Thirsty Honeybees in the Flowerless Land

 

Take your eyes off the booming big events. Cup your ears for delicate notes. They won’t turn you deaf and still pass on the most significant messages as cannot be given even by the thundering notes of cataclysmic day. Quantum physicists will vouch for this truth. The tiniest of subatomic particles contain as much substance of the ultimate reality as do mammoth galaxies.

Much as you ogle starry eyed at the mammoth lusty games of the higher species, where the game of procreation shoots off with multiple tragedies, take a pause and look at smaller plays on the stage of creation. Give a cute, little look to the tiny winged tools of cosmic love-making. Insects! These trees, flowers, crops, plants, grass, you, me, all these and more would die loveless if not for these little buzzing shots of cupid. Nature hums its procreating love songs through their buzzing darts from flower to flower, leaf to leaf, and branch to branch.

Humans, let them live! They are Mother Nature’s love-making means to self-sustaining procreation through pollination. They share the love story between two flowers eager to meet, love, create more flower and fruits. These little winged Adam and Eves are the Angels of creation. Their buzzing carries the song of love and procreation. Their flights symbolize the dancing of two flowers eager to brush against each other, pining to pollinate and procreate. Look deeply into nature. This is the same energy following countless pathways, and love and procreation hums deeply at all frequencies in the cosmos.

In a human-dominated and manipulated earth, all the lesser species appear to have surrendered their natural rights. A water bucket is placed as an act of charity. Of course, we carry guilty conscious. We know what havoc we have wreaked. We may not acknowledge it openly though. The very same age-old human malady, ego! Around the bucket, left as penance for individual and collective sins, beggarly specks are buzzing around: poor honeybees and decimated yellow wasps, unnecessarily ill-famed for giving bulbous swollen noses and lips to we humans.

If you don't mean to be an intruder they are unmindful of your presence, like mine just a couple of feet away. Even the angriest of them always follows the rules of the game, never attack till attacked. So even if an angry one happens to perch on your nose, it won't bite unless you get panicked, and transfer your fear to the tiny helicopter on your nose by taking a swipe at it. Then it becomes a matter of flight versus fight scenario. Even in forests, animals basically attack only after our panic gets hurled at them through our scared eyes and gestures. It lets loose a tiny chaotic storm in the tea cup, which may result in swollen lips, bloody screeches on skin or even an end to dear life.

Coming back to the bucket business and the honeybees. It’s scorching heat. The spring has died. The real spring has of course died long back, yet it survives metaphorically at least on calendar. But here it has met its end even on the calendar. The summers are ripe to the core. The flowers are withered, burnt to pieces in fact. However, life has to continue till flowers bloom once again. With temperature over 40 degrees and flowers gone, these honeybees look like desert travelers busy around an oasis. The surroundings are almost on fire.

The water level in the vessel was low, so many of them slipped down the edges while attempting to take tiny swigs of water. I feel like a savior who turned out to be a murderer. Anyway, one can use love, care and help in any corner of the world. It polishes the aesthetics of humanity. One must never miss a little practice to be more humane. Goodness is qualitative in nature. It doesn't need quantity to get certified as a good deed. The main thing is one's emotion. So here I take my quantum jump in evolution by continuously filling the bucket to the brim so that these little thirsty visitors safely perch on the upper edge and drink water without risking their lives. The heat is so much that grandpa sun soaks more water than the entire beehive, so I have to replenish it almost every hour to save the water from going too deep in the well. They get water, I become more aware of the godliness in me. Profit both ways, vow. Bah, what a fruitful day!

In the beehive, thirsty neighbors beg for a sip of water. The temperature in shade is 46 degree Celsius. Everything is on fire. It's a matter of fight or perish for the honeybee hive in the Marua (Marjoram) and wild rose thicket by the compound wall.

As it happens everywhere, the bravest take up the challenge and volunteer to keep the chances alive by collecting water. So the “water collector” bees scout for some water source. In this case, it happens to be the bucket left around our tap and faucet in the yard corner. I keep this bucket of water all day to help them in this struggle for survival. But then as I told earlier, quite a lot are drowning in their extra effort to retrieve water. So I try my level best to keep the water full to the brim so that they perch on the edges and take sips. Even this isn’t helping much though, so now I have put a cloth on the bucket. They sip on the moisture and there is less risk of drowning. So as of now they seem to like the water source and give a happy, excited buzz to slurp up as much as possible. Just imagine the scale of the fight to survive. These water couriers fly back to the scorched hive and regurgitate water so that the bees there suck it up. The latter in turn spit it out over the hive. All this is to cool it down and save larvae from dying.

As per the intangible laws of the existential forces, the water collector bees come to know and detect the problem when the colony is under the threat of scorching, killing heat. Water collectors are the itinerant types, the gutsy adventurers. They are extroverts and don't lie lazily when the brood-nest is under the threat of excessive heat. They are just on the look-out for water deficit symptoms and straightaway start collecting water to maintain the hive's temperature.

This seems to be a lesser sacrifice as the bees are even known to commit suicide to save the colony from dangerous mites. Imagine we humans love to weave endless tales of our sacrifice and struggles to raise kids and meet our duties. The endless spools of our stories of struggles are meant to earn biggest trophies of praise and certification in the eyes of society. Little do we realize that the very same thing, in fact hundreds of times bigger on the scale of selfless love and care, is taking place unsung, unknown at each and every step around us. Observing these makes us far more humble and obliged for our privileges and tones downs our ego born of the so called duties and deeds.

The researchers have found that when it becomes unbearable under extreme heat, the worker bees start soliciting by “walking up to the face of another bee, contacting the bee's antennae with her own and then extending her tongue between the mouthparts of the other bee.”

This distressed water seeking puts the water collectors into action. So they scout for a suitable water source and get busy in water-retrieval efforts to manage the hive’s temperature. All this of course is done to maintain their survival as honeybees collectively, not as individuals. They lessen the temperature below the deadly threshold that can dehydrate the bee larvae thus killing them. Hundreds perish in the water-fetching operation of course. But they don’t bother. They exist in the form of their dear beehive.

The researchers say that the effort to survive is never enough for them. Apart from the water, which gets spread over the hive, some extra cautious and wise honeybees stockpile additional moisture in the brood comb. And to take it further on the scale of management, some of them store water in their bellies as well. Their life and living is at the collective level unlike us.

