Bear the Storm, Smile once it’s Gone and Cherish Love

 

Sometimes there are testing times for your faith and philosophy of life. You want to keep them safe but things going out of loop point to the contrary. High time that you allow the chaos to pass over you. You will find yourself under dust once it is over. But you have the chance to smile again and gather the scattered pieces of your faith to assemble your gear again. Victory lies not in beating the storm. It lies in not being blown away. Oftentimes just staying there means victory.

Finding things too tough and out of your control? Bend down sister, allow the storm to pass. Storms are aberrations, not routine. Peace is.

Even the most horribly mixed up knot in a jumbled up mass of thread has the easiest way out. Well, it may not appear to our eyes. But definitely solution lies buried undiscovered in the apparent mess. So basically it is about our failure to discover. Funny part is, a problem cannot exist without a very viable solution. Solution and problem are the two sides of the same coin.

Mind you, there are always easiest of routes to the toughest of destinations. Every hard situation has the softest of a solution also. But the easiest path lies buried under the dust of tougher routes. So there is no hard problem in the real sense. Our solutions make them so. When in the face of a tough situation, blame your solution not the situation.

Brothers and sisters, I understand there are situations in life when your mind just doesn't see any solution in a difficult phase of life. Kindly start with an assumption that things will turn for the better. Then without wasting time and energy on becoming too serious, just put yourself on autopilot. Simply allow things to happen to you. Just persist there. At the lowest morsels.

It’s a very intelligent universe out there to help you survive and sustain. Look with hope and love into the infinite starlit distances at night. The ‘primordial will’ will reciprocate. You will get rewards as opportunities will grab you slowly, silently without sounding miraculous. But for all that you have to be there on the stage of life. So preserve yourself even if it means just lying there.

When the sun shines again, you will feel the warmth of love pervading your mind, body and soul as you smile with tears of pride and gratitude.  

Faceless Gods by Sandeep Dahiya

 

It is a long story, slowly moving like a broad river in its journey through the plains. It is just an effort to highlight some sober facts like the true meaning of nationalism, religion, politics and humanism. The work has very sharp political connotations. But I would like to clarify that while espousing the cause of clean politics, I have taken very dagger-sharp cuts at certain political forces whose brand of politics results in reversing the basic meanings of religion and nationalism. Also, it is for sure that all such literary efforts from my side are just a battle cry against bad politics, rather than going against any particular political stream. By having creative cuts at the razor-sharp edges of most of the political blocks in India, I have tried to carve out a straight-faced deity whom people have in mind when they envision their interests in the safe hands of the state. 

 

One of the characters is a beautiful girl named Phulva, the gypsy girl. Through the trials and tribulations of her beautiful path through the society of the settlers, I have tried to depict how these almost stateless, religionless people come into friction with the sedentary society to create sometimes ecstatic and oftentimes tragic episodes. She smiles like a lotus in the perilous waters of a muddy pond. Also accompanied is the pleasantly sweet-sour path of the now-vanishing nomadic culture that once caressed the settled society with the suddenness of a fresh and fragrant gust of wind. When the gypsies pitch up their campsite on the fringe of settled—and the so-called civilized society—always there are showers and sparkles as the merging fronts of two different entities rub past each other.

 

The main protagonist is a lame Hindu religioner. Well so much for his Villainy! But there are reasons for badness. After detailing the circumstantial forces, which put him on the path of selfishness—and ultimately his brand of utilitarian Hinduism—I have tried to depict him under the light of multifaceted sun of faith. Through the testing admixture of religion, spirituality, blind faith and superstition, I have tried to churn out substantive meanings, which have eluded the mankind puzzled by conflicting dilemmas of faith, superstition, ritualism, or the religiondom overall. At the other end is his guru, the man with the real, selfless, utility-less mission of spiritual awakening. Through this contrasting set of religious personalities, I have made a humble effort to point out a little arc along the infinitely drawn out compassionate folds and contours of Hinduism.    

 

Heartily mixed up in the silent pace of the tale is the old Muslim fisherman. The silently brooding—and expertly following the principals of humanism—frail man plays a far-far weightier role in the tale with his effortless maneuvers instigated by a heart lit by the unsung lore of true humanity. The man from Bengal, a direct victim of the partition-time butcheries, carries along the seemingly insignificant path with firm, humanistic strides.  

 

Then there are smaller players: the disciples, good and bad dogs, stoically suffering animals like donkeys in the caravans, and plainly villainous bunch of thugs who can always put their foul smell in any fragrant orchard—all jutted against the exciting admixture of fate and human deeds.

