Synchronicity

 A dove-eyed gazelle,
Deep in a forest,
Steps on a dry leaf,
It murmurs with pain,
A thin crackling sound
and it falls apart.
Far away in a concrete jungle,
She has a sadistic smile on her lips
and steps over his heart.
The leaf in the forest
voices the shattering blast
of a broken heart.
A plum ripe fruit on a branch,
It grabs naughty semian attention,
A playful snatchy pull,
And the fruit goes off at its prime.
Far away, the death sharpens its scythe, chuckles heartlessly,
and harvests a young life at its peak.
A pale old leaf surrenders 
to the painless pull of gravity,
And swirls down to ecstatic oblivion.
Far away, an old man peacefully
takes his last breath in sleep.

Merry Christmas!

 When the morning sun suddenly peeks over the corner to set a blizzard of light in the sleeping vale. It triggers a shimmering lightwork in the dewy beads clinging to drooping leaves. The morning mists pleasantly launch vapory fireworks, carrying the fragrant message of love, life and living. It's like the first pure smile of a baby after opening eyes in the morning! I stand mesmerized in this little bowl of peace and harmony, completely soaked in solitude, the sunbeams going deep inside to sooth my soul, the fragrant vapors percolating deep into the pores of my heart to assuage guilt, fear, anger and of course bruises and wounds it suffered and poured the same on others during the journey, and the dewy shivering glade embracing me wholeheartedly... It gives a clue and key to life! blissful! We feel the best when in a state of expansion, as a set of a larger totality. Expand your knots of ego in such solitary corners guys! Melt in larger panorama nurtured by mother earth. One feels uncaged from a narrow, suffocating feeling that we have cemented around. Come on, let's claim our freedom that is long due! Let's pledge ourselves long draughts of freedom on this Christmas! Merry Christmas to all you out there looking to pry open the cage of miseries, suffering and restlessness! Let the coming days see you smile more and be at ease with yourself!

A crying Laughing Dove

 

Laughing doves chuckle cutely, hence named so. It’s endearing to have a laughing, rolling and yodeling call. But just like a comedian’s pain in the heart is always preceded by the rib-tickling laughter masking the facial features, a laughing dove’s cry also gets covered up by the rib-tickling sounding chuckle of theirs. Its sobbing, suffering cry still comes out as funnily rolling notes of a birdie chuckle. Pain camouflaged by vocal chords has both advantages and disadvantages. It saves you from mockery but at the same time robs you of sympathy that may still be there in some corner.

An eagle is for the aggressive majesty of power, domination and hunting. It looks majestic with its killer’s instinct, equipped with a hawk eye, hooked beak and razor-sharp talons. A dove is for peace. It’s a symbol of live and let live. It looks lovely with its innocent eyes, graceful walk and stoic demeanor. The eagle is for stealth and strength. The dove is for benevolent, peaceful and an unassumed life and living without much ripples on the canvas of existence. The eagle shrieks almost with a war cry. The dove coos for peace. As the two sides of the same coin of creation, they paint the picture of existence in their own ways. One as important as the other.

The laughing dove is seen, as usual, on its customary perch point on a rusted wire loop jutting out of the corner of a two storey house. His call is insistent and non-stop from dawn to dusk for the last few days. The irony is: even if a laughing dove is crying, it sounds like laughing. To those who don’t know his story, and there aren’t many who would have the time and inclination to be interested in the affairs of a dove, it is a mere love-bound chuckling laughter of the laughing dove. I but hear the pain of loss buried behind his insistent chuckle. He has lost his partner. Laughing doves are monogamous by the way. Like all monogamous birds, the loss of a partner is incalculable loss and many perish in the wake of their spouse’s death. The way he is mourning from dawn to dusk, I suppose he may not survive as well.

He seems determined to starve himself to death. I have seen him just once taking littlest mournful beak bites on the ground, the very same ground where they walked in lovely majesty picking out grass seeds and tiny insects when she was alive. Now he finds everything almost distasteful.

