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Showing posts from May, 2013

Can you ever be happy?

To what end do you toil? Ask anyone and the answer is most likely to be "I want to be happy ". Even the saints and good Samaritans do what they do to be happy. Meditators meditate, new age people read tarot cards, do reiki, take deeksha, go to satsang, and do yoga; all intended to make them happy. Is that true for you too? Here is my problem. Unless you know what you are and unless you can define happiness, can "you" really be "happy" ?  Oh yes, you could get that exciting feeling in your spine or that blissful state with tears of love running down your cheeks. Is that it? You are looking for some euphoria  like in an orgasm? So it is a body thing, is it? Try this, go to a scary movie. Curious you will get a similar wave of excitement in your body as you would in a feel good movie. The body doesn't know where you get it the chemical fix, as long as you get it. Or, may be you are a mind person, looking for cerebral happiness like the one

Mindfulness Misunderstood

Once during a Buddhism meditation practice, we did this raisin eating exercise. If you haven't done    the experiment, it is simply taking a very long time to touch, feel, taste and finally eat a raisin in five may be even ten minutes. Some may call it mindfulness but I think this works well only if you make your other senses come to life and engaged. It works well if you cajole your mind into stopping its normal function of thinking and get our other organs which are normally hijacked by the mind, to do what they do best. Feel! So to me, mindfulness really means paying attention; eyefulness, nosefulness, tastiness, touchyfeelyness and simply loveliness. The confusion arises due to the common understanding of mindlessness, when one goes about living like a mindless zombie. So naturally we assume that being mindful is the opposite of that. It is the process of thinking that confuses the issue. Being mindless means living without paying attention not necessarily without thought.

"I,Me, Self" was born out of love

Not I, the body, I the mind or I the soul but I the label was also born in love.  This body at the age of nine months and before survived due to just one reason, love. Had it not been the love from my parents, "I" would just be a lost entity. They offered "Me" the identity as an I with a name, a home, a country, a religion and a whole bunch of attributes. Nothing other than love could have such an immense impact on the psyche of the body and mind to imbue an unshakable belief that "I" actually exists. To undo this, to realize that there is no I, me or self, unfortunately I has to discount the most sacred thing in its life and being and that is the love of the creator, the creator of this I. Truth is born out of disloyalty to the love that created you. What a bummer! Love takes on this grandiose conceptual status but it starts with the body and touch which nature has designed for you to feel immediate bliss. It is the most powerful drug for all life

Why Me?

Biological and mechanical sensors have limited range. So while body and mind can quickly notice an aching back, I can't sense the supernovae light years away. This gets more complicated as mind and thoughts interpret the pain as belonging to it because of the proximity. Thus the chain of identification begins eventually leading to this clumsy world of fear and joy. Mind does have the ability to parse through the signals and opt to limit itself to this puny self or extend its reaches to totality. Takes constant vigil known as meditation. All there is, is an integral of all changes in the limits of 0 and infinity. Me is just a very tiny part of the resulting unity and loves the comfort and limits of its existence. That's why.

TOTAL RECALL

Every thing you know or can know is or is based on memory. Everything! So, can you trust your memory to tell you the truth? A seeker said in passing that the reason we do not recall much of our first three years of life is because our memory is not fully developed. Think of a really bad experience from the past. Death of a parent or a loved one for instance. That was a body of flesh and bones that was labelled by your mind as a dad or a spouse. When he or she left for a few days, your mind labelled it brief absence. But now it is labeling it a permanent absence. All labels! In reality everything you felt in his or her presence or you feel now is based on memories. Your sadness is based on a memory of not having the interaction then or now. Your fear of losing a job not having money or a catastrophe in the future is based on a memory of similar event or memory of something you read, saw or imagined. How many times have things not been what you anticipated them to be? If you were