in touch with reality....

are we in touch with reality or do we pretend to live in our "projected ideals", whatever they may be.
in one of my early encounters with my master, he listened patiently to me and said, " Sundar, I can hear Jiddu, Vivekananda, Bach, Rand and others from you. But I am yet to hear you."

That hit me.

I was Mr. Borrowed Concepts, trying to shape and fit my life into the reality of others.

for me they were no more than mere concepts, far away from my reality.

He remarked that reading a map was not the same as visiting a place.

My acquired spirituality was a mechanism to cope with my various failures and discontents in life, nothing more. It was intellectual masturbation.

i was trying to justify various events in my life and mask myself behind my "sorrow management" mechanism.

My reality was misery, a dryness of feeling within.....dead automation like movements as i went through life's motions. Meaninglessness, Boredom, Lethargy.Trying to do the "right" things as I perceived them.

There was a discernible gap between the "what is" and the "what i aspired to be" . I believed myself to be many of the things I aspired to be.

A reality check proved otherwise........

i tried to "love" my mom ....i discovered i was innately incapable of it..in the realms of the mind, we only know to use and abuse each other....to fulfil our needs...relax..dont rush to defend...what i discovered is that the mind is intrinsically incapable of love and joy.i found spirituality to be "conflict-free " living which essentially operated from the heart.....a faculty whose basic nature is joy and love....one does not have to try to love....that is pathetic and humiliating.....similarly joy was intrinsic to certain states of being, not a matter of simulation through selective events or efforts of any kind....paradigms and fortresses of perceptions and mental formations within me began to crumble....it was often frightening....as closely held beliefs and concepts collapsed on intense scrutiny....the hollowness of life as i was leading it dawned....as light started coming in, the darkness had to give way..huge pockets of energy released inside me as clogs were cleared.I started breathing.

Nothing conceptual....the experience of freedom within was physical, not even psychological.

Grace..the word acquired a new dimension....Awareness levels deepened bringing with them fresh insights and greater releases.

The process continues......the voyage of discovery ........on the foundation of my realities, rather than concepts....

enlightenment - word associations

we have a tendency to distance ourselves from the perfectly ordinary and natural by making it exotic and exclusive. History is replete with examples of the "brahminisation" of life and allied aspects.

i have had the privilege of meeting some extraordinary beings in my life, spome of them spiritual leaders, others just drawn from ordinary everyday walks of life.One quality which has attracted them to me is an extraordinary ordinariness in all that they talk about and do. Simplicity in expression. Every small act is colored with these..a total acceptance, a benign compassion, a great ability to listen non-judgementally.....

they can be in industry, they can be in glamour, they can be in spiritual organizations..does not really matter....the light shines through in their integrity and ordinariness.They merge with life...wherever they are....harmonize and blend....

Once a shoe fits you, you are not conscious of it....it is not a special attention event..it just blends..so also with a waist belt.....

the word "enlightenment" may be an esoteric concept to many, but is it not a wall one has to break. It is in ordinary living and life expresses that it has to manifest, not merely for a chosen few. Our perception of enlightenment as an exotic and exclusive realm of being can distance us from it. Each one of us is a part of the whole, the wave is never different from the ocean.Breaking through the illusion of separatedness is the key.

Rather than being a destination, i see enlightenment as a continually and eternally evolving process.

ponder......

is it a person we really love/care about or the thrill one gets out of of loving/caring for the person ?

all grief, no matter what the occasion is, is for the "self".

- anthony de mello

developing wings - a matter of trust and faith

Probably, the reasons birds can fly and man cannot is because they have never felt they cannot....as swami vivekananda used to say, we cannot access fresh air by covering ourselves with blankets.We have to risk leaping into domains of the unknown.....and breaking the shackles of our conditioned positionalities.change is a quality of life and a resistance to change is stagnation.every moment is a reaffirmation of life in a mutation through death of the past manifest.

inspirations from my master

awareness is freedom...it is not the means to an end..it is an end by itself.You dont get "aware" of fear and then put in an effort to eliminate it....awareness disables the fear and liberates....

spirituality is an attitude, not an activity....every act can be heightened by the attitude brought in by the participants..nothing is mundane....awareness is the key which brings in sacredness....everything, everyone and every moment is sacred in the realm of awareness.

True awareness is non-judgemental and totally experiential.....

knowing where we are headed.....

