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.”

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.