Karta: Life-Inspiring Essays On Cognition, Consciousness & Causality by Santosh Jha (book suggestions txt) 📕

The old man could have handled the scene skillfully. Consider the change of the scenario: The old man could have invited the kids to his house and allowed them to have their fill. This certainly would have taken the seemingly sadist joy out of their kiddish adventure and they would have moved to some other pranks.

It could not happen. Rather, all bad things happened. Even when, a small gesture and a small idea could have ensured that all good things could have and should have happened. So sad, so bad…!

This is life for us. We all can do all good things. We have the potential to attain goodness out of any situation. However, our follies and we ensure that we land into all sorts of bad and sad things and negativity. Moreover, usually, we realize when things move away and we have our hands empty. Most do not even realize this simple thing! Sadly, often, wisdom comes to us as a lost opportunity and a posthumous virtue.

We are all born as a huge potential. Science admits that a healthy new born is the ultimate genius of the cosmos as the infant is designed this way. In next few years of the infant’s life however, we all ensure that he learns all stupidities of life!

Sadly, our learning processes take away a major part of our potentials and ensure that we grow up to become otherwise stupid but only culturally genius. We turn the infants as slaves of contemporary popular societal benchmarks as they grow. This suits all cultures and civilizations of all time…

However, we all have a chance to get back to this original genius position, when we grow up and have a maturity stage in life. If after becoming a grown up, we could start an opposite unlearning process, to get rid of the slavery of societal mind; we can hit our potentials. Very few people actually understand the utility of such a process of unlearning. Fewer of them, actually perform it.

There is actually a huge gap between two people – one with a mind being a societal slave and one with a mind freed and liberated after the unlearning mechanism. The unlearning process for an individual is a tough one and only the person himself or herself can opt for it. No amount of persuasion by others could make him or her go for it.

However, one always wishes; there should not be so much of attitude, ingenuity, hypocrisy and sadomasochism when already; the entire being is so brimming with pure affection, intimacy and compassion.

Probably, humanity is still not mature enough to understand and allow the level of pure affection, intimacy and compassion to rule our being and lives. Had it been, there would definitely never have been so much of attitude, ingenuity, hypocrisy and sadomasochism on this beautiful planet.

However, staying optimist is always better. As a poet said, “darkness of night is just a guest, heralding the morning’s inevitable quest!”

Sad it is, not every good thing conforms to the metaphor of inevitability of dawn after night.

Therefore, better it is for individuals to say a final goodbye to all attitude, ingenuity, hypocrisy and sadomasochism, before the finality of life draws its curtain.

**

A Flower’s Wish

THE SUN IS NOT the first to rise up in the morning. Before it wakes up, the breeze gets up and heralds the morning. The pre-dawn breeze wakes up the trees, the birds and those humans who value and cherish the music and fragrance of life…the dance of inner self.

The nature wakes up before the Sun does and nature stirs the potential from slumber. The potential hits the morning alarm bell for all those humans who understand purity and purpose of life.

This is not manifested to all. Those jumping out of the bed on the cacophonous morning alarm of their mobile phones for offices in big cities may not apprehend it.

It is a routine in higher sides of deeper Himalayan mountains, where dawns and pre-dawns are as beautiful a phenomenon as creation of universe. In such unapproachable mountain heights lived a stupendously beautiful and magnanimous flower… her charm was truly magical… she was happy and her happiness made her spread her fragrance to nature’s deepest of bosoms…

One gloomy day, when it was raining incessantly and even birds were running for shelter, the flower became unhappy. She thought : how sad, she may be so beautiful but nobody comes to see her and nobody praises her beauty. She wished she could be seen by humans and be praised by them as she had heard the humans were great lovers.

One day, her dreams came true. Four handsome young boys came trekking and made their camp just where the flower lived. The boys were so thrilled to see her. They lit huge bonfire around her and brought out the bottles of rum and packed food. They drank, danced and made merry…

Within an hour, the flower got burnt by the fire, her fragrance was drowned in the bitter smell of rum and as the boys went to sleep late evening, she found herself dumped within the garbage of half-eaten chicken legs, empty glasses and cartons. Next morning, the boys moved ahead. The birds refused to come to her as she had lost her beauty and fragrance. She was actually stinking…

The flower regretted her wish to see the humans. She prayed god that she be moved to even higher and deeper mountain tracts so that no human could ever see her again…

**

Readiness

THE DAWN was still processing its registry… the birds had though geared up for the day… flowers stirring and looking eastward set to welcome their beloved Sun…. A boy was awake too, marshalling his goats. He could clearly hear him singing in his pastoral best shrieking tone…

He sat by the window of his house watching and enjoying the blank sky. The grey sky would gradually turn crimson and finally golden. The darkness of the sky was what he was enjoying. He had a feeling it would look wonderful as and when dawn would herald its inevitable arrival...