A sparrow couple was almost fruitlessly trying to put the foundational sinews on a very narrow edge of the wooden rafter in the cattle barn. Feeling their plight, I fixed a cardboard box on a not-in-use rusted ceiling fan. It just hung there as a cobwebbed chandelier of the cattle world with its connection wire broken. However, there were no birdy takers for the beautiful nesting house that stayed mournfully inviting and empty. There seems to be some natural intelligence at work. The birds have seen so many ceiling fans whirring death, doom and destruction to the feathered lives. So they shirked from taking the offer. Then the dove couple, egged on by their simplicity, made use of it. They put the first dry twigs not inside but outside on it to fructify my attempt at helping bird nesting after almost three years.   

The nest was—it is still there with the fossilized seal of their love in it—a very flimsy platform of dry twigs of neem branches. Marking their lovely milestone in their love story, she laid two eggs. On the path of creation, there are pulls to destruction at all points. Then the mankind’s cousin came as a challenger to the forces of creation from the side of destruction. He climbed into hang with one hand from the iron grater and pluck away the booty, one egg. I reached on time and came within the fraction of a second to turn his bum redder with a strike. He escaped unscathed. I checked and found one fresh hatchling lying there as a tiny ball of winged prospects. As long as there is some semblance of encouragement in the nest to propel their paternal instincts, the loss hardly mattered to them and they kept the routine feeding and customary watch over the predators. I have heard that the nesting adults even feign injury to distract and draw away predators from the nest.

How should a laughing dove change the amplitude of its yodeling notes to turn it into a mourning call instead of a customary chuckle? His call is the same like before. He sounds like wooing a female even though he is mourning the death of his life partner. But my knowledge of his loss turns me aware of the pain carried by these notes. He has the unwavering spirit to mourn and cry till eternity. I have the heart to feel his pain. His pain doesn’t go unacknowledged at least.

The mourner had once fallen in love. His cooing calls were reciprocated by her, the one who is gone now. Attractive was his courtship display. His adolescent wings catapulted him into the lofty spheres of love, lust and procreation. He launched his infatuated self into the air with his wing clapping, making romantic, charged sounds and majestically glided down in a gentle arc to display his youth and coming of age. He was very emphatic and impressive in his display of masculinity. The crazy lover followed her with his head bobbing accompanied with seductive cooing. And all this blizzard of passion still sounded funny because from both extremes of pleasure and pain a laughing dove has the same means to voice his emotions, his cuddly laughing cooing.

Emboldened by her attention, he started pecking his folded wings in “displacement-preening” to solicit her surrender to the physical manifestation of love. She accepted by crouching and begging for food, a gentle prelude to her acceptance of him as her chicks’ Pa and a provider of safety and companionship. With abounding passion he indulged in courtship feeding before conjugal ride and the beginning of a monogamous matrimony. They preened each other. They made a fantastic pair of long-tailed pigeons with rufous and black chequered necklace. Their chuckling calls, a low rolling croo-doo-doo-doo-doo involving a fluctuating amplitude, vibrated on the airy canvas for love and procreation. In their corner of the cosmos, they germinated a soft ripple of pining love and robust care. He as a possessive, jealous fellow won’t allow her to go too far. If she foraged far, his cooing cascaded to her ears, tying her with the invisible cord of his attention and insecurity, forcing her lilac tinged neck and head to turn in his direction and she would whoop down to be with him. Cutely they walked on the ground and ate grass seeds and other vegetable matter and tiny ground insects like ants, termites and beetles. Docile and fairly terrestrial, they foraged on the ground, their reddish legs giving them the gentlest of steppings. In contrast, they took flight with a lot of noise followed by their swift and straight flight with regular beats of wings and an occasional sharp flick of the wings. All this and more wrote a beautiful chapter in romance.

They looked almost similar in appearance save his slightly bigger size and his pinkish-brown under-side slightly colorful to her paler one. His bluish grey band on the wing was bigger than her’s. These are the features that helped me in recognizing him as the surviving mourner.

