Letter to a non meditator friend III

Constantly making decisions, we constantly face elimination. Should I eat this, and drop this? Should I listen to this song, this person, this idea? It is all a matter of attaching significance.

Kind of worthwhile to understand this mechanism of significance. Where you place your significance would not come to you automatically, if it does then there is no gap between what you want to do and what you are doing right now, your wishes are your reality, you will and you are able to make the changes easily, without resistance from inside.

How to discover significance in our lives?

Significance is more a matter of creation. Look how you are 'making' your choices. You might be living in a world of ideas but your choices are a good reflection of how much the unconscious is operating its hold. You might believe in good food, see if you grab a tea knowing full well the milk might be adulterated. These operant reflexes, as I call them, will show you, help you discover your significance status by scratching some deeper layers. If you are not exercising when you can and no disability hinders you, you have not attached significance. It is a blessing time is a limitation, you can look through your actions during the day (or month) and come to your larger and inner significance barometer because this limitation sets prorities higher, decides what you actually did.

Start making changes from here.

What kind of changes?

Well, again ironically we know the larger things in this case but miss out the last details and that is where all the action happens. You are reading this mail and still wondering why are you not doing the work you had currently planned ... you are doing something that is ruining your larger plan in a small way.
Observe carefully, these larger changes reside in every moment. Small things, but immediate things. Sometimes implementing is not possible--you can not leave the job right away to start implementing changes, even if you can and will do it in future, you cant change everything suddenly to become the ideal person. Come on, lets accept that :) Now these gaps where we fail to implement are places that rot first. So, if you decided to exercise tomorrow, you made this choice thinking I would perhaps buy breakfast and miss reading the paper if I have to but I will exercise. If you dont then you stock some guilt. You become like a trader, first making a trade between exercise and buying breakfast and then between exercise and an opinion on You.
You know, you stop this trade. Become very clean with yourself. If you plan to wake up for exercise, let that come without trading with something else. Bring it as an intention, strong intention and you see you will get up ... things get easier, not difficult or judgemental--do not let the rot come in, just go on constructing.

In a larger context, do not let a failure in the past, a guilt, or a success affect your intentions or affect the significance you attach to something. No failed relationship should come in form of affecting your underlying actions out of habit. I know a girl who does not wear short sleeves because her ex didnt like them. Let there be no 'carry overs'. Once you do this you will find yourself dropping a lot of things, an old song that haunts you will probably lose its strength, will empty some space in your mind. You would be cleaning a cupboard and stacking fresh significance.

Lv

Letter to a non meditator friend II

Good Morning Gracious



Find time to look at the sky, take a walk.

Mind will wander thinking what to do ...

Bring you mind back and embrace the situation. A lot changes with how we deal with the situation. Not in actions but in perspectives, we can take away all the power a situation may have on our minds just by turning our thoughts.

Think of how things happened to us, we are made to do things that have been unpleasant to us. So much is out of control, for a while let go of the idea of what You did, see how it all happened, how it slipped even as we tried our best to save what we held dear.

And then embrace the situation, we already are deep in it, stop struggling for a while, breathe easy and take a walk.

Sending you love

When we love ...

Love can only mean one thing - love

Love is not mysterious for those loving it

Let me dwell upon what love is not:

Love is not 'touching', not 'feeling', love is not co-incidences, love is not rage, love makes existence gentle

Love does not entice you, love does not lure you, love does not overwhelm, love gives ease

Love is not a rumor, love is not limited, love is not miracle, love is real

Love is not mindless, love is not stupid, love is not cupid, love is not delusion, love is mindfulness

Love is not pleasure, love is not pain, love is not 'want', love is not competition, love is equanimity

Love is not spontaneous for most of us, but then love is not tied not impossible, love is not commited to just 'good', love just is, equally, for all!

When love erupts, it more or less cosumes everything else-all sorrow, all hatred, all bitterness everything vanishes in a surge like that of the waterfalls I saw somewhere in South Africa

Empowering

Just wanted to write that the burden of life becomes easier when you meditate.

Work

To fathom the seriousness of the practice is no easy task. I thought I was serious enough until I was taken to task, to real work. Now, that I see the veil I was under, I find it no surprise that people do not realize the 'seriousness' until they are near death, or withhold some similar strong experience to realize what vaccums we live in. Most people go well past the stage where they can really invest years of hard, focused work on cultivating the insight and faculties required for meditation, without realizing the 'seriousness'.

For one, I know now, meditation (vipassana) is no laid-back, relaxing activity-- I was under that delusion for so long! Like any real job in this world, it requires a through grinding in concepts and correct exercising of technique, just that at times it is much much more difficult because the emotions you might be facing may be as strong as tides in the ocean and at the same time seem intangible. They are Not intangible, just seem to be so, no thought is without significance, and lack of mindfulness and there you go, down in the pits of multiplying sankharas for hours and days on end.

