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The prayer evolved by Benjamin Franklin beseeches the ‘powerful Goodness, bountiful Father and merciful Guide’ to increase in him that wisdom “which discovers my truest interest” . The age-old search of every seeking spirit has been in divining that vocation and pursuit specifically suited to it, which would not merely confer fulfilment but also that ‘flow’ and supreme effectiveness . This, verily , is the ultimate realisation of all human quest through the call within — one’s swadharma , or his work upon this earth.
This quest, in essence is the entreaty , summed up beautifully in the great Indian prayer, tamaso ma jyotir gamaya and the inspiring poem of Cardinal Newman, commencing with the lines, Lead Kindly Light. This also is that approach , prompted by the ancient dictum, Know Thyself, inspired by the continual inquiry within , Quo Vadis. The entire process is centred on obtaining that supreme felicity of self-knowledge , self-realisation or atmagnanam — call what you will.
Philosophers — modern and ancient — over the entire world , have dealt with this sublime, though abstract subject and philosophy , in various ways. One example in this regard, is Somerset Maugham’s portrayal of his characters, Charles Strickland and Abraham in his Moon and Sixpence and Larry Darrel in his Razor’s Edge. Spurred on by the call within, they forsake sinecure living to pursue and fulfil their dreams, braving and overcoming difficulties from all over.
The sine-quo-non for all spiritual pursuits is thus knowing oneself and thus being clear in priorities and pursuits.
This ‘knowing’ comes not through just mere learning (apara vidya) but through that knowledge of the self, leading also to comprehending one’s “truest interest” (para vidya). The evolved seeker would not only “act while there yet is time” but act also well, wisely and rightly.
This also would ensure that after obtaining the object of one’s dreams, he would also always cherish and be fulfilled by what he has thus obtained. He would never, ever, have to feel, “It is, but hadn’t ought to be” , as felt by the characters of Bret Harte’s parody of John Whittier’s Maud Muller.
The true essence of all spiritual pursuit is thus centred on that supreme blessing which any human can aspire for — realising oneself and thus one’s own ‘truest interest’ !
K Vijayaraghavan
La Monte Young, an American singer, composer and musician, had a shattering first encounter with Ustad Abdul Karim Khan’s vintage records. When he first heard the Khansaheb’s Jamuna ke tear in the raga Bhairavi, he thought that perhaps “it would be best if I gave up singing, got a cabin up in the mountains, stacked it with a record player and recordings of the Kirana guarana maestro and just listened for the rest of my life!”
Raw genius often has that kind of chilling effect. Not every singer can hope to achieve the kind of legendary status that Abdul Karim Khan carved out with his magical voice in the 20th century. Lest we forget, such an attainment also needs something more than sheer talent. “Achievement is talent plus preparation ,” writes the great thought-provocateur Malcolm Gladwell in his best seller Outliers : “The problem with this view ,” he goes on the clarify, “is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.”
The inventor Thomas Alva Edison even put a figure on the respective mixes or proportions : genius is 1% inspiration (talent) and 99% perspiration (tyyari or preparation), said the Wizard of Menlo Park at the start of the 20th century. Since then a number of studies have confirmed Edison’s sweaty hunch — only practice leads to perfection; that there are no ‘naturals’ ; musicians who float effortlessly to the top while practising a fraction of the time their peers do; nor could they find any ‘grinds’ , people who work harder than everyone else, yet just don’t have what it takes to break the top ranks.
“( New) research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school , the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works,” Gladwell explains. “What’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.” The challenge then boils down to keeping up one’s motivation during the slog overs. That separates the men from the boys. One sure-fire way enjoined by the Bhagavad Gita is to enjoy the ride rather than the destination. Don’t waste time and energy worrying about final goals and outcomes. Once you realise nothing real is threatening you, you can fly free!
Vithal C Nadkarni
The scientific search for extraterrestrial (ET) intelligence has all the makings of a new religion. Believers argue that while it’s true our Earth is the only planet in this solar system that harbours such life, astronomers in the last 15 years have already discovered some 400 other extrasolar planets orbiting relatively nearby stars. What’s more, they say, we haven’t even scratched the surface . Considering our Milky Way galaxy alone has about 100 billion stars with potential intelligence-bearing life around them, and there are about 100 billion galaxies around, what are the chances — if not astronomical — that the universe is teeming with sentience?
Unbelievers are not convinced by such blind faith. They like to paraphrase physicist Enrico Fermi’s paradox which states that although the size and age of the universe suggests many technologically-advanced civilisations ought to exist, the hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of evidence to support it. In other words, if ETs exist , then where the heck are they? Why have we not heard from them? Not a single alien space probe has ever been seen or contacted and, in any case, if travel is difficult for them, why have we not been able to detect any of their radio transmissions at least? Why the great silence? Unless there’s nothing to hear and no one out there.
Agnostics point out that the search for alien intelligence has been in progress for at least 50 years with increasing powerful instruments being pressed into service searching for electromagnetic signals but, to date, nothing definitive has emerged. However, they also point out that seeking something in our image is being rather human-centric ; other intelligences don’t necessarily have to be housed in humanoid forms, using bodily processes or homo sapient technology. Therefore , without ever knowing what ET could be like, we can never take it for granted that we will find it or it even exists.
Faith, as usual, plays a big part in this belief or unbelief system. The US government at one time funded the search for ET through a Nasa programme with federal grants, just like it once funded research into faith healing too. Human beings like to believe in belief , and often it works for those who believe the hardest while the faithless take faith in only themselves. Yet, does anyone really like to think we’ve been cast adrift alone into the unknown?
Mukul Sharma
We all have two identities, the identity that we project to the outer world, and the identity that we believe to be us in the inner world. The identity that you believe to be you inside your mind is called mamakar in Sanskrit. This will always be much smaller than what you really are. You will carry or remember all your failures, past mistakes and guilt, constantly trying to work on them.
The identity that you project to the outer world is called ahankar. Ahankar is your visiting card. You print everything that you want others to know about yourself. This is based on the identity you show to the outer world. This will always be more than what you are because you think you have to sell yourself. It becomes a basic need to do this, especially in the societies where you have to market yourself.
Ahankar will be based on a superiority complex. Mamakar will be based on an inferiority complex. Ahankar will be based on fear. Mamakar will be based on greed. Your identity, your personality that you show to the outer world will always be based on fear. This is why it will always be more than what is true about you. You will constantly try to keep it alive. The identity that you carry in the inner world is based on greed. This is why you always try to develop the identity that you carry inside you. You constantly work on the identity that you believe is you and continuously try to chisel it.
Your life is nothing but the fight between these two worlds. The conflict between ahankar and mamakar, the conflict between the personality that you show to the outer world and the personality that you reveal in your inner world is called ‘tension’. The uneasy feeling between these two identities creates disease. Both the identities, ahankar and mamakar, are pure myths; both are lies! You are something beyond these two identities.
If you spend your whole energy expanding ahankar, the identity that you project to the outer world, your life becomes materialistic. People who work on mamakar are constantly working on their personality, trying to create some identity to feel satisfied about. If you spend your whole life chiselling and developing mamakar, the identity that you think is you, your whole life becomes moralistic and suppressing.
The basic truth is that you are much more than these two identities. When you ‘unclutch’ from these two identities, you will suddenly realise that you are beyond the two identities. When that happens, these two identities can never bind you again. Be blissful!
