Love: The Privileged Guest

 

Love is a noble guest. It stays in a regal hall. You just cannot expect it to manage in a chaotic household. Before you invite the love guest to stay permanently, you have to put your house in order. But then we commit this folly of treating the title more important than the story. Want to know more about it? Read on.

There is a house well plastered, tiled and painted on the outside walls. Its well-designed, vibrant exterior catches your attention. Drawn by the catchy external look, you step inside. You expect the same magnetism inside. But a surprise awaits you. You come across soot, grime, dust, unplastered walls, cobwebs, cement and stone-crush staring at you. How do you feel now? Don’t be surprised if you feel cheated.

It’s a house that has been left unattended inside. Incomplete. You will feel running out. It’s a house that needs the workers more than the visitors. That’s how most of us die: just houses under construction. Throughout our lives we keep on painting the outer walls to satisfy our ego through expanding our visibility, hoping worldly attention will give happiness and peace. Little do we realize that real comfort lies in the house completed from inside. So the interior remains incomplete, disordered and under construction. Can such a house give permanent peace? No.

Outer walls are important but only to the extent of defining our world, a psychological boundary to stamp our ownership of our chunk in this world. Only this much. And the importance of the outer walls is meaningless if the interior is unfinished. Outer paint is just the title of the orderliness inside. It’s a summary of all the cozy arrangement inside. We, but, commit the folly of treating the title as the main story. Can a title replace the main text of the story? No. The title ought to be catchy. But the story is all that matters.

So guys let’s first put our house in order from inside. Magnificent positivity, the lovely bride of love and compassion, will naturally step in turning your house into a home, making you the kind and considerate person that you are meant to be.

Happiness: The Natural Fruit of Love

 

Happiness gets brewed fully to turn joy. But to love, essentially, and be loved, as a simple natural corollary, are the necessary ingredients. Love, joy and happiness then radiate from your soul and draw many a good circumstances in your life.

Here is a simple exercise to evaluate our options before we move on. When do you think your bigger loss occurred: when someone broke your trust and love or when you broke someone’s trust? Sadly, my book is only for people choosing the second option. Others can go to more practical guidebooks to seek their destiny.

The secret to happiness is unconditional love. Contrary to our experience, happiness is a matter of choice. I firmly believe that one can choose to be happy.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”

Guys, unconditional happiness isn’t possible without unconditional love.

Since most of us are roaming the planet to look for something that is safe in our pocket, the discussion becomes relevant.

Myself, by the way, is someone who has taken the quieter by-lane to be happy. The hustle and bustle of the big, booming main street is intimidating with the added risk that I may well forget myself after being lost in the crowd. As you walk in the crowd, the monotony and anonymity takes over. You lose the charm of life in doing the same things others are doing. You don’t feel the kick in solving the same problems using the same old, oft-repeated methods. The solutions also are boringly the same, the results also the same.

A chronic boredom starts nagging the self. We try to fake being happy, forcefully trying to convince ourselves and others with our material achievements. But in our heart of hearts, we know that the happiness ever looks at the farthest end of the planet or even beyond. The long and winding chains of the preconditions to be met, before you trudge nearer to the ever-elusive happiness, are spooling on and on: the dangerous mathematics of infinitely long factors and functions of happiness.

I will be happy if I top the exams, then you become a topper, ok let me grab the best job, you get it, ok let me be the best CEO, you become one, then more. Then your children have to be the same or even more to take you to the still elusive dream of happiness. More money, more power, more prestige, more, more, more. Then there are others in the fray who can turn you unhappy even after you have overturned the records set out for yourself. There is no stopping. And hence no happiness. Forget about joy.

The problem is if your happiness is not within you from the beginning and lies at some goal-post in future at a distance, there are millions, trillions, zillions and even more open-ended factors that affect, mathematically scuttle your chances of a win. Forget it. It’s futile chase. The more we run after conditional happiness, the more we push it away from ourselves.

