is what they call as reincarnation. This can go on and on because as long as this particular portion of Life has things to do it will keep manifesting, because Life has nothing but infinite time and infinite Life energy to support this Life.

In short, Life is not something that has to be defined and we live by that definition, but rather we let the life live through us to experience life itself.

The Now of Life

What is Now?

What time is it now on your watch? Is it 6PM? Would you call it as “Now”? But one hour later when it is 7PM it can still be called “Now”. Go forward 10 days and you can still call that as “Now”. Heck, by the time you say the word “Now”, the now might have moved a couple of seconds. I am writing this now, but you will read it later which is now for you. So when exactly is now? If you think about it, our past, present and future is nothing but an infinite string of “Now” – Now, Now, Now, Now …! It has always been now and only now has existed in real and nothing else.

What about the past and future? Where are they?

The past is not going to be found outside. You can find its imprints but that’s it, there is no secret place where they keep re-enacting our past. The past is in your memory. We remember things and that is how we relate to the past.

- We love the good things of the past and we want to repeat that experience and we also hate the bad things and we don’t want them to happen. This is when we intensely pray God! We pray to God that we don’t want old bad things to happen again to us. But they happen to us anyway and then we say “Why God Why!”.

- The opposites of life makes sure that if you get something good, you also get something equally bad. So if you want something better from the past, you will have to accept something worse too. It goes on in a vicious cycle and if you believe in re-incarnation we continue this ignorantly in our next life.

- The Past should be used only for learning and for guidance. You have to totally understand that what worked in the past may not work in the present moment, lest you want to end up in that vicious cycle.

So where is the future then? I have no idea! According to what I have read, there is an infinite cosmic mind and it contains possibilities of the future. Let it be so or Let it not be so, but our point has been that we always worry about our future. We have to earn enough money so that we can live a peaceful life in future. We have so many dreams built up, believing on a future that is yet to happen. We work with the financial adviser and chart out a really intelligent plan which is based on the “Stock Market” and add hope to the equation. When our hopes shatter, we blame it on the Society or Government or we get angry with our Gods. Well, Future is always going to be full of surprises.

The Surprises of Life
I will share with you a short Zen story I read.

A student goes to stay with a master to learn fencing. For the first week, the master asks the student to completely do only the household chores like cooking, washing, cleaning and serve the master. The master treated him like dirt. Apart from this, the master began to attack him with a stick every now and then randomly. The student would go to the kitchen and he would be attacked, he would go to the bedroom and he would be attacked. Every time the student kept track of which places he hides and he would become alert there. But the master kept using new hiding places and surprised him everyday. The student finally gave up, he left all the memory of the hiding places. He became completely alert wherever he went and was always ready for a surprise attack. The next morning when he went inside the kitchen, he immediately defended the surprise attack in the blink of an eye. The master said “Now you are ready to learn!”.

The experiences of the past makes us more alert and this is the learning we have to carry. Be aware at all the times, because life is full of surprises. It doesn’t mean you have to live in fear, it just means awareness or alertness. It was not the past solution of keeping track of the hiding places that helped him, but the new solution of acting out of alertness in the moment that helped him. Your alertness decreases when you worry about the past and dream about the future all the time. When you be in the moment, your alertness naturally follows. For learning more about Awareness, I found the book – Awareness By OSHO to be very informative.

Tuning into the moment
What does this mean? Shall we all stop doing what we are doing and just go live in the moment, partying all the time? That’s not only impractical, it is also stupid. So don’t get carried away when people want you to live in the moment. Think what it means.

It means that, continue doing whatever you are doing, but the only focus should be on what you are doing right now with complete awareness.

When the Zen Master eats, he just eats. But when we eat we do the following:

1. Talk.
2. Think about stuff.
3. Worry about stuff.
4. Criticize the food.
5. Count the calories.
6. Keep track of the time, so you eat fast.

Basically we do everything but eating. Passively eating and actively engaged in other stuff. If we do the reverse, Consciously eat  and let the other stuff just float by like clouds. When you consciously eat, you will automatically relax and eat slowly. You will be more in the moment. This is actually easier said than done. I have been trying this for the past few weeks (struggling, with stupid jokes flowing during serious contemplative moments!) and I am hoping that I will get a hang of it someday.

So What happens if you are in the now? You tune yourself with the Universe. You will begin to exist with the flow of nature, establish a deep harmony. When you are in the now, a lot of questions get answered automatically. It is like answers flow as thoughts from the silence of your mind automatically with no effort. The entire Universe is in Meditation and when we tune ourselves into it, we are naturally in the meditative state.

I also learned that any technique of meditation only helps you to be in the meditative state. It is just the beginning and it has to be like that all the while during the day even when we don’t practice the technique. The more things I get to know, the more ignorant I feel.

So Let’s Just be.

