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The comedy writer Max Brooks specializes in tongue-in-cheek advice on how best to meet our undead monster foes. When you meet a Zombie, for instance, "remain calm; emulate the ancient Romans," he told an April fool’s edition of the journal Archaeology.
"Panic is the undead’s greatest ally, doing far more damage, in some cases, than the creatures themselves," he added. "The goal is to be prepared, not scared, to use your heads, and cut theirs."
Of course, Brooks is joking: only after one lops off somebody’s head do they become undead; not before! In any case, trying to run a chopper through a spectral neck is a little like trying to filch gold from a rainbow: impossible!
But there is far more to such stories, says Stephen T Asma in his new book On Monsters: an Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. Much as rationalists may desire it, the concept of monster cannot just be erased from our language and thinking with the wave of an illuminating wand, he argues.
In other words, you need monsters just to be able to appreciate or value humans. "Ironically then, inhuman threats are great reminders of our own humanity (and vulnerability). And for that we can thank our Zombies," Asma, who teaches philosophy at Columbia College in Chicago, writes in an online essay. "Remember, things don’t strike fear in our hearts unless our hearts are already seriously committed to something (e.g., life, limb, children, and ideologies or whatever)."
Paradoxically, when fear departs, when the heart deadens itself against human vulnerability, one may end up with an inhuman monster. That’s the lesson of the monstrous metastasis of Ashwathama in Mahabharata. As a child he’s naïve enough to accept flour water as milk from his penurious mother.
As a student he vies querulously against the Pandava hero Arjuna and obtains the invincible Brahmasiras missile from his father, Guru Dronacharya. But he lacks the spiritual force and valour needed to control the universally destructive fire of the astra.
At the end of the horrific Great War, Ashwathama morphs into a rogue mercenary so heartless that he does not flinch from attacking the unborn heir of his father’s most beloved pupil. He is ultimately banished for eternity outside the pale of humanity.
He’s still searching for redemption for his crimes, somewhat like the Wandering Jew. Spare a thought for such monsters on this Halloween night.
Vithal C Nadkarni
Even by Third World standards of 30 years ago, the crumbling rundown police mortuary on the outskirts of Kolkata was a dishonour to humanity — dead or alive. Non-airconditioned and windowless, it was designed to hold about 50 bodies when originally built but was being crammed with over 300 unclaimed ones.
As a result, bodies decayed freely outside its four walls — in the verandas, the perimeter yard and amid the sparse vegetation that grew around the structure. In summer the smell of putrefaction was terrifying for hundreds of metres. The lone living occupant was an old uneducated Dom outcaste who functioned as pathologist, autopsy surgeon and mortician rolled into one, who was permanently high on pot.
One day he noticed an imported car stop at the gate and a man in his thirties with a little nine-year-old girl in school uniform get out of it. Both held handkerchiefs over their noses and were breathing through their mouths. As they came closer, the young man smiled and greeted him cordially — an unusual event in the Dom’s experience — entered his name and address in a frayed register and went inside the building.
They came out after a while and started walking around the perimeter, stopping beside various wasted remains of what used to be human beings with the man often pointing out totally unnecessary details as far as the Dom was concerned to the girl and talking amongst themselves.
At the end of about half an hour the two thanked him pleasantly and were about to leave when curiosity got the better of the Dom’s hash hit haze and he basically asked the man the equivalent of just what the hell did he think was going on. The man thought for a moment and replied cheerfully that he had picked up his kid from school and decided to bring her to the mortuary so that she could see for herself the impermanence of it all. The Dom was not impressed. He grunted and dismissed them away.
But a month later he traced the address and landed up at the young man’s fancy apartment with a little boy at his side. "I’ve been thinking about what you told me that day," he said to the surprised man when he opened the door, "and I think you’re right. This is my grandson, he’s eight. I decided to bring him here so that he could see for himself the impermanence of it all. May we look around?" The man was not impressed. He grunted and waved them inside. Moral: Idiots can be found everywhere.
Mukul Sharma
All human beings have desires. Desires running amok is the cause of human suffering. When the desires function independent of discrimination, it causes immense stress. Few ever stop to take a reality check on their desires. Being carried away with what we want, we do not bother to see the ground realities.
The mind (mana) and intellect (buddhi) become divorced entities. The mind is the desire. The intellect is rationality, discrimination. These two do not function in tandem. This discord is the base of human suffering.
One example of this lies in bad choices. A girl falls in love with a boy. She has many dreams of what the marriage will turn out to be. The mind fantasises. Goa in monsoon, romantic cruises. There is nothing wrong so far. But if the intellect does not scrutinise the dreams in view of the ground realities, she will be disappointed. She may get too carried away in her own imagination to see what he is really like, to check if her dreams are justified.
After marriage the hard reality strikes. He hates anything to do with water. Monsoon and cruises alike! And is too busy for romance! And has no money anyway! She may berate the stars, or him. But what she is facing is the consequences of her own choices, her own actions. Once an action is taken, the consequence will have to be faced. Hence it is very important to make a choice correctly. There is no use crying later.
So too is it with business decisions. There is a tendency to get carried away by the dreams rather than see the realities. That explains why so many people lose so much in business, in the stock market. It is difficult to keep one’s head because the desires are so forceful. The greed, the fancies, are all powerful motivators. It is easy to go along with them blindly and live in a world that does not exist. But reality catches up sooner or later. It is called consequences.
One solution is to call in outside experts. The theory is that they will be able to look at the matter more objectively. So basically we pay huge sums because our desire is out of our control. Would it not be wiser to gain more objectivity ourselves? Studying Vedanta trains us in gaining this objectivity. Reflecting on Vedantic truths fortifies the intellect to be the controller of the mind and its dreams.
Janki Santoke
Being proactive is among the great virtues of a king that Valmiki lists in Ramayana. “This is what the Sage termed agravashi, or the one who initiates conversation,” writes Subroto Bagchi in his new book The Professional. “This self-confidence is not about who you are; it is about where the conversation could lead. What if (by initiating the conversation first) I end up committing to something?
“What if you ask me for something I cannot give or do not have? Fear of commitment makes us stay put, keeping the hand and the words to ourselves,” adds Bagchi whose latest designation is ‘Gardner’ for his role ‘to repot, weed, fertilise, even clip the human sources’ of his company.
According to him proactive individuals are genuinely interested in the well-being and welfare of the other person. Nor are they worried about creating work for themselves as an unwanted consequence of reaching out. Sometimes though being proactive can land one into trouble. But then what’s a king who is afraid of trouble?
Being proactive is also the number one virtue in the list of Steve Covey’s motivational best-seller The 7 Habits of Effective People. This entails taking conscious control over your life, setting your own priorities and goals and working actively to achieve them rather than waiting passively for opportunities and merely reacting to events outside your control.
Even in the reactive mode, you aren’t as helpless as you may think, says Covey pointing to the gap between stimulus and response. Within that gap — what Kashmiri Shaivite Masters also ubiquitously refer to as joint or sandhi — lies unimaginable potential for change.
