Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once

The heat is on, it is getting to me. The heat is fatal. Now to think about, last few days have been rather complicated. When there is too much on the plate, you never know where to start and with what, too much to do and just not knowing where to start and with what and when you do start there is that continued feel of all the other that needs to be done. So it all ends up in a fix.

A few days back, a girl came to me crying and opened up her past for me. A very strong willed girl I must say. She and her very good friend were out on a drive, things were fine they were talking, having some beers and discussing life. They stopped at a couple of places had food at a restaurant things were fine. In the evening before dropping her, the guy came close to her kissed her on. It was nice, both felt something very strong. After some days they met and this continued and they got a little more intimate. The guy fell in love with the girl. While the girl still liked him as a friend. Even after thinking a lot the girl wasn’t able to think of him as someone more than a friend. Thinking she would hurt the guy more, she started ignoring him and the guy started thinking that the girl used him. She tried to tell him, make him understand but he wouldn’t listen. I don’t blame him, he loved her. The girl tried to go back to the good friends they were, but things were not the same. Slowly they parted ways. The guy moved on with his life. But the girl still sits there thinking that maybe she used him. She cried and cried, I couldn’t stop thinking about it later. The guy moved on, and so should she I told her. I told her it was past, it was long back.

She was looking for someone to understand her, someone to tell her that she is not a bad person. I hope she felt better after she went home. The question just stayed in my head, how people keep blaming themselves for things happened way in the past and cling to the bad memories more than the good ones.

Maybe after that day even I am thinking too much about the mistakes I did in the past, maybe I m blaming myself unnecessarily. To think about it now, were they really mistakes? No one tries to fail or mess things up on purpose. Each one of us wakes up in the morning, walks out in the world and does the best we can. Understand it is important to take responsibility of your mistakes, but it doesn’t mean you let your past grip you.

I want to ask you all; do u think she is wrong? Do you think she should spend all her life crying about a mistake she did? Do you think we should seize our mistakes and keep feeling guilty it happened?

A bit of fragrance clings to the hand that gives flowers.

Hey this blog is dedicated to my dearest friend divya, coz she is the one waiting for my blog for so long :D. Anyways, this time I will talk about something even I am not too sure of. These are just my views on it, they are quite random and some can even be wrong. It is something that I have learnt from books and long discussions.

Today I am discussing the something I am. Some call it God some call it a chemical reaction or maybe you can call it A or something else. The unknown cannot be taught, it has to be learned. And even when you have learned it, it remains unknown, that’s the beauty of it. God never becomes knowledge, but on a contrary the more you know the more mysterious it becomes. As you come near the centre all certainty is lost, all clinging disappeared. So sometimes we confuse it with that there is no God. But when we actually reach the centre, the seeker within us is lost, the knower has disappeared. When there is no knower how can we reduce the unknown to knowledge?

Saints throughout centuries have asserted that God is ever copious and there is no limit to his grace. While man may get wary of asking, he never gets tired of giving. His treasures are unlimited and there is nothing man desires and cannot get. All men are made alike. They have the same origin. The maker is also one. They are a drop of the same ocean and have the same ultimate end. He is real, eternal. He is everlasting; everything in the universe and universe itself is false. He alone is true.

We sometimes feel that we are being tested. I say it’s a part of ignorance. You can test something that you are not sure of. If God tests you that means he doesn’t know you. But it is not the case. He knows your past, present, future, your strengths and weaknesses. He alone gives you strength. We only test ourselves, because we do not have confidence. We always see God as a fatherly figure watching us somewhere from above. We demand like a child, but when we see God as a child we have no demands. God is the every core of our existence. God clings to you like a baby to his mother until you die. Love it like a mother; take care of it as you do for your kids. Love makes every object come to life. We see the children talking to the moon; they say that the moon smiles to them. As if it expresses its emotions to them. A mere mouse, Mickey mouse, is seen like a living human being but as we grow up some of us start to consider even a living mouse as an object. See the God into everything, even the mouse.

