Discovery

Every moment is a discovery. It is fresh. Prior experience covers the freshness of the moment.

We read many many books from our course and from a library. Each book, its each page is a discovery. We discover that the book is boring, or its great, or its cryptic. What are these thoughts about? They are about us. We don’t discover the book, we discover ourselves.

We go to learn music. A music teacher gives us a lesson and tells us how (quality), what (the notations) and when (timings) of that lesson. We start our practice. Our effort of reproducing the quality of sound that the teacher produced initially fails. Deep in our heart we know that it’s possible for us, just that its not happening now. A few continue to create noise and not music but know that music is hidden in the same noise. A many of us just give up. Whether we take up music or give up, it’s a discovery. Its not the discovery of that instrument but discovery of the self.

Listening to music takes efforts only to reach the auditorium and occupy a chair for which we don’t have to practice unlike the musicians. There are many people who are not trained in understanding the music but the beauty is that they can appreciate it. Why? Does it touch unknown corners of our being where a thought never reached? Do we attend a concert for discovering ourselves ?

A mother loves her tiny child unconditionally. As the child grows she starts finding faults in him, in his retention, his behaviour..in comparison with other children, she still loves him. She starts correcting the child. Her attempt is to make the child discover himself. She thinks she is discovered, now its child’s turn.

I have a friend who is a die hard fan of sufi singer Late Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Every time I meet him he makes me listen to his new discovery, new juice in the music of Ustadji. Is he discovering Nusrat or discovering himself ?

An academic teacher teaches students. The moment s/he feels that there is nothing new for her to teach, the subject is same old stuff that she has been teaching, the discovery of the self had ended. Then that teacher is dead. S/he is creating more dead souls in the classroom.

We have far too many places on the earth filled with dead people, not in the graves but in the homes, educational institutes and offices. They think their discovery is over, its of the past, they are ready to help other discover. I am no different. I too help people discover themselves. The moment my discovery is over, I’ll be dead, useless and rotten. Every hero that you have in your life, it may be your father or a movie star or an idol in a temple, just ask yourself if you are watching his every action and following him or in the process discovering yourself ? Life is about you, about your discovery that is available to you every moment, even in the moments of life that we deny…

Rhythm

Music is one of the greatest expressions of our mind! While the sur(musical notes) in a song takes flights to different heights in our hearts and minds, beats are something which express the “now” of the song. A sur is a summation of different harmonics of a frequency. In technical terms sur is an animal of frequency-domain. Shruti is defined as a smallest change in frequency that our ear can perceive, that our ear is sensitive to. There are 22 such shruti’s out of which a subset of 12 notes are used in an octave. Likewise, beats/taal is an animal of time-domain. Its measured in beats per minute. If we think what is the smallest change in beats in our day to day life it appears that the dhak-dhak of heart beat is one, daily sunrise or sunset is a slower version, the slower than that is our birthday and slower than that is our whole life, which is just one beat (Thak). On the other hand if the beats are played faster than the perception of an ear then it becomes a sur, a musical note. Interestingly, its all perceivable to the mind.

Rhythm has a certainty i.e. you know in advance when next beat is going to happen. Its like knowing the future in advance. What goes on in the mind of a percussionist when s/he plays the instrument? S/he’s playing the instrument ‘now’ and at the same time preparing for the next beat. There are 3 parts to a beat viz. what, how and when. ‘What’ expresses the syllable/bol of it e.g dhin, tak etc. ‘How’ operates on the quality of the sound of each syllable that a percussionist produces. ‘When’ is the heart of it which is the composition of a bunch of beats that s/he repeats to create a cycle of a rhythm. A slight change in bunching of beats changes the whole meaning of the rhythm. This you all have noticed when somebody tells your own mobile number in a different way. E.g. rhythm of a phone number 98860 98860 v/s 98 86 09 88 60 v/s 988 609 886 0. The number is same but if uttered in a different way sounds like an unknown number. In the cycle of one pattern the percussionists attempt is to break the pattern and present the variety to the audiences. His job is to wake up the dozing audience by breaking their pattern that they carry through in the song.

