We have become ‘wanting’ beings

Give up all that you don’t need, don’t have or keep pining for. Life then, most certainly, will be bliss.

You – and I – thanks to instant gratification in a facebook and SMS era, have become obsessed with wanting things now and urgently. You try to reach someone and the lines are jammed. You get irritated. You get a mobile phone but you are not satisfied. You want an iPhone. You have a roof over head, but you want to own a property. You want to buy gold because prices are up now and you want an investment backed-up. You have a child, but you won’t leave the child alone; you want the child to be doctor, engineer, class-topper, cricket player, and such, never pausing to think what the child wants to do! Wants. Wants and more Wants! This has made your Life miserable. You have become a wanting being. Than being human! Which is why you are running from pillar to post. Trying to earn more and more thinking you will be happy some day in the future. Now, if you get all that you want it is fine. But Life doesn’t work like that. So, when you don’t get all that you want, you become desperate; you sulk, brood, and plunge your Life into an abyss of worries. Then you attend therapeutic programs and read spiritual books to ‘cleanse’ yourself. The feeling of oneness with the Universe lasts only as long as the programs do. Soon you have resumed the wanting in you and have lost yourself again.

Know that you will always get what you need and never always what you want!  If you have all that you need, just be happy with it. And stop pining for what you don’t have. Only then will you be in bliss!

You can’t enjoy a sunrise if you think about your nightmares

Don’t avoid worry. Understand it.

In the time that you spend worrying, you are missing living! You cannot do both at the same time. You can either live. Or you can worry. If you are worrying, be sure, you may be alive, breathing, seeing and doing, but you are not living! The nature of the human mind is that it will keep churning thoughts incessantly and most of them will be about your worries. If you want to stop worrying, then that want may now become a new worry!

Instead understand why you worry in the first place. You worry about things, people, events, money, health, relationships, jobs, because you want them in your control or you want to know more about them or both. And when you are unable to do any of that, you worry. You say that you want a job. Is that a worry? Hardly. Will you get that job? Now, that’s a worry: because you want to control the outcome of your want and you want information about the future. My wife has gone to meet a friend. Is that a worry? Not really. But who is that friend? It is this greed for the detail, for that information, that will spawn a worry. And then the issue is no longer about the wife meeting the friend, it is about the gender of the friend and then it morphs into another, new, horrific worry: Is my wife cheating on me?

How do you contain this human urge to want to control what’s going on and/or keep seeking information on what’s going on? The simple truth is, you can’t. So, wanting to stop worrying is an improbable vision to begin with. What you can do, however, is to attempt living. When you are filling out your job application, for instance, why do you worry about the outcome of the effort? Focus on the application you are preparing. Pour your heart into it. Don’t let your mind wander. Bring it to attend on the only, supremely important, singular task at that moment in your Life, the job application. You will never enjoy a sunrise if you keep thinking about your nightmares. Even if you are at the most beautiful resort in the Pacific, you will not even see the sun rise if you are not present in that moment.

The cure to worrying is like the cure to diabetes. Once a diabetic, always a diabetic. At best, you can astutely manage your diabetes with your strict diet and exercise regimen. Even a day’s, or even a meal’s complacency or indulgence, can spike your sugar levels. So it is with worrying. You cannot stop worrying. Period. But you can always start living. When you live, in the present, no worry can plague you! Will you please live, worry-free, today, a day that has been crafted exquisitely for you? 

Your Life doesn’t need any fixing

“Oh! God! Can you bring along your toolbox? My Life needs fixing!” __ Anonymous.

Interesting thought that. But in reality our lives are all, perhaps, pre-fixed. Like a pre-paid SIM card. What you are, what you are going through, is part of a larger, inscrutable cosmic design. The best you__and I__can do is to accept the design as it is, for what it is, and live fully, peacefully, happily! The truth also about your Life is that you have always been what you are, except when you awaken spiritually, you know who you are and who have been so far! This awakening will lead you to understand and appreciate that despite whatever you may want fixed, Life will do exactly what it pleases and when it pleases.