A few days back, I found the chick had died. It was a mere dried whitish tiny tissue lying in the nest. It but still kept them bound to the duties and they hovered around, walking gracefully in the courtyard around the flower beds and plants to get their breakfast, lunch and pre-dusk dinner. The two of them were always together. Inseparable. The rest of the world loses its significance if a pair in love has their world full within themselves. It made such a beautiful sight of a love-smashed bird pair.

As a birdwatcher the sight of a new bird in the area is very assuring and alluring. Four days back, the sight of an eagle on a nearby keekar pretty much excited me. The eagles are rare now, hardly seen within the village boundaries. It’s a majestic powerful bird, the sign of aggression and playing on the front-foot with assurance and confidence. I knew an eagle has no mission other than hunting. But even this knowledge cannot stop you from watching it with an appreciating eye. He looks regal. Royalty always has had claws hidden beneath the regal attire and extravagant show on the surface. No wonder he looked a veritable King of the birdy world. An eagle can afford to be restful on a tree. He appeared perched up stoically almost with a carefree air. It was business as usual. Even the cantankerous crows didn’t bother too much over his transgression into their territory.

The doves with the dead dry chick in their nest walked as gracefully in the yard as before to welcome a fresh day in their winged life. Cutting the cool early morning air with his talons he swooped down and killed her. The yard was empty, so he didn’t feel in a hurry to fly away with the prey. He ate her right there. She was now just a scattered bloodied lump of wings and feathers. Her lover just could shriek in anger and pain in his laughing notes.

Her memories continue to reverberate through his fur and he is tirelessly cooing from all the perch points that bear the smell of their love as if to woo her out of death. He thinks she has ditched him and taken a new paramour. He is confident of his cooing display and thinks he can win her back. So he continues his painful laughing notes, his heart bruised and his masculinity embittered. Little does he realize that she has gone onto be a part of her hunter. She is no longer that docile bird of peace. She is reshaped as the steely nerves and power of talons to hunt now and not just get hunted down like before. 

He cries with the passion with which he had once wooed her to make her a part of himself and turn himself a part of her. Now a part of him has vanished. It is painful to see him survive as a fraction of himself. He may not survive as a monogamous bird. I but wish that some female, who has just come of age or has been unlucky like him to lose her partner and is ready to accept a mate now, takes his crying coos as the teasing cooing of a challenging male who is trying to break the folds of feminine inhibitions and hesitation.           

The Ultimate Racism

 A lot many (or rather all of them) mechanical and bio-chemical contrivances, in the form of machines, apparatus and many other things of utility, are simply an extension of our capabilities to accomplish things at the material plane. A car is simply an extension of our feet to reach the destination faster. A boat is an enlarged attempt at swimming. Weapons are simply our extended claws and fists to hurt more painfully. A computer is simply an apparatus to calculate, store, memorize, analyze and help our brain. It is a mere appendage to the brain just like many other machines and tools are the appendages to our legs, eyes and hands.

An earth-mover may move a mountain-side and we may not be able to break even a single clod of earth with bare hands, we are still qualified with something extra. The machine doesn’t exist experientially to know and feel that it exists. It’s a closed system. We can quantitatively go on increasing its power and capabilities, but the fundamental barrier between sentient and non-sentient persists to keep it qualitatively different.

With artificial intelligence people say that this final frontier might be broken. It would be possible for the machines to exist in self-awareness, it’s speculated. It may not be so. You have a heap of stones around. You set masons to work on it and dress the stones in limitless ways and build something architecturally marvelous. But does it change the nature of stone? Is the structure aware of its identity? Same is the case with our rest of creations. Someone may die if the structure crashes down though. The so called AI-stimulated machines of future may crush we humans with their mammoth capabilities but that would be accidental in nature rather than a planned coup by the mankind’s creations.

