Happiness

Happiness is primarily an acceptance of one's situation in life. It might not come to you even in a palace if you don't really settle inside the walls and within your skin.  You are a cranky host, so it will avoid you. And it will definitely come to visit your slum hut if it finds you an unashamed, guilt free, kind host. As an old, poor charwoman, whom Somerset Maugham meets after many years in 1949, when there had been lots of developmental works in the meanwhile, says to him: "They have cleaned up the slums and the dirt, and all the happiness and joy has gone with it."

Musings on a rain-soaked day

 I walk far more than any ultra-marathon runner. In fact I beat all the runners combined in terms of walking and running. I walk with my mind. I walk on the legs of thoughts. They keep me on the busy highway. The other day, someone complained, 'You hardly go out these days, always busy with books!' Now how to tell that person that I'm always walking, walking in the mind. The best test is just to walk with legs only with the mind shut off. Because walking with both mind and legs can be very tiring. Walking on legs with positive feelings is somewhat better. But there was Krishna who walked on a blood smitten battlefield. He just walked on his legs. With no feelings and thoughts. What detachment! No wonder we worship him as a god now.

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Human mind is conditioned to hatch and plot more and more human-centric realities. Artificial intelligence and synthetic biology are the latest tools to further spread our intellectual wings and forge bigger realities. But ultimately the 'maker' will stand synonymous with the 'made'. Presently we can feel proud while looking at our products because they stand separate and lowly while we muse our our creations. But now there is a fundamental shift. The product isn't strictly outside our physiological body. The product is creeping inside us--into our neurons as artificial intelligence; into our cells as synthetic biology. We have been crazy about making something. And when there isn't anything left to make, we have started making a newer version of our own self. It's just like nature produced we humans on this tiny planet but got devoured by its product. Similarly the homosapiens will be gradually absorbed by a new product, a new species. Just evolution, maybe. So why worry. Make the most of it as one of the last real homosapiens generation on this small planet. Enjoy what life and mother nature has still to offer.

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Language is used in pursuance of intellectual truth, an edifice created by the mind on the basis of sense perception. It's a mere utility just like the birds have wings to fly. With words you can make a career at the most, be it any field. And intellectual truth is just a portion of the experiential truth which one feels in the moments of dissolving the self in beautiful nature where nature is cooing its real secrets through sighing winds, rippling brooks, waving trees, playing clouds, solitary valleys, wild flowers and more. 

The moment we really feel, not just theoretically because that again is mindwork, that thoughts and their end product, intellectual reality, is a mere sense perception based functionality, just like an ant's single-sense based craze to seek a grain of sugar, we take a quantum jump into higher dimension. We enter the dimension of experiential reality which again is a portion of the ultimate reality but it's far far bigger than the intellectual reality. It's a portal to the unknown.

From words to silence to unknown. It's just a matter of rise in consciousness. Words speak of something limited, something symbolically fixed to help us understand a tiny portion of existence around. Silence speaks, wordlessly, of its own self. Open yourself to it. It will embrace you in its maternal loving arms and transport you into a far bigger dimension. And obviously one feels better at an uncrowded place. Don't we feel better after coming to a peaceful hill station, leaving behind the hustle and bustle of bazaar and cities? In the same way our consciousness is also seeking avenues to a broader dimension, from intellectual to experiential, from materiality to immateriality. 

Happy be thy journey from noise to silence, from running (both in mind and body) to arriving home, from restlessness to perfect ease.

The landless farmer

 

Harichand was a broad-shouldered, squarish man with an impressive bear paunch. Just like any other landless struggler in the rural society, shorn of any economic or social legacy, he had to pull his family cart in a way wherein the last step was just sufficient to push the next one, a painful but terribly aware living where the present grips you so hard that you barely get any time to either reflect over the past or muse over future. Clad in soiled dhoti and kurta he stockily squared up to the routine challenges of a poor household. He had many children and some of them grew up with us playing in the neighborhood.

One of his various vocations was to ply his tonga to the market town and carry cattle feed sacks for the farmers. He remember him walking stooped, cautiously, carrying a quintal of cattle feed sack on his back. The more the weight you can lift on your back, the lesser of it you have to carry in your mind. In addition to all this, for some years he rented a berries farm on the outskirts of Delhi. With the start of flowering, he would pile his horse-driven tonga with all the necessities of setting up a hut and start with his wife, leaving the children under the care of their grandmother.

His youngest son found the village primary school almost a prison and the yearly sojourn among the berry trees appeared the ultimate meaning of freedom. Harichand would use all tactics to deter his son from following the tonga. He started with shouting words and soon graduated to thrashing. It failed. He tried starting very early in the morning, thinking the little one would be asleep at the time. But the school-scared kid would smell his plan and he would keep awake all night. Then the concerned father tried to tire out his obstinate son by making him run after the tonga for many kilometers. On one occasion, he had to yield to the tiny runner after the latter had broken all previous records by following the tonga for almost ten kilometers. With this excellent focus and hard dedication, the little kid got freedom from the school for forever.

Then the times changed. The berries farm was gone for more lucrative land use. Now Harichand took farmland on lease within the village to make a living. He had a balding pate, snow white beard but stayed as robust as ever. Now his many children had children of their own. It was now a big family that couldn’t sustain at one place and they fell apart to take care of their own struggling course.

