An ode to silence

 You don't need to have just ears to listen. You can do it far better with your soul. If not this, why would one listen to the beautiful songs of silence in solitudional woods. The voice, whisper and songs of silence that come embracing you to console, to befriend, to comfort, to reassure, to rejuvenate. You need to 'have' a soul to listen. Of course everyone and everything has a soul. By 'having' a soul I mean one is aware of its presence, its lively throbbing, its guiding light, its essence, its imperishable nature beyond the bodily encasing. Its real feel, its vibrant awareness is what I mean to 'have' a soul. The trees, plants, grass, flowers, birds, snakes, earth, sky, stars and all and sundry have a soul. And they listen. I sometimes say a few gentle, appreciating words to the flowers and they smile better. Yes, they do! But you need to have a soul to soul connection to feel that. I tried it with a snake but it scampered away and so did I after that brief period of calling it a ceasefire along the human-snake line of fear-fire. The very same primal fear blocking soul to soul contact. The next time i intend to use the voice of silence and words of gentility through the eyes instead of oral words. It might work. You never know.

A lovely book of poetry

 We are born as little poems, soft, sensitive, pure, innocent...our senses open to the poetic wonder unfolding around. But then as we age we are cast into rigid, customised identities. We lose poetry. We leave behind that soft, gentle, fluid glow of humanness. The same happened with yours truly. I started as a poet but then on the hard anvil of life lost touch with poetry over the years. In between I would pick up poetry books but they won't sync with the hardcore fighting self in the battlefield of life. But I'm glad that I hereby come across a book that really touches one's poetic chords. Brief. Conscise. Gagar mein Sagar. Each word a tale in itself. Little lines embracing vast seas of emotions. Antraji is a renowned painter. Her poetic words are merely an extension of what she creates on the canvas. If poetry is a painting in words then there is no bigger proof than these poems.

Smoking @ 1 cigarette/year

 I'm not a smoker but I can't say that I haven't tasted it. I do smoke sometimes --  one cigarette or two at the most in a year. Never more than that. And that too when I feel I deserve this and have earned this right to cheat on myself and be a goonda for some rare occasion. 

Why do I do this? Maybe because I find the tag of a tetotaller too boring. I don't believe in too clean a slate. We have to scrawl our nonsense also. Sometimes. In celebration of our rare personal feats. It's just to be human. Completely denying something is one thing. It's a block. But saying no to it even with the choice and openness to have it is totally different. It shows you are in the driver's seat. (Disqualifier: I am not belittling those who don't touch it on principles. Smoking is bad, that's a universal truth, irrespective of the fact whether you are a chain smoker, tetotaller or someone like me who smokes one cigarette in a year.)

And even if I miss this one or two annual criminalities I hardly miss anything because I barely feel anything while smoking. The whole thing feels very funny. Imagine filling your mouth with smoke like an engine and then puff it out. Ridiculous...just like most of the addictions are. The book shared below is for dear fellow human beings who want to go smoke free. It's a really helpful book in the genre.

The lightness of life

 

There is a marvelous lightness in ‘being’ alive. The extra dimension of sentient life in matter (we may call it soul for simple reference) makes the matter very light. The same matter without this energy, or call it soul, feels weightier.

The birds are very light. Hold a living bird in your hand and you would marvel at its weightlessness. How can such a feathery thing accomplish such airy dances and sing-song chirpings!

A babbler entered the fenced yard. It seemed a suitable plan on the bird’s side to seek safety because it couldn’t fly. Maybe it was a sick babbler. It sat there on the ground sad, silent with a drooping beak. It would hop for a few paces and then rest. It sat near a water puddle and took a few beakfuls of water. I tried to feed it with a dropper but it won’t eat anything. When I held it in my hand it felt so light, just a winged representative of the air around.

It came in the morning and died in the afternoon. I found it in its eternal sleep in the flowerbed. As I picked it up for giving it a dignified burial I could feel weight this time. So there is a mystical type of lightness in being alive. Maybe the soul has a floating quality to make the matter feel less weighty while it’s in the body. The soul gone and the same mass feels heavier.

Maybe the soul is always acting in reverse to the forces of gravity, always looking upwards for expansion, always trying to expand and go up, trying to evolve into a higher dimension. Just like the lifebelts keeping the body afloat on water. Maybe that’s why it feels like to be in a cage, I mean that vague sense of being trapped, that niggling sense of something missing. Like air trapped in a balloon, floating the body around. And once the tendency to float, the inclination to expand, the urge to evolve—represented by a particular soul—is gone for a free float (before getting trapped again) the mass that remains behind feels weightier. Like a balloon would weigh more after getting deflated and the air gone out.

It’s marvelous that just one breath keeps us alive and afloat, keeps us in the category of the lightness of being. Maybe the soul is just a breath. But look at its divine component of ‘the lightness of being’! We can easily lift a living being. Lifting a corpse is far weightier proposition. The floater is gone and the stickler is left behind. Just one breath gone and we have a piece of relatively heavier matter. One breath in and we have a far-far lighter being.

So we have this iota of infinite freedom and expansion trapped in this body. It’s always trying to float freely, like the air in a balloon taking it in different directions. But that is the irony with existence. To manifest, the component of absolute freedom has to be trapped in the confines of limited ‘matter’.

But why do the free-floats, the individual souls, again get trapped in the body? A spiritualist once told me that all the surrounding air around us is full of free-floats helplessly, even jealously, looking at we the embodied ones. They look like jealous children at the embodied ones. Probably we love and hate the prison in almost equal measure. A kind of addiction to being something. And to be something you need a body. Body is acquired, then what. The one that acquires the body, the cosmic representative of ultimate freedom (the soul), has the fundamental inclination and urge to be free. It breeds a type of endless love-hate relationship.

What is ultimate liberation or freedom? Maybe it’s the state of a free-float when it no longer feels jealous of the embodied entities. When a sage quits the body in complete freedom, without fear, without any attachment, without any desire or expectations, he goes for a cosmic expansion, so large that it can no longer be trapped in a confined body. Because a fragmented individual disembodied entity cannot beat the greed of getting trapped again unless it becomes a part of everything that’s there. The wholeness cannot be lured to be confined to limited ‘somethingness’. 

Maybe this is what they mean by getting ultimate liberation by feeling all and everything within you. By acquiring this unqualified and unconditional trait, all that is trapped and non-trapped feels within you. Like free air feeling the trapped air in a balloon as a part of itself. So it won’t feel inclined to be trapped in a balloon to feel its existence.

So this body itself is the gateway to break the final barrier. It’s the portal to enter that unqualified state of absolute freedom. That is why they say that being born as a human is a blessing because we arrive qualified to pass the final test. Best of luck for the examinations of life! 

The fiction of scientific reality

 

Once you have a theory, you can surely prove it. Like it’s possible to move from Point A to Point B in infinite ways. I think the shortest and the most convenient path from A to B comes to be established as a fact, a mathematical reality. But that doesn’t mean it’s an absolute fact, or say truth. An absolute fact has to stand on its own, without any sort of assumption. To fix a portion of reality within our perceptual domain, we have to assume certain points, however hard the logic of any scientific model might be. And for that ‘assumption’ we create another hypothesis and find a way to prove it. We create proofs and facts. They don’t exist. We create the factual reality using our perceptual faculties. However, what definitely exists is an absolute uncertainty, an absolute sense of probability, an utmost potential, an infinity, an endless loop in which we generate our meanings.