Hope next time when you see a honeybee, you will look at it with more respect and plant more trees and flowers to make this a sweet, honeyed world. Lot of bitterness going around, eh!

Bear the Storm, Smile once it’s Gone and Cherish Love

 

Sometimes there are testing times for your faith and philosophy of life. You want to keep them safe but things going out of loop point to the contrary. High time that you allow the chaos to pass over you. You will find yourself under dust once it is over. But you have the chance to smile again and gather the scattered pieces of your faith to assemble your gear again. Victory lies not in beating the storm. It lies in not being blown away. Oftentimes just staying there means victory.

Finding things too tough and out of your control? Bend down sister, allow the storm to pass. Storms are aberrations, not routine. Peace is.

Even the most horribly mixed up knot in a jumbled up mass of thread has the easiest way out. Well, it may not appear to our eyes. But definitely solution lies buried undiscovered in the apparent mess. So basically it is about our failure to discover. Funny part is, a problem cannot exist without a very viable solution. Solution and problem are the two sides of the same coin.

Mind you, there are always easiest of routes to the toughest of destinations. Every hard situation has the softest of a solution also. But the easiest path lies buried under the dust of tougher routes. So there is no hard problem in the real sense. Our solutions make them so. When in the face of a tough situation, blame your solution not the situation.

Brothers and sisters, I understand there are situations in life when your mind just doesn't see any solution in a difficult phase of life. Kindly start with an assumption that things will turn for the better. Then without wasting time and energy on becoming too serious, just put yourself on autopilot. Simply allow things to happen to you. Just persist there. At the lowest morsels.

It’s a very intelligent universe out there to help you survive and sustain. Look with hope and love into the infinite starlit distances at night. The ‘primordial will’ will reciprocate. You will get rewards as opportunities will grab you slowly, silently without sounding miraculous. But for all that you have to be there on the stage of life. So preserve yourself even if it means just lying there.

When the sun shines again, you will feel the warmth of love pervading your mind, body and soul as you smile with tears of pride and gratitude.  

Faceless Gods by Sandeep Dahiya

 

It is a long story, slowly moving like a broad river in its journey through the plains. It is just an effort to highlight some sober facts like the true meaning of nationalism, religion, politics and humanism. The work has very sharp political connotations. But I would like to clarify that while espousing the cause of clean politics, I have taken very dagger-sharp cuts at certain political forces whose brand of politics results in reversing the basic meanings of religion and nationalism. Also, it is for sure that all such literary efforts from my side are just a battle cry against bad politics, rather than going against any particular political stream. By having creative cuts at the razor-sharp edges of most of the political blocks in India, I have tried to carve out a straight-faced deity whom people have in mind when they envision their interests in the safe hands of the state. 

 

One of the characters is a beautiful girl named Phulva, the gypsy girl. Through the trials and tribulations of her beautiful path through the society of the settlers, I have tried to depict how these almost stateless, religionless people come into friction with the sedentary society to create sometimes ecstatic and oftentimes tragic episodes. She smiles like a lotus in the perilous waters of a muddy pond. Also accompanied is the pleasantly sweet-sour path of the now-vanishing nomadic culture that once caressed the settled society with the suddenness of a fresh and fragrant gust of wind. When the gypsies pitch up their campsite on the fringe of settled—and the so-called civilized society—always there are showers and sparkles as the merging fronts of two different entities rub past each other.

 

The main protagonist is a lame Hindu religioner. Well so much for his Villainy! But there are reasons for badness. After detailing the circumstantial forces, which put him on the path of selfishness—and ultimately his brand of utilitarian Hinduism—I have tried to depict him under the light of multifaceted sun of faith. Through the testing admixture of religion, spirituality, blind faith and superstition, I have tried to churn out substantive meanings, which have eluded the mankind puzzled by conflicting dilemmas of faith, superstition, ritualism, or the religiondom overall. At the other end is his guru, the man with the real, selfless, utility-less mission of spiritual awakening. Through this contrasting set of religious personalities, I have made a humble effort to point out a little arc along the infinitely drawn out compassionate folds and contours of Hinduism.    

 

Heartily mixed up in the silent pace of the tale is the old Muslim fisherman. The silently brooding—and expertly following the principals of humanism—frail man plays a far-far weightier role in the tale with his effortless maneuvers instigated by a heart lit by the unsung lore of true humanity. The man from Bengal, a direct victim of the partition-time butcheries, carries along the seemingly insignificant path with firm, humanistic strides.  

 

Then there are smaller players: the disciples, good and bad dogs, stoically suffering animals like donkeys in the caravans, and plainly villainous bunch of thugs who can always put their foul smell in any fragrant orchard—all jutted against the exciting admixture of fate and human deeds.

 

It is a highly literary work. The target audience is all those who love real humanism devoid of all misinterpretations and miscalculations.

Love your Challenges and you Love Life

 

Most of our struggles, which we presume to be exceptional, are mere routine challenges. Look through the cloud of struggle and all you will see is a trail of everyday challenges. So smile. It is happening to all and everywhere. You haven’t been picked out solely to prove your worth through exceptional push and pull. Creation is simply an ever-evolving checker-work going on and on with challenges and counterpoints. Existential forces have nothing against you particularly to rob you of your loving self.   

Napoleon Hill: “Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.”

These routine challenges are what push and propel the onward march of creation at countless fronts. There is no escape. Accept the process of shaping your destiny, smile, admit the challenges and unlearn to see them as struggles, and add to the pool of love in you.

You can wince with frustration as a struggling beast. However, as a human being progressing by tackling routine challenges you can smile as well. And a smile holds the best prospects for your real self.

Well, look at the play of nature around. You will invariably see that the so called struggle is just a means of strengthening and prevailing over odds.

Generally people are struggling only, like majority of us are. All because we have a tendency to see our own petty challenges as exceptional hurdles. Believe me, very rarely people suffer in exceptional ways. We have a commonality in getting tested.

These are basically challenges that are the fuelling force of creation to keep the things evolving. Put it out of the scheme and the mammoth engine of creation stops. Ironically, we construe challenges as struggle, lose our smile in the effort, forget our intrinsic loving self, and come out fretting, frowning and fearful.

As you see through the challenges, you will see the rays of empathy surfacing, which the apparent struggling self was subduing. Now you can relate to other's challenges and with these feelings you realize your compassionate being.