Rhythm intertwines rules and exceptions. When mind is not attached to any rule it remains alert to exceptions. With every exception it doesn’t create a new rule. Similarly life is about a beautiful rhythm. Life is about exceptions not about rules. Every moment is an exception. Just that we have to break both, the old rules and the process of creating new rules in our heads. If you see one person in a group of people who cannot clap in rhythm and you are uncomfortable about it, its not problem with him, it’s with you. S/he was blessed with no-rhythm and you were blessed with rhythm. Its not chosen by you or me. It is, it just “is”.

Are you observing your heart beat, now?

You smiled but your acquaintance just walked past !

What happens in us when somebody we know doesn't acknowledge our smile or a shakehand but just ignores and walks past ?

The first inner reaction is my ego gets hurt. In this situation what happens to him/her who didn’t smile is less important. S/he may be in his/her own world of bliss or mess. Why that should put me in a mess? Mind starts wandering. It thinks, is it that somebody told her something against me and that’s why she didn’t smile? Is she under some pressure and hence she ignored me or doesn’t want to share something with me? Is something wrong in my face, my clothes today? Is she ignoring me? Our ego-factory can produce a lot of such crap. That’s by design. What happens to me with all these thoughts is more important. WHICH specific output of my ego-factory have I latched myself on to and HOW MUCH have I latched on to? These 2 factors will decide if we can be free even if you smile and the known person ignores. Last time this happened to me I got latched to a thought that the other person is ignoring me but he seems to be in his world of problems that’s why he’s doing so. That evening I just walked to him and said hi! We got onto regular talking terms, cracked jokes and departed. I learned a lot with this experience about the functioning of my mind, its unbeatable ability to create nonsense in my head even when everything was really fine.

In another incident the problem began when I smiled at an unknown lady misunderstanding her as an acquaintance and she smiled back with a question in her eyes. Now I’m thinking hard ;)

Selection, Rejection and Dejection in a Job Interview.

My interview was going great. I was almost sure I’m in. The final question from the interviewer was, “Do you want to go for higher education?” I said “Yes” and was disqualified. This is somebody’s true incident.

How does our flow of thoughts operate from now on hearing this incident is very important? We will easily conclude that we will say “No” if we are asked such a question. I want you to understand the dynamics of the situation and of the mind. You will find an exact negative story where person said “No” and he was still disqualified. Now where does your thought flow take you? We always feel that we are opening a gate by learning from someone else’s experience but remember that by trying to open one gate you have actually closed many other gates. With a knee jerk reaction we concluded that “Yes” created the problem. Can we look at the situation deeper than that, free of what we think is right?

The result of not getting a job is a function of both, the interviewer and the one who was interviewed. Why are we deciding beforehand what’s going to be our reaction if we encounter such a situation. Any small noise around and we immediately have a conclusion ready how I am going to behave and how everybody else should behave in that situation if s/he faces it. With these conclusions we fail to see the situation in totality because 100 such situations happen and we have 200 walls built around us. If your true answer was “Yes” then what’s wrong if you got rejected? We always love the outside result and fail to nurture the inside growth. Do we see the inside growth at all? We want best from everything, job from an interview and higher education from studying and there's nothing right or wrong about it. Problem is not with rejection, it’s with dejection of having lost control of the situation which I thought was earlier under my control. Somewhere the interviewer doesn’t believe that she can influence you to change your decision of going for higher studies and you don’t believe that you can change her decision to get you in. If you go beyond your belief only then there are higher possibilities. Then thoughts will happen to you, you don’t have to think. Can you allow things to happen to you..? Can you still win the interviewer's heart if not a job ?

The Yes-Yes fun!

One evening at 6:00pm I declared in my home that till the end of day I am not going to say “NO”. Whatever you tell me I will do it. Friends, it was an amazing experience to realize how much conscious was I about everything then on, how much no’s are a part of my being. When my 9yr and 5yr children understood what it meant they made me play all that they wanted. My wife and dad played small tricks in their sentences and made me say “yes” to everything. In spite of all this I pronounced “NO” 6 times in 5hrs. I also learned many positive ways of saying “NO”.

Just close your eyes and say “Don’t climb a tree.” The picture that the mind creates is “climb a tree” and then deny it. As students, teachers or parents if we can find clever ways of telling the other “what to do” than “what not to do” we are veeery differently empowering that person. Moreover, if you convert it into a question for right situations then you are not only empowering him/her but also giving a freedom of choice.