PARAMAHAMSA NITHYANANDA
WITH year-end looming large, it’s time for that feisty review, for meeting up with family, friends and colleagues, for jollity and merriment in the true spirit of Christmas and New Year. On this happy occasion, it might be prudent to avoid excessive self-reflection or at least the wrong sort of reflection. It’s not for nothing that some surveys showed that nearly 45% of respondents in the plusher portions of the planet seemed to dread the festive season!
Sometimes darkness does lurk right under the lights. But it also lies in the eyes of the beholder — those searching for the darker, danker aspects are bound to find it! That might explain why western countries report the highest incidence of blues during this season. Cases of suicide peak too, as do levels of carping and cavilling.
All this is not because flinty Scrooge, or the Christmas-stealing Grinch rather than Saintly Santa rule during this season. Nor is it entirely due to something more mundane like SAD or Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) brought on by the dark winter weather! The real culprits may be excessive inwardness or self-centredness and unrealistic expectations.
Other factors could be ‘victim’ mentality brought on by rumination on innate inadequacies of life, particularly in comparison with other seemingly lucky or more fortunate individuals.
Self-help gurus like Guy Finley attribute it to the power that the false self has over us. “Nothing is more discontented than our lower nature, the false self,” Finley explains in his best-selling primer on how to let go loneliness and discontent. “It is always unhappy with one thing or another. If there is one weed in the field of roses, you can bet that is what it will see. Since it has no real life of its own, it must endlessly create stimulating thoughts and feelings of one kind or another in order to give it the sensation of being alive.
“Like Sisyphus condemned in Hades to a life of endlessly pushing up a rock uphill, only to have it roll down again, the false self must spin its life tales over and over again. It is desperately afraid of not having the next thing to do.”
Simply unplug it by refusing to buy into the artificial winter of discontent. If that creates a sense of vacuum, don’t be afraid. “Choose being over doing, and there will be no more pain in what you do or don’t because you don’t have to prove that you are real,” Finley says. “You are, and you know it!”
Vithal C Nadkarni
As opposed to the received tradition of “family first”, some people (including this writer) often like to say that as far as rapport,reliability and tolerance — all essential aspects of relational affinity in fact — is concerned, their friends come first. That they then constitute family. And, thereafter, only those genetically-related family members who also qualify as friends can re-engage as family. There’s no reason to disbelieve them either. Ethnologists who study human racial groups have a somewhat near enough term for it: fictive kinship, the process of giving someone a relatedness and treating them as if they had the actual kin relationship implied.
There’s nothing gaspingly avant-garde about this nor anything particularly new in it. Cultural anthropologists have noted that among the Gurungs of central Nepal exists the (admittedly dying) institution of Rodhi where teenagers form fictive kinship bonds and become Rodhi members to socialise, perform communal tasks and find marriage partners. Indians influenced by western tradition routinely refer to good friends of their parents as “uncle” or “aunty”; African Americans call one another “bro”; and college fraternities and sororities usually use “brother” and “sister” when talking about members of the organisation.
(Actually friendship must be a very powerful attractant, otherwise how can we explain why this whole thing works the other way around too? It’s the reason, for instance, why a lot of people say that their mother or father was “not only my greatest confidante and caregiver but also my best friend”. Or why two brothers are described as being like “inseparable friends”.)
Unfortunately however, when it comes to the crunch and society begins to intrude the fiction in fictive gets increasingly difficult to dispel. Which is why it’s easy to throw a wild bash for friends at home and not necessarily call a close cousin living across town. It becomes dicier though to have a son’s engagement party and not invite Aunty Sheila who stays in an adjoining state. And it’s virtually unthinkable for a daughter’s wedding to happen if Mom and Dad can’t make it down from Canada. Rare is the person who can say the marriage should not take place because some important member of the non-biological family cannot attend. Suddenly buried roots turn upside down and blossom.
Mukul Sharma
It was wisely said that impatience can be a virtue if practised on oneself. Right though this statement is, it also is incomplete and inconclusive. In fact, all disturbing, harmful and retarding emotions such as impatience, repentance, regrets, cravings, jealousy, grudges, resentments and even depression can be transformed into virtues. However, there is a big if attached to this possibility.
Yes, the happy outcome of transforming such emotions to creative and constructive purposes would come about only when these emotions are also accompanied by the ability to understand, analyse and channel these. This is through patience, perseverance and intelligent application, inspired by that abiding wish power (ichcha shakti) within.
After all, emotions of all kinds, including those commonly thought of as negative, are forms of energy. Just as one form of energy can be converted into another, so can one form of emotion, which may otherwise damage, can be transformed into another, which would be supporting.
Taking the case of repentance, this would continue to mar the sufferer. However, when brakes are applied, one would discover, in many cases, that it is not too late to reverse.
Even where wisdom dawns too late, he can offer the wisdom gained to other true seekers and, in fact, where possible, himself take a different route to another form of excellence, which would beckon his wounded, yet ennobled and wise, personality. This approach could, thus, act as the base to catapult him to levels of substantial fulfilment — his own and others.
The possibility, as above, is also the base for the ancient Indian visualisation of transforming even the sensual and sexual energy, besides cravings to dynamic and creative outlets. This concept is that of awakening one’s latent powers, in this regard (kundalini shakti or serpent power), lying thus far, coiled in its base and dormant position.
This process is also the cessation of longings and the ‘burning’ within, whereby one could invariably be led eventually even to fulfilment of his originally conceived of dreams too. This verily is true and sustained liberation through really ‘having one’s fill’: mukti through bhakti.
Intelligence would prompt that for all apparently negative emotions, there always is the opposite side of the coin. Wisdom lies in divining this truth through tapping and awakening one’s latent powers and the treasure house within, thus learning to live happily ever after!
K Vijayaraghavan
In Frank Baum’s children’s classic all hell seems to break loose when Dorothy and her friends meet the Wizard of Oz for the first time. The 12-year-old orphan and her friends are wearing the green spectacles given by the Guardian of the Gates of the Emerald City. The glasses produce strange distortions depending on the wearer’s state of mind: when each traveller meets with the wizard, he appears each time as someone or something different.
To Dorothy, the wizard appears as a giant head. The Scarecrow sees a beautiful woman instead and the Tin Woodman sees a ravenous beast while the Cowardly Lion perceives a ball of fire. The sound effects are terrifying too. Each time the Wizard speaks, his voice rolls through the grand hall like thunder!
No wonder Dorothy and her friends quake and shiver in front of the Wizard who also has the power to hurl around spears of flame and smoke. However, when they meet for the second time, their dog Toto accidentally tips over a screen in a corner of the throne room to reveal a strange little old man standing at an elaborate control panel. He’s busy pushing buttons and pulling levers, talking a mile a minute in the microphone. Each time he speaks his tiny voice is magnified into a roar filling the hall.
Suddenly it dawns of Dorothy that the great ‘wizard’ is just a powerful projection created by a wizened little fellow cowering behind a screen! She’s shocked at the cruel trick that’s been played on her. But at the same time, she feels liberated from her self-created delusions and fears. The moral of the story is chuck off those green spectacles!
