Impermanence of Things

The core of Buddhist teachings is the impermanence of things. That is, there is nothing that truly exists forever be it life, people, relationships or just about anything. Take relationship for instance - it passes through various stages that finally leads to commitment. It ends when someone dies or separates. Similar to relationships, everything that we come across goes through a sort of normal distribution curve where it rises initially, coasts for a while and then, there is a decline.

We all get old, our memories fade. The nature around us changes too. Species come and go. Nature uses its destructive forces - earthquakes to reshape continental plates. These changes are so timed that it makes the universe endure. And it is a mystery as to why things have to be this way. Nobody wants to lose a loved one. We would all want somethings to remain the way they are. But, the reality is that everything fades after a spectacular debut.

Perhaps there is some form of holiness or spirituality involved in this. And things end so we can have that spiritual experience. The fact that reality is not permanent does not mean we have to consider it to be superficial. It could mean wholeness - the consciousness of sacred possibilities in finite things.

Cool Loneliness

"The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself." ~ Mark Twain.

I've been struggling with the pain of loneliness for some time now. I used to think it as a terrible disease - something that people should not get. But a friend of mine whom I haven't met so far has made me realize that it is not a disease and it is a common problem and that this occurs to all of us at certain point in our lives. And when it hit us, we get thrown into this sense of awareness that no one knows us or understands us. Worst yet, we may feel we don't understand ourselves. What I've learnt along the way is that loneliness is just a part of human experience.  It is an occasional price we have to pay for being human.  On introspection though, it can lead to a discovery of our own personal resources and to a greater sense, our own independence. The following article by Pema Chödrön talks about what we can do with this thing called loneliness. 

As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright: an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity. To the degree that we’ve been avoiding uncertainty, we’re naturally going to have withdrawal symptoms -- withdrawal from always thinking that there’s a problem and that someone, somewhere, needs to fix it.

It’s tough going, because it goes against the grain of an ancient neurotic pattern that we all share. When we feel lonely, when we feel hopeless, what we want to do is move to the right or the left. We don’t want to sit and feel what we feel. We don’t want to go through the detox.  The experience of certain feelings can seem particularly pregnant with desire for resolution: loneliness, boredom, anxiety. Unless we can relax with these feelings, it’s very hard to stay in the middle when we experience them. We want victory or defeat, praise or blame.

Usually we regard loneliness as an enemy. Heartache is not something we choose to invite in. It’s restless, pregnant, and hot with the desire to escape and find something or someone to keep it company. When we can rest in the middle, we begin to have a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness, a relaxing and cooling loneliness that completely turns our usual fearful patterns upside down.

There are six ways of describing this kind of cool loneliness. They are: less desire, contentment, avoiding unnecessary activity, complete discipline, not wandering in the world of desire, and not seeking security from one’s discursive thoughts.

Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment.

Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment.

When you wake up in the morning and out of nowhere comes the heartache of alienation and loneliness, could you use that as a golden opportunity? Rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart? The next time you get a chance, experiment with this.

-- Pema Chödrön,  from "When Things Fall Apart"

So the next time someone gets this feeling of loneliness, just take both the 'l's' and the  'i' off that word and you get oneness...just sit with yourself  and see what it has to offer. You'll be surprised to see how much you can do.

Lessons from a hologram

Holography is a technique that allows light scattered from an object to be recorded and reconstructed later so that it appears as if the object is in the same position relative to the recording medium as it was at the time of recording the image. As the position and orientation of the viewing system changes,  the image changes  in the exact same way as if the real object is present and thus  we get a three dimensional image.  We don't have to look far to see a holographic image. It is present in our credit cards and driver's licenses. 

An interesting property of hologram is that its entirety can be reconstructed from arbitarily small part.  That is, if we tear a hologram into half, each half will still show the image as a whole. This is true even if we keep on cutting them to smaller and smaller pieces. Each tiny fragments will still contain the information necessary to make another but smaller version of the original image. Every part of the hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. 

If we try to take apart something constructed holographically,  like say dissect it to study its respective parts, it simply is not possible - all we get by that process is smaller wholes (quantum entanglement?). I think in reality that there are no pieces that make up a whole because nothing exists that in not comprehensive by itself.  I guess each one of us harbors a universe within ourselves just like the universe harbors us. 

