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.

When i was young i was deeply influenced by Bertrand Russell a lot, His philosophies had a very positive effect on my life. Recently i remember i had once written down an excerpt from his autobiography in a notebook i used to frequently read. Recently i have been reading a lot of about the workings of the mind, the ego and emotions etc. I found it strange that Bertrand Russell had in that work given a very nice way to over come the drag the ego can have on our lives.


I believe that Our mind is like a garden. You can plant beautiful plants in it, and it will grow into a beautiful and serene place. but if u don't bother to take interest and sow the plants that are wonderful, your garden will soon be filled with weed and bushes. You need to maintain your garden, by constantly cutting the weed and unwanted shrubs.


observe your mind for 5 minutes. now.
there are two types of thoughts that can arise in your mind.
the first kind is that of a constant background radio that keeps playing in your head.... keeps telling you want to do and what not to do almost with no logic or reason what so ever, these kinds of thoughts are deeply rooted in the past and keep reminding you how things are not the way u want them to be .... these thoughts , according to the Buddha, cause you dukha (suffering) . these are like plants that grow in your garden when u don't maintain it.... these are like weeds... these are unwanted.

There is another kind of thoughts that can arise, these are the thought that u have the control to think consciously with an effort. these are the thoughts that you are aware that YOU are thinking! these are like the beautiful plants you plant in your garden and nourish constantly.


In his book The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell says, "I was not born happy. As a child, my favorite hymn was: 'Weary of earth and laden with sin.' . . . In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more . . . very largely it is due to diminishing preoccupation with myself. Like others who had a Puritan education, I had a habit of meditating on my sins, follies, and shortcomings. I seemed to myself— no doubt justly—a miserable specimen. Gradually I
learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals
for whom I felt affection."




"It is quite possible to overcome infantile suggestions of the unconscious, and even to change the contents of the unconscious, by employing the right kind of technique. Whenever you begin to feel remorse for an act which your reason tells you is not wicked, examine the causes of your
feeling of remorse, and convince yourself in detail of their absurdity. Let your conscious beliefs be so vivid and emphatic that they make an impression upon your unconscious strong enough to cope with the impressions made by your nurse or your mother when you were an infant. Do not be content with an alteration between moments of rationality and moments of irrationality. Look into the irrationality closely with a determination not to respect it and not to let it dominate you. When it thrusts foolish thoughts or feelings into your consciousness, pull them up by the roots, examine them, and reject them. Do not allow yourself to remain a vacillating creature, swayed half by reason and half by infantile folly... " ....


.... "But if the rebellion is to be successful in bringing individual happiness and in enabling a man to live consistently by one standard, not to vacillate between two, it is necessary that he should think and feel deeply about what his reason tells him. Most men, when they have thrown off superficially the superstitions of their childhood, think thatthere is no more to be done. They do not realize that these superstitions are still lurking underground. When a rational conviction has been arrived at, it is necessary to dwell upon it, to follow out its consequences, to search out in oneself whatever beliefs inconsistent with the new conviction might otherwise survive. . . . What I suggest is that a man should make up his mind with emphasis as to what he rationally believes, and should never allow contrary irrational beliefs to pass unchallenged or obtain a hold over him, however brief. This is a question of reasoning with himself in those moments in which he is tempted to become infantile, but the reasoning, if it is sufficiently emphatic, may be very brief."

Here is a story:
"How shall I get liberation?";
"Find out who has bound you,"said the Master.

The disciple returned after a week and said,
"No one has bound me."

"Then why ask to be liberated?"
That was a moment of Enlightenment for the disciple,who suddenly became free.



We are all walking talking heaps of distortions. We are carrying within ourselves great tonnes of solutions to problems that no longer exist. Everybody is so, we think these are 'solutions', but we are just fooling ourselves. these 'solutions' in fact are judgments , opinions, beliefs, thinking patterns and so on. It is these stupid things that we call knowledge and are made to be so proud of. If at all anything, It is only a hindrance for us to observe and to really 'know'. The mind is dulled by these repeated primitives/patterns.


We Humans have been doing this for ages, trying to join monasteries, trying to join religions,trying to join scientific beliefs, trying to accept others beliefs, trying to accept rules, trying to accept ways. All this is trying to force our minds to conform to rigid and established patterns. Such is mind is bound to be dull. Such a mind is bound to be monochromatic. Such a mind is bound to be devoid of awareness. How can such a mind find out what reality is???


Here we are, trying to follow a leader, trying to follow a sage, trying to follow anybody. To follow is what our minds have become into. It is broken , It is confused , It has lost its virtue , It has become illusioned.'It has become Unconscious' !. Here we are everyday, every hour, every second, every nanosecond, .... thinking.... .All the time, thinking...thinking ...thinking.... Thats what we have confined our minds to... confined to thoughts,and nothing else.
we have become insane .When a mind is kept confined to thinking and no other activity, Every thought that arises builds a wall between us and Reality.


To really know reality we have to shed all this so called 'knowledge'. Thoughts are only tool to rationalize, thoughts can never understand the irrational. Reality is irrational, take a look at the fact that we have been trying to rationalize and deduce reality for so long, have we ever come closer to it. Every time we have try to define it , only to be proved wrong by another definition. For every one thing you learn, you realize there are 10 more things you don't know. Hence you always stay in a constant state of seeking answers. Some one today defines to us Say The Ultimate reality as God. We applied our minds , thought and learned this definition, only to realize 10 more questions popped in our mind :
who is God?
how was god formed or born?
what is God?
why does he/she/that-entity make us suffer?
where can i find god?..... Now these questions that popped in our minds have moved us further away from god than even before we knew our newly learnt definition of the Ultimate Reality as god.

When are all these questions gonna be answered??? when can we end our inquiries???... To answer this question i shall take a story from Buddhism:

But the monk persisted. Each day he would repeat the question; and each day he would get silence for an answer till he could take it no more and threatened to quit unless this crucial question was answered to his satisfaction, for to what purpose was he Living a life of renunciation if the souls of the just perished with their bodies ?


Then the Lord Buddha, in his compassion, spoke: “You are like a man, “he said, “who was dying from a poisoned arrow. His relatives rushed a doctor to his side, but he refused to have the arrow taken out unless he had the answer to these vital questions: was the man who shot him white or black? was he tall or short? ,was he a Brahmin or an out-caste? , I must know his name and family ? i must know whether a spring bow or a cross-bow was used? Before this arrow is drawn out. Such a man is bound to die before he knew the answers to his question ”
The monk stayed on!


I would like to quote a verse from the Upanishads:
"The supreme reality , without moving is swifter than the mind; the senses and the mind cannot reach him:he is ever beyond them. Standing still he over takes those who run."

our whole approach has been wrong. Thoughts can never reach it. Thoughts can only point at it. The ultimate reality can be felt, before a thought , and after a thought, and in between them but never in them. For then how can a mind corrupted by thought ever know it! Reality cannot be known by running towards it, for it is swifter than mind itself. This is why no one can teach us what is reality... it cannot be written down, it cannot be spoken of, it cannot even be thought of. But it can be felt, it can be realized. But this feeling and realization must occur in you , for it cannot be transmuted , it cannot be inherited from your parents or a past lifetime. For even the Buddha cannot tell you what it is, he can merely point at it.


I think the greatest sermon given by Buddha was the following:


Buddha once pointed to a flower and asked each of his disciples to say something about it.
One pronounced a lecture.
Another a poem.
Yet another a parable.
Each outdid the other in depth and erudition.
Only Mahakashyap smiled and held his tongue.
For Only he had understood the sermon.