Beauty's momentum to bloom

 

After the terrible rainstorm at night---that blessed the parched land with holy water apart from satiating the summer time thirst of the rough handwritten draft and notes of some book in future, smudging and bloating the words like soaked almonds, apart from allowing many other books to drink some water---the beautiful hibiscus appeared shaken and jolted. Was plucking old withered flowers and by mistake plucked two unopened buds also. Youth has its moment and indomitable spirit. It has to blossom irrespective of the killing strike. They retain their spirit and blossom up like they would have on the plant. If buds don't mind being plucked unripe accidentally and still smile, I don't have any reason to sulk on spoilt script and water sodden books. In any case, it was my mistake in both cases: plucking the buds unripe and leaving books carelessly at a place where they too would get tempted to get a rain bath!

PS: Nothing happens suddenly at a fixed point in this creation. Infinity won't be possible without an ever-occuring transition having a stream of points as we know them. There is a handover, a sort of takeover. Physical Death also doesn't occur at a point as it seems to us. There is still life in the buds to continue running the show of smiles and living. In case of human death, nails and hair continue growing for 13 days on the corpse after the moment of death as we see it on the surface. It means, it takes 13 days for all the life force to leave the last of cells.

Human mind--the instrument of violence

 

Violence was a necessary evil in the survival game for our ancestors, the cave dwellers. To survive as one of the lesser animals (in physical terms) in the forests, the humankind used their mind and intelligence as a weapon to overcome the challenges of survival. And over thousands of years got primed to use their intelligence as basically a weapon in the game of violence necessitated by the urge to live, survive and thrive. To overcome the threats posed by the forest animals, the humankind’s organized violence served as a platform for survival. But then it became our habit.

Violence has gone very deep in our cells. We have become a very violent species. As a result, our mind primarily comes as a weapon to us—to control, to manipulate, to exploit, to disempower others. The human species will burn in its own violence if this fundamental instinct to use mind as a weapon of violence is not changed. To beat the survival challenges as a weak forest-dwelling animal among more powerful beasts, violence was a ‘regrettable necessity’. But to further rise from what we have now become, we will have to stop using mind as a weapon of violence. It cannot help us rise further. It’ll only make us a powerful animal that will eat itself when there is nothing left to beat and eat on the earth.

The entire structure of using the mind as a means of violence (manifesting as a paranoid self-interest that pervades at individual and collective hierarchies based on identities ranging from individual, family, clan, caste, religion, nation and region) needs to be overhauled to further rise as a species. After chucking out all the enemies in the rest of the species, we are now creating virtual enemies on the basis of ever-unfolding self-interests, which in turn make us scared of losing out to the enemy out there on the other side of the identity that we have created for ourselves. For one species tamed in the forests, we have hatched 100 conceptualized species in our minds to give it more fodder to continue its violence.

Mind is a wonderful instrument. It can be primed for different nonviolent values like love, trust, care, kindness, consideration and cooperation. But the irony is that those who occupy the throne, and are in a position to start giving an institutionalized twist in that direction, are primarily structured to use mind as a weapon for manipulation and misguided control—the various types of violence in its myriad forms of the urge to be in control at any cost. It would be like expecting a serpent to cut down its own poison fangs.

The use of mind as an instrument of violence has too deep roots to be dug out. It seems an impossibility. Aren’t we devising more and more means and reasons to unleash more, renewed violence against each other on the basis of nationality, caste, class, creed, religion, ethnicity? We are a haunted species—haunted with hunted by the fear of the enemy. The animals as the threats to our existence are gone. Now we are using our mind to manufacture more and more enemies. We are seeking enemies within the house in the form of soured family relations and domestic clashes. We are aiming sniper rifles against rivals, competitors and enemies in the neighborhood, offices, business sphere, even in the fields of art and culture. We are baying for the enemy’s blood across the border, over the religious fence, beyond caste lines, beyond ethnicities.

It’s plain raw fear blasting in a nuclear fission reaction. On and on. Acquiring atrophied mental shapes from the real physical threats of animals in the forests. The phantoms of the mind that haunt us always keep us insecure about our interests. We are tensed. We see danger everywhere. Everyone seems seeking to eat our share of the pie. But in seeking enemies everywhere, we have turned our own enemies.  

The cyclical livewire

 

Infinity is possible in a cyclical way. The seasons change in a sequence. All the natural processes follow a cyclic path. Countless little cycles going on and on as part of the ultimate cosmic cycle. A human body is also a cyclical process involving millions of tiny cycles at the cellular level.

From birth to death, we are on the course of a cycle. But there is a linear force at every point on the curve of our life’s cycle. The linearity of the intention to live, to survive, to retain this shape, to achieve something, to create something, to give some meaning to life, to realize dreams. This central linearity is the directive principle for all the smaller cycles to flow along a central path in the larger circle. In its absence the system breaks, giving free space to as many probabilities to take hold as it is possible. The closely defined system loses its shape and melts to a bigger shapelessness. For example, leave a new car unused in your yard for many years. The core linearity of its purpose—a vehicle for transport—is broken. All the little operational cycles that toe the line of the bigger machinery’s cycle fall apart; the binding linearity ceases to operate, and random cycles open up, taking recourse to further little cycles in the absence of a central linear push.

The clearly defined linear push is the force that pushes point a to move to point b on the cyclical path. The linear push is what gives a thing, person, animal, bird or process a specific identity and purpose. If not claimed and bound by this central linearity, the different components of a system, thing or body are claimed by various small processes. Most of these are random and there is no coherence among them. That is disintegration from the point of view of the original shape of that thing, process or body. So an unused car will lose its identity over the years. It will be pushed into shapelessness by the random forces operating out-of-bound from any linear push. In fact, the only doing force here seems to be the undoing force. So to keep evolving we have to always keep in mind the central linear idea—the one pushing all the cycles in themselves and along the curvature of the largest cycle of our overall existence—alive, kicking, fresh and invigorated.  

The open window

 

As you stand lost in your thoughts, and you smell the fragrance of a rose. Know that it’s smiling at you and sending a message through a fragrant whisper—that there is hope, love, sunshine and smile. The moment you are open like this to a thing of beauty, you realize that you had built a shell of your weakness and crawled into it for safety. The shell made of fears and insecurities. It’s a big fort. It will make friends look like foes and foes like friends. It will block freedom, joy and sunlight from trickling in. But it will allow the agents of infirmities creep in. It wants to retain its prisoner. Because what jail is worth if not for the prisoner inside?

Beyond the web of factual right and wrong

 

One can commit violence even using the naked sword of ‘truth’—the so-called matter-of-fact truth. It’s a bland, statistical, mechanical bit of information. A soulless entity. It’s an arrow that’s strung on the bow of ‘honesty’ to pierce, to hurt, to settle a score. Most of the so-called ‘outspoken’ and ‘blunt’ people, who assume that they are truthful, are in fact using the facts to hurt and settle scores with the people they don’t like. They are no worshippers of truth.

The real truth is in spirit. Beyond technical accuracy, it has a soul. It possesses a sweet core. It’s a feeling, lively entity. A really truthful person will not unleash a factually correct arrow to outscore some rival in a debate or argument. The facts that hurt someone can be retained and left unused. And if you need to use these facts at all, it should be with love, care and an intention to guide and bring positive change in someone’s life, not just the plain intention of judging and showing someone in bad light and humiliate him/her.

So the intention behind what we say is the real decider of what is truthful in spirit. Even slightly modified facts that are meant to help someone, make her feel better, guide her on a nice path are far more ‘truthful’ than the naked, fanged facts that hurt someone and are basically used as weapons to pamper our ego.