Visitors

What do I find interesting in a temple?

Paying respect to the idol is a five-minute occupation. After that I watch the visitors. Sometimes the person is alone, or with family, or with children. Whatever he may be outside the premises, in the temple, he has come to meet his personal god.

No tension in the face, no impatience with a restless child, no lack of courtesy in the queue, no ego in prostration, no shame in prayer,  no greed at the prosaad, no lethargy in walking around the building. All visitors merge into this mass of characteristics, undivided, bhakta. That is where I glimpse the divine.

Gods don't make a place of worship. Devotees do.

Health and happiness

Do we blame other people for our lack of  physical health? Then why do we tend to blame others for our mental illness, which is called misery?

Happiness is our own responsibility, just as health is. There is a difference however. Physical health has built-in corrective systems that bring health back on track. But mental health has an destructive system called the mind on one hand and a corrective system called the intellect on the other. The intellect has to manage the emotional mind and bring it back on even keel quickly, so that happiness is restored. That is why, to continue to be happy, our intellect has to be on guard 24x7.

Even when in the grip of emotions, we have to first listen to our intellect.

Friendship

We see so many posts and nice pithy write ups that encourage us to recognise and appreciate our friends.

The goal of having friends seems to emerge from my need of a support group, people from whom care and pampering can flow to me, who can try to fill some hole, some incompleteness inside me.

If we wish to grow as human beings, and in our role as friends, I feel we should focus more on being a friend than in needing a friend.

So let's see a series starting "You know you have been a good friend when..."

Ehsaan

Kis baat pe zyada roye --
Jab koi na kare ehsaan,
Ya ehsaan na mange koi?

Back to basics

Mankind searches both high and low in the scientific world. On the one hand, he looks for the ultimate unification of energy and matter, so that all laws are covered by a single one. On the other hand, he keeps breaking down matter into smaller units, looking for the single basic building block for all varieties of form.

Mentally, however, it is a one-way street for the human being. Intellectual growth is conversion of physical experiences into concepts, renaming partial information into knowledge, and as a consequence, communicating with each other at verbal levels that mean different things to different people and often mean nothing at all.

There are heavy words like "life" and "relationship", which are supposed to convey something specific but really conveys whatever the hearer wants to hear.  There are lighter words like "justice" and "fairness" which are often generalisations of a specific unpleasant experience. Even a common adjective like "good" or "rich" may be misleading unless the speaker and listener are calibrated similarly.

The victim in all this is Communication. Mature communication is one where we relate a specific experience and describe the relevant mental reaction. If we are generalising, it should be an addendum. Take the following statement.
"Anil is such a crass person. I don't know how I live with him."

What are the questions here? What incident made you think he is crass? Does he behave like this every time in a similar situation? Does he react the same way in other situations? Is this a serious disturbance to you? Is living together full of anxiety because of this? In fact, a psychotherapist or counseller asks these type of questions and tries to lead the person back to basics.

Healthy communication arises out of an initial internal check of basic reactions. Let not the mind jump up to a higher level language. Let us talk basic events and reactions and there will be no dispute. Then let us discuss conclusions and at worst there will only be a debate.

I have sometimes found it useful to speak of or recall an event like I am writing a play. A play has no scope for any commentary. It relates conversations and movements alone, leaving the audience to draw it's own conclusions. A novelist, on the other hand, trends to impose his own conclusions and generalisations on to the reader. A playwrite, as a base level communicator, needs much more control and skill.

KARMAtoon

Actions are the cause and the happening is the effect. That is why both the action and the happening is called karma. Happening being Sigma karma is FATE. The choice of next action is FREE WILL. The Sigma of all these instantaneous actions are the next momentary FATE.

Of course the cycle need not roll second by second. Karma or action is not necessarily a physical action alone. The lesser mental involvement in a physical action, the faster is the karmic response. If the eating is not wise, there is a tummy-ache. If the action constitutes an emotional decision, the karmic response would take longer to fructify. If it was an intellectual decision alone, the aftermath may take lifetimes; there may be none at all if it was dharmic.

Since FATE is an effect, it is always perfect. Imagine a giant clothes-hanger with many people hanging from the bottom wire. Depending on where they are positioned, the tilt of the hanger keeps changing. As the people shimmy about (individual actions), the tilt of the hanger is determined perfectly by laws of gravitation and the physics of balance and is a resultant effect. They either go up or down depending both on their own position on the hanger and the hanger's tilt. Similarly, in life, individual fates may vary. The person can choose to shimmy to the higher end of the hanger; that is his free will. But in spite of his effort, he may still be down because of the actions of all others. He who understands this physics, does not blame FATE, viz the hanger, for his plight.

Liking and loving

In liking, we receive something from a person that we like.
In loving, we want to give something that he/she likes.

Liking is an effect, a result of receiving likeable things, raising our happiness.
Loving is a cause, which when we feel, we want to make the other person happy.