X gets axed; Y gets sexed only to be faxed

Do we run for happiness, peace, contentment and joy? Or is our pursuit nothing more than an escape from our sufferings, our visible and invisible pains, the vacuums inside which threaten to suck us in, giving us this nagging restlessness, discontent and dissatisfaction? Both aren’t same by the way.

In the former, there is a bit of acceptance and sync with one’s present—however minute it may be—some restfulness, some taste of self-love, that lays the foundation of further journey with something in your reserve which you can offer to someone. You have a choice; you decide to move in a particular direction, simply because you aren’t running from your present like it’s a sinking ship. Here at least you know where you are heading because survival isn’t at stake. There is no emergency.

In the latter, it’s a blind escapade like one dashes out of a house on fire without having much clue about where one is headed. This is an emergency. You go by only survival instincts. And emergency measures hardly lay the foundation of a smooth journey. The basic instincts of survival turn us selfish—not that it’s about right or wrong, or moral or immoral—simply because that’s how creation is. We cling to life-support like a drowning person clutches at the straw. No wonder, we drown the support also. We want to grasp to survive. We rarely hold hands to walk together.

There is nothing basically wrong with these two scenarios. We are just humans. In the former, we are creating our circumstances. In the latter, we are the mere meek product of our circumstances. In effect, they manifest in either ‘make’ or ‘break’ scene, a sort of ‘creation’ or ‘destruction’. In the former, we are able to ‘create’ because we have a surplus of self-love to handover to someone. In the latter, we ‘destroy’ because we are dragging the fusion wire from the last burning house. The former has the possibility to redefine life for better. The latter can turn it meaningless altogether.

Unfortunately, the modern lifestyle and its consequent personal, social, economic and cultural contours hardly leave any room for a world of choice. It’s mostly about the forced necessities. It’s rarely about healthy options. There are loads of issues and problems crammed to the gills at every step. In pursuit of our so called economic growth and development, and the resultant grievously smothered social set-up, we have constricted life and living to create unsustainable vertical towers. Stability lies in horizontal opening up, not just in minds but in emotions and feelings also. Life gets caged in vertical towers as you are just looking skywards. You rarely look at the sideways panorama. Finally, you feel cornered. It’s like a house on fire. We haven’t too many options as we run out to salvage whatever is left of us. Very few of us go out on our own terms with a smile on lips to grab more of life and living, to waddle in the river of nectar just because we have tasted an ounce of it. Very rarely you have seekers of joy simply because they have tasted happiness and now are eager to upgrade their experience for the better. The thoroughfare is crammed with people running away from their miseries. They are exhausted and are prone to lean on any x, y, z shoulders accidently popping up nearby in the stampede.

  

It brings me to the critical question of modern day relationships. Relationships don’t stand in abstract. They are mere manifestations of a generation. We see that all relationships are drawn taut, always to the snapping limit. There is always more possibility of things falling off the line than a smooth, mundane passage of the day. Why have relationships become so brittle, so fragile? It’s because we just take temporary shelters as we are running away from our house on fire, our dissatisfaction within, our personal pains born of our voluntary, involuntary alienation from our own self. In emergency measure, we are running to get our lives defined by others, simply because that appears the easiest of an option. Working on the self is tedious, but it sows the seeds of great harvest in future. We but grab a few corn-heads along the path as we rush out to survive.

We move into people’s arms predominantly as takers, not as givers. We hardly have anything to offer from our side. Our own emotional scars are so deep that the most we can do in a relationship is to ‘receive’. But our sense of ego will always try to convince us that we are investing; we are giving, which is rarely the case. A woman prone to emotional lynching born of discontentment with her present may think that she is indeed ‘giving’ as she pours out her agony to someone, alongside listening to the tale of woes from the other side. In reality, she is trying her level best to anchor her own footing. A man who offers his so called masochistic, gallant support to her mellowed and teary sea of woes presents himself as a solid embankment to redefine the scattered flow of her life. But just like she has grown too pliable to become a puddle without any course, he himself is lynched by the pain of his solid, stony knot of manliness, he wants to spread. She is a victim of her pliable softness. He is an equal victim of the stony constriction. The initial embanking support to give a course to her life turns out to be a check-dam in her new course as he manifests his pain to broaden his identity in her life through his insecurities and possessiveness. He blocks her and she deluges him.