 

It is a highly literary work. The target audience is all those who love real humanism devoid of all misinterpretations and miscalculations.

Love your Challenges and you Love Life

 

Most of our struggles, which we presume to be exceptional, are mere routine challenges. Look through the cloud of struggle and all you will see is a trail of everyday challenges. So smile. It is happening to all and everywhere. You haven’t been picked out solely to prove your worth through exceptional push and pull. Creation is simply an ever-evolving checker-work going on and on with challenges and counterpoints. Existential forces have nothing against you particularly to rob you of your loving self.   

Napoleon Hill: “Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.”

These routine challenges are what push and propel the onward march of creation at countless fronts. There is no escape. Accept the process of shaping your destiny, smile, admit the challenges and unlearn to see them as struggles, and add to the pool of love in you.

You can wince with frustration as a struggling beast. However, as a human being progressing by tackling routine challenges you can smile as well. And a smile holds the best prospects for your real self.

Well, look at the play of nature around. You will invariably see that the so called struggle is just a means of strengthening and prevailing over odds.

Generally people are struggling only, like majority of us are. All because we have a tendency to see our own petty challenges as exceptional hurdles. Believe me, very rarely people suffer in exceptional ways. We have a commonality in getting tested.

These are basically challenges that are the fuelling force of creation to keep the things evolving. Put it out of the scheme and the mammoth engine of creation stops. Ironically, we construe challenges as struggle, lose our smile in the effort, forget our intrinsic loving self, and come out fretting, frowning and fearful.

As you see through the challenges, you will see the rays of empathy surfacing, which the apparent struggling self was subduing. Now you can relate to other's challenges and with these feelings you realize your compassionate being.

Love the bad road of your life because this is what basically keeps us going. Without it you lose your motivation. It is your fuel, instructor and passageway all mixed in one.

Be thankful to God that life is not just a smooth road, taking us uninterestingly to a plain destination! Guys be grateful that it is pot-holed and bumpy. The vehicle of our life gets jolts and jerks that are in fact the lifelines for our material and physical being. It tests the vehicle of our existence. The latter responds to the little tricks put up against it and this see-saw battle releases energy for the engine of our survival.

Have you seen rotting, rusting vehicle chassis in dump-yards? They are at rest. They don’t move and aren’t thus part of the expansion of the cosmic energy. One is alive as long as one is connected to the threads of cosmic expansion, be it a leave on a twig, a tree, an elephant or a mosquito. It’s only the movement. You are relevant as long as you are moving in the scheme of things.

So guys if your road appears bumpier than others, just feel the sea-storm of energy your system is creating not just for your own survival but also for the common cause of creation and endurance at the universal level. As a struggler you contribute far more to a great unseen cause than it appears on the common plain of your material existence.

Most of the time, we take it as torture, while in reality all this is meant to shape the wooden crate of our destiny, to make it a fine, presentable chest out of the random wood lying around. Try to find out the nuances of the process. Creation is painful. Ask a mother when she gives birth to a child. Ask the seed when it bursts to unleash the potential of a mammoth tree in its small womb.

So you might think that God has been always busy hammering the wood. Tonk, tonk, phutt, phutt, buuum, buuum. Lot of noise. And you crying foul. He Himself must be wincing with unbearable pain as you cry foul and blame Him for being so merciless and unkind. God but is doing His duty. He has to have both smile and tears, for they lose their meaning in the absence of each other. Thus it’s all blame game on Him and little appreciation.

God puts down nails into our wooden being to shape the box of our destiny. Otherwise we are simply shapeless mass. We are just undefined dead wood without His woodwork. Making is painful and laborious. It’s not a cakewalk. So we keep on crying with pain and curse Him for his mercilessness.

Making is highly painful buddy. It draws blood and fetches tears of remorse even in His eyes for being so accepting to the painful side of existence. He but cannot remove pain from universe because then joy will lose its meaning.  He cannot chuck out darkness, for light will become meaningless. But believe me every nail writes the script of many, many pleasant moments in future.

Love your struggle. Accept your pains. Be a bit kind to yourself when you fail. Only a fall carries the full measure of a rise. See through your tears at the impending victory waiting at a distance. Love your labor on the hot sands of your destiny because these are the milestones that will define and make your victory meaningful and worth it.

Comparison: The Enemy of your Loving Self

 

A lot many of us are unhappy—and naturally less loving—because of the perpetual feeling of loss and failure. Well, a lot of it has to do with our comparison of our situation and standing with others instead of the actual placement of things. Looking at the brighter suns, we get blinded and go into low self-esteem and self-reproach. It makes us terribly discontented and unhappy. To make it still scarier, it’s the worst diagnosis for one’s loving self.

