The elusive Bird of Joy!

My dear Syamala
Neither zero possessions nor too much of them can be a source of happiness. Each causes unhappiness for different reasons. That brings us to the question about the exact quantity that can make us happy. Once Gandhiji said, “There are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” A loaf of bread can make him instantly happy but once his hunger is satiated, his happiness will expand its frontiers of need. I cannot sum up the quest for happiness than he did in the following words, “Happiness, the goal to which we all are striving is reached by endeavoring to make the lives of others happy, and if by renouncing the luxuries of life we can lighten the burdens of others.... surely the simplification of our wants is a thing greatly to be desired! And so, if instead of supposing that we must become hermits and dwellers in caves in order to practice simplicity, we set about simplifying our affairs, each according to his own convictions and opportunity, much good will result and the simple life will at once be established.”

Why do we talk of these things like life and death here? In the beautiful words of St.Thomas Aquinas, ‘It is necessary for the perfection of human society that there should be men who devote themselves to contemplation’. Society, all the time seeks to condition the individual. Mystics, by their experience, teach us the methods to de-condition. Our own discussions help us to achieve this purpose in a small way. Life is certainly worth living but at what cost? Let us rephrase the question. Is life worth living at whatever cost? A life that is worth living should also be a worthy life. A worthless life serves no purpose either to the liver or to others. Yes, I have read The Bet and consider it as very profound.

The frustration that Osho speaks about is not the one that is caused by all our aspirations remaining unfulfilled. On the contrary he is talking about the vacuum in our heart even after all our aspirations are achieved which in turn frustrates us. It is not the frustration of the mind but of the heart. It is a very common sight in highly affluent Jain families to come across a young girl giving up everything and taking up a life of total renunciation. I am always puzzled and disturbed by this phenomenon. We spend all our life in pursuit of material-related happiness only to be jolted into reality by such acts of renunciation!

Sri

 

Dear Manju
Absolute or total happiness has not been defined by anyone with any degree of success or accuracy. So I have no answer for the question on who could be happier, the shirtless or the one whose wardrobe is bursting at the seams. If happiness is not subjective, how can there be any discussion on it? At least for ramblers like me, there is nothing called objectivity. I just take different subjects and analyse them until the last of the homing birds makes it safely to its allotted tree!

It is the kind of frustration that Osho talks about that made Pattinathar renounce everything, all his riches, wife et al, when he realized that even an eyeless needle would not accompany him in the final journey. He had that vision to develop it into a philosophy when he was given an eyeless needle. I just throw it and buy a new one! Now don’t tell me that if an eyeless needle is sufficient to make one a Saint, then every tailor from Annaji Rao to Chinnaji Rao in Pycrofts Road would be a Saint. This is again subjective.

The dialogue between King Janaka and Ashtavakra is one of the many gems of our scriptures. This is learning through a series of negation of what we believe and take us to point zero where the Awakening comes. The most important point in this episode is Janaka’s humility and readiness to stand corrected. Without this, no learning will be possible at all. Compare this to our present mindset of materialism that makes the realization of the Ultimate Truth highly elusive and gets us more and more entangled in the mire of Maya.

I say this stanza of Annapoornashtakam before I do the Pariseshanam. In the initial stages, I used to wonder about the need for making a submission for jnana and vairagya to Annapoorani. My mum used to tell me that vairagya should start with food. Eating only Satvic food needs Vairagya and only if we succeed in it, we can hope for any jnana! The staple diet of Paramacharya was bitter gourd!
Sri

 

Thank you Malathi for the nice word of appreciation. This quote is not mine though but I can assure you if Ms.Charlotte had not uttered it, I would have sooner or later!
Sri

 

My dear Viswa
Sorry for this delay in replying to your FB.
That’s a very profound statement you have made! ‘If the cause of my birth is the Grace of the happy Lord who wished to reduce the burden of all my bad actions of the past..’ explains the cause of our being here to a nicety. I recall the words of Jalaluddin Rumi:

I died a mineral and became a plant
I died a plant and rose an animal
I died an animal and I was man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as man, to soar
With the blessed angels; but even from angelhood
I must pass on. All except God perishes.
When I have sacrificed my angel soul,
I shall become that which no mind ever conceived.
O, let me not exist! For Non-Existence proclaims,
‘To Him we shall return’

I like your explanation of the P/E ratio for our conduct through our life. In the preceding FB from Manjureddy, we have discussed the dialogue between King Janaka and Ashtavakra which is an amazing piece of learning. Emperor Asoka’s transformation after the Kalinga War followed a similar contemplation by which Asoka realized that these victories ultimately meant nothing. A tale about Alexander’s expressed wish for his final journey also exemplifies this awakening. That we own nothing, not even our body is simply the truth.

Talking of birth and death, whatever all the highly evolved souls have said all amount to the same thing. Two years before his death, Tolstoy wrote a letter that is worth quoting:
‘Now, our whole life from birth to death, with all its dreams, is it not in turn also a dream? Which we take as the real life, the reality of which we do not doubt, only because we do know the other, more real life? Our life is one of the dreams of a non-real life, and so it is, endlessly, until the very best one, the very real life-the life of God!’

‘If our core is already Blissful, what is it that we are searching outside?’ A very apt lead for healthy meditation! Kannadasan has summed up this beautifully in a song in Thiruvarutchelvar with a profound question, ‘Irukkum idathai vittu illatha idam thedi, engengo alaikindrar’
Sri

 

Dear Kamla
There are better methods of showing displeasure than merely frowning upon someone who incurs our displeasure even if it is carefully cultivated. I have even compiled a whole book on how women react in different circumstances based on my experience spanning over 65 years, my first experience being the facing of the ire of my peer living next door with a single plait and a perpetually running nose. I remember vividly the cause of her anger and irritation but till this day, I am of the view she over-reacted. All I did was referring her running nose to a ‘Jeeva Nadhi’! Since then there have been several instances of my saying wrong things at the right time or right things said at wrong time but women always took offence and reacted sharply. Frowning is perhaps the way with sophisticated women like you but coming from the hard core area of Madras where women are more used to stripping you of your large and small intestines and wearing them like a garland, I consider frowning as a weak substitute!