Choosing or timing your response well would be relatively minor aspect of this change. It needs to be preceded by self-awareness: if somebody insults or accuses you, there’s no ‘law’ on earth, except in tribal codes or in knee-jerk Pavlovian responses that says that you must respond likewise.
You can choose not to get angry. But you have to be conscious of your power of choice backed by the creative imagination to envision an alternative. This also calls for chutzpah, to be able to exercise the freedom to choose your own unique response.
Can you buck the pressure? Can you, like a real King, create the space for yourself to decide on your own terms? More important, can you accept the consequences without whining excuses or pointing fingers at others?
Vithal C Nadkarni
The good news is that there is a fourth way out of the eternal triangle of belief, unbelief and riding the fences. That’s the sham medical intervention technique called the placebo. But a placebo’s effect is a measurable and observable improvement in health which cannot be attributed to any administered medication. Latin for “I shall please”, it is an inert ingredient such as a saline solution or sugar pill that has no therapeutic value but still manages to produce a testable physiological effect similar to what would be expected of a pharmacologically active substance such as an antibiotic.
The idea of the placebo in modern times originated with H K Beecher in 1955 who evaluated 15 clinical trials concerned with different diseases and found that some 35% of patients were satisfactorily relieved by a placebo alone. Other studies since then have calculated the placebo effect as being even greater.
Some of these for example show that placebos are effective in 40% or even 50% of subjects with certain conditions like pain, depression, some heart ailments, ulcers and other stomach complaints. And, as effective as the new psychotropic drugs seem to be in the treatment of various brain disorders, some researchers maintain that there is not adequate evidence from studies to prove that the new drugs are more effective than placebos.
The trick, however, is that the patient has to believe that he or she is receiving medication that will alleviate the condition. In other words, if something is viewed as helpful, it can often heal. Like belief. That is, it’s dependent on perception, expectation and motivation. For instance, studies have found that the colour and size of the placebo pill makes a difference. So does size, branding, past experience and price.
Interestingly, if a placebo is viewed as harmful, it can cause negative effects too, which is known as the nocebo effect. Like unbelief.
So if something that shouldn’t be of any medical value can often result in a palpable metabolic response in the body, then faith obviously plays a big role in causing quantifiable change. Not to believe then would appear to be a no-brainer, since by doing so we opt out of a possibly viable solution. The fourth alternative, therefore, should be to believe in something knowing that there’s nothing to believe in but knowing also that not to believe in that could be harmful.
Mukul Sharma
Translated, atmasuddhi simply means, ‘clarity of the self’. This inner self or the spirit within is the atman which is more subtle than just the mind (chitta). Therefore, chittasuddhi is the stage before attaining that ultimate, the atmasuddhi. This state of atmasuddhi involves not just cleansing of the mind or psyche of ‘mental toxins’ (chittavrithi), but attainment of freedom for the entire self or personality.
This is a release from the binding effects of all past karma — not just the aspirant’s karma but that of others too, which have had the effect of affecting or influencing him. This, therefore, is that supreme freedom, attaining which, the liberated soul (muktah) is freed of all suffering — that state of dukah samyoga viyogah, which the Bhagawad Gita declares, is yoga by itself (6, 23).
Atmasuddhi, thus commences with the stage of true comprehension of and thus discriminating between the true and the false, whereby all aspects of one’s thinking, living and speaking become right and holistic. Not permitting any exceptions or allowing any weed of a dead past to ever even rear its head, this verily also becomes the process of neutralising or annihilating, through the new found right living, all past bad karma.
In the stage which would follow naturally, the vagaries of living or the bad karma done upon the sadhaka by others too, would cease to even affect him. This also is that state of oneness with nature, where, as conceived of by Wordsworth, no “dreary intercourse of daily life” would “ever prevail against us, or disturb our cheerful faith, that all which we behold is full of blessing” (Tintern Abbey Lines).
Simply put, the pursuit of atmasuddhi involves freedom from all aspects of one’s past and present, which have the effect of sullying his soul, reflected in unnatural developments or situations, obstacles, shallow relationships, fruitless transactions and such irritants, which most persons are heir to.
An analogy in the above regard is that of a white writing board or a spotless mirror, rendered even unidentifiable through accumulation of innumerable writing marks, dust and dirt. Effective cleansing would bring the board or mirror back to its original and normal state (swaroopa).
Applied to the individual self, all spiritually refining processes would involve rediscovering and obtaining the swaroopa within. Comprehension of this is that vital step towards real pursuit of the ultimate — atmasuddhi!
K Vijayaraghavan
Comic book characters like Prince Valiant or Tarzan are much older than Asterix the Gaul. The diminutive warrior’s first adventure appeared in a French magazine in 1959. That makes him only fifty; which, even by non-Gallic standards, is still prime-time.
His newest adventure, his 34th, is all set for release and it’s expected to sell zillions of copies in 107 languages. So why not party? As they say at the end of each of his adventures, “Bring out the victuals and the mead and carouse away happily, as long as you don’t let Cacofonix the Bard to sing!” The problem is, not everyone agrees.
Serious lovers of Asterix series claim the French icon’s last album of true merit was Asterix in Belgium. It was also the last album the script-writer Rene Goscinny worked on before his death in 1977 with the creator of the cartoon, the Italian-born artist, Albert Uderzo. According to the purists, Asterix hasn’t quite been up to his old standard ever since.
Paradoxically, the Asterix albums have never sold as many as they do now. For all its commercial success, some purists would like to ‘retire’ Brand Asterix. This might entail sending him into the forest-of-no-return, just as they sent once-mighty-but-now-aged kings and their preceptors, such as the Druidic Getafixit, into that final state of oblivion called Vanaprastha — it literally means ‘entering the forest’ in Sanskrit — in the Indian tradition.
Of course, Underzo will have none of that. “Asterix must live on after me,” the artist who is 82, told reporters recently. He has already sold the rights to a publishing conglomerate. So does this mark the triumph of mass-marketing, as some critics allege, over artistic merit? Not necessarily.
We must remember art does not have to imitate life. Notice how Lord Greystoke a k a Tarzan thumbs his nose at the Grim Reaper with his ageless spouse, Jane Porter. Who knows with infusion of genius and fresh talent Asterix might still get a new life.
Alas, real life dictates otherwise. Notwithstanding claims made by futurists like Raymond Kurzweil, humans simply aren’t “living long enough to live forever”.
One can pop away hundreds of supplements, guzzle gallons of alkaline water and green tea, as Kurzweil reportedly does daily, but that won’t ‘reprogramme’ your biochemistry.
That, however, is not a call to apathy, far less for premature retirement. Strive to live well, fully.
Vithal C Nadkarni
The scientific method for investigating phenomena is simple. You collect information by observing stuff, experiment with that data and finally test various hypotheses by making predictions. If the predictions turn out to be dependable and others can repeat the whole procedure, and all the results are available for scrutiny by peers later, the investigation is complete (for the time being at least) and we have an explanation of what, for example, is thunder. Or light. Or whatever.
An important aspect of this method is that the entire process should be objective in order to reduce the chance of a biased interpretation of the results.