Love the bad road of your life because this is what basically keeps us going. Without it you lose your motivation. It is your fuel, instructor and passageway all mixed in one.

Be thankful to God that life is not just a smooth road, taking us uninterestingly to a plain destination! Guys be grateful that it is pot-holed and bumpy. The vehicle of our life gets jolts and jerks that are in fact the lifelines for our material and physical being. It tests the vehicle of our existence. The latter responds to the little tricks put up against it and this see-saw battle releases energy for the engine of our survival.

Have you seen rotting, rusting vehicle chassis in dump-yards? They are at rest. They don’t move and aren’t thus part of the expansion of the cosmic energy. One is alive as long as one is connected to the threads of cosmic expansion, be it a leave on a twig, a tree, an elephant or a mosquito. It’s only the movement. You are relevant as long as you are moving in the scheme of things.

So guys if your road appears bumpier than others, just feel the sea-storm of energy your system is creating not just for your own survival but also for the common cause of creation and endurance at the universal level. As a struggler you contribute far more to a great unseen cause than it appears on the common plain of your material existence.

Most of the time, we take it as torture, while in reality all this is meant to shape the wooden crate of our destiny, to make it a fine, presentable chest out of the random wood lying around. Try to find out the nuances of the process. Creation is painful. Ask a mother when she gives birth to a child. Ask the seed when it bursts to unleash the potential of a mammoth tree in its small womb.

So you might think that God has been always busy hammering the wood. Tonk, tonk, phutt, phutt, buuum, buuum. Lot of noise. And you crying foul. He Himself must be wincing with unbearable pain as you cry foul and blame Him for being so merciless and unkind. God but is doing His duty. He has to have both smile and tears, for they lose their meaning in the absence of each other. Thus it’s all blame game on Him and little appreciation.

God puts down nails into our wooden being to shape the box of our destiny. Otherwise we are simply shapeless mass. We are just undefined dead wood without His woodwork. Making is painful and laborious. It’s not a cakewalk. So we keep on crying with pain and curse Him for his mercilessness.

Making is highly painful buddy. It draws blood and fetches tears of remorse even in His eyes for being so accepting to the painful side of existence. He but cannot remove pain from universe because then joy will lose its meaning.  He cannot chuck out darkness, for light will become meaningless. But believe me every nail writes the script of many, many pleasant moments in future.

Love your struggle. Accept your pains. Be a bit kind to yourself when you fail. Only a fall carries the full measure of a rise. See through your tears at the impending victory waiting at a distance. Love your labor on the hot sands of your destiny because these are the milestones that will define and make your victory meaningful and worth it.

Comparison: The Enemy of your Loving Self

 

A lot many of us are unhappy—and naturally less loving—because of the perpetual feeling of loss and failure. Well, a lot of it has to do with our comparison of our situation and standing with others instead of the actual placement of things. Looking at the brighter suns, we get blinded and go into low self-esteem and self-reproach. It makes us terribly discontented and unhappy. To make it still scarier, it’s the worst diagnosis for one’s loving self.

Lyanla Vanzant: “Comparison is an act of violence against the self.”

We have this terrible propensity to add to the weight of sadness and pain inside us. And the simplest mode of adding to our woes is unnecessarily comparing us to others. By prioritizing comparison over your uninfluenced action, you surrender a part of your free will. It is a vital resource. You just jab your own confidence by bruising your self-love. A detached attitude gives you freedom. Comparison basically is a bug that sickens your spirits. Long before you beat others, you berate your own self. You get into sickened imaginations and enter a whirlpool of impracticality.

Comparison is the most irksome short-cut to unhappiness. Almost 90% of the time, we are comparing ourselves with people better placed than us. No wonder a crippling feeling of inadequacy sinks in. Under the glorious sun of their hyper-achievement, you writhe with your somewhat real, but majority of imagined, inadequacies.

Well, the imperious combo of compare and compete beats the hell out of our compassionate self. I am not saying don't compete. Do it with all your capability. But remove the indoctrinated vice of comparison from it. All we can do is to compare our former self with the present one to see the degree of change. Be your own comparison.

Gerald Jampolsky: “Love is the total absence of fear. Love asks no questions. Its natural state is one of extension and expansion, not comparison and measurement.”

So walk slowly, look within, and reach your goal with a smile; you will beat the fastest runner. Qualitatively I mean, since walking to the goal-post with a lovely smile and loadful of loving self makes you the real winner. We just need to change the evaluation of victory. The system may take a generation to bring out such qualitative changes; meanwhile, we can begin with the self.

The moment you grasp the meaning and purpose of your life, you become indispensable for the scheme of things around. You become a requirement for this whole universe. You are no longer a burden for this cosmos to drag on. You just don’t survive accidentally. Yours becomes a planned journey, shaping and reshaping the environment not just for meeting your end, but also carrying the effects that go onto touch many lives around.

The sea cannot survive without its tiny drop. Suppose a drop goes missing, the sea gets a hole in its heart and it just cannot afford to miss its drop. Similarly, this universe cannot sustain the hole left by you. It sustains by you as much as you sustain by it. The only condition being that you live consciously, that you know what you are doing, that you pick an option only after deliberating over it. In this manner you bring full justice to your consciousness.

From chance living to well-meant steps purposeful for the self and the larger humanity, all it takes is a small realization. Just look back and see the trail of decisions you have taken in life. How many of these were taken consciously, you being fully aware of the range of options? How many of these were just pushed on you by the random happenings and chance occurrences?

Unfortunately, a vast majority of our options are born of random throws by chance factors and we just grabbing some involuntarily. And a life dictated by uncalculated, random options and opportunities, hits and mis-hits ends in a confusing travel across the endless twists, turns, U-turns and back outs from dead ended streets like in the puzzle game. We get wasted and wearied in endless turns, re-turns and U-turns, always pushed on by the random factors that happen to spin out of the lot. No wonder, even after travelling a whole lifetime, we are still near the point of start. We feel we haven’t done anything at all. It’s the puzzling zigzag. It cannot be called a path leading to your destiny.

