Monthly Archives: December 2005

You

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You
 
 
 
 
 
There’s one thing you must understand before starting to read this: that you are capable of doing anything. Rules aren’t the modus operandi of some particular process; they are the hurdles that you must cross in life to actually know what that process is in its entirety. Knowing even what staring at a wall actually is takes more than life. More, than life.
 
   I meant more. That’s Death to speak the truth.
 
   But that’s another story. Let’s talk about the rules you experience in your daily life. There are two kinds of rules or laws: (i) Human-made laws, and (ii) Natural Laws. I trust you already know how to break the first kind, so there’s only one kind of law left for you to conquer: Natural Laws. Human beings grow up in a cocoon of laws and rules so that they take law-breaking to be some sort of sin or wrong. What I believe is that law-breaking is like writing or roller-blading or studying: a constructive process that will give you the same effect as these other processes give you: peace of mind. Remember the worker in the previous article? Work in any form is work.
 
   Breaking Natural Laws is going to be tougher than hell. I’m not telling you to try it out. I want you to step out of that cocoon of lies and believe you can do it.
 
   Everything you see, hear or feel is just a set of electrical pulses interpreted by your brain, deciphered by this cocoon-wrapped mind of yours to form sights, sounds and feelings. The wonder that’s hidden in this process is that for a particular external phenomenon that occurs, the information that the brain sends to
different parts of your body in response to that is free to be altered by your mind.
 
   Take a few seconds to think about the last paragraph. What it actually means is that a red-hot splinter laid along your left hand may cause you to shiver as it burns through your skin, or  swimming in the Antarctic Ocean may give you a blister or two.
 
   Such strange responses have been achieved through hypnotism, and that’s where the joke comes in. It means that your mind is more in control of someone else than yourself. You know what’s responsible for that? It’s that rule-dependent existence of yours. We’ll call it the Matrix. Some of you will know why.
 
   Say someone put you on top of the Twin Towers in Malaysia and told you to jump. Jump, that is, from one tower to another. You look at the distance and say you can’t do it. You are taken down a few stories and put in front of the bridge that connects the towers and you are told to cross over to the other tower. You are at an altitude of hundreds of feet from the ground, and gusts of cold wind are sweeping across your face because it’s December. The streets look a little hazy from where you are standing, and the bridge in front of your eyes looks like an obsolete and crazy proposal. Are you going to do it? No.
 
   Now let’s say another man appears on the other side of the bridge with someone alongside him. You rub your eyes and look again: it’s your new girlfriend. It’s been about a week since you met her. You are told that if you don’t cross the bridge at once, that girl is going to be thrown off the platform and she is going to be a bloody mess down where the streets look hazy and she’s going to hold up the traffic for some time.
 
   Suddenly the bridge looks very narrow, barely more than a few strips of steel and concrete joining heaven and earth. You drop to your knees and start crying. When you rub your eyes and look up, you see your brother standing dangerously near the edge, being held from behind by the same man who a moment earlier was grabbing your girlfriend. You are told the same thing again, and offered a sum of a quarter of a million
dollars if you can get across. The people seem dead serious now. Your brother looks very frightened. You watch as his freckled face peers over the side of the platform to glance at the deadly heights below. The cold wind seems to rip through your skin. The streets below are out of focus. You stand up and look at your rother again. Ten years bind you together. The concrete strips suddenly seem stronger, the bridge suddenly looks wider. You run across the dangerous narrow path and grab your brother with both your arms. You don’t remember the money. You just crossed the bridge linking the Twin Towers of Malaysia for your brother, and that’s the whole story.
 
   Now how did that happen? You just got hold of a few laws that were tying you down and you ripped them apart. These laws included a warning that you might fall off the bridge because it was so narrow, the natural law of gravity and the law that says that terrible things happen when you fall off a bridge linking the twin towers and hit the ground. Well, actually you didn’t. What you did was to get away for a few seconds from the fear that these laws give you and become master of the situation. What you must see, realize and believe for yourself is that you can conquer not only the fears that accompany these laws but the laws themselves. It doesn’t at this level mean that a narrow bridge means you are safer up there, or there’s nothing called gravity, or you’ll feel better after you’ve hit the ground after the fall. It means that a calm and composite frame of mind can make up for a narrow bridge, and even if you fell down — although it is completely avoidable, but even if you somehow fell down, you wouldn’t feel a thing as you hit the ground and death would quickly take over and you wouldn’t even know. Trust, distrust, friendship, hatred, anger, love, pain are all electrical pulses free to be interpreted by your mind as anything you want them to be. That’s fact.
 
   And now here’s a little secret you’ll never believe. I know you won’t, but I’ll still tell you. The secret is the fact that at a higher level of knowledge you’ll know that a narrow bridge may mean you are safer up there, and there’s nothing called gravity, and you may feel better after you’ve hit the ground after the fall.
 
   Those of you who haven’t yet watched The Matrix, please do. And there’s something you should know before buying the tickets: it was based on that old, old book of the Indians, the Gita.
 
1Life.
    
 
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Philosophy

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 WARNING

HIGHLY PHILOSOPHICAL MATERIAL:

NOT FOR PRACTICAL OR SENSITIVE MINDS

 

IF YOU ARE AFRAID TO READ ANY FURTHER,

DON’T.
   