When two people meet, they hardly talk about the best things in life. They open up the longest tales of their pains, woes and sufferings. That is when any relationship gets doomed right from the beginning. They are two poor ‘takes’ seeking refuge from their own house on fire. How can we expect a good chemistry between two beggars? When one is running away from the house on fire, even a temporary stay appears a wonder dream. In reality, there are simply two scared, lynched souls running to the well to survive. The initial sip of water is solacing like you feel when you get water after almost dying of thirst. But what after that? Do you turn a giver, a river of peace and joy? Very rarely! The fire is too much within. The fire is too big for the tiny sips of water that they both offer to each other. It vaporizes almost instantly. No wonder, these relationships are nothing more than temporary survival halts. Bubbles! They pop up with extravaganza and vanish like nothing happened. Nothing to surprise, we have such massive leap-frogging, literally a stampede of temporary relationships. Here ‘break-up’ is the chorus song. The x gets axed very smoothly and with mountain-loads of justification. Then the y gets sexed up only to be faxed soon. We just continue seeking. As a so called love-seeker on the path of relationships, x, y, z are mere numbers not leading to any destination. They just land one in a quagmire. The past with its ever-growing fires retains its grip on life. On the restless path, the past gets more burdensome because some new number has been added in the love equation.

How many daters we come across who have lovely things to share about their past? Very few! A person who has something to offer in a relationship will definitely have a lot of positive to share about her or his past. The moment you start with a positive past, you are in a position to give something in a relationship, otherwise forget it, you will always be a taker, irrespective of what your ego tells you about your contribution in the new relationship. Good relationships are built among people who are moving to a better destination, not merely running from their burning houses. The latter are merely accidentals bumps on the way. Only while you are walking with poise, deliberation and choice that you meet happy people walking to be happier.

   

There is nothing wrong in seeking love outside. But in running out too fervently to escape our own miseries, we miss one basic point. We hold our destinies in our very own fragile fists. External manifestations of love are mere catalysts. Unfortunately, we make them the main constituents of the equation. Be a nice companion with your own self before you take the responsibility of being someone’s companion. Without sowing the seeds of a ‘giver’—it’s as good as self-love (there is a difference between self-love and being egoistic and narcissistic by the way)—within your own house, you cannot expect to have a luxuriant crop of harmony in any future relationship. So guys, when you go for your next date to get a new x, y or z please ensure that you present yourself as a self-loving and caring person who carries fond memories from the past, who isn’t merely running away from a house on fire.

Slippers on the head: The crown of fools

Agricultural revolution allowed humans to keep larger population under worse conditions. Industrial revolution took it still further by allowing more and more people under still worse conditions. In the last couple of centuries we have further moved on. Presently, around 8 billion people are kept alive under worse conditions than ever in history. The tiny minority of economically well off people have utilities, but they have huge load of emotional suffering. This generation is the worst suffering in entire history. Why is it getting worse with each generation? Why is it that the current generation suffers more than the previous one? We are caught in a vicious circle. We have been committing the mistake of taking things of utilities as the currency of life, living, happiness and joy. No, they aren't! We have to break this malafide linkage of the items of utility to happiness and joy in life. This grotesque monetization of the meaning of life in terms of the items of utility needs to done away with. The things which should have been under our feet, we have put them on our heads as crowns. No wonder, we are loaded to the limits and tottering on the path. Life and living is mere struggle. Throw down the load of utilities from your mind. Walk over them. Use them. Treat them like your slaves, not vice versa. You know what, how funny it appears? It appears like we are carrying our slippers on our head, taking it to be a shiny crown. It's better we put on our slippers, a place where they need be, not on our heads. Mere utilities off the head, and you have a confident human goin on her journey, the head occupied with better ideas and heart full of sweet songs.

