The Only Non-fatal Excess: Love

 

W.B. Yeats nails the truth: “All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.”

Poison in small amount can be beneficial like nectar. And nectar in excess can be fatal like poison. We tend to jump from one extreme to another in our likes, dislikes, opinions and affiliations. And all excesses are stepping stones to pains, sufferings and alienation. There is only one thing in the universe that isn’t fatal in excess: love. This is the supreme leveler, the ultimate counter-point to all and sundry excesses and imbalances.

Alice Walker gives a very nice little exercise to get the magic potion flowing in your life: “‘Thank you’ is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.”

I would add, say ‘Thank you’ with a disarming smile. That completes the exercise. You may repent million and one words of yours but never ‘Thank you’. Try it. It’s a very potent bomb-defuser.

Dalai Lama: “Too much self-centered attitude, you see, brings, you see, isolation. Result: loneliness, fear, anger. The extreme self-centered attitude is the source of suffering.”

We hit the extremities and find ourselves struggling at the end of the pole. Irony is that all of us know with our practical knowledge that only a balanced central point can give us respite from shaking and the fear of falling over the edge.

In the Cosmic Mirage over there, we hardly have things positioned at one extreme. So leave your perch at the extreme, and surrender to the lure of the midway point. And mind you, love is the counterweight that can help you stay in the middle.

So guys, mix the contradictions. Churn out a paste. Blend the duality. Grind it well. And you get nothing in the so called ‘everything’. Is there any hard and fast line between the so called two ends of our perception? Is ‘black’ only ‘black’? Is ‘white’ only ‘white’? No. They seep into each other and relatively define each other, apparently though, not in reality. Black is less white, and white is less black.

Dark is not just ‘dark’. And light is not just ‘light’. Dark is only ‘less light’. And light is just ‘less dark’. Duality sustains on our sense of ‘ego’ driven by our perception-hungry senses. It turns our consciousness into self-consciousness, thus smartly laying the snare for a limited potential to grow and evolve.

Is there any pure, unadulterated ‘pleasure’? No. Pleasure is a state of having lesser pain. Pleasure has a mild dose of pain in it. Always! Find out a person who has no trace of pain in him. Is there any condition of just having ‘pain’? No. Pain is just having lesser degree of ‘pleasure’. Pleasure carries pain in it, and pain carries pleasure in it.

Our ego, our sense of ‘I’, stretches the point of reality in two directions for suitable dualities wherein things stand compartmentalized and defined almost as contradictions of each other.

Imagine the morning ‘twilight’ when the day’s rising light mixes with the night’s vanishing darkness. The balance! The melting of duality. Observing the phenomenon outside, we have to dispel the fog inside and see the sun of reality in its true avatar.

Is there any state of something being perfectly ‘cold’ or perfectly ‘hot’? No. Cold is just lesser hot. And hot is just lesser cold. The reality just gives the illusion of apparently getting stretched in opposite directions. It’s the see-saw battle. We look this way, then we turn to the other side. By subduing the element of ‘self’ from pure ‘consciousness’, one can get a balanced vision. Then the funny mirage of seeing two avatars of the same thing becomes invisible. And loving self becomes the most natural of an instinct.

If you want to swim, accept drowning. If you want to fly, accept falling. To win, accept loss. To fulfillment, accept emptiness. The duality is bound by almost an unbreakable cord, at least to a disillusioned self cowering under the weight of ego. Pull one, and the other one comes dragging. A win is not a win completely. You are losing something also, in some form or the other. No flight is a flight solely. It involves a fall also here and there. Swimming isn’t floating only. It involves intervals of drowning also. Accept the so called opposite, antipodal, the perceived enemy and the threat. Don’t run away from it. Success is not the absence of defeat. It’s only accepting defeat, learning further and moving on. Accept death and you live. Surrender the ego and you get to master the ownership of your thoughts, actions and emotions. You then control them instead of they deciding your fate.

The two versions of the same thing are inseparable, and are just our conveniently defined two points on the plain of reality. Death is not just death in itself. It is the beginning of life, of birth. Birth is not just birth. It is the beginning of death. Death starts the moment we take birth. After all it’s a process, not an event at the end of life.

Same is the case with the apparent duality of creation and destruction. They don’t exist separately. For an event and happening to occur, there has to be a balance between the two. Like human body survives on the principle of the balance between creation and destruction. New cells are continuously being created and old ones are dying. The circle. It holds the key to the mystery. Here is the end; here is the beginning.

