Welcome to Smita-Land. You will find short stories, fragments of poetry, some comic takes on life and a few random ramblings of an ever-inquisitive mind. Join me in my journey of deciphering the rainbow of life - one colour at a time.
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Long Road
It’s a long road… ...this road between the heart and the mind.
And I hope to traverse it one day.
2
comments:
Chandra Shekhar
said...
I was quite moved by "Life is...what happens". Just wish to share the chain of thoughts that your blog triggered.
You say, "Where do I get the education to go through life?"
Living is education enough. And this is the only world. Therefore, there is no need to choose. In fact, there is no possibility of a choice since we do not know any other world, any other life. Yes, we can read in a scripture about heaven and hell but we ourselves have no idea. We have just read or heard. We have not known ourselves.
Then you say, "Maybe I just have to listen, listen real hard, to that faint little sound emanating from my core. For it might be the echo of God’s own words reverberating in my heart – struggling to survive in this worldly din!"
The mind is the world. More often than not, all that we do (and don’t do) and all that we perceive (or don’t) are merely reflections of our own mind. We have all felt it. The world is mind-stuff. That is why the same world appears different to different people. And mind is ancient. It is made up of all our yesterdays; past learning and past experiences. Isn’t it?
Does a new-born have a mind in the psychological sense? Is there any memory? There is only bliss. Even a fairy tale is a wonder. Haven’t we seen that look of fascination on our childrens’ faces when they are enthralled by the stories we tell them? I can still remember the story-in-a-story that my grandmother narrated when I was small. The king and his magic parrot, the beautiful girl and the mirror, vikram and vetal…For children, everything is new; everything is the ‘first-time’…..untried….un-trodden. A child sees life as it is, because there is nothing, no prior experience…no history to compare it with. The mind has not been inaugurated as yet. That is why he/she can trust us when we tell him/her stories of magicians and fairies. Can we adults trust…..anything…..anything at all? The mind has come in now. It is full of doubt. Someone says, “You are wonderful”, and we immediately doubt. “Is that true?” we ask. If we don’t, we doubt the very credential of the person saying it. Man has gone too much “between the lines”. The actual lines are forgotten. The mind adulterates reality.
With time, we accumulate experiences which become the memory and serve as reference points for our reactions in the future. In fact, much of our future is just a more decorated (if we are optimists) or ‘not-so-decorated’ (if we are pessimists) version of our past. If there was no past, no memory, we would have no mental constructs through which to see reality. Then we could see life as-it-is…..each moment would be new….fresh like dew. But all our lives, we look at the world through the colored glass of our mind. And the world and the people in it have kept changing shapes and colors for us depending on the looking glass. And we have felt cheated, because it is so transitory. There is no guarantee. Each time the glass changes, the world changes. In fact, we have long since forgotten the world as-it-is. We only know the colored glass. We live too much in the mind and too less from the heart.
If there was no mind, wouldn’t a ? be a ! The kink in the question mark would be straightened out and we could exclaim….Aha!!! How wonderful it must be when no answers are needed because all questions have dissolved.
The “faint little sound” that you talk about from your core, is the voice of the heart. That is the only authentic you. But we live in the mind and so we doubt the vailidity of that voice. In fact, through the mind, we concoct our ‘personalities’. We acquire an idea of ‘I’…the ego. It is just something put together by us….something fabricated. The social structure and we together have made it. It is arbitrary and can be shattered any moment. We have had many moments in our lives, when the ego has felt enhanced or crushed. It is fragile. Any one can praise us and inflate it and any one can prick us with an insulting remark and there….the balloon bursts.
That voice….from within can surprise us because it has nothing to do with what we think we are, or what we want to become, or what we want to appear to the outside world. That voice is the true us and it is not confined or obligated to fit into a set pattern of all the ‘norms’ that we and our “well-wishers ” have defined for us. That is why, we stifle it. It can be dangerous. Something ‘new’ can be dangerous. The mind is impotent with anything new. It is difficult and uncomfortable for it to handle anything novel.
With the old, with the past (dead and gone), with all the mind games, we are familiar. Familiarity is the drug for convenience. But then the feeling of something missing constantly nags at us. All the money and all social security and still…..something is missing. It is we who are missing. The mind has taken over and we are no more. So, the inner voice has become feeble and so distant that we can not even tell if it is really there or we are just imagining, just hallucinating about it.
And that “faint little sound” is certainly not the so-called conscience. One is never born with a conscience. It is planted there…by the parents, by the school, by all the education and training, by the scriptures…..It is not original. It is our training, our conditioning….our, as you put it: “knowledge-bank”. If we can de-condition ourselves, true life may be revealed. We may then come face-to-face with our true identity. Till then, the question, “Who am I?” will remain. And any amount of analysis will fail because it is not a question for analysis in the first place. It is a matter of recognizing what we have forgotten. Recognition, realization is needed. Analysis means dissecting and if we dissect too much, we may in fact lose touch with ourselves totally.
You write, “If I can accept that not all questions are meant to have answers, not all quests are meant to be fruitful… I think I will start living life…”.
I think you got it right there and then lost it again in the last sentence, “Till then, I am happy analyzing it.”