Now, you may ask that why aggressiveness is there or anger in the world if God is watchman to every one? But you may have noticed that they become aggressive when they see u r weak. Everything here belongs to God, just relax and be prepared to go down. If you go down on the floor, you cannot be bought further down. Have faith in him as you are not alone. Don’t surrender as it is what the meek do. Surrender is not an act it’s a state and we can never recreate a state. Jealousy and anger are not the traits of God as he is the only one, the sole creator. He has no one to compete with, no one to look up for. Have the ability to see God in the person sitting next to you. The food we eat is God and the stomach ache we get is also God. Everyone and everything within us and outside, every existent thing is God.

Missing you....

Did it have to be this way?

I saw you the other day

I noticed things that I dint before

it seems I have walked through a different door.

I watched your lips move as I fell into

into a daze, into confuse

did you have any clue?

it must be a path I had to choose

These feelings I must share

each day I feel deeper

that you are the keeper

you are the one I must care

Your wings sore upon me

you should light upon thee

joy that I feel

so before you I kneel

I ask "will you hold my hand and never let go"

the answer I will never know

If you tell me I will forget

but if you show me I will know

to this I owe you a debt

hopefully you wont say no

frog in a well shaft seeing the sky

A blank page has been staring at me for some hours now.

Right now I am tempted to keep away from a lot of things and tempted to get involved in many. It would all seem very exciting and adventurous, but prudence rules and we keep away. The exuberance of youth at times gets one very close to succumbing to temptation. But as you mature it takes on a different shape. Responsibility and understanding keeps one conscious of the fact that this would not be the right thing to do. There are elders to answer to, seniors to respect. What would they say in such circumstances? We need to not just look after ourselves but indeed to look after what they need and feel. As youth we can accomplish everything, precisely because it accepts no past, obeys no future and fears no present.Selfishly at times we do not consider our responsibility, our compulsion to keep the elders involved. We ignore them and ignore many other aspects, eventually to lament later why we did not.

Exposure to the ‘complex’ world is suddenly destroying its almost utopian existence in the years gone by. My appearance may be in keeping with the temperament that a new object that infuses in me, but what does it do for those that fail to accept it and have succumbed. There are many that have given up, resigned from life, abstract, still and allowing it to take over. I would imagine they too live a life. A life they chose according to their standards. But everyone need not follow that. Life does allow one to take off on a tangent. Sometimes it brings a tangential difference. As they say respect is love in plain clothes. Musicians are artists no different from painters and poets. They document our culture, make us think, provoke us and introduce us to new ideas. And the good ones are philosophers.

Strange is it not, that this emotion should manifest itself into such strong feeling. There are times in the daily routine of our lives when we build many thoughts. Discuss and assess them. Write and rewrite them. Correct them for errors and mistakes, readjust them, Para-phrase them again and again, convinced that this is what is final and complete to go out to the rest of the world. These are but personal musings which occupy our mind and our time for a sizeable number of minutes, perhaps hours and then disappear. They were constructs of an idle mind, harmless, inconsequential and bearing nothing more than an incoherent moment in the complex structure of our brain. We need to keep our mind far away from all these vicious thoughts or they run like a Trojan horse on all out thoughts.

On a joyride called her moodswings...(a friend wrote this for me)

Switching in and out of the alpine green and the arctic freeze is something most people can only dream of . and havin experienced both at the same time on
numerous occasions courtesy her, i can be proud of it . she sways in and out of different moods , can be evil or an angel , can be naughty or coy , can be
the closest person or someone who you harldy ever knew . i remember seeing her for the first time , full of shimmer n dat exuberant sparkle in her eyes that
some how gripped my attention . she could make you feel wanted like a peice of her heart , like air she can't breathe without , seal your heart with her
kisses and on other days she would just run away as if you were stalking her . her bruises and hurt have never healed , they somehow keep coming back to her
, switching places , company , fighting her own self she some how cant get over it .
She could sound like an imbecile juvenile , or perhaps on other days shock you with her sense of maturity and worldly knowledge . perfectly affable during
day time and perhaps a curse during the night . what amuses me and grips me towards her in this world full of pretty faces and diverse mind sets is her knack
of going las vegas and tibet @ da same time ( oh yes shes got a spiritual side as well ). she would do anything to bring about joy to a sad face and at times
even a room full of dead people won't bother her . shes your eternal damsel in distress , u believe somehow you can be her prince charming to the rescue but
lo !! she would somehow find her own way back on her feet somehow .

