Life

Nowadays many people are fans of brownies with ice cream. Brownies are quite rich in fat and add to that the sugar and milk powder of the ice cream makes it a deadly combination. Just like brownies, we relish our ignorance. We don't need to do anything to remain ignorant except pretend that we know everything. That's the easiest of the options. If we decide to remain ignorant, even all the wise people of the world put together can not wake us up from our ignorance. If such a brownie gets a topping of ice cream for social validation, the temptation is almost impossible to resist. On the one hand, we can choose an easy path to remain ignorant and on the other hand, we get a medal from society for being good as well. What more is needed in life.  We keep eating such brownies with ice cream without realizing that what looks quite harmless slowly and gradually makes our life hell. We keep consuming so much fat every day and slowly gain weight of fixations and slowly become obese and...

Relationships are the foundation of our lives. Even the most powerful and wealthy people in this world cherish relationships. In fact, it may be the other way around, as these relationships also worked as the support system to help them become so powerful and wealthy. If we look around there are so many beautiful relationships. We see the relationship between Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Ramakrishna Paramhansa and Swami Vivekananda, Sri S N Goenka and his wife Smt Iliachi Devi, and so on. We also see many relationships that are exploitative and people even commit suicides tortured by such relationships. What makes a relationship so beautiful or so ugly? What are we seeking in a relationship? I feel that any and every seeking has the same fundamental seeking: to be complete. We feel incomplete due to the loss of awareness of our true self (consciousness) and therefore keep seeking that completion in different things such as money, powers, and relationships. Probably there are three dif...

In today's world, almost everybody is connected through the internet and social media. We have thousands of friends on Facebook and are connected through Linkedin and Twitter. About 3.7 million videos are being uploaded on WhatsApp daily watched worldwide. We share our lives and photos on WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. Thus, we know quite a lot about so many people. Yet, we are feeling so lonely. As per the estimates, around 1 in every 8 people in the world is living with mental disorders. When we are so connected on social media, why are we so disconnected and facing mental disorders? One of the most interesting features of such sharing is that it is selective sharing. We share what we "want to share" and not "what we need to share". We share our happy moments, nice memories, celebrations, and promotions. We do not share our sad moments, loneliness, and need for help. In some cases, certain issues are shared on platforms like Quora but many of the identitie...

Human beings live in communities. Community living makes us feel comfortable because we have developed a system whereby different people in the community do other works to exchange the same with money being the medium of such exchange. For example, somebody invented and manufactured the airplane, but today anybody can enjoy the benefit of traveling by flight by paying money. Similarly, we can buy a flat, furniture, electronic appliances, laptops, fruits, vegetables, cars, and so on by spending money and enjoying the fruits of the work done by somebody else. We too work to get the money to buy all these comforts. Thus, the human civilization is flourishing and is working quite well. However, the other side of the community living is quite dark. Money has gained disproportionate significance because almost everything has been tagged with money by the community. All the objects of material comforts have a price. A beggar on the street who does not have money will have to struggle for even...

Have we seen any animal stressed ever? We have so many dogs, cats, rats, and other animals surrounding us. We see them almost every day. All these animals either take action when they feel threatened or remain silent. For example, dogs keep silently lying on the streets and when they feel threatened, they start barking. Human beings are quite a strange species. Most human beings are so full of stress and despite that, they keep smiling or at least do not express their stress openly.  Hidden stress has numerous consequences on our health and is probably one of the biggest reasons for different diseases in our bodies. Stress simply means suppression. The body wants to react and the mind is stopping the body from reacting. Thus, the body and the mind are in a state of constant conflict and a lot of energy is being consumed in this conflict. Fortunately or unfortunately, human beings have a very robust mind that can think of the future and past. Therefore, we keep thinking of the conse...

We have different fears such as fear of losing what we have, fear of failure, fear of shattering our dreams, fear of the unknown, and so on. By and large, all the fears are the result of ignorance. Since we are not aware of the whole of our existence, we cling to whatever we are aware of and develop a fear of losing that. Since we are not aware of the whole of our potential, we cling to our dreams and therefore have a fear of shattering of dreams. Since we are not aware of inner happiness, we look for that happiness in the success in the external world and become fearful of failure. Since we are disconnected from our inner being, we cling to this body and therefore are always afraid of something unknown. Most people feel that success and accumulation will make them secure. In reality, success and accumulation always make us more insecure since our dependency on the material world increases and we become more and more ignorant of our inner world.  Not so that it is impossible to be ...

Long back, I watched the movie "Rang De Basanti". There was a song in the movie, Lose Control wherein some students are drinking liquor and having fun and jumping from a very high place into the pond and singing the song Lose Control. In today's world, not only the students but also the adults are looking for more and more opportunities to lose control. The more we want to control the world, the more are we becoming desperate to lose control.  We live in a very strange world. Stressed during the day, while attending the office somehow avoiding the undesired consequences. Somehow we manage our work which is ever-expanding with the increasing complexities of the systems. Ideally, with the advent of technology, the life of human beings should have been easier, and we should have had more time to connect to our fundamental elements. However, on the contrary, with the development of technology, we have become control freaks. We have set up cameras at home and want to see what ...