The first drop of life

Billions of years ago, in a little water puddle on a tiny speck of dust in the cosmos, there was the littlest of a spark. A spark that opened a new dimension in the zone of matter energy transformation. It sowed the seeds of a new possibility, a new manifestation of energy, a far more dynamic form, life as we know it, a temporary balloon in the stream, a microcosm of the ultimate cycles, the little drop that contained the essence of the whole.

The matter had been lying in the mold for billions of years before that spark. Now it took the course that would leave it further down to the world of you and me billions of years down the stream. That spark, leading to the formation of the first cell, paved the way for the ever-going matter—energy interplay to be interjected with still subtler transformations in a new dimension, the first drop of life, the first cell, a new possibility, a new prospect for the transformation to evolve cyclically in far subtler forms of not just bodily limbs and organs but emotions, feelings and thoughts.

The single-celled amoeba in the primordial sea ruled as the rudimentary carrier of the delicate most traces of consciousness on this planet. Its sovereignty lasted for millions of years. After the initially blasting stage when earth, this lump of gases, was catapulted into the solar system, it took billions of years for the matter to get into a state of relative stability, like the dust blown by a storm takes many hours to settle down. The evolution of the first cell was no miraculous turn in the state of matter. It was just a phase when the storm of matter—energy interplay and transformation could adjust a new dimension in the same transformation, where it was still about matter—energy makeover but with an additional factor of rudimentary consciousness in the same equation, the new factor hardly disturbing the primordial equation. Just that it self-evolved to maintain the earliest laws as things settled down on this tiny planet.

There being no difference between matter and energy, just that matter is visible and energy isn’t, physical science tries to correlate them through the equation Energy=Mass x square of the speed of light. We can say that mass is that apparent energy that has been stabilized to the extent of so low frequency as to make it visible to our sense perception. It is simply a state of energy. In this apparent stage of relative stability, another dimension of energy opens up to compensate for the shooting off tendency of the energy. It’s consciousness. It opens up as a factor of the square of the speed of light. No wonder our thoughts, emotions and their resultant scenarios building up, forever popping up, are simply the manifestations of that surplus raw energy in its pristine fleeting form that has to somehow spend its creative force in one form or the other.

So starts the game of evolution of consciousness through the suitable means of rapidly emerging biochemical and biomolecular bridges holding matter and consciousness together. Lo, let there be the first drop of ‘life’ the way we interpret it in the form of single cell amoeba in the primordial sea, like a drop of rain in the desert, and it blossomed up. Energy in the form of apparent mass (stabilized to a fraction of square of the speed of light) was now an empty canvas for the creative force to write as many lines as possible in the emerging story. Time was never a factor. Millions of years went with more ease and less change than we see in a decade these days. It was pull for the maximum. Not so soon, millions of years down the first spark of the first cell, we had cells clumping together to form as many patterns as possible. The climax reached when you had mega-flora and mega-fauna. There were dinosaurs bigger than the biggest ship in the seas presently. There were birds bigger than the largest cargo planes of the present. Reptiles longer than trains slithered around. There was no hurry. A day of today is busier than a decade of those times.

But then even creation has to follow the law. It just cannot go larger and larger in size even if in this new dimension moderated by an evolving consciousness it felt excited like a child exults after getting new set of toys. For minion and millions of years since the days of the largest roamers on earth, when rudimentary consciousness rode mammoth bodies, there has been a decline in physical stature of the largest mammals, reptiles and birds on earth. 