However, there’s a problem with this methodology — namely, a built-in bias: the act of observation (or measurement) changes the nature of the phenomenon being observed. When a child has a fever, a parent plonks a thermometer in its mouth to measure the temperature. But the thermometer has to absorb some heat energy from the body to record a temperature which changes the temperature of the body. Similarly, when an electrician connects a voltmeter to a circuit to measure the voltage in it, the device puts an additional load on the system, thus changing the behaviour of the circuitry itself. Again, when the path of an electron needs to be observed a photon must interact with it. This changes the electron’s path.
In the case of sense perception and the mind the same thing also happens because there is an unconscious component there, becoming conscious of which inevitably affects it. For example, the knowledge of a dream subtly alters its function and, like other measuring observations, creates a new phenomenon. Meaning, psychological phenomenon, too, cannot easily be partitioned or deconstructed without affecting it in some way. To come to terms with overall significance, it must be viewed as a whole without degrading any pre-existing or prior to measurement properties.
Yet when it comes to our most inner being — our soul, our spirit or perhaps even the godhead that resides within us — we are constantly urged to contemplate it. As a result, a lot of us attempt to analyse and examine it using various methods such as mediation, visualisation and prayer, to actualise our existence and give it a higher meaning. Does this refined scrutiny not militate against the evidence for the wholeness that we are deemed to be not just part of but, indeed, are?
Mukul Sharma
Whether we lead or we follow, in order to be fulfilled in whatever we do, we need to be intense. Intensity is not an emotion. When you are intense, one part of it may be emotional. Intensity should become a quality in you. If you are talking let intensity be there. In your relationships, in your decisions, in your memory, in your thinking, in your desires, even in your fears, be intense without escaping from this moment.
Intensity does not depend on the nature of the work or action. It can be as complex as running a billion dollar company or as simple as cleaning the floor. It is not the ‘what’ but the ‘how’ that is important. Intensity means radiating the energy that does not create any conflict inside and outside. Intensity is intensely being inside you. Intensity flows smoothly and yet strongly. We always believe that if anything flows smoothly like a river, it will not have intensity, and if something is intense like a stone it will not be flowing freely. No. Intensity is like a flood, which is intense and flowing.
Some people intensely create conflict every moment! Anything you tell them to do, they will be ready to create a conflict. Real intensity does not create conflicts. It is flowing but intense.
Usually we feel a terrible restlessness towards the outer world. We do not know what is happening. We do not know what should be done, but there is a deep dissatisfaction about what is there in the inner space; this restlessness should become intensity.
The father of Yoga, Patanjali, says: ‘Success is nearest to those whose efforts are sincere and intense.’ A river does not need a navigator or signboards to reach the ocean. It reaches its destination without any help. When your whole energy moves in one direction as a whole you can move easily. When you are intense and ready to flow you will achieve your goal.
Usually intensity leads to a solid feeling. We may be intense but we may have lost the ability to flow, because we are driven by ego. We are determined to achieve what we want but we have our own rigid ideas about how to get there. We fail to understand that Existence can make events happen in a much more beautiful and effective way than we can plan.
Take up something and follow it with full intensity. Intensity does not mean acting rigidly without scope for updating or change. Only when you are open to change you can make your way like the river flowing intensely towards the ocean. Intensity is integration. Intensity is focus. Intensity is sincerity. Be Blissful!
PARAMAHAMSA NITHYANANDA
AT the pre-dawn hour, the City of Light on the Ganga looks a little like the Queen of the Night by the Arabian Sea, from where your columnist has flown in the previous night with a Dutch scribe. As our boat churns through the sacred waters off Benares, there is a whoosh and a glittering submarine form glides by the prow. “Sisu!” the boatman hisses. “Does he mean a corpse?” whispers the scribe, who lives on a boat in a city famed for its carmine-coloured ‘cannonball’ cheese.
In response the boatman puckers up the fingers of his right palm into a cobra-like hood and makes dolphin-like curving, dancing movements. “Of course he means the dolphin,” the penny drops. Sisu is the local name of the Gangetic Dolphin, which marine biologists have woven into the creature’s Latin name as well. There is another splash and the dolphin tumbles by the side of our boat once again.
This time the darshan is long enough for us to spot its tiny vestigial eyes. These make it look like some myopic Muni grinning perpetually with its half-open beak-like mouth. The facts are more prosaic: over millions of years of the Sisu’s evolution in the muddy environment of the Ganga, its eyes have withered away and the dolphin is not grinning as much as sending waves of sonar to ‘see’ its way around.
We must regard ourselves as fortunate for having seen so highly endangered a creature so quickly. “Perhaps there’s a more ominous portent to the encounter,” the scribe begins to ruminate uneasily. “Aren’t dolphins traditionally regarded as porters of the dead?” They are indeed. Notice how William Butler Yeats used them in his celebrated poem Byzantium, where after “dying into a dance/ an agony of trance” the poet arrives into the city of eternity “astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood” by that “gong-tormented sea”.
We decide to ask the boatman, “What kind of shakun (omen) is the Sisu?” “Ji Shubh! (Lucky),” he replies. Is he certain? What if our boat were to capsise now? Does he have life-jackets for us all? In response to our persistent questioning, the boatman simply quotes a doha from Kabir, the 15th century mystic master who was connected with the City of Light (Kashi).
The couplet is about a worn-out boat (nab jarjari) rowed by a frail old captain: “Travel light (without worries) if you want to float across,” the Master advises, “(halke halke tire). For those who loaded their heads sank (Bude tini sirh bhar).”
Vithal C Nadkarni
Is there a limit to what we can know about the universe or the nature of reality? Not a limit in the sense that we might never have the devices or brains to unravel the mysteries of the cosmos but a knowledge boundary we’re not “permitted” to cross by an external agency. Such ideas don’t necessarily spring from the minds of religious fanatics or the lunatic fringe but even from the writings of our great scientists. In 1992 the world renowned physicist Stephen Hawking posited a conjecture saying that going back in time may be forever forbidden because “...there is a chronology protection agency which prevents (this) and so makes the universe safe for historians.”
Now comes an even more audacious suggestion from two distinguished physicists, Dr Holger Bech Nielsen and Dr Masao Ninomiya from Denmark and Japan, concerning the Large Hadron Collider which is about to become functional later this year. They say their maths proves that the hypothesised Higgs boson — or so-called “God particle”— which scientists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one. Something like a time traveller going back in time to kill his grandfather. “In the case of the Higgs and the collider,” writes Nielsen, “ it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus.”
For the record, the multi-billion-dollar machine, built over almost 20 years by the European science agency CERN, was set to launch in 2008 but broke down after it overheated during a test run. The relaunch was then pushed back to late 2009 as more and more parts had to be replaced. Then, recently, CERN was scandalised when a leading LHC scientist was found to have approached al-Qaeda for work!
