Physical Body ̶ Love = Robot

 

Take a deep look into the pools of nature. Mysteries will dissolve. Hardly anything looks improbable or impossible as you come to understand everything better and see more clearly. Beyond all the drama for survival, with apparent self-centered follies and ambitious pursuits, you will find the common stage of love and care. There is a natural propensity for it. Cut away the brief moments of insecurity and fear-driven runs, the rest is peace, repose and harmony.

Delicious dew, lazy blue skies, the sea lost in its own depths, sleepy pastures, dreamy meadows, pathless woods, lonely slopes, solitary groves, refreshing rain, balmy sun, the still beauty of a dawn, languorous dusks, spotless white snow, all these and more are just soft whispers of nature in the language of love. All this loveliness sprouts from the uninterrupted flow of love.

No wonder Michelangelo mused that his soul could find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth's loveliness.

Nature is not with anybody. Neither is it against anyone. It is for us to decide whether we are with it or against it. The onus is on us! Since we are a part of it, it suits our purpose if we go with it. Going against nature means going against ourselves. But that is what we are doing presently.

With its impartiality, nature ensured a competition among the species for survival. Look at the fantastic evolution of organisms and species. But then with the food-chains reaching a dead end with mankind being the master, the nature itself—the cause—will become the casualty.

Humans evolved as inseparable part of nature, just like any other animal species, using their best skills to survive. Humans used brain to master nature. Even now the mankind (biologically) and its institutions stand on nature’s back. But now we are crossing all limits. Possibly the inevitable juggernaut of progress will drive us over the precipice. The more forests we cut, the more species we force into extinction, the more pollutants we release into the air and the seas, the more we are eating into nature’s guts. It’s like killing the hen that lays golden eggs. It’s like cutting the branch on which we are sitting. Can there be a bigger folly? And still we feel so proud of our brains!

Our present biological standing is a sum total of the nature around us. We are a reflection and sum total of the state of the overall natural health. With more natural ecosystems being decimated to get into a more mechanized world, it will be a folly to think that we will be able to survive with the present biological level of human physiology.

In a world with ghastly depleting natural resources, and cement, steel and machines ruling the roost, how will the present human biology—the outcome of the natural phenomena and food-chains—survive? It just will not. So the cut into nature’s guts will require adaptations in human biology and physiology as well.

Simple fact is: the present human physiology will be totally redundant in a world where there will be hardly any forests, most of the species extinct, air polluted and weather totally changed. To survive under the new challenge, the mankind will be forced to bring out mechanization in the physiology itself. Genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, artificial organs and many other goddamned things will see a world in which mankind will be a semi-machine managing full machines.

And with the final traces of nature gone, with the environment modified mechanically to survive, the mankind will finally become a full machine. It might be just 200 years away when the last sinews of human blood, ligaments, flesh and skin will be replaced by artificial devices. The cycle of evolution grossly manipulated to reach a point of no return.

It’s unimaginable to guess how will the super-species behave! But one thing seems sure: with only machines all around, you have the inevitable destruction. All because the nectar of humanity, the soul of mankind, love, will come dwindling in proportion to the artificiality in human body, leaving us mere robots.

Do we need further proof about what chiefly stamps our identity as human beings? It is love by the way, if you still missed it. 

Stony Truths Pelted at the Love Flower

 

Siri Hustvedt: “Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth. We're all limited by our perspective.”

Miracle of miracles, existence has given us five senses to interpret the inherent unity in our own ways. As Friedrich Nietzsche says, “There are no facts, only interpretations.”

All of us are destined to appear different in many ways. On the surface, above the deep sea of commonality, these differences define our specialty in the mass of heaving humanity. And the so called truth, which you hold dear to your self identity, is actually an opinion only. Problem arises when we present our opinion as absolute truth. Holding one's mere opinion as absolute truth panders the mankind's foe, ego. And you will hardly find a more potent enemy of love than an over-bloated ego. Accepting your opinions as mere opinions like any others will make you an amazingly honest person. And love blooms under honesty and humility.

If you are kind enough to allow someone's truth to shine, taking your dazzle away, you show a kindness. Not that you should always allow even ill-found opinions to sail over your head. You have every right to checkmate such misguided shots. All I want to say is that fight an opinion with your opinion only. It's just a scoring game. Outsmart and fox with your argument, but always remember that you are not the omniscient entity having a copyright on truth. And never forget to smile when cutting opinions with opinions.