A boat docked in a tiny Mexican village. An American tourist complimented the Mexican fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took him to catch them.
Not very long," answered the Mexican."But then, why didn't you stay out longer and catch more?" asked the American.The Mexican explained that his small catch was sufficient to meet his needs and those of his family.The American asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?""I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, and take a siesta with my wife. In the evenings, I go into the village to see my friends, have a few drinks, play the guitar, and sing a few songs . I have a full life."

The American interrupted, "I have an MBA from Harvard and I can help you! You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the extra revenue, you can buy a bigger boat."And after that?" asked the Mexican."With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers.Instead of selling your fish to a middle man, you can then negotiate directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant. You can then leave this little village and move to Mexico City, Los Angeles, or even New York City! From there you can direct your huge new enterprise.""How long would that take?" asked the Mexican."Twenty, perhaps twenty-five years," replied the American."And ! after that?""Afterwards? Well my Friend, That's when it gets really interesting,"answered the American, laughing. "When your business gets really big, you can start selling stocks and make millions!" "Millions? Really? And after that?" said the Mexican."After that you'll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends."
The moral of the story is: Know where you're going in life...

To turn towards Thee, unite with Thee, live in Thee and for Thee, is supreme happiness, unmixed joy, immutable peace; it is to breathe infinity, to soar in eternity, no longer feel one's limits, escape from time and space. Why do men flee from such boons as if they feared them? What a strange thing is ignorance , that source of all suffering ! How miserable that obscurity which keeps men away from that very thing which would bring them happiness and subjects them to this painful school of ordinary existence fashioned entirely from struggle and suffering !

- The Mother, Auroville

Have you heard of the cow who attained liberation (Moksha)?It was dyslexic and kept on repeating OOOOMMM !

on this dussehra, wonder what ravan ( the 10-headed one) used to do with his headaches, if he had any ! ! i miss attn to such detail in mythology..daily truths....like whether krishna used to shave and if he did, with what? were the kauravas a test-tube or rather earthen-pot baby experiment gone awry!!!!

repeat an old fav for those of u who might have not read it....

all science is poetry.....can u imagine a world without the technologies of today.... where do they emerge....Mathematics and calculus and its various implementations are critical in the development of various technologies....and mathematics has its roots in "zero" an empirical definition arrived at by the indian spiritual mystic , Aryabhata.The first two postulates of mathematics are never under question; they are sacrosant....They just have been there eternally....mysticism is poetic ; to me The Beatles were mystics , as was Kabir.But so too was Einstein......science is an art , too....mystical, poetic......

All of us know of Kekule and his mystical dream ( the inter-twined snakes) which led to the discovery of organic chemistry . A very fascinating alter-insight into processes of "intelligence" and its expresses is provided by the book, "The Man Who knew Infinity" , a biography of the mathematical genius, Srinivas Ramanujam.

Happy Dussehra!!!!!!!!!and wishes for the awakening of intelligence as different from knowledge all around...

for those browsing my blog.....the perspective of the sharing is "can we also see it this way?"...a shift in perceptions and insights which have tremendously helped me motivate me to share, in the hope that it may serve as lead pegs for some fellow-travellers on the highway of life. I share because i feel like doing so; in much the same manner as a few of you may chose to read.When one shares, one throws the door open for infinite possibilities, expected and unexpected.The process of pro-actively sharing is an act on its own and has its own fulfilment while the interaction emerging from it is a universe of its own.They have their interconnectedness as well as a certain uniqueness of experience in their own spaces.The experiencer is a part of the experience in colloquial realms until sometimes when the experiencer dissolves into the experience and only experience remains.Valuation is always contextual to a set of known parameters and never absolute.Parameters shift dynamically as do valuations.It is positionality which more often than not that stifles real growth, as in it leads to a static potential rather than a kinetised dynamic.Movement is a quality of life.

Every part of the whole is a whole in itself as a beautiful Sanskrit shloka indicates...

Om Poornamadha Poornamidham..

Poornaatpoornamudhachte..

Poornasya Poornamaadhaya..

Poornameve Vasishyathe..

Om Shanti Shanti Shantihi...

Synergetic Convergence....a phrase I learnt at my University.....a fascinating phenomenon in consciousness....a leaf is a whole by itself, so is a branch....but when some leaves , branches, roots etc come together....they form a tree which is greater in expression than the mere summation...