Damage control

I have been reading my guru's biography for the past few days. (For the record, he is still alive).

He just spoke about something that is forcing me to write this post.

In 1999, something happened to me when I was in Mumbai (even I was forced to call it that and I did not like it. I felt like my past childhood was being violated and my Bombay home being demolished for a few fanatical nut jobs.)

It was a very traumatizing experience in emotional terms. Let us just say I lost. Not physically, just emotionally. Physically too in terms of distance.

At that time, something inside me was destroyed. In a very literal sense of word, I felt that a certain place inside me had evaporated like a blade of grass in front a nuclear blast. For months I could not do anything. I took seriously to drinking (I love you, whoever you are, who made gin), got so depressed I almost lost my job, and seriously contemplated dying myself, not once but many times over the years to come. Death seemed much better than living with all that devastation inside me. Death was all that made sense.

Today, 30 Jan 2012, 17:26 IST, I am glad I did not do myself in.

A few weeks ago I was reading another book in which the guru answered questions about life, death, suffering, disease, misery, and a lot of other topics. It made sense on a certain level and I accepted it, but it would be a lie to say that I fully understood his answers.

Before going further, I need to say something about spirituality. Spirituality is not saffron clothes, ash on the forehead, giving up of material life, looking towards god, requiring a master, or any of the "brand ambassadors" that usually go along with the word. Spirituality has lots of meanings, one of which is "self destruction." Not the destruction of the body but the destruction of all that binds us to the material (it is a long list of positive destruction). A man can pursue money and be spiritual. He could pursue sex and be spiritual. He could do anything, good or bad, and still be spiritual.

One meaning is that spirituality means looking inward and helping that evolve. But how do you recognize it. Some people can do it easily. I never could. I have started now but still I am not completely there.

So what is the significance of a trauma that makes you feel completely destroyed? The first and most obvious is that it at least makes you look inward. When something inside hurts, it cannot be ignored. You must drop everything. Let the job go, let the parents go, let the wife go, let the children go, let everything go ... the only focus at that time is on the pain inside. It demands so much attention that for a moment a human being can also think of death - without fear and with absolute acceptance - and getting rid of a body so foolish that it can contain so much pain and still live. It all feels wrongs.

When I look back on my life, even now, I have to forcefully drag my mind away from all that is bad and let it go. I have a long way to go. But after today, I think it should have a certain modicum of freedom. When all those things happened, I just ignored the pain, never looked inside. Certainly, if those things are still coming back to me it is only because there is something there to learn still.

Another aspect is, whatever one thinks of oneself, it is mostly in terms of the body. We do a lot for our physical bodies. Our minds, our emotions, our morals, our ethics, our choices, our actions ... all of them are just governed by our bodies. A certain intellectual component may be there, but then even the intellect is part of the body. When this body drops, everything drops with it. After that, there is no more logic, ethics, morals, codes, emotions, or anything (in the human sense) that we value so highly when we are alive.

But somewhere inside, there is something that continues even after everything has been destroyed. That something is the core of who we are. The core why we live at all. Everything else we do, we do merely to survive. The body needs a survival mechanism, not the being. That being that longs for more than physicality and keeps us unhappy regardless of material possessions because it is yearning for something outside the physical plane.

I realize that this has been there with me for a long time. Once many, many years ago, I wrote to Paramjit in an email, "I do not want to survive. I want to live." I doubt if he remembers it. So this longing was always there but it manifested in ways I was not wise to understand.

Ok, enough of the salami tactics.

All my life, I never looked inside and the moment I looked (I saw nothing and still see nothing, but instinct insists that that is all that matters, and I have always been more intuitive than intelligent. My education scores are evidence of that, hahaha) everything changed. I have no clue what is inside, but the mere act of even trying to look inside has made more changes than any list could hold.

So this brings me back to the title of this post. When something inside you is left devastated, perhaps the reason is that you are an idiot (well, at least I am) who never looks in that direction so that a cataclysm is required for you to do that.

If you look at it in terms of requirement, the pain was caused because you are selfish. Selfish not in the material sense but in a spiritual sense. You are so spiritually impoverished inside and so utterly ignorant of it that others must cause you pain to force you to look inside.

It is we, so absorbed with our so-called needs and wants that we starve ourselves to the point where we must have unendurable pain to force us to see the obvious.

