The year for me seems to have travelled from September 2015
to September 2016. Given the way my mind works – that doesn’t seem off or
abnormal but it does seem queer even to me that the mind can create odd realities
of its own. Or does it? The past month feels like it has been an interim
period. It feels like it was a this-worldly bardo during Durga Pujo: a
period of introspecting, looking back, understanding or trying to understand; a
period of looking at what I did wrong or what I can do right in the coming round, reconnoitering the possibilities out-there and a period of
praying for a mind expansion which makes the universe conspire to work with me.
I can’t say that this bardo has been as grand as the one in winter 2010-2011
before it blew up partly in my face or the one in winter-spring 2002 that
turned out to be a dream within greyness and opened into a golden experience by Fall or a
couple of other ones…; of course all my past bardos, I can see led to one final
point of realisation. This was a particularly non-hallucinating
bardo for the most part with a few streaks of unmistakable colour and very quiet
bits of insight in between the lonely pits and dungeons. But I was expecting
the state back in the middle of the year, so this time, at least, I can’t say
it was unexpected.
I have no 5 minute miracle wand. Deluded or not – I am convinced
I have my failsafe guide. What is to be? The old year feels like it is over. I
have memories I cherish – a few of which I even wrote about on the blog – ones
that I wouldn’t give up, including a burst of workshops in Spring, warm
conversations in the external world, which made me feel that all was becoming right
in my world and even while the scratching fingers, inside my mind, showed me an
empty expanse in terms of workshops for the future months. My scratching fingers are not always right
in predicting gloomy futures but in this one they were right, which doesn’t make me
feel any better. I had been travelling a fair bit through the year but that
simmered down when the organisation with which I work on projects started going
through changes of its own. But there were still times of delight post Spring
and despite the scratchy fingers too which made me believe that maybe I wasn’t
born to endless night – some of those times now feel like they happened to
somebody else.
In the age of the internet, it is true that one will find an
answer to any question that one might type into the google box or about a topic
of interest. Pupu said, among other things, that there’s a movie liner which
says, ‘you can find anything from how to make a baby to how to make a bomb,
on-line’. Whether the answer is likely to satisfy one or makes sense or proves
to be useful in some form or manner is another question. I would be the last
person to be against the internet, email, blogger and even youtube, for which I
have my own reasons. On the other hand, I am quite firmly with the Dalai Lama
on the fact that we have more and more marvelous means of communication but
have nothing meaningful to communicate. Where there is meaningful
communication, however, the internet has been a boon for the likes of me who
neither have the ability to go gaga over every new bit of technology for
communication that comes into town nor wish to go back to the time of carrier
pigeons. I remember a few of the scenes from the film ‘Mona Lisa Smile’; one of
them being a young woman who is desperately trying to be happy by showing off
her husband’s novel purchases of which she is the proud owner – a washing
machine and dryer. Now it has become phones, apps, the social media…and more
and more gadgets and selfies.
The only reason I catapulted and bought a smartphone this
year was because my best friend first coaxed me, goaded me and then when I
still gave excuses and reasons – he threatened to buy me one. It is a useful
gadget certainly; it helps me find the way through this city to places I have
never been and it has helped me earlier on in the year to get to places in
unfamiliar cities for appointments or meetings. It helped me book an Ola cab
too, in July, on one marvellous morning. A week ago, I told somebody that she could
check the projected fare ride for Ola on her phone and she called me ‘tech
savvy’! I even bought and got an A/C fixed this year. I sometimes look at it
happily, being reminded of some particularly fine memories or sometimes glare
at it – poor thing – while grumbling (and for an utterly bizarre reason).
I have never been a Marxist and I’m almost grinning as I
write this but my point is that with my views well and truly beaten and
tempered, I can well see that there is nothing inherently bad or wrong in
technology or in making money or even shopping for material items or discarding
old technologies for the new but it goes back to why one is involved in the
same. I don’t think my views about this nugget have changed in the last 14
years. But Fimh says a ‘haha’ to me and I have to shake my head for I am
reminded of my batty beliefs from some years ago: imagining that the knowledge
of the presence of the reality of thought-communion at a worldwide scale would
usher in a new age of consciousness.
I have been on the net more often over these last couple of
months and especially during the long Pujo break, thanks to Suvro da who
insisted I get broadband cable instead of using a ‘silly’ dongle. And it’s not
been a waste at all, I think, despite my inner and often adamant railings and
even plain mute wonderings against and about the obsession over technological
marvels in our present-day world. I even managed to have two consecutive Skype
chats and not with my imaginary friend for one thing – and all because I got
broadband cable. Normally, I was reflecting, my net habits had stayed more or
less the same (with all factors remaining constant? – which they didn’t)
through a decade. Along with my daily ritual and sometimes regular and
sometimes not-regular communication over the net, I watched movies and read
on-line in the US when I could afford to and now I have watched some TV series,
longish youtube videos, read all kinds of stuff on self, creativity, sexuality,
mindfulness, memory, meditation, self-hypnosis, karma, past-life regression and
stock market trading, and I got hooked onto yoga and pilates all over again via
some youtube videos and stuck to a daily mixed ritual of my own. The yoga has
not done the good like it did in expanding my mind one Spring quite some Springs ago and all of a sudden when
I needed it badly. It even led to receiving a clear sign from the external
world. Back then I practiced from what is called a book and had attended a few
classes with a matter-of-fact teacher who told me that I should practice on my
own and she told me quite firmly that I didn’t need to come to the class. This
time, I’m hoping that the yoga is at least benefitting my body if in some
invisible way but the mind expansion and the ‘lighter feeling of being’ that I
was looking for and even looking forward to have not transpired as yet – sadly
enough. But then I did still receive the sign - so there's something to smile widely over, for now!
