It is thanksgiving

and I am thankful for the opportunities the universe gives me to find my talents and express my potential - but all that would be ash, if i wasn't able to feel the tender love and care that the universe provides me!  

Be Water, my friend

 or the monster-like-way my mind is behaving

It is like I have given up, it is like I have been tested and my reserves have finally given away - sounds reasonable - but be water, my friend. If you take a rubber band it tries to get back to what it was (there is a constant stress in the rubber band that says - make this go away, MAKE THIS GO AWAY!) with water, it doesnt matter - so be water, my friend.    
 
and when you fail, rise up again, and be water, my friend. and sometimes be so much more than water, be space - let things be or not be, independent. but then be more than space - don't be dead, or callous, or unkind.

Days are longs but the years...

I recently read somewhere that days are long and years are short. I think this is a fantastic idea - small things that we do daily add up to make up our years, but things that happen once in a while, no matter how landmark-ish, are only a flash in a pan. We forget that the way we all learnt how to walk wasn't by running a marathon, but by first observing and then trying and falling and seeking help over and over again. Most of life is like that. 

 

When I pay attention to my inner-life i realise there is a bit of a dance going on in there; there are habits, there are assumptions, and there are irrational likes and dislikes. At any point in time there is part of me trying to assess the world around me, trying to interpret experiences (i would typically do this based on my assumptions) and based on that trying to decide what action should i take to arrive at what I have assumed to be most valuable. Then there is part of me that is functioning out of sheer momentum, these are habits. They might be good or bad, but usually there isn't much thought given to it - smile at me and i will smile back, frown at me and you'll have me confused (or is it the other way around ;) and those kind of things. Then almost like pieces of iron in presence of a magnet, I find my experiences and therefore my actions strongly impacted by certain "magnets" in this world - the confusing thing, of course, is that in the world magnets don't come nicely labelled. ("What an inauspicious mess!!", I wrote to a friend ;)

In all of this, we are trying to seek peace and contentment and self-actualisation and happiness! Swami Chinmayananda said that a goal tranforms a blah of a person to a towering giant among men (of course, i paraphrased a little bit) - the right goal is the music to which my being dances in tune! oh what a dance that would be!

Existential Angst for the Day

It is such a cheesy thing to say, but Before I die* I would like to genuinely develop my talents, to genuinely help people experience happiness and finally get to the core Reality of Life! It was so cheesy I didnt even put it on twitter - I am not completely enjoying modelling at the moment becuase of its necessary and (thankfully acknowledged) disconnect with reality; as opposed to people taking real-time decisions, modellers are always aware they might be wrong. In fact, they know that they are wrong, what they are always on a look-out for is how many ways can they be wrong about. Like this guy who won the nobel prize for physics replied to the question of how he reacted when he realised he had made his discovery, he double checked his calculations! I am particularly experiencing the disconnect because I don't have my family either to keep me grounded. Boy I really do need to get my connect back, my sense of reality back. I need to grow - there IS a reason i am here, i need to start happening to life**. 

*Before I die... inspired by that lady who gave the TED talk
**As opposed to life happening to me; I get impacted by everything a bit too entirely!

 

PS: Oh this blog is turning into something totally unreadable for everyone else!

Where do we live?

There are things that people often tell me, as if they are the first ones to share this secret with me, without realising that everyone else has said the exact thing to me as well. it is fairly amusing and it is some variation of, "Have I met you before? You are EXACTLY like this other person I knew." I don't even know what to make of it - is it a good thing? a bad thing? does it mean anything? Maybe I should get curious about these doppelgänger-s*. Anyway, then when they get to know me a bit more they'll tell me, "You THINK a lot" - like I didn't realise that? like they took this long to figure that out? like they were the first ones to get that?