So, let’s stop arguing with Life and battling it. Instead live it! It is still beautiful. And it is so only because of its unpredictability and its seductive mystique! The truth, therefore, your Life doesn’t need any fixing. What you bring to your Life, your attitude, most definitely does! 

You are the peace that you seek

You cannot have the cake and eat it! The same way, you cannot cling on to things in Life and still want inner peace!

When you are clinging on to things in Life __ which is when you are attached to family, job, salary, EMIs, worries, problems and emotions, opinions, prejudices, you cannot live freely! You have been brought up to believe, just as I have been, and just as the way we are bringing up our children, that living equals ‘earning-a-living’. But does earning-a-living give you joy? It may give you comfort, but does it give you joy? And so, that’s how, in search of the true meaning of Life, your transformation from struggler and climber to seeker happens.

At the end of the day, everyone is seeking peace. But do you need to have worked so hard, not lived any of the 70 years of your Life, and then discover that peace is easy to find and easier to retain, if only you stopped clinging on to things in Life!? There’s a story that Swami Rama, the legendary Himalayan Yogi, used to say. It is the story of two monks. The two monks were on a journey by foot. And the younger monk asked the older one how detachment can be practiced. “By letting go,” said the older one. “But my worldly responsibilities refuse to let me to let go,” complained the younger one. The older one did not reply. They retired under a big tree for the night. The next morning, when the younger monk woke up, he found the older one hugging the tree’s trunk. Saying that it was getting late, the younger one respectfully invited the older one to continue their journey. But the older monk complained that the tree wouldn’t let him go! The younger monk tried pulling the older one away from the tree. But to no avail. Finally, disgusted at the older monk’s childish behavior, the younger one said, “Master, you are foolish. It is not the tree which is holding you. You are the one who is holding on to the tree. You have to let go to be free and go along on our journey.” The older monk smiled and replied: “But how can I? I am attached to it pretty much the way you are attached too, with your worldly Life?” The younger monk got the lesson. And hopefully you too have got it!

In reality, we are the peace we seek. We don’t have to find it, or seek it. We must just stop clinging on to all that which is an impediment to us feeling our inner peace. We must just let go of everything that we cling on to. What will then remain is only peace!

Acceptance means not resisting Life

Make Life simple. Do not question what’s happening to you. Don’t fret or gloat over anything. Just live with complete awareness and in total acceptance.

Imagine something grave has happened to you. Maybe someone you know died. Now, it is normal for you to be in pain, agony and also in mourning. But how long are you going to live being dead every breathing moment? On the other hand if you accepted that death will follow birth, as it has done ever since creation happened, you may miss the person, but your grief will cease. Replace death with any other context and do the same thing. Someone’s nasty to you, accept it. You lost your job, accept it. You don’t get business because the markets are in the grip of a recession, accept it again! Acceptance does not mean inaction. It doesn’t mean you should not strive to make things better again. You should. You must. Acceptance means choosing not to resist whatever is happening to you at any given time.

Acceptance replaces grief with bliss while still not solving the problem you may be confronted with immediately. Problems will go away exactly the same way they have come. They are a product of your time. But bliss is not dependent on what you are going through. It is a state that you are already in; you don’t feel it because you have complicated your Life by resisting Life! Simplify Life by accepting it for what it is

Nano-second ‘nirvana’: you are not what you think you are

The simplest way to bliss is to keep reminding yourself that you are not what you think you are.

My laptop crashed this morning. A wave of worry swept through me. My files, my data? But a few minutes into the worrying episode, a certain peace arose from within. I said to myself: "Hey! I am not this computer. I haven't crashed. Let's figure out a way to deal with this."

