Vasant aayi re!

It’s spring season here in NZ. Glorious vasant ritu. And my garden is suddenly abloom with flowers. It seems that almost overnight bulbs that were in hibernation through winter have worked their way up through the earth and burst into leaf and flower. Since this is my first spring in this house, it has all taken me by surprise, for now there are flowers where I didn’t expect flowers to bloom. Flowers of the kind I’ve never even seen before. Flowers that look they are wearing dainty designer skirts with petals that go upwards and through the gaps petals that go downwards. God must be one heck of a flower designer :))) The roses are not out yet, but the bushes are full of tender leaves and tiny buds, the promise of flowering clasped tight in their delicate petals.

The kowhai is in full bloom everywhere and when the yellow flowers drop they form a lovely yellow carpet on the grass beneath the tree. My ex-neighbour told me that the kowhais around her house bloom one after another. So the tuis when they have finished feasting on the flowers of one, their beaks tucked deep into the flowers, they go on to the next and then the next. Wow! What wonderful synchronisation! How God takes care of all His creations :)))

The birds are having a busy time, feasting on berries, collecting twigs for nests. They are all atwitter among the branches, calling out to one another, exchanging notes, I like to believe, on food gathering and nest building :))) My neighbour has a brood of 4-5 hens and when they cluck-cluck, it instantly transports me to Kerala :))) Bright flowers everywhere nodding in the breeze, the sun warm on the grass, the birds busy among the trees, the sky blue and clouds white, the day long and languorous, the night soft and gentle, yes, Spring has claimed my heart and soothed my soul.


The trees are covered with young leaves fluttering merrily in the breeze. Just a few weeks ago they had been bare, raising their bare limbs to the winter sky. In summer their green will darken and when autumn comes, turn golden, yellow and orange and then drop off. The leaf doesn’t cling to the tree, the tree doesn’t grieve the leaf’s falling. When spring comes new leaves are born. And so the cycle of birth and death continues in perfect harmony. It reminds me that I must drop the old and the dead so that life continues to be renewed and refreshed everyday.

Yes, vasant ritu is a great teacher :)))

Your state of peace and joy is the quality of your life

A very concise, logical explanation about the body, mind and spirit by Sadguru Jaggi Vasudev.

Watch the video here

The art of being still

I have made it a point in recent times, if possible, to spend a large part of Saturday doing nothing. Five days a week is spent in earning the daily bread, and Sunday is spent in myriad chores, so I say to myself, surely there must be some time for rest and recreation. In the Bible it is said that God spent six days making the world, then on the seventh day he rested. Jews even now observe the Sabbath as a day of rest. But I have noticed that the malaise of modernity is such that most people do not know how to rest anymore. Rest for most people means plonking themselves in front of the TV and watching mindless stuff that producers churn out in the name of entertainment. It seems we have a great need to be entertained but no ability to rest.

So come Saturday morning, after a leisurely breakfast, I sit on the sofa and do nothing. The view outside is very pretty, trees, grass, flowers, sky, clouds. Nature brings me into a state of stillness, maybe because nature itself is so still. In the beginning thoughts come, crowding together in my mind, kicking and jostling for the spotlight. After a while of breath-watching, I am able to detach myself from the thoughts and view them as I would watch a movie being played out on the screen of my mind. The trick is not to get involved in the movie. Thoughts have this great capacity to evoke emotion and this thought-emotion dance gets us further and further entrenched in the mental-emotional process.

So if I just sit and watch this movie, slowly it flickers and fades and I am left only with silence. Of course, thoughts keep gate-crashing, but the very act of observing them makes them go away because the mind cannot be in control in the presence of awareness. It is like the mist that disappears when the sun of awareness blazes. This silence is very liberating, it makes me light and joyous, calm and still, insights become clear in this stillness, like as if Wisdom itself is talking to me, sharing its secrets.

If we can access this stillness at least once everyday, we can carry it on throughout the day. We need the mind only to carry out mental tasks, logical reasoning, vocabulary, etc, but we need our innate intelligence that lies beyond the mind to do just about everything else. Living only in the mind most people live just mechanical lives, doing what is expected of them, by family, by society. They cannot see the sublime, the ethereal, the wondrous, in everyday life. They have lost touch with the magic in life that exists everywhere around us, with the magic that lies within themselves. Having lived their entire life in the mind and the material world, they are entrapped, unknowingly looking for that elusive something, but not knowing what or where to look, continuing with the rat race until deliverance comes in the form of death. They are like prisoners trapped by the bars of the world, gold-plated maybe, but bars nevertheless. Like Jesus said, “Of what use is it to a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul”.

I am reposting a story I had posted up a couple of years ago, which I had originally read in an old issue of The Readers Digest -

Some time ago (maybe 19th century) when the African jungles were still largely unexplored, an English explorer went to Africa for study and exploration work. He hired some locals to do the navigation and carry his gear and together they set out into the jungles. They would stay in tents during the nights and get up at dawn, cut through the bush, clear a path, do exploration, tent down for the night, next day clear some more bush, go forward etc. This went on for a few days until one morning the Englishman discovered that all his guides had gone on strike and had decided not to move from there for a few days. When he asked them the reason, they said "We have been working and moving and rushing on so fast that we feel that we have left our spirits behind. We need to stay in one place and get back into the rhythm of things so that our spirits can catch up with us".

So I spend some part of Saturdays doing nothing, catching up with my spirit, learning to be still, to just Be, from the trees, birds, grass...... This is my natural state, my authentic self, my true nature. In this stillness I lack nothing, desire nothing and yet have everything.

