Lessons from Life - III

What do we live for?

My answer is true freedom, because only a free individual can be truly happy and blissful

Freedom doesn't mean running away from responsibilities. Freedom and responsibility are not mutually exclusive. It simply means one does because they choose to from love instead of having to from a position of duty. This is not a ideology of just changing mindsets. This is truly possible only if one is really a loving person and can give and also receive when needed. One must however strive to give more than they take

Why did the chicken cross the road?

To evolve :)

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Love and Duty 

Sadness = Love becomes duty

Happiness = Duty becomes Love

When Love becomes Duty, it is important to spend "me time", recuperate, recover and love thyself and turn back some part of the duty back to love. The other non transferable part can remain as "duty with boundaries" for one's inner peace, for it does take two to tango

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Love 

Love is the highest vibration. Since this is a heavily misused word, I refer to love as that being unconditional and that gives freedom. Love that does not give freedom to the other cannot be termed as love. At the same time, freedom is a great power and with great power comes great responsibility that the "other" should recognize and act. We are all born free and thus it should remain so.

The greatest act of love is to simply sit by a tree and wait for its fruit to be offered to you and not plucking it, which is an act of violence. In the world we live in, this is not practical, but the analogy can serve as our moral compass to constantly evolve 

Society conditions us in various ways, even how we are named. To realize our true self, we have to break all illusions of who we really are and only then can any meaningful answer be found to the one true question "who am I?"

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Freedom 

Earthly Love < Pleasure < Money < Power <  Divine Love < Skill < Time < Self Love <  Inner Peace < My Morals < Freedom

My Morals = personalized and completely dynamic Inner moral code by which one lives. Every individual needs to define this for themselves for their happiness and not be influenced by any books, scriptures, etc. If one's individual morals goes against the prevailing collective moral code (say law and order), there will be consequences that one must be ready to face

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On Awareness 

Concentration = Focus outward on a single point

Meditation = Focus inward, slowly working one's way to observing thoughts

Awareness = Focus outward and inward and more importantly on body sensations and emotions, the gap between inward and outward. Do not focus exclusively on thoughts. Attention on thoughts gives more energy and power to thoughts. If you want thoughts to reduce for inner peace, one must learn to focus on the body sensations and emotions like anger, lust, etc and not focus too much on thoughts.

Awareness > (concentration + meditation)

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Money & Wealth 

Money != Wealth, Wealth > Money

Money = What you work for

Wealth = What works for you, even while you sleep 

Money and even wealth can buy assets, but not skills. All the money in the world can help you get good piano teachers, but can it give you real piano playing skills?

How much money does one truly need to be happy and make a meaningful impact to the world? Do not let anyone tell you how much is enough. Decide for yourself for what impact you want to leave on the world is and should be only your plan 

What are we all if we are not able to cultivate our individual skills and talents for our own happiness and for the betterment of the universe?

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The art of gifting 

The best gift is just money, cause money gives the "other" the freedom to "choose" what they want to buy with it for "their happiness". It might not be the best thing that they could do for themselves, but it's their choice. Who are we to judge?

True charity does not need branding and advertisement. If you are right handed, one's left hand must not know what the right hand provides

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Group dynamics

It is ok to be disheartened by the state of the world, but one cannot change it in groups without inflicting the same misery that one set forward to eradicate. Change your individual being instead and radiate peace, love, joy and freedom and effect change organically, not as a collective mob. One must therefore be very wary of every group they are associated with 

One must not chant mantras for which they do not know the meaning of and it's effects on oneself and the greater universe and that which does not make them happy to chant. One must specifically avoid mantras which require a certain amount of repetitions for as intelligent beings, we must question the very need for such repetitions. One must avoid chanting in groups as firstly the intention for the group chanting is not always clear and secondly it is very hard to get all participants to agree on the intent and the very nature of such groups would mean that they send negative vibrations to some other individual. 

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Healing 

Food can heal

Exercise can heal

Fasting can heal

Sleep can heal

Music can heal

Water is life

Movement is life

Life is energy in movement

Do not let anyone tell you how much and how often you should eat or sleep. Let your body be your guide

Music can heal. Real music is the raw emotion without the lyrics or the meaning of a song getting in the way. Listen more to BGMs than actual songs for healing, for the moment one hears lyrics, the mind takes on the role of attempting to find it's meaning and associating it with other unrelated facts thus establishing it's dominance

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Peace

There's a calm after every storm and there's a storm after every calm. 

Prepare for both by honing your awareness

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Schedule

Your soul, body and mind need to work in unison always. 

Timetable your life accordingly as per your needs

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Inner Peace

For peace, detox your mind

To detox your mind, detox your body

To detox your body, detox your immediate environment

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Thoughts 

Not all your thoughts might be yours. Don't attach too much importance to them. How you "act" is far more important than the thoughts you "get".