The fundamental mistake is that we expect happiness to be the fruit on the tree of our efforts, i.e., the result, the fructification. No, it simply isn’t. It is the root of the tree of our endeavors, where we begin from, which lasts from the beginning to the end. If it’s not in the beginning, forget it, it won’t appear later. It has to be there before you begin and persist while you are in the process, while you are in the journey. Learn to take the effort itself as a form of happiness. And simply doing becomes the cause of boundless joy.

The state of being happy can be habituated. Practice it as a daily routine, like you pump iron to tone your six and eight packs. Nurture the habit of just feeling happy, causeless and reasonless. Just smile when you are alone. Please try it and you will know what I mean. It lets loose a cascading effect driven by the hormones triggered by the movement of the muscles around the corner of your lips. Try it. Close your eyes and just smile. Unconditionally. You will feel how comforting it can be just to be happy.

The fruits will follow later as you slog it out in the battlefield. It’s a simple verb, being so, a simple act, a solacing function. We but treat it as an intimidating noun in future, interpolate it as success and achievements, the fruits at the end of the journey, the light at the end of the tunnel. It but is the lamp that is within you when you are in the dark.

The path to happiness can never pass through the stages of unhappiness and mental struggle. It’s the present in continuation. Remove all future components from the equation of your happiness. So passing through the quieter by-lane, not stomped and nudged by the teeming crowds, one can reach a solitary path, laid out just for himself/herself, to reach his/her destiny, to be happy primarily, and enjoy the fruits of being happy. All in all, you just practice the art of being happy unconditionally. And unconditional happiness is love personified.

If you have any doubts about losing the achiever’s tag, which sounds plausible in being on the main thoroughfare, kindly reevaluate your position. Being unhappy in the same way as others with loads of the same stuff like anyone around is no replacement for a liberated self seeking its own destiny on a free path leading to the ultimate freedom.

The Flower of Love in the Soil of Unity

 

A sense of unity opens the floodgates of loving nature. A sense of unison empowers you in untold ways. Love, peace, justice, equality, happiness and harmony are all the natural derivates in a system standing on the principle of unity.

The apparent diversity at the level of matter is just an illusion at the periphery. In reality, there is a unity of spirit, of life. There are ways and means of feeling this unity. The more you accept the principles of unity, the more the extreme, egoistic divisive forces take a backseat, allowing your spirit to chime with the cosmic harmony. All in all, it simply makes you a loving, kind, grateful and compassionate person. And mind you, given the way things are going around, it may not be possible at the level of organized religions to provide this feeling of unity to their respective followers. But unity in love is always possible. So go out there and spot how everything is unified in the larger scheme of things. 

Take clues from the open book of life lying around you. Look lovingly at the trees and plants nearby. Just because they don’t assert their importance in the language we are used to get messages, we have taken their availability and contribution to our life for guaranteed. But man and women, if the tree is cut, you too will suffer in your science-derived cocoon. If the garden around you burns, you too will feel the heat. Look at the larger stage, and you will realize, it’s merely one huge cosmic stage, where sneeze by one protagonist leaves upheavals in distant most corners. 

There is a system of goodness. The simplest code nature shows is of unified and interdependent co-existence. All things, phenomena, life processes and transformations give and take from the larger system. In simple terms, nothing can exist in isolation in this universe.

Our little environment is supported by earth, earth is supported by sun, sun by larger suns, they in turn by galaxies, and the latter by super-galaxies, and so on and so forth. There is absolutely no such thing as individualism in nature. It’s all a collective behemoth, ever expanding in more and more transformative ways. So how can our very own happiness come from our own limited self, concerning and defined by just our little fights and brawls in the arena of life?

Ask someone, whom you take as the epitome of material achievements, has he hit the biggest treasure of joy and happiness during his pursuits to get more and more power, prestige, money and material in his life? Just a little talk with someone who has spent decades on the path may clear your vision, helping you in reorienting your journey.

We just take fractions of happiness from the bigger pool. Happiness is never complete, or you can say just cannot happen, if it is confined to the limits of the individual self. There are happy families in happy societies and happy individuals in happy families. You simply cannot have happy individuals in an ant-swarm of unhappy society comprising unhappy families. And you cannot have a happy society surrounded by an unhappy ecosystem. You simply cannot.

