A Brush with Truth beyond the Pale of Opinions

 

Salutes existential intelligence! At the low tide, I left a trail of footsteps on the soft seaside sand. Then the high tide came and cleaned the slate for somebody's fresh journey. We just write the same lines over and over on the same slate. Life is one. It's not a noun. It is basically living, a throbbing and ever-persistent verb. Throbbing in totality, driven by an ever-expanding code of cosmic intelligence, which allows a bird weighing 10 grams, and insects weighing in milligrams, to accomplish what we can’t do with our 2 kg brain. And existence lives through different things, phenomena, processes and characters. It's just a quizzical interplay of earth, water, fire, air and ether. 

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"...large animals, particularly cows, are aware of their impending slaughter well before it happens. Consequently, they experience high stress levels, which generate a tremendous amount of acidic content in their systems. This, in turn, has its own adverse effects on those who later consume the meat." —Sadhguru in Inner Engineering.

Now I understand why cow-eaters face so many problems, especially the ones who do halal, torture, before slaughter because it is just implanting them with poison. Well, the debate should be kept beyond religion. It's basically what is good for the human system and what is not. The benefits of a live cow, as an integral part of the rural economy, are far more than a slaughtered one. In Rwanda, the gift of a cow, girinika, meaning god bless you with the gift of a cow, is helping in rebuilding a society ravaged by civil, ethnic and tribal wars. The moment two parties at loggerheads gift each other a cow, it is accepted as a truce and confidence building measure. The President there has started a girinika program, which has revolutionized the meaning of rural development, using cow as a partner in the rural economy.

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In the power game, humanely inferior, very unfortunately though, almost always defeats humanely superior.

"A bigger civilization is always defeated by a lower civilization. India was continuously defeated because of her higher civilization. People were more at ease, not in the mood to fight. They were enjoying life. Those who aren't enjoying life, they are ready to fight. If life is beautiful, you can bless everyone. If your life is in difficulty, in turmoil, you can kill, you can become destructive."__Osho

Why India only, now we understand why Tibet was gobbled up by an ever-hungry China. Now we understand why the people from some belief systems are more prone to hate killings. The only exception to the above seems to be America. But then possibly we shouldn't interpret technological advances as a mark of civilization.

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Be the king in your small world. There are just dozens around us who have achieved more than us at the cost of far less struggle and effort than us. But there are millions who have nothing like us, even though they have struggled thousand times more than us. The numbers involved in this simple mathematics should make us proud and satisfied with whatever we have achieved and given by life. So smile, feel lucky and look at the small world, your own world, around you. It is bigger and better than you ever thought. Just that you have always been looking sideways to the taller structures. Don't worry, the inhabitants over there are even more anxious than you. They have their own still bigger world to ogle at and feel sorry for themselves. You are a 'being', a phenomenon, who can exist in the present. So simply be with the moment in your small world. That's what we call by being with your own self.  

A Little Lantern of Truth

 

Ordinary beings possess extraordinary potential to win against odds, to jump over hurdles, to smile over tears, and, most importantly, to be happy when there aren’t enough reasons to be. They are the faceless constituents of a massive commonality. They are surrounded by a swiping generality. They are colored in the monochromes of mundane reality. Still they are special. We have to acknowledge and celebrate the extraordinary in the ordinary people. I see heroes and heroines in the small protagonists on the stage of life. They fight, and oftentimes fail, but write a little passage in the infinite book of life: an ordinary life that was lived substantially. On the small stage of life, they live very intensely. Somehow, the world would not be the world that is still beautiful without their contribution. They heave humanity onwards in its march to some better destination.

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Of all types of death, including by disease, accidents and ageing, the death born of someone's hate is the worst. Hate-born death slaughters the core principle of being human. It strangulates the basic constituent of our collective consciousness to survive individually as a part of bigger collectivity at the social level, a literally must-have for our identity as much as oxygen is must for our biological survival. Hate has potent carriers. It breeds death with the weapons of religion, caste, creed, race and ethnicity. From Nazi Holocausts and communist purging to modern day ISIS slayings, hate wreaks the worst form of death. Death born of hate is the very negation of the meaning of life.