If we play yes-yes with self then we move into a different paradigm. Lets see how this evolves when we talk about concentration. One definition of concentration is “If I am reading something, I should be lost in the world of reading. I should not know what is going on around me.” We tend to deny everything that stops me from concentrating in my studies e.g. sexuality, TV, internet, SMS. We are stuck to this definition because we have borrowed it from elders, neighbours, books and maybe, previous experience. The other definition could be “If I am reading something, I may or may not get lost in the world of words. Am I aware of every thought (we call it distraction) that happens when reading?” There are two types of thoughts viz. those which are created because of reading the subject and those which are just coming to me without asking. Can you find your definition of ‘concentration’ and question it to the core? There are thoughts that happen to us, don’t deny them. Have Yes-Yes fun with them. They are not the voluntary ones as they seem to be.

If you are filled with a lot of questions after the read, be with them.

(please go through the article that triggered the above thought process at: http://www.citehr.com/863-toxic-thinking.html)

Zero and Infinity

• 0/1 = zero; 1/0 = infinity
• We are infinite when we are born and zero when we die. Can we be zero when we are alive and infinite when we are dead ?
• Sometimes we think time doesn’t pass and sometimes we think years fly by so fast.
• Sometimes we feel each thing around me is just for me and sometimes we feel each thing around me is just because of me.
• When we go to Himalayas we feel we are so minuscule, when alone at home we feel ‘I am Himalaya’, ‘I’m the king.’
• When my body is free of any pain I don’t feel it. It just exists. When there is toothache or any pain the whole existence just becomes pain.
• The space between written words is zero and the words are infinite, the silence between the spoken words are zero and the sounds are infinite. Are the thoughts infinite and is there a zero between 2 thoughts ?
• Husband is zero, wife is infinite ;)
• Inhaling is becoming infinite, exhaling is becoming zero.
• Sometimes we think everything is under my control and sometimes we feel there’s nothing that is under my control. Not even my voluntary decision to go and drink a glass of water.
• I ‘think’ therefore I am OR I ‘think’ therefore I am not what I am ?
• Sometimes I feel zero and infinity are poles apart but sometimes I feel they are just next to each other, merging in each other like 2 ends of a same circle.

Are zero and infinity really merging in each other ? Is there a clarity in duality ?

Slowdown

We wake up in the morning, go to loo, brush teeth, have coffee/tea, bath, travel, go to college/office, attend lectures/meetings, work, come back home, spend time with friends/family, dine and sleep. There are a lot of things that we do physically which are voluntary and lot of things which happen involuntarily. Lets keep aside involuntary things for a while and look at voluntary actions. Say, brushing teeth, having coffee, bathing and similar ones. Can we slowdown the voluntary activities? Can we brush the teeth carefully, slowly, enjoy the whole process consciously, and feel each splash of water on the face? Thoughts are involuntary; they come to us like waves in an ocean. They just keep coming, endlessly. They might rule over your slowed down actions, its ok. When conscious again put your heart in your slow down. Can you wait and observe the sensations in your mouth just after brushing your teeth and before you sip a hot cup of tea and kill the earlier sensation for a new one?

We enjoyed school recess, we don’t like recession! We don’t like market slowdown, it hurts. But this slowing down of daily actions can be a different experience. It can be done now, while reading this. Slow down, just sloooow down!

In computers there are debuggers to debug(weed out bugs from) computer programs. I use to work on a debugger called SoftICE. It was an amazing tool for debugging Windows BSOD’s (you know Blue Screens?). Instead of causing Blue-Screen this tool grabs the CPU and halt the whole process. When the system was halted I was able to see the state in which CPU is, what were the RAM memory contents etc. After seeing ‘what-is’ and knowing ‘what-should-be’ debugging became easier. It was all possible because the system was halted (slowed down to 0 speed.)

Notice here that seeing ‘what-is’ is extremely important. A slowed down action or a thought helps us see ‘what-is’ really is. But, our whole thought process seems to be interested in looking at destinations, goals and what-should-be. Can you slowdown a few activities daily, say, taking 5 breaths slowly or chewing 5 bites of you dinner with your eyes closed without hurrying up for getting the next bite ready, or 5 times you blink your eyes or taking 5 mugs of hot water on your body when you take your bath?

Enjoy the slowdown only then going fast will be a fun, fun with more clarity than what it was!