So, the thing is, I DO think a lot - I see things and then I think that placing a value on them is internal to me, that I can choose to place high or low value on them - and thus, I can choose, whether or not a thing can affect me or not. (This is important because without this the world, not I, will determine whether I will enjoy or suffer) I am, to a certain degree, always having an out of body experience, till I hurt myself - physically or emotionally, and then some part of me screams out in pain and hurt, and I FEEL IT, and it is awe inspiring - the sheer reality of it that you tend to forget when you read Vedanta or John Steinbeck talking about how he is happy to write and went without food for 4 days or watch movies like Inception.

I am wondering about all the things that make little sense, Vedanta sweetly calls them Vasanas, that are like these things that are endlessly trying to get expressed - that keep toppling the apple cart, so that a situation that should be picture perfect doesn't feel picture perfect; because other things have assumed a high value by themselves and just wait for me to recognise them.

To see things for what they are, to call each thing by it's true name. Here is a lovely writing by Helen Keller when she recognises that each thing has a name, "http://www.afb.org/mylife/book.asp?ch=P1Ch4"

*but here is the clincher, I did once see myself crossing the street in Melbourne, from the other side - except it wasn't me, of course I was on this side - but there was this person crossing the street and I stared at her because she looked like she was I.

PS: I am starting to bore myself, except for the strange experience of doppelgangers, and the awesome writings of Helen Keller, I am just being boring. 

Soaking it up like a sponge

I am currently reading Life in Letters of John Steinbeck and finding it endlessly fascinating, clubbing it with blogs on 'finding purpose and meaning and happiness' I am amazed at the degree of good thought that people have spent on it and their findings. It gives me hope, tho I was actually asked if it left me with despair - ha! It gives me hope because it says I am what I settle for, I am ONLY what I settle for; because it says one doesn't realise the Self because one works for the Self, one realises the Self because one CHOOSES the Self. How does one choose the Self - that wonderful boy Nachiketa shows what it is to choose the Self!

Sometimes I feel like a sponge, absorbing all these ideas, they all make sense, they fit together - it is amazing how everyone who has given it some thought tend to agree. They are all saying the same thing, it is still I who has to walk the path if I am to get anywhere.

Sometimes doubting becomes the easiest thing, but 'to believe everything and to doubt everything are two equally convenient solutions, both dispense the need for thought' said Henri Poincare, and I believe he was right. The only solution is to not give up, to be constantly aware of all that the mind is upto, the world is upto, where we heading, and why do we think we are heading there - we can fool ourselves for a short while, it is true, but to do it constantly is impossible. 

habits and living with awareness

My mother might have tried to teach me this when I was a child and maybe I simply never picked it up, but I have at any moment a choice and a preference and that, I have now found out (look here [1] and [2]) is not always such fantastic thing. I think the purpose of schools is not to teach us facts but to use learning of facts as a means to find out about ourselves, about the way we function, about the way other people function, about how the world functions and, just as importantly, to cultivate good habits.

I went thru a bit of a stressful time a little while ago, and realised that the sheer momentum of good habits would have seen me thru (pushed me out of?) some of the stickiness I found myself in. Unfortunately, I had not invested in creating good habits. We are all creatures of habits, we must be aware and conscious of them, and continuously weed out the bad ones... There are a few terrible ones in me - when to sleep and when to wake up and whether or not to have breakfast and lunch and dinner and fruit are all choices that i have[3]; sometimes i choose whether or not to take responsibility (when it is really not a choice at all); sometimes i do not live in the present but in the past or the future, and it is easy to forget you even have this habit till the past is suddenly a very painful regret or you have an insistence on exactly how you'd like things in future which leaves you with little but fear!

(I have some great habits too, that keep me from the depths of despair (as Anne of Green Gables would say) but not much of a point talking about them - I know what they are because I have come to rely upon them. But this is not the place to talk about them, so let's not. I have some neutral ones as well - like writing on this blog - and so on.)