There is a fundamental difference between what we make and what evolves naturally. Consciousness is the final frontier separating us from our machines. The more the pool of memory to enable a computer to go into the domain of super-computing skills, the more is the realization that it hardly becomes self-conscious. It stays on the path of becoming a larger pool of bits of memory operating across transistors. Its potential is not infinite. It is a closed circuit. Its destiny is planned. It cannot create something beyond the set of memory installed. There is a boundary. And self-consciousness is impossible within a boundary. It may calculate unimaginable things and facilitate things that we cannot even imagine. But it can hardly imagine. It has no free will to define the multi-dimensionality of existence. It cannot dream. It cannot become joyful, cry, feel sad, be ecstatic and get jealous. Can it get excited to make love? Come whatever we may do, it will but stay a machine—bigger though—just like a wheel is a wheel even if it graduated from the stone wheels of the Stone Age to the modern ones. The modern wheel is as much unaware of itself as the stone wheel was thousands of years back. Mere addition in efficiency isn’t consciousness. However, given their super-human capabilities, the AI and its apparatus may spell doom on us, but that would be accidental, not a planned vendetta to bring us down and rule the planet.

There are billions of neurons in our brain that interact through chemical-nature neurotransmitters. These have evolved at the interface of pure energy and matter. There hasn’t been a limit, no pre-set boundary. There are trillions of pathways in which information can be passed on to create infinite experiential possibilities. Being aware of ourselves is just one of them.

Is a stone fundamentally different than the neural fluid in our brain? Yes and no. The structural and molecular arrangement in a stone provides it a rigid identity that contains the seeds of awareness in its most rudimentary form. The stone turns to dust to become soil where bio-signature of life starts in the form of grass, graduating to animals and humans. Human consciousness is thus no abstract entity. It is a drop in the ocean of fellow drops. It’s a leaf on a tree. It’s a part of the whole and has no abstract existence. The moment we talk of an apparatus, we accept an abstraction. A systematically cut off portion from the rest of entire creation. Its destiny is to exist inert as we call it. We humans are a part of the entire set of evolution. Our energy system has the bridges with the whole even with the hard sense of self-awareness. A machine has no such facilitating bridges because it hasn’t evolved. It’s merely a contrivance, a short cut to facilitate some task, a kind of closed system.

The levels of consciousness vary among flora and fauna. Even a stone possesses the level of consciousness that it needs to exist in its particular form and shape. We commit the mistake of evaluating all forms of consciousness using the benchmark of our own consciousness. We have a fluid integrative and ever-expanding picture of things and phenomena through our senses. At least on this planet, it seems the pinnacle of evolution of consciousness. Hence we belittle animals for having raw consciousness and stones for having none.

Artificial Intelligence may not turn out to be catastrophic intentionally—it may bomb out our entire existence in own swipe accidentally though—as many of us may worry about. The real danger will be from within our own minds. The urge to have super-human qualities and capabilities through selective genetic engineering, implanting bio-chips in brains to boost our self-centered design and scheming of life will create a future world where the advantaged and the disadvantaged will be decided by the fact who can afford the new technologies and who cannot. The future world will have two classes, almost different species, of humans: Tech-implanted and simple flesh and blood humans. The latter will occupy a servile category, serving the superior new-breeds because they won’t have any option. The ultimate racism will emerge. The strains of self-consciousness will remain till the last naturally evolved cell—carrying the blueprint of millions of years of natural evolution—stays in the tech-implanted super-species. After that we may have a world of super-machines who won’t be self-aware like we have been.

The art of life beyond self-preservation

Self-preservation is genetically ingrained in our apparently individual consciousness. It's the basic need for the energy, the soul, to keep clinging to the matter, the body; matter being just a transitory phase in the ever-going cyclical surge of energy. The nature of this energy is nothing yet everything at the same time. It’s a self-sustaining ripple, a pulse, a flicker, in the void; a kind of echo, where the echo itself recreates further echoes; a kind of self-generated reverberation.