Lyanla Vanzant: “Comparison is an act of violence against the self.”

We have this terrible propensity to add to the weight of sadness and pain inside us. And the simplest mode of adding to our woes is unnecessarily comparing us to others. By prioritizing comparison over your uninfluenced action, you surrender a part of your free will. It is a vital resource. You just jab your own confidence by bruising your self-love. A detached attitude gives you freedom. Comparison basically is a bug that sickens your spirits. Long before you beat others, you berate your own self. You get into sickened imaginations and enter a whirlpool of impracticality.

Comparison is the most irksome short-cut to unhappiness. Almost 90% of the time, we are comparing ourselves with people better placed than us. No wonder a crippling feeling of inadequacy sinks in. Under the glorious sun of their hyper-achievement, you writhe with your somewhat real, but majority of imagined, inadequacies.

Well, the imperious combo of compare and compete beats the hell out of our compassionate self. I am not saying don't compete. Do it with all your capability. But remove the indoctrinated vice of comparison from it. All we can do is to compare our former self with the present one to see the degree of change. Be your own comparison.

Gerald Jampolsky: “Love is the total absence of fear. Love asks no questions. Its natural state is one of extension and expansion, not comparison and measurement.”

So walk slowly, look within, and reach your goal with a smile; you will beat the fastest runner. Qualitatively I mean, since walking to the goal-post with a lovely smile and loadful of loving self makes you the real winner. We just need to change the evaluation of victory. The system may take a generation to bring out such qualitative changes; meanwhile, we can begin with the self.

The moment you grasp the meaning and purpose of your life, you become indispensable for the scheme of things around. You become a requirement for this whole universe. You are no longer a burden for this cosmos to drag on. You just don’t survive accidentally. Yours becomes a planned journey, shaping and reshaping the environment not just for meeting your end, but also carrying the effects that go onto touch many lives around.

The sea cannot survive without its tiny drop. Suppose a drop goes missing, the sea gets a hole in its heart and it just cannot afford to miss its drop. Similarly, this universe cannot sustain the hole left by you. It sustains by you as much as you sustain by it. The only condition being that you live consciously, that you know what you are doing, that you pick an option only after deliberating over it. In this manner you bring full justice to your consciousness.

From chance living to well-meant steps purposeful for the self and the larger humanity, all it takes is a small realization. Just look back and see the trail of decisions you have taken in life. How many of these were taken consciously, you being fully aware of the range of options? How many of these were just pushed on you by the random happenings and chance occurrences?

Unfortunately, a vast majority of our options are born of random throws by chance factors and we just grabbing some involuntarily. And a life dictated by uncalculated, random options and opportunities, hits and mis-hits ends in a confusing travel across the endless twists, turns, U-turns and back outs from dead ended streets like in the puzzle game. We get wasted and wearied in endless turns, re-turns and U-turns, always pushed on by the random factors that happen to spin out of the lot. No wonder, even after travelling a whole lifetime, we are still near the point of start. We feel we haven’t done anything at all. It’s the puzzling zigzag. It cannot be called a path leading to your destiny.

Across the serpentine criss-crossing and entangled turns of random paths and choices, there are most suitable paths laid out for all of us. All we need to do is to start living consciously. Don’t allow generalizations drawn out of comparison of your situation with others to be your guiding principle. Walk slowly but mindfully. You may see others hurtling fast on the racetrack around you, raising dust, crashing into sidelines, shouting with trophies at some corners, but mind you, no journey is complete and meaningful if one doesn’t feel contentment at the end. No journey across the blizzard of accidental turns can result in peace that you are looking for at the end of the day.

So plan your journey even if it means walking slowly. You can even delay your onslaught on the exams or other important tasks of life by a year if you decide to go into self reflection, weighing your abilities and limitations, all this while keeping a close look at the competition. It’s better to watch from a distance first. It’s better to walk slowly if you know what you are doing.

Mindless dash towards the finish line has no meaning at all. Stop if you have been running. Pause if you have been mindlessly allowing yourself to be held by the collar by the monster called life. Sit down if you have been standing for too long. And then look around and think. Look at the zigzag pattern of your senseless run so far. The actual distance covered will surely be very short.

Walk slowly like a wise man. A wise man walking slowly will still beat a reckless sprinter at the end of the day. It’s better to walk slowly to the finish-line, with your breath still under control, your legs still able to carry you. The end becomes meaningful, preparing you for the next journey. Running out of breath to the end line, and crashing straightaway has no meaning. This is no victory. This is not the destination. It’s not meeting the goal. It simply means collapsing. The whole journey turns meaningless.