The Stages of Life

A humble attempt at various stages of life the way I see it.

THE BEGINNING
Each of us are born from our mother’s womb (or a test tube) as a free being. The only thing we probably knew was eat, sleep, excrete. We didn’t even have the need to think about anything because what do you need to think when you are being taken care of by your parents! But as we grow, we begin to learn from our surroundings. So a person born in a small village in India is only exposed to the teachings he can receive from there. In other words we begin to see the world around us as whatever there is. This also holds true for religion. We are all born into a religion to which the parents belong. If the parents are atheists, we are born atheists too. But the point is, when we are born we learn to see what we perceive from our nearby external world as the truth. This is our beginning stage, the stage where we narrow ourselves, where our exposure is limited and our idea of the world is confined to our location. This is a stage till we go to a school.

THE SCHOOL
As we grow, we know more. School teaches us history of the whole wide world in its own prejudiced way. I mean, we believe what is written in a text book to be the truth and hope that what is written there will guide us in our lives. We are exposed to science. We are taught how to communicate. Basically, we learn from the books, through the interpretation of the teacher. Our understanding now becomes wider. But then, for the most part, the education that we take is understood more from a career perspective. A Long preparatory effort of money making in your later life. A few of us learn it for the sake of learning, for the mere joy of understanding something new and expanding our knowing. A rare few of us can see beyond school and learning and find their own path, but in general we end up preparing for the big money making days, whatever way it may be. Art, Music or Literature doesn’t matter, only that which can help you earn money is learnt. After all, money is needed for our survival, so we ourselves do feel the necessity. Whatever opinion on religion we had will most likely continue the same during this stage.

THE RAT RACE
We land a job or some of us hopefully will land a job after we graduate. We work tirelessly for a big name corporation to earn our living. We sacrifice everything for the sake of earning money. We put up with the boss, we put up with the traffic, we put up with life in general and focus our whole energy in money making. This can be endless and varies from person to person. The desire never ends and as years pass by we continue to live a meaningless life of making money. Not that it is wrong, It is just that we don’t get a sense of fulfillment, a perception merely. Also, there is a retirement life that needs to be taken care of and all the talks about preparing for the future keeps you very busy.

THE TRANSITION
During this stage, We tend to know more now, because we read the news and blogs on the internet, it makes us more knowledgeable of the things that go on around the world. We begin to have our own opinions. We can talk about various topics for hours with our friends during that Saturday night party and really go on till we can prove that we are more knowledgeable than others. Our ego builds up and it may make us question the need for a religion or a God. The Atheist mind now comes into picture. We feel the need to go beyond our tradition. This is not bad and may not be good either. Because, the questioning Atheist minds is actually the first step to the Truth, but if you let the ego breed into Atheism, it might mislead you. Some of us, eventually get tired of taking a side and fighting for one way or other and progress to a stage of Agnosticism. But again any judgment of any transition happening to an individual is wrong, so don’t be worried about whatever you are right now, whatever is happening right now is the truth. Whatever situation you are in right now is the reality, worrying about the past or wondering about the future wont help at this point.

But life can test you. Life gives you jolt sometimes. Life wants you to understand life and not just go on in the closed confined beliefs that you carry, whatever it might be. Your whole understanding of life will be questioned by life itself. This is the point where you are given a chance to get out of the Rat Race, to break free of all prejudices. You are merely given a chance to understand things better. But we want logic don’t we. We want explanations for everything. Sorry, but the jolt that life gives to you will have no logic. It will just happen for no reason. It will challenge you to enter the world of questioning yourself, questioning your understanding of everything.

There is only 2 possibilities from here:

1. You can choose to ignore, offer whatever resistance you can and get back into the Rat Race after facing several hardships and then continue blaming Yourself, Society, Government or God.

2. You can begin the process of questioning. You can step into a whole new world and a new way of understanding. A new life will begin. You will be in the Rat Race, but the Rat Race won’t pull you with that force any more. You will start going at your own pace. That own pace might be faster than the Rat Race Pace or slower. But the difference is, in the former you are being pulled and in the latter you are in control and you choose your speed. It will be like every one is begin pulled at 50 miles per hour around the track in their lanes and you would be flowing consciously at a varied speed, walking freely at the pace comfortable to you, in your own lane. You will begin to break free.