The reality has loops of the so called dualities going side by side, at all points, in all directions, and in all events. The counterweights. The balance. Going on and on in loops. The ever-expanding universe and the ever-dying universe. In loops. In circles. At countless points. Forever. Explosions and implosions. Blasts and suction. Circular loops. Creation and destruction. Creation and destruction. On and on. In circles. Expansion and suction. Going from nowhere to everywhere and from everywhere to nowhere. And passing through the point where you happen to read it presently. 

Enjoy the moment. Take pleasure in the ride. It’s a whole thoroughfare out of nothing. From nothing to everything! Don’t feel puzzled over the fact that the net energy of the universe is zero. At the most take it as something synonymous to godliness. It’s a cosmic heartbeat, with the only difference on the so called time scale. Your heart beats once per second. The cosmic heart beats at the rate of billions of years. It expands, it implodes. Endlessly. So don’t get doubts about eternity. It’s possible. If a clock pendulum can maintain its swing, why cannot the cosmic cycle? When the pendulum is going to the right, it’s creating the potential to travel leftwards, and vice versa. When the universe is expanding, it’s creating the potential to implode. During implosion, it’s creating the potential to explode. Simple see-sawing with net zero energy! Isn’t it the greatest trick by the existential force!

And the seed, the focal point, of this mammoth mirage is love, compassion, harmony, rhythm and a never-ending melody. Love, along with its aforementioned derivatives, is the only thing whose excess never crosses the critical limits because it has to stay one step ahead of a mischance when everything may cease to exist thus stopping the mirage. Till it goes, love and harmony stay in the front, pulling the great show in its wake. Roll in the twilight grey of love where there is no light, no dark. But there is bliss definitely.

Universe: The Singular Song to Melt your Discordant Notes

 

A.P.J. Abdul Kalam: “Look at the sky. We are not alone. The whole universe is friendly to us and conspires only to give the best to those who dream and work.”

Spread the self. Mix in the infinity. You will feel light, love and harmony pervading your cells. It’s simply like a drop of water feeling the unchained extents of a huge sea. You will catch the harmony. Einstein said that only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity. Come, drop your guard, abandon the stupidity and look upwards into the mystical distances. You will realize the oneness. You will comprehend how inconsequential we are, merely specks of dust, and over-bloated with ego and ignorance. Open your heart to the profound vastness. You will get lessons in life and living.

It's such a colossal system, so forget about nurturing any ego to change things. Forget it. The only point in the universe where you can be sure of fixing things is yourself. Nothing out there was ever fixed by a mere part of the system. That is an absolute reality. But there is always light. The picture is incomplete without you. You change your perspective and the universe changes.

Joseph Campbell says: “The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.”

Try this fabulous matching game. A drop of water is just a small ocean. The ocean is merely a larger drop. There is hardly any qualitative difference. They hold the same seed of potential. Similarly, you are a small cosmos. The cosmos is simply a larger you.

Stephen Hawking: "We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special."

And understanding the universe begins with understanding the small universe, i.e., you. The first step in the journey.

Look at your body and think, does it exist in abstraction, in exclusive totality. It doesn't. It simply cannot. It’s merely a few kilograms of matter clinging to consciousness, chetna. Just like electricity is the link between a computer’s hardware and software to make it an operating unit, similarly, prana energy is the link between the matter body and consciousness, the seat of your real being. You occupy the chair of your existence as a dynamic unit operating under the infallible laws of reciprocal transformations of energy.

You are just the karmic point, the soul DNA, having the code of your journey across other transformations, which we term for simplicity as the ‘previous births’. Just like semen and egg cells have the DNA imprint for the matter body, your consciousness has the DNA coded with all your experiences since the journey began. And this journey is just a journey within the largest, singular journey, the expansion of the present universe since the Big Bang in its current cycle.   

This ecosystem, which supports you and countless other beings, is your extended body. You are just a point of existence within this larger body. These trees over there are your bigger lungs. These streams of water are the larger replica of the water in your body. Calcium, phosphorus, zinc and other elements of your body are just the tiny replica of the vast mountains and plains containing mammoth amount of this matter. You retain your identity in this sea of ecosystem like a drop of water does in an ocean. It exists simply because the larger entity exists to define its existence. 

Moving up the hierarchy, this ecosystem also has an extended body. It is mother earth itself. Earth with dense metal in its core, its gravity, its spin and revolution, sets up the stage for the ecosystem to exist.