Give up the great illusions which are keeping you from letting go exhorts Guy Finley in his best-seller The Secret of Letting Go. “The way in which our sleeping mind looks at life makes this difficult: it sees cause and effect as being separate operations. It refuses to see through the game; worse, it takes on an erroneous sense of responsibility for the same.
This can result in all sorts of illusions and inhibitions. But learning to recognise and disarm these “can only happen outside the shadow of pride,” Finley adds: “Anything that resists correction is part of what is wrong... we should recognise that pride is the middle name of the false self. You lose when it wins, and it wins by getting you to deny or protect your mistake.” But we can defeat it and instantly become free as Dorothy did, merely by questioning it.
Vithal C Nadkarni
The sustainability of action is crucial to success. An individual action, even if well executed, does not achieve goals. The ability to consistently perform is vital to success. Consistency in action derives from a person’s internal attitude. Three kinds of attitudes govern human action: selfish , unselfish and selfless.
Selfish persons act merely to fulfil their personal desires.
Their interests , and may be that of their families, are all their mental horizon can encompass . At its most unsophisticated level, selfishness is merely following one’s whims and fancies. To do, at the spur of the moment, what would give one immediate gratification .
There is no thinking involved. The capers of such people fill the more popular sections of the society papers. Such people are not achievers. They do not fix goals and discipline themselves into achieving them.
Further down the continuum are the selfish persons who do set goals and achieve them. However their goals pertain only to their personal well-being .
Such goals cannot span decades. The pressure of desires necessitates fast results. The intellect being fuzzy, cannot project beyond a point. So consistency over long periods is not possible .
The common burn-out syndrome is a manifestation of this attitude . People push themselves to achieve their self-centred goals to the point of collapse. Not only that, they get discouraged if their goals are not achieved quickly.
The unselfish people fix goals ranging a wider spectrum, both in terms of time and persons it will benefit. They can conceive a goal that may take decades to show results . Mother Theresa, Mahatma Gandhi, J R D Tata and the like demonstrated similar long-term perspectives.
Today, even after many years, we are still benefiting from their vision . Also, their failures never seemed to bog them down. However , unselfish people also have a boundary. They can conceive up to a point. The identification , though great, ends somewhere, may be at my community / country / species. Though far superior than the selfish, they too are restricted in conception.
Those rare individuals who are totally selfless, who want nothing for either themselves or for the world, can transcend all barriers. They conceive, pursue and achieve the goal of self-realisation which may cut across many lifetimes . Their capacity for consistency is awe-inspiring .
Thus a person’s consistency of action is dependant on how high an ideal he is able to conceive. The higher the ideal motivating him, the greater will be the capacity for consistency.
Janki Santoke
Most of us unconsciously believe that life is filled with incidents that are under the control of our logic. But life again and again reminds you of the truth that life is beyond your logic. You are reminded of this fact, especially when some near and dear friend dies or when something unexpected happens.
If you lose your job, suddenly you see that life is not under your control. You wake up to the reality that life is beyond your logic. Then you start seeking the Truth.
Especially if you live in the city, your routine is almost fixed. From morning until night, you know exactly how your day will unfold. You know where you will go, what you will do or not do, and what and when you will eat. Practically, your ego gives an idea, your logic gives you the feeling that your life is under the control of your logic.
That is why whenever some incident happens that is beyond your logic that is not under your control, you are totally shaken. You are not able to handle it. You don’t know what to do. Either you fall into depression or you just suffer.
There is an important truth, an ultimate secret that you must understand. Never think things are going smoothly because of you. In spite of you, things are going smoothly! This is one of the important secrets. As long as you believe it is because of you that things are going smoothly, you will be constantly suffering with ego.
Death clearly shows that whatever mind you lived with has no real existence. The moment you experience that there is nothing to be achieved, that the diamonds you are protecting are not diamonds but stones, and that all your valuable possessions in life are mere toys, you will understand the purposelessness of life and a new consciousness starts blossoming in you.
The genuine purpose of life cannot be understood without dropping our ego. Understand the divine purpose of life, the leelas or the Divine play; you will enjoy the drama. If you keep thinking that life has a purpose and wait to achieve something, you will miss life itself.
Life itself is the path and the goal. When you have a goal, you will run; your feet will not touch the ground and you will miss the beauty of Existence or nature. When you drop the goal, the emphasis will be on the path.
The meaning of living is the meaning of life or Existence. Drop the goal and enjoy life.
Meditate on this teaching again and again. The Truth will dawn on you and the nithyananda (bliss) state will flower in you, the state that is the very meaning of life. Be Blissful!
PARAMAHAMSA NITHYANANDA
As son of the late-night talk show pioneer Larry Finley, Guy Finley grew up among Hollywood celebrities. At an early age, he became a song writer and rock artist, and several of his songs were recorded by popular artists such as Diana Ross and Debbie Boone. For all its razzmatazz, Finley was dissatisfied with showbiz. He felt something vital was missing from his personal life.
So he abandoned his music career and like a modern Siddhartha, went in search of spiritual teachings, to investigate the true nature of success through a heightened state of self-awareness with masters in India and the Far East.
His search continued in the US in the 1980s, and he ended up studying with Vernon Howard, the noted spiritual teacher who likened inner liberation to a ridding process. Howard also claimed that new life could only be found through awareness, and that the human ego was a barrier to this awareness.
It was this false self — a fictitious collection of self-images or pictures about who we think we are — that needed to be jettisoned for inner enlightenment to occur. In the 1990s, with Howard’s encouragement, Finley finally discovered his true calling as a successful author of spiritual books.
Like Howard’s teachings, Finley’s philosophy combines Christian mysticism with eastern wisdom and Jungian psychology. In his recent bestseller, The Secret of Letting Go, for example, he explains that the spiritual work of letting go and growing into our ‘native holiness’ is unlike any other kind of effort we will ever have to make.
“It starts with embracing — and then daring to act upon — the understanding that nothing can be added to our True Self,” he adds. “It entails freedom from the burden of false responsibilities; true reconciliation with lovers, friends and family; the grace to forgive old foes completely and a growing sense of a loving and compassionate intelligence unbound by passing time: these gifts and more come to those who learn to let go.”
That is what I have learned, Guy Finley emphasises: the missing half of our lives is letting go. Blessed are those who make this spiritual discovery. Their lives are fulfilled effortlessly. “Breathing in would be worthless without exhaling,” is his epiphany. “So, think of letting go as learning to take part in the very breath of life, something that’s as natural to who you truly are as it is for the Sun to shine.”
Vithal C Nadkarni
In his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins refers to an incident in the life of British evolutionary biologist J B S Haldane when he was approached by a lady who didn’t believe in evolution. Apparently she said something like “Even with billions of years of evolution available how is it possible to go from a single cell to a complicated human body with trillions of cells organised into bones, muscles and nerves, a ceaselessly pumping heart, miles of blood vessels and a brain capable of talking, thinking and feeling?” To this Haldane is supposed to have replied: “But madam, you did it yourself. And it only took you nine months.”
The larger point Dawkins is trying to make is that in developing from a single cell to giant whales or towering redwoods, the genes are not following a pre-planned architecture or design (which would imply a designer) but are actually undergoing self-assembly. That is, all living things may look like the result of deliberate planning but, in fact, each individual cell inside them, when it’s growing, is only following a set of local rules which do not apply to the whole of the organism.