He reminisced and smiled. How many times in his life, he found and cherished loads of purposes. He smiled because he realized how important stupidities of life are... how they extend you the chance to be wise. How people miss the relevance of stupidities as catalyst of wisdom.

He recalled the efforts and pain he had to invest in the preparedness for attaining his purposes at different stages of his life. And look at the brilliance of the conspiracy of almighty; whenever he prepared hard and meticulously for a purpose he wanted to attain, he would invariably fail. He would feel bad, low and frustrated about the wastage of his investments. Most of his successes came when he had done the least preparation and was not even sure of the purpose...

He had finally accepted; preparation and purpose had a strange relationship. He wished to come to terms with the realization that preparation for a purpose is a misnomer. The preparedness is required for something, which is uncertain. His father would often tell him – ‘hope for the best and be prepared for the worst’. He realized it that what is certain and a definite purpose, is what falls in the realm of hope. Preparedness is required for what is uncertain and does not form a purpose. If preparedness and purpose were linear realities, there would have been far more success stories on earth. Success remains as handful exceptions… success has traditionally been referred to as object of desire, hope and dreams. The real world faces the trouble that failures are the rule and most people are least prepared for it….

He realized; one needs to be in the state of ‘readiness’ not for a specific purpose but as life in general. One needs not to ‘prepare’ but to be ‘ready’. Readiness itself is the larger purpose for all preparedness. Preparedness is only a process whereas readiness is the end product; the final destination. The readiness is required not only for failures but also for successes. Handling success is more tedious task than handling failures. Success requires larger readiness.

He smiled as he realized he had attained readiness. When you attain, you go blank. The zero is the highest point of readiness. He thanked the almighty for bestowing upon him a series of crises and loads of stupidities … this journey to zero was necessary. He however prayed that the wisdom of zero remained with him. He wished to continue with his ‘readiness’ and not be part of any ‘preparedness’ in future.

He had realized his stupidity. The road ahead was clear to him. He had gone past the fear factor in his life. And, the readiness, the ultimate and exalted beingness was just beyond the confines of the fear factor. He remembered, how since childhood, he struggled to conquer a series of fears he thought he was born with. He grew up demolishing them but only to realize that he had added more fears than he overpowered.

The existential fears were replaced by fears that society offloaded on him. He grew up accepting so many benchmarks of successes and goodness that his family, his peer group, his seniors, icons and leaders lined up for him to follow. He grew up preparing hard to win all the benchmarks and in time got more apprehensive of failures and loses.

Even successes that came when he expected them the least, made him bury deeper in the abyss of fear. Each success only stretched the benchmarks and prolonged the process of preparedness. The fear never went away; rather it grew up engulfing his beingness totally. He could not understand the elusiveness of the state of readiness; a stage after reaching where he could say he had finally arrived. He could not understand the hydraheadedness of the fear; that no doubt egged him to higher stage of preparedness but never allowed him the basic urge of a lasting satisfaction. He had even started believing that life is a never-ending ‘preparedness-struggle’ for the elusive satisfaction of ‘readiness’……

….. the state of zero, the state of quintessential readiness, the state of unattached consciousness made him realize for the first time what wins all fears. It taught him to rise above the process of preparedness to the ultimate stage of readiness. He truly understood why he felt fearless. When it happens; all good and cherished ideals of humanity fall in your lap, they fill your being. It embodies all goodness – honesty, innocence, transparency, selflessness and egolessness and above all the compassion.

It does the magic…. It makes the willful merger of individualism into the collectivity; the individuality of ‘I’ dissolving into the collectivity of ‘us’. It fills the heart and mind with compassion and when compassion plays the music in the heart, all cherished ideals and goodness of humanity get drawn into the mind. The fear goes away the next moment as this happens. He thanked the almighty for making him understand the fear factor and its dynamics.

Readiness leads you to the door…. the entry point of zero but then, you have to step ahead to be into the zero. Every human being is blessed by the almighty to attain this readiness as all human beings are given at least one chance to experience it. To the blessed ones is revealed the music of compassion…. It leads one to the ultimate empowerment of self – the ability to forgive. When forgiveness becomes the first instinct, it is a sure sign that the stage of readiness has been attained. The forgiveness is attaining the blank, the zero, the ultimate empowerment, the readiness. You accept nothing - no pride, no self, no ego, no ‘I’ and you give everything as you forgive....

**

If I Were Married

To be very honest and, without sounding virtuous or