Further up, the solar system is earth's extended body. Earth cannot exist in exclusion from the solar system. Without it, it will just vanish like a tiny speck of dust and scatter its energy to be taken up by some mysterious, concurrent phenomena, God knows in what incidental, interesting way.

The Milky Way is the solar system's extended self. The solar system will collapse without the vast surrounding and balancing forces of the Milky Way. It’s just a tiny phenomenon cocooned in the huge galactic forces of matter and energy transformations prevalent in the Milky Way.

Super-galaxy is Milky Way's extended body, and so on so forth. Till you arrive at the roof of everything. Till you reach the farthest expansion of the universe. Then it’s nothing, simply because there the explosion is imploding, getting sucked into nothingness, only to be blasted out again for another cycle. And the cycle goes on and one. Self-sustaining with zero net energy! Doesn’t eternity sound plausible this way?

Mind you, all this endless play is being played on the mathematical sum of zero energy. How is it possible with net zero energy? Visualize a pendulum. It swings left and right simply because of the energy transformations taking from kinetic energy to potential one and vice versa. When it’s moving up, its kinetic energy is turning to potential energy. When it’s going down its potential energy is turning to kinetic energy. So much of drama without any loss or gain of energy! Just simple transformation of energy from one form to another! Same is the case with this cosmic pendulum. At its two extremes it explodes and implodes, expands and gets sucked up, and on and on, just like a cosmic swing, moving on and on.  

Now, can you guess, what is the meaning of ‘universe’? It is ‘one song’. If you still didn't get it, no need to waste time, carry on like before, but don't forget to smile and have fun. This is just one harmonious, ever-evolving song to which you can definitely add your melody and composition by being in tune with the natural laws. There is no specific need to understand it. It can be very easily lived. 

Closely watch nature. You will see the miracles happening with such magical effortlessness that they appear more mundane than even the simple task of you lifting your hand. And one more thing, like you see around, it's nothing but dynamic exchange and transformation of energy and matter. In any case, it’s basically energy, because matter, and its consequent shape and appearance, is just the apparent state of energy at a particular frequency.

Your own purpose in life always falls short of the universal will unless you link it to the causes beyond your own self. So while you strive to be happy and successful, try to do it in a way that it gets in sweet concordance with the very same desires of not just human beings but whole of the ecosystem.

Even a genuine prayer for someone will do. Enlightenment doesn't mean skies will shower flowers and earth will part and you will get a halo around your head. It happens when you become the commonest of the common and see yourself in the natural scheme around, as a part of the totality surrounding you. It simply means to be in a state when you accept in all humility that there is hardly any individuality around, when you feel that it’s all but a massive commonalty.

One seed contains the potential of a whole forest. The cosmic seed, the point, the bindu of Hinduism, is just the dot where explosion and implosion begin and end. At the highest hierarchy, this seed, this point, this vector of nothingness, contains limitless possibilities for the mutually interchanging interplays of energy. Look at the marvel of a tiny banyan seed. Look at the wonderful sprout of a huge tree with the lateral openings for birds, animals and humans. The cosmic seed, the point of nothingness, contains the seeds for everything. Quite stupendously, it’s nothing and everything at the same time. 

These little groups of words in this tiny sermon just try to take a picture of the infinite and its day-to-day reflection in our lives. It’s just a poor substitute for the ultimate reality. Just like a picture taken on your camera is a poor replacement for the lively panorama you wish to capture. With due regard to human limitations to express the infinite dimensions of reality, all our efforts through words, art and science are merely indicative in nature. They simply point to the largest reality far above the smaller planes of human-contrived tiny realities that make life easy, comfortable and somewhat comprehendible.

There is hardly any difference between ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’. This cosmic cycle, having a time-span of billions of years, is a blast from a point. The net energy is zero. You can have an endless interplay of energy, with nullifying factors at each step, like you go on adding and subtracting the same amount at all levels. Eternity then becomes possible. It’s possible to have ‘everything’ out of ‘nothing’. The so called Maya of Hinduism is nothing but the apparent reality, which involves the subject and the object. In quantum physics, they say that for the subatomic phenomena to exist, it’s necessary to have a perceiver. No wonder, they say that the world is as you see it.

Radiation is both wave and particle at the same time. How is it possible? It is a wave because it shows the properties of a wave like refraction. It’s particle because it can strike like a particle and get bounced off? Contradictions melt in probability. And that probability is never complete till you have the observer to define it.