Just like when thousands of starlings flock in assembly, they flock as a tight-knit coherent group with no starling straying. In the process they often form myriad different and wonderful shapes that appear to emerge miraculously out of that movement. Yet, again, each individual bird is just following its own set of local rules that apply only to itself depending on its position in the flock — what distance to keep from the bird in front, when to turn, which speed to maintain, etc. No central planning, no choreographer, no group mind at work. Just self-assembly.
As coherent as this argument is, it raises two questions. The first is, aren’t the billions of neurons in our brains also following their own set of local rules? Each neuron is firing when required and processing its little bit of information, or not firing when not required and not processing that bit. Yet when they work together we get this most amazing organ which is capable of, to quote Haldane’s questioner, “talking, thinking and feeling.” How did this group mind suddenly start working?
And the second, more important, question: where are the “local rules” emerging from? Designs may not necessarily imply a designer but rules are different. In order to be followed, someone has to make them.
Mukul Sharma
In his Bhaja Govindam, Adi Shankaracharya observes, “Childhood is lost in play and youth in dreaming of women with the result that old age has to be lost in repentance”. Pitiable brooding on what “might have been” arises on account of various aspects of one’s earlier life — be it lost opportunities, let down having had to be faced or decisions, which turned out to be wrong, besides also not equipping oneself in the fields dear to heart.
An insight would, however, reveal, instead of such passive repentance, one can, instead, choose to channel creatively his regretful feelings, even when he knows it is too late for himself and that he has already “missed the bus”.
Having learned lessons through mistakes, he can help others pre-empt such errors; having missed opportunities, he can guide others in recognising and seizing them as they come; having been misled, deceived or led down the garden path, he can forewarn others, who seek the art of skilful and wise living; having damaged his health himself, he can counsel and teach on the importance of good habits and lifestyle.
Very importantly, having comprehended the huge potential for excellence in particular fields of human endeavour, he can point the way, inspiring those who seek, though he himself had drawn blank for want of timely action. He can sportingly thus live out, at least vicariously, all his dreams, through others who he had thus inspired. Thus he could rest in the feeling that he too had contributed.
Repentance and regrets over omissions and commissions of a dead past can thus, through adoption of a healthy approach and attitude, be a spur to creativity and to bringing out the potential in others and also often in one’s own self, though the field of activity now taken up may be different from one’s own past dreams. History of mankind would be replete with innumerable such instances and also of constructive sacrifices, inspired through such benign repentance.
The case of Annapurani is a case in point, in the manner conceived of by the legendary Tamil writer, ‘Kalki’ Krishnamurthy, in his short story, Kadithamum Kanneerum. She founds a service organisation for women and the underprivileged, motivated by the yearning that the factors which led to her repenting for what “might have been” in her past personal life, should never ever bind others in realisation of their dreams. Indeed, ‘dynamic repentance’ is also, thus, one of the means for leaving “foot prints on the sands of time”!
K VIJAYARAGHAVAN
A herd of cows is shown gathering outside Nanda’s palace in the Kangra miniature painting. The dark-blue Godchild, held up in his foster parents’ arms, dominates the frame. “Look at the subtle shades and distinctive contours used to depict every individual cow,” says noted art historian B N Goswamy. He’s delivering a lively discourse on the presence of the Divine Cowherd in pichawais and miniature paintings in Mumbai: “As it gazes meltingly at the Lord, each animal seems to pulsate with a magnetic personality of its own.”
The artist from the hills has, thus, caught an aspect of bhakti that seems to leap across all of creation. This has been often been lovingly described in our sacred texts.
According to the Shrimad Bhagvatam, for example, Krishna’s foster father, Nanda Maharaj, had no less than nine lakh cows and the Godchild would herd all of them and play with his friends in the pasture grounds throughout the day. Just before sunset, he would come to the spreading tree known as Ter Kadamba and, from its top, call each and every cow by playing upon his divine flute.
That’s when a miracle of enumeration occurs; what the distinguished art expert Umberto Eco calls ‘ecstasies of the infinite’ in a recent exposition on lists and their endless charms: as the Lord manifests his all-intoxicating ambrosial love through sound, each particular cow seems to hear Krishna personally and intimately calling her back to Him.
Every individual wavelet from the formless sound (anahata) of the Lord’s flute seems to have been custom-made for each animal that comes running from the pasture grounds of Braj to meet its Master. Each animal perceives Krishna lovingly gazing only at itself. Imagine there were nine hundred thousand of them and they were divided into 108 different groups according to colour and attributes! Krishna also had a string of bejewelled cowherd beads on which he would count each of the 108 herds as they would appear.
Now, should any animal fail to appear, the Lord would personally go down from the tree to bring her back from the pastures, to join up with the totality of the rest of the herd. The entire odyssey has been compared by some commentators to the journey of the soul — from its emergence from the formless: from individual awakening to its return into the infinite.
All this is in response to the call of the Supreme. This reverberates in each ear by its own sacred name.
Vithal C Nadkarni
Delving into ourselves — when and if we find the time to do so, that is — we can discover either a depth of moral authenticity or a body of deceit. Or both. And there lies the rub in that very dichotomy. For if the former, it must consist of values such as truth, goodness, honour, honesty, etc, and, if the latter, then it has to encompass lies, pretence, double standards, dishonesty and the like. Also, where do thoughts of stuff like this originate if all life can be reduced to a chemical accident in an accidental universe governed by the overarching laws of mathematical physics? For that matter, what does it even mean to be able to delve? Animals don’t.
So we’re told we can do that now since we’ve become mindful entities because our brains have evolved exponentially faster than other creatures of the Earth. And that this has resulted in our basic altruistic attitudes which originated only for the protection of the grouping and species to advance in increments till they now form the bedrock of societal sustenance for its greater benefit. A genetic parallel is often drawn comparing us, for instance, to bees that function in collective swarms for the well-being of their hive, eggs or queen. But bees don’t delve.
The word means to search deeply and laboriously. The concept of crime, therefore, has to be examined a little more carefully. There is no intentionally aforethought wrongdoing among animals as seen in thieving monkeys, rogue elephants, man-eating leopards or mate-devouring mantises which seem to violate a pre-existing natural order.
Each and every one of these actions can be attributed to an almost exact pinpoint of cause without anything like untruth, pretension or hypocrisy playing a role. Yes, we know they don’t have the brains for all that whereas we do but where did our brains tap the stuff out from if evil was never inherent or evolutionary?
It seems it must originate from good as good means nothing unusually different from neutral without the existence of an antithesis. And of course the other way around. Meaning, when our brains evolve further and it becomes possible to delve even deeper than most of us can at present we might find that the twin principles actually arise out of a middle ground which is neither. So if a god exists it should be either good and evil combined, or none of them — else how would we have ever known the difference between the two?
Mukul Sharma
Guilt is nothing but your past decisions and actions being reviewed with your updated intelligence. For example, if you had a fight with a friend in school. And many years later, is it right to review that incident and feel guilty? No! At that time you had only that much intelligence, so you behaved in that fashion. Now, you have updated intelligence. It doesn’t make sense to review the past with your present intelligence.
You are designed to move like a freely flowing river. Guilt is like rocks in the path of the water. The main problem is that society has subtly branded happiness as a sin. That is why you will notice, when everything is going smoothly and happily, there will be a lurking feeling of guilt in you. You are taught by society that being happy and enjoying life is being irresponsible in a way. So you feel guilty. But when you feel sad and depressed, do you ever feel guilty? No!
