Love your Duties to Retain your Footing

 

Our duties, responsibilities and commitment are the roots that keep the tree of freedom and rights standing. The tree of rights falls without the roots of duties. Read the constitutions anywhere in the world and you will realize what I mean.

Loving one's job and many other duties is a huge step in self improvement. You hardly realize when you step over from the small stage of individual duties to general to universal responsibility. I call this sprout of love. Love sprouts.

The weeds of hate and anger are growing too rapidly. Don't we need more and more love sprouts? Once you start loving your commitments, gone is the discontent, brighter turns the light inside, and happier you are. Love is the destination where one can enter from so many alleys open on all sides.

Phillips Brooks says, “Happiness is the natural flower of duty.” Even George Washington found happiness and moral duty inseparably connected.

Your sense of responsibility fuels your flight of independence. The ability to respond (responsibility) is the price you have to pay to achieve your own type of grand greatness. The more your sense of responsibility, the lesser you are prone to blame others. With less blame in your heart, and lesser grudges, there will be more reasons to smile and accept others as they are.

All the talk of universal brotherhood, love and sense of responsibility are incomplete without your own contribution, your love for your responsibilities. And mind you, privileges, responsibility and opportunity are part of the same system. They sustain each other. You just cannot have one of them and stay happy. Not sustainable man. 

Seen the fate of a free kite? It falls man. A stringed kite is better than a free flier. Any day.

We can fly and rise higher only if we are tied to certain responsibilities and commitments; our freedom-lorn spirit tamed to an extent by tolerable social conventions, individual values, family setup, the sweet-sour tides in our offices, etc. But most of the time we find it as a drag on our real enjoyment of life. We just feel how great life would be without all such irritating stuff of the mundane life. But guys tell me, can a stringless kite fly? The kite flies because there is a string pulling it down to help it rise higher in the sky. It also tries to negate the limitations set up by the string. It shakes its head in negation. OK! No issues. It has every right to create a scene. But tell me, what happens when its dream to be string-free become true? It just takes a few ecstatic circles in air and falls onto the ground. Those free swirls of its dreams prove to be its death dives.

We are the stringed kites fella. We fly and rise high only because our destructive passions and straying traits are tamed and tied to a string. So love your commitments, your responsibilities, and your struggles for small-small things in life. The moment you love and like the stage on which you slog out to carve out the things that define your life, everything turns loveable. Try it. A very simple cause and effect phenomenon.

Love and liking go a long way together on the synonym path. Increase you quota of likings for the things that define your personal and professional lives. You will be free to harvest your love crop under the beneficent sun of your heartfelt likings. All the best!

Give an Ear to the Melody Inside

 

There is a voice inside, soft and musical but with biggest nuggets of sanity.

A.R. Rahman: “Your inner voice is the voice of divinity. To hear it, we need to be in solitude, even in crowded places.”

So, guys take a step away from the busy pavement. And listen to the voice of your best guide.

Even a thief knows someone is watching. It’s his inner self, the conscience, the real observer. It catches him long before law and society seize and condemn him. He knows, he is being watched by the real objective self. This real self is detached enough to mutely observe everything done by the carrier body in the folds of ignorance and darkness. Just that the thief shouts over the inner voice and makes off with the illegality. It's hard to have a thief who was in fine tuning with his inner voice and still carried out the misdeed.

No man killed, or injured, or committed crimes born of hate while listening to the soft inner voice. These are exceptions when the unfortunate person totally forgot the inner voice, and the door to his compassionate self bolted temporarily. Even the feeble-most rays from the real compassionate self are strong enough to remove the last traces of shadows under which one could have done some wrong. The alchemy of love is too strong to allow any poisonous traces remain in the cauldron.

So don't allow that little reminder to be drowned in the drama of life where we try to imitate others' lives, where we get trapped in stereotypes, enabling prejudices to subdue the real us. If you want to be the best version of yourself, you have to give an ear to the little best friend. It is your pathway to realize the most genuine self, the loving you, the compassionate and considerate you. It needs no repeating that it brings the best you have to offer on the basis of your inborn talents and skills.  

As you open up the channel to allow the gentle notes to come above, the all-knowing instincts will shake off the dust, leading you to the right path. And no correct path ever bypassed love, compassion, peace, harmony and happiness. These are simply the milestones falling along the right path.