The apparent matter is nothing but momentary hiatus, a sort of sabbatical, on the path of energy journey when it decides to drop its guard at low frequencies and minimum speed to be visible and give rise to phenomena, shapes, sizes and the consequent interplays at extremely slow pace in comparison to its normal speed, i.e., the speed of light that we have measured so far. This galactic slow-down of the energy floats around in the form of the five primary elements. The first four namely earth, water, fire and air are floating to maintain equilibrium in the fifth element, ether.

Well, this cosmic macroscopic view may sound too intimidating, filling us with this helpless feeling about our inconsequentiality and worthlessness. So let’s come back to our little backyard on planet earth. Returning to the instinct for physical survival, this urge for survival in a particular form has the natural inclination to go overboard and turn into a chronic obsession. As is the natural law, anything beyond a limit is harmful. Too much of nectar is poison and even poison within limits is beneficial and healing. So this tight grip on survival beyond a limit turns counterproductive.

(I)llness is nothing but the sense of ego 'I' gone overboard, a kind of autoimmune syndrome triggered by lopsided consciousness. Its rampant competitiveness and insecurity turns it almost blind, leaving it capable of going against its own organisms that it is supposed to protect. It harms the matter, the body, that it presumes to protect. It breeds illness of both body and mind. It in turn leaves its negative imprint on the soul—the core point of consciousness functioning as the bedrock for this body—in the form of painful, suffering account pool of karma, which in turn guides it further as per the potential created by the pool of ingrained memories along the path.

(We)llness is nothing but 'I' diluted and replaced by 'We'. The hard knot of ego melts to give way to get a more proportional consciousness beyond the hard limits of the physical self and its obligations of relentless fight for self preservation. The only way we can check this running down the precipice to self doom is to calm down 'l'—leading to Illness of both body and mind—and nurture 'We'—leading to wellness. It’s a quantum jump on the path of creation from illness to wellness. We are the agents of creation. Just that uncontrolled self-obsession turns us the slayers of the self instead of the creators of something bigger. Life’s meaning is just in actualizing this potential.

Life is what we ‘create’ using the tool of consciousness through the process of living. This is a kind of self generation. It’s not necessary that what we hatch out in our pursuit of our free-will will fit in the normal standardization of achievements, rewards and victories that we see around us. These are simple destinations where many people have felt comfortable in creating their lives around the axis of comfort and common acceptance. But it doesn’t mean that these are the sole parameters to judge and evaluate our lives. Life needs evaluation not judgments. The judgements unjustifiably categorize it as high-low, good-bad, success-failure, etc. This narrow compartmentalization is no justice to the infinite dimensions we are capable of adapting to and recreate new avatars. If we live life by judgments, we cut short our potential as per the standard barometer. It may sound safe, but the outcome is equally mundane. It always leaves us with that persistent nagging feeling that we didn’t kiss the nectar of ultimate freedom, choosing rather to tie the chains of our convenience. In contrast, as a creator, we simply evaluate beyond the scales of moral or ethical judgments. We see life in totality with a smile and carve out our own world where we are the sovereign, ruling as per our own set of laws. This is what we mean by freedom. This is the territory where we may feel at rest, free from that nagging restlessness and incompleteness that usually plagues most of us.

We have the collective platform in the form of genetics born of systematic, generational grooming of consciousness along specified paths. It decides in what shape we come out starting from an invisible couple of cells to a meat of ball to finally this body. We also have the surrounding pool of socio-economic platform among which we open our eyes and learn the basics of life. Genetics and the surroundings where we grow are the kindergarten for us to help us lead to a bigger platform. Unfortunately, most of us grab our doctorates and post-docs from the kindergarten only, completely forgetting that we were supposed to come out of the learner’s stage long ago and be creators.

I know genetics and the surroundings we are born in are beyond our control. These are but just the launching pad. After this what we create in the form of life through well directed consciousness is always within our hands. It’s suitable to accept our status to be creators. Create life. Don't survive as a creation, accidently pushed and prodded by the collective factors that have given birth to this body and the circumstances around.