I am not afraid of old age because I have already achieved that honour but I am certainly weary of the nuisance value of senility. The main nuisance value is that we develop a tendency to start delivering spiritual lectures at the drop of a hat. It is not the fear of old age but the need to act according to our age that makes us do it. At this age, all our medication that slows down our metabolism makes us more detached from all worldly pleasures than any degree of meditation.

Do you think that practicing detachment amounts to escapism? Maybe you have a point there. I never looked at it in that angle. You probably imply that people who revel in material attachments resort to a show of detachment to establish that they are not what we think they are. Yes, there are several people like that all over the world who make the pursuit of the lofty goals of spiritualism a total farce. And the fact that most of such people belong to the affluent category probably made the Lord declare ‘it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’
Sri

 

My dear OJ
It is not often that I get two FBs to a single thread in a vastly different tone, one comical and the other serious. It is like the display of facial masks signifying joy and sorrow! But rest assured that both your FBs gave me immense joy and satisfaction and I have decided to give separate FBs to both.

To tell you the truth, when I made this expose about the real intentions of Brahaspathi, I too was assailed by similar doubts. I thought that he was certainly a bad tactician in selecting this as a way to contain the menace of the asuras but there was nothing much I could do about it as he had already gone on record with his plans. He was obviously doing what we in South describe as touching the nose by taking the hand around the head! My hearing problem becomes chronic only when my wife seeks to give me some errand to do. When writing about guys like Brahaspathi, one cannot afford to commit any faux pas. That’s the reason why I took so long to bring it in black and white in IL. I cross-checked and double checked with both the friends and foes of Brihaspathi and then only decided to talk about it here.

I knew that your suspicions were triggered by all the topics listed under mine and you probably found a sinister link there. You wanted to don the role of Shamu to see if you could save Brahaspathi from the blushes. I cannot say if you wanted to do this because you had a soft corner for B’pathi or it is in the nature of investigative journalism but I have learned a very valuable lesson from this exercise. One has to be very careful in choosing a title of his snippet. If we are a bit careless there, it can take you anywhere from detective Shamu to the ideal short eats for watching a cricket match! That’s where your experience shows. You title it ‘Metamorphosis’ and IL is stumped. The software ran all over the domain to find something even remotely matching it and came back with its head hanging down in shame. As a face saving gesture, it showed another ‘Metamorphosis’ written some three years back! No Shamus, no recipes, nothing at all!
Sri

 

My dear OJ
I cannot say if I like this serious contemplation more than your previous light-hearted version. Honestly the first one coming with your irrepressible humour gave me greater joy which is what we are all trying to achieve through these discussions.

I can readily relate to your experience of being away from your family without a phone. In fact, this would have been the experience of all those who lived through phoneless and ‘phoneful’ days. At the time when trunk calls (God knows why they were called so when more often than not they ended up as truncated calls!) were the only source to get in touch with your family even if you lived just 50 kms away from them, my wife lived in Chennai with our two daughters and I was loafing around the whole of North India in pursuance of some rubbish of a duty that SBI selected me for carrying out. It involved continuous touring for four long years 50% of which I spent in interior Bengal in such places as Bongaon, Alipurduar, Changrabandha, Boinchee, Islampur and Memari! We had STD facility in some of these places and in other places we had something called ‘Demand Call Facility’. You dial a number, 842424 it used to be then, and give them the number you want to speak to. They would connect you to your number as you waited on the line. In my case, it was my maid servant who would answer the call to say ‘Madam has gone out with the kids!’

You are quite right. We accepted our fate silently then but now we tend to lose our cool despite so many alternatives being available. It was a problem scarcity then and now it is the problem of plenty. Both make us unhappy! Technological advances and the associated material gains do not mean a thing in causing happiness. Communications have reached the speed of light thanks to all these awesome technology but the romance inherent in them is completely lost. There is a lot of difference between waiting for a letter and waiting for a SMS message. The immortal story of Pheidippides running all the way from Marathon to Athens to convey the news of the victory of Greece over the Persians and laying down his life due to exhaustion is etched in history. Jawaharlal Nehru’s letters to his daughter Priyadarshini have become a memorable part of Indian history. Had Nehru belted all these messages from his laptop, only Google would have been the beneficiary and not humanity in general.

Yudhishtira is one of the most enigmatic characters of Indian mythology. On one hand, he displays superhuman wisdom in his final journey particularly when answering Dharma but on the other hand, he goes and wages everything on a game of dice with a man who is known for his cunning. When he wages his wife and loses her too, Bhima chides him ‘You went too far when you offered Draupathi as a stake’ and Draupathi snarls, ‘Who stakes his wife in a dice game? Go back and ask him who he staked first, himself or me? Report to me!’ No one is able to answer her question. The entire assembly is uncomfortable with this question and Yudhishtira is silent with his head bent in great shame.

Who is not attracted towards material possessions? Some of the Avatars of Vishnu were necessitated to protect Indra’s wealth and fame! Material needs can never get satisfied fully. As you have rightly pointed out, when one gets satisfied, a bigger one rises up! They come one after another like waves in an ocean. Our desires make us all beggars. A person who begs for a billion dollar considers himself superior to a beggar in the street begging for food. How absurdly illogical this is!
Sri