As you dash on the rough and tumble of the outer show of life, keep your ears open for the best advisor, the inner voice. It will lead you over the hurdles that have been so far preventing you from fulfilling your destiny.

Mahatma Gandhi says everyone who wills can hear the inner voice that is within everyone.

You just have to learn to listen to it. It's your conscience, the seed of real you. It has all the motherly talks about what is best for you. The moment you start connecting to it, true liberation starts. Happiness, health, love and generosity are some of the simple fruits of this tree. You just have to listen. That's it. Only this much awareness will do. Awareness of this voice itself is the solution. It's like watering the great tree and it flourishes. So guys, keep your ears open. And believe me, it never misguides.

Far away from opinions and criticisms, it will help you discover the real you. Just have a look around, all the so called less-brained species have an innate ability to go intuitively in the game of survival. I think they are in league with the natural intelligence spraying around on the atoms of cosmic energy going round and round in cyclical transformations. No harm in feeling proud of our brainy bulk. But that is to win the war in the matter world. It unfortunately falls short of the real goal to be happy, which is the domain of our spirit.

To nourish your soul, you can hardly depend on the material world that is just one of the means to your real goal, not the end. So guys, amplify the soft notes of the inner voice. They carry the potential to turn you into the luxuriant canopy of a beautiful persona. Love and compassion are the fruits on the tree.

O traveler,

Forget about the hoot and holler

emanating from the world outside,

And give an ear to the soft and murmurous

cooings emanating from the soul,

It has a soft and sympathetic

message for you only, —

Your most personal message,

meant only for you,

Listen to these delicate chimes,

It’ll help you in finding peace in chaos,

In getting a foothold in the stampede,

In feeling rest, repose and respite

in the face of constant buffeting by the world around,

It’ll help you in breaking

the hardest of superficial layers,

which suffocate and limit your identity,

And put you face to face with

your  true self, your real worth,

Listen to it, close your eyes,

And pay attention with all your heart,

Just for a change,

don’t look far, look closest at yourself,

It’ll be as uneventful as looking

at a dust particle around your feet,

But it changes the universe for you,

You will have the biggest message

in the softest of whispering phrases!

And it’ll help you in finding yourself,

You will surprise yourself in being love incarnation.

Reaching the Shrine of Love through the Wooded Path of Happiness

 

Do you find the mythologically grand idea of love and compassion too much for you? No worries. Relax. I would ask you to hold the nose from a more convenient angle. You may find it more lucrative for the self in its direct form. Guys, it’s about happiness. Target happiness. The world is yet to see a happy person who isn’t loving in nature. 

And mind you, happiness can be taken as simple as breathing.

It’s basically we who repel happiness away from us. We don’t allow it to come to us, embrace us, take hold of us. We set it as a goal too far down the line in future. Some house, some power, some position, some accumulation of pleasure, some relationships, etc., etc. We set up goals as the preconditions for our happiness. And the goals keep on piling up, over the years, and set up a wall between us and happiness, pushing it more and more distant from us.

I will set up a home and then be happy. Happiness delayed. Then I work over the years. There is no end. I set a goal to raise a family and then be happy. Again it sets up a wall between happiness and us. Relentlessly we just push on while happiness stays a distant goal never to be achieved. The biggest folly is that we make it conditional on endless goals, which are never met, because it’s the destiny of a goal to merge into another bigger one. They never die, only we perish. Huge immortals as they are. In pushing for them, we die, separated from happiness that could have been the greatest gift of life, had we not pushed it away from us.

We keep on forgetting to celebrate the milestone that we had promised to ourselves to enjoy on reaching it. It happens because the moment we reach there, the mirage shifts further down the line. It’s thus our destiny to be in the journey. Here lies the key. The journey itself is its own reward.

The remedy lies in taking away happiness from the far end of our endless goals and keep it safe in our house, like we store some grains for the harsh winters, near us, in the safest part of our house. It has to be cut away from the trail of endless goals and ambitions and kept with the self, in the present. It has to be set free from any conditions of meeting some goal. It’s a state as good as being healthy. Just being happy and living for a day. We have to learn to separate being from becoming.

You should be pushing towards yours goals as a happy person, rather than somebody who wants to be happy in future after completing the goals. The goals never come to a halt, only we do, at the moment of our death. So we die unhappily, separated from the natural state of happiness that could have pumped our life with unthinkable contentment and satisfaction, only if we had set it free from the chains of goal-setting and placed it unchained from those unreachable spots in the future.