You are taught that life is a chain of suffering and endurance, with happiness stepping in once in a while. When you are enjoying, dancing or relaxing at the beach for example, suddenly you will observe guilt starts rising in you about all the work that is pending, about all the responsibilities that need to be fulfilled.
Your being is a crowd of voices that doesn’t belong to you. It is a totality of your mother’s voice, your father’s voice, your teacher’s voice, your neighbour’s voice etc. All these voices are in there. If there is only one voice, you will never have any problem. Your mind will move like a river. But there are so many voices telling you so many things and creating the rocks of guilt in your path.
As long as you flow like a river, you will express extraordinary intelligence in your life. You will breathe with an energy that is overflowing every minute. The moment you allow guilt in you, the moment you are stopped in your free flow, you create energy clots inside your being.
Guilt has no basis but it can destroy your whole life. Living and existing without guilt, will make you enjoy every moment without feeling any regret and still fulfilling all your responsibilities. When you commit a mistake, instead of feeling guilty, perceive objectively reasons for committing it, how you committed it.
Watch as an observer how and why it is getting repeated. Introspect scientifically into the mechanism of guilt. Just this awareness will open a new door and you will never commit the same mistake again because once you look into it, and discover the reasons, they will disappear. Be Blissful!
PARAMAHAMSA NITHYANANDA
When the noted writer Zadie Smith was 14, her mother gave her Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. “I was reluctant to read the book, Smith recounts in her recent book of essays Changing My Mind, “I knew what she meant by giving it me and resented its inference.” But she was hooked when she read the first page of the novel that TIME listed in 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005: “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death By Time. That is the life of men.
“Now, women forget all those things that they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”
That aphorism “had me pinned to the ground, unable to deny its strength,” Smith reminisces, “I found myself melancholy for these nameless men and their inevitable losses. The second part, about the women, struck home.” The novel also forced the teen-aged writer-to-be to abandon several of her passionately held aphorisms such as only dead white males like John Keats had a monopoly on lyrical language: “Above all, Hurston is essential universal reading,” Smith explains, “because is neither self-conscious nor restricted.” Raised in an all-black town the writer “grew up a fully human being, unaware that she was meant to consider herself a minority, an other, an exotic or something depleted in rights, talents, desires, and expectations. As an adult away from her home town, she found the world was determined to do its best to remind her of her supposed inferiority, but Hurston was already made, and the metaphysical confidence she claimed for her life is present, with equal, refreshing force, in her fiction.”
The search for this metaphysical confidence, which flows from self-actualisation or self-realisation, is one of the pivotal drivers of the human condition. But only when it is realised does it seem as essential or ‘easy’ as breathing or cycle-riding. Smith writes. “It is also as complicated, as full of blessings and curses.”
Blessed are only those willing to confront and master its often counter-intuitive claims. This may entail just being and letting go as much as it calls for struggling and sweating. You’re IT.
Vithal C Nadkarni
Why do some people suddenly opt out of doing what they’re doing so successfully? Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin & Hobbes, a comic strip which was so popular that it was syndicated daily from November 1985 to December 1995 in over 2,400 newspapers worldwide simply decided to stop one fine day when the comic collections were selling more than 30 million copies. Australian cricketer Glen McGrath quit test playing while the Aussies routed England in the Ashes an.d then left ODIs when they won the World Cup and he was adjudged player of the tournament. And now Oprah Winfrey says she’s going to stop her multi award winning TV talk show in 2011 after a blitz run of 25 years.
People have their different reasons. Some probably feel they’ve had enough, others that it’s time to move on, and yet others out of an impending fear of failure, oversaturation or even boredom. Watterson said he was leaving because he felt he had achieved all that he could in the medium; McGrath reportedly commented that it was better than being gently eased out when he wasn’t able to contribute the best for his country; Winfrey thinks, because a quarter century is long enough to be doing something. “When I’m done ...I’m done,” she revealed to her unbelieving audience.
Yet a lot of others hang on for a lifetime and more if they could when their ability, expertise or craft is clearly gone for all to see. It’s a fact that Einstein contributed nothing of much value to science for the last two-and-a-half decades that he lived compared to his earlier astounding breakthroughs and was increasingly isolated from mainstream research. Most critics are also of the opinion that the greatly acclaimed Satyajit Ray should have stopped making films after his medical condition deteriorated and that the last few films he did manage to complete after becoming semi-ambulatory were embarrassingly mediocre.
Admittedly, letting go of a good thing is difficult — especially when we’ve run with something for so long that it’s become routine. Smokers in general and those in failing relationships know this better than most people. Yet routine is what defeats us eventually; not the game plan. And there’s the trick: the game plan. It includes the immediate game being played but doesn’t necessarily exclude the rest. Very often it’s better to leave the moment behind before the moment has left us — because it always does.
Mukul Sharma
John Whittier narrates the story of Maud Muller, a poor farm lass “of simple beauty and rustic health”. One day, as she worked, she sees the young Judge of the village riding up to her. Both are drawn to each other. She dreams of the riches that would be hers if she were to marry him, while the Judge too longs for joyous living with nature, freed from “the doubtful balance of rights and wrongs” and the “weary lawyers with endless tongues”.
John Whittier narrates the story of Maud Muller, a poor farm lass “of simple beauty and rustic health”. One day, as she worked, she sees the young Judge of the village riding up to her. Both are drawn to each other. She dreams of the riches that would be hers if she were to marry him, while the Judge too longs for joyous living with nature, freed from “the doubtful balance of rights and wrongs” and the “weary lawyers with endless tongues”.
The two, however, are not destined to unite, as the Judge weds a “wife of richest dower” and Maud marries “a man unlearned and poor”, as “care and sorrow and child-birth pain left their traces on heart and brain”.
Nevertheless, Maud and the Judge, even in the midst of their allotted lives, continue to dream of each other. These vain dreams are epitomised by Whittier thus, “God pity them both! and pity us all,/ Who vainly the dreams of youth recall.” He also notes, “For all sad words of tongue or pen,/The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’ ” A remarkable similarity to this is to be found in a touching Tamil short story, Kadithamum Kannerum, of late ‘Kalki’ Krishnamoorthy, which originally appeared in Ananda Vikatan in 1938, with the published English translation (Penguin) by Gowri Ramnarayan.
The story is about Annapurani. She explains to her colleague how love can inspire one to high levels of creativity. Widowed at the age of nine, after child marriage, Annapurani had gone, while yet in her teens, to a wedding, where she observes a young man staring at her. Later, he gives her a letter. Overcome by love and helplessness, Annapurani spends many days crying. Illiterate thus far, she learns to read and write. She then comes to know that the man, who had known that she was a child widow, had asked her, in this letter, to marry him, suggesting she come to the evening ceremony, just holding a piece of flower in her hand, to signal her consent. Alas, in view of Annapurani’s illiteracy then, the union never, therefore, takes place!
Spurred by a will to help the deprived, lest they too miss out on opportunities for sheer want of right upbringing, Annapurani founds a remarkable institution for women and the destitute. However, like Maud Muller, she too, now aged, carries eternally the weight of the regretful longing for what could have been hers, if only...