If you think that the conveniences created science are the modes of happiness, then you are mistaken. These are mere utilities. Utilities are just contributors to happiness like countless other things. And generally these utilities come with far more intangible costs than we presume. You have cars, then you have pollution, and your lungs suffer, simply because trees are suffering. It’s just like everything and everybody is unhappy and suffering in a forest fire. In a flowery luxurious garden, on the other hand, everybody and everything is happy and peaceful.

We are happy or unhappy as a collective unit, not individually. Well, this is how it is, if you consider the real substantial meanings of peace and happiness. The rest are simply temporary delusions, nurtured under the mistake of taking some scientific conveniences as the destination of happiness, which they are not. They are simply the means of a tiny, temporary purpose in life.

So nurture this habit of connecting to the environment around you. The natural environment is the base of our struggle and sustenance. See the processes of life and learn the art of miraculous interdependence. And come out of this delusion that we humans can be happy and unhappy in isolation in our modern-day scientific cocoons.

Far above the debate between elixir of life and curse of death, creation has just one source, single point of focus. Elixir of life and curse of death spring from the same source. The nectar and the poison originate from the same place. Life’s shadow is death, and death’s shadow is life. The perceived duality is a mental image projected in vacuum as we peer through the lens of “ego”, i.e., helpless bondage to the outermost layer, the grossest level of our material existence. The latter stands as the bridge to the shaky walk this way or the other. Break the bond and these drift away into non-existence.

Love is tied to hate. And our “ego” is the rope, the bridge holding the two extremes of duality. Clinging to the two extremities, we have the option of treating one as the substance and the other as the shadow. If your ego allows love to be the substance, then hate turns a shadow. And vice versa. But in treating hate as the substance, we contradict the basic principle of nature. Hate is an exception, love is the rule at the cosmic level. Endless swathes of cosmic tranquility into fathomless depths cannot sustain without inherent love, peace and harmony. By hating we are putting a roadblock, a speed-bump in the path of infinite space-time continuum.  Through love we speed up the cause of evolution. In choosing love and the elixir of life, we add to the inherent cosmic harmony. In hating we add to the cosmic explosions and accidents.

So guys sow the seeds of love in the soil of unity. It will be a rich crop. It makes the world beautiful and provides you strength and affability at the same time.

The Only Non-fatal Excess: Love

 

W.B. Yeats nails the truth: “All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.”

Poison in small amount can be beneficial like nectar. And nectar in excess can be fatal like poison. We tend to jump from one extreme to another in our likes, dislikes, opinions and affiliations. And all excesses are stepping stones to pains, sufferings and alienation. There is only one thing in the universe that isn’t fatal in excess: love. This is the supreme leveler, the ultimate counter-point to all and sundry excesses and imbalances.

Alice Walker gives a very nice little exercise to get the magic potion flowing in your life: “‘Thank you’ is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.”

I would add, say ‘Thank you’ with a disarming smile. That completes the exercise. You may repent million and one words of yours but never ‘Thank you’. Try it. It’s a very potent bomb-defuser.

Dalai Lama: “Too much self-centered attitude, you see, brings, you see, isolation. Result: loneliness, fear, anger. The extreme self-centered attitude is the source of suffering.”

We hit the extremities and find ourselves struggling at the end of the pole. Irony is that all of us know with our practical knowledge that only a balanced central point can give us respite from shaking and the fear of falling over the edge.

In the Cosmic Mirage over there, we hardly have things positioned at one extreme. So leave your perch at the extreme, and surrender to the lure of the midway point. And mind you, love is the counterweight that can help you stay in the middle.

So guys, mix the contradictions. Churn out a paste. Blend the duality. Grind it well. And you get nothing in the so called ‘everything’. Is there any hard and fast line between the so called two ends of our perception? Is ‘black’ only ‘black’? Is ‘white’ only ‘white’? No. They seep into each other and relatively define each other, apparently though, not in reality. Black is less white, and white is less black.

Dark is not just ‘dark’. And light is not just ‘light’. Dark is only ‘less light’. And light is just ‘less dark’. Duality sustains on our sense of ‘ego’ driven by our perception-hungry senses. It turns our consciousness into self-consciousness, thus smartly laying the snare for a limited potential to grow and evolve.