Ravindranath Tagore says so beautifully and briefly, “Facts are many, but the truth is one.”

Squabble over facts, but never show the attitude that you own the domain of truth. Quite interestingly, truth may be told in millions of ways, and the beauty is all can be true in their own ways. And mind you, biggest truths are incontrovertible. They come in the form of love, honesty, kindness, humility and scores of other beautiful things. Can anyone put up a debate about this?

Don't you think that your firm convictions are laid bare by the sweeping winds of unfolding experiences and new facts and knowledge coming on the way as you move ahead in life? Doesn't it mean that so many of your own self-cherished truths turn out to be mere opinions later on in life as you move with flexibility, wisdom and meaningful search of life? So where is the truth? This much of open-mindedness will avoid so many unnecessary situations in life. As you cut down such chaotic moments from your life, you actually lay down a firm seed-bed for the flowers of love to blossom.

Pick you grains of truth. They are for some frail humanitarian purpose. Don’t take them as the cosmic seeds of the ultimate truth.

With our limited self perception, the universal truth stays out of our grasp. It is pleasantly lost in the infinite cosmic spread. So all we have is the scattered grains of perceived truths. My truth, your truth, his truth, her truth, their truth. Bits and pieces of truth, picked up for convenience, for suitability. Truth, as we seem to know it, is a mundane piece of daily utility, as much suitable as the food we take as per our body types and socio-economic circumstances.

It’s advisable to forget about the most justifiable of truths. The most we can do is to get an average of all truths, a mathematical average, a common truth. This but again is a simplified standard to derive rules, principles and moral code to run society. A mere arrangement to run a bigger household.

I know my truth can be false for someone else, and vice versa. Truth and falsehood, recurring shadow and substance. Sometimes falsehood is the shadow. Oftentimes truth is the shadow. But they are always nearby. Touching each other like the shadow clings to the substance. Both have their suitors simultaneously. Someone holds the substance for support. At the same time someone takes shelter in the shadow to accomplish something that can be managed in a grey zone only.

As Swami Vivekananda says: “Our duty is to encourage everyone in his struggle to live up to his own highest idea, and strive at the same time to make the ideal as near as possible to the Truth.”

This much of space for each other leaves the scope for full gardens of understanding and cooperation in our social arrangement. With your leniency, long before you help others in search of their destiny, you primarily help yourself because your own opinions don’t turn stones to checkmate your growth and evolution. And when all and sundry are journeymen on the path of the ultimate truth, there is hardly any time for roadblocks and traffic jams resulting in quarrels and brawls. It happens simply because you aren’t trampling on any fellow foot. All are moving on their own path. This is what we mean by real liberation. And loving kindness is the soul of this quest.

Love: The Privileged Guest

 

Love is a noble guest. It stays in a regal hall. You just cannot expect it to manage in a chaotic household. Before you invite the love guest to stay permanently, you have to put your house in order. But then we commit this folly of treating the title more important than the story. Want to know more about it? Read on.

There is a house well plastered, tiled and painted on the outside walls. Its well-designed, vibrant exterior catches your attention. Drawn by the catchy external look, you step inside. You expect the same magnetism inside. But a surprise awaits you. You come across soot, grime, dust, unplastered walls, cobwebs, cement and stone-crush staring at you. How do you feel now? Don’t be surprised if you feel cheated.

It’s a house that has been left unattended inside. Incomplete. You will feel running out. It’s a house that needs the workers more than the visitors. That’s how most of us die: just houses under construction. Throughout our lives we keep on painting the outer walls to satisfy our ego through expanding our visibility, hoping worldly attention will give happiness and peace. Little do we realize that real comfort lies in the house completed from inside. So the interior remains incomplete, disordered and under construction. Can such a house give permanent peace? No.

Outer walls are important but only to the extent of defining our world, a psychological boundary to stamp our ownership of our chunk in this world. Only this much. And the importance of the outer walls is meaningless if the interior is unfinished. Outer paint is just the title of the orderliness inside. It’s a summary of all the cozy arrangement inside. We, but, commit the folly of treating the title as the main story. Can a title replace the main text of the story? No. The title ought to be catchy. But the story is all that matters.

So guys let’s first put our house in order from inside. Magnificent positivity, the lovely bride of love and compassion, will naturally step in turning your house into a home, making you the kind and considerate person that you are meant to be.