Electromagnetic radiation, the wave, has particles called photons. These photons have zero mass. Then how can these be particles? They are particles through the probability to exist at a point within a specified zone in the wave path. The probability of their existence remains dormant until you have an observer. They are a wave without an observer, and turn to particle status the moment the observer arrives on the scene to define a moment of existence at a particular point in the band of probability. Scriptures say that all this is an extension of your mind. The latest researches in quantum physics prove the same thing.  

Explore your own space within the infinitely dynamic exchange of energy in the singular stream of primordial energy shooting off in countless directions, carrying fixed laws and supported by infallible universal intelligence. And all this is defined by the last law of all the lesser laws, the ultimate law. Call it God, supreme intelligence or the ultimate being. All this but is the same thing. Its reflection in our day to day life is through a feeling called love.

Ego: The Dark Dungeon of Self-imprisonment

 

People oftentimes mistake their insecurities, lust, possessiveness and ego as love. You look for perfection, as per your expectations, in your relationships. It blocks your vision. You then look sideways to blame the externals around you. You shout at people, call them names and blame them for your discomforting situation in life.

Ego is an illusion that creates a false identity preventing you from coming face to face with the real self. And from the false chambers you cannot be a loving person. You have to nail down the culprit. You have to be vigilant. You have to observe it closely. Mere observation will help you come out of its trap. The moment you come out of the dark room of ego, humility, modesty and respect for others will sprout forth. And that is where the sun called love dazzles with its life-transforming warmth. 

Now let us come down to the funny game of breaking the walls that don't even exist. A very small and practical key that can unlock and set the love code free to sparkle in your life.

Let’s start with the body. It’s not a wall, this body, separating the world outside that our illusionary ego, the sense of ‘I’ makes us believe, exclusively separating the self from the other. The stronger the feeling, the bigger is the illusion. And, as a direct result, lesser is the scope of love and compassion to blossom.

There are no separating walls. They appear so on account of the conditioned mind and the limited perceptions, thanks to our sense organs that interpret the fragmented parts perceivable to them in the forms of touch, taste, feelings, appearances and shapes at certain frequencies. The latter are nothing but concentrations of energies at particular frequencies. Otherwise, it is the same cosmic energy, vibrating, evolving, transforming in endless chains. It’s nothing but an ever-existing evolution, with balancing counterpoints all along the way. The apparent creation and destruction, the dualities, are nothing but the balancing acts as the cosmic design unfolds. You can compare it to a pole-wielding rope-walker. The movement is onwards, but at each step the pole sways between the dualities to manage the balance and ensure the movement ahead.

So let’s start with the cemented identities of the separation of the self from the big scheme out there. At least accept that there are windows in the wall. Accept that it’s not an unbreakable stone wall around your flesh and bones. Open the windows and let the light flood in. By taking windows as walls, we just keep on piling a crust of illusions around our apparently exclusive self. Then it becomes a fortress, created and cemented solidly by the mind. A dark, sooty psychological crust around the self. It’s a narrow, confined world of insecurities, jealousy, self-centeredness, hate and complexes. The things that should hardly matter become life-defining parameters. Under the tar of illusions, our real self, our real potential, our gateway to success, plus peace, lies dormant in the dark.

The crust becomes too hard. But its brittleness increases with its thickness with the passage of time, as our age and experience tell us later. It is bound to crack. And when it does, we feel the pain. Our assumptions of happiness and success turn out to be flimsy and childish. It seems we just ran after a mirage. No wonder we die in pain and agony.

So guys start hammering down the crust. Practice opening the windows in the illusionary wall. Let the light pour in. It’s there, everywhere, the real you, with your potential of greatness and peace. As much as you pursue dreams in a competing world, return home to your real self in the evening for rest and repose. That is your root, the real origin. Nourish it. Leaves, branches and trunk are important. But these are the manifestations of the potential of your roots that lie there in the soil of unity and totality of one universal energy going on and on in countless transformations, following the same laws in different transformations at each stage. So nourish your roots to the real self. The branches will be sturdy, the leaves healthy and shiny. And the biggest reward, the best takeaway, falls in your basket. It’s the fruit of love. It’s the certificate of self-authentication. It’s the degree of coming home to realize your essential loving nature.

Go and embrace the tree near you. It is the same energy, utilizing the five primal matters like yours, manifesting its tree form at a slightly different frequency than yours.

