Risk

Take chances. Don’t play safe games. Life is just about adventure. No matter how much power, prestige, money you achieve with your soft options, you will never be at home with your existence. Real joy will always elude you. Real joy comes when you risk, constantly dive into the darkness where only your heart can show you the way. Yes only heart can show you the way in such darkness because mind is about safe games. Mind cannot be your guide there. People keep doing safe and secure things all through their life and then dream about pleasure. How can pleasure be there when you haven’t given your heart the exercise? The centre of pleasure is not the mind but the heart. Pleasure happens when you are prepared to give up your comfort zones and wander into the darkness like a vagabond. It happens when you feel your fears hitting against your face and yet you move on where your heart takes you. But people want to keep respecting their fears. They are very eager to believe in all logics, theories, reasons, past. And this intellectual stuff can only give you warning signs. ‘This happened in the past. It can again happen,’ that’s what your mind says to you. But heart is just the opposite. It’s something always on a holiday. It needs its food so it tells you to do something that to a mind makes no sense. Mind is simply against all that heart has to say and it tries to prove its point on the basis of very sound looking reasoning. And once you have respected your mind, you have given mind its food and you have become a slave to it. It has got stronger. When it was supposed to be an instrument under your control, you have made it your master. Silently, it will make you do bigger things in the future and you won’t even know. At the same time your heart is deprived of its own food. And if the heart is starving for its food, where can the pleasure, the feeling of health come from because these are not the feelings mind can give you. No way. Heart is the home of love and pleasure. People are really inclined to playing safe games. There are some who spend whole of their life just doing ‘right’ things. Because that’s what our society, religion, parents teach us. Which parent tells its child to involve in something that is unconventional or can lead to failure. I have rarely come across such parents. And they think they are doing some great parenting act leading a child on some well known, secure path. What they do not know is the harm they have done by giving their own fears a space to grow and by infusing in the child the tendency to respect his own fears. They robbed the adventure out of the child’s life and now the child will continue to use his past as a model for his future because mind has got its food, it has strengthened. So the next time a child is supposed to make some decision, these memories will make the decision for him; again a backseat for the heart! Your religion has always been against the pleasure of human being. Understandable too. If every person becomes happy, satisfied with his life, he won’t feel any need for something like religion. The need for the religion arises only for those who are unsatisfied with their lives so they think may be religion can compensate for that loss of pleasure. But how can religion also do that? Religion itself is nothing but a set of Dos and Donts, another curb for the heart. Religion has condemned everything that can give a person the food for the heart or can free a person. And once in a while a person emerges who is free but the masses who are themselves unsatisfied do not want to see this person so free, so happy. So they try their logistics of rules and regulations to somehow knuckle him down. He becomes an apostate, someone not one of them. And then they try him in the court and take their revenge. Society is itself dissatisfied but it doesn’t want someone satisfied with his life to be at ease either. This is what your society is. This is what your religion is. But pleasure has a simple rule. Give food to what gives you pleasure. Open your heart and let it bloom. Let the consequences take care of themselves. Success of failure become meaningless because the heart has got what it wanted.

Go And Ask The Pope, The Pundits If They Ever Could Touch Anyone’s Life

They deliver gospels, chant mantras. They are the greatest heads of their businesses. Go and ask them one simple question: ‘How many lives have you been able to transform?’ And look for the conviction in their words and belief in their eyes.

How much of a change have they really effected? If there really was potency in their words, how could so much unrest in the society emerge? Why an average man cannot find answers to his routine problems? If what they profess in the name of religion has any substance, why is there so much barbarousness in the world? Muslims are fighting the Christians, Christians are up against the so called God’s chosen men- the Jews, Hindus are against the Muslims. And what about the civil war? They have not been able to contain the in-house fighting between the Protestants and the Catholics, between the Shias and the Sunnis either. If their religion really had power, why did we witness Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the two world wars?

They never could because they themselves never fully experienced what they professed; the conviction, therefore, was never going to be there. Unless the conviction in the teacher is there, students obviously will doubt. They will nod, but the nod will always be accompanied with doubts in the head. And if the doubts are there, teachings will never manifest into actions.