Across the serpentine criss-crossing and entangled turns of random paths and choices, there are most suitable paths laid out for all of us. All we need to do is to start living consciously. Don’t allow generalizations drawn out of comparison of your situation with others to be your guiding principle. Walk slowly but mindfully. You may see others hurtling fast on the racetrack around you, raising dust, crashing into sidelines, shouting with trophies at some corners, but mind you, no journey is complete and meaningful if one doesn’t feel contentment at the end. No journey across the blizzard of accidental turns can result in peace that you are looking for at the end of the day.

So plan your journey even if it means walking slowly. You can even delay your onslaught on the exams or other important tasks of life by a year if you decide to go into self reflection, weighing your abilities and limitations, all this while keeping a close look at the competition. It’s better to watch from a distance first. It’s better to walk slowly if you know what you are doing.

Mindless dash towards the finish line has no meaning at all. Stop if you have been running. Pause if you have been mindlessly allowing yourself to be held by the collar by the monster called life. Sit down if you have been standing for too long. And then look around and think. Look at the zigzag pattern of your senseless run so far. The actual distance covered will surely be very short.

Walk slowly like a wise man. A wise man walking slowly will still beat a reckless sprinter at the end of the day. It’s better to walk slowly to the finish-line, with your breath still under control, your legs still able to carry you. The end becomes meaningful, preparing you for the next journey. Running out of breath to the end line, and crashing straightaway has no meaning. This is no victory. This is not the destination. It’s not meeting the goal. It simply means collapsing. The whole journey turns meaningless.

Victory means being able to smile after reaching the destination. So stop, look back, see the mindless work and the stampede, pause for a moment, look ahead and walk to your sweet goal with a smile on your lips. You become a winner instantly.

Unhappiness: Poison for Self-love

 

Willie Nelson: “We create our own unhappiness. The purpose of suffering is to help us understand we are the ones who cause it.”

Whole lot of unhappiness is born of comparing your situation to others. It's your short-cut to instant unhappiness. By instinct we compare ourselves to those better off while overlooking millions of unfortunates.

Dostoevsky: “The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.”

Unhappiness is the state of forgetting primarily yourself for what you are. We simply allow unhappiness to sink over us. It's a symptom of self-loathing instead of what others have done to you.

Marcus Brigstocke: “I realized that to compare your insides with other people's outsides leads to unhappiness.”

You must be feeling that all the preachy talk lays too much emphasis on how to be happy. Well then, we take a bit different route. We can achieve better results by handling unhappiness.

Enjoy being the frog king in a shit hole; it's better than being a slave in heaven. It directly cuts on the pool of unhappiness, brightening your chances of loving primarily yourself and loving all as a consequence. It’s all the more important because unhappiness straightaway stabs at your intrinsic loving nature. The challenge here is to stab unhappiness in a nonviolent way. There is a methodology.

Apart from all the shit happening around, life is supposed to be a big, fat and interesting book. Let it be an exciting story, not because others applaud it, but basically because you own it, write it and enjoy it. Don't die every moment to see appreciation in the eyes of those around. If that is the expectation, then forget it. It won't happen. People around you will give you more reasons to be sad rather be happy. Others will prefer to see your miserable face instead of ever-grinning, full of joy joker. Not because they are sadistic in nature, just that it helps them in somehow digesting their own miseries. So at least don't hold any expectation on that front.

The appreciation has to come basically from within you. So let it be a very fat book of your follies and little, little triumphs. Let there be unending trails of anecdotes that make you the champion of your small world. Forget about being a world champion. This world is as small as you in comparison to the cosmos. Both are puny. Laugh at it, if it laughs at you. Quite interestingly, this world has limitations, but not you. There are no limitations on you to extend the world within, inside your smallness of routine life, tiny errands, short walks, little losses, tiny gains and stable-unstable relations.

Live more. Like a frog that just jumped into the murky, muddy, mossy green puddle of water. This little puddle itself won't be there after a week. Summers are unsparing. It's boiling. But does it stop the frog king from walloping and taking fantastic breaststrokes in the filthy water? Does it stop the love-lorn fella from croaking dandily and woo the lady of its dream? It doesn't because it's just living in a lifeful 'consciousness', not 'self-consciousness' like we humans who impose 'self' on natural 'consciousness' so heavily to make life a burden.

'Ego' is the feeling of 'I am'. 'I' overshadows 'am', the state of 'just being', of 'consciousness', of living fully, of gliding in the present without the burden of past and worries of future. Nurture 'am-ness'. Water it. It will prosper. Consciousness will spread healthily as you nurture am-ness. Unburden the enjoyment of life from the heavyweight of 'I' and woo your mistress, the life, even in the dirtiest waters like the king of the puddle, the frog. Just 'be'.

Write more chapters in the book of your life. Not as 'I' but by 'being' there. More the chapters, the better it is! Don't bother if these are just scribbled with amateur verve. It's your creation, and as a parent you will hardly be judgmental about it. If a particular chapter goes stale, wind it up and save your book from getting boring. Start a new chapter. We are the writers of the book of life. Keep it interesting! 

Life turns interesting, not because there are exciting things around. It’s interesting if you ‘find’ it interesting. The stage is lying neutral for anyone around. How you see it and how you decide to jump on it with your own antics, playing the protagonist of your life, is all that matters.

Comparison: The Enemy of your Loving Self

A lot many of us are unhappy—and naturally less loving—because of the perpetual feeling of loss and failure. Well, a lot of it has to do with our comparison of our situation and standing with others instead of the actual placement of things. Looking at the brighter suns, we get blinded and go into low self-esteem and self-reproach. It makes us terribly discontented and unhappy. To make it still scarier, it’s the worst diagnosis for one’s loving self.

Lyanla Vanzant: “Comparison is an act of violence against the self.”

We have this terrible propensity to add to the weight of sadness and pain inside us. And the simplest mode of adding to our woes is unnecessarily comparing us to others. By prioritizing comparison over your uninfluenced action, you surrender a part of your free will. It is a vital resource. You just jab your own confidence by bruising your self-love. A detached attitude gives you freedom. Comparison basically is a bug that sickens your spirits. Long before you beat others, you berate your own self. You get into sickened imaginations and enter a whirlpool of impracticality.

Comparison is the most irksome short-cut to unhappiness. Almost 90% of the time, we are comparing ourselves with people better placed than us. No wonder a crippling feeling of inadequacy sinks in. Under the glorious sun of their hyper-achievement, you writhe with your somewhat real, but majority of imagined, inadequacies.