Poverty breeds further poverty. He kept working his own bit. He possessed the loudspeaker of a throat, very useful in scaring away the birds eyeing his fruits and vegetables. He used it to good effect in sending warnings to his children within a radius of one kilometer around the village, yelling their names, asking them to come home and attend to more important tasks than just playing. We played almost three-quarter of a kilometer from his humble house. Then his voice would come sailing over the trees, village school, the pond, threatening his children to immediately return.

He possessed a sword, but held it with a calm demeanor. We saw him standing with the weapon when a drunk Jat farmer tried to molest his adolescent girl. He stood composedly with the sword in hand while the offended girl gave a nice example of taking revenge herself by profusely hitting the erring man.

He also possessed a big bamboo bow and scores of clay balls to hit the enemy birds. We were inawe of his big bow and clay bombs. There was a rumor that he could catapult them to a distance of one kilometer.

During his last years he was leasing our twoacres of land to plant marigolds and vegetables. Then for the last two years he further sublet it to another farmer, taking the money in one lot, passing it to me in installments to have a slight economic advantage from the situation. That is all he saved from it. Just a chance to use that money for some months. I wasn’t aware of it and when I came to know this I took it as a little help that I could provide him. From the annual settlement, he still owed me INR 21000 from the lease amount. This time he hadn’t paid it on the promised date. So I thought of visiting his house. He was lying on a cot. ‘He has been having fever,’ they told me. From the folds of his dhoti—very near his genitals—he unfolded the roll of notes and handed over ten thousand rupees. It carried the sweat and smell of his private parts, the essence of his existence. ‘See, what are you forcing me to touch!’ I tried to maintain a funny touch. I asked them to drop the sweaty wad of notes in a polybag, intending to put it under the sunlight to dry.

He had kept it safe like it was his treasure. There were risks in the needy joint family. ‘What about the remaining?’ I asked. ‘I’ll give if I get well!’ he exclaimed ironically. ‘Of course you will get well! What can a simple fever do to your robust figure?’ I assured him. He sighed resignedly. Once outside the house, his son told me, ‘He has liver cancer.’ Harichand couldn’t fulfill his last promise because he died soon after. He died in early sixties, carrying a little debt to me and a few others. As a friendly gesture I freed him from the unsettled issue. That’s all I could do for him.

A balanced life

 

Uncontrolled emotions will turn us suicidal, depressed and at the most a brooding misfitted poet. Uncontrolled mind will leave us open to the chance workshop of the devil. Anything negative may come out as a dark product. Uncontrolled energies will see us lunatics. Uncontrolled biology will find us turning into sex maniacs and rapists. Having control over life is only meant to avoid a ‘part’ of our nature or existence from becoming ‘everything’, thus shadowing all other dimensions of life. We get hijacked by one impulse. Then it’s a stunted growth.

Holistic growth, call it evolution, needs balance among the various aspects of our existence. As Buddha said balance is the key to a really joyful life. Keep the parts in place. Maintain all the impulses firmly in place. Don’t deny any part of your existence but please don’t allow just ‘parts’ to become ‘whole’. It’s a multicolored bouquet with fresh flowers of body, mind, emotions and energies. Maintaining balance among them gets us a fulfilling life full of nice relationships, jobs, growth, faith, love, kindness.

If we are driven by just one impulse then it acquires too big a force, driving us in one direction, imbalanced, and we turn mere products of our impulse and randomly developing circumstances. Use all the ‘parts’ of your existence and we become creators of our own self because then there is no excess of one particular driving force.

As humans we can grow and evolve only as creators, not as circumstantial products. To be a mere product would be a degradation and utter disregard for the tremendous potential of awareness that mother nature has given us. So again remember: Balance, Balance and Balance. At least listen to Buddha if not me.

Everyone talks of balance but how to do it, one may wonder. There is a very simple technique for it. Allow yourself to be softly braced by various aspects of life that touch and test the different parts of your existence. Live an experiential life in totality and allow mother existence to caress your multilayered and multidimensional self in various forms at the level of body, mind, emotions and energies. Don’t run away or shun any particular aspect of life. Embrace the experiences that come your way. And where all are sovereigns, nobody would emerge as a tyrant to manipulate your life in an imbalanced way.

A really ABLE girl

 The story of a champion. A very-very ABLE girl, daughter, sister, sibling. She is the real champion because even to reach the stage where most of us are born with natural privileges, she had to walk and then run through fire. Well, if you can't walk, don't stop, try to run instead, like she does! 

'Preethi has two younger brothers and an older sister and belongs to a family with meagre income. Her hope now is that her historic medals can bring her a sustained source of livelihood. 

"My father runs a small dairy. During Covid he was in hospital for 3 months. He is still unwell. He has diabetes and has to get injections often. A lot of it is caused by worrying for us. I often tell him that I will arrange for my sister's marriage. My second biggest dream is to be able to organise and fund for my sister's wedding to whoever she likes. I hope my medals can get me a government job. That is my prayer now. I have to take care of my family. I want my father to take care of his health and stay at home and my mother also should not have to go to the forest to feed our buffalo. I want to be able to give them some rest. They have struggled all their lives," she says.' 

(HT News)