Life

 Probably, there are only two ways of living. First, to live as a Bhogi, and second to live as a Yogi. A Bhogi seeks something from every action he performs. He eats food for taste or to be strong. He works hard in the school to get an entry to a good college. Works hard at the college to get a good placement. Works hard on the job to get increments and promotions. He forms relationships with different people so that these relatives stand with him in the tough times. He takes care of the kids so that kids may take care of him in old age. He gathers information and knowledge so that he may boast of the same and may feel proud. He helps other people so that society considers him to be a good person and he gets heaven post-death. He prays to God so that he gets whatever he wants. Everything is an investment for a return. In the process, the focus is always on the future. What am I going to get from this investment or hard work? This question remains at the forefront always. The memo...

Deepawali is a festival of lights. After defeating Ravana, Ram returns to Ayodhya with Sita and Lakshmana. The story of the Ramayana has fascinated me for a long time. It always appears to me to be a story of all of us—the story of Rama and Ravana within us—the Ravana of "ego" and the Rama of "consciousness."  The first stage of this "inner play" is set in Ayodhya that represents the mental plane. We generally stay in the mental plane where our "intellect" or the "rational mind" rules like Dashratha. Like Dashratha, who has a chariot that can travel in 10 directions, the intellect can also think in 8 physical directions, the quantum world, and the cosmic world. We are quite happy in the mental world. The problem arises when the "intellect" wants to hand over the kingdom of the mental world to the "consciousness" represented by Rama. Manthara represents "Chitta, " the storehouse of past memories and desires....

I think the entire world is comprised of two broad types of people: givers and takers. The givers find happiness in giving and sharing, while the takers want more and more. I am often surprised by the behavior of the takers. They remain beggars even after reaching the best positions and becoming the richest people in this world. It appears that their thirst increases exponentially with the intake of water. Having earned for their lifetime, they want to earn for their kids and then for the next generations. People's greed rises to the extent that they use the whole of the organizations to fulfill their desires and members of the organizations and communities are just tools to achieve their targets.  In the process, everybody and everything becomes a tool for them. The entire country became a tool for Hitler to fulfill his ambitions and he brutally killed millions of people for his maddening desire. It was the greed and ambitions of Dhritrastra that gave birth to monsters like Duryod...

Fear of the unknown plays a big role in our lives. We keep sticking to the sickening routine because we do not know what lies in the domain of the unknown. We like to use the tested brands, buy flat in a known area, like to visit the places for which we have got the feedback, continue with the jobs and businesses that we do not like, continue in the suffocating relationships, and so on. Somehow, we have great fear in the domain of the unknown. On the other hand, we have people like Columbus and Vasco Da Gama who dared to travel in ships crossing the continents to an unknown world in an era when there were no mobiles or communication systems and these new continents were not even known. How did they have so much confidence in their dreams? What gave them the courage to enter into the sea full of storms and tough weather conditions, with almost 100% chance of losing their lives, to follow a very foggy vision of their dream? Where did this dream come in the first instance when the entire ...

Today, I attended a session by sister B K Shivani. She talked about adopting qualities like love, compassion, honesty, and integrity and dropping qualities like greed, lust, jealousy, and completion. I wondered as to why the adults need to be told all these things. If a person in his 40s and 50s is greedy, competitive, and full of jealousy, then we have failed miserably as a human race. If we learn how to live life while half or more of our lives are over, then there is definitely something absolutely wrong with civilization.  We go to these sessions, listen to these preachers, feel good, return back home, and start doing the same things that we were doing for years again. Why does it not serve the purpose? Why despite the world being full of so many gurus and preachers, the world is full of rapists, terrorists, and criminals? I think Sister Shivani gave a good example of drinking tea on the bed. If tea falls down, we immediately clean the bed sheet before it seeps into the mattres...

Probably, one of the biggest barriers to growth as a human being is the inauthenticity of our characters. There are layers and layers of our mind. We are conscious of only a few upper layers and remain unconscious of the rest of the layers. For example, the need for social validation and appreciation is so deeply inbuilt in our minds that many of our decisions are unconsciously guided by the same. Say, for example, the choice of career. What plays at the back of our minds is the social perception of career options and often there is a conflict between what we want to do and the social perception. Many of the students have an inclination to work as a doctor and yet become civil servants because of the social recognition of civil services as a career. We become inauthentic in the process and tell ourselves and everybody around us that we want to become civil servants while the fact of the matter is that we just want social validation and in order to get the social validation, we are comp...