Indeed, it takes immense dynamism, resourcefulness and presence of mind to sail on in life, never ever troubled by the feeling, “...it might have been”.
K Vijayaraghavan
Sixteen years ago, William Dalrymple journeyed up from the banks of the Bhagirathi towards the great Himalayan temple of Kedarnath, believed to be one of the earthly light-lingas (Jyotir-linga) of Siva. “I was not alone on the road,” the Scottish-born writer says in his luminous travel book, Nine Lives: In search for the sacred in Modern India, the first he’s penned in 10 years, “The narrow mountain track appeared like a great sea of Indian humanity. Every social class from every corner of the country was there. There were groups of farmers, illiterate labourers and urban sophisticates from north and south rubbing shoulders like something out of a modern Indian Canterbury Tales.”
As he clambered up the track, Dalrymple met with an ash-smeared naked sadhu about his own age. As the two conversed, it quickly became apparent the sadhu, Ajay Kumar Jha, was a far more cosmopolitan figure than what the writer had expected: someone “with a traditional village background, motivated by a blind and simple faith”.
Just five years earlier, the sanyasi was a salesman peddling refrigerators. He had done an MBA at Patna University and was considered a high-flyer by his employers. “But one day, I decided I could not spend the rest of my life marketing fans and fridges,” he said. “So I just left. I wrote a letter to my boss and to my parents, gave away my belongings to the poor, and took a train to Benares. There I threw away my old suit, rubbed ash on my body and found a monastery.”
It was a sudden decision, but never regretted, he added, even when he’d not eaten for several days and was at his most hungry state. It was unarguably difficult, “but then everything worthwhile in life takes time,” he reflected. “Once you learn to restrain your desires, anything becomes possible.”
Superficially, the life of the MBA-turned-monk may seem as different as a wild forest is from a slick city. But deep down lurk quaint unities, writes Patrick Olivelle in his collection of essays, Ascetics and Brahmins, “For its very existence, a culture has to impose restrictions on an individual and his appetites. In this sense, there is an ascetic in all of us, and asceticism is, at its root, very much domestic, very much social.”
Some evolutionary biologists even talk of an innate tendency towards renunciation, an ascetic instinct similar to the language instinct.
The ascetic is at home, everywhere.
Vithal C Nadkarni
Karl Popper, the Austrian-British philosopher of science, is probably best known for his proposal of falsifiability: that any theory, conjecture or claim can only be meaningful if it can also be proved false. Thus, to claim that ‘all swans are white’, for example, makes sense because it can be falsified by the discovery of even a single black or green or whatever swan. In other words, true science advances by advancing theories that have been deduced from generalised observation for which counter-factual claims have not arisen yet but, importantly, can in theory be made at some time in the future. As Einstein put it, “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”
On the other hand, if someone else were to come up with a theory that asserts there is an alien oven-toaster-griller in a galaxy far away that controls our destiny, how can any experiment ever prove it wrong? One could, of course, always say that the person presents no evidence in support of that claim, but he or she could then just as well turn around and ask if the rest of us have any evidence to refute it. On whom does the onus lie? Popper tried to resolve the issue by saying that if evidence cannot be presented to support a case, and yet the case cannot be shown to be false, not much credence can be given to such a statement.
A lot of philosophers, scientists and atheists use a similar argument to deny the meaningfulness in the claim for the existence of God — especially an all-powerful, omniscient entity. Being a transcendental being, beyond the realm of the observable, claims about it can neither be sustained nor undermined by observation. Does it make sense?
The short answer is no. But, in fact, the overwhelming majority of human beings at any given point in their history and across myriad cultures has chosen to go along with it without questioning its empirical validity. And that’s in spite of the amount of sometimes seemingly purposeless pain, suffering, evil and unnecessary brutish deaths which an omnipotent, loving and, ultimately, ‘good’ god would and should have the power to allay if not eliminate. So, does it make sense?
If we are not bound by an uncompromising belief in the claim to His absolute unlimited powers, Popper’s falsifiability proposal still holds true and the long answer surprisingly turns out to be yes. Because there’s ample evidence to the contrary.
Mukul Sharma
You can live either in expectation or in gratitude, never in both. With expectation there is a desire to possess things. You become the owner. With gratitude, you become the enjoyer. When you are the owner you enjoy only the few things that you own. When you are the enjoyer, you enjoy everything in Existence. When you look to own, nothing will seem enough. When you enjoy, everything seems to be overflowing! That is the difference.
When we believe that what we need is always only outside of us, we will only continue searching! When we believe that Existence always gives us what we need, we will find everything within us. Working with expectation is like pouring clarified butter into fire to quench it. Can you quench fire by pouring clarified butter into it? Never! In the same way, you can never feel fulfilled if your actions are rooted in expectation.
Try to sit down and make two lists: one of all the things that you have and one of all the things that you don’t have. The first list should include every single thing that you have, starting from your eyes, ears, hands and legs, because there are people who don’t have some of these. Include all your physical and mental faculties before moving to material things. If you write very sincerely without leaving out anything, you will not be able to complete the first list! That is the truth. If you find you are unable to finish the first list, it means gratitude has started happening in you!
The problem is that there is a continuous expectation in us all the time. That is why gratitude doesn’t happen easily.
We continuously receive input from our eyes, nose, ears, tongue and touch. Based on this, we continuously expect something or other to happen in a certain way. When we see someone who has a better house/ car, it registers in us. When we hear of some great achievement by someone, it registers in us. Our energy moves only outward, constantly following our five senses, never inwards towards self.
Gratitude is when this process reverses and you suddenly awaken to the abundance in you! With gratitude there is no expectation or greed. When you start experiencing deep gratitude, your responses to situations change. You start resonating with Existence. Your body will flow with that resonance, with a cool grace and softness. All your actions will arise out of this grace. There will be no violence, only joy will be flowing. Then anything you do will only make life sweeter.
Be Blissful!
PARAMAHAMSA NITHYANANDA
James Cameron obviously had the blue-skinned God Vishnu in his mind while making his latest film. The movie is called Avatar, or reincarnation, something for which Vishnu is celebrated in the Indian mythical tradition. The complexion of the protagonists, a humanoid race known as Na’vi, is an electrifying shade as blue as the sky-coloured God’s skin.
But the divine symbolism is more than skin-deep. The hero of Avatar is a paraplegic ex-marine who lies in a casket-like space vessel, while his consciousness is projected into an avatar: “Vishnu-blue and nine-feet-tall”, like the native extra-terrestrials.
As a pre-viewer says, “It’s a fantasy about fantasy, about the experience of sitting inert in the dark while your mind enters another world.” Unlike the eastern avatar, the Hollywood version is not about to save the alien world from wrack and ruin. Initially, all the avatar wants to do is to infiltrate among Pandora’s local people only for the sake of exploiting a precious superconductor called Unobtanium. As the name suggests, it can only be obtained on planet Pandora under conditions that are extremely noxious to humans.
But then the ex-marine Jake, through his avatar, falls in love with the Na’vi princess, who then teaches him to live in harmony with nature. In turn, the avatar leads his beloved’s people in a war of insurrection against the ‘evil exploiter’ colonists.
So, the movie once again swings back to resonate with yet another blue-skinned avatar of Vishnu, who was famed for his yellow raiment, and who delivered an immortal discourse on the mother-of-all-battlefields called Kurukshetra in India.