Let happiness be a precondition for our doings, not a poor outcome of our efforts. Do everything as a happy person; instead of doing the deeds to become a happy person. Happiness is a state of being so, not the specific result of some hot pursuit. There is only one way it can be availed. Either we embrace it in the condition we are in, or it just eludes us. Keep it with you while you fly. It will boost your determination to go far and high.

So the only way to remain happy is just to be happy, instead of slogging it out to become happy later. Fella, kindly decide to keep happiness as a routine, let it take possession of your present, like a monkey eating fruits, the birds flying and the trees standing with stoic muse. All in the present. Now. Just being so. Simply being happy. This is the natural state of each and everything in nature. Had it been otherwise the system would have collapsed under the heat of agitation.

It pays the way to reach a stage when you find it actually possible to become happy without any reasons. Choiceless happiness and loving kindness are same by the way.  

Nurture the Seeds of Goodness

 

The fruit of love is in season forever. It stays there for all irrespective of caste, class, creed and religion. Does air have a choice in deciding to get into selective nostrils? It hasn’t. So is the case with love.  

Want to feel the brace of choiceless love in your life and don’t appear to have a clue about it? Ok, no worries. Just recall a word called forgiveness. It’s your short-cut to the love-pool. Develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. The inability to forgive robs you of your ability to love, in scientifically direct proportions.

The best of us have some bad in us, and so do the worst of us carry some goodness. Just mere realization of this simple fact clears our vision, enables us to be accommodating, receptive and understanding. The latter unavoidably turns us forgiving. Countless situations turn in our favor the moment we lay claim to the soft weapon of forgiveness. Being good in action and thoughts becomes so easy after this.

The things that ought to be simply done, should just be done. Otherwise, their shadows linger in the mind. They grow heavier with the passage of time. This invisible weight is heavier than the stones we see around. Simple, harmless acts of appreciation, of enjoyment, of helping someone cross a stream are better done and closed with a full stop. It’s better for a healthy mind. Otherwise, they linger like conspiring shadows over our conscience.

A missed chance of being good will definitely cast a shadow on our mind. An effort to help the self in being good, on the other hand, will hardly leave any unbecoming imprint on our conscience for pinching reflections later.

Only goodness has a legacy and future. Hypocrisy and meanness are just bad examples and leave repentance most of the time. To do good is instinctive for a human being, it’s however another matter that we stifle the urge most of the time. To be bad, on the other hand, is not intrinsic to our nature. It is wrongly reflective, a miscalculation, a tragic bypass of the instinct of goodness.

Nurture the seeds of the instincts of goodness. It’s a simple practice. It gives peace of mind, clear conscience and makes the journey enjoyable. Avoid it and you carry the burden in your mind. A burdened mind, as a natural corollary, is an easy prey to hate and malice.  A light, well-poised mind, on the other hand, is the glittering throne of love.

Don't be a Pollutant

 

Henry David Thoreau: “Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”

All of us carry an aura around us. It comprises an electro-magnetic field born of the flow of life energy through our bodies. It exists at the interface of physio-psychological and superior selves. The quality of this aura is a function of our mental, physical and emotional states. Anger, regret, fear, jealousy, desperation, sorrow, rejection and hopelessness create negative energy and consequently a harmful aura. This bad aura, apart from being injurious to us, pollutes the surrounding environment like a heap of garbage.

Now isn’t it our bounden duty to keep the environment clean by remaining positive, happy, smiling, poised, relaxed, sympathetic and compassionate? It's our duty brothers and sisters! It's as good for others’ health as it is for our own. All the steps to the cleaning of all types of pollutants start from the self. Stay happy. Stay clean. Just by doing this we do a social service.

Just this much effort on your part to avoid being a pollutant sets in motion a huge effort by the existential forces to turn you a fragrant flower with its ounce of love, beauty and aroma for the cause of creation. Sounds mystical? Well, that’s how it works. Just that we have got conditioned to see things directly correlated like in physical sciences.

Realign your energy field on a frequency of love and smiles. It goes strictly along the laws of nature because it’s basically about evolution. And you won’t find a bigger proof of your evolution than kind, loving and  considerate elements in your character.