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.

Two Cups and a Butterfly

It is said that, the universe is so interconnected with cause and effect that a flap of the butterfly’s wings can cause an earthquake in San Francisco, or a Tsunami in the Indian Ocean, or a Tornado in Kansas, or probably unite two nations. I don’t know which butterfly’s flap was responsible for making me get into wordpress and blog about some random stuff, get people’s attention, and make them like my blog. But the result of the flap is I have been awarded Two Cups and a Butterfly by my blog friends.

Sometimes you don’t know if you were doing good or bad, when you do something. Only when you see the effect of it, you will truly understand the impact that you have created by doing it.

I have been awarded a butterfly by Reema for awesomeness in blogging. I definitely know that my blog is awesome, because sometimes Reema leaves a comment in my blog that goes like  “Aww…so cute” .

A butterfly is meant to fly, not because it has wings but because only then it will fulfill its true purpose. A Butterfly has wings because it is supposed to fly. So I am letting this butterfly fly off as an award to my fellow bloggers:

Usha at Agelessbonding

A-Kay at Lemon and Chillies

Rads at Tunneling Thru’

Sakhi at her Lagukatha

If you are health conscious, do not worry, this is a “94% Fat free Butter”fly or “I-can’t-believe-it-is-not-butter”fly.

I have also been awarded a Trophy by Reema and another Trophy by Apar. When you participate in a race, it is not possible for you to get both the first and second prize and come home with two cups. But that is a race, and to me Life is not a race. Life shouldn’t be considered a race against time, but it should be considered as something to spend your time. That is probably why I got two Trophies at the same time, which doesn’t say I am the first or second, but just says I am good.

A Cup can hold a drink and a drink makes you feel good, not when you have it alone, but when you share it with a friend across the table. It doesn’t matter if it is Pepsi or Vodka or Orange Juice or Pattai Sarayam (Arrack), what matters is the friend who shares the Joy with you.

So since I have two cups, I would like to share my special drink called the Essence of Life with all of my friends in the blogroll and those who read and comment on my blog and those who just read my blog but don’t comment. Because Life belongs to everyone and Life is one big drink that is shared by everyone.

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An Opinion on God

Everyone has an opinion on God. Everyone who has a blog, at some point tends to write their own opinion about the being called God. A post at Paul’s blog made me write my opinion on what I think about the phenomenon of God. I am posting my idea of God here.

God has been equated to a super natural being so far by Humans (including Atheists, because Atheists use the God in the same meaning as theists, for argument).

If at all there is a being called God, and if at all the universe is created by God, there was no intelligent design behind it. God probably did a one time random work of art called the universe or a river of multiple universes and probably stands back and enjoys the work of art. It is like a painter making a unique painting, standing back and enjoying it for as long as he/she likes. The painter is not a God here, he is an artist who splashed the colors and whatever happens later he doesn’t interfere with it. He doesn’t sit down to alter the finished painting, but he rather moves on to the next. A Random work of art can also happen by accident. When you accidentally spill a plate of pasta on the floor, it can look like an art. My Tamil readers will be able to relate this to a scene in the movie – “Anbe Sivam”(which means Love is God). So God might have ended up creating the Universe while he/she dropped his/her lunch on the floor. This can only mean that the existence or non-existence of God doesn’t matter to our own existence.

Imagining this or Accepting this as a fact or trying to prove it right/wrong does not matter.

Because whenever we try to prove it either way, we only end up in an argument and cause division among ourselves. Whatever thoughts we have, we shouldn’t force it on others. This means that you do not have to take whatever I say, You are free to have your own opinion and I will not sit and argue with it. My friend who had read J.Krishnamurthi, used to say the same thing. Not forcing one’s opinion on others is also a principle of Zen.

What matters is we are intelligent beings born out of the universe like how a flower or fruit blooms out of a plant. We are part of this work of art and that is the connection that needs to be realized between us and the Universe we live in. We certainly did not jump out of nowhere into this Universe. Since we belong to this work of art, to us there is no relevant external divinity. The Universe itself is God(You have to change the definition of God here) and since we are born out of it and connected to it, we have God in ourselves. I have another post that will illustrate this. It is an idea that I read in a book.

Due to this reason, I really do not like to describe the term God with the dictionary meaning of “God being an Omnipotent being”. These are all not entirely my thoughts. They are just some thoughts read, understood and inferred from few books and websites. I do not claim to know everything on the topic and I do not mean to say I am completely right. I keep an open mind to accept new thoughts and correct myself once a while. I also do not believe in standing one way or another and arguing. This doesn’t make me an agnostic either. I could use a new category to describe myself, but I am really not interested in forming another new school of thought, because any form of cult only separates us from each other, than unite us.