Gold Rush

Suppose I was on a riverbed in California in the 19th century, walking amongst the pebbles looking for gold nuggets. It's evening and the light is failing, but I have to carry on and maximise my riches. What would I do? Pick up pebble by pebble and examine them before throwing them back again, right?

Life is like that riverbed. Opportunities will seem to come up all the time, inviting our action or involvement, but we ignore most of them, especially if we are the low-energy type, saying "Oh, I will wait till I can see the glittery one, the gold nugget. That will be the right one for me. "But, really, how do we know it is not a gold nugget without picking it up, without addressing the opportunity to some extent before rejecting it?

It seems we choose our life path when we are born, having set out to experience some particular events for sure during this lifetime, mostly for self-growth (Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield talks about this with a fair bit of passion). Opportunities for the same, the gold nuggets, keep popping up, but are overwhelmed by the pebbles of ordinary living. That is why it is important that we taste as many opportunities as possible, whether they seem relevent or not, so that the gold nugget does not escape our scrutiny.

We need to get rich quick, right?

Being rich is a mug's game

We are all trained to become rich, to own more and more things, which, apart from status, will give us right of exclusive use of a service that the property represents.

But I tell you, it is a mug's game. Why not let someone else own the goods but let them be ever ready to provide the service to you.

How many mansions can you own? But if you are a person whose presence in a house makes the house-owner feel blessed, imagine how many mansions across the world you can live in.

That is how, I feel, spiritual leaders are far beyond personal wealth. They need not own a car, because hundreds of cars are at their disposal for their local travel.  They need not plan their next meal, because werever they are at meal time, there will be many who are keen to have them share their food.

Personal richness is very limiting. When the world opens its arms to you, everything becomes available without owning anything.

Muscles for the mind

 

We all are keen to do meditation. But is it that simple? This is what I read.

A person went to the gym for body building. The instructor asked him whether he had any physical problems. He said, not much, just some arthritis, a bit of asthma, ulcers and spondilosis. But he wanted to do weight training. The instructor told him, first cure your ills, make your body suitable for weight training and then come back.

Meditation is body building for the mind. We suffer from rigid attitudes, we start wheezing with anger at any provocation, our mind is full of bleeding ulcers from prejudices, and we are pains in the neck personified. Yet we think we can just plop down onto the ground, sit cross legged and experience a serene mind?

Read up Patanjali's Yogasutra, O aspirers to meditation, and first makes your mind fit to sit. Yama and Niyama are perhaps the toughest stages to cross.

The fertile field of uncertainty

In many discussions, I have heard concepts rejected, saying it is not scientific. Something being "scientific" seems to be the ultimate approval stamp on a phenomenon, that makes it worthy of discussion. 

Yet, what is a scientific phenomenon? One that has gone through the steps of hypothesis, data, formulation, validation and subsequently used for prediction. If it is not possible to carry out these steps, the phenomenon is not a scientific one. But I feel that putting a scientific framework in place is itself a marginal activity, because each of these steps are limited in scope.

Hypothesis is limited by human imagination.

Data is limited by instrumentation.

Formulation is limited by intelligence.

Validation is limited by choice of field.

Prediction is limited by boundary conditions.

As we filter out one phenomenon after another, we are left with a scant sample that can stand the test of this intellectual game. Yet when we are faced with any uncertain process, we call it unscientific and be done with it.

In that sense, Hiesenberg was perhaps the biggest iconoclast, because he knocked the validity of observation out of the window when he said that the position and velocity of a particle cannot be determined at the same time. This makes space itself uncertain. Holding the hand of Hiesenberg, scientists are now taking a few steps out of their small cottages of certainity and exploring the fertile fields of the uncertain.

After all, experience is a far stronger determinant of truth than experiment.

The preloaded paintbrush

Someone had said: Words are the biggest impediment to communication.

Words started out as convenience. Instead of saying a full sentence, saying one word would suffice. That word comes preloaded with a meaning.

Yet that preloading is a problem too. If I want to paint in pink and my brush is preloaded with green, the pink colouring gets distorted. If I say "kill" in the sense of "finalise" (an idea, say) and in the listener's mind "kill" means "terminate", that preloading corrupts the meaning I am trying to communicate. That is why, when we want to be abundantly clear, we need to use simpler and simpler words, words that are almost unitary in their application.

But even in this process of simplification sometimes we reach a dead end, where there is not a single word available that is capable of conveying what I want to convey right now, without any preloading whatever. Finding a word without any preloading is difficult because, after all, preloading IS the purpose of wordification. 

Sometimes when I look at a sky laden with monsoon clouds with white egrets flying across, that feeling is... indescribable. Words fail. When words fail, we succeed. We succeed in silently touching a level of thinking and feeling that is super-communication. We are silent not because we do not know words but because all the preloaded words that we know are insufficient to express this sensation. 

Then it is time to drop the brush and become the paint.

Sin and sinfulness

There is a great difference between sin and sinfulness, and we tend to equate the two.

When I say "I have sinned", I mean that I have been party to a physical event where I hold doership as an actor. 

Sinfulness is not this act itself, but the feeling that flows on inside us, of regret or guilt, and colours our present day image of ourselves with a dark brush.

We cannot undo the original sin, if we choose to call it that. What we can do is to remove the tinge of sinfulness from our memory of the sin, so that we are whole and pristine again, free to deal with life with our fullest energy.

Sometimes an act helps to drop this feeling of sinfulness. It may be a confession, or a reparation, or even a ceremonial bath. The memory then no longer haunts us but just remains as a reminder of a path not to be taken again.

A champion's blister

When in college, I was a champion carrom player. But every year, before the contest season began, I had to go through a minor ordeal.

When I would start playing after a longish gap, the skin on my thumb at the contact point would start to peel and then to blister, which would burst and again re-form. Only when a hard callus formed at that point on my thumb would my aim suddenly improve...and then whatever I hit would zip towards the pockets.

This process taught me two life lessons. The first - and more obvious one - was that we all have to go through a preparation process of hardship and pain before we can become successful at whtever goal we plan to pursue.

However, the second lesson is less obvious. This callus-forming process used to take around a month, so I had to, strategically, start playing through this rough patch more than a month before the competition. If I started playing straightaway at the competitive matches, I would be nowhere, knocked out in the first couple of rounds itself. 

Similarly, for us, mentally, this process of toughening up has to start far before we hit adult life and take on responsibilities and serious challenges - the championship game, so to speak. We often give our children a pretty easy time when they are growing up, thinking that anyway they have to be burdened with responsibilities soon, so let them play around now. However, we would be doing them a great service if we allowed some scrapes, some blisters to form while growing up, so that when they play the first serious match, their skin is callused and their aim is true. Otherwise, before they know what hit them, they would have missed the first job offer, lost the first life partner, messed up a few friendships, mishandled the first sales team...and in general perhaps got diverted to a life by default instead of a life by choice, just because they did not know how to handle themselves, how to aim true.

For those of us who still have children who are growing up, let us not protect them like oysters. They will develop a shell, but will never grow a spine.