THE SEEKER
If you chose the blue pill, the point number 2. Welcome to the world of seeking, where you seek only the absolute truth. If you took this step, don’t worry because there are always fellow seekers who guide the other seekers in your path. Your real journey begins now, it doesn’t matter where, but it will happen only in the now. Only “Now” will be important. Whatever your mind so far has thought about Religions, Atheism, Agnosticism, Some cult are only stepping stones. They were just connecting stations before your long journey of seeking. Your Journey begins not in the future nor did you miss it in the past, but it is in the changing now. It is now and never ever. It is very important to understand what is “Now”. What is Now? We will see…

The Opposites of Life

What is it?
Good and Bad exist in the external world like Day and Night. Positives and Negatives coexist in the Universe and are the driving forces behind its creation and further evolution. Electricity itself is the flow of electrons in one direction and protons in the opposite direction. But this is very generic and one would wonder what it all means and what could be taken out of it. These are the kind of generic basic lessons I was getting from that cartoon show back in 2007 and It actually took one year to dawn on me that I should probably read a few resources to understand this in detail.One of it was a book “What is Zen?” by Alan Watts, a Classic.

One way of looking at it was, without the bad you cannot appreciate the beauty of Good. Without night, you will not appreciate the light from the day. So, does this mean bad is essential? Should things go bad? Should there be “badness” in this world? Don’t we all think that how peaceful the world would be if everything is just good? May be we can all export the badness (not bad people) to some other planet and just keep the juice of goodness on Earth? Will that give us happiness? My mind was taking crazy spin around these thoughts when I was trying to relate what the Zen wisdom of law of opposites meant in real life.

Where is it?
It was a constant search. I never realized that I should look in the direction of the thoughts that come in your mind. You have so dwelt in our thoughts, so become one with our thoughts that we forget to watch our own thoughts and we just lead a reactive life to our thoughts. In other words, we just identify ourselves with our thoughts. If we get anger, we show it. If we get sad we react to that sad thought. All of this happens as we get stimulated from our external environment and we just remain like a dancing puppet in the hands of the external world controlling us all the while.

The next thing we do is the moment we see what we are thinking, we immediately judge ourselves with those thoughts. We judge that we are good when we are kind and we are bad when we are angry. Because, we have identified ourselves as this Body and Mind, anything good done by the body and mind makes us feel good and massages our ego but anything done bad or goes bad makes us feel bad about ourselves and we accumulate fear, guilt and what not! We then let that trigger more emotions within us. We are just a bundle of these chains of infinite emotions of opposite polarity arising from our thoughts. The modern civilized man has actually lost himself in his mind of opposite emotions.

This was the opposite that had to be looked at. The opposite of Good and Bad thought right within us. Knowing is Good, but if you are not conscious enough, it can cause the rise of your ego and whenever someone questions your knowledge and if you don’t seem to know it right, your ego will be hurt and you feel bad. Knowledge caused the Goodness in you, while the Hurt ego made you feel bad. This is the kind of existence of opposites within you.

Why is it?
The realization was that Good cannot exist all by itself. It attracts very quickly the equivalent bad very close to itself. So Good and Bad exist together as neighbors in your mind. How crazy is that? All the while, the moral world wants everyone to only be good, but the law of opposites says you can only be good if it can attract equal amount of bad. Go ahead, give it a thought, this is always true and there is no escape. If you are conscious you will quickly find that all the so called “badness” thoughts are actually getting buried by you within yourself because you are afraid the society might think you are mad. So long you would have thought you had controlled your anger and then one simple insult or a provoke you burst and you don’t even know it happened.

What to do?
At some point, some circumstances lead me to this book – “Emotional Wellness” by Osho. I mainly picked it up because I wondered if it could help me manage my fear and anger. I had no idea that I would be introduced into the world of consciousness and being aware of yourself and how one can deal with all your emotions completely. The essence of the book was to take the stance of a neutral observer and watch as you feel these emotions, without making any judgments. The emotions don’t stay within you if you just watch them. They stop their flow and stay with you as soon as you want to pass a judgment. Otherwise, They just flow out slowly and steadily. It becomes a living meditation where you watch your feelings all the time as a neutral entity/being. You will finally become that neutral being from where only the light of neutral energy flows. This is what is described in the book and if you read that in detail, a lot of it makes sense. Osho keeps it interesting and understandable with Zen stories and humour throughout the book. The only thing left for me is to experience this practically and I had been practicing that ever since I finished it (which was 2 weeks back I think!). At first, it seems difficult but I think as you go it would become more free and natural to observe.

The Fight of Good against Bad:
The society always tells of the stories of the fight between good and bad. The Good finally wins and the bad is destroyed. Sorry, but they are just stories where only people who couldn’t manage their “badness” were killed by the society. The truth is there is no point in killing bad people, not even killing yourself if you turn bad. Because it is the badness that you have to let it out. There is no point in letting the Good and Bad in you fight with each other. This is exactly why Gandhi and Buddha vouched non-violence as their motto. Ahimsa is the way that they said. If you have bad thoughts in you, you just watch it and let it flow out, leaving absolutely no stain in you. The moment you judge you leave the stain of guilt. Never Judge, just watch. Watch it fill your body and flow out of every single pore of your body.  This is also what it means when they say offer it to God. Osho simply said that in practical terms. If you let it out, it is automatically absorbed by God or Universe.