The director has played God in other ways for the first film made by him in 12 years after the success of Titanic: he worked with a linguist to develop the Na’vi language, inspired by fragments of Maori he picked up in New Zealand years ago.
He based Pandora, and its myriad flora and fauna partly on the creatures of the coral reefs and kelp forests he has seen at the abyssal depths. As George Lucas, another director known to be imbued with ‘God complex’, says, “Creating a universe is daunting. I’m glad Jim is doing it — there are only a few people in the world who are nuts enough to. I did it with Star Wars, and now he’s trying to challenge that.”
But in the end, what will make it (or break it) is the human element, just as in the millennial Indian epics of avatars.
Vithal C Nadkarni
To continue, what is this thing called consciousness? Some scientists maintain it’s when we’re aware of things. But is that really right? Forget dolphins or chimps, isn’t an ant — a creature we normally would not endow with the quality of consciousness — aware of its environment so that it can avoid extreme heat, poison and other hostile animals while preferring food, mates and shelter? Even in something as ‘dead’ as a plant, there are tropisms: movements of its stem towards light and roots towards water.
Biology tells us it’s blind evolution: things that have worked for survival in the past will make surviving work better in the future. Okay, let that go. Cognitive psychologists and philosophers, on the other hand, would say consciousness is more than merely being aware. It’s when one is aware that one is aware. But what does this mean? That I know that I know?
That I can think of the fact that I’m thinking? That I can reflect on my reflections? How long can this go on without becoming meaningless like, for instance, some superior or enlightened being becoming aware that it’s aware that it’s aware?
Then four times. Then five. That’s like images in two facing mirrors which regress away to a vanishing infinity without becoming any clearer as the distance increases. Forget that too.
In 2006, when researchers at the University of Cambridge and their colleagues asked a 23-year-old woman who was injured in a car accident and had slipped into a completely unresponsive vegetative state of coma to imagine she was playing tennis, they were dumbfounded. Her brain scan lit up in virtually the same places as the brains of fully-conscious healthy volunteers asked to do the same thing. So, sure, she was aware.
Maybe even aware that she was aware. But she had been unconscious for five months by that time. Since then, neuroscientists have found that something like 4 out of 10 similarly-diagnosed people could be conscious. Hmm.
Obviously, consciousness has served another purpose. Non-conscious evolutionised creatures are value-free. That is, they may be altruistic as some animals definitely are for a local Darwinian function, but they don’t exhibit a moral dimension as we understand it. Consciousness must, therefore, have been developed — or dealt to us — with the intention of being able to differentiate good from bad. In hindsight, this must be true because we can be so proficient at both.
Mukul Sharma
The concepts concerning atmasuddhi, besides exercises in contemplation and meditation or taking time to be with oneself — these are not, in their true sense, merely religious or spiritual involvements. Purely from a rational and pragmatic point of view, elimination of the undesirables obtains for the seeker that ‘space’ within, where truth, wisdom and intelligence can enter and take root.
Consequently and naturally, he would be guided well to pre-empt or sidestep mistakes and errors in judgement. This verily is karmasu kaushalam (Bhagawad Gita: 2,50), leading inevitably to ‘dissociation from suffering’ (6,23) and also the concept of James Allen, “suffering ceases for him, who is pure”.
The above would serve as explanation to the axiom that all aspects without (transactions, relationships, developments and events) are mirrors of the state within. True progress towards atmasuddhi is thus manifest externally in many ways. Gita elaborates on certain characteristics of such an evolved person (sthithaprajna) — 2:55 to 59 and 2:71.
Certain other specific traits would also include creativity, pursuit of excellence in chosen field, control on all concerned aspects, including on habits and lifestyle, besides planning what one does and doing what one plans, obtaining thus, as if effortlessly, the art of time management by putting more work into one’s hours than hours into his work, transcending thus also the laws of Parkinson and Murphy.
That uncanny ability to confront odds and pessimism all around, being scintillating, displaying virtues that scorn the limitations within, practically applying one’s knowledge (jnanam and kriya and the Biblical concept of “faith and works” — James: 2,20), freedom from obsession with oneself, concerned with others too, besides cultivating a healthy indifference to the evil — these dynamic characteristics would also embellish the evolved being.
Such a seeker, imbued with pursuit of atmasuddhi, would naturally also discover “new, universal and more liberal laws” beginning to establish themselves “around and within” him, enabling him to live with the “licence of a higher order of beings” (Thoreau’s concept). He would also comprehend how “God’s in His Heaven - /All’s right with the world”, feeling thus that “all we behold is full of blessings”.
Indeed, such signs manifesting externally spring from the dynamic cleansing within — that progress towards true atmasuddhi.
K Vijayaraghavan
When we talk of professionals, whom do we normally think about? Doctors in white coats? Engineers in hard hats? Lawyers in black gowns? How about a man who makes a living from dealing with unclaimed corpses from public hospitals and police mortuaries? “This is not someone who is conventionally associated with the term professional,” writes Subrato Bagchi, noted ‘gardener’ of corporate human resources, in his new book, The Professional.
“His name is Mahadeva. He came to live on the streets of Bangalore with his mother. When she fell ill and died in a government hospital, he became an errand boy under the tutelage of an old man who had helped in the admission process of his mother. After he’d grown up, he unwittingly turned into a ‘collector of corpses’ when the cops asked him to bury an unclaimed body and paid Rs 200 for the job. That’s how he became the go-to guy for burying Bangalore’s unclaimed dead. He did his job with such dedication, focus and concern for that soon he was much in demand,” Bagchi writes.
“His work grew and he bought his own horse-drawn carriage... When his horse died, people who had watched Mahadeva all these years came together and bought him an autorickshaw.” Till date, Mahadeva had buried more than 42,000 corpses and the work had earned him great public gratitude and goodwill. The chief minister of Karnataka felicitated Mahadeva for his selfless service to the waifs and wanderlings of Bangalore.
What makes him a true professional against someone who is simply professionally-qualified is the ability to work unsupervised and the ability to certify the completion of his work, Bagchi says, between the dead and the living, there is no one to question him. Bagchi’s epiphany reminded your columnist of the story of Vyadha Gita from the Mahabharata in which an arrogant sanyasi is humbled by a butcher (Vyadha) as he learns about righteousness (dharma) which teaches that “no duty is ugly, none impure”. It is only the way in which the work is done that determines the worth of both the doer as well as the deed.
The Vyadha Gita extols the importance of performance of swadharma (prescribed duty or duty in life). Accordingly, a butcher deemed low by birth but engaged in dharma and doing good to others is capable of teaching a Brahmin, regarded as being higher by birth but practising austerities for his own good. A true-blue professional is pure indeed.
Vithal C Nadkarni
Adherents of mystical sects of any faith such as the Sufis, Bauls, Kabbalists, etc, are usually not the most well-beloved of the faithful. At best, they are tolerated; at worst, abhorred and, at any rate, not very popular. There’s a simple reason for this: they seem to make belief an unnecessarily easy internal process.
This obviously doesn’t dwell well in the heart of doctrinal liturgy that prescribes mountains of texts to be followed with strict definitions and within stricter parameters. Meaning, if decades of formality like solitude, celibacy, prayer and penitence can’t always guarantee a knowledge of God, how can a bunch of people just dancing around the place or singing all over the countryside claim to commune with the Creator in such a hurry?