Are these convenient coincidences or is the troubled collider being sabotaged by its own future — a cosmic censor? According to Nielsen, all Higgs-producing machines will have bad luck. “One could even almost say that we have a model for God,” he writes. “That He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.” Before we make up our minds it might be interesting to note what Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”
Mukul Sharma,
Actually feeling, experiencing and living out an effective, worthwhile and meaningful way of living is, doubtless, the ultimate objective of every aspirant (the sadhaka). Innumerable obstacles (vigna) stand in the way in the form of enemies within and without. While the obstacles without are identifiable, those within are more subtle, often hidden even to a discerning eye. These are in the form of impressions (samskara) accumulated over the years and, according to the ancient Indian faith, even many previous births.
Whatever be the case, every human has in store various obstacles, which he has to overcome and eliminate, through observation, analysis, practice and perseverance (sadhana). One who cleanses his soul of these ‘toxins’ obtains the ultimate — atmasuddhi. Purely from a religious point, this is that state of God realisation, in the manner conceived of by the Bible: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Mathew: 5,8).
Even from a strictly rational or agnostic point of view, atmasuddhi is a very practical concept, though hard to realise. A simple analogy is that of cleansing one’s physical system, after going through illness, infection or contamination of the system by harmful bacteria. The patient has to exercise discipline concerning food, rest and lifestyle. This too is a form of sadhana, as this process also involves one of ‘making up’ or compensating for one’s past bad karma through good karma.
The analogy, as above, can now be extended to the spiritual purging of the ‘toxins’ or obstacles within through the needed regimen, discipline and efforts (sadhana). The increased atmasuddhi that would result would lead to weakening of obstacles or enemies without too, resulting thus in more favourable situations, relationships and developments all over. These, after all, are mirrors of the extent of clarity (atmasuddhi) within!
In the above regard, there are various techniques designed to approach the desired objective. While the devout would derive sustenance through prayers, the religious through rituals, the agnostic would rely on analysis, study and changes in his approach to things and issues. All authentic, time tested and validated techniques, which also would be rooted on diligence, truth and goodness of heart, would, sooner or later, lead to the common objective — increased atmasuddhi, which, doubtless, is that truly ultimate in all feeling, experience and realisation!
K Vijayaraghavan
Asia’s richest man has just taken a 66% pay cut to “set an example of moderation”. How should one react? Should one sympathise? Or should one give in to feelings of schadenfreude? That, as you know, is one of those untranslatable German words which stands for ‘shameful joy’ brought on by taking delight in another’s suffering.
But the moot question is whether Mukesh Ambani is suffering monetarily? He will take home Rs 150 million and a share of this year’s profits. That’s not small change, going by the living standards of most of his compatriots. In any case, the connection between cash and contentment may not necessarily be as large as many people believe it to be.
Indeed, one expert goes so far as to describe the relationship between money and happiness as “pretty darned small”. Others are less certain. Hunter Davies, author of Living on the Lottery, which follows the fortunes of 27 winners from the British game’s first year, for example, goes to a diametrically opposite pole. “Money does buy happiness,” he asserts. “It makes you nicer and kinder — may be because you don’t get messed around so much.”
Of the 27 winners that he tracked only one turned out to be depressive and unhappy. “Those who mutter about the awful things in store for winners are simply subscribing to a compensatory myth that makes them feel better,” Davies said. But other studies covering larger samples have produced more ambiguous results: of the 2,000-plus millionaires created since the inauguration of the lottery in Britain in 1994, one has committed suicide, several winners found themselves in prison, and some others have displayed the worst excesses of binge buying.
So how does one interpret Davies’s findings? One explanation is that the extra cash brings in increased status and sense of security, which may actually have a greater impact on happiness than money per se.
“Such a sense of inner well-being soars beyond mere material wealth,” Stuart Zimmerman and Jared Rosen write in their paean to inner security and infinite wealth. “Inner security can only be forged (no pun intended) by going beyond traditional, restrictive concepts of wealth,” add the authors ostensibly transformed by 9/11. The Bhagavad Gita links it to inner silence and resolution (atma-vinigraha) and purity of purpose, all of which boosts mental strength and separates the real men from the boys.
Vithal C Nadkarni
A scientist specialising in geology who studies mountains among other structures constituting the Earth with the tools of physics, chemistry, biology and other sciences knows a lot about the Himalayas, for instance. He or she knows that the main range runs, west to east, from the Indus river valley to the Brahmaputra river basin, forming an arc over 2,500-km long, which varies in width from 400 km in the western Kashmir-Xinjiang region to 150 km in the eastern Tibet-Arunachal Pradesh region.
And that it consists of three coextensive sub-ranges, with the northern-most, and highest, known as the Great or Inner Himalayas.
Such a person also knows that the Himalayas are among the youngest mountain ranges on the planet and consist mostly of uplifted sedimentary and metamorphic rock. And that according to the theory of plate tectonics, their formation is a result of a continental collision between the Indo-Australian Plate and the Eurasian Plate which began about 70 million years ago, when the north-moving Indo-Australian Plate, moving at about 15 cm per year, collided with the Eurasian Plate.
The Indo-Australian plate continues to be driven horizontally below the Tibetan plateau, which forces the plateau to move upwards. And, finally, that it’s still moving at 67 mm per year, and over the next 10 million years will travel about 1,500 km into Asia which leads to the Himalayas rising by about 5 mm per year.
A person of artistic vision, on the other hand, who longs to revel in the rhythms and cadences of nature and has backpacked or hiked from the foothills to 2,500 metres up in the clouds and sits facing the same range on some late evening could have a different take on these mountains which have revealed their local names but still hide a lot of other intimate and timeless history from wonder filled eyes.
He or she sees the pre-sunset colours form a winterline pencil of darkly flattened mist run a tabletop ridge high over the myriad peaks; a gleaming temporary palette of green and gold which fades to dusk as the Earth keeps turning away into darkness.
Later, this person could paint a picture of light and shade or letters and words on a canvas or journal and, who knows, one day millions might be able to participate in the shared harmony of the experience and revel in their minds too. But if the person was also a geologist we would have a perfect marriage of science and spirituality.
Mukul Sharma
Seriousness can be defined as paying undue importance to something, at the cost of everything else. It arises from the inability to see that all of life is just a drama that is unfolding every minute. Seriousness is the result of over-expectation from life.
In a Zen monastery, there was a competition among disciples over who had maintained the best garden. One disciple was of a very serious nature. He always kept his garden neat, clean, and well-swept. All the grass was of the same height. All the bushes were neatly trimmed. He was sure that he would get the first prize. On the day of the competition, the master went around all the gardens. Then he came back and ranked the gardens.
This disciple’s garden got the lowest ranking. Everyone was shocked. The disciple could not contain himself and asked, ‘Master, what is wrong with my garden? Why did you rank me the lowest?’ The master looked at him and asked, ‘Where are all the dead leaves? A garden maintained in such a way is no longer alive! It is dead.’
Seriousness kills spontaneity and destroys creativity. It closes your mind to the openness and freedom of life. It makes you dull and dead. When you perform a task in a relaxed and light manner, your thinking and decision-making capacity is automatically enhanced. The same task when performed in a serious manner dulls your mind. When you do something too seriously and are too concerned about the result, you are actually not allowing yourself to perform at the optimum level.
