helplessness...

read about the story of a 8 year old at a fellow bloggers site today.triggered a lot of memories for me. Have been involved in the development sector as an individual and a professional in India for the last 15+ years..when one looks at the macro, the scene is overwhelming...but, encouragingly, at micro levels, there are some intervention facilities which have been effective...mumbai and other cities now have a CHILD helpline...1098.

personally, while being a direct and indirect part of various developmental efforts, it took me deeper into spiritual questions, I have sought to address in my life...I have seen the mumbai riots as well as the bomb blasts at very close quarters..so also the various disasters...tsunami, the 26/7 deluge, the various earthquakes etc...while such events leave none untouched, the most affected are the already vulnerable...children, women, the differently-abled etc.and mechanisms remain just that....

guess all of us have the opportunity to transcend from being a Siddhartha to a Buddha ; no one can escape its ( suffering's) presence, it touches each of our lives...

in the context of the huge magnitude of issues , one may not make too much of a difference; it is a drop in the ocean....but to a person we are able to reach out to in our individual capacities within the realm of our lives, believe me, it makes a world of difference.

A human life is not a mere statistic.

While ngos and other agencies are expected to be involved( they operate with their own limitations) , it is a choice each one of us have, to make a difference in the context of our lives. All our lives are touched directly or indirectly by such issues.

And that probably is the key....not issues blackboxed as child care facilities or old age care facilities...they are needed, but somehow , the tendency to blackbox issues has to be avoided and responses purely at spontaneous , human levels enhanced...within the context of our lives...

enforced adherence...

appearance is everything in the world of today..plastic smiles, blank deadpan faces abound.masks are elaborate, the burden of carrying them enormous...
we have pre-defined notions of everything and strive to live upto it..thus, the title "husband" or "wife" has some automatic associations arsising from conditioning in either spouse....and life more often than not becomes a struggle to live upto that definition.

"What is" is very faraway from the "what should be" as projected by our minds.

"How are you?" elicits the mechanical "fine, thank you."

if people realy responded with how they are really feeling, the question would cease to be asked!!!
We are "expected" to enjoy certain things to harmonise with peer group perspectives; we pretend to do it..

death within....

mebbe a certain degree of masking is prudent in social interfaces, but the danger is when we start believing in our projections.

It is critical to be "aware" of our inner reality at every moment...as we breathe, so that we live...

Reality...

Reality, mostly is not what it is, but what we have decided it is.

We first make our conclusions - then find some way to arrive at them!!!!

- Anthony De Mello

Seeing.....

I call up a friend...the friend does not respond.I keep waiting for his call. No luck. My mind gets frantic. "Have i offended him some ways? Is he annoyed with me?.Will he cease being a friend?"

The thoughts just keep coming.

Is my friend or his action the root cause of my misery?

Nope...It is the fear , the insecurity within me which generates the thought flow.

The friend, the event were mere triggers.

When events occur, for learnings to manifest, it is critical that we see "correctly".

Normally, we tend to focus on the friend or the event. We ignore "our" reactions that are emerging from within.

Seeing is the key to learning.

freedom....fact or fiction...

are we really free within? a freedom that flows through circumstances and events with ease...

when there are blankets of mental formations and perceptions enveloping and suffocating us, can we really be "free". we operate in the context of our conditionings and perceptions. we automatically and mechanically judge, the moment we encounter an event. judging is always "contextual" to positionalities as dictated by our mental formations and conditionings.

genuine freedom is an inner state of being independent of circumstances.it is a state of acceptance of events as they manifest in our lives, a path of least resistance.It is not a passive acceptance as in "resignation" . It is an acceptance in awareness which stimulates "response" as different from "reaction". ironically, in direct contrast to popularly held beliefs, I have found that true freedom is an absence of choice. It is just a natural and spontaneous state of flow.

It is not devoid of responsibility; rather responsibility in integrity is the hallmark of freedom; it is not an enforcement or a conceptual adherence.Thus , one does not "try" to love or "fight" one's fear. One "sees" it and accepts it without condemantion or guilt. One does not resist its presence. Great energy is released in "acceptance".

Awareness, from such platforms, also witnesses the commentaries of the mind as we watch events. the witness consciousness watches over our habitual "judging", reminding us that it is contextual.

As the "witness consciousness" grows, we experience larger spaces of freedom within us.

manifest....

we all have different needs in our lives.Even with similar needs, perspectives and strategies of achieving them can be very different.

Everything is but a concept.....and we tune in to different concepts as per our inclinations and mental filters.

A peek into creation reveals that even paradoxically contradictory concepts can co-exist; infact they necessarily do.

The key is in our actualizing and manifesting abilities, irrespective of the concepts we are trying to implement for ourselves.

I have regularly encountered much less skilled persons in the context of my profession achieving much more. While skill is a definite parameter in achievement paradigms, there are a lot of other parameters too.

We create our worlds, our universes through our thoughts. But, in conditioned states of being, our lives are architectured unconsciously by thoughts that flow through us from myriad sources.We have no control over them in our colloquial lives.Thus, we may on the surface go all out to achieve something, putting in our very best, but success may elude us.We normally ascribe it to a lot of external factors. While they have a contributing role, even the external factors are more often than not architectured by thoughts arising from conscious/unconscious domains. If we observe carefully, all of us have patterns operating in our lives.Success is an easy pattern for some while it is a struggle for others, for yet others it is elusive, inspite of the best efforts.

For us, the current levels and scope of our awareness limit our abilities to see such an emergence from blueprints.