When Homo sapiens indisputably controlled earth around 40000 B.C., the largest creatures were mammoths, mastodons, earth sloths weighing 10 tons, tortoise weighing 3 tons, and cats were bigger and fiercer than the modern day lions. These last big creatures were not lucky like their predecessors and vanished too quickly as Homo sapiens, the epitome of consciousness, not in size but in mind this time, quickly threw the forces of creation into the domain of ‘mind over matter’. Under these forces, the rest of the biggest animals, birds and trees bowed out. Mankind’s mind was buzzing with that huge surge of energy, which had abandoned huge bodies to take the course of bamboozling consciousness.

It would be foolish to think that consciousness is peaking in human brain only. Corona is far more intelligent than us. It has unique structure to beat our immunity and any other medicine and cause death and launch literally a third world war. Mankind may be standing at the top of the food chain in a world where the plant, animal and bird species are vanishing altogether. However, in the emerging pattern of the diminishing flora and fauna, the counterbalancing forces will arrive from the smallest quarters. The counterbalancing arm of consciousness will arrive through nanometer-sized means like Corona.

We have been investing too much to ward off visible threats from our fellow human beings as well as other tangible threats in nature, building up huge armies and stockpiles of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Little do we realize that all along this time, while we triumphantly gesticulated over our supremacy over the fellow human beings as well as other lesser species, the counterbalancing arm of consciousness has taken the path of nanometer-sized foot soldiers, where our armies will be redundant. 

Beware Homo sapiens, it was easier to kill mammoths in Siberia 12000 years back. But killing invisible bacteria and virus isn’t that easy. Millennium after millennium we have fought against real animals in the forests and later our imagined enemies bigger than any animal on earth to make bigger and bigger weapons, wasting our precious resources in its wake. The chink in the armor is glaring now. Our unpreparedness to fight against the ‘small’. Corona teaches us a bitter lesson.  

Is there any solution? Of course there is: Instead of pushing the stage of creation into a corner, from where it decides to launch fusillade through nano-arrows, learn to balance things in all walks of life. Don’t push nature too far into a corner. It always has the option to hit back. It may not be able to hit tangibly in the form of a dinosaur, it can but surely do the same through invisible Corona and many more. 

There is a reason why we have pushed mother earth too far into the corner, our intra-Homo sapiens rivalry. Earlier we fought as a unit as Homo sapiens against far physically superior species. Now those threats are gone. So drop your weapons my dear ever-scared jungle man, who is almost biologically molded to keep fighting now after millions of years of fear and insecurity. Saving other remaining species from extinction is important, but far more important is to stop the virtual fear driven animosity among nations build upon false assumptions of ideologies, faiths and beliefs.

All that is needed is a collective feeling of Homo sapiens. When our ancestors set out from Africa 60000 years ago, they could overpower far superior enemies in the battle of survival. Now we stand at the crossroads again. Now the enemy is invisible. It will manifest through nano-particles and other imbalance-born outbursts of mother earth. Fight as a band. Fight as a species. As a globalist. Sow the seeds of love and trust among all the nations. 

All the divisions are man created. We can easily remove these. Love for our fellow human beings will sow the seeds of love for this little planet, our house. Don’t try to land on Sun; try to use the precious resources where in case of health emergencies our best cities in the world don’t bear the insult of the doctors and nurses fighting without even proper masks. A ballistic missile worth millions of dollars rusting in a bunker and a life-savior doctor fighting Corona without PPEs! See, what have we turned this world into!!

