LOVE

There is abundance of love around, of family, of nature, of birds, of animals, flowers, everything in fact. When hate vanishes, love blooms and you soar high with such love instead of falling. You love all simply because you don't hate anyone. Love for a man or woman is the first step on the ladder. Fall in love with your man or woman, but don't just stop at the point. It's just a beginning. From particular to the universal. The limited love is simply a window to help you have a glimpse of the infinite potential of bliss, universal love. So guys keep falling in love. But just falling forever doesn't define you. Rising will. And rising occurs when you start loving all. Your love relationship with the man or woman in your life is simply an apprenticeship to help you become an all-loving person. So keep falling, but learn to rise and love all.

Love you all!

The infinite perceiving itself through the finite

 Nothing stands in isolation. Can a drop of water stand alone in the ocean? Can an ocean exist without a drop, i.e., with a hole in its heart and the drop missing? Same is the cosmos. It's one continuity in one or the other form. Sea is nothing but drops drops everywhere in the expansion of its geographical spread. Same is with the super sea of cosmic consciousness. It's merely individual consciousness everywhere. Now the question is: how come there is a perception of individual consciousness? Well, that's how the fabric is! Start dividing a sea into tiniest dots! What happens? All we have littler seas made of tinier drops! The threshold from individual to infinite intelligence exists and doesn't exist at the same time. Possibly the sea itself perceives itself like a drop. Divide it into countless drops, they retain the feeling of individuality. Individual consciousness is thus nothing but a point of perception in the transforming whirlpool where the elements are going cyclically. Is a drop fundamentally and qualitatively different from a big sea? It isn't! Coming to humanoids. The so called conscious is the littlest bit of perception surrounded by the subconscious, which in turn melts into the infinite intelligence and consciousness pervading all around. That's the ladder to spread yourself, to feel more meaningful. One's subconscious part of mind is most active just before sleep and immediately after waking up. That's when the gates open tangibly for taking a quantum jump from conscious to subconscious and further on into super-consciousness. Grab it. Put your affirmation and claim to a larger self. There are infinite possibilities. What you seek at your greediest best may not be more than a drop of water desiring to double its size. You have the pathway etched to be the sea itself. You already are. Just that all that remains to be done is to start seeing through the walls of conscious, watch eagerly through the windows of subconscious in those walls and get connected to the infinite right there in front of you. It's suitable to start with tangibles to break the virtual shackles, just like it's easier to start with body in yoga. The higher battles with more virtual demons are managed further on the path. At the mind front, it's more convenient to start with the conscious part because it's tangible through its operational part through thoughts and emotions. There starts the second tier of management leading to the subconscious part and further on to be out of the prison to come united with everything around. It's not mother existence's concern whether there are storms lashing a drop, pond or sea, or peaceful calm waters pervade. To her indiscriminating eyes all things are just as they are. What happens in the drop of your consciousness is solely your own concern. You create the storms or peace in the tea cup of your existence. And the tools to make and break are conscious thoughts and their shadows in the form of emotions and feelings. They majorly decide the energy pattern pervading across this specific pattern of awareness, this little arrangement of energy within the super sea of energy. Pain, suffering, disease, stress and tensions are mere effects, little obstruction in the flow of river, the life stream. And the repair work primarily begins from the conscious part of the mind , which operates through thoughts, emotions and feelings. So just like u go gymming, go gymming with thoughts. Work like a mason. And etch your reality, your better self on the subconscious, which in turn reflects as your truth on the endless canvas hung around with its infinite dimensions. Good luck!

A condolence gathering

 

In rural Haryana, to take anyone’s name properly is against the protocol. So Randhir becomes Dheere, meaning slow. But he is a quick and very agile dairy farmer. Wiry and fast. He is small but strong. He also washes the dead, puts them in new clothes, prepares arthi with bamboo and straw, and sees the dead on the last leg of their journey.

There is a condolence gathering. An old woman has died. They are talking about drinkers. All of them drink pretty heavily but those who drink throughout the day are considered the drunkard cases in the village society. The case they are discussing happened in a neighboring village. A young man passed out under the scorching rays of July sun after drinking too much. He was wearing just shorts. His once tanned brown strong body was found almost burnt black.

