SepticPen ...

Today I came across a video on YouTube that i want to share with you. The video speaks for it self , the intensity in the environment is intense, yet there was a person trying to be peace. yes that's what i said ‘trying to be peace’. Lets see what that means.

‘What is the purpose of Life?’ that's a great question… Osho(i know not many agree or like him, but at times he has something valuable to say) , Rajneesh (Osho) says that ‘you’ never ask that question, your mind asks that… and no matter what answer you provide, its not enough, in fact its never enough. and that's because that is the function of your mind .. ‘to ask’ … to be in the state of ‘needing to know’.

Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken), a German Philosopher and author says something very profound. He says instead of asking ‘What is the purpose of Life?’ ,we must ask ‘What is Our Purpose to Life?’. To paraphrase it, instead of asking ‘of what use is life to us?’ we must ask ‘What use are we to Life?'’

Eckhart Tolle further ,adds to this and ,says in a talk he gave at a retreat, It is more useful to raise the question “what is my purpose to life?” , and your purpose in any Life situation is to bring peace into that situation. You are here ,as a portal to bring ‘presence’ into this world. (Of course to fully follow what this simple line means ,you may have to be familiar with Tolle’s works)

It may seem The Buddha would often never answer this question. But his silence is the very message of Eckhart in action.

If you are walking to get a cup of water, then your purpose is to walk and walk alone. to walk fully , and not absently, to be there fully. when you pick up your glass of water that is your purpose in life, be there totally and notice what you are doing,and do it fully. when you drinking it, drinking is your purpose in life. when you are sitting , sitting is your purpose in life… to do it fully to bring presence into this world by bringing presence into your Life.

In any (so-called) life situation your purpose is to be peace, by bringing presence into it.

Lets have a look at the video that brought out this post through me.
I want you to know that some times a form of teaching which you might consider is not very clear or advanced does help bring peace into life. and therefore we must genuinely appreciate and have respect for all teachings

P.S: Looks like my writing stream is becoming active, may be its because i changed rooms :D , be ready to see more posts this January

do leave a comment and let me know what you feel about this post and the theme i tried to address here.

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.

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.

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.

As hard as it is for ones mind to be come still. the process only gets worse when to try to force your mind into stillness- a state of having no identification with your thoughts.


I tried my hand at wall gazing as in Chan or the Zen School, and found my self getting absolutely nowhere. One is supposes to sit erect facing a fall and just start perceiving non-duality by realizing the wall is staring back at you.


I tried to do wall-gazing for the past 2 days. and today something strange happened. i was sitting facing the wall, and apparently there was a window behind my back and the sunlight was just flooding into the room.and i noticed something , a shadow was being cast on the wall before me, and the shadow was a very hazy one, i could actually see many layers of the shadow being superimposed on each other. and there i was looking at a very opaque but not sharp image of mine. it was very unexpected , and i started to observe the shadow , and i notice that i could sit there and just gaze at the shadow for a really long time. I guess the mind it self just gave up arguing and complaining about a shadow of the very body which it had successfully deluded to be identified with it. At last! victory of the identification and the conditioning, albeit a very temporary one. but the fruits of such a dis-identification are very high indeed.


and so i have been shadow-wall-gazing for sometime today, and i feel its a great exercise to attain stillness , especially when the mind is very very restless.

The following series was after long hours of felt oneness with being. Such a state arises when one is able to quieten the mind and starts observing the observer. Such stillness gives rise to a deep under current of peace , which opens the channels of being to creatively influence the thoughts. in short, No thoughts = the state of stillness;


These posts are a direct result of such stillness, and therefore contain much more that what you merely see as words. Some thing like 'Reality reading' like in the Zen tradition is whats needed to read and assimilate works of Stillness. Read the following sentence thrice. The brief gap between the paragraphs are not there just to make the blog posts look organized, it is there for you to break free from the voice in your head and pay close attention to the brief period of stillness that can arise. It is only in those brief periods that the true meaning of these paragraphs become "realized".