Soul's Scars from the Past

In my past birth, I was a simple Taoist follower in a quaint mountain village in China. Then the atheistic Chinese Communism breached the fort of our peace and silence. I fell victim to their blatant, rampaging force creeping up the hills to forge a new China. A ‘making’ that first involved million times ‘breaking’, the so called revolution. And revolution drinks a lot of blood like an ever-hungry glutton. At the time of leaving that body, two extremes sealed my fate, the driving differentials that create karmic force to propel the soul to adopt another body: my love and liking for Taoism on the one end; and my dislike (almost to the extent of repugnance and hate) for the atheistic Chinese Communism. The past can’t be shaken off too easily. We carry our karmic imprints, the scars on our souls that need a few lifetimes to heal. I carry mine in the form of my surrender to Taoism and my frustration at the ways and manners of the Chinese communists. I know this chasm stalls my own evolution, and forgetting and forgiving will surely facilitate my spiritual evolution. But maybe, just knowing it isn’t sufficient to do the same. This lifetime of hate, and my consequent stagnation in my spiritual evolution, will help me balance out the negatives of karma. Forgiving will surely settle the score this very moment. I know it. But is forgiving that easy? Especially when you are carrying the scars from your past birth!

De-cluttering

Nature is not with anybody. Neither is it against anyone. It’s for us to decide whether we are with it or against it. The onus is on us. Since we are merely its part, it suits our purpose if we go with it. Going against it means going against ourselves. But that is what we have been doing presently, especially since the industrial revolution. Our brains turned the crowns of our ownership of the planet as the sole proprietor species. The weakening of the overall system manifests primarily in the weakening of its constituent parts.

In a single-species environment, the rest of all subservient species get threatened with extinction, just like Corona virus imperils our cells. The exponentially growing species may think that it’s moving towards the crowning glory in terms of development, it’s in fact moving towards a pointed summit where maintaining a perch is impossible. So why move so laboriously towards a little point, only to topple down and start all over again after the crisis. Why not maintain a less ambitious broad high point, i.e., a plateau. The rise will be full of pause and the perch of pinnacle point will be safer and broader. Why do we aim for pointed summit which is unsustainable? Why can’t we raise the bar a bit less seriously and move to another plateau only at a higher elevation. I would say it finely graded growth. It doesn’t collapse rapidly.

Corona is now the most dreaded word. Corona positive is the most fearsome status. It’s stalking the entire humanity. The enemy is invisible and quite wisely we have locked ourselves in the safety of our houses. Meanwhile, the high points of our economic and financial hills fall down.

It’ll be too shortsighted if we just consider Corona as a malady in abstract. Corona isn’t something that has somehow surfaced randomly. It’s merely a symptom of the greater malady with the ecosystem, something to do with the entire earth. It’s just an indication that there are far bigger problems than what we may envision just looking at Corona.

Suppose there is a body having severely compromised immunity. Naturally, things are supposed to collapse. But there will be a trigger somewhere in some part, in some organ, to let the manifestation start. Corona is just one of the triggers that indicate the grievously harmed immunity of mother nature on the planet. Beyond the point of whether the Wuhan virus is lab-created by the Chinese regime or jumped out of inhuman gluttony cascading through live animal markets in China, the basic point is that it’s a symptom of an ailing planet. If not Corona, something x, y, z will unleash the same consequences. If not some virus, it will manifest through the virtual virus of human minds to create phobias, fears, greed, humongous egos and envy to catapult destabilizing forces to penalize the errant society.

Open-ended are the options for the effects to manifest in lieu of the cause, our unsustainable practices. The effects can manifest either through man-made mediums such as wars, civil strife, terrorism, natural calamities, or these can simply manifest through the rulebook of nature in their unseen, intangible ways. I am no perpetual doomsayer, but my only point is that with our awareness we should have known better. We could have done better. It’s not simply enough to go after inventions and discoveries. An equal amount of our energy and resources to estimate the consequences of our actions could have turned our practices more or less sustainable.

In the face of this pandemic, where are the earth-shattering issues like Brexit, trade wars, geostrategic brainstorms in top government offices to control regions, military pursuits, tensions on borders, etc.? If we can survive without them as we do during the lockdown, we can do the same even post-endemic. As we sit in silence after many decades, let’s just cast a look at the mountain loads of unnecessary things that we have crammed in our minds, houses and bazaars. Let’s start de-cluttering.