Victory means being able to smile after reaching the destination. So stop, look back, see the mindless work and the stampede, pause for a moment, look ahead and walk to your sweet goal with a smile on your lips. You become a winner instantly.

Unhappiness: Poison for Self-love

 

Willie Nelson: “We create our own unhappiness. The purpose of suffering is to help us understand we are the ones who cause it.”

Whole lot of unhappiness is born of comparing your situation to others. It's your short-cut to instant unhappiness. By instinct we compare ourselves to those better off while overlooking millions of unfortunates.

Dostoevsky: “The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.”

Unhappiness is the state of forgetting primarily yourself for what you are. We simply allow unhappiness to sink over us. It's a symptom of self-loathing instead of what others have done to you.

Marcus Brigstocke: “I realized that to compare your insides with other people's outsides leads to unhappiness.”

You must be feeling that all the preachy talk lays too much emphasis on how to be happy. Well then, we take a bit different route. We can achieve better results by handling unhappiness.

Enjoy being the frog king in a shit hole; it's better than being a slave in heaven. It directly cuts on the pool of unhappiness, brightening your chances of loving primarily yourself and loving all as a consequence. It’s all the more important because unhappiness straightaway stabs at your intrinsic loving nature. The challenge here is to stab unhappiness in a nonviolent way. There is a methodology.

Apart from all the shit happening around, life is supposed to be a big, fat and interesting book. Let it be an exciting story, not because others applaud it, but basically because you own it, write it and enjoy it. Don't die every moment to see appreciation in the eyes of those around. If that is the expectation, then forget it. It won't happen. People around you will give you more reasons to be sad rather be happy. Others will prefer to see your miserable face instead of ever-grinning, full of joy joker. Not because they are sadistic in nature, just that it helps them in somehow digesting their own miseries. So at least don't hold any expectation on that front.

The appreciation has to come basically from within you. So let it be a very fat book of your follies and little, little triumphs. Let there be unending trails of anecdotes that make you the champion of your small world. Forget about being a world champion. This world is as small as you in comparison to the cosmos. Both are puny. Laugh at it, if it laughs at you. Quite interestingly, this world has limitations, but not you. There are no limitations on you to extend the world within, inside your smallness of routine life, tiny errands, short walks, little losses, tiny gains and stable-unstable relations.

Live more. Like a frog that just jumped into the murky, muddy, mossy green puddle of water. This little puddle itself won't be there after a week. Summers are unsparing. It's boiling. But does it stop the frog king from walloping and taking fantastic breaststrokes in the filthy water? Does it stop the love-lorn fella from croaking dandily and woo the lady of its dream? It doesn't because it's just living in a lifeful 'consciousness', not 'self-consciousness' like we humans who impose 'self' on natural 'consciousness' so heavily to make life a burden.

'Ego' is the feeling of 'I am'. 'I' overshadows 'am', the state of 'just being', of 'consciousness', of living fully, of gliding in the present without the burden of past and worries of future. Nurture 'am-ness'. Water it. It will prosper. Consciousness will spread healthily as you nurture am-ness. Unburden the enjoyment of life from the heavyweight of 'I' and woo your mistress, the life, even in the dirtiest waters like the king of the puddle, the frog. Just 'be'.

Write more chapters in the book of your life. Not as 'I' but by 'being' there. More the chapters, the better it is! Don't bother if these are just scribbled with amateur verve. It's your creation, and as a parent you will hardly be judgmental about it. If a particular chapter goes stale, wind it up and save your book from getting boring. Start a new chapter. We are the writers of the book of life. Keep it interesting! 

Life turns interesting, not because there are exciting things around. It’s interesting if you ‘find’ it interesting. The stage is lying neutral for anyone around. How you see it and how you decide to jump on it with your own antics, playing the protagonist of your life, is all that matters.

Comparison: The Enemy of your Loving Self

A lot many of us are unhappy—and naturally less loving—because of the perpetual feeling of loss and failure. Well, a lot of it has to do with our comparison of our situation and standing with others instead of the actual placement of things. Looking at the brighter suns, we get blinded and go into low self-esteem and self-reproach. It makes us terribly discontented and unhappy. To make it still scarier, it’s the worst diagnosis for one’s loving self.

Lyanla Vanzant: “Comparison is an act of violence against the self.”