Happiness: The Natural Fruit of Love

 

Happiness gets brewed fully to turn joy. But to love, essentially, and be loved, as a simple natural corollary, are the necessary ingredients. Love, joy and happiness then radiate from your soul and draw many a good circumstances in your life.

Here is a simple exercise to evaluate our options before we move on. When do you think your bigger loss occurred: when someone broke your trust and love or when you broke someone’s trust? Sadly, my book is only for people choosing the second option. Others can go to more practical guidebooks to seek their destiny.

The secret to happiness is unconditional love. Contrary to our experience, happiness is a matter of choice. I firmly believe that one can choose to be happy.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”

Guys, unconditional happiness isn’t possible without unconditional love.

Since most of us are roaming the planet to look for something that is safe in our pocket, the discussion becomes relevant.

Myself, by the way, is someone who has taken the quieter by-lane to be happy. The hustle and bustle of the big, booming main street is intimidating with the added risk that I may well forget myself after being lost in the crowd. As you walk in the crowd, the monotony and anonymity takes over. You lose the charm of life in doing the same things others are doing. You don’t feel the kick in solving the same problems using the same old, oft-repeated methods. The solutions also are boringly the same, the results also the same.

A chronic boredom starts nagging the self. We try to fake being happy, forcefully trying to convince ourselves and others with our material achievements. But in our heart of hearts, we know that the happiness ever looks at the farthest end of the planet or even beyond. The long and winding chains of the preconditions to be met, before you trudge nearer to the ever-elusive happiness, are spooling on and on: the dangerous mathematics of infinitely long factors and functions of happiness.

I will be happy if I top the exams, then you become a topper, ok let me grab the best job, you get it, ok let me be the best CEO, you become one, then more. Then your children have to be the same or even more to take you to the still elusive dream of happiness. More money, more power, more prestige, more, more, more. Then there are others in the fray who can turn you unhappy even after you have overturned the records set out for yourself. There is no stopping. And hence no happiness. Forget about joy.

The problem is if your happiness is not within you from the beginning and lies at some goal-post in future at a distance, there are millions, trillions, zillions and even more open-ended factors that affect, mathematically scuttle your chances of a win. Forget it. It’s futile chase. The more we run after conditional happiness, the more we push it away from ourselves.

The fundamental mistake is that we expect happiness to be the fruit on the tree of our efforts, i.e., the result, the fructification. No, it simply isn’t. It is the root of the tree of our endeavors, where we begin from, which lasts from the beginning to the end. If it’s not in the beginning, forget it, it won’t appear later. It has to be there before you begin and persist while you are in the process, while you are in the journey. Learn to take the effort itself as a form of happiness. And simply doing becomes the cause of boundless joy.

The state of being happy can be habituated. Practice it as a daily routine, like you pump iron to tone your six and eight packs. Nurture the habit of just feeling happy, causeless and reasonless. Just smile when you are alone. Please try it and you will know what I mean. It lets loose a cascading effect driven by the hormones triggered by the movement of the muscles around the corner of your lips. Try it. Close your eyes and just smile. Unconditionally. You will feel how comforting it can be just to be happy.

The fruits will follow later as you slog it out in the battlefield. It’s a simple verb, being so, a simple act, a solacing function. We but treat it as an intimidating noun in future, interpolate it as success and achievements, the fruits at the end of the journey, the light at the end of the tunnel. It but is the lamp that is within you when you are in the dark.

The path to happiness can never pass through the stages of unhappiness and mental struggle. It’s the present in continuation. Remove all future components from the equation of your happiness. So passing through the quieter by-lane, not stomped and nudged by the teeming crowds, one can reach a solitary path, laid out just for himself/herself, to reach his/her destiny, to be happy primarily, and enjoy the fruits of being happy. All in all, you just practice the art of being happy unconditionally. And unconditional happiness is love personified.

If you have any doubts about losing the achiever’s tag, which sounds plausible in being on the main thoroughfare, kindly reevaluate your position. Being unhappy in the same way as others with loads of the same stuff like anyone around is no replacement for a liberated self seeking its own destiny on a free path leading to the ultimate freedom.

The Flower of Love in the Soil of Unity

 

A sense of unity opens the floodgates of loving nature. A sense of unison empowers you in untold ways. Love, peace, justice, equality, happiness and harmony are all the natural derivates in a system standing on the principle of unity.