Gautama Buddha went about saying, "Anitya, anitya, anitya." Impermanent, Impermanent, Impermanent to everyone he met, including priests. The only permanent thing that exists is inside us and we are the fools, and self-appointed rulers of the existence, who spend years and years so consumed with the impermanent that we forget to look at the eternal inside us.

What a waste. An almost criminal, unpardonable waste.

For me, this whole process has been nothing short of rebirth. My choice of atheism was partly out of disgust for what in my opinion passed for god and religion and partly a logical deduction based on a heck of a lot of reading and just plain observing. The madness of religion and ritual is now falling into place. Who was it who said, "If you don't know history, you don't know anything?" Michael Crichton, I think.

The answers are all there, but people no longer remember. They just know the rituals and rites and names of popular figures, and perhaps a few famous anecdotes. The true answers as to why they do what they do are long forgotten but thank goodness not lost.

So looking inward is wonderful, provided you know how to do it right. And the sense of destruction, of having a hole blown into your internal fabric is not such a bad thing if you look at it from the proper perspective. In fact, one purpose of the whole meditation and yoga combo is to reach a point where there is nothing left to destroy within and what there is, is indestructible and untouchable anyway. So basically you consciously and compassionately destroy all within that can lead to any negativity in any sense and cultivate the true self to a point where enlightenment becomes a natural state of being and nothing more.

Look inward. It is all there.

I hope that out of the 7 billion human population there are at least a few billion smarter than I have been or perhaps ever might be.

The Dead, The Living, and The Unborn

The Dead
Or, to put it in another way, the past. That thing known by the cliche, "the dead past." There is a reason why the past is called dead. It is, really. It cannot do anything, like a corpse. There is no activity in it. The only thing it can do, it does not really do, we allow it to do. Just as someone's death can affect oneself. The one who is dead is dead. He/she/it is not doing anything, but it affects us just the same. It may be a cruel thing to say, but the pain we feel when someone or something else dies is a purely selfish. There is no love in it. One does not really care for the other who died. It is one's own, personal pain that consumes one. And if one does care, then that is an even greater folly, for this life has to end. Mourning the inevitable is such a futile exercise.

Take any other aspect of life. If you know in advance that something adverse, perhaps unaccountably painful, is going to happen. We prepare for it and to a certain, or complete, degree accept it.

Now death. There is no living thing, man or otherwise, who does not realize that death is inevitable. If it was not, there was no need for the universe to bestow the survival instinct in single-celled organisms too. Even they want to live as much as possible. Maybe at a low level of consciousness, but at an extremely high level of wanting to survive. Why else do western countries need a new flu vaccine every year? Even those little buggers will keep evolving so our drugs cannot kill them as easily.

But coming back to the past. I personally have found that until recently my past was not something inert, but a huge monster that could make me do anything it wanted. One memory, one word, one voice, one sentence, the name of a town, literally anything had the power to force life into a downward spiral. It had become so powerful.

Then the understanding came through my guru. It is dead. If it is doing anything at all, I am the one allowing it do that. The control is mine, not its. A corpse has neither desire nor need to control anything. The magnitude of my foolishness staggered me to no little extent. How could I have let this happen to myself. My past has no outside influences. It is entirely and absolutely mine. I should be in control and not it because I am the one making decisions now.

So another lesson was learned. The past should only be a source of two things. One is joy. If thinking back gives pleasure, there is no harm in it. If present life becomes tough, one can always think back to a sunset, a rain shower, a walk, a person, a smell, a phrase in a book, some bit of music. If it soothes, why not use it. The second is knowledge. It can teach one how to avoid doing the things that led to unpleasant memories. That is all unpleasantness should be. A little inoffensive reminder not to get into all of that again. Yet, how we tend to let this dead past corrupt our present by moping, endless grieving, thinking and rethinking and rethinking and never stopping, all the time spent in "if only", and goodness knows how much more. There is no "if only". It is done and dead. This is "how it is." Deal with it.

Let the past be there, one cannot be rid of it, but one can make it a pleasant part of life.

The Unborn
Or, the future. I do not know how it is with you, but this is the very devil for me, or at least was. Oh, the plans that I had. This reminds me of something very small that happened to me once.

I have a friend in Bombay (yes, yes, Mumbai, I know, bear with me) called Archana. We met occasionally at office parties and chatted a lot over the bulletin board system or BBS (Google or Wiki it. It was the precursor to the Internet). I always told her things I had told no one. I am beginning to understand the reason for it now, but back then it always puzzled me. Why am I telling this person things I would hesitate to share with my doctor? Anyway, I did. One day in an email or chat, I said something like, "Sometimes I feel my whole life is nothing but a graveyard of dead dreams." She said, in effect, I do not remember her exact words, "What genius told you to make a graveyard of dead dreams?"