We should be sincere and sensitive which means being aware of everything. Understand, being sensitive does not mean being open to everything. Being unable to say ‘no’ does not mean sensitivity. That is actually ego! The person who is not able to say ‘no’ when he needs to is egoistic. Sensitivity is having the clarity about when to say ‘yes’ and when to say ‘no’ and having the sincerity and courage to follow that decision.
We should make plans and think ahead with sincerity, not with seriousness. Seriousness is not the same as sincerity. Sincerity is focusing on the task with enthusiasm and youthfulness while giving your best without worrying excessively about the result! When you are serious, you don’t enjoy, you don’t laugh. How can you laugh when you are serious?
We should understand our uniqueness but this does not mean that we should consider ourselves so special that we start taking ourselves too seriously.
Be Blissful!
PARAMAHAMSA NITHYANANDA
\In 2002 when Gurcharan Das decided to go on an academic holiday, the former MNC-head-honcho-turned commentator had no idea of the minefields of the mind that he would have to traverse. Das began his odyssey at the Regenstein Library of Chicago University renowned for its rich collection of South Asian texts. “I would pull down from the shelf a volume of the Mahabharata’s critical edition,” the author told your columnist recently in Mumbai during the release of his labour of love, The Difficulty of Being Good: on the Subtle Art of Dharma.
“With Whitney’s grammar on my right and Apte’s dictionary on my left, I would read a small passage,” he added. Although it was extremely hard going, by the end of the first year Das found himself inextricably hooked by the epic “which,” he writes, “is in many ways an extended attempt to clarify what dharma is — that is, what exactly should we do when we are trying to be good in the world.”
During the quest, Das tried to imagine the look of shocked incomprehension on Yudhishthira’s face when the Pandava Prince loses his kingdom and his wife in the dice game and this happens soon after his greatest triumph when he is consecrated ‘King of kings’. “He could only suppose that his world had gone awry,” Das explains.
“Gradually, I began to realise that the dice game may be symbolic of the quixotic, vulnerable human condition in which one knows not why one is born, when one will die, and why one faces reverses on the way. The only thing certain, the Mahabharata tells us, is that kala (time or death) is ‘always cooking us’.”
That reminded your columnist of another great line from the text — which followers of a latter-day prophet like Karl Marx would rediscover with catastrophic consequences for some of their constituencies: this is delivered by grandsire Bhishma as he lies mortally wounded on a bed of arrows: Man is slave of money (arthasya purusho dasah).
Yudhishthira also has equally memorable lines, Das reminded his readers at the inaugural: “Could one depend on dharma to protect one in this uncertain world,” he asked rhetorically. “If so, how does a person go about finding dharma?” When the prince is asked this very question in a life and death debate, he “confronts the possibility that the universe might not care about dharma”.
That makes Yudhisthira’s commitment to truth, dharma and compassion (anrishamsya) all the more admirable.
Vithal C Nadkarni
More on Lawrence Kohlberg, the psychologist best known for his theory of stages of moral development. He used the following illustrative story: A woman is dying of cancer. There’s only one drug that can save her which a druggist in the same town has recently discovered but he’s charging ten times what it costs him to make: $2000 for a dose.
The woman’s husband, Heinz, goes to everyone he knows to borrow the money, but can only collect about $1,000. He tells the druggist his wife’s dying and asks him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist says: “No, it’s my discovery and I intend to make money from it.” So Heinz gets desperate and breaks into the man’s store to steal it. The question is, should Heinz have done that?
In Heinz’s Dilemma as it’s come to be known, Kohlberg wasn’t so interested in the answers he got as he was in the reasons given for them. That’s because his theory holds that the justification which is offered is what’s much more significant, ie, the actual form of the response.
The theory also identifies six stages of moral development progressing from childhood onwards, namely: obedience, self-interest, conformity, law and order, human rights and finally, when achievable, universal human ethics.
Thus a child-person at stage one might say that he should steal it because it’s only worth $200 and not what the druggist wanted for it. Like, he had even offered to pay for it and was not stealing anything else. On the other hand, someone at stage four (law and order) might say he should steal the drug for his wife but also take the prescribed punishment for the crime as well as paying the druggist what he’s owed. Seems fair enough to both sides.
But now let’s see what would someone at the so-called very end stage of moral evolution (universal ethics) — which apparently very few people are capable of achieving — say?
According to Kohlberg, such a person’s take would be that Heinz should steal the medicine because saving a human life is of more fundamental value than the property rights of another person. Great sound bite but do we hear that right?
Did the famous psychologist never stop to wonder whether an emancipated response like this might not stem from the person being unable to face an impending loss of a loved one and thus doing anything to stop it from happening? Of course, we don’t know the answer; we wouldn’t be discussing it otherwise, would we?
Mukul Sharma
Rightly was it said that the taste of the pudding is in its eating! Monologues and exhortations on ‘making up’ for past bad karma through present good karma would assume meaning only when these are capable of practical interpretation through positive results that show in actual life, in the form of tangible changes for the better.
Repentance, through realisation of past mistakes and slip ups, would also bear fruit only when this is followed by adoption of new and changed ways of living, acting and thinking. Otherwise, such acts of remorse would only serve to further depress the spirit within. This would be akin to this situation conceived of by Whittier in his Maud Muller: “For all sad words of tongue and pen, /The saddest are these, It might have been.”
Dynamic and positive repentance along with simultaneous intelligent analysis, observation and inferences would, on the other hand, usher in that optimism, recognising that the past is, after all, a bucketful of ashes. This, verily, is also the practical application of the great Sutra of Patanjali (2, 16) that suffering, which would otherwise have ensued, can be pre-empted.
Swamy Satyananda Sarswati, in this regard, alludes to the analogy of the intelligent farmer, who, after discovering about and repenting over the improper techniques adopted thus far, changes his approach. Though the results of the immediate harvest cannot be changed, those of the future ones can. So is the case with every aspirant’s apparent drift in the past, which can be made up through realisation of specific and universally applicable rules to live by, leading to right and powerful action — karmasu kaushalam.
Thus, the actual practice of ‘making up’ commences from making the needed changes within — tendencies, mind sets, habits, paradigms, and perceptions, which had thus far impeded all progress towards freedom, life and light.
A highly practical guideline in this regard is found, as noted by Priyadarshana Jain, a scholar of Jainism, in Acharya Kundakunda’s Pravachana Sara (3, 38). This verse observes how an ignorant soul takes many years to destroy its bad karma through painful austerities, while a true jnani does this in a jiffy, through “exercising restraint of mind, body and speech.”
Indeed, the road map to the actual practice of ‘making up’ and thus being born to a new world is clear to the seeker who is prepared to open his eyes to sublime truths and indications, which beckon his spirit!
K Vijayaraghavan
As the sky blushed with pre-dawn light, the seeker from the Land of Lady Liberty sat absorbed in meditation on the edge of a still lake in Janakpur. After some time, he noticed another presence by his side. As he looked around with a semi-opened gaze, he noticed a handsome sadhu dressed in spotlessly clean robes.