It has been almost a year that I have given up dinner, most days I have gone without food after noon. Lost considerable weight on the boobs and buttocks apart from being weak and thin, frail. This invited a lot of comments from friends and well-wishers. Apparently, even I felt I didnt know my facts so well ... but not for a moment did I doubt about my following the eight precepts. As I lost strength, I knew how strongly physical reality grasped me. What I believed differed from what I 'felt', I noticed how proud I was of my body and how strong the attachment. Taking care of body is one thing, being attached to the point of being deluded is another. Unruly attachment leads to unruly passion, to conducts that risks your happiness, to realise this--one needs to probe these first hand feelings, not indulge one's beliefs that change every now and then. First hand experience surface from such incidents as being hungry and not eating because u have determined t see you reactions, suspending what u 'think' and looking at how you react to physical fabrications first hand, it is only this first-hand experience that gives an opportunity to Work. That is why reading this will not help unless you also practice meditation, it has to come to individual experience, not mental 'belief'.

It is true that the past months I have been taking one early-evening meal, and have regained some of the strength, but I know I have also failed in more ways than one. It wasnt about giving up food, it was about will, releasing greed, releasing ties and compulsions. There were times when I would be busy in the morning ... and during the day, one particular day I came back home from another city and having walked miles was feeling weak and entirely hungry, I delayed taking food until next morning, cultivating even stronger will, stronger that the need for food. This determination has come to my rescue in times of tough decisions and during easy ones, I have been able to preserve discipline, not when it was easy to slip but also in times when it is difficult to slip. I noticed I tend to loose control when I thought Oh! I am in control let me take a bite....when I thought I wasnt giving in to greed I indulged in it!

It was during hostel days that I started thinking about giving up evening meals altogether. Dinners were the best deal of the day ... rich and nutritious. I remember coming back from jog one evening, Asha mam was taking attendance and some girls were sitting around her having dinner, their plates were full of goodies, finger chips, manchurian ... and I felt a strong moment of reflection thus "I have determined to not take dinner, it does not matter what is cooked, I will not react to the food or look at it". Without knowing I had sown a seed that will help my determination during this one year of giving up dinner. In fact, it didnt seem like 'giving up' at all, some time back (one year one month back, when I was still at PGW hostel, Delhi Univeristy) I was yet to discover the joy/pitti. This giving up was not giving up because it was colored by 'joy' rapture of meditation. Being prepared helps, one does not know what lays in the future, investing in mind is true preparation.

Having discovered this joy, away from material pleasure is a relief. I have discovered it only a bit, also now I know that joy that I now experience is also artificial, like cultivated just from will, it is not pure, but yet, I conceptualise the brahma-vihara. It is 'joy' and I notice it, it is as a factor of enlightement, and in no matter what small amount, I shall acknowledge its presence, I acknowledge the presence. Reading Thanissaro Bhikku's "Head and Heart Together" on accesstoinsight.org really helped understanding metta--ignorance sucks, one really needs guidance to come out of igorance. I discovered this site while working at Katha, a resource that gave me guidance and acted as a spiritual companion. I ultimately lost my job as editor at Katha as I used all the time to read the texts on this site. Didnt have a computer at my disposal and didnt have the discretion to buy it from a month's salary, the urgency to read was so great that I read it as soon as I laid my hands on the computer right from the first days at work, work suffered. I was thirsty, Ganges was flowing ...

One strong moment can lead to 10,000 others. Learning itself becomes a swarming tide that engulfs all the broken temporary shackles where the mind is caged. It seems like destruction has met us, that one has to start all over, that giving up a dinner, a job, a passion is unwise for something as abstract as a 'notion of discipline' in med., greed makes us overlook basic precepts, sometimes fear threatens and we give in!

I know I thought I was correct even as I broke some of these rules, cultivating so much harm that it is beyond imagination to fathom the cost I had to bear. Someone not into the practice may think of my opinion of this loss as fear, that I broke the precepts and the loss was as great as I make it out to be, may think I am scared or in misbelief.

However, I am lucky, I see the danger, I have seen the roots, and I have seen how carelessness establishes and feeds on us, destroying all the good we may have done. Usually there is a conviction at the back of the mind--that you are correct--this conviction has to go. *An unskillful mind cant be trusted! That's why complete surrender to the buddha, the dhamma, the sangha.

May I thrust myself with greater force in the practice, a force literally greater than the fear of death, death itself. May I emerge successful.

Replace this conviction with discrimination, replace it with detachment, equanimity, awareness-keep cultivating and practicing to make them stronger.