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The death of a moth! Don’t feel guilty if you find it inconsequential like the shifting of a speck of dust. Does nature evaluate things on the scale of huge and small, like the death of a moth and the collapsing of a mammoth star? Maybe, maybe not! I definitely find it a momentous occasion when the moth takes its last sigh! Kindly don’t laugh at me and condemn me as someone prone to making mountains out of molehills. Even physics is now going into super-small entities in the tiniest wombs of sub-atomic particles to unravel the ultimate mystery. Coming back to the moth, its corpse shakes involuntarily today like it fluttered consciously yesterday. The only difference is that yesterday its littlest ounce of consciousness was still inside this tiny milligram of a body. Today but that ounce of consciousness has spread to become part of everything. The matter now moves to the force of everything around: Transition from life to matter. What about the consciousness that moved it? Here I stand and there flutters the moth corpse to free winds. Yesterday, exactly at this time, I saw it crawling on the floor. Little did I realize that it was on its death bed! Now it becomes part of everything to take its consciousness at this frequency on the further march of evolution of consciousness, just like species have evolved at the level of biology, at the level of matter. Matter and consciousness both evolve. There are parallels. We just need to be aware of it and it becomes a very much realizable process.

The Real 'Wrong'

 

Well, most of us commit our wrongs with a sense of duty, a sort of commitment, with a kind of frenzied sense of occupation. If not for this, so many of us will not be found ready, almost instinctively, to go the wrong way rather than volunteering to do something good. So, the ‘wrong’ seems to have its justification born of those perceived duties by the doer.

A hierarchy of sieving then decides not so common from the common-most crop. At the first level of filtration, the finest wire-mesh allows majority of the mob of wrongdoers trickle down into the dustbin of petty wrongs on the smallest stage closest to earth in crowded slums, stinking nullahs, mucking markets and laboring beehives, where the fight for survival saps most of the energy, leaving very little escapades, now and then, in the frustrated minds. The bigger, fat, rascally particles stay above on the screened, perforated platform and engage in higher wrongs on a more substantive stage.

Now, the second level of sieving takes place among the thicker rascal-heads, the bigger baddies, or the plumpier daddies of the trade. The holes in the wire-mesh are bigger than the previous one. A lot many foolish gallants topple down, so many die, get beaten, imprisoned and clobbered down to survive at the second tier of wrongdoing. They slide down the screening holes at the second tier and settle for bigger wrongs than the lowest mass. As expected, the still thicker ones get a chance to play the wrongdoing game at the next level. Here, the stakes are higher. The risks involved are bloody, but so are the returns, which hit the proportions of Himalayan jackpots.

To qualify to stay above the screening mesh at the third level, the thickheaded pebbles, veritable stones, quibble, use brain as well as brawn, and mostly utilize the muscle of the toppled down smaller particles at the level immediately below, and the ignorance of the ant-swarms at the bottom.

In this final sieving, the biggest mafias, cartels and powerful politicians stay afloat to rule at the apex. Now they decide what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’. All other versions of right and wrong at the lower rungs lose their meaning. On the lower platforms, murders, rapes, felonies and thefts come to be mere stats in the law and order book. These are mere social problems and hardly matter as long as these don’t shake the foundations of the state, i.e., interests of the ones qualifying to be filtered at the highest sieve.

One can commit a murder on the lower rungs and still be considered a foolish nonmalignant element. However, if a sound brain, even in the frailest and most non-violent of a body, raises a verbal assault against the wrongdoers at the apex, he then becomes the most lethal anti-state, malignant criminal. The state is basically not bothered about the marketplace cacophony of petty criminalities like someone cutting somebody’s throat, or someone raping, plundering, beating or shouting abuses. These are local police station worthy petty, minor pardonable wrongdoings. These in fact are the cause of creating the bread and butter for a whole damn law-keeping department. The real ‘wrong’ is the ‘wrong’ that shakes the confidence, or throws light, or exposes, the machinations and stratagems of the biggest rascals at the top.