Well, you might think all I am doing here on Deciphering Life is actually ciphering it further! Thanks is too small a word for your thoughts. But thanks anyway.
2 comments:
I was quite moved by "Life is...what happens". Just wish to share the chain of thoughts that your blog triggered.
You say, "Where do I get the education to go through life?"
Living is education enough. And this is the only world. Therefore, there is no need to choose. In fact, there is no possibility of a choice since we do not know any other world, any other life. Yes, we can read in a scripture about heaven and hell but we ourselves have no idea. We have just read or heard. We have not known ourselves.
Then you say, "Maybe I just have to listen, listen real hard, to that faint little sound emanating from my core. For it might be the echo of God’s own words reverberating in my heart – struggling to survive in this worldly din!"
The mind is the world. More often than not, all that we do (and don’t do) and all that we perceive (or don’t) are merely reflections of our own mind. We have all felt it. The world is mind-stuff. That is why the same world appears different to different people. And mind is ancient. It is made up of all our yesterdays; past learning and past experiences. Isn’t it?
Does a new-born have a mind in the psychological sense? Is there any memory? There is only bliss. Even a fairy tale is a wonder. Haven’t we seen that look of fascination on our childrens’ faces when they are enthralled by the stories we tell them? I can still remember the story-in-a-story that my grandmother narrated when I was small. The king and his magic parrot, the beautiful girl and the mirror, vikram and vetal…For children, everything is new; everything is the ‘first-time’…..untried….un-trodden. A child sees life as it is, because there is nothing, no prior experience…no history to compare it with. The mind has not been inaugurated as yet. That is why he/she can trust us when we tell him/her stories of magicians and fairies. Can we adults trust…..anything…..anything at all? The mind has come in now. It is full of doubt. Someone says, “You are wonderful”, and we immediately doubt. “Is that true?” we ask. If we don’t, we doubt the very credential of the person saying it. Man has gone too much “between the lines”. The actual lines are forgotten. The mind adulterates reality.
With time, we accumulate experiences which become the memory and serve as reference points for our reactions in the future. In fact, much of our future is just a more decorated (if we are optimists) or ‘not-so-decorated’ (if we are pessimists) version of our past. If there was no past, no memory, we would have no mental constructs through which to see reality. Then we could see life as-it-is…..each moment would be new….fresh like dew. But all our lives, we look at the world through the colored glass of our mind. And the world and the people in it have kept changing shapes and colors for us depending on the looking glass. And we have felt cheated, because it is so transitory. There is no guarantee. Each time the glass changes, the world changes. In fact, we have long since forgotten the world as-it-is. We only know the colored glass. We live too much in the mind and too less from the heart.
If there was no mind, wouldn’t a ? be a ! The kink in the question mark would be straightened out and we could exclaim….Aha!!! How wonderful it must be when no answers are needed because all questions have dissolved.
The “faint little sound” that you talk about from your core, is the voice of the heart. That is the only authentic you. But we live in the mind and so we doubt the vailidity of that voice. In fact, through the mind, we concoct our ‘personalities’. We acquire an idea of ‘I’…the ego. It is just something put together by us….something fabricated. The social structure and we together have made it. It is arbitrary and can be shattered any moment. We have had many moments in our lives, when the ego has felt enhanced or crushed. It is fragile. Any one can praise us and inflate it and any one can prick us with an insulting remark and there….the balloon bursts.
That voice….from within can surprise us because it has nothing to do with what we think we are, or what we want to become, or what we want to appear to the outside world. That voice is the true us and it is not confined or obligated to fit into a set pattern of all the ‘norms’ that we and our “well-wishers ” have defined for us. That is why, we stifle it. It can be dangerous. Something ‘new’ can be dangerous. The mind is impotent with anything new. It is difficult and uncomfortable for it to handle anything novel.
With the old, with the past (dead and gone), with all the mind games, we are familiar. Familiarity is the drug for convenience. But then the feeling of something missing constantly nags at us. All the money and all social security and still…..something is missing. It is we who are missing. The mind has taken over and we are no more. So, the inner voice has become feeble and so distant that we can not even tell if it is really there or we are just imagining, just hallucinating about it.
And that “faint little sound” is certainly not the so-called conscience. One is never born with a conscience. It is planted there…by the parents, by the school, by all the education and training, by the scriptures…..It is not original. It is our training, our conditioning….our, as you put it: “knowledge-bank”. If we can de-condition ourselves, true life may be revealed. We may then come face-to-face with our true identity. Till then, the question, “Who am I?” will remain. And any amount of analysis will fail because it is not a question for analysis in the first place. It is a matter of recognizing what we have forgotten. Recognition, realization is needed. Analysis means dissecting and if we dissect too much, we may in fact lose touch with ourselves totally.
You write, “If I can accept that not all questions are meant to have answers, not all quests are meant to be fruitful… I think I will start living life…”.
I think you got it right there and then lost it again in the last sentence, “Till then, I am happy analyzing it.”
Well, you might think all I am doing here on Deciphering Life is actually ciphering it further! Thanks is too small a word for your thoughts. But thanks anyway.
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