We are ordinary human beings. What do we have to do with Veda and Vedanta? All these things are so complicated to understand. All your words went above my head. There are so many such phrases that we keep telling ourselves to justify the way we live. We continue to live the same way and continue to suffer. The "ego" tries to hide behind the shield of the ordinary.  When we drive a car, we learn all the functions and then take the car to the roads. We can't say I am an ordinary driver and know only how to drive forward, but I do know how to drive the car in reverse gear. Anybody would laugh and say "O fool why did you take the car for driving when you did not know how to drive the car in reverse gear". We read the manual of any machine before using it or ask somebody who has used the machine before. Unless we understand the basic purpose of human life, we will keep living a very sub-standard life. It's like using the laptop like a typewriter.  The problem is ...

Today, while watching the annual day function of my daughter, I noticed musicians playing different instruments beautifully, and suddenly a thought struck my mind. Music comprises seven different musical notes. What if the musician gets stuck on one of these notes. The entire beauty of the music will be lost. Similarly, nine different forces of nature operate through us making our lives so diverse. We all play different musical instruments using those nine forces of nature. When it gets fixated on one possibility, life becomes so boring and meaningless. I fail to understand why we get stuck on one of the possibilities. Why would a Tabla like to become a "Sitar" or a drum like to become a flute? We all are so unique and use the nine forces of nature to play different tunes. Why would we like to play the same tune again and again? Wouldn't life be so boring in that case? I also watched the choir. It was so nice to see the coordination among the singers. The teacher was beau...

The world is full of people who are driven by their life goals. Society praises achievers and criticizes failures. The hero defeats the villain, and that's why he is called a hero. We have an old tradition of hero worship and that's why everybody wants to be a hero of his family, community, organization, and so on. Slowly this deep desire to become a hero or winner gets into the bones of almost everybody since childhood. Everything is seen as a war and we want to win each one of them. We want to win over the discussions, leave other vehicles behind in the traffic, come first in the class, prove to the best kid of the parents, outsmart others in the office, win medals and awards, reach the best of the positions, and so on. Quite often, the winners become so full of themselves that they lose sensitivity towards the people around them. People around become just a tool to fuel their winning streak. When these winners become the heads of families, they torture their kids to top the ...

 I don't know what Rama would have felt like when he developed Vairagya looking around at the temporariness of life, and all the material objects. He had the blessed company of saints like Vashistha and Vishvamitra who could answer hundreds of his questions with example and their experiences. King Dashratha was spiritually mature and therefore rather than snubbing the Vairagya of Rama, he could request Vashistha and Vishvamitra to answer the questions asked by Rama. When Siddhartha had similar questions in his mind, he had nobody to answer and his father, in fact, tried to keep him away from the questions about life. That is the strategy of probably the entire society today. If you can not answer the question, prove the question itself to be wrong.  That is what happens to anybody having these questions about the purpose of life. The first response he gets from society is that all these questions are a waste of time. In the entire history of humanity, we have not been able to ...

At any point in time, we have two alternative choices. First, to live a life based on the information we have gathered so far, we may divide the whole of life between good and bad, desirable and undesirable, likes and dislikes. We may continue to make choices aiming at what is good, desirable, and liked by us and trying to resist what is bad, undesirable, or not liked. Second, having realized the limitations of our awareness we may be willing to "try" new things that do not make much sense to us for the time being but we still try these things because we have faith that some force of nature is guiding us.  If our life is guided by the first choice, then we will always be a prisoner of the past. Our choices will always be a product of the domain of the known. We will try the career options that have been widely accepted by the society. We will land into conventional jobs or businesses. We will look for conventional partners and relations. In sum and substance, we will follow ...