We have this terrible propensity to add to the weight of sadness and pain inside us. And the simplest mode of adding to our woes is unnecessarily comparing us to others. By prioritizing comparison over your uninfluenced action, you surrender a part of your free will. It is a vital resource. You just jab your own confidence by bruising your self-love. A detached attitude gives you freedom. Comparison basically is a bug that sickens your spirits. Long before you beat others, you berate your own self. You get into sickened imaginations and enter a whirlpool of impracticality.

Comparison is the most irksome short-cut to unhappiness. Almost 90% of the time, we are comparing ourselves with people better placed than us. No wonder a crippling feeling of inadequacy sinks in. Under the glorious sun of their hyper-achievement, you writhe with your somewhat real, but majority of imagined, inadequacies.

Well, the imperious combo of compare and compete beats the hell out of our compassionate self. I am not saying don't compete. Do it with all your capability. But remove the indoctrinated vice of comparison from it. All we can do is to compare our former self with the present one to see the degree of change. Be your own comparison.

Gerald Jampolsky: “Love is the total absence of fear. Love asks no questions. Its natural state is one of extension and expansion, not comparison and measurement.”

So walk slowly, look within, and reach your goal with a smile; you will beat the fastest runner. Qualitatively I mean, since walking to the goal-post with a lovely smile and loadful of loving self makes you the real winner. We just need to change the evaluation of victory. The system may take a generation to bring out such qualitative changes; meanwhile, we can begin with the self.

The moment you grasp the meaning and purpose of your life, you become indispensable for the scheme of things around. You become a requirement for this whole universe. You are no longer a burden for this cosmos to drag on. You just don’t survive accidentally. Yours becomes a planned journey, shaping and reshaping the environment not just for meeting your end, but also carrying the effects that go onto touch many lives around.

The sea cannot survive without its tiny drop. Suppose a drop goes missing, the sea gets a hole in its heart and it just cannot afford to miss its drop. Similarly, this universe cannot sustain the hole left by you. It sustains by you as much as you sustain by it. The only condition being that you live consciously, that you know what you are doing, that you pick an option only after deliberating over it. In this manner you bring full justice to your consciousness.

From chance living to well-meant steps purposeful for the self and the larger humanity, all it takes is a small realization. Just look back and see the trail of decisions you have taken in life. How many of these were taken consciously, you being fully aware of the range of options? How many of these were just pushed on you by the random happenings and chance occurrences?

Unfortunately, a vast majority of our options are born of random throws by chance factors and we just grabbing some involuntarily. And a life dictated by uncalculated, random options and opportunities, hits and mis-hits ends in a confusing travel across the endless twists, turns, U-turns and back outs from dead ended streets like in the puzzle game. We get wasted and wearied in endless turns, re-turns and U-turns, always pushed on by the random factors that happen to spin out of the lot. No wonder, even after travelling a whole lifetime, we are still near the point of start. We feel we haven’t done anything at all. It’s the puzzling zigzag. It cannot be called a path leading to your destiny.

Across the serpentine criss-crossing and entangled turns of random paths and choices, there are most suitable paths laid out for all of us. All we need to do is to start living consciously. Don’t allow generalizations drawn out of comparison of your situation with others to be your guiding principle. Walk slowly but mindfully. You may see others hurtling fast on the racetrack around you, raising dust, crashing into sidelines, shouting with trophies at some corners, but mind you, no journey is complete and meaningful if one doesn’t feel contentment at the end. No journey across the blizzard of accidental turns can result in peace that you are looking for at the end of the day.

So plan your journey even if it means walking slowly. You can even delay your onslaught on the exams or other important tasks of life by a year if you decide to go into self reflection, weighing your abilities and limitations, all this while keeping a close look at the competition. It’s better to watch from a distance first. It’s better to walk slowly if you know what you are doing.

Mindless dash towards the finish line has no meaning at all. Stop if you have been running. Pause if you have been mindlessly allowing yourself to be held by the collar by the monster called life. Sit down if you have been standing for too long. And then look around and think. Look at the zigzag pattern of your senseless run so far. The actual distance covered will surely be very short.

Walk slowly like a wise man. A wise man walking slowly will still beat a reckless sprinter at the end of the day. It’s better to walk slowly to the finish-line, with your breath still under control, your legs still able to carry you. The end becomes meaningful, preparing you for the next journey. Running out of breath to the end line, and crashing straightaway has no meaning. This is no victory. This is not the destination. It’s not meeting the goal. It simply means collapsing. The whole journey turns meaningless.

Victory means being able to smile after reaching the destination. So stop, look back, see the mindless work and the stampede, pause for a moment, look ahead and walk to your sweet goal with a smile on your lips. You become a winner instantly.