Is there any pure, unadulterated ‘pleasure’? No. Pleasure is a state of having lesser pain. Pleasure has a mild dose of pain in it. Always! Find out a person who has no trace of pain in him. Is there any condition of just having ‘pain’? No. Pain is just having lesser degree of ‘pleasure’. Pleasure carries pain in it, and pain carries pleasure in it.

Our ego, our sense of ‘I’, stretches the point of reality in two directions for suitable dualities wherein things stand compartmentalized and defined almost as contradictions of each other.

Imagine the morning ‘twilight’ when the day’s rising light mixes with the night’s vanishing darkness. The balance! The melting of duality. Observing the phenomenon outside, we have to dispel the fog inside and see the sun of reality in its true avatar.

Is there any state of something being perfectly ‘cold’ or perfectly ‘hot’? No. Cold is just lesser hot. And hot is just lesser cold. The reality just gives the illusion of apparently getting stretched in opposite directions. It’s the see-saw battle. We look this way, then we turn to the other side. By subduing the element of ‘self’ from pure ‘consciousness’, one can get a balanced vision. Then the funny mirage of seeing two avatars of the same thing becomes invisible. And loving self becomes the most natural of an instinct.

If you want to swim, accept drowning. If you want to fly, accept falling. To win, accept loss. To fulfillment, accept emptiness. The duality is bound by almost an unbreakable cord, at least to a disillusioned self cowering under the weight of ego. Pull one, and the other one comes dragging. A win is not a win completely. You are losing something also, in some form or the other. No flight is a flight solely. It involves a fall also here and there. Swimming isn’t floating only. It involves intervals of drowning also. Accept the so called opposite, antipodal, the perceived enemy and the threat. Don’t run away from it. Success is not the absence of defeat. It’s only accepting defeat, learning further and moving on. Accept death and you live. Surrender the ego and you get to master the ownership of your thoughts, actions and emotions. You then control them instead of they deciding your fate.

The two versions of the same thing are inseparable, and are just our conveniently defined two points on the plain of reality. Death is not just death in itself. It is the beginning of life, of birth. Birth is not just birth. It is the beginning of death. Death starts the moment we take birth. After all it’s a process, not an event at the end of life.

Same is the case with the apparent duality of creation and destruction. They don’t exist separately. For an event and happening to occur, there has to be a balance between the two. Like human body survives on the principle of the balance between creation and destruction. New cells are continuously being created and old ones are dying. The circle. It holds the key to the mystery. Here is the end; here is the beginning.

The reality has loops of the so called dualities going side by side, at all points, in all directions, and in all events. The counterweights. The balance. Going on and on in loops. The ever-expanding universe and the ever-dying universe. In loops. In circles. At countless points. Forever. Explosions and implosions. Blasts and suction. Circular loops. Creation and destruction. Creation and destruction. On and on. In circles. Expansion and suction. Going from nowhere to everywhere and from everywhere to nowhere. And passing through the point where you happen to read it presently. 

Enjoy the moment. Take pleasure in the ride. It’s a whole thoroughfare out of nothing. From nothing to everything! Don’t feel puzzled over the fact that the net energy of the universe is zero. At the most take it as something synonymous to godliness. It’s a cosmic heartbeat, with the only difference on the so called time scale. Your heart beats once per second. The cosmic heart beats at the rate of billions of years. It expands, it implodes. Endlessly. So don’t get doubts about eternity. It’s possible. If a clock pendulum can maintain its swing, why cannot the cosmic cycle? When the pendulum is going to the right, it’s creating the potential to travel leftwards, and vice versa. When the universe is expanding, it’s creating the potential to implode. During implosion, it’s creating the potential to explode. Simple see-sawing with net zero energy! Isn’t it the greatest trick by the existential force!