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Depression & Regrets

Be thankful for good times, for they come to bless.

Be thankful for tough times, for they come to teach.

It is therefore futile to regret anything that might have happened in one's life, if one sees everything as constant evolution.

When you hit rock bottom, the only way to go is up. Spend "Me time" to heal yourself. Focus on only yourself without any "other" and do good loving things for yourself. Buy new clothes, eat outside, spend time outside. Exercise is a good way to get out of any depression. When one takes care of their body, healing becomes faster. Spend more "body" activities than "mind" activities to get out of depression. Move your body, for it is only in movement one can get out of the vicious depression cycle created by one's own mind

Never let anyone regret or guilt trap you, especially for spending "me time" to heal yourself

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Observation 

Learn to "observe" without "labels".

Would a rose smell as sweet by any other name? Sure it would

The label conjures up associated facts with totally unrelated things and can lead one easily astray from pure observation and hence pure awareness

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Judgement

Live life without judging the "other". The lack of judgement will lead to a loss in discernment which will eventually work against oneself, but it is far better to let at least the first interaction be judgement free. It is better to have loved truly and lost than to not have loved at all out of fear. If you have loved and lost, heal yourself before you can love another without your judgement or your discernment getting in the way of true happiness. The heart always knows the right thing to do, but to follow it, one needs to be fearless to overcome the mind's discernment especially if one has already experienced failure. Do not fear the mind's discernment, for it helps you survive, but do not let it colour your life with one or even more tainted experiences, for that's what destroys your true essence of being a loving personality

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Gods & Devils

We are all the devils for each other. 

We can however choose to be the Gods for each other.

If your kindness is exploited, learn to set strong boundaries. Respect yourself and value your time and energy and on whom and what it should be spent on 

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Happiness

Happiness is 99% effort and 1% divine grace.Even if you are not able to achieve 99% effort, let the bulk of the effort be yours truly. Do what is in your control and let the universe handle the rest. The universe does not give you problems, you cannot solve

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Discipline

Perfection is the enemy of discipline

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Science & Spirituality

Science is what we focus outward on. Spirituality or inward sciences is what we focus inward on. True happiness might be only when we focus in the intersection and be in balance, for deep spirituality would lead you astray with dogmas, rituals and superstitions and deep science would lead one into a state of giving away absolute power to the mind and not "feeling" enough. Without feeling enough, ironically we would have only one feeling, that of being a machine

 

Mouna Ragam - A study with age

Mouna Ragam (Silent Symphony) - One of my favorite movies of all time.

A beautifully made movie on all counts. Ilayaraja's mesmerizing BGM. You can even see the influence of western music on Ilayaraja, when the character played by Mohan is seen listening to the four seasons - spring vivaldi orchestration in one scene. Funny I remember that music having a good imprint on me when I watched the movie the first time. That was in early 1990's I guess, much before I had access to the Internet and I never bothered to know what that music was, even though it left a lasting impression on me then. Fast forward 15+ years and for some unfathomable reason I decide I have to start learning the violin and my violin teacher (a very good one) gifts me the four seasons CD to listen and appreciate the violin better and behold a eureka moment!

When I was much younger, I admired the character that Karthik played. Extremes of emotions in one persona - anger and violence that makes him beat up someone every 5 minutes on one side and light-hearted frivolity (remember the Mr. chandra-mouli!) on the other. What is there not to like in such a character? The character endears to us almost immediately.

As I have grown older, though I've started to admire the character essayed by Mohan in the movie more.
A calm head to almost every situation. You don't tend to like him much first, he's quite to put it bluntly - dull as compared to Karthik, but then he slowly grows on you and becomes much much larger than the role essayed by Karthik.
That slow growth in me has spanned almost a decade for me.
It's interesting today to me to see how my own perspective has changed with age, revealing the futility of believing in anything as the absolute truth.

Dear Mani Ratnam, please please make more movies of such kind.

Quietude

You know that awkward moment when your family does the things that you have indicated vociferously numerous times that you just can't put up with?
It happens frequently and then there's something that remotely resembles an apology that comes along after the fact and then it's family after all. So you act big-hearted and move on, until it happens again with another apology gift wrapped and then again and then again and again and again.
The apologies tired of this charade skip themselves out of the loop along the way, but the thing that riles you up doesn't and is damn persistent and without the pretext of an apology backing it up is even tougher to handle.

How does anyone handle all this in a sane manner?

After years of ongoing struggle, here's the answer - Resist all temptation to speak, communicate, opine or react and in that quietude lies the path of detachment - of being able to look at oneself as just another thing.

It's amazing how most solutions to tricky problems have their origins in quietude. Have you ever figured out a solution to something complex when you were totally involved doing something else or after a good night's sleep or while taking a bath?