 

 

 

All these years you have been a creative, innovative, productive person, taking from the society and dedicating unknowingly. You have been a good student and a good son/daughter, a good friend and a good person. You follow all the laid down rules perfectly, and you can’t remember the last incident where you broke even a school rule. You are helpful, matured beyond your age, intelligent and far-seeing. You love your life.

 

The last paragraph fits almost all the people who are going to read it.

 

This one fits even better:

 

You are a slave, a brainwashed, blind prisoner in a prison of thoughts, beliefs, notions and missing knowledge. You have absolutely no idea who you are, and don’t care to find out. To you, birth is the start of a race which ends at a solid black stone wall called death, and beyond it, there’s nothing. You just evaporate in the stream of time and ‘you’ remains a moving, talking entity that lasted and occupied some space on this Universe for seventy or so years. You are flowing in a stream of common beliefs, fears and consequent rules, and are just another toy of the society.

 

Does that fit?

 

For the Generation X, philosophy might be a fossil to preserve very carefully in a national museum, to be occasionally pointed out and laughed at. You are content with what you are, and your infinitesimally narrow and confined worlds give you more pleasure than you can possibly bear in one life. There’s one slight problem, though: you never get to see the seas and the skies and the worlds which lie beyond the old stony mountain that takes the form of studies, parents, the girl/boy who threw a smile at you last Thursday, and so on.

 

And this fits all. The minute fraction which do not fall into this category are fast becoming extinct.

 

But tell me, didn’t you ever reflect in solitude as to who exactly you are? Do you even believe that you are someone, apart from the bone and flesh and skin that people call by your name? Are all your thoughts, emotions, infatuations, anger, decisions, temptations and wisdom just a bunch of electric pulses coursing  through your head inside the axons? Is that you? Think. And there’s a wonderful sentence I heard in a famous movie that consisted of the two words: ‘Know Thyself.’ That’s the problem with the Generation X. They don’t know who they are.

 

Listen to me, now. I know you will start the mouse cursor for the little ‘X’ on the top right of the screen as soon as you see this word, but you’ll be missing things.

 

You’re a soul. That’s the word that completely defines who you are. You can now forget all the paragraphs
you’ve read. That’s a sentence that contains an eternity in it. Because it defines the wonder that Science is still miles off from, and it’s the word that’s the driving force of the universe.

 

Soul. You’d expect religion to provide a satisfactory answer to the enormous question that’s hidden inside that word, but the religion that you experience can’t.

 

Listen to me now as I tell you a story that is found only in a very, very old Indian book, the Gita.

 

Krishna, one of the gods of the Hindu religion, was once asked by three people, one a highly intelligent person, another a worker and the third a pious man, as to how he should be worshipped. Krishna replied to the first man, the intelligent one: "You first need to believe that there is no god. All you have been taught until now,
you forget. Then with your thoughts and arguments and logic and realization, you shall try to find the answer to all the questions that baffle you. At the end of it all, you will know everything, You will know who I am, and you will see that you and I are no different, and you will know what this universe means. That will be worship enough."

 

To the worker he said: "You only need to love your work. Keep belief and faith in God, but your work should have higher priority. It is work you must worship. Take care that you have respect and love towards whatever work you do. Do not  separate good and bad. They are the same thing. Through your love of work, I shall find your love of me."

 

To the last person, the pious man, he said: "You are a man who will find satisfaction through rituals and customs. Keep belief in God, but never question too much. Observe all the rites, and you will be worshipping me. You must believe blindly in religion and God."

 

The first person he called the Gyanayogi, or the one who took the path of knowledge, the second he
called the Karmayogi, or the one whose worship of God was worship of work, and the third he called the Bhaktiyogi, or the one whose path lay in faith and blind devotion.

 

The first person, obviously, was far superior. He knew what he was doing, and he was never afraid to question. He had his eyes wide open.

 

The second was partly blind, but his needs and fulfillment of cravings and completion of life was done through his love and concentration towards work. Worship in any form is worship.

 

The third, in my eyes, was the most inferior. He never thought of himself as a creature that could question. He accepted everything blindly. His rights stopped at the walls of faith and he could not venture out to the world where the Karmayogi was, let alone touch the Gyanayogi’s world. He was totally blind.

 

The first paragraph of this piece fits the Bhaktiyogis and Karmayogis. Even if you are not a religious fanatic or don’t believe in God, even if you completely avoid religious matters, lack of the knowledge about yourself, inability to comprehend the basic things makes you either a Karmayogi or a Bhaktiyogi. The hard truth is that the people who currently represent religion are Bhaktiyogis. That is the reason behind their inability to answer the question named soul.

 

But religious people do not have to be Bhaktiyogis. The fact that such a story was in a religious book proves that there can be religious Gyanayogis, too. They are, in fact, the most religious people of all, because they do not make a puzzle out of it that’s only to be solved through rituals and customs, but instead they hold it upside down and shake it thoroughly until all the secrets and puzzles are lying on the floor in broad daylight, innocent little facts that are so hard to connect to the heavy stuff that you know as religion.

 

Does that make you think again?

 

The purpose of this piece is not to persuade you to follow any particular religion, but to persuade you to believe that all religion lies within you. You don’t have to believe what every other person says as long as you know who you are.

1Life.