Einstein, another of the Sufiesque ilk, faced a similar problem with e = MC2. How could an equation with merely five alphanumeric characters in it possibly purport to explain the mysterious nature of space and time and the intimate existing relationship between matter and energy which apparently were the same? It took years of experimental verification and the wholly-unforgiveable deaths of over 1,20,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to demonstrate that simple can also be correct to the point where it can even be used stupidly by stupid people.
Or Darwin for that matter. He reduced a lot of convoluted and unnecessary rubbish floating in the ether for millennia about the origin of species and the descent of humans to just two words: natural selection. The ‘It can’t be right’ — or, more properly, ‘It shouldn’t be right’ — reaction was far more ferocious in his unfortunate case with traditionalists openly lampooning him during his day and their creationist descendants doing the same thing more than 150 years later in the 21st century.
Luckily, mystics don’t care because — one suspects — they’re done caring and have moved on, or in, as the case may be. It’s us, the luckless unfaithful ones, who fume in our temples of devotion and trip over archaic instruction manuals while contemplating the dutiful life; who fret between the ought and the should, the so-called bad and the good, lingering over 2,000-year-old 2,000-page texts that only manage to separate us from what is, who should be caring. The truth is, the truth is not out there. It never was, as any mystic worth his or her ism could tell us. It’s in here.
Mukul Sharma
Life is nothing but a totality of conscious choices that you continuously make. Whether you want it or not, directly or indirectly, you are choosing everything. Someone else does not choose for you in your life. It is you who makes the choice.
An employee approached his boss, ‘Sir, my wife said I should ask you for a raise.’ The boss replied, ‘Oh, I will ask my wife tonight whether or not I should give you a raise!’
Understand, continuously it is your choice, your decision. You may think somebody else decides. But it is only you who makes decisions. For example if somebody criticises you, you choose to get offended. If somebody praises you, you choose to get flattered.
Because of your habit, you may choose it unconsciously and think that someone else is influencing your decisions.
All your continuous choices every minute put together decide your life. If you don’t decide and if you allow incidents to decide your life you go into a mode of ‘paralysis’. Our life as of now is nothing but paralysis. Only when you decide to live your life without any outside events, situations or decisions being forced on you, you actually decide to be alive.
A man was invited by a scientist for lunch at his home. The man was sitting at the lunch table when he saw a horseshoe hanging on the wall. A horseshoe is believed to bring good luck. The man was surprised and asked the scientist, ‘Sir, I can’t believe you are a scientist and you also believe in this superstition that a horseshoe brings you luck!’
The scientist replied, ‘No, no! I don’t believe in such stupidity. But the person who gave it to me said whether I believed it or not, it would bring me luck all the same!’
Your responses to different situations, decisions you make are completely your choice. But you fool yourselves and others into believing someone else is responsible and is making you execute things their way. We constantly believe we have been given unfair results.
This is because we are not able to connect the cause and the effect of many of the things that happen in our lives. We are blissfully unaware that we are the ones responsible for the consequences. We have made it happen by the way of unconscious living.
Continuously, it is only your choice, your decision. You may think that somebody else decides your life. Understand you can decide to respond differently. For example, when someone criticises you, you can choose not to get offended and remain calm, relaxed and collected. You can choose to live consciously. Be Blissful!
PARAMAHAMSA NITHYANANDA,
The celebrated humorist and film-maker Woody Allen wants to live backwards in his next life. Hold on right there, you might object. What’s the guarantee of his being given another shot at life, that too as a dead white male? But once you suspend such quibbles, you “start out dead and get that out of the way,” Allen explains.
“Then you wake up in an old people’s home and feeling better every day, you are kicked out for being healthy. (Then) you go collect your pension and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you are young enough to enjoy your retirement,” the comedian goes on in that vein to eventually end up at the moment of his own conception, as a big ‘O’, just as Tristram Shandy does at the beginning of Laurence Sterne’s masterpiece.
Brad Pitt portrays a reversal similar to the one Allen proposes in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Based on a story by F Scott Fitzgerald, the movie depicts the travails of the protagonist who suffers from a scarce ageing disease.
Jokes apart, the unspooling of relationships entailed by such fictional reversals complicates the story infinitely. What’s the point of reversing your arrow of time while everybody’s is going forward? Imagine the pathos, not to forget the cruel incongruity of having a doddering old woman (played by Kate Blanchett) mooning over her former lover as an infant!
This is what happens in Thorne Smith’s Glorious Pool when a 60-year-old man accidentally discovers a fountain of youth in his backyard swimming pool when the man, his wife and his mistress take a dip, only to shed 20 years of their life with hilarious results.
At the end, Smith says that like life, his stories had no point. Like life, they were a little mad and purposeless.
He goes on to describe himself as being “trifle cosmic unlike the great idealists and romancers who insist on a beginning, a middle and an ending for their stories”, his stories possessed “none of these definite parts”.
So, whether one goes from start to finish or backwards to start, one comes up against what the Bard describes as the “last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history,/(which is) mere oblivion”.
The moral is a sort of temporal palindrome described in the Bhagavad Gita: beings ‘unmanifest’ in the beginning and end; our only window of opportunity lies in the manifest middle (vyakta-madhyaani). Use it or lose it.
Vithal C Nadkarni,
A deeply troubled adolescent eagle returned to its nest one evening and asked his father, “Dad, is it true that we should follow our bliss?”
The elder eagle, with years of inexperience behind him, sighed and replied, “Only conscious creatures have the luxury to indulge in such thoughts. We, on the other hand, who have no idea that we’re living and neither any notion when death overtakes us, possess more pressing priorities. We follow our hunger. Therefore, go out tomorrow as usual and practice killing field rodents and baby rabbits and, after a few seasons, look for a female eagle. End of story.”
The mother, who was almost dozing off by then, turned and said, “I don’t know why you bother. That kid’s goofy in the head.”
Years later, after both his parents had dropped out of the sky, the young eagle had become an extremely proficient predator. He could swoop effortlessly down on small furry animals and with his honed claws and beak, rip them to shreds.
Also, by this time, he had found a mate who bore him many clutches of mindless eagles who never returned to the nest and asked him anything in the evening except for more space to sleep. But what no one knew was that he still remained deeply troubled. Times when he was really frustrated, he would mutter to himself, “But what if I’m conscious? Would I have the luxury then?”
“Not necessarily,” said the Wise One. He was a mythical eagle who lived alone in an old eyrie atop a steep cliff face many flights away from where the others of his kind dwelt and who our young eagle in desperation had one day forsaken his eagle ways to seek out.
“Just because your father said something to you once doesn’t make it false. Nor does your constant dwelling on it.”
“What makes things true then?” queried our hero. “Or, more to the point, should I be following my bliss instead of simply hunting and mating and not knowing if I’m alive or dead?” The Wise One looked away into the horizon in silence and spoke after a long time.
“I could have told you,” he said, “that hunting and mating was indeed your bliss, but you seemed to have heeded your father a little too literally and followed your hunger. In which case, you now have the rare honour of being the next Wise One atop this lonely but conscious cliff, your only bliss from now on. Happy, goof?” Saying that, he went to the edge of the precipice and dropped out of the sky.
Mukul Sharma