It is difficult to understand the meaning of life unless we contemplate death. Death is the end of this body. What happens after that? The first category of people believes that there is nothing after death and so one should maximize the pleasures in this life. The second category of people believes that depending upon our karma in this life, we go to heaven or hell and therefore we should do good deeds and then there is a whole lot of debate over what is good and what is bad. The third category of people believes that the soul never dies and is not affected by the Karmas. We have made different meanings of death depending upon our own philosophies and belief systems. Our meaning of life also changes significantly depending upon our meaning of death. The first category of people wants to have fun and pleasure from everything in life and invest a lot of time in acquiring and accumulating the ways and means to perpetuate these pleasures. That includes material possessions as well as rela...

 We have often heard that whatever we do in this life, we get the results accordingly in the next life. This is called the law of Karma. Probably we do not need to wait for the next life and psychologically, whatever we do, we get the results the very next moment. For example, if we like appreciation, we become happy as and when appreciation is received. That means whenever somebody criticizes us, we will become sad or angry. Thus, our future sadness or anger is the creation of the pleasure we took in appreciation. Whenever we divide the world between good and bad, right and wrong, we try to associate with the good and what we like or what we consider to be right. That naturally means that we resist what we consider to be wrong or what we dislike. However, all these divisions between right and wrong, like and dislike, etc exist in our mind and most of the time are just a result of our vantage point. The moment we look at things from a different perspective, their meaning undergoes ...

Yesterday evening, we bid farewell to a great officer and a very evolved human being. Somebody asked a question about how she could be so nice. I have no doubt that everybody appreciates fearlessness, love, and compassion. In fact, all three qualities may also be summarised in a single word "love". The opposite of love is fear. All of us are beloved children of the Almighty. At the core, all of us are connected to the divine consciousness. That's why love is quite natural to us. The feeling of love connects us to the divine and since all other human beings are different manifestations of the divine, we love other human beings as well. However, we slowly lose awareness of that inner connection and that loss of awareness makes us fearful.  Probably the only parameter to evaluate the growth of any person, as a human being, is the center of his life. The more the life of a person is centered around fear, the less evolved he is, and the more his life is centered around love, t...

All of us would have faced situations in our lives when we get triggered. Some get triggered by abuse, some by honking, some by physical pain, some by separation in marriage or breaking of a relationship, some by loss of a family member, some by loss of money, some by loss of prestige, some by insult, some by difficult relationships, and so on. Once triggered, we have a foul mood and generally feel unhappy and react in different ways. Some become depressive and isolate themselves from society and friends, some start taking alcohol or some other drugs, some go on pills, and some become aggressive and start abusing others, shouting at others, or even becoming physically violent. There are different ways of self-defense and we adopt one or the other way to defend ourselves when we feel an emotional threat. Why is it so that different people get triggered by different things? Probably it is because we all define life in a very unique way. We are born and brought up in quite diverse situati...

There are different techniques of meditation. Few teach imagination and visualization and the meditator is asked to close his eyes and visualize different things. Some organizations and Gurus ask us to visualize a particular God in a particular form. In contrast, some ask the meditators to visualize the head of the cult, and some more liberal ones ask people to visualize some sort of light or any similar thing in different parts of the body. I often wonder whether all these techniques of visualization serve any purpose. Meditation is an exercise whereby we try to connect to reality in its purest form. When we talk of reality, it should be away from all sorts of impurities and falsity. I have a few questions at this juncture. First: How can a mind, that focuses on visualizing or imagining what is being told by some guru, sect, or organization, observe reality? Second: who is observing the reality? Whether it is the mind or something else? Third: How can one be sure that what one is obs...

Nowadays, almost all of us are suffering from a new age disease we call FOMO or Fear Of Missing Out. We have FOMO of social media, parties, and so many other things. It is strange to see our own behavior that every few minutes our hand is on our mobile to see WhatsApp messages or e-mails as even organizations have started expecting a response from employees the moment messages are put on the group. The gold standard of responses is slowly shifting to minutes or even real-time. The expectations are rising among kids' peers also and I see kids coming under tremendous peer pressure to respond to their WhatsApp messages on the group quickly. Overall, we are moving towards a culture of FOMO where at the back of our minds, we always have a fear of missing out on something. We are so afraid of missing something that we even do not want to examine what we are going to miss. All of us are quite hardwired to have a FOMO about the body and that is why we all have a very robust mechanism of ...

It is often strange to see that some people do not learn despite being surrounded by the source of wisdom, while some learn even if they have to struggle for it. It all depends on the philosophy of life of different people. Our priorities are a product of our philosophy of life. Most people in today's world are followers of Charvak's philosophy which says that we should enjoy our life even if that is at the cost of taking loans. Most people are busy fulfilling the desires of their senses and they want to study and acquire knowledge to use that to get more money and powers to satisfy their senses. That is the reason that they conveniently ignore what they feel is not relevant to the satisfaction of their desires.  Some are mad after information and knowledge because they have tagged their self-image to knowledge and like being regarded as intelligent. For them, knowledge is the tool to get that recognition from their peers and colleagues in particular and society in general. It ...

We have so many movies and books written about happiness, including how to be happy and the pursuit of happiness. I often wonder as to why happiness is so overpriced. Is it because of the internal hollowness that makes us search for something or somebody who can make us happy? Somebody who does not have water and feels thirsty will definitely look for water desperately. But in that case, his thirst will be quenched after having water. Why does our thirst for happiness never get quenched and the more we get it the more we want to get it?  What was Rama seeking in his life that he was so contented? What was Krishna seeking in his life that he was so contented? If we look at history or mythology, only those people who pursued truth could remain happy. When we talk of pursuit of happiness, our minds consider something as desirable and make efforts to get that. Object of desire may vary quite widely. A beggar may become happy if he gets 100 rupees from anybody, a student if he gets good...