Well, the imperious combo of compare and compete beats the hell out of our compassionate self. I am not saying don't compete. Do it with all your capability. But remove the indoctrinated vice of comparison from it. All we can do is to compare our former self with the present one to see the degree of change. Be your own comparison.

Gerald Jampolsky: “Love is the total absence of fear. Love asks no questions. Its natural state is one of extension and expansion, not comparison and measurement.”

So walk slowly, look within, and reach your goal with a smile; you will beat the fastest runner. Qualitatively I mean, since walking to the goal-post with a lovely smile and loadful of loving self makes you the real winner. We just need to change the evaluation of victory. The system may take a generation to bring out such qualitative changes; meanwhile, we can begin with the self.

The moment you grasp the meaning and purpose of your life, you become indispensable for the scheme of things around. You become a requirement for this whole universe. You are no longer a burden for this cosmos to drag on. You just don’t survive accidentally. Yours becomes a planned journey, shaping and reshaping the environment not just for meeting your end, but also carrying the effects that go onto touch many lives around.

The sea cannot survive without its tiny drop. Suppose a drop goes missing, the sea gets a hole in its heart and it just cannot afford to miss its drop. Similarly, this universe cannot sustain the hole left by you. It sustains by you as much as you sustain by it. The only condition being that you live consciously, that you know what you are doing, that you pick an option only after deliberating over it. In this manner you bring full justice to your consciousness.

From chance living to well-meant steps purposeful for the self and the larger humanity, all it takes is a small realization. Just look back and see the trail of decisions you have taken in life. How many of these were taken consciously, you being fully aware of the range of options? How many of these were just pushed on you by the random happenings and chance occurrences?

Unfortunately, a vast majority of our options are born of random throws by chance factors and we just grabbing some involuntarily. And a life dictated by uncalculated, random options and opportunities, hits and mis-hits ends in a confusing travel across the endless twists, turns, U-turns and back outs from dead ended streets like in the puzzle game. We get wasted and wearied in endless turns, re-turns and U-turns, always pushed on by the random factors that happen to spin out of the lot. No wonder, even after travelling a whole lifetime, we are still near the point of start. We feel we haven’t done anything at all. It’s the puzzling zigzag. It cannot be called a path leading to your destiny.

Across the serpentine criss-crossing and entangled turns of random paths and choices, there are most suitable paths laid out for all of us. All we need to do is to start living consciously. Don’t allow generalizations drawn out of comparison of your situation with others to be your guiding principle. Walk slowly but mindfully. You may see others hurtling fast on the racetrack around you, raising dust, crashing into sidelines, shouting with trophies at some corners, but mind you, no journey is complete and meaningful if one doesn’t feel contentment at the end. No journey across the blizzard of accidental turns can result in peace that you are looking for at the end of the day.

So plan your journey even if it means walking slowly. You can even delay your onslaught on the exams or other important tasks of life by a year if you decide to go into self reflection, weighing your abilities and limitations, all this while keeping a close look at the competition. It’s better to watch from a distance first. It’s better to walk slowly if you know what you are doing.

Mindless dash towards the finish line has no meaning at all. Stop if you have been running. Pause if you have been mindlessly allowing yourself to be held by the collar by the monster called life. Sit down if you have been standing for too long. And then look around and think. Look at the zigzag pattern of your senseless run so far. The actual distance covered will surely be very short.

Walk slowly like a wise man. A wise man walking slowly will still beat a reckless sprinter at the end of the day. It’s better to walk slowly to the finish-line, with your breath still under control, your legs still able to carry you. The end becomes meaningful, preparing you for the next journey. Running out of breath to the end line, and crashing straightaway has no meaning. This is no victory. This is not the destination. It’s not meeting the goal. It simply means collapsing. The whole journey turns meaningless.

Victory means being able to smile after reaching the destination. So stop, look back, see the mindless work and the stampede, pause for a moment, look ahead and walk to your sweet goal with a smile on your lips. You become a winner instantly.

Love entails even the Lesser Evil

 

Be less dangerous and less hateful. Put down your dagger and pick up a stick. Keep the possibilities of repair and redemption. All these are nothing but lease deeds to see you through the turbulence, till you come out of the fog after some experiences and see for yourself the truth. Without real blood on your clothes and scars on your conscience, the journey to unearth the real loving you will be easier, I tell you.

If pushed to the wall, and with all options out, you can still choose lesser wickedness. That mind you still keeps you on the path of salvation.

The ancient days of real bloody hand-to-hand battle are over. Then daggers were more suitable than sticks. They drew more blood and made you more threatening. These are but more of social battle times presently. Instead of drawing blood, it’s about catapulting ego, anger, jealousy and complexes. It’s no longer about bloody injuries since these might land one on the wrong side of law. It’s about law-abiding invisible whiplashing.

An advice here. As you set out to tame and slay the real and perceived enemies in the social battle, you can very well afford to carry a stick instead of a dagger. The dagger will go too deep into somebody’s ego to inflict a permanent wound. Staying there as a painful milestone to instigate the carrier to work and connive against you in future. If it is not possible to drop the weapons altogether, carry a stick at the most.

Instead of calling somebody bastard, thus inflicting a dagger wound, we can say your father must have been away when you were conceived. Hope it again doesn’t sound like a dagger wound. Well, I mean to say, we can try to bruise the skin only, to pacify our ego, with the stick of our words, instead of stabbing the heart with a dagger. A mark on the skin is less painful. It will not leave a permanent scar. Time heals everything. But it takes some more time, and sometimes it lasts more than a lifetime, to reach the extent of the dagger’s farthest point.

Social battles are very funny ones. Almost flimsy. So why carry lethal weapons. There are hardly any permanent enemies. Scenes and stages are shifting. These are basically funny little stage shows. People hardly care about who the last paper enemy was. So carry a namesake stick. We need not even hold it in our hands most of the time. Just keep it in reserve tied to your belt. You will feel like a well-equipped soldier ready to tackle the enemies in the social battle.

Dagger is suitable for hate, plain anger or for the unholy, dark duty to kill like in war. But how long can one keep the fire of hate going? Long before the fire consumes our last enemy, it burns the carrier body. Its quality is to burn only. More importantly, it hardly differentiates between the carrier body and the target. So beware you all who have the propensity to burn in anger at the slightest match-strike of tiny irritants. It's better to be irritated only, instead of going full throttle with anger and hate. And a stick is a suitable weapon for irritation. It's a lesser weapon. Irritation also is a smaller fire. It is as much less harmful to the target as it is to the carrier.