I have been thinking too, recently, that by certain individuals,
people and communities I would be seen as a crackpot or an insane woman or at
best sick or obsessed or useless. Strangely enough, I don’t think I had ever
processed this bit. I have certainly been called all those things at various
points in my life, and not always without reason and not always by people I
don’t care about (Come to think of it, in an earlier age I might have even be
seen as a witch, I guess, which seems more interesting in a way; I certainly
have some of the right attributes for being branded as one!) But I would not
argue against the names or the same because the individual calling me the same
has not always been wrong. I have not been entirely right – which would have
made me a marvelous messiah, of sorts, by now, or at least, gloriously
successful by worldly standards or something else. The years I have gone
through across the past 20 years weren’t always productive and they haven’t
always been beautiful and enchanting and while I am sure that I have gathered riches
beyond compare – from worldly standards, I do come across as rather poor and/or
abnormal…
Before I start counting or recounting my experiences here –
let me move over to a few other matters. While practicing some very good yoga
videos, I noticed with a wry raise of an eyebrow and an inner grumbling that all
the best yoga videos are made by North Americans. Why is that? Also, I noticed
that for every general self-help video or random article which supports a point
of view – there is always another which espouses the opposite. The opposed
voices on the net do not all come from the same source, and they don’t belong
to one who takes count of the ‘fluid many-sided nature of reality’, and so I wasn’t
expecting any miracles. But I wanted to see what was out-there, for multiple
reasons. If someone is talking about the importance of clear goals, another
person will say that it’s not goals but the ‘systems’ (process) which are (is) important.
For someone who says ‘follow your passion’, someone else will say ‘find
something to do which is socially worthwhile’ or ‘find your market’ or ‘create
a demand’. If someone says ‘you are what you think’, there will be someone who
says, ‘you are not your thoughts’. For someone who says, you are powerful and can
accomplish anything you set your mind to, there will be a cautionary voice piping
in saying you must accept certain conditions for what they are, and a voice of
some psychiatrist saying that to think that you are powerful and to believe that you can do something great could actually mean you have bi-polar disorder. For
the very reasonable voice which says, ‘do not let anyone else define who you are’,
there will be voices in unison saying that success, happiness and bliss can
never be experienced alone. For someone who sings, that there is always visible beauty and love around
us in the external everyday world, there will be someone – meaning my own self
saying ‘gah’. For someone who says ‘stick on’ because that’s the only way to
accomplish something even if things don’t work the way you want or wish them
to, there will be yet another reasonable voice saying that there is nothing
good about a flat period of rejection and failure – so, ‘move on’. For someone
who says let go of all desires, there will be someone who says that desires –
all desires – make us human while The Buddha's voice rings around my ears with his, ‘desire leads to suffering’ and my Fimh, many years ago, pointed out to me that the very 'root of life is in desire'.
For a Dumbledore who says, “Of course it’s happening in your head, but why on
earth should that mean it’s not real?’ – but let me stop right there.
I could go on with the list of opposed ideas that I have
found on the net just across the last month and more, and it can be confusing –
even if they don’t necessarily sound wrong or absurd or silly all the time. It
reminded me of Eliot’s bit on the wisdom we have lost in knowledge and the
knowledge we have lost in information and that was quite some time ago. It also
provided me with objective proof that I’m certainly not ‘la-la, gushy-mushy’
biased when I am biased or ‘obsessed’. Personally, I think while remembering
what one has read and/or heard or seen and felt – one has to judge the context
of where one is placed, look at one’s own experiences, examine one’s own motives
and consider the significance of what one is intent on achieving and pray a
prayer. I have never seen anything noble or glorious about being a failure. From
the perspective of plain reason, I can quietly accept that the joys, delight,
bliss, adventure and perfect experiences that life potentially offers will not
be granted to a single human life (maybe that’s why imagination and the inner
world become over-active and one’s Fimh speaks?) and maybe many questions are
answered in the hereafter and many unspoken of joys are experienced there too –
but the intention in this world is to win in some crucial rounds and on very clear
grounds, after beating certain odds which seem unfathomable and inscrutable. To
me, it almost feels sometimes as though God is playing a bizarre prank – but then
I cannot believe that God would play a malicious prank…
Occasionally, I find myself loudly arguing over
Shakespeare’s bit about nothing being good or bad – only thinking makes it so.
Yet Rumi’s line about meeting in a field beyond ideas of rightdoing and
wrongdoing also strikes a chord somewhere deep down.