Her cute fantasies of dwelling in a world full of candies and chocloates would make you want to hug her ( if she lets you that is) , and at other times
perhps she would want to walk on the beach with you barefeet . every time i think of her i remember a rather famous poem by emily dickingson which goes like

:

Hope
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

You gasp a gush of breath and wonder how often can she surprise you (warning : her wrath could swipe you off too) . But all you would ever yearn for is to feel her around you and stay happily in love with all that she does...

THE UNBALANCED EQUATION OF LIFE CAN ONLY BE SOLVED BY INTRODUCING THE VARIABLE OF CHANGE

The only thing consistent about the world is its inconsistency. We are all undiscovered geniuses or ignorant fools. Change is the only constant thing that has ever been. It forms the basis of our lives and is inevitable. He who rejects change is the architect of decay. Some changes we welcome with arms wide open and some of them cause tears to stream down our eyes. While we are kids, we play with everyone. Every hand offered to us is genuine and is given to play, no one to envy or to idolize. A little further a telling change awaits; we leave the safe haven of our house and enter school. The first day we are upset, we cry while entering the new place as we unwillingly let go of our mom’s hand all we want to do is to cling to her and never let go. In another one hour we acclimatize and don’t even want to leave that place as every one in the vicinity is called a friend. That’s the day when we realized that home is not the only place to be. And the people you can talk to do not always have to be so big. The first change which we accept with haste and that which turns out to be great. Leaving play school is always difficult but we kind of adjust to it as we want to grow up in a jiffy. The first step in school makes us feel big, tells us that this is the place I will spend 14 years in. Gladly we tell everyone we know, call up all the relatives and tell them that we go to a much bigger school with more students than earlier. Studying is fun, learning is interesting and every person in the class ones again is called a friend except those who eat our lunch when we bring something real tasty and gulp down tang from our bottles. The days we realize everyone is not good, some people just can’t bring their own kurkure and just have to pounce on your pack whenever you open it.

We are all geared up and our car is in full speed when we realize the road also has speed breakers called exams. And the pressure goes on increasing. Parents start scolding and you join the race where everyone wants to win. Friends become competitors, who gets more becomes the saga. Here is the introduction of jealousy and I won’t tell her how much I have covered coz she always tells me she knows nothing but still manages to get a better score than me. Emotions hold us up at all points. The way we perceive them and take decisions make us who we are today. Now we come across changes in people some of them which we can see and some internally. Our body changes, we grow inside as we fight changes outside. But things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly. Now we desire more as our needs grow from emotional to social to sexual. We want to keep pace with the growing trends and new knowledge. We grow everyday and with a blink of an eye the school ends and we are all out in the world where there are more people, more to learn and more dreams to be fulfilled. The wheel of change moves on, and those who were down go up and those who were up go down. The innocence we had kept with us goes away slowly and gradually. We look behind and all we see is people who were ones our best buddies, without whom you couldn’t even imagine your life, busy in their own lives. Competition is cut throat and here as Darwin said it is not the strongest of the species that survive, or the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. So here we are after a lot of fight we enter college, make new friends just to find that they aren’t really your friends they were the ones who spoke behind your back. You get attracted to the opposite sex and the experimental self in you wants to explore more. We term this as love without even knowing what we want. But the difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions. The person you thought you loved wasn’t the right person either. Your friend change again, they are more understanding than the earlier group and you change your opinion which you had about them before and a new bonding is formed. The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind. College ends, three years learning which more than the 14 years spend in school was. Good and bad experiences, people everything has made you wiser. But somehow you feel unhappy about the life you live now. Change has caused this conflict between mind and heart. Before you can even think of solving this conflict you have more entrances, or interviews. And the story goes on……………