And why will the conviction be there? They themselves were same category of students in their time, who had doubts but nodded to not offend their teachers. They are making the present generation do what they did themselves for their teachers. This process has been going for ages. No one of these men is doing anything new. And if any courageous person, once in a while, wishes to object to the established routine, he becomes the enemy of the established system, an infidel.

Their efforts will continue to be abortive because the approach itself is flawed. They are pouring beliefs. No effort is being made to make people reach the truth. They call themselves the preachers of Christ or Mohammad when in fact they are complete antithesis to what those enlightened men said. These enlightened men never asked people to believe. They asked them (people) to doubt, to explore. This was also how they achieved enlightenment. Only doubting can lead one to truth. Belief will always be skin deep. A little scratching and its all out. A little danger and people ask: ‘God, why me?’ This is belief. But experience is paramount. How can you defeat what you come upon? You know that you KNOW.

But the pope, the clerics, the pundits know if everyone sets out on exploration, who will think about them. They will become redundant, jobless. That’s why they are feeding beliefs. They are in a conspiracy to dent the urge of a man to know so that their businesses can blossom; and they have succeeded to a great extent. Otherwise there was no way religions could have survived all these centuries. It’s going on because they have culled the intelligence over a period of time and now it’s almost a norm. Today a child is born and he almost accepts the norms that these shrewd men are trying to feed. Once in a while a Socrates will be born but he will be weeded out. If they don’t get rid of these heretics, their sins will be out. But the more they try to get rid of them, the more they will demonstrate to the masses their own weaknesses, fallacies. No one would ever have known Christ had he not been killed. But the authorities were so anxious to get him out of sight that they killed him. Had they been a little patient, he would well have faded away. And his killing did the damage. It proved Judaism lacked substance. And Christianity was born, yet another system where few men could rule over unintelligent masses in the name of God.

You Don’t Lose Anything When People Don’t Welcome You

Not always will you go and meet someone with a friendly gesture and return befriending the person. I have seen people returning my smile back with a wry reaction. So often you will leave voice mail and wouldn’t hear back the reply. You may have known a person for years but if you see him in the bus or on the roadside, there is ample chance he won’t even smirk at your sight. There will always be times when people won’t ask you to join in their group of friends during a party. You will be upset with such behavior and attitude of people toward you, when on the hindsight you lost nothing. They are the losers. You had everything to give-smiles, love, and friendship. They turned you down and lost all you had on offer. Don’t trouble your mind. Don’t curse yourself. Just move on. See if someone is waiting to receive you with open arms.

Don't Fear Love

People fear falling in love. When you are in love, your ego begins to dissolve. When ego dissolves, you begin to lose your identity. Then you are no more you. You are no more the person world recognizes you as. You are not a doctor, not an engineer. You are not your name. You feel the joy being in love, but can’t relinquish the pleasure of sticking to your ego. You lose the feeling of ascendancy over your lover even!. Once you know you are no more what you always thought yourself to be, you feel helpless, butchered. To make love with purity demands courage. I say courage because then you step into some unknown territory. And anything new and unknown always gives you shivers. It brings uncertainties. This world has made us habitual of surviving on the known. That’s why staying in the known gives you comfort. ‘Do this’, ‘Don’t do that’… this is what we are fed on. All religious scriptures and texts are nothing but compendiums of dos and don’ts. Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna never gave people dogmas. They came and gave their love. And that love had to be experienced. Later generation did nothing but turned their love into beliefs. That’s the reason religion failed. Otherwise how do you imagine a world full of religions still being irreligious? To love you have to face the challenge of stepping into the unknown. You have to embrace the uncertainties. You have to be adventurous. It will strip you of your ego but only then will you see your real self. Not before that.

Be Selfish When It Comes To Love

Be selfish when you love. If you love, you benefit. If you love, you feel that health inside of you. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you are doing a favour to the person being loved. Be absolutely selfish and love with purity. Give your all and expect nothing in return. Make your love entirely unconditional. If someone loves you, don’t let your ego take control of you because what he is doing is entirely for himself, not for you. He feels good about being in love, so he loves you. You are no reason for that. You can always join the party, though, and be in the same boat. For that you have to love like the other one loves you.