And the seed, the focal point, of this mammoth mirage is love, compassion, harmony, rhythm and a never-ending melody. Love, along with its aforementioned derivatives, is the only thing whose excess never crosses the critical limits because it has to stay one step ahead of a mischance when everything may cease to exist thus stopping the mirage. Till it goes, love and harmony stay in the front, pulling the great show in its wake. Roll in the twilight grey of love where there is no light, no dark. But there is bliss definitely.

Universe: The Singular Song to Melt your Discordant Notes

 

A.P.J. Abdul Kalam: “Look at the sky. We are not alone. The whole universe is friendly to us and conspires only to give the best to those who dream and work.”

Spread the self. Mix in the infinity. You will feel light, love and harmony pervading your cells. It’s simply like a drop of water feeling the unchained extents of a huge sea. You will catch the harmony. Einstein said that only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity. Come, drop your guard, abandon the stupidity and look upwards into the mystical distances. You will realize the oneness. You will comprehend how inconsequential we are, merely specks of dust, and over-bloated with ego and ignorance. Open your heart to the profound vastness. You will get lessons in life and living.

It's such a colossal system, so forget about nurturing any ego to change things. Forget it. The only point in the universe where you can be sure of fixing things is yourself. Nothing out there was ever fixed by a mere part of the system. That is an absolute reality. But there is always light. The picture is incomplete without you. You change your perspective and the universe changes.

Joseph Campbell says: “The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.”

Try this fabulous matching game. A drop of water is just a small ocean. The ocean is merely a larger drop. There is hardly any qualitative difference. They hold the same seed of potential. Similarly, you are a small cosmos. The cosmos is simply a larger you.

Stephen Hawking: "We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special."

And understanding the universe begins with understanding the small universe, i.e., you. The first step in the journey.

Look at your body and think, does it exist in abstraction, in exclusive totality. It doesn't. It simply cannot. It’s merely a few kilograms of matter clinging to consciousness, chetna. Just like electricity is the link between a computer’s hardware and software to make it an operating unit, similarly, prana energy is the link between the matter body and consciousness, the seat of your real being. You occupy the chair of your existence as a dynamic unit operating under the infallible laws of reciprocal transformations of energy.

You are just the karmic point, the soul DNA, having the code of your journey across other transformations, which we term for simplicity as the ‘previous births’. Just like semen and egg cells have the DNA imprint for the matter body, your consciousness has the DNA coded with all your experiences since the journey began. And this journey is just a journey within the largest, singular journey, the expansion of the present universe since the Big Bang in its current cycle.   

This ecosystem, which supports you and countless other beings, is your extended body. You are just a point of existence within this larger body. These trees over there are your bigger lungs. These streams of water are the larger replica of the water in your body. Calcium, phosphorus, zinc and other elements of your body are just the tiny replica of the vast mountains and plains containing mammoth amount of this matter. You retain your identity in this sea of ecosystem like a drop of water does in an ocean. It exists simply because the larger entity exists to define its existence. 

Moving up the hierarchy, this ecosystem also has an extended body. It is mother earth itself. Earth with dense metal in its core, its gravity, its spin and revolution, sets up the stage for the ecosystem to exist.

Further up, the solar system is earth's extended body. Earth cannot exist in exclusion from the solar system. Without it, it will just vanish like a tiny speck of dust and scatter its energy to be taken up by some mysterious, concurrent phenomena, God knows in what incidental, interesting way.

The Milky Way is the solar system's extended self. The solar system will collapse without the vast surrounding and balancing forces of the Milky Way. It’s just a tiny phenomenon cocooned in the huge galactic forces of matter and energy transformations prevalent in the Milky Way.

Super-galaxy is Milky Way's extended body, and so on so forth. Till you arrive at the roof of everything. Till you reach the farthest expansion of the universe. Then it’s nothing, simply because there the explosion is imploding, getting sucked into nothingness, only to be blasted out again for another cycle. And the cycle goes on and one. Self-sustaining with zero net energy! Doesn’t eternity sound plausible this way?