The ultimate goal of course is to go without any weapon at all. And dropping irritation to still less harmful and gentler reactions is the aim. All this goes in parallel with the degree of control we have over our mind. Again it boils down to training the mind. And sitting in silence and looking at the real self daily is the first step in that direction. 

With softer weapons in your hands, the loving self inside you will be the first one to drop its guard. It will embrace you with gentlest force the moment you drop down even this flimsy weapon. At this point your loving self feels no bounds. Limitless vistas of freedom open before you. You enjoy unconditional joy. Do you still have any doubts about attaining enlightenment?

Love Reflects in the Mirror of Pause

 

Albert Einstein: “He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”

Most of the time we feel that only moving and running define the journey. Wait. It's a great mirage. It's generally the pause that resets new choices, fresh options and possibilities to define the path. It allows the chaos to sink in and give you clarity of perspective. Hitting the pause button is often more paying than the start button. Simply because such pauses are really creative. In pause you simply rest on the seat of soul, the real you, the essentially loving, compassionate, kind and generous being. All these are always in us, but we tend to forget as we huff and puff without rest and respite.

Bruce Feiler said, “Take a walk with a turtle and behold the world in a pause.”

Pause is the pathway for your heart to map out its route. It draws you closer to the soul. You listen to the unified notes of the ultimate song and the melody of love.

When things are spinning out of control, pause, the basic building block of patience, is the remedy. You just see things more clearly. So leave the chaotic scene for some time. Soak in silence and solitude. Most of the times, things simply get along just because we are no longer poking our nose like a futile struggle in quagmire.

Life is full of crazy, ugly and complicated things. These create the so-called crisis. But pause button is always in our hands. The bugs of disorderliness lose the oxygen they thrive upon. It's a great button in your hands, I tell you. Not that I am asking you to put yourself into pause in front of a train. That is foolishness. To jump out of the tracks will be normal precautionary reaction. Pause applies to so many unnecessary mental webs that hardly leave any effect on your situation. It saves energy. Pause is the silence when you hear the voice of your real self, your closest buddy, your craziest lover who never betrays you.

Jerzy Kosinski: “The principle of art is to pause, not bypass.”

Why do you think nature has given us sleep? It's the most rewarding time for your physical and mental being. Your damaged cells get repaired. You get rejuvenated for the next day's wear and tear. Well, that is what pause does to you in your life's struggle.

You must have observed that in a turbulent pond, beautiful interplay of white domes of cloud in the sky doesn’t reflect clearly. Well, same is the condition with our minds and on a larger scale in society and civilizations. Just like the sky shines clearly in the calm waters of a pond, truth shines in a well-paused, restful moment.

We have to understand the value of rest and pause because it’s the mute button that helps us in realizing our essentially loving nature. In stampede we forget and the fight or flight instincts bring out animalistic reactions, which over a period become habits, almost first nature, and we start identifying ourselves with these reactions only. But let me tell you, reactions never define your essential being. They are mere flimsy waves on the surface. 

You run after a thing, struggle and toil for it to the chronic pain of your bones, and much deservedly you land up at the destination. You have achieved your thing. It’s the time to cherish its worth, its value for you. It’s time to celebrate and pause and allow the feeling to sink in. What value the victory carries if you cannot even spare the time and pause to allow the feeling to seep into the perspiring pores of your skin, allowing cool calmness to kiss the limits of your soul. But it almost never happens. The pause, the rest is ever elusive.

You achieve your target and the thing turns out to be valueless. The things, goals and destinations that you get, achieve and reach become almost insignificant the moment you nail it. It’s always a struggle for more in future. The dream value, which was earlier carried by the things and destinations where you stand now, shifts again to some another milestone in future. So again we drop our present and run after future. Consequently, it’s never living in the present.

Only living in present can provide spontaneity to your compassionate instincts to curb down the customary reactions born of hate, hurt, jealousy and anger.

So much so for the futile chase! The mirage keeps on shifting on the hot sands of our bloodied battle. And we run, madly, trampling the things and the moments that are the only possessions we have in reality and could have enjoyed, and rush for future, for virtual things in mind, in the form of ever-escaping criteria of values, goals and destinations. No wonder, we never live our present. We hardly enjoy the victories and rewards our sweat has fetched us. We abandon the real rewards. We trample the true trophies of the present.

You get the thing and it loses its value. No surprise that we feel so deprived, poor, cheated, underachieved and unhappy at the end of the journey when we fall. We hate any talk of pause in life. Little do we realize, a restless run results in a fatigued, huffing fall at a time when legs cannot carry the weight anymore, eyes fail to see the light any further and heart gives up even the last hope. There can’t be a bigger, more painful defeat.

A run or a walk is well managed with intervals of pause and rest at the milestones we cross. It reinvigorates you for the next leg of the journey.

Pause is blissful. It gives you the beautiful gift of accepting your present. A man, an animal, a vehicle, a civilization or for that matter anything, all need pause at intervals to maintain the journey, to save a fatigue and burnout. Unfortunately that is what we are not doing. Individually and collectively, we are headed down the precipice. The mad onslaught of modern civilization, with its plunder of natural resources and unchecked technological growth, needs a pause, for survival, for continuation of the journey.

Don’t you think that our mad rush has given cancer and tumors to mother earth? Human ailments are simply a spillover of the disease we have been giving to Mother Nature. We are far advanced down the technological lane. Let’s pause now. First allow the horizontal spread of the utilities and benefits to the poorest of the poor. Let’s put a pause on population growth rates, exploitation of natural resources, scientific spurts and industrial productions. The modern civilization has gone too far with its unchecked growth. Unchecked growth is self-destructive. It’s nothing but cancer. The planet is carrying a cancer now. It needs to be checked. Let there be a pause, please! 

Love the Art of Simply doing Things

 

Long before you try to be a champion in others’ eyes, try to be a superwoman and world-beater in your own ways. Well, it holds the key to real success. Recognition by those around is simply a natural outcome, a mere side-reward like you have visibility as a flame throws light in the dark. 

