SepticPen ...

you know its been a long time since you wrote your last post. to be frank, you had gotten yourself 'reset'. hard to explain it, but its similar to unlearning everything. so you somehow felt you shouldn't write another post until, you hit a problem.
    
Its not too hard for a problem to find you once you have reset. You work long days, cause when you lie down, you don't want to be able to think,you want sleep to find you easily.
But yesterday you couldn't sleep. Its back, those old days,when you were forced by life to stay awake at night without sleep to accept and recognize your existence and actions.At first its terrifying. you are afraid to peep inside. You know deep down you dont understand life. but some part of you wants to desperately understand it, and there is also a part which is scared of stumbling upon a possible truth. 


But you want to be at peace with yourself. its really late, in a few hours there will be sunlight. you can no longer lie down, your breathing is heavy,its almost as if you are breathing steel. But you are also tired. You sit up in your bed.


"Why? ... Nothing in life makes sense".The street light is flooding your room and You notice you are casting a long shadow across the floor. You look at it for sometime.... 'the constant companion'. Doesn't your shadow always follow you. is it not always less a feet away. An Old man once said the shadows are the greatest gift you could have asked for, it is the very form of 'Death'. that's how close death always is, less than a feet away.

Suddenly you are face to face with death, even though it had followed you for ever.It is no longer a stranger to you. A role that death plays for you is to remind you of how soon you are forgotten. You do much to impress yourselves upon the world, to make yourselves remembered, to stamp your existence.And yet, as Marcus Aurelius often reminds himself, after we die we are quickly forgotten. Our legacy is short in the larger time span of history.

"All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike" (Book 4, §35 ,Meditations of Marcus Aurelius).


If you have to be at peace with yourself, you have to prepare for things that are likely to remove that peace.

You might want to read my previous post titled “Evanescence”
http://septicpen.blogspot.com/2009/07/evanescence.html

Feel free to leave any comments & please tweet this post if you like it.

Surrendering is the greatest act of all human endeavors. what does it mean to surrender? no efforts in any direction at all.... phew! when i got that answer i knew its way too much for humble souls like me to apply. then one person taught me that to surrender means to have no resistance to life.

No resistance = Surrendering.
Now that seems more doable.

If u are in any physical pain, surrender to it, do not resist it.


Recently i had a throat surgery and the post-operative pain was too much for me to handle. I started trying out all the practices that learned through Buddhism , Advaita, etc etc. things never improved. the pain was till too much for me to bear, also since i couldn't administer pain-killers because they may cause bleading to my operative wound , things just got worse. i gradually with out even my own notice slipped into depression, the pain kept troubling me every moment. i couldnt even sleep .

Initially i tried making an effort to convince myself that the body is experiencing the pain, i am just an observer. i tried this practice very intesely but to no avail, the pain just kept rushing into my head and distubing my peace of mind. thats when i had realized that i was intorduced to practises of overcomming psychological pain, but never once had i learned to handle physical pain. and this was the Time i need it the most.


i was introduced to the Blue Buddha or the Medicine Buddha Mantra and a friend of mine asked me to recite it and concentrate my awareness on my presence and less on the pain. again may be due to my humble efforts and also since i had made soo little progess , and my practice was still very unexperienced ... i dunno things never imroved the pain was still unbearable.


one early morning even before sunrise, the pain woke me up. i juts lay there on my bed, the pain was there too like a loyal friend who never betrays you. i wished i had never had this kind of pain. I wished i was all right. i began thinking of the time when this pain wasn't there.


that's when it happened. that's when i noticed that i was making efforts in all directions to get rid of the pain.!!! i was making efforts in evry possible direction, then i remember thta to surrender means to stop efforts in all diretions. thast i when i realised i am gona just stop all this. again a thought came to my mind, a deep innervoice tellin me "resist nothing"... and i did. i just lay there, not resisting pain, not resisting anything.


firstly i surrendered my body, i just lay there, i dint bother to breathe until there was a need to . if there was a need to inhale i inhaled. if there was a need to exhale i exhaled. if there was a need for me to adjust my arm , i did it. i dint resist anything. Then i slowly started surrendering in the mental plane. i surrendered my will to think. i surrenderd my wil to wish to be something else. i surrendered my need to complai about his situation. i surrendered also any need to falsely praise what i was doing. i surrendered my need to talk to myslef. i surrendered to life, and i did not reisst anything. total surrender. thast when i realized the pain was existing, and so was i. but i dint need to do anythign to it, and it ceased to do anything for me! i had finally learned something of incomprehenssible measure from my experience, i had finally learned to surrender.