I am wondering how easy or difficult it is cultivate a new habit, if there is an art to it or if sheer stubbornness gets you to it. In any case, I leave you with these other rather interesting quotes:

1. You are what you settle for, you are ONLY what you settle for.
2. You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence therefore is not an act but a habit.
3. You do not realise the Self by attending satsang or by any other means; you only realise the Self by choosing the Self!  
and a slightly longer:
4. Our [] perception of reality is tied closely to where we focus our attention. Only what we pay attention to seems real to us, whereas whatever we ignore—no matter how important it may be—seems to fade into insignificance. [] "For the moment, what we attend to is reality."1Obviously, [] things  [do not] become nonexistent when we ignore them; many things of which we are unaware exert powerful influences on our lives and the world as a whole. But by ignoring them, we are not including them in our reality. We do not really register them as existing at all. Each of us chooses, by our ways of attending to things, the universe we inhabit and the people we encounter. But for most of us, this "choice" is unconscious, so it's not really a choice at all. When we think about who we are, we can't possibly remember all the things we've experienced, all the behaviours and qualities we have exhibited. What comes to mind when we ask "Who am I?" consists of those things we have been paying attention to over the years. The same goes for our impressions of other people. The reality that appears to us is not so much what's out there as it is those aspects of the world we have focused on.

[1]"There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation."
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/25/william-james-on-habit/

[2]"You need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. 'You'll see I wear only gray or blue suits,' he said.'I'm trying to pare down decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.' He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one's ability to make further decisions. It's why shopping is so exhausting. 'You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can't be going through the day distracted by trivia.' - Barack Obama on optimizing decision-making, excerpted from Michael Lewis's fantastic Vanity Fair profile of the President.
http://explore.noodle.org/post/31869759671/you-need-to-remove-from-your-life-the-day-to-day

Beauty and kindness, lot more than justice

i once met a child who was in a corner looking miserable, when i asked him what happened he started sobbing that his leg hurt becuase someone had kicked him while playing soccer, a few moments later he was sitting on my lap crying his heart out. It wasnt that anybody meant to hurt him - and he knew it, but this was just the physical pain of being kicked in the leg and it HURT, the pain simply hurt. i cannot understand why, but this world simply hurts us sometimes.

and then you see miraculously, people emerge from that kind of pain - it doesnt look like they have strength but like they are living in a different world altogether, that they are percieving it differently to all of us.

on a similar but slightly different note, very often we do victim blaming because if the victim did not cause it, then this could happen to us too  - I think that we are simply terrified of the randomness of grief. If I have to put faith in anything, I would not put it in the law of karma - i do not remember my previous struggles or my previous selfishness and cruelties, so it seems unfair for me to bear the results. more than justice let there be kindness, more than anything, i believe in the kindness and the sheer pure love of the universe - sometimes i can't see it, like the stars in daylight, but BEAUTY and kindness is the stuff the world is made of - if not, it would not be worth living.

These are a FEW of my favourite things

People - I am one of those crazy ones, who light up like a happy baby when I meet people - I really really like people; I like them better when they like me too, and SHOW it!

 

Sunshine and water - what is to be said about this one? The sun is shining there is fresh water to balance things out and everything is right with the world (or eventually will be) - i was probably a plant in one of my previous lives ;)

 

Philosophy - what is going on^? how to see things as they are? what guarantees does life offer - there has to be something to live for, right? what am i doing here? and why? if i haven't had my dose of wisdom for the day (from people who are not hypocrites), my looks will turn the milk bad*!

 

^like Alice felt in wonderland, when she eventually started wondering - who in the world am i?

*makes sense only if you know what happens when you squeeze a bit of lemon in milk.  

On Diwali I ask to experience Love

When I watched The Thin Red Line, it said - If I never find you in this life, let me feel the lack. One glance from your eyes and my life would be yours. Since I realised it takes so little to distract us from so much, I thought it was an awesome prayer. But in hind sight (that being so clear) I think if i choose to ask I might as well ask that since You love me, I may be able to feel it and experience it.