Dheere says that it would have been the same with Beere also. He saw him lying on the dusty field path outside the village, taking what he firmly believed to be the last painful breaths with painful jerks to his body. Dheere lies down on the ground and gives aching jerks to his body to give a demonstration of how he thought Beere was dying. Dheere waited under a nearby keekar so that he could take on his usual duties with the corpse. But then Beere stumped him. He got up, took cleaning swipes with his palms at his soiled pants and tottered ahead on the path of life, leaving all the yamdoots and bier-makers waiting and even annoyed.

Narender becomes Neender. He also is a part of the condolence gathering where they are discussing the matters of death so seriously. He also shares his quite recent close encounter with the guards of mortality. He is a fifty something stocky fellow. He got electrocuted while watering his iron-bodied cooler on the terrace. They found him senseless. The village quack doctor was called. He declared him dead. There was no pulse. That was all he knew about the matter and his set of injections and pills that he had assembled for common diseases wouldn’t serve anymore. He stepped aside with a sullen face expecting a full mourning blast by the family’s females.

Once the doctor said ‘no’ everybody clucked their tongue to nullify any plan to take him to the hospital at the earliest. ‘There is no use, he is gone!’ the unruly conglomerate around the supposedly dead man agreed in a loud chorus. Then a few chance words from a woman saved his life. ‘Put pressure on his chest and blow air into his mouth!’ a woman piped in with her enigma-injecting suggestion. She meant resuscitation. Two hefty ninety-kg fellows, at the peak of their rotund youth, got into the business. One fellow sat on Neender’s stomach and heavily pommelled his chest with his crude palms and fists. The other one blew blizzards of air to give him the hiss and kiss of life. It was a torrential action lasting a few minutes. Neender’s soul was sucked back into the body by the intense storm raised by the two youths. His ribs and muscles are aching now even after two weeks as the poignant symbols of their effort to defeat death from his portals. ‘They seemed bent upon killing me,’ he complains.

The Earth Overshoot Day

 

The Earth Overshoot Day is the day when we have used all that the ecosystem can replenish and regenerate in one year. On July 28, we have already consumed all that mother earth will be able to renew in a year. It means what mother earth generates in one year we eat it up in almost half of the time. So for the rest of the year we are borrowing from the natural coffers at the cost of future generations.

Mother earth’s bio-capacity is severely overstretched. As per the current consumption levels, it would take almost two earths to sustain us. There are countries that chuck out an entire year’s sustainable resources within just two-three months at the beginning of the year. For the rest of the year, they would be drawing from the deposited pool of resources, the pool that is diminishing rapidly and will surely go empty one day.

Well, I should abandon all gloomy thoughts born of these stats for the time being. An earthworm is not bothered either. After a spell of monsoon rain the earthworm seems all joyful.

The earth is all wet

and the earthworm is all set

to crawl to a new home.

 

It seems a huge effort by the earthworm to move. It has to stretch its length repeatedly and make a humpbacked U in the middle to stretch and bring forth the tail part by a few millimeters with each heave. An ant-swarm crawls out. The breakfast is almost steady, a slightly shifting breakfast it is to them. They would love to eat it alive. They have the numbers with them. Like the politicians have the numbers to eat our public money in one way or the other. There are hundreds of tiny bites. It wriggles with pain. I think we are like the ant-swarm and poor earth is like the earthworm. It’s wriggling with pain as we the human-swarm continue biting it non-stop, twenty-four hours a day and 365 days of the year.

The baloons

Of late, flavored condoms have hit sales to the ceilings in West Bengal’s Durgapur. The students have gone berserk. It should be encouraged if they are using contraceptives. But here poor condom is used not for love-making nasha. It’s used for a dangerous intoxication. It contains aromatic compounds that produce alcohol on breaking down. Condoms are soaked in hot water for long hours and the booze is ready. Once consumed it produces scores of health hazards but they are unseen and wait till they strike down the system. But for the time being they give a high and that’s what matters for the short-sighted modern generation.

Growing up in the eighties, we did free advertisements for the newly launched Nirodh. We inflated them to full size and left them floating in the air. The big balloons floated and scandalously spread the message of family control in the conservative society. But we had hardly any clue to the slap-stick advertisement. The elders gave scandalized, embarrassed looks. So in a way we carried free publicity for birth control on behalf of health and family welfare department. But most of the farmers were greedily griping misers as far as pleasure, the sole form of entertainment at night, was concerned. They won’t budge and give away the tiniest slice of pleasure by using the free-selling contraceptives. They found the thin barrier thicker than palace ramparts.