I am about to judge a blogging competition, and in the spirit of fairness I thought it is a good idea for the judge to walk the blog space awhile in the shoes of the judged. So I am regaining the joy of whimsical unedited writing, under the pretext of getting a fresh taste of the blog pill, my last tryst with blogging coming from as far as 6 months ago.
This blog post is inspired from overheard bits of papa's phone conversation about meditation - Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's (SSRS)The Art of Living way of meditation, to be precise. A relative had called him seeking advice and information about SSRS's cult, and my dad, in the course of relating his experiences at and after the three week-long meditation courses he had undertaken, dropped some mull-worthy bytes for me when I was already chewing epiphanies of my own since last night.
Papa said that even though he had enjoyed the buzz of blankness and calmness which this meditation had indeed effectively helped him experience mentally, the part that ticked him off was where the people associated with the organisation started behaving like a zen-addicted sect that owed the soundness of every breath they took to the blessings of Guruji (SSRS). "Jaigurudev!" (which is signature SSRS-club greeting) they'd say, and then gleefully launch into an "Oh look you were able to find yourself a parking spot at the centre on a Sunday! It is all Guruji's blessing!", recollected Papa, confessing to me later of wondering at that point if Gurudev himself would have been able to find himself a parking spot each time on a Sunday with the power of all his blessings?!?
We, me and Papa, do not discount the bliss arising from the sense of a guiding power over your head that gives you the confidence to calmly solve problems in your life. Even as I wrote this, a friend messaged me saying how a series of kitchen accidents that subsumed my morning today were a result of my thoughts being elsewhere. Reading that message I desperately wished to achieve a more stable state of existence than that!
But, Papa and I are wary of an addiction to such a stable state's quest itself. An addiction that makes us obsessively do everything SSRS tells us to do to realize the zen-like effect we end up being so addicted to. So, for instance, SSRS tells us that to successfully achieve complete inner calm we must do all of this - meditate for 20 minutes in the morning on an empty stomach everyday and visit the meditation centre every Sunday for the longer routine, regularly volunteer in the organisation of Art of Living (AOL) events, and donate resources and time for AOL sponsored social projects. A manic zeal to achieve all these goals at any cost, regardless of a greater demand for our time and resource coming from significant work and people around us, becomes the new peace-and-calm robbing source in our lives.
Again, I am not against making a sincere effort to achieve goodness in our lives. We must. But, attachment to goodness.. that is a sure-shot repellent for me. Papa has been maintaining a safe distance from a lot of the "recommended practices" of AOL for about six months now.. he said the aggressive whiz of it all makes him sometimes fear if he is being sucked into the "whirlpool of the mad (making him AS mad, by implication)", which is when he likes to take a step backward.
What would I like to take a step backward from? Last night I was mulling one such goodness the latest professional development in my life exposes me to. Popular recognition. "Trending" is the twitter term for it, I learn in my increasing consciousness to this and other social media tools - amplifiers to your voice box and to the voices in your head! Choosing journalism as a career, doesn't let me get addicted to making piles of money, for obvious reasons, consequently letting me focus all my energies on winning Name'N'fame!
Also, the cut for name and fame has undergone a remarkable alteration since I checked last. "Twitter has changed the definition of a celebrity", someone commented at a gathering the other day as he committed to another guest that he'll "follow" her! So on twitter I hang around in the company of fellow journalists who find a compulsive need to tweet the drop of a hat, especially when the hat dropped is a Yves Saint Laurent worn to an illuminati gathering they are exclusively covering! And though, I am likely not to post this piece of pleasure documentation on to twitter, I do flip-flop with the decision for more than a passing second.
I justify posting it up, telling myself that it educates readers about an important conclusion I drew about life, when the truth really is that it entertains me more than my readers, and knowing of its outreach to readers is also more about the hedonistic pleasure of being read, rather than about the satisfaction of fulfilling the social purpose of educating anyone! Ah, ironies!
Now the thing that is irksome about hedonistic attachment to any goodness, be it meditative states, money, fame or anything else, is that life becomes a roller coaster of diabolically erratic ups and downs henceforth. Because success is a relative measure. No amount of goodness will ever be enough once you're attached to it, and no goodness, like everything else in this world, is permanent. When the temporary goes away, it is the attached who is crestfallen, while it is the oblivious who picks up the pieces and carries on without damage. My examples about tweeting journalists and writers are obviously the tip of the iceberg, and the extreme thirst for fame knows no bounds.
But then, We the Mango People... we, and not a Mother Teresa or a Florence Nightingale or a Mahatma Gandhi.. we choose our career paths according to the life-goodness we individually crave most for,some crave money, others power, and some name-recognition. A lot of us try and imbibe the school-blackboard quotation, "make your hobby your career and you will never have to work a single day", into our lives and make earn a living out of the art we love contributing to. But our ambitions with that art.... again, guided by either money-thirst, power-thirst, or fame-thirst... combined with a partial sense of social responsibility in a lot many cases, BUT never free from the thirst!
