The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Sunday 21 March 2010

SHOULD FAITH BE QUESTIONED AND BALANCED LIKE TRUST?

Isn't it the sort of looking away from the reality when we see something, for which we can't find a reason, and bypass it or accomodate it in the name of religion and God dependent faith? One of the basic tenets of the spiritual journey is to find the God within. We can't find the Almighty anywhere else but inside us. Can we ignore our own weaknesses?

No we can't. If we do so, we do it on our own peril. And, largely we do. We can find us when we dig in, question more of us, to find some of us, in order to build that 'us' that would take us nearer to the oneness of the supreme spirit. Faith needs to be absolute, but for that, it needs to be the evolved one. Every great soul, at some point in her or his life, has questioned the element of faith and so the every other soul.

When we begin this journey called existence, we begin with trust in the form of values we inherit from our elders, and remember, that is the only interface between us and the God during that cycle of our lives. Here trust leads us to have faith. Slowly, we gain insights. We approve and disprove the notions that we inherit. We approve and disprove the elements of trust and in the process, we question our faith. The process that begins at this stage, continues abated lifelong. Being the circumstantial beings, we get into situations, when we feel crisis of trust, and there are moments, when this crisis leads us to questions our faith.

A balanced approach to life is to maintain the harmony of our internal and external worlds. We are as social as individual. We need to cater to the innner 'us' as well as the other 'us' and life is all about finding this balance. Its a process of refinement and if we ignore or suppress even a single question in the name of absolute faith, our evolution to the spiritual quest become questionable. Trust in innner 'us' leads to the evolution of elements that let us question our faith in order to refine us. God is not to be seen, but to be felt, to be realized. Any any realization comes after all our questions are answered. Yes, we can feel the answers, though delayed, only if we have balanced the trust in inner 'us' to the faith in the elements beyond this life.

And this is not the just one single culmination point. Life is sum total many such realizations. After all, evolution is a never ending process.

Tuesday 9 March 2010

LIVING AGAIN THE YESTERDAY

Taking a side, heading a day,
Having a longing for the yesterday
When, again, I talk to me,
Morphing the soliloquy of me into we
The night falls, the day prepares to call
The night roars, the day whispers
The straight bars still changing angles
The roars, the whispers, and their confused jitters
Their desperate war cry to tread-off some solace
At the cost of loosing identities; getting some place
Slowly comes the high when all dazzles, and all is seen
The horizons melt, the bounds sublimate, setting the pace
The night and day, now tucking at the bay
I loose all, the night and the day,
When I plunge into this fall,
Out of bounds, taking the side, heading the day,
Now, in my own way
The unusual becomes the real,
When the ethereal becomes the surreal,
When the bars fade-in to come in a circle,
My words find their place, fed with my Soul
When you come to sit with me,
Words make a free fall and silence only speaks
I run again to loose me in that sublime whole,
When I talk to me, gone beyond this life,
Floating in the depth of the melted thoughts,
Drifted apart, drifted alone; getting the parts, creating the whole
The harmony of the silence gets louder,
The Soul stops seeking all, the flow gets wider,
There comes the moment,
Where I sublimate, away from all,
There remains just the soliloquy of we,
Lost in my absurdity, tanned with my words
Washed ashore on the riverine bed of the whole,
Cruising along the unsung song,
When creeps in the painful moment,
Where the journey back to this life begins,
Throwing me into the chasm of lost moments of the night
The Soul remains, but the flow is frozen,
That odd entity, the sleep, comes in its oddity,
The bars resume their dangling,
Crawling again with their rumbustious angling
The day falls, hopefully, for the night to call
Passing a day, living again the yesterday..

Saturday 6 March 2010

HOW MANY TIMES..

