On Joy March 19, 2006
Posted by silentEcho in Spiritual.5 comments
Read a piece by Barry Long from his 'The Mask' and I couldn't resist to put up a part of it here. It's so true. Have a read:
Life is to be enjoyed, to be made conscious by enjoying it. When you enjoy anything you do, you are conscious. If you enjoy dancing, you are conscious while dancing. If you enjoy gardening, you are conscious while gardening. If you enjoy your work, you are conscious while working. Every moment of your life and you are living consciously as well as joyously.It's as simple as that.
Joy or consciousness is your natural state. It's always there. It's like the sun that is always shinig above the shadow of the earth and clouds. Stop living in your own shadow, and the sun, the joy, immediately shines.
Living joyously is the joy of clarity – no problems.
This is there now, inside you, just waiting to be lived. You don't have to strive for it, search for it or make it. It's you. It's yours, your very being.
It is wonderful the way he puts joy and our conscious being at the same level. They are indeed the same. Joy indeed is our natural state. We all seek it. Just like the state of stable equilibrium, a slight disturbance from the equilibrium, the restoring force, here our soul, tries to carry us back to the equilibrium…the state of joy, divine pleasure : neither sorrow nor happiness…just joy.
Random reflections on Life… March 18, 2006
Posted by silentEcho in Spiritual.9 comments
It is a very fast life and I think we do not get any time to reflect on our life. Not that it is required all the time but sometimes introspection might be a really good idea. Standing on the roof of my apartment one evening during such a self-imposed introspection session, I was thinking about life. There is so much here we see, hear and do. So many things we take for granted. So many things we care about too much or we ignore. I asked myself a very simple question, atleast it seemed simple to me then, What is life?
What is life? It’s a question that comes to the mind several times and in several forms but very often than not we do not know the answer to this question. May be it’s good that we live what we do not know because if we knew everything about life then it wouldn’t be any fun. No surprises, nothing. Why live it then?
As one sees many times in life, life is worth living but more than that it is worth seeing as well. In fact it is sometimes better to look at life than only living it. This is so because merely living life puts it into the domain of time where we might not have time to understand life because of the pressure dealing we undertake every moment. However looking at life brings it closer to heart and mind, in the domain of experience and emotions. This makes, I think, it easy to understand life and to feel it.
Another question that often comes up is : Why does life go on at all? I mean why does not everything come to a standstill and we remain what we are? It seems such a good idea to some about being in the childhood or teens throughout. I myself sometimes think that it would have been better if I had been a child always. No worries, no tensions. But this does not happen. And it is good from one view point : it breaks the monotony of a singular life. Life proceeds because may be the world looks more beautiful from the other end – the place that might be the place we really ought to be. Life probably is a necessary delay on our way to this place. From where we stand, it might seem ages before we sleep but from the other end ages seem to be seconds – absolutely nothing. But certainly it’s not that only the years in life count. As Abraham Lincoln puts it :
” It might seem from this end that it’s only the years that count but from the other end we shall see that in the end it’s not the years in life that count but the life in the years. “
This means that life is about filling life in our years, making every moment breathe and vibrant with living spirit so that in the end we sleep with peace. But filling life and living it needs a certain grit. Not everyone has it. This is why not everyone ‘ lives ‘ lives life in the real sense of the word. Most of us speak about what life is and what we wanted it to be.. To most of us life is not the party that we hoped for but since we are here all we can do is to dance. But that is a wrong attitude. I think we get satisfied very easily and we do not search for more. Or even when we do it we do it with a pessimistic mindset – cursing life, saying things like ” if only…” et cetera. We should search for joy. Half of us are not able to follow our own instincts and what our heart says. We should do that and we should stop taking things around us for granted because these things will not always stay. It’s might be a good idea to appreciate and value life. It knocks at everyone’s door only to find that most of us don’t open the door, welcome her and make her at home and so, embarrassed, it shoos away. I think we should not allow this to happen. We should learn to love life and live it on our terms. It is difficult to live life on our terms. Those who are able to do this really live their life, others are mere parasites. They haunt their bodies with no identity whatsoever other than that of breathtakers, food eaters and other things one can think of. Read what Steve Jobs said ( Commencement Address, Stanford University ):
” Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. “
Life finally at bliss comes to those who live it. And this, as I remarked earlier, needs a certain grit because living life in its true sense is not just having nostrils to breathe in air but doing so while underwater. It’s just like handling a rose to handle life, we will have to endure the thorns. Life is what Maya Angelon said :
“ Life is about survival. You may encounter many defeats but you must not be defeated. “
It is all about laughing out loud even in the face of difficulties and in slaying them. The more difficult the hardship, the more glorious the achievement. True! If it hadn’t been difficult to ‘ live ‘, everyone would have done it.