I was listening to an interesting debate on the following YouTube link that ignited a series of thoughts in my mind: https://youtu.be/o2aAx3wk6dg?si=qLSwKnR0Cp4TyLPC It is interesting to imagine a world where we can get almost everything done with just a command right from driving a car to flying a plane, doing the homework to making presentations for the meeting, taking care of the plants to taking care of the parents, getting the food cooked to get the surgeries done.  After listening to the discussions, I was quite amazed at the idea of delegating the decision-making to the AI and investing our time in exploration. Decisions about whatever is in the domain of known may be taken by the AI in the future and human beings may be busy exploring new possibilities.  However, how will AI make the decisions? Suppose, during the Ramayana times, AI was fully developed. How Kaikeyi would have taken the decision? I believe for AI or anybody to make a decision, the desired goal has to be...

When the battle of Kurukshetra was taking place, there were many observers and participants. The battle was primarily between the Pandavas and Kauravas. Dhritrastra did not participate in the battle and yet he was most attached to the results of the battle. He was so attached to his son Duryodhana that he desperately wanted him to win the battle. On the other hand, Bhishma participated in the battle from the side of Kauravas and fought to the best of his capacity since he had centered his life around his duty towards Hastinapur. Yet, he had an awareness of the truth and justice, however faint, and that awareness guided him when he revealed the secrets of his death to Pandavas. The death of the material body resulted in the freedom of his soul from all the emotional attachments.  Thus, we see two different extremes. On the one hand, there is a height of attachment in the form of Dhritrastra who is so attached to his sons that even while not participating in the battle, he is greatly...

The more I study the Indian scriptures and listen to the Indian Bhajans, the more I get surprised about the behavior of the people. A society that celebrated Vairagya of Shiva has become so obsessed with material objects. A society that celebrates the love of Rama and Bharata is now full of court cases among siblings. A society that has the ideal of Savitri-Satyavan and Sita-Ram is full of marital disputes. Probably one of the biggest reasons is that we have discarded our scriptures which are full of guidance on every aspect of life from our saints and rishis. Bhagwad Geeta is more read by foreigners than by Indians. The following is the link to a video that I listed recently, and it made me think for some time: https://youtu.be/glUuKyj1NoU?si=WDZdiGvEOnypAlBl Yashoda held onto a very small emotion that why did Gautama not ask her before leaving and that holding on to a single emotion disturbed her for so many years. The moment she let it go, not only did she become free, but that free...

Today, while walking I observed a dog barking from the balcony of a home at the street dog. The street dog was searching for some food for her kids from the garbage. The barking dog was barking hard and the street dog was busy searching for the food almost ignoring that bark, to the extent of making fun of that barking dog. So what if you are well-fed and have the comfort of staying in luxury, you do not have the freedom to roam around like me.  That's how the people having the luxuries and comforts bully the people who move on the path of detachment and that's how the people moving along the path of detachment do not care. The barking dogs use their power structures, like the balcony used by the barking dog, to bark at the people who do not have such support. These power structures exist in different forms such as money-driven privileges, positions in organizations, and religions, wide audiences driven by huge fan following, being whos and whos of the society, and so on. The p...

In Vipassana, we practice observation with equanimity. We practice the observation of different parts of the body, and the sensations therein, without reaction. All the reactions exist in the mind and body. The field of consciousness is beyond body and mind. Till the time we identify with the body or thoughts, we will react. We will crave for what we like and have repulsion for what we do not like. Similarly, we feel good when the body has comfortable sensations and we will feel bad when the body does not feel comfortable. We will keep reacting to get more of what we like and to avoid what we do not like.  When we sit in meditation and our back starts paining, we would like to relax and lie down. Similarly, when our feet start paining, we would like to change our posture. If we are feeling hot due to the weather, we would like to switch on the AC. If we feel cold, we would like to wrap ourselves in a blanket. Mosquitoes, insects, and the sounds of vehicles would also disturb us. Th...

Every society aims at setting up the systems. Systems are founded on the principles of fairness and equality. they aim to provide equality of opportunities to everybody. For example, the examination system and the system of civil services in India. Had these systems not been there, people like us would never aspire to reach positions where we can participate the national policy-making and setting up new systems for the country. Similarly, systems like IITs and AIIMS allow people from socially and economically challenged backgrounds to enter the best colleges in India and aspire to become the best of doctors and engineers. Similarly, the system of democracy allows anybody who connects to the people to contest elections and become their representative.  There is no doubt that all the systems try to bring harmony. Had these systems not been there, Tamas or Rajas would have prevailed. Most of the people would have given up unable to find any hope. Some, with money and power, would have...