We all are reluctant to allow changes in life. Everyone wants a stable and a smooth running life without a lot of ups and downs (a few are ok though). Life in its own journey, presupposes its own change and movement, and one tries to arrest them at one's eternal peril. Even if we don’t like to change but this cycle of life never ends, which also keeps me from thinking that maybe life without change be mind-numbing. The truth is that the only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery. (Oh no the parliament too: P)

the abode of the mind- beyond worldly desires

Saints have blessed this world in every age. Whatever be their country or religion, their message has always been one: to discover God and to seek release from the karmic - cycle of births and deaths. They did not teach with an intent to lay the foundations of new religions, creeds and sects. Creeds and sects breed fervourous passions and fanatical loyalties which invariably lead to quarrels and conflicts, while the essence of the teaching of all saints is love and harmony among the people of the world. While a saint is alive, we listen to his words. But we do not pay heed to them. As soon as he leaves the world, we turn; we turn to rites and rituals and thus completely forget the purpose of his tenets. We begin ones to manipulate his lofty teachings and the truth of his experiences into sects that serve our own ulterior motives, thereby sowing the seeds of discord and disharmony. We do this for selfish reasons and justify them in the name of national honor or prestige of traditional religion. What greater injustice could we do to these great saviours than to misinterpret and narrow down their teachings and freeze them into sects that are based on partial or incorrect versions of their teachings?

All saints tell us that nothing that we see in this world has come into being on itself. Their must be some creator. This creator is the one lord; we remember him with love and devotion by means of a thousands names. He is the supreme object of our search and our spiritual yearning. An electric bulb, however luminescent it may be, can’t light up the room if it is covered with over a dozen layers of thick black cloth. In spite of its light, the room it is in will be in utter darkness. But as we begin to remove the covers, the room will grow brighter and on removal of the last layer it will become brightly lit. The same way our soul begins to leave the company of the mind and to shed its covers, it begins to know itself. That is why it is said that self- realization is essential before god-realization. All our efforts, all our strengths and all techniques we use are directed towards subjugating the mind and withdrawing it to its source at the top of the spiritual region. Every religion has the same aim and lays an equal emphasis on subduing the mind. We try a thousand ways to control the mind. We turn for help to the recital of holy books, to penances, to worship and bathing in the holy rivers, reading scriptures and religious books, giving charity and burning sacred fires. We even leave our homes and go into solitude of forests; we sometimes hide ourselves in mountain caves. Through discipline we try to detach our mind from the desire inducing objects of the world, but because our thoughts do not become attached to something superior, something beyond, our mind reacts and rebounds and comes back into the world with as much strength and cunning as ever. To control our mind with force is like putting a viper in a basket. As long as the basket remains tightly closed, we remain safe from the venom of the viper; but the moment it escapes, it will again bite. Merely putting a viper in the basket cannot free you from fear. There still lays a danger to risk our lives. If instead we catch hold of the viper and remove the poisonous fangs, it will become harmless. Controlling the mind by strict discipline is like covering a live charcoal with ashes; apparently the fire is dead, but when a gust of wind blows, the ashes are scattered and the fire comes alive ones more. In the same way, when the storms of passions arise, the mind goes out of control and runs into impetuous actions with reinforced vigor. Forcible control of the mind may be liked by the police, so as long as the criminal is in the custody we are safe from his misdeeds. But as soon as he gets released, he gets back to his wicked ways. On the other hand if we manage to reform the criminal through persuasion and thereby make him a good human being, we would be set free from his evil deeds forever.

We generally say that the mind is fond of variety. It tries to constantly change when we see or eat the same thing. If we look back at our lives, we find that in our childhood we dearly loved our parents then come siblings, then friends and the cycle went on n still is . So unless the mind gets something higher than worldly love, it will never be ready under any circumstances to give up the pleasures of the world. There is only one way to subdue the mind and that is to give the sweet enchanting taste of the name of god. The sweetness and the magnetic pull of word will remove all its attachments.