Responding to Life situations with such trained equanimity works very well. You can try this approach too. First begin with (re)-knowing that you are not this body. You have heard of this from millions of wise folk before. I heard this ‘pearl of wisdom’, one more time, from my friend who recently turned 50. When I sent him a mail wishing him on his fiftieth, he replied saying he still felt young, as if he was in his 20s. “The body is aging but the soul is timeless,” he wrote back. That’s the spirit! Even so, while you know that this is the intelligent way to live, you conveniently slip into the worrying mode over anything concerning your body. For instance, you know, just as I do and everyone else does, that the body will die one day. Yet you grieve over whatever happens to your body. You grow older, you grieve. You grieve if you lose hair, if your hair becomes grey, if you become fat or if your body is affected by cancer. Let's simplify this. When you feel hungry or thirsty, are you feeling so, or is your body feeling so? The body is like a car. And you are the driver. Can a car drive on its own unless the driver wills it, drives it and leads it? The car needs food and that's what fuel, oil, coolant and such are for the car. Clearly, the driver has more power, more control than the car. Similarly the real you, if you can get to know that person within you, is the one you need to be aware of and identify with.  

Once you get to that state of self-awareness, self-realization, when you know that you are not what you think you are, you will be able to handle any 'real world' situation. A computer crashing, a job loss, a break-up, betrayal, financial loss, anything! Realize that you are not your qualifications, job, social position, your bank balance, your worry, your anxiety or your fears. You are truly above all of this. When this realization dawns upon you, you are already liberated and a free spirit. You may not want to believe that you can immediately reach this state. But know that you can be there in a nano-second if you want to. Know also that when you get to this state, you can call it nano-second nirvana, you will be one with the cosmic energy. When you will be untouched. And be in bliss!

In this New Year, try a different ROI!

Follow what inspires you and you will harvest a greater return from Life!

Another New Year is upon us. And the business newspapers this morning are full of stories of where-to-invest and how-to-maximize-your-return-on-investment in 2015. While prudent financial decisions are key to leading a comfortable Life, some people get obsessed with their wealth and assets. Life cannot and must not be lived on financial parameters alone. When every action, each opportunity is dissected, scrutinized for Return on Investment (ROI), we are operating from our intellect. When we operate from our intellect all the while is when so much stress and strife comes. I am not saying that’s bad. It is perhaps complicating Life a notch too much. Instead try another ROI – Return on Inspiration. Have you ever wondered what to do with stuff that inspires you in Life?

I find this philosophy of Return on Inspiration, so simple and so effective. I am the sort of person who is inspired by film music – I can never quite thank the generations of music composers, lyricists, singers and artistes who have left behind a treasure chest full of their work for us to savor them endlessly. The other day, on Christmas, a bunch of friends and us got together. We jammed, singing old Hindi and Malayalam film songs. Nobody operated from the intellect. Nobody worried about the next morning or the next paycheck or about what was past or what was coming up. Each of us sang from our souls, inspired by the works of some of the greatest composers, lyricists and singers from Indian cinema. We went on for a good hour, humming away our worries. Each of us had a story. Each of us had our challenges. Kids to be raised. Bills to be paid. Life to be dealt with. But if that hour reflected bliss in a microcosm, we all experienced it wholesomely. That’s why I am truly believing of this way of Life.

Kaviarasu Kannadasan, that divine poet, has said this so simply, so soulfully, so beautifully, in his song written for ‘Paalum Pazhamum’ (‘Milk and Fruits’, 1961, A.Bhimsingh, music by Viswanathan-Ramamoorthy, sung by T.M.Soundarajan, Sivaji Ganesan, Saroja Devi), “Ponaal Pogattum Poda….” Which means, ‘whatever goes, let it go….let bygones be bygones…let go of whatever has left you….” Those of you who follow Tamizh may enjoy this song (video is, understandably, bad).

So, in this year, just keep doing what inspires you! Whatever it is, just do it! And review how you feel doing it! That feeling, which cannot be compensated or computed in money terms ever, is your true ROI – Return on Inspiration!