Spirituality is not in contents, it is in increasing our abilities to see ourselves.It is in breaking through layers and layers of conditioned positionalities until we are able to see things just as they are.During the process, getting increasingly aware of patterns that govern our lives is critical.

It is immaterial what concept of spirituality one identifies with....or does not...

our fundamental need is to address the roadblocks in our lives which prevent our desired manifests.Spirituality is a dissolution of conflicts and an actualization of our conceptualizations in the context of our lives. Concepts don't control us. We see them as concepts and consciously implement the same in our lives. We usde the mind rather than allow the mind to use us as is the case colloquially.The mind is nothing but a dynamic aggregate of thoughts.

Live the moment...the future is a mirage..

My brother-in-law opened the bottom drawer of my sister's bureau and lifted out a tissue-wrapped package. "This," he said, "is not a slip. This is lingerie." He discarded the tissue and handed me the slip. It was exquisite; silk, handmade and trimmed with a cobweb of lace. The price tag with an astronomical figure on it was still attached. "Jan bought this the first time we went to New York, at least 8 or 9 years ago. She never wore it. She was saving it for a special occasion. Well, I guess this is the occasion." He took the slip from me and put it on the bed with the other clothes we were taking to the mortician. His hands lingered on the soft material for a moment, then he slammed the drawer shut and turned to me. "Don't ever save anything for a special occasion. Every day you're alive is a special occasion." I remembered those words through the funeral and the days that f ollowed when I helped him and my niece attend to all the sad chores that follow an unexpected death. I thought about all the things that she hadn't seen, or heard, or done. I thought about the things that she had done, without realizing that they were special. I'm still thinking about his words, and they've changed my life. I'm reading more and dusting less. I'm sitting on the deck and admiring the view without fussing about the weeds in the garden. I'm spending more time with my family and friends and less time in committee meetings. I wear my good blazer to the market if I feel like it. I'm not saving my good perfume for special parties; clerks in hardware stores and tellers in banks have noses that function as well as my party-going friends'. "Someday" and "one of these days" are losing their grip on my vocabulary. If it's worth seeing or hearing or doing, I want to see and hear and do it now. I'm not sure what my sister would have done, had she known that she wouldn't be here for the tomorrow we all take for granted. She might have called a few former friends to apologize and mend fences for past squabbles. I like to think she would have gone out for a Chinese dinner, her favorite food. I'm guessing - I'll never know. It's those little things left undone that would make me angry if I knew that my hours were limited. I'm trying very hard not to put off, hold back, or save anything that would add laughter and luster to our lives. Whenever possible, life should be a pattern of experience to savour, not endure. I'm trying to recognize these moments now and cherish them.
-Unknown author

The nature of fear...

Fear , a significant motivator for most or all of our actions today. Insecurity, a trigger and a catalyst for so much of what is happening in our universes. Deep down, we pursue an education/career out of fear, we relate out of fear,so on and so forth.Everything is a reinforcement of the self.Somewhere we reinforce the very cause of fear in our efforts to tackle it because of a fundamental skew in perception.

Do events cause the fear or they mere media for enabling the surfacing of fear that already exists within our consciousness. Do events cause fear or is it rather our intrinsic fear which manifests the events in our lives. Amongst various karmic laws I have observed, what we fear, manifests.Deep rooted fears create a series of events in our lives, almost an entire pattern of manifests.

Fear, to me, is an attribute of the self...as ancient as man itself.The self has an illusionary existence and feeds on fear for its sustenance. The manifests of this fear can be manifold and multi-expressive.

A direct manifest of fear is anger and resentment.

Fear is the key to a million conflicts within us. If we explore and understand the real nature and roots of fear, the releases are immense, the possibilities unlimited. We operate in the realms of a projected ideal that fear is undesirable and needs to be eliminated. By that very thought, we re-inforce the energy of fear within us.When we are able to see it as it is and accept its presence non-judgementally and in the absence of condemnation, we switch on a process of fundamental change.

Fear is an underlying, omnipresent root motivator within us. When we feel breakthroughs in specific activities, we have merely rearranged the location of fear. The fear still manifests but in a different sphere . Thus , the fear of loneliness manifests a desire to relate; when one manages to relate, the fear of losing it all takes over...The fundamental fear remains, only the manifest has changed.Fear is an intrinsic attribute of the "self" and cannot be viewed in isolation.

Somewhere, intelligence demands a move away from a mere management of fear to an elimination of it as a basic motivator, as management is very limited in its scope of deliverables.

Release is different from management.

That necessitates an integral explore....a dynamic understanding of the very nature and emergence of fear.

And then, the locks snap open......

some things in life you cannot buy..

you can buy a man's time.
you can buy a man's physical presence at a given place.
you can even buy a measured number of skilled muscular actions per hour per day.

but you cannot buy enthusiasm
you cannot buy initiative.
you cannot buy loyalty.
you cannot buy the devotion of a heart, mind and a soul.

you have to earn these things...

....Ed Liden

I become life....

i feel the surge of power,
the urge to look around and laugh,
as i burst through the slimy pool
of stagnant memories and thoughts.
Coming to the surface to sink again,
But in a glorious ocean of light.
I am the bird, the tree and the ocean!
I am the unlimited self effulgent glory of the sun!
A ray of light,
Travelling straight,
unattached, unstopped,
Shattering the darkness of a thousand nights,
Filling the heart , mind and body, with the sweet , uncontrolled feeling of ecstasy.
I vibrate with a thousand vibrations,
mixing, mingling with the universe,
till i remain not.
I know I am freed.
I have become life.....
- from the diaries of a friend.