Experience and maya

We live in the world of experience, don’t we? Our daily life is almost entirely experiential. The information that is collected by our senses and our responses to these, the thoughts / imaginations we have and the emotions that follow, these are the building blocks of our experience. It seems that our entire lives are lived in these experiences.

Experience is not what happens, but the responses to these external events that take place in our minds. It can be said that we carry our world with us, in our minds. Take an example of two people traveling in a train. One is looking around, taking in his surroundings through his senses and a flow of thoughts then stream through his mind. That is his personal experience and that is his world. Another is sitting next to him, but is reading a newspaper, totally engrossed in it. For him, his surroundings are a blur, but his mind is actively involved in absorbing the news, imagining the events, understanding the implications, digesting the information. His personal experience is totally different and he lives in a different world than the one his neighbour inhabits even though they are physically seated next to each other.

All of us live in our own world which shifts and changes according to inputs to our minds and our responses to them. Even our personal responses to the same input would be different and would be based on past experience and memory. If we are all living in our own worlds, is there any such thing as a single, common world? If so, how can that be assessed? Is it even possible to access it? I think not. If no such world exists, what world are we living in? The only world there is exists in our minds. And that one constantly shifts and changes, has no permanence. Then the question arises: is this world even real? After all it exists only in our minds and is mercurial, dies down when we go to sleep, spring up when we wake up. Vanishes completely when we die. Surely there must be a world beyond the world of experience. If it exists, how to access it?

By realising that the world we carry around in our heads is not the real thing. That the mind is a master illusionist, tricking us into believing things that catches its whim and fancy, by constantly serving up a stream of thoughts that keeps our attention so engaged that we do not have the opportunity to look any deeper and find its deception. By strong intention and steady practice of mindful awareness, we’ll be able to see glimpses of a different kind of reality, one that does not rely on an inconstant mind. By going beyond the mind into a state of stillness a whole new world opens up, seamless, constant, eternal, full of love and bliss. It is our birthright to be in this world always, this is our natural habitat, our natural state of being. This is what we are born for, this is the purpose of our life. Not to seek wealth, fame, security and all those temporary crutches, but to seek and find, or rather, to cast away the veil of illusion and to dwell in the bliss of the Self.

Music that moves

A moving, powerful, beautifully rendered Thatvam by Dr.Balamurali Krishna

Thathvam by Dr.Balamurali Krishna

And a brilliant alapana -

Kunthalavarali Alapana by Dr.Balamurali Krishna

An evening with a legend

I am just back from a music recital by Dr.Balamurali Krishna and it’s only slowly sinking in that I had really been in the presence of a legend. Dr. Balamurali has long been one of my most favourite classical singers and I had not even dreamt that I would one day go for a live recital of his and then stand just a few feet away from him.

Sitting there in the darkened auditorium listening to the legend sing was an indescribable experience. Most of the time our emotions are the body’s responses to thoughts but there are some things that impinge on our senses and go straight to the heart, bypassing the mind completely. Music is one such. I sat there enthralled, my heart melted and quivering, and I felt that I had reached the feet of the Lord. Dr. Balamurali is a human, but surely it must be the divine in him singing and the divine in me responding.

The compere informed us that Dr. Balamurali can sing in many languages and can play many instruments. He was a child prodigy and gave his first public performance at the age of six and his first full-fledged performance age at the age of eight at the Thyagaraja music festival. He then went on to give more than 25000 performances, compose ragas, make great innovations in Carnatic music, compose and direct music for films and act in films singing his own songs.

I found it interesting that he only sang songs in praise of the Lord. And I thought how apt! After all God is the only truth there is. And love. But then the two are the same. Why sing of pain and suffering? After all they are illusionary and passing. And so as the notes climb and fall and the music flows out of him so effortlessly, I know I am in the presence of the divine. Where else would such purity, such wealth of spirit, such genius come from?

After the singing he took a break and came back to the stage and signed autographs and posed with people even though he’s almost eighty and had just given a long recital. There were no airs about him, no pompousness, no show of superiority. He posed obligingly with whoever came close and smiled warmly at all as though he was just one of us, not a living legend. There was an elderly lady who couldn’t climb the steps to the stage, so he very kindly got off his chair and sat on the stage so that he could be on the same level with her. Only the truly great can be this humble.

I went and stood close to the stage and took some photographs. I wanted to touch his feet but I was so overwhelmed by his greatness that I couldn’t bring myself to do even that. I was content just standing a few feet away and being in his presence. Driving back home, I was so overcome with emotion, I wept tears of joy. It was an undreamt dream come true. To be in the presence of a genius, to get a glimpse of divinity, to be transported and transformed by greatness. Surely it was a once in a lifetime experience.

Dear God

I am writing this to you even though I know you are everywhere. In the paper and pencil when I write, in the computer where it will be posted, in all the screens where this letter will be displayed. You are in all these places and everywhere else, so why write.? Because I like writing to you. :)

You were right when you told Arjuna that he must think of you always. Whenever I think of you, all my sadness, misery, tensions, even happiness vanish. I am filled with the most exquisite peace, bliss and love. The world flickers and becomes indistinct and then there is only this vast silence where there is no desire, no thought, no emotion, just ineffable bliss.

When I think of you all my thoughts, words and deeds are right ones. There is no question that it will be otherwise. I wish to remain in this always. I do not understand the reason why I came into this world because its illusions make me forget my true nature. I’m sure my soul that is you, had a good enough reason. But now that I am in it, I would like you to show me how to remain aware of my divine self always. How to remember always that I am you when the world intervenes and tells me otherwise. That is all I ask of you, dear God.

There are a lot of things I would like to talk about. Maybe some other time. I’m sure you don’t mind waiting. After all you are beyond time.

Love
from love to love for all is love