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.
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.
- It is possible to count the number of breaths I took.
- It is possible to count the types of foods I consumed.
- My parents are known.
- My childhood is know to some people at least.
- My education is known.
- My profession is known.
- My income and my savings are known.
- My likes and dislikes are known.
- My tendencies, some of them, are known.
- 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:
- How many thoughts did I have.
- How many emotions did I feel.
- How many deductions did I make.
- On what basis did I decide my likes and dislikes.
- What governed my behavior in any situation.
- How many decisions did I make from one moment to the next.
- 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.
Fantastic piece of writing.. keep them coming
ReplyDeleteTake each day, moment as it comes and not burden myself with the past or the future is how 'I' have tried to live so far, with a good bit of success. This is well depicted in this blog by you, and so rings a sweet bell and gives my philosophy of life a sort of legitimacy I so much yearn for. Well written .. keep up the good work !
ReplyDeleteRajiv