At that time, I felt furious with her because I felt she was mocking my sense of disappointment. Now, after being out of touch with her for nearly fifteen years, I get what she was saying.

Like the past, the future has a tremendous hold on us. It too can make us do foolish things. But that is only because we confuse hope with a cocktail of desire, want, and ego. There is nothing wrong with hope. However, the only useful hope is either that which comes with practicality or that which comes with  absolute faith. Faith not in the sense of god setting things right, but faith in the sense of "whatever may happen, let it happen." I seriously suspect that that vintage of faithful hope is almost gone from this world. There is only an egoist, self-serving hope left. That is why I refused to hope. That is why I felt a long time ago that when whats-his-name said, "hope is the opiate of the masses," he was right. But there is a lot in it. However, I digress.

Just as the past cannot be undone by any power in the universe, the future cannot be fixed by any one being to his/her own preference.

The future is like an unborn child. There is no control over what sort of human being that child will turn out. All we can do is raise it with a certain care. With the unborn child, the only care we can take is of a precautionary nature. We take certain precautions to make sure the child is born normally and healthy. If every parent started obsessing about their unborn's children's destiny the way they obsess about their own, well, that would put a sure stop to the growing population.

But the future, like children, is inevitable. It is going to happen. Obsessing about what kind of future it might be, trying to control it, worrying about it, or anything else - will not make any difference.

When the world was a smaller place the number of variables determining the future were few. Today, the variables could be said to have reached almost infinite proportions. How the dickens anyone expects to decide on their future is beyond me. It was always beyond me, that is not the point, but now I realize that the only thing to be done can be done now.

Why worry about something that you cannot control anyway? And why try to predict it and ruin the fun? Sure, we say we do it for security, but is security such a valuable price that our lives become dull?

Do what is right now is and let what may happen, happen. What was that song from the Sound of Music? Que Sera Sera. Even that song makes sense to me now. "Whatever will be, will be. The future is not for us to see." I suppose you could call it a Musical Comedy Gita. Haha.


The Living
So the past cannot be changed and there is no control over the future. Where does that leave us? I am so glad you asked me now. If you had asked me before December 2011, I would have taken you to a bar and got you drunk because that is the only answer I had.

How fortunate for you that I am here to tell you the obvious truth that you already know, but heck, I like writing, so I will tell you anyway. I mean, what can you do? Browse away? Well, nuts, I will continue waxing, that is why I am here.

The rest is written in first person, all "I".

The only living thing that I have is the present. The past is dead and unalterable and for all my hoping and planning the future is not in my control.

The sad part is, I have had this my whole life and I wasted it.

To think back quantitatively, what exactly did I have, let me make a list.

1. It is possible to count the number of breaths I  took.
2. It is possible to count the types of foods I consumed.
3. My parents are known.
4. My childhood is know to some people at least.
5. My education is known.
6. My profession is known.
7. My income and my savings are known.
8. My likes and dislikes are known.
9. My tendencies, some of them, are known.
10. I am expected to behave in a certain way in any given situation.

These are just some of the quantifiable factors through which I know the world and how the world sees me. And that was my whole life.

Now what did I not know. Another list:

1. How many thoughts did I have.
2. How many emotions did I feel.
3. How many deductions did I make.
4. On what basis did I decide my likes and dislikes.
5. What governed my behavior in any situation.
6. How many decisions did I make from one moment to the next.
7. How, how, how, how ... what, what, what ... why, why, why...

There is no end.

I always thought of life as a finite quantity. "Live for so long by the law of averages. Do this, this, this, and this, and maybe a bit of that, suffer through, die."

Today, when I put aside the finite and think only in terms of how many "now" did I have in my life, the answer is obvious. There is no number. The "now" is infinite. Even now, having wasted 41 years of my life, I still have an infinite "now" left.

But I never paid attention to the "now." It was always something "back then" or something "later on", never "now."

When I think about it, does a human body really have a finite lifespan? Yes, it does. But does a conscious human being within a mortal body have a finite time? Again, no. Life is an infinite number of "now" that can be used to accomplish anything. And I wasted it all on "back then" and "later on." What a miserable waste of life.