The journey of life

All of us journey through the passage of time. We are voyagers in the midst of a myriad of days that are all so similar to each other. In the course of our lives, we build as much as we can build, get as much as we can get, and go as far as we can go. Over the glaring lights of our cities, the stars seem so far away and yet, we want to capture them for ourselves.

The question I wanna ask is - is it all worth it? Empires fall, buildings tumble and the stars continue to shine in the night sky. In defending these things, we bleed to conquer. But, ultimately we are all conquered by the hand of time. Trees will lose their leaves, summers will lose their warmth. We all die and pass on.

We are so preoccupied with time, often only seeing and hearing what can be seen and heard. But seldom do we stop, and take time to see and hear the spaces between all that we think we know and experience. We are too busy attaching ourselves to the demands of the society, to the materialistic concerns; buying and selling from dawn to dusk. We spend too much time criticizing, finding faults in ourselves and others, allowing ourselves to hate, to kill, to die. We count the hours, minutes, seconds. We so infrequently take time to breath, to love and try to understand what this life is all about.

But I think there is much more to this journey of life. We don't know much about what we cannot see. But if we let go of frivolous distractions of life and explore the silence, we would find a greater sense of peace, happiness and love. These greater forms of joy in life cannot be built out of steel or concrete and so cannot be destroyed as these lie beyond the limitations of what is destructible.

I guess it must all mean something and that we are more than just physical beings. Perhaps with this knowledge, the material world will be less of a distraction. Perhaps we will become less consumed by all that which does not matter. Perhaps over the glare of city lights, the stars won't seem so far away.

Is the jar full?

I came across this beautiful story on the net. Many of you would probably have heard of it but I think I'll share it here again.

There was a lecturer at a University who, one day, instead of bringing his lecture notes to the class came in with a fairly big glass jar and put it on the table. While his class was wondering what he was up to, he started to put large stones into the jar until he could get in no more. He then turned to the class and asked 'is the jar full?' and the class said 'Yes.'

He smiled, took another bag from under the desk which had smaller stones and managed to fit those in between the spaces of the big stones. Once he was done, again he asked, 'is the jar full?' They all shook their head and said 'No.'

He smiled again, took a third bag which contained sand and started pouring it in to the jar until he could get no more sand in. He asked once more, 'is the jar full?' And again the class said 'No.' Then, he got some water and poured that in. After he could get no more in, he stopped, and asked the class, What am I trying to prove here with this demonstration?' When the class could not give him any satisfactory answer, he said, ' What I was trying to show was if you want to fit the big stones in, fit them in first. Don't leave them to the last otherwise you'll never get them in.'

This story is about priorities. About what we should fit in our daily schedule or may be even life first of all. There are many things which many people realize as the big rocks of their lives - their family, relationships, dreams, ambitions, peace of mind, etc., and, sometimes we leave them to the end in our day, in our week or maybe in our life, we don't find the opportunity to fit them in. That's one of the reasons why happiness eludes us. The priorities are completely messed up. We should probably remember this story and put into our life what's important to us above all. The other things we can always fit in, but later.

Ignorance

Ignorance means not seeing things are they are. To many people who are well educated,  its uneasy to think that they are ignorant. That applies to me too but of late, I realized that  I had completely failed to understand the reality of things happening around me - the reality of life if you will. For instance, consider the situation of  walking all alone on a road at the dead of night. We are familiar with what happens when we see a shape in the shadow of darkness - the quickening of our steps even though that shape might just be a short tree stump. It is our ignorance that creates a sense of panic and causes us to speed up. But, suppose there was some light, we would have noticed the tree stump and accepted it for what it was.  There would have been no fear, no suffering because there would have been no ignorance. 

To think that one has suffering, pain, grief, despair - that it is not fair and one needs only security and happiness stems from ignorance which makes things complicated and results in far greater problems.  This ' ignorance' sows the seed for craving, hatred, jealousy, pride and what not.  Much of human anguish which is empty and meaningless is also born out of ignorance  It is because of this that the human mind tells us to annihilate things that lay in our path. 

So long as we dont develop the ability to concentrate and open our minds to the true nature of things,  we remain ignorant.  But with the right conditions and training, the unerring nature of things are revealed and we no longer dwell in the abyss of ignorance.