As Victor Hugo says, “Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”

To have a taste of the ultimate sweetness, you have to come out of the self-imposed prison. If you have become too habituated to target enemies, if that is what fuels your journey to achieve targets, then target your own ego first. The biggest enemy is nearest, within your own self. Come on, first at least acknowledge its presence. Observe its tricks objectively. You will soon realize the hollow foundations of this phantom palace.

Cracking the Code of Love

 Dalai Lama: “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.”

The fundamental structure of the seed of our being, our soul, is unconditional love. It stays deep at the core of our consciousness. It may not be tangible as a vigorous emotion. It is simply a state of being the way it is.

Ram Dass sums it up so beautifully: “It's not 'I love you' for this or that reason, not 'I love you if you love me.' It's love for no reason, love without an object.”

Quite ironically, we tend to oversee love and find it easy to hate. Little do we realize that the things we love are kept in our heart. The baggage of hate is carried by the mind. An empty heart and a laden mind is a sure shot recipe of frustrated self.

Come, let us explore the code of love. In the game of survival and sustenance, there is an underlying code of love, compassion and consideration. All the apparent turbulence on the stage of life is simply like waves on sea surface. Inside you have undisturbed depths. Try to read this subsurface code of love in things, phenomena, relationships and all other worldly scenarios as life chugs ahead.

Loveless Souls: Biggest Losers

 

Kinky Friedman: “Money can buy you a fine dog, but only love can make him wag his tail.”

Doesn’t he crack open the little secret, which perhaps lies too much in abundance for us to give it almost no value like dirt around our feet?

The farther we exist on the periphery from the central core of our being, the more we get identified with rampant ambition and its instrument, power.

Abraham Lincoln says, “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.”

Try it on someone who appears a replica of goodness and a cute bundle of niceties. Many times we make our fears, weakness and insecurities pass off as beacons of morality. Give power to one such guy and test. As Plato says, “The measure of a man is what he does with power.”

The urge to dominate, the ambition of power and the desire for prestige, these are all driven not by strength, but by some inherent weakness, fragility, fear and imperfection. There is an inherent imperfection that drives grossly selfish acts.

As Eckhart Tolle says, “Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.”

Stalin had very short legs in comparison to his upper body. When he sat on a chair, he looked damn funny as his legs fell short of the ground. We need not insult humanity anymore by even retelling the atrocities he perpetrated on his own people.

Changez Khan won half of the world and slaughtered countless innocent human beings. He was so insecure of his death and mortality that he went on rampage to forcibly plant his biological seed across Asia. By an estimate, almost 6% of the Mongoloid people draw their genetic line from him. But even this large scale cropping won’t give him peace and security. He was so scared of his death that fearing some sabotage he never slept at nights. He just went paranoid and one night ran out of his tent, tripped, fell on an iron peg and died like a stray dog dies accidentally.

You can add Hitler to the list. About him we need not say even a single word because speaking about the evil sounds like becoming evil itself.

I have no reason to feel that these characters were happy, content souls. Such violence and hate can only pour out of burning innards. The fire burns forever with the dry fodder of self-hate and self-reproach. The soul burns in it. Those around simply feel the heat. Pity for such poor idiots. Contrary to what they strove to project outside in the form of power and fear, they were the weakest of human beings inside. And their efforts to cover up that weakness took the world into whirlpools hellish tragedies. These were the souls who had basically got totally detached from their essentially loving soul, the biggest tragedy for a human self, and the biggest punishment also in surviving as living ghosts. These are glaring exceptions where these people completely lost their essentially loving self. Feeling sad for the biggest losers.  

They exist with only this much of lesson for humanity: How far one can fall if one’s soul loses whole of its essential self, i.e., love. One then becomes a devil incarnation. Even the smallest amount of love in a human being saves him/her from hitting the nadir of existence, i.e., becoming Satan itself.

So guys, hold your love in your heart with pride. And look up to Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and scores of other soldiers of love and peace. Look at the dark characters in history only with this much of a gentle reminder about hate and its destructive capacity because all of us have the virus ever-ready to attack our loving self.

Simply keep on observing your anger, hate and irritation. Watch it as a spectator like you observe the world outside. This much awareness itself will enable you to be in a position to take charge of your affairs as things start getting out of control. The agents of hate and malice strike you in total unawareness. Light the lamp of your awareness and you see the shadows creeping away.