Don’t do everything just for money, rewards, recognition, name and fame. As we feel, most of our doings are just blind pursuits for something more important expected at the end of doing. Doing thus becomes secondary, the outcome. The reward takes the centre stage, and everything before that turns a stale, perspiring and frustrating struggle. The process of doing becomes traumatic.

By subjugating the process of doing to some unknown outcome in future, we pawn happiness and intrinsic satisfaction, which simply doing could have been, against the shifting, blinding mirage on the hot sands in future. Try to make doing primary. Love simply the process of doing. It holds the key to your most lovable self. It’s like casting the chains away. It lightens your burden. Not only it will light up your soul, the outcomes, whether you care about them or not, will just follow with a bang.

If you do something just for some specific outcomes, it’s not doing, rather it’s some barter against the drops of your sweat. It’s labor, a menial work, mere slogging. You are not the master. Just try to do a few things without caring for the material and social rewards. You will know that you own the act of doing. It becomes pure and unadulterated. You own it and you are the master of it. Once you master something, given the potential human soul has, the byproducts will drop like sweat autumn windfalls, fully ripe, without any effort. That is the cascading effect of pure doing.

There are hundreds of posts on my blogs apart from a few books that I have authored. I write not for viewership stats or adsense money. My reward is the numerous trophies I gather while simply writing. I write because I love doing it. There is no bigger reward than being able to do something you really love and like doing.

A small publisher trusts me and publishes my books. He likes my writing and invests some money to publish my books. I help him to the little extent that I don’t take any royalties. My books sell in just hundreds of copies, rarely touching the four-figure mark. And even for that I don’t expect any royalty. Still I write for months to complete a book. Simple thing is, I just love doing it. As I work on my books, without any restraints on publisher- and commerce-ordained limitations, I feel like flying in an open sky. It’s like being a painter having a completely empty canvas and possessing all the options to experiment with colors and shapes. This is what you get, the rewards, your breath of freedom, your space and your happiness.

Every moment is like holding a big trophy. And believe me, if you immerse in doing something just for the sake of doing it to the core, you warp space-time continuum to the tune and frequency of your doing, and rewards follow, whether you accept these or not is another matter. Most importantly, the doings that bring an instant soul-sweetening sensation rarely give you money and material rewards. They carry the intangible rewards of nourishing the soul.

Just try any of these and see how does it feel: Helping a stranger, who has lost her wallet on a crowded platform, with a hundred rupee bill that can help her out of a hell lot of trouble; stopping to take an old hand and help her to cross the road; taking a stranded stray puppy out of the drain; a smile from an unknown face just because you did only this much to keep the elevator door open, helping her to catch onto the precious moment, etc., etc.

The feeling you get instantly is sufficient to overpower any vanity of earning millions and getting gold medals. Most importantly, such small, small doings help you hone the art of humanity in you. Just like you pump iron in gym to harden your muscles, such little, little acts of just doing without expecting any rewards will hone the muscles of your conscience.

Goodness can be practiced. It can be made a habit. Start with such small things where your egoistic, self-driven workflow won’t revolt to begin with. Very soon you will turn out to be the best of a human being. And who is a good human being? Well, basically she is happy. And at the top of it all, she is love and care personified.

It will also surely help you in honing the art of perfect 'doing': smart, suave and marketable.

Looking forward to learn the art of balanced "doing"? Do you find yourself falling off the rope usually? Well, you might be lacking in the art of doing. Most of the time you find it's underdone, and the consequent target misses, falling off the mark, and more importantly, the rumbling shadow of self-doubt, reproach, frustration, helplessness and even cynicism. Other times, it gets overdone, and its precipitous after effects, falling off the cliff with the overdrive, giving more despair than not doing at all, and resultant efforts to undo, to chip down the extra, and getting into a zone totally crazy beyond the extremes of overdoing and underdoing, landing in a zone where you no longer know whether it's a tragedy or a comedy.

Wishing you all the best in mastering the suave art of just doing, finely balanced, perfectly nailed and expertly nuanced!

A Simple Test to Understand the Value of your Softness

 

In this universe, there is delightful softness, a charming pliability and sweet-flowing malleability that allows this cosmic game of interactive transformations to the limit of infinity. We are cast in the image of that pliability. Love courses through the soft tissues of our being. Love is soul's blood. Softness has a mystical innocence and cozy vulnerability that sustains the consciousness unlike a stone. Well, that is what makes us humans. Don't mistake your softness for weakness. It's the seat of your sensitivities and loving kindness.

Softness has its mystical sublimity and grandeur. It's the medium through which love spreads. Rigidities hit a roadblock in the medium. So feel proud of your softness and sensitivities. It only proves your liveliness. Mind you, many a time feminine fragility is simply a camouflage for the inherent strength and vitality. So don’t commit the mistake of discarding it only on its face value.

All those who have lost faith somehow along the bruising path (including many who get into self-reproach for being too soft and thus invite punishment), I invite you all such suffering rabbits to try faking a lion for some time! Well, this is to create a visible contrast between the soft you and the hard you. So bury your softness and turn hard.

It is a bit of iron talk to test whether it stands or not in comparison to the butter soft approach to life. So to start with the tough tasking.

Impose the belief that life is to be won by wearing the battle shields and arms of cold hard logic and point blank reasoning. You become a soldier. Keep your emotions and sensitivities safely cradled deep in your heart. Don’t wear them on your chest, firmly convinced that some arrow will easily pierce you. So always be predatorily alert to the risks to your interests. Kindly handle the extra strain at your own cost. Ha Ha!

A lot many of you might be thinking that life is screwing you up from many angles, and despite best of your efforts, the softer you becomes the cause of your fall. So despite all the humanly possible tries, you find the situation unchanging, the same pliable you letting you down time and again. As the self-assigned practice to get hardened up, you can now fight for a change. Force the change in your vulnerable self, the carrier of this entire unjustified shitty load! Turn stone hard as we said earlier.

Get into the steely mode to turn yourself physically stronger. And forget about the psychological variants of strength. Believe that it is like a person suffering under 100 kg weight. And come whatever may, she cannot unburden herself of this load. What is the option left now? It is just to get physically stronger so that it is possible to carry the load.