“Beware of scorpions in the guise of butterflies!” the yogi growled to the first aspirant who was thoroughly rattled out of his meditative calm by now: the stranger’s speech rang with accents of Queen’s English. “Why are you saying this?” the sadhaka asked the enigmatic sadhu who went on to stare back intently without saying anything for long.
“Don’t open yourself to demons in the disguise of holy men or you may discover your life in ruins, only when it’s too late”.
The handsome sadhu whose name turned out to be Vasudeva invited the American seeker to travel with him on foot for three days to reach an obscure holy place. The pair begged for food while journeying through the countryside. Each day they would receive some rice and dal which Vasudeva would cook with an artist’s finesse. Whomever the duo met along the way seemed to be charmed by Vasudeva’s gentle nature.
“But something puzzled me,” the Chicago-born seeker who later became known as Radhanath Swami told your columnist during the recent launch of his autobiography, The Journey Home. “Behind a mask of cheerfulness, I sensed my learned friend (a professor with a Ph D belonging to a wealthy family in his pre-sanyas days) was a tormented man.” It turned out that he was being pursued by a Tantrik Guru who was alleged to be adept in the so-called black arts.
“I knew from what I had observed in India that many gurus had strong powers, including the power to sway followers to do whatever they asked,” Radhanath Swami added. “I was more terrified of what my companion had revealed to me than I had been of the pack of rabid dogs (which had attacked the American Swami just a few weeks earlier). The dogs I had at least been able to see and fend off. But how does one fend off forces of evil menacing seekers of the spiritual path?”
Soon after he’d left Vasudeva, Radhanath Swami saw a big Yankee being terrorised by monkeys into dropping his groceries. Seconds later he also saw a skinny Nepali boy chasing the simians away. The moral was clear: Only fear fear. Ultimately it was not the size but the fight in the boy and faith that had won the day.
Vithal C Nadkarni
A bank manager in the US routinely used depositors’ moneys to help out others in times of need with up to $2,000 for things like car repairs, mortgage payments and taxes. She also reversed bounced cheque charges and sundry fees during her tenure because, as she put it, “I would take other people’s problems and make them my problems.”
In all, she embezzled about $340,000 before being apprehended . Expressing repeated remorse during the trial, she was prepared to accept any penalty for her misdeeds but the judge decided to impose a minimum sentence of a year in jail saying, “Those Robin Hood days are long over.”
So, was the woman stealing? And if so, why did the judge let her off lightly? The answer to the first one is that going by the legal definition of stealing as taking the property of another without right or permission, of course she was stealing.
The second question is a bit more tricky to answer and, in fact, undermines the culpability of the first, especially since she even had the option of being released early for good behaviour. Looks like the judge was overwhelmed by the “spirit” of the law and not only wanted justice to be done but “seen” to be done. After all, the manager was only helping “poor” people and doing the “good” Robin Hood thing which we all actually understand and secretly empathise with, right?
Wrong. The Hood’s contention was he was robbing from the rich and giving to the poor because the rich had amassed their wealth by robbing land and taxes and other stuff from the poor in the first place. But what if there was at least one rich person amongst them who had earned his affluence through honesty and hard work? Would his robbery be just collateral damage which we should also understand?
The psychologist, Lawrence Kohlberg who specialised in moral development said a child reasoning at a pre-conventional level might say that it isn’t right to steal because it’s against the law or someone might see you. At a conventional level, an individual might also argue that it isn’t right to steal because it’s against the law and laws are necessary for society to function.
An individual at a post-conventional level might argue that stealing is against the law because it’s immoral. To this we should add that at a para-conventional level the law has nothing to do with it at all; stealing is wrong, period. It’s difficult to accept this but justice is not blind; morality ultimately is.
Mukul Sharma
Worry is a deeply embedded pattern in us. It happens independently, without any valid reason to justify it. Worry is like an addiction. Any addiction happens because we try to maintain our patterns. It becomes our nature.
We should understand that the mind is like a piece of hardware programmed with the software called ‘worry’. If, for example, we experience depression or worry every morning due to work pressure, then even on holidays we will experience a disturbance in our mood around the same time because our mind is a programmed hardware.
Worry is a deeply embedded pattern in us. It happens independently, without any valid reason to justify it. Worry is like an addiction. Any addiction happens because we try to maintain our patterns. It becomes our nature.
We should understand that the mind is like a piece of hardware programmed with the software called ‘worry’. If, for example, we experience depression or worry every morning due to work pressure, then even on holidays we will experience a disturbance in our mood around the same time because our mind is a programmed hardware.
The stress of suffering or worrying becomes part of our being. If the worry or stress is taken away from us, we feel lonely. We feel we are missing something. When we fall into this software, this worry, again and again, we often end up in a dilemma.
The dilemma happens when thoughts move back and forth while making a decision. There are so many thoughts inside us trying to put their signature on our final decision. These thoughts clash with each other when a decision has to be made because they were recorded at different times and circumstances. This conflict becomes our dilemma. For each person, the dilemma is different as there are no standards or rules for a dilemma.
We become so used to our inner software that we end up like an island that is cut off from the fragrance of the mainland. We are cut off from the fragrance of Existence because of our worries. We miss the miracles of Existence continuously happening around us. We forget to appreciate and remember only to complain. We forget bliss and remember stress. Remembering these negative things becomes a habit. Bringing deep awareness to our being is the solution to this distorted software of the mind. Deep awareness is like a benign virus, if such a thing exists! Once awareness enters our system, the more we work with the mind, the more the awareness gets into the worry software and destroy it!
Awareness is nothing but bringing our focus to exactly what is happening in and around us. Anything that we watch with awareness, whether it is physical pain, mental pain, worry, etc, will dissolve. That is the power of awareness. When we watch with awareness, we stop the conflict somewhere within us. We start moving with the natural flow of things.
When we watch worry with awareness, we focus light on exactly how worry is created, how it exists. Once this happens, the worry starts to dissolve and clarity starts happening. Be Blissful!
PARAMAHAMSA NITHYANANDA
There is a story of a little girl who was on the beach one day after the tide had rolled out. On this beach hundreds of fish washed up on the shore. The little girl was picking them up one at a time and throwing them back in, when a man approached her saying, little girl, you can’t make a difference for there are thousands on the beach. She looked at him as she threw another one in and said it made a difference to that one.
The Bible says: "Unless you are honest in small matters, you won’t be in large ones. If you cheat even a little, you won’t be honest with greater responsibilities." Most of us tend to think it’s big things that make a big difference, but when we trace the sequence of events in our day-to-day life, we will find that eventually what leads to that big opportunity is the result of a lot of little things being done. If we look at all the little things that we did, we will see the invisible train that leads to our big breaks. A journey of thousand miles begins with one step, including downwards treks.
Sound mind in a sound body. We may earn good grades in our studies but at the same time if we do not take care of our health and our mental well-being, all is futile. We need to manage our time in such a way that we find time for exercise, that we eat at the right time and that we get sufficient sleep. All this daily routine looks small but if not followed, the consequences could be colossal.
Peter F Drucker, the management guru, says: “Man’s most perishable resource is time and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed. Each minute is a little thing and yet, with respect to our personal productivity to manage, the minute is the secret of success.”