So why bother about the "back then" corpse or the "schizophrenic later on" that cannot make up its fat head what it is going to be?

"Now" is where I live and where everyone lives. No one lives in the past or the future. Life happens in only one single place and that place is "now."

I wish I had known this very early in my life, but, well, I know it now, so it is okay.

First person narration over.

You know, if you want, life can make sense from any damn thing. In the movie "Bourne Ultimatum, the Director of CIA (Kramer?) says, "Hope for the best, plan for the worst." Wonderful strategy. Except in his case when things got "worst", he decided most of the principals are better off killed.

When learning, be careful of who is teaching and what is the purpose of the lesson.

Cheerio.

Circle

Take a hypothetical circle.

At the bottom of the circle is a dot where most people start.

Then depending on their natural tendencies, external influences, and a few other factors they set off in either of two directions, fully or partially confident that they are on the right track.

Along the way the horizontal line connecting these two dots keeps getting wider and wider. During this time, they acquire a lot of baggage, some good and some bad. The most burdensome and difficult to break through are the beliefs, whether they be pro or against anything, including material, spiritual, logical, social, and all sorts of other beliefs.

Quite often, the material beliefs are simply reflections of the other beliefs, all jumbled up into one confusing life, supported by odd ends like fate, destiny, malicious influences, and perhaps even god (or lack thereof).

The diametric opposition in the beliefs in these two types of lives traveling around the circle leads to a lot of intolerance on the outside, foolishness on the inside, and general misery all around.

That is where I was until recently. At the 180 degree mark, at the maximum possible distance from and completely at odds with the whole world, drinking myself to death slowly (well, maybe not that slowly).

However, the real tragedy that I narrowly avoided was almost missing out on the beautiful phenomenon when those two dots going around the circle would have eventually started coming together.

It would not be a complete truth to say that I had never expected or wanted to see this happening. We all desire some form of peaceful closure regardless of who we think we are or the type of life we are living. The trouble is that we do not have the required perspective to see what we deeply desire to see. The circle of life (pardon the popular cliche) is too wide for people like me to see the other side, and if one cannot see it, the logical mind will refuse to consider it, except in dislike and hate.

Getting that perspective is one of the most wonderful things that can happen to a human being.

When that circle closes, everything is going to merge as it had been before the circle had started to widen. Perhaps this is why old people tend to become peaceful. A certain awareness of the closing circle - this has nothing to do with death - comes to them and they become peaceful.

Of course, I think it is unfair that now I am not only aware of the circle but can see clearly that for a lot of people that circle is a bondage they will endure, happily I hope, but still endure, for some time.

Imaging having the necessary awareness and tools to skip the circumference and go straight from one end to the other or all the ends at once. Sure I have had to travel more than half that circle in discomfort, but the bliss that followed it made it all worth it. I would gladly suffer that much again for a single moment that I am living now. By the way, I tend to exaggerate.

An awareness needs to be cultivated about the dot at the top, life is taking us there anyway. This is not a shortcut. There are none. Simply that the more awareness one has, the more pleasant will be the time spent in reaching the top dot.

One is going to reach the same spot as every other human being. There is no option in that. But there is a choice in what state of awareness one gets there and in what state of awareness one transcends the circle.

Transcending it, of course, is a different thing altogether, but the only factor that stops anyone is one's own limited awareness.

So, be aware. No need to beware. Just go ahead and be aware. It is rather a bit of fun. Enjoy.

Making it up ...

Knowledge acquired for survival is irrelevant when compared to knowledge acquired for life. Universality can teach more than all the universities combined.

Don't ask for explanations. I am just making this stuff up.

It is wonderful to be extra ordinary.

Mostly about pebbles...

One day a pebble rolled off a big mountain.

After that, everyone only thought of it as another pebble among countless others and not as a part of something bigger.

Fortunately, we come equipped with the power to change that. The problem is accepting oneself as a pebble with joy and then rolling up that mountain to its very peak. If acceptance comes, the longing to roll up will come, with longing the will, and with will the determination.

After that, it is just perseverance.

Someday, I would like to know who puts all these things in my head.

Getting wet ...

Life is a flood and we all pretend we are the most perfect umbrella ever made. If you try to save yourself from the flood of life with an umbrella, the umbrella will break. When the flood becomes uncontrollable, throw away the umbrella and jump in. You are going to get wet anyway. You might as well have a bath of such grand proportions that all of you will be cleansed in a moment.