Life is short but wide and if we hear real close, we will here what life has to say, something very similar to what Robin Williasm said as John Keating in The Dead Poets Society :
“…Carpe, Carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary. “
All life takes is all we have to give. Let’s just grab the here and now of ourselves. Decide what the purpose is, forget past – good or bad. This is so because good causes desire to live back those days and the bad causes frustration. I think we should care about future only to the extent to which it does not hinder our present. Osho gave a more extreme version :
” Existence knows only one tense – the present. It neither knows the past, because it is no more, nor does it know the future, because it is not yet. “
Life is a verb and NOT a noun. It is ‘ living ‘ and NOT ‘ life ‘. Hope you get me here. So let’s live life. Let’s escape into it instead of escaping from it. And as the workers from the floor below pack their stuff and the sun sets beyond the horizon, I have understood that Life is worth living. I know this because I have one to live. About what I posted in this post, I would like to add one more thing ( Churchill ):
” The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes. “
I am not sure but I might be right…
My letter to Kittu March 17, 2006
Posted by silentEcho in Philosophy, moron's Diary.4 comments
Another letter, this time written by me to my friend Kittu. I and Kittu were good friends. We had gone to some school for a competition. They had some beautiful paintings on display and she asked me, while looking at some of those paintings, ”What do these paintings mean?” I did not answer at that time but later I gave this to her:
_______________________________________________________________________
Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved. Same is with a painting. A painting must be lived and not merely be understood. This is because only a monotonous, dead thing can be understood and not lived. This is not the case with painting. A painting is colorful ( as life is ) and is unquoatable, unsaid, unrevealed. A painting is not just a fiddle of colors. As I said above, it is colorful and this means it has many insights just like life has. Different people see different patterns in the same painting and hence interpret it differently. It is very similar to what they do to life. Different people live life differently.
The meaning of a painting lies in the eyes of the beholder. It is not absolute and hence in the absence of an observer, its meaning nullifies ( quite solipsistic ). I mean to say, the painting has a meaning because the observer has attached a meaning to it.Of course, a painting preserves in itself, the sole expression of its painter but once it has been painted, it no longer belongs to the painter but to the heart which is common to all. From here onwards, the painter himself is an observer.
A true painter never paints to make people understand but he paints just to express himself. It is the abstract feeling of his mind, soul, heart which find expression in a painting. Abstractness seldom finds expression. But whenever it finds expression in the very domain of seldomness, it is difficult to appreciate, understand and overall to live it. Paintings which simplify this are ‘good’. This is why ‘good’ paintings are rare, why caricatures are widespread compared to paintings and why there are more cartoonists than painters.
The feelings of painter are the patterns and the colors that we see on the canvas.As the painting preserves the originality and genuinity of expression filled in it by its painter, one way to understand a painting is to keep yourself in place of the painter. Painting then becomes the feeling that the painter wanted his soul to understand or to be more precise, live. So next time you see a painting do not just try to understand it, but live it, with you as the painter.
We are all paintings, hanging on the walls of life with nails of obligations. Whatever that may be, these paintings made by the master painter are all good and beautiful, you being the best of them.
_______________________________________________________________________
I made this reply to her in the form of a letter that I gave her when we got out of the school bus at our bus stop ( we had the same bus stop ). She took it and promised to read. Few days later I asked her the fair copy of this piece back and she said NO because it had been added by her to her collection of writings. This was the first and the last letter I ever wrote to her. After that we went different paths and it has been a long time since I last met her.
he gave me a letter… March 16, 2006
Posted by silentEcho in moron's Diary.3 comments
Hi,
I don't know what I will be writing or may be I know, I am not sure. But I am sure you will probably understand what I want to say. When I will hand on this letter to you, you will remember that once I said that I wanted to say something. Then you will remember a lot many things.
I have done things that do not make me feel very nice about me. May be, I won't be able to act in the best manner possible but what I can do is do what I can because I want it so. You have been one of the best persons I met so far in my life, a good friend. Things happened, things changed. I will like to a poem here… or let it be. I have been trying to change things again, probably they were. Then I just wanted to see it happening and not say a word. I expected you to understand without me saying anything.
This was all I wanted to say to you in person but couldn't, I don't know why. It just delayed the things. Well, this is it. Nothing more to say. I will watch things happening.
You are a very good person, I know that. Wishing you Best of luck.
abs. 07/02/06
Best of Luck.
_______________________________________________________________________
He gave me this letter and he left. We used to be together but we parted. He went with someone else and I never knew the reason. Neither did he tell me about where I was wrong, what was my fault or things like that. But then he gave me this letter one day. We could have been better. We could have had great time together but it didn't happen. I still do not understand the "why" thing in the whole event but it is no longer significant. We are on different trails…trails which will never intersect from whatever we know now.