How many times do I question you?
How many times do I doubt my faith?
How many moments of pain and agony
How many blows of unspoken spell of tyranny
How many times would I fail me?
Like this..
How many times you would fail me that I now doubt?
For, you have come always to my rescue
For, I could not realize your hand so many times
For, I was led to question me and you so many times
But, isn’t the evolution that I need?
O’ Almighty!
Please don’t suspect my questions
Please don’t question my intentions
It’s all in the circumstances that you force me in
It’s all in the repercussions that you witness me to
I am thankful,
That you somehow bring me beyond my questions,
Every time,
But,
You again give me more reasons to doubt
Perhaps, you also need this vehicle of evolution
Your unseen hand forcing me to look for my path again
I question, you take me beyond questions again
I look for life, you take my beyond this life again
Why do they say then faith should be doubtless, absolute?
If life is all about evolving,
Questions have to be there
For, any spot of sustained suspicion,
Hampers the faith’s evolution
O’ Almighty!
You’re fully inside me; it is said, in all
But I don’t know if I’ve seen even a trace of my internal you
The battle is on, the fight is lonely again
For how many more times?
Why don’t you come to fight for me?
For, now I need your visible hands
Like never before..desperately..

नीलकंठ शब्दों के


ब्रह्मा शंकर पाण्डेय, १९७४ 
                                     ओ मेरे नीलकंठ शब्दों के!
वन-उपवन चौकड़ियाँ भरकर
मनमाने कूजते विहंगम,
खुद की कस्तूरी की खुशबू से
होकर उन्मत्त किसी मृग-जैसे
दूर कहीं अनजानी राहों पर
भटक यों न जाना
कि वापस न आ सको,
                                    ओ मेरे नीलकंठ यादों के!
अधरों के पिंजड़े से छूटे
उर के उन्मुक्त गगन-पंछी,
बंदी न हर्गिज़ तुम मेरे
और हुए बंदी कब किसके?
कारा के दरवाज़े खोलो,
बेड़ियों की जंजीरें तोड़ो,
इन्द्रधनुषी स्वप्नों की घाटी पर
उड़ते पतंग-जैसे खेलो,
रेशमी धागों से बंधे हुए
कीर, विहग स्वर के,
फैलाए पंख आज भावों के
उड़ो....उड़ो....और उड़ो--
                                      नीलकंठ, शब्दों के!

Tuesday 2 March 2010

BEING JUDICIOUS, NOT JUDGEMENTAL

One of the most difficult but necessary skills we need to develop as
meditators is learning how to be judicious without being judgmental.
An as a preliminary step to developing that skill, it's good to
reflect on the difference beween the two.

Being judgmental is basically an effort to get rid of something we
don't understand and probably don't want to understand. We see
something we don't like and we try to dismiss it, to stamp it out
without taking the time to understand it. we're impatient. Whatever
we're being judgmental about, we just want to get rid of it quickly.

Being judicious, however, requires patience together with
undestanding. A judicious choice is one you've made after
understanding all the options, all the sides of a question. That way
your choice is based on knowledge, not on greed, aversion, or
delusion.

The problem with being judgmental is that it's not effective. We try
to stamp out things here and they go springing up someplace else.
Being judicious, though, is more effective. It's more precise. We see
what's really skillful, what's really unskillful in the mind, and we
learn how to disentangle the two. Often our skillful and unskillful
habits get entangled. The things we don't like within ourselves
actually do have some good in them, but we don't notice it. We focus
instead on what we don't like, or what we're afraid of, and we end up
trying to stamp it all out, the good along with the bad.

So this is why we meditate: to step back a bit, to watch things
patiently so that we can see them for what they are and deal with them
effectively. Our concentration practice gives us a comfortable center
in our awareness where we can rest, where we feel less threatened by
things. When we feel less threatened and less oppressed, we have the
resilience to be more patient, to look into what's going on in the
mind, and to develop the proper attitude toward what is skillful and
what isn't.

One of the main problems in modern life is that people have so little
time. When they meditate, they want to cram as much of their
meditation as possible into their little bits and pieces of spare
time. Of course that aggravates the whole problem of bing judgmental.
So keep reminding yourself that meditation is a long-term project.
When you have a sense of that long arc of time, it's a lot easier to
sit back and work very carefully at the basic steps. It's like
learning any skill.

Thanissaro Bhikku, "Meditations"