I am talking of plain physical strength. Forget about all other versions of power. Simply believe that physical strength is the prelude to all other concepts of strength. So all you guys and girls, who feel that they are undeservedly carrying extra load in life on their softer self, just sweat it out. Grow strong physically. Let us see if you will be able to laugh at the weight on you? Only you can find the answer. Hope the fighting spirit gives you permanent peace.

Much as you carry on with the hardening exercise, never forget to be cautious though. The effort should not be an alert soldier type all the way. You may break. Soft and loving you are essentially at the core. And you are just trying to be what you are not. So take little breaks also. You deserve your airy moments—little-little somersaults, froggy jumps over life's grounded roadblocks, and tiny ballooned flights above the sandy realities on the surface. But still keep it somewhere in the heart that you are terrestrial beings not the airy angels. So guys ensure that you land rightly on your feet after airy jaunts and not crash-land on your ass.

 

One month is a suitable time to test the effects of this changed approach. If living like an iron-masked alert soldier gives you sustained peace, well and good, you may carry on like a hard-fisted maniac. All the best to you for your worldly laurels!

However, if you find something missing, you will automatically realize the significance of the mellow posturing of your softer self. All I can do is to turn your attention to one simple fact in nature: A huge tree breaks in the storm; a blade of grass meanwhile survives to kiss the warm sunrays after the storm is over.  

Awareness: The Bulwark to Safe-keep your Love Pond

 

Nathaniel Branden: “The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.”

No wonder, adding to your awareness takes you to greater dimensions of consciousness, which in turn opens limitless possibilities for you. In fact, awareness and the resultant contemplation provide a meaning to the infinite interplay of random forces around you. It simply helps you in getting your footing. The moment you get your footing, you get a huge dose of hitherto untasted confidence and then you just cannot help a smile full of love for each and everything around you.

This awareness boosts your conscience that in turn empowers free will and creativity. You make better choices. You respond well to situations instead of reacting. And all these are nothing but tiny rivulets unloading their majestic waters into the pool of your loving being.

As they say, awareness is the first step for any type of change. Without proper insight and self-acknowledgement, both born of awareness, it is impossible to even think of any concrete change for the better. You get a spontaneity that gives you a marvelous detachment, taking you on the path of spiritual upliftment even before you realize. Love is simply a natural outcome on this path.

You know the entire concept of kindness is based on the awareness of interdependent co-existence of living and nonliving beings. Limitless is the canvas of awareness. You can simply etch out infinite dimensions of the ultimate truth on it. You become a unique creator because in the realm of raised awareness kindness, love, beauty, truth, insight and intuitions are available to you to help you paint your picture in an entirely original way.

With awareness, you get a clarity where you get sensitivity for other's pains and feelings. A very fine pre-requisite for an all-loving persona. It is a simple journey from particular to the universal. The horizon gets broadened. More space for your soul to spread, and the nagging dots of fears and insecurities vanish in the roofless vaults of the cosmos.

It needs no mathematics to prove that if you see more clearly, you can walk better. If you have better insight, you can make better choices. Only through practiced awareness, you get some clues about the larger picture. Otherwise, we just waste it on a narrow stage, always fighting with hate and prejudices to avoid a fall off the edge. Awareness gives you a whole limitless pasture to roll in fun and be there with a purpose that isn't bound by your insecurity-born prejudices and complexes.

Awareness is the most practical step to self-discipline. It dismantles the self-created walls of an unaware mind, thus setting you free. You see the light. You bathe in it, and smile and love the way things are.

It also sharpens the streak of solitude in you. In the mode of pause, you observe little wonders that are otherwise lost in our mad rush. To put it more simply, in the silence aided with awareness you allow the inner voice, the citadel of your all-pervading goodness, to come up. If not God, at least godliness becomes possible. And the chief trait of godliness is love only, nothing else.

Awareness is a simple remedy for thousand ailments. Raise awareness. Work on it diligently. It gives you a nobler heart and more controlled mind. No better recipe to cook love delicacy, I tell you. It’s a practice much like you build your physical strength through regular workouts. Natural instinct, almost similar to being inclined to be lazy, is to be caught unaware. It’s nothing short of blindness, just like going into a dark tunnel. Once you cannot see, you are no longer responsible for your actions.

Evil has roots in unawareness. Awareness is a disinfectant. A human being, while being fully aware, can’t kill, rape, rob or quarrel. It’s simply impossible to be aware and be at your worst at the same time. Goodness flows from awareness. It’s simply being in the warm light where you feel better and see everything crystal clear.

There is a fountain of happiness inside. It lies dormant under the crust of fears, lies, illusions and ignorance. All these are bred by unawareness. To sharpen your awareness, you need to do the spadework. A lot of unearthing required. You need to dig, stop, take a pause and dig again. It needs a long look within.

With just knowledge, you can walk on the crust only. It makes you simply competitive, wherein you want to win at any cost. It pushes you into a zone of being terribly self-centered. No wonder you become less humane.

Awareness breeds wisdom. You reach the source of happiness. Therein you just don’t run to your destination stampeding over the lesser mortals along the path. You have empathy and you care for the consequences of your actions.  

Unawareness is the root cause of pseudo-illnesses of the mind. In the long term, these even turn into real physical and social ailments, for example Pseudoism. It’s the art and craft of using a positive emotion, picking its hypothetical meaning in letter, and grafting it over the mean spirit. Pseudoism is a suitable device with power aspirants particularly.

Pseudo-secularists copiously cash minority fears. Then pseudo-nationalists take charge of the affairs. The latter create a rhetorical stage, offering people a feeling to contribute to the nation. Little do people realize that by the time they are still enjoying the echo of their slogans, they have already crossed a line to enter a zone of hate. Even before they realize the slightest change, they have already surrendered a part of their good self. They are less loving, less tolerant, and more insecure. They get polarized. The society gets a fracture. It's painful. 

Not that I just crib about it. I offer a solution also. Web soldiers and internet patriots can go to Breakrooms specially designed to allow the spirit of revolution come out. Go there and smash out your hate and frustration on junk TV, microwave, radio, etc. It will soothe the angry man in you. The blood on boil will cool down. An utter sense of heroism will prevail as you smash the screen. It can be a suitable punch bag for the paper tigers of pseudo-nationalism. After pouring out hate and frustration, they will come out happier and more loving beings. They might even go beyond the tools of pseudo-nationalism like temples, mosques, cows and national anthem, and do something more important for this country.