Silence is totally underestimated in today's society. The people hogging the limelight are all the ones who talk incessantly. Everyone is constantly striving to be busy, everyone wants to be distracted - with work, with music, with chatter, with gossip. Most people just love to talk. Society rewards this. I've experienced it myself numerous times at work. It's not important what work you do, but how you project yourself about what you do/might do/didn't do.

Silence is underestimated. Quietude is underestimated and it's only in quietude, one can see this.

Spiritual Paths

Was talking to a spirituality minded friend and he remarked that for most people, the path of bhakti (path of devotion) and it's variants is a more colorful path and that the path of jnana (path of knowledge) is a boring negative path.

I thought that was a very subjective remark cause if they all lead to the same goal, how could one be more colorful and other not so and for the last 3 days have been completely confused grappling with this question and yesterday felt like a break through, which culminated in the creation of the picture below.

So like the picture says - From utter confusion, arises utter clarity, which are nothing but at two poles of the axis.

End result, I don't think one path is colorful or boring; though I can now appreciate why the majority of people would like to think so; cause life is to make a generalized statement more colorful when you add stuff than remove stuff.

Why so many paths then? Depending on your personality, I guess you can choose what you like.

Family

I've never enjoyed Visu's movies. Let's be honest. Which would you rather watch? A Rajnikanth plot where the hero has revealed the huge challenge that lies before him at interval time and then when you go out and buy more popcorn and worry about what will happen next,  the hero non-chalantly sings the inevitable song that turns the tides and the day is saved or a visu family drama where you bunch a group of people in a joint family situation and each one tries their best to torture the other and make you pull out your hair as well?

Some scenes of his do stand out though. There's one movie where everyone lives in a joint family and they all constantly tread on each other's toes and then finally they all realize that, go their separate ways and get together only on festive occasions like pongal and diwali. Good riddance to living together. You can't fault the merit of that idea even if you can fault other aspects of his movie making skills.

I think the reason people start their own families is that, that existing thing that they call a family has become too authoritative, too dictatorial, too unbearable and too stressful. So the thinking is - Let's start a new one, where we are the boss. There will be some niceties along the way - someone to converse with, sex, shared goals and others.

And then there will be kids and everyone likes to say that they want their kids to grow up as independently as possible, but all the time knowingly and unknowingly feeding all sorts of ideas, beliefs, superstitions, restrictions into the kid's mind.

The kid grows into an adult, takes care of himself and yet the forces that need not be mentioned continue to exert their mis-guided and unwanted influence until it can be taken no more and then the whole cycle starts again.

This new adult however has fresher perspectives. So the next generation kid will be more independent. There will be lesser threats to the next generation kid's way of life, but they will still exist. This will go on and one day some lucky generation will have total freedom on how they want to live their lives. No one judges anything. No one dictates anything. No one has power to affect the individual.

The concept of a family will dissolve then and morph into something much more beautiful than that ugly thing that we call a family today. Maybe it will be the emergence of the commune that Osho spoke about in such glowing terms. Maybe it will be something else, but if it allows individuals to just lead their lives and get together on occasion without any judgement or control, that will be a beautiful thing indeed.


Reality today is not so cozy. No one in the family knows where to draw boundaries. It is no longer a place of support. It fosters fear in you, just like the news channels that I have stopped watching. Your ideas and beliefs do not matter. They are dismissed because they do not conform. Something as simple as taking a car key from my father becomes a stressful incident. The key is offered and you promptly try to take it with your left hand because it's not convenient to twist your body around and take it with the right hand and that leads to a sulking face, a dramatic moment, menacing words and inevitable hurt and that's just the simplest of the incidents that I can talk about right now. The big ones just make my blood boil. It is pretty much at this point I realized that all the self taught anger management was no good. Am back squarely at square one.

And the hits just keep on coming. It's all too stressful and hurtful for a sane individual to keep taking them. The solution to all this is to not start another family, which is what am expected to do, but to learn detachment from the existing one.

Modern day survival kit!

The absolute necessities required in descending order of priority...
Don't take my word for it though and hold me to it!

O2 - ✔

H2O - ✔

Idlis - ✔

Milagai Podi - ✔

Music - ✔
 
Internet - ✔

Ice water - ✔ (couldn't resist leaving it out!)

A light heart - ✘ (working on this still! I'll know when this bubbles up to the top of this list!)

Challenges -  ✘ (current challenge is to create challenges!)
 

Lessons from Life - II

I've always been angry at something or the other in my life. Still am, but now I am always aware of the anger, (cough cough) well most times, (ahem) some times, ok now and then!

Even though I've been angry for such a long time, it took me so long to learn this lesson about anger.

When someone is angry at you, walk away from them. It's the best thing you can do for them immediately, to remove the object of the anger (yourself) from their sight. Later - well that's a different story. I don't know. I only know the immediate solution.

I suppose it is not without merit that it took me this so long to learn, cause when one is angry, one tends to learn things very slowly.