How do we maintain our relationship with our friends, our parents? Do we take time to remember some of the simple courtesies that are so important in our effort to build personal regard and graciousness in relationship with others? Do we remember the smile, the compliment, the positive note and the word of encouragement?
We should do these important little things without reserve. They should be a part of our everyday manner as we groom ourselves socially in the critical young-adult years. One quality of character most needed in this world is compassion for other people. One of the urgent lessons of life is to learn how to deal with imperfections in ourselves and in others. And if we are not altogether pleased with us, it should be easy to understand why we are not altogether pleased with others.
L R Sabharwal
The 2007 bestseller, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens, received critical acclaim from reviewers who even compared it with Bertrand Russell’s classic anti-theist work Why I Am Not a Christian. Religion, wrote Hitchens, is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism and bigotry, and invested in ignorance. Guilty of misogyny, child abuse and fraud on a monumental scale, “it is a plagiarism of a plagiarism, hearsay of a hearsay, an illusion of an illusion.”
More specifically, he said religion misrepresents the origins of humankind and the cosmos, demands unreasonable suppression of human nature, inclines people to violence and blind submission to authority and expresses hostility to free inquiry.
It’s obvious that after unleashing such violence against a belief system adhered to or practised by over 90% of the world, Hitchens would lay the blame squarely at the feet of the source of such belief — God — and pronounce that, under the circumstances, He couldn’t possibly be great by any stretch of imagination.
And right he would be. For anyone who manages to wade through the litany of physical and mental savagery perpetrated in the name of faith down the ages should, logically, come to the same conclusion. Is it any wonder then that hostile reviewers (many of those too) didn’t acknowledge this fact but instead attacked the author of shoddy research, sloppy erudition, sly distortions, misrepresentation of scriptures and juvenile characterisation of religious belief. Some of this criticism was correct but completely dodged the issue enfolded in the provocative title.
Because where Hitchens is wrong is that God — if such a thing exists, of course — doesn’t have to be great. The mistake lies in providing Him, Her or It with a superhuman attribute that can be equated with comic book characters like Wonder Woman or Spiderman, forgetting in the process that something which is capable of creating whole universes would neither need such exaltation from a small planet nor necessarily be honoured by it.
That same God would also have to be intimately associated with everything happening in the cosmos including, as far as our recent existence goes, what we perceive as good and what we think of as evil. Turns out, all Hitchens was doing was demolishing a very simple-minded notion with an equally simple-minded rebuttal.
Mukul Sharma
Delivering a speech at an institutional gathering recently on the topic of ‘Rethinking religions’, Arun Shourie, MP, said that by the middle of this century religion would be very different. That its present form would be completely unrecognisable, given the changes brought about by an emerging information society. “Religion as we know it will not be the same in 50 years. There has been a rapid democratisation of the world. The world is a much smaller place. The pronouncements of religions can therefore not remain the same,” he said. More importantly, he maintained that some notions central to religion would not survive the future: “You have to stay with the times or you’ll be left behind.”
One wonders if Mr Shourie had also been sitting in the audience listening to himself would his jaw have dropped? For if there’s one thing we all know that doesn’t change, it’s religion. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc, have lived comfortably through many technological and other intellectual upheavals in the past such as the Renaissance, printing and the industrial revolution, for instance, and have emerged even more stubborn and ossified if anything afterwards. Sure, peripheral elements change — heretics are no longer burned at the stake, sati is outlawed, fundamentalism goes on rampage — but “notions central to religion” not surviving, say, the Internet, is laughable.
That’s because the central notion of all religions, concepts that are cold-welded to the first few pages of any scripture, is that there is a God who is the creator of all things including us, that we have a duty to love and worship Him and that He stands for everything which is good. These things have so far reliably demonstrated a sure-fire ability to endure millennia.
On the other hand, consider Parsis. More and more members of these modern-day descendants of migrants who fled persecution in Iran more than 1,000 years ago, are turning to new technology to keep their ancient Zoroastrian religion alive and kicking. “Websites, blogs, on-line directories and matchmaking portals are being used by the close-knit but scattered and shrinking community to stay in touch and true to the 3,500-year-old faith,” reports AFP. In fact, they’re doing exactly the opposite of what Mr Shourie fears: they’re staying with the times for fear of being left behind. It’s what all religions have always done in order to keep the faith.
Mukul Sharma
Do things matter? Both believers and non-believers, conscious creatures, partly aware animals and almost totally insensate one-celled beings behave and live out their lives exactly as if it did. What's more, it seems to make no difference to the rest of the environment. Or, even if it does, there's nothing to show for it. Whether it's building intricate systems of political thought, raising leopard cubs and teaching them to hunt or flowing into pseudopodia to engulf a speck of nourishment, we do it with a mix of creativity, caution and élan to ensure as much success as we can under the circumstances. As if things like these really mattered a lot to us.
Yet the Sun which keeps pouring its life-sustaining juices out, and without which we wouldn't have been around to question such matters, is a physical process with a finite life of its own. In about five billion years from now it will have expanded outwards to many times its current diameter due to internal pressures till it billows beyond the orbit of Mars and vapourises all the inner planets in its path.
Much before that, however, its rising luminosity would have burnt the life out of all living beings and made Earth a completely barren and sterile world awaiting final destruction. Soul will of course shrink back in times to come but by then the ultimate destruction would have been irrevocably wreaked.
But it's also true that Earth would have by then returned to the same roots of nothingness it sprang from. Some five billion years ago there was no ground beneath our feet for us for instance to step on and be conscious, semi-conscious or inert. If at all our future world existed it was in the form of a whirling disc of dusty matter spinning around a newly formed star.
Uneven gravitational forces would slowly begin to ball it up till it became globular and then start a long process of cooling - adding, as it went, an atmosphere, water, breathable oxygen and, finally, in a one-off or universally mundane manner spawn that quality of being which is so different from the inanimate.
In short, we would get a life. One which is so fraught with the fragile that it's a wonder we make is so liveable without the thought of a past or future or wherever we came from or are going to. It's not important whether things matter or not. We must only insist that they should. Otherwise how would it have ever mattered?
Mukul Sharma
Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano begins Mirrors, his new book, with an unusual take on Genesis. “Life was alone, no name, no memory,” he writes. “It had no hands, but no one to touch. It had a tongue, but no one to talk to. Life was one, and one was none. Then Desire drew his bow. The arrow of desire split life down the middle, and life was two. When they caught sight of each other, they laughed. When they touched each other, they laughed again.”
Galeano’s account echoes the Vedic saga of Prajapati retold by Roberto Calasso in Ka: “He didn’t even know whether he existed or not... There was only the mind, manas.” Unlike Galeano’s split progenitor, Vedic Prajapati senses he has a companion, a second being within him. It was a woman, Vac, Word. He let her out. He looked at her. Vac “rose like a continuous stream of water,” Calasso adds, quoting the Rig Veda. “She was a column of liquid, without beginning or end. Prajapati united with her. He split her into three parts.”