The apparent diversity at the level of matter is just an illusion at the periphery. In reality, there is a unity of spirit, of life. There are ways and means of feeling this unity. The more you accept the principles of unity, the more the extreme, egoistic divisive forces take a backseat, allowing your spirit to chime with the cosmic harmony. All in all, it simply makes you a loving, kind, grateful and compassionate person. And mind you, given the way things are going around, it may not be possible at the level of organized religions to provide this feeling of unity to their respective followers. But unity in love is always possible. So go out there and spot how everything is unified in the larger scheme of things. 

Take clues from the open book of life lying around you. Look lovingly at the trees and plants nearby. Just because they don’t assert their importance in the language we are used to get messages, we have taken their availability and contribution to our life for guaranteed. But man and women, if the tree is cut, you too will suffer in your science-derived cocoon. If the garden around you burns, you too will feel the heat. Look at the larger stage, and you will realize, it’s merely one huge cosmic stage, where sneeze by one protagonist leaves upheavals in distant most corners. 

There is a system of goodness. The simplest code nature shows is of unified and interdependent co-existence. All things, phenomena, life processes and transformations give and take from the larger system. In simple terms, nothing can exist in isolation in this universe.

Our little environment is supported by earth, earth is supported by sun, sun by larger suns, they in turn by galaxies, and the latter by super-galaxies, and so on and so forth. There is absolutely no such thing as individualism in nature. It’s all a collective behemoth, ever expanding in more and more transformative ways. So how can our very own happiness come from our own limited self, concerning and defined by just our little fights and brawls in the arena of life?

Ask someone, whom you take as the epitome of material achievements, has he hit the biggest treasure of joy and happiness during his pursuits to get more and more power, prestige, money and material in his life? Just a little talk with someone who has spent decades on the path may clear your vision, helping you in reorienting your journey.

We just take fractions of happiness from the bigger pool. Happiness is never complete, or you can say just cannot happen, if it is confined to the limits of the individual self. There are happy families in happy societies and happy individuals in happy families. You simply cannot have happy individuals in an ant-swarm of unhappy society comprising unhappy families. And you cannot have a happy society surrounded by an unhappy ecosystem. You simply cannot.

If you think that the conveniences created science are the modes of happiness, then you are mistaken. These are mere utilities. Utilities are just contributors to happiness like countless other things. And generally these utilities come with far more intangible costs than we presume. You have cars, then you have pollution, and your lungs suffer, simply because trees are suffering. It’s just like everything and everybody is unhappy and suffering in a forest fire. In a flowery luxurious garden, on the other hand, everybody and everything is happy and peaceful.

We are happy or unhappy as a collective unit, not individually. Well, this is how it is, if you consider the real substantial meanings of peace and happiness. The rest are simply temporary delusions, nurtured under the mistake of taking some scientific conveniences as the destination of happiness, which they are not. They are simply the means of a tiny, temporary purpose in life.

So nurture this habit of connecting to the environment around you. The natural environment is the base of our struggle and sustenance. See the processes of life and learn the art of miraculous interdependence. And come out of this delusion that we humans can be happy and unhappy in isolation in our modern-day scientific cocoons.

Far above the debate between elixir of life and curse of death, creation has just one source, single point of focus. Elixir of life and curse of death spring from the same source. The nectar and the poison originate from the same place. Life’s shadow is death, and death’s shadow is life. The perceived duality is a mental image projected in vacuum as we peer through the lens of “ego”, i.e., helpless bondage to the outermost layer, the grossest level of our material existence. The latter stands as the bridge to the shaky walk this way or the other. Break the bond and these drift away into non-existence.

Love is tied to hate. And our “ego” is the rope, the bridge holding the two extremes of duality. Clinging to the two extremities, we have the option of treating one as the substance and the other as the shadow. If your ego allows love to be the substance, then hate turns a shadow. And vice versa. But in treating hate as the substance, we contradict the basic principle of nature. Hate is an exception, love is the rule at the cosmic level. Endless swathes of cosmic tranquility into fathomless depths cannot sustain without inherent love, peace and harmony. By hating we are putting a roadblock, a speed-bump in the path of infinite space-time continuum.  Through love we speed up the cause of evolution. In choosing love and the elixir of life, we add to the inherent cosmic harmony. In hating we add to the cosmic explosions and accidents.

So guys sow the seeds of love in the soil of unity. It will be a rich crop. It makes the world beautiful and provides you strength and affability at the same time.