Do you remember the scene when Munna forgives himself and asks for forgiveness from Circuit in “Lage Raho Munnabhai!”. The emotions were let loose and they flowed out. What was left was the unconditional friendship love between them. Where was Munna’s anger/guilt and Circuit’s sadness after that one single act of letting it flow consciously? In fact this is exactly what Gandhi employed against the British. He will remain the watcher, will not react and will neither co-operate to all the laws laid out by the British. Only peaceful protests. Gandhi made the entire country just remain silent and watch as the British left us eventually. It is another story whether we really got the “Freedom” after that. But the essence that Gandhi applied externally is the same for your inside, with respect to the fight between Good and Evil.

Watch the evil in you without any judgement and also watch the good in you without any judgment. You will raise above the ordinary Good and Evil and you will become pure unconditional goodness. This is what is preached by Osho, Buddha and all enlightened souls.

And now we Begin:
If you want to understand the universe, you have to understand yourself first without any judgment or conclusion about yourself. You have to keep observing yourself until you reach the point where you simply become the observer with no relation to the thoughts that arise in you. You go on as being that neutral observer after that. This process never should stop, and the wasteful thinking slows down and would eventually stop. This is the state, the state of a neutral observer that has no opposites. You are then in control and aware of what you do. You can then choose to provide that neutral energy to whichever thought you wish to. Your thinking will now be clear and conscious. This is where I am trying to get to and I am wishing that every single human gets his/her opportunity to know this and get to this.

I am now reading another book of Osho – “Awareness” to know about this in detail. So far this book has been great and I will try to provide a summary and a review when I finish reading it.

The Journey of Life

It is interesting when you look back at your life. 10 years back you were in a state that is completely different from what you are in right now. Every moment you are changing. Life offers various opportunities at various times and you make use of it, you make good, you make bad, you fall into a trap, you get lucky. It all happens. This journey of life is not the same for everyone and we all experience different things. But at some point during our life, we begin to question the purpose and want to know where does all these ups and downs lead us. We are happy when we are up and we are sad when we are down and we have no clue why we can’t just be happy all the time. When you start questioning deeper, the door opens up for you into the answers of life. This particular part of the journey will be the most exciting and completely surprising. Every single moment you will see something new that you never thought about before.

The funny thing is the door opens up to you in strangest of the places in strangest of the situations. The Universe knows where to get you started. This is why I am always surprised that my journey into the world of truth and spirituality started with a simple cartoon TV show. Can you believe it? Neither can I! The show is – Avatar, the Last airbender. I got curious. The philosophy and concept behind the show was extremely intriguing for me and even though some of the names of concepts were familiar to me, they were totally new because I had not gone any deeper into those. Nevertheless, it happened and the door was opened out for me. I chose to step in. This was 2 years back and I had no idea what I was stepping into, but looking back I am glad where I am and I am glad that I stepped in.

I chose to read about Zen Buddhism and the associated Eastern Philosophy. I picked up a simple book on Zen from the library – Zen, the Beat way by Alan Watts. It was a compilation of Alan Watts’ Radio commentary on Zen. It opened up to the world of Eastern Philosophy and I actually felt ashamed that I, coming from the east, had to travel all the way to a small town in the west to read about the history of the region I come from. Interestingly, Alan didn’t say anything about the religion as such and he covered various Eastern beliefs and how each of them conveyed the same exact underlying meaning. It was a great learning happening on that day. A 100 page book did kindle a lot of curiosity in me. I started searching on what all these meant, I wanted to know more because I believed there is something in this that will offer solutions to me. There was some unknown attraction towards this, I didn’t force myself into this but it was just happening and I was being pulled into it.

I like science. I like to question the logic behind everything and see if there is scientific proof to those. I love science fiction stories and movies. Quantum physics had also fascinated me for a long time. Not at the deep level, but at the high level of knowing what it means. Any show on the Universe, Planets, stars I was there watching. Knowledge was the great thing that was happening to me. But knowledge was causing a tussle within me. I come from a city in south India that is full of temples. I had been to a lot of these temples and Hinduism is a very important part of me. Obviously, when knowledge got to my head and fueled my ego, I was beginning to question all of the religious beliefs. One part of me was becoming the atheist and the other part was the born theist. They were pulling me apart. It was my very own Personal Kurukshetra.

Well now, the war is quitened. There is no more tussle. They are both there, but they don’t fight anymore. They are quietly residing in me doing their own part. Spirituality is not related to any particular religion alone. It caters to everyone, it includes everything. It is the coexistence of the opposites to become the whole. What does all this mean? I will will write about this more and share my expeiriences on various levels. I will try to be as simple as possible because my aim is to not provide multitude of information, which you can get from books and internet (and I will mention them once a while when I can), but my aim is to provide you a simple peek into all of this through my experience.