Eons ago, Aryan seers scripted this remarkable Genesis, linking the birth of language with emergence of the feminine and humanity itself. Galeano’s version is not less politically sensitive and anthropologically correct: His Adam and Eve are black. Their adventure begins in Africa, from where our ancestors set out to conquer the planet. “Many paths led them to many destinies, and the sun took care of handing out colours from the palette,” he writes.
“Now the rainbow of the earth is more colourful than the rainbow of the sky. But we are all emigrants from Africa. Even the whitest of whites comes from Africa. Maybe we refuse to acknowledge our common origins because racism causes amnesia, or because we find it unbelievable that in those days long past the entire world was our kingdom, an immense map without borders, and our legs were the only passport required.”
You expect nothing less from an author who describes himself as “a writer obsessed with remembering intimate lands condemned to amnesia.” His works combine several genres and often use non-literary sources. In Mirrors, however, he smashes narrative history to rearrange the shards into a new pattern of stories of those overlooked by traditional histories — artists, servants, gods, visionaries, black slaves who built White House and woman traded for dynastic ends.
The result is a mind-changing mosaic made of lives lived on our sorry, sparkling planet.
Vithal C Nadkarni
Statistically, chances are that the older one gets, one also gets religion. It’s not as if atheists turn overnight into believers — although that too happens quite often as we’ll see in a moment — but that a feeling that may have lain dormant on a forgotten back burner begins to simmer and, before one knows, it’s boiling out of control.
It’s also not as simple as saying young people are necessarily less mature than old people and that religion appeals more to maturity than immaturity or that in their heart they believe they have more time left than they know what to do with whereas old people know their time is short. It’s more because youth has its own priorities.
A life has to be learnt; oats sowed, studies swallowed, families planned, children begotten and homes built. Add to that young people are more likely to defy and rebel against those they see as authority figures who, among other things, will often try to ram in-your-face religion too down their throats. So it’s natural they don’t feel as sure about things and question everything a lot more. At best, it could be said that religion, when it’s there, is there in their hearts but not in their schedule. But, unfortunately, as the Bard put it, “What’s to come is still unsure... Youth’s a stuff will not endure.”
Because one day, when that dividing line of years is crossed and our faculties begin to fail and frailty is useless to fight, what’s to come becomes plenty sure. Life leaks, death looms and we realise we don’t want to just pass away into the nothingness of science and non-believers. Then it seems foolish to think that there is no intelligence behind the creation of worlds.
Six years ago, the well-known philosopher and even-better-known atheist Antony Flew shocked the world when he announced that he had, in the felicitous phrase made famous by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘wilfully suspended disbelief’ and espoused a First Cause responsible for all creation.
Now the point is not whether professor Flew was scared or senile — in fact, he has been diagnosed with dementia — but that if such a cause does exist and it is at all engaged with us, will it rebuke or embrace such adoration-come-lately? One would like to believe the latter but in the idiom of Blaise Pascal, why take a chance? That is, instead of frog-marching our young towards altars of varied worship, wouldn’t it be better to instil in them this gentle bit of wisdom?
Mukul Sharma
The great Sufi mystic Jalaluddin Rumi once asked, “Why does a date-palm lose its leaves in autumn? / Why does every beautiful face grow wrinkled in old age?” Adding other examples of ravages wrought by Time, the Master’s couplet puts the question to God himself about “the fate of lion that weakens to nothing”, and the wrestler who could hold down any man as long he wanted but who’s now grown so weak that he needs two people’s support under his arms just to walk.
Why had their strength fared so badly? “Because they put on borrowed robes and pretended they were theirs,” God answers. “I take the beautiful clothes back.” So that we may learn that the silken robe of appearance — the outer coil, what another mystic Master Kabir who lived as a weaver in Benares, called zhini chadariya — is only a loan: “Your lamp was lit from another lamp,” Rumi’s poem adds: ”All God wants is your gratitude for that.”
Rumi thus viewed ageing as being inevitable. From his detached perspective, it was not ageing that was the loss but life itself which was suffused with nostalgia for our origins from which we found ourselves separated. One way of curing ourselves from the ensuing regret, guilt and anxiety is to focus on the present, on the here and now instead of the past or the future.
Awareness of such moments is gained through an exercise proposed by the spiritualist Ken Wilber in his book, Integral Vision: Even as you read these words, think of the images and thoughts going through your mind; notice also your bodily sensations and look around to register the various objects and vistas encompassed by your vision.
Now go back to what was in your awareness just five minutes ago. Most of the thoughts would have changed as did the bodily sensations. Since you sat down to read, it was not the same air you were now exhaling, nor were the cells in the same place. The blood would have moved and the air too. Not one thing is same.
But through all that flux, what is present now that was also present then?
Wilbur calls it the sense of I-Amness; what Vedantins would call the aham-Brahmasmi feeling or the self-validating sense that arises from the body and yet seems to float beyond it.
The Koran calls it Al-Baseer, the All Seeing One, the Ever-Present Seer, one of the manifest attributes of God. He is the One, the great unborn and the undying, who is ever present from beyond the beginning. Be aware of the lamp that lit you.
Vithal C Nadkarni
The very nature of the mind is to be dissatisfied, not be contented, and not be in the present moment. The mind can only exist either in the past or the future because you cannot have thoughts in the present moment. So, by its very nature, the mind will chase desires. We have to bring awareness to ourselves and understand whether our desires are actually ours or borrowed from others.
When you go for a drive in your car and notice an expensive Mercedes alongside, you start thinking, ‘It is time to buy a new car... may be a Mercedes.’ Until then you were happy, but now, seeing somebody else’s car, a desire has entered you to possess that same vehicle. You have borrowed the desire of that car owner — this borrowed desire is an example of a want, not a need, which is born out of comparison. Drop all your prestige problems and do an honest self-analysis of your desires. If you cannot drop your prestige when alone, how will you drop it when you are with people!
Before sending you to planet Earth, Existence furnishes you with the energy to fulfill all that you will require to live a contented and fulfilling life. But when you start spending this energy to realise borrowed desires, you start feeling that you are not equipped with enough energy for fulfilling all your desires. You experience discontentment because your own desires have not been fulfilled. The moment one want is fulfilled, numerous wants arise within you because you borrow more desires from others.
The enlightened master Ramana Maharishi says, ‘The mind is such that it shows a tiny mustard seed to be a huge mountain until it is attained. As soon as it has been attained, even a mountain appears as insignificant as a mustard seed!’ We all function around these three axes of doing, having and being. Doing for having, without enjoying being, is the cause of all our misery. Doing never catches up with having! Every time you work hard and fulfill one desire, suddenly that desire loses its pull over you.
As soon as one desire is fulfilled, you attract another desire — you don’t even have time to enjoy your fulfilled desire and feel satisfied. You start thinking, ‘Just let me acquire one more thing. Then I can relax and enjoy what I have.’ Be very clear, your mind will never allow it happen. You have enough energy for fulfilling all of your needs but not your wants. The only way to really live and enjoy life is to enjoy the very doing itself. Then automatically the doing, having and being, will be integrated and will happen. Be Blissful!
PARAMAHAMSA NITHYANANDA