Mind you, all this endless play is being played on the mathematical sum of zero energy. How is it possible with net zero energy? Visualize a pendulum. It swings left and right simply because of the energy transformations taking from kinetic energy to potential one and vice versa. When it’s moving up, its kinetic energy is turning to potential energy. When it’s going down its potential energy is turning to kinetic energy. So much of drama without any loss or gain of energy! Just simple transformation of energy from one form to another! Same is the case with this cosmic pendulum. At its two extremes it explodes and implodes, expands and gets sucked up, and on and on, just like a cosmic swing, moving on and on.  

Now, can you guess, what is the meaning of ‘universe’? It is ‘one song’. If you still didn't get it, no need to waste time, carry on like before, but don't forget to smile and have fun. This is just one harmonious, ever-evolving song to which you can definitely add your melody and composition by being in tune with the natural laws. There is no specific need to understand it. It can be very easily lived. 

Closely watch nature. You will see the miracles happening with such magical effortlessness that they appear more mundane than even the simple task of you lifting your hand. And one more thing, like you see around, it's nothing but dynamic exchange and transformation of energy and matter. In any case, it’s basically energy, because matter, and its consequent shape and appearance, is just the apparent state of energy at a particular frequency.

Your own purpose in life always falls short of the universal will unless you link it to the causes beyond your own self. So while you strive to be happy and successful, try to do it in a way that it gets in sweet concordance with the very same desires of not just human beings but whole of the ecosystem.

Even a genuine prayer for someone will do. Enlightenment doesn't mean skies will shower flowers and earth will part and you will get a halo around your head. It happens when you become the commonest of the common and see yourself in the natural scheme around, as a part of the totality surrounding you. It simply means to be in a state when you accept in all humility that there is hardly any individuality around, when you feel that it’s all but a massive commonalty.

One seed contains the potential of a whole forest. The cosmic seed, the point, the bindu of Hinduism, is just the dot where explosion and implosion begin and end. At the highest hierarchy, this seed, this point, this vector of nothingness, contains limitless possibilities for the mutually interchanging interplays of energy. Look at the marvel of a tiny banyan seed. Look at the wonderful sprout of a huge tree with the lateral openings for birds, animals and humans. The cosmic seed, the point of nothingness, contains the seeds for everything. Quite stupendously, it’s nothing and everything at the same time. 

These little groups of words in this tiny sermon just try to take a picture of the infinite and its day-to-day reflection in our lives. It’s just a poor substitute for the ultimate reality. Just like a picture taken on your camera is a poor replacement for the lively panorama you wish to capture. With due regard to human limitations to express the infinite dimensions of reality, all our efforts through words, art and science are merely indicative in nature. They simply point to the largest reality far above the smaller planes of human-contrived tiny realities that make life easy, comfortable and somewhat comprehendible.

There is hardly any difference between ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’. This cosmic cycle, having a time-span of billions of years, is a blast from a point. The net energy is zero. You can have an endless interplay of energy, with nullifying factors at each step, like you go on adding and subtracting the same amount at all levels. Eternity then becomes possible. It’s possible to have ‘everything’ out of ‘nothing’. The so called Maya of Hinduism is nothing but the apparent reality, which involves the subject and the object. In quantum physics, they say that for the subatomic phenomena to exist, it’s necessary to have a perceiver. No wonder, they say that the world is as you see it.

Radiation is both wave and particle at the same time. How is it possible? It is a wave because it shows the properties of a wave like refraction. It’s particle because it can strike like a particle and get bounced off? Contradictions melt in probability. And that probability is never complete till you have the observer to define it.

Electromagnetic radiation, the wave, has particles called photons. These photons have zero mass. Then how can these be particles? They are particles through the probability to exist at a point within a specified zone in the wave path. The probability of their existence remains dormant until you have an observer. They are a wave without an observer, and turn to particle status the moment the observer arrives on the scene to define a moment of existence at a particular point in the band of probability. Scriptures say that all this is an extension of your mind. The latest researches in quantum physics prove the same thing.  

Explore your own space within the infinitely dynamic exchange of energy in the singular stream of primordial energy shooting off in countless directions, carrying fixed laws and supported by infallible universal intelligence. And all this is defined by the last law of all the lesser laws, the ultimate law. Call it God, supreme intelligence or the ultimate being. All this but is the same thing. Its reflection in our day to day life is through a feeling called love.