Therefore, being sucked in by either, sometimes a combination of more than one, goodness-evil is but inevitable, if one is at all ambitious.
This blog post is inspired from overheard bits of papa's phone conversation about meditation - Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's (SSRS)The Art of Living way of meditation, to be precise. A relative had called him seeking advice and information about SSRS's cult, and my dad, in the course of relating his experiences at and after the three week-long meditation courses he had undertaken, dropped some mull-worthy bytes for me when I was already chewing epiphanies of my own since last night.
Papa said that even though he had enjoyed the buzz of blankness and calmness which this meditation had indeed effectively helped him experience mentally, the part that ticked him off was where the people associated with the organisation started behaving like a zen-addicted sect that owed the soundness of every breath they took to the blessings of Guruji (SSRS). "Jaigurudev!" (which is signature SSRS-club greeting) they'd say, and then gleefully launch into an "Oh look you were able to find yourself a parking spot at the centre on a Sunday! It is all Guruji's blessing!", recollected Papa, confessing to me later of wondering at that point if Gurudev himself would have been able to find himself a parking spot each time on a Sunday with the power of all his blessings?!?
We, me and Papa, do not discount the bliss arising from the sense of a guiding power over your head that gives you the confidence to calmly solve problems in your life. Even as I wrote this, a friend messaged me saying how a series of kitchen accidents that subsumed my morning today were a result of my thoughts being elsewhere. Reading that message I desperately wished to achieve a more stable state of existence than that!
But, Papa and I are wary of an addiction to such a stable state's quest itself. An addiction that makes us obsessively do everything SSRS tells us to do to realize the zen-like effect we end up being so addicted to. So, for instance, SSRS tells us that to successfully achieve complete inner calm we must do all of this - meditate for 20 minutes in the morning on an empty stomach everyday and visit the meditation centre every Sunday for the longer routine, regularly volunteer in the organisation of Art of Living (AOL) events, and donate resources and time for AOL sponsored social projects. A manic zeal to achieve all these goals at any cost, regardless of a greater demand for our time and resource coming from significant work and people around us, becomes the new peace-and-calm robbing source in our lives.
Again, I am not against making a sincere effort to achieve goodness in our lives. We must. But, attachment to goodness.. that is a sure-shot repellent for me. Papa has been maintaining a safe distance from a lot of the "recommended practices" of AOL for about six months now.. he said the aggressive whiz of it all makes him sometimes fear if he is being sucked into the "whirlpool of the mad (making him AS mad, by implication)", which is when he likes to take a step backward.
What would I like to take a step backward from? Last night I was mulling one such goodness the latest professional development in my life exposes me to. Popular recognition. "Trending" is the twitter term for it, I learn in my increasing consciousness to this and other social media tools - amplifiers to your voice box and to the voices in your head! Choosing journalism as a career, doesn't let me get addicted to making piles of money, for obvious reasons, consequently letting me focus all my energies on winning Name'N'fame!
Also, the cut for name and fame has undergone a remarkable alteration since I checked last. "Twitter has changed the definition of a celebrity", someone commented at a gathering the other day as he committed to another guest that he'll "follow" her! So on twitter I hang around in the company of fellow journalists who find a compulsive need to tweet the drop of a hat, especially when the hat dropped is a Yves Saint Laurent worn to an illuminati gathering they are exclusively covering! And though, I am likely not to post this piece of pleasure documentation on to twitter, I do flip-flop with the decision for more than a passing second.
I justify posting it up, telling myself that it educates readers about an important conclusion I drew about life, when the truth really is that it entertains me more than my readers, and knowing of its outreach to readers is also more about the hedonistic pleasure of being read, rather than about the satisfaction of fulfilling the social purpose of educating anyone! Ah, ironies!
Now the thing that is irksome about hedonistic attachment to any goodness, be it meditative states, money, fame or anything else, is that life becomes a roller coaster of diabolically erratic ups and downs henceforth. Because success is a relative measure. No amount of goodness will ever be enough once you're attached to it, and no goodness, like everything else in this world, is permanent. When the temporary goes away, it is the attached who is crestfallen, while it is the oblivious who picks up the pieces and carries on without damage. My examples about tweeting journalists and writers are obviously the tip of the iceberg, and the extreme thirst for fame knows no bounds.
But then, We the Mango People... we, and not a Mother Teresa or a Florence Nightingale or a Mahatma Gandhi.. we choose our career paths according to the life-goodness we individually crave most for,some crave money, others power, and some name-recognition. A lot of us try and imbibe the school-blackboard quotation, "make your hobby your career and you will never have to work a single day", into our lives and make earn a living out of the art we love contributing to. But our ambitions with that art.... again, guided by either money-thirst, power-thirst, or fame-thirst... combined with a partial sense of social responsibility in a lot many cases, BUT never free from the thirst!
Therefore, being sucked in by either, sometimes a combination of more than one, goodness-evil is but inevitable, if one is at all ambitious.
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