The Sterile Land where Humans acquire a Super-special Shape

 

Well, you might wonder, what is this piece about internecine geostrategic gamble doing here. Beyond the parameters of right and wrong, for geostrategic religion has its own white-blooded pantheon of Gods, it’s the vacuum where lesser mortals like you and me can only fiddle around like scared infants taken into a theatre playing a horror movie. It’s beyond the pale of emotions, love, compassion or most of the things we find related to life and living: a sterile land where a super-species of humans, very close to being super-powered robots, plays its entertainment game. I also visualize a little game with Ajit Dobhal in Afghanistan.

In order to consolidate the non-military Indian rebuilding efforts in Afghanistan, the suffering soil of the lost paradise needs Indian boots now. Modi Sahab listening! Modi Sir, it will help Trump also. He is very cranky and pissed off right now, especially after the Greenland fiasco.

Well, the Indian PM is now well known, in fact famous world over, for doing lot many things, which we see happening for the first time. So, why not Indian boots in Afghanistan to restore the rule of law there? It's not that it will help Afghanistan only. It will directly help India in Kashmir also. Violence in Afghanistan and Kashmir share a subtle anatomy. I don’t think there is any doubt about this poignant chemistry. Just peel off the upper layer, use some common sense, and there you see the bitter juicy reality.

So, why not go into the den itself to contain the scourge. A little icing on the cake, it will cheer up Trump also. He is very moody and unpredictable. You may find him having Iftar with Imran Khan, if you leave him alone to suffer with this irritation. Modi Sahab listening? One more thing: by having Indian boots in Afghanistan, you get a strategic location to twist both the right and the left ears of the naughty all-rounder boy.

History gives a little opportunity now and then. There is a little opening for India to consolidate its position now—after all that rebuilding efforts within our limits, which Trump, unfortunately, finds almost inconsequential to the puny extent of just building a library somewhere in the war torn country—by redefining its association in Afghanistan. Trump is willing presently. He seems to have bitten more than he can chew, so needs munching jaws to support the mouthful. If irritated further, who knows, you may have, God forbid, naughty all-rounder boy's boots there, which will be worse.

I know the skeptics will sound a warning about the irresolvable puzzle that Afghanistan is, suitably giving Russian and American examples. But aren't things managed finally by someone? The Indian PM, being an astute human resources actualizer, can definitely count upon Dobhal Sahab. The modern version of Acharya Chanakya has definitely more to offer than assignments like managing Post-370 Kashmir. Modi Sahab count upon him to manage Afghanistan with Indian boots in the once paradisiacal country.

If the whole idea still seems too preposterous and unworkable, go there at least as goddamned UN peacekeeping boots. Graft the American-led NATO forces with a UN peacekeeping mission. The boots will remain the same, with the addition of Indian boots of course, and it will not create a paper revolution in India by the pissed off opposition. Moreover, beyond all the stratagems, the poor country needs a peacekeeping force only. Even in the worst of a situation, a bit of empathy can keep the hopes alive for millions.

The Real Prison

 

You know what, institutions are the mammoth whirlpools, which suck individuals into their all powerful innards. By institutions, I mean the systematized, soulless machinery to achieve dark, power-hungry, ambitious motives—even though a lot many of them pass off as the needs to run the world. Such institutions come in the form of despots, dictators, mafia, corporate cartels, business magnates, hidden heavyweights pulling the strings, the intelligence and spy agencies, politicians, NGOs, and many more. These are the black holes that absorb their own light, hence keeping them hidden.

Those who operate there lose their souls, their sense of right and wrong, as a strange sense of ennui grips them, making them sleepwalking jombies. The institutional juggernaut reaps its crop, while the individual clogs, levers, pullies, nuts and bolts just perform their duties mechanically. Institutions have strange hypnotic powers to put vibrant hearts and independent minds on the chopping block to turn these into suitable mincemeat. The constituents operate like lifeless bottles on the conveyer belt in an assembly line in a factory.

Even the stones change, slowly though, to the cooing calls of varying seasons over decades. The institutions do not. They adapt though to the changing circumstances. However, the core philosophy stays the same. And long after the cog is retired, and regains a fraction of his soul, and sees the grease on his hands, only then he realizes what he has been through. Now he can listen to his heart. His mind now can help him see beyond the factory wall. It does not, but, change anything in the world. Nor it can even if the retired cog tries. All it gives is a guilty bruise to an ageing heart and a sad feeling that life could have been spent better beyond the walls of the institution.