Skip to main content

Technology of Self - Diamond in your Pocket



If you happen to go to a class where they teach Creative Writing, one of the exercises they will ask you to do is to hold a fruit, say an Apple in your hand , observe it for a few minutes and then ask you to write about what you have noticed and experienced with your senses of sight and smell. You will hold it in both hands and take it to your nose. Its shiny light skin with myriad shades of red, orange and yellow gives off a mild smell which makes you wonder what it would be if you were to walk amidst an orchard of apples trees laden with ripening fruits. You can’t but wonder at the infinite intelligence behind the design and the solution so befitting the purpose.


What if I now ask you to shift attention from the  feeling and the emotion that holding of the apple has caused and shift the attention inwards to investigate ‘who’ is experiencing ?  If the apple and the thoughts and feelings it created are the object of experience who is the subject ?  What do you see there ?  When the light is shone inwards, what do you find ?  No wonder you cannot describe it, as it is formless void without objective qualities. Is it not the ‘You’ which you call the ‘I’. 

Don’t you feel a sudden quietening of the mind and slowing down of thoughts - investigate the  gaps appearing between thoughts that is so relaxing that it immediately makes breathing deeper and longer that the chest almost hurts with the expanding lungs. In a flash, you see that you are not your thoughts , but the thoughts are in you. Don't you see that the gaps between thoughts are the "I" whose nature is pure awareness.  You may also experience an unwinding of the coils of the body that even wells inside the cranium , a flexing of the cells of the brain and notice a fragrance in the nostrils when air in ever deepening gusts wafts in and out --the fragrance of being. Awareness is thought what being is to the body. You are that , "Tat Tvan Asi". The super conscious that permeates all beings and non-beings- you , me and the apple.

Can you abide in that awareness, focussed only on the subtle breathe that moves up and down as the only ripple of the being ?   Vasanas,  rinds of scar tissue of neutrons formed on the brain,  try to push through habitual thoughts. Emotions, which are but reactions of body to the mind also butt in.  Try not to resist them, but just as thorn is used to remove thorn,  turn the attention inwards, back Into the source in an investigation of who  the experiencer is,  so that they do no overpower you. You can see these thoughts subside, at least the gap between them increase;  the ego-mind refuses to submit and demurs, bringing to the fore the many things that you need to ‘do’ and many desires to fulfill before the sense of lack could be assuaged-a chimera.

Say thanks, but no thanks to the ego-mind. 

Flow down and down into the ever widening circles of being — Jalahuddin Mohammed Balkhi ( Rumi)




Sat Chit Ananda.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Washing Machine - Short Story by Sujatha

The maid had not turned up again today.  Her husband was immersed in the newspaper as usual.  Even the phone ringing at the most inconvenient moments __ when she was preparing the omelet for swetha, ironing her school uniforms or somebody knocking at the door, did not seem to have any effect on him. “It is for you”, she said. “Say I am not there”. “I am not used to starting the day with lies” “There is no auspicious time for lying, Savithri”, he said. There was again a knock at the door. He deigned to look who it was. It was the man who bought old newspapers.  “Newspaper Fellow”, he announced, reverting to bury his head into the papers. Everything had to revolve around her. “Not today”, she was speaking to the man at the door, “Had I not asked for your wife to come for work”. “She is already working in 6 other houses”, “might come from the first of next month after she gives up on one of these houses”. “First of next month?” How will I manage till th...
1 comment
Read more

RAT - Short Story by Asokamitran

Exora  Asokamitran recently passed away. He chose writing for a living and suffered the economic consequences of it.  Have you seen the Exora flower ?  When I was young , we had an Exora plant ( or bush ?)  near the steps at the front of the house.  If you pluck a few flowers with their long stems in tact from a bunch and reverse them and put the stems in the mouth and gently suck them by pressing your lip to the palate, you will get a fleeting taste of sweetness, of its nectar. .  Asokamitran handles subjects the same way.  His approach to the subject and writing style is as gentle as  the butterfly settling on a flower and the effect on the reader is just as subtle.  Not for him the the heavy handed stuff, not for him the harangue  Nobody captured  the ordinariness of life  like him. Nobody understood the mental make up of middle-lower middle class urban dweller like him.  He saw life as a progression of ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Chair - Story by Ki Rajanarayanan

How could you call a house without a chair a home? So it struck all of us in the house the same time. This issue was immediately placed on the agenda for family discussion. Just the day before we had a family friend visiting us. He was a sub-judge and as our luck would he have it, he came not dressed in Veshti and Shirt but fully suited and booted. All we had in our house was a three-legged stool, which was itself just three-fourth of a foot high. Our grandmother used to sit on it when she whipped curd. Since our grandmother was a little 'broad at the bottom' our grandfather had asked the carpenter to make it a little broader than usual. For want of any alternative we had requested his good self to take his seat on this three-legged affair. The sub-judge himself was a little thick-set; that caused him to place one hand on the edge of the stool before setting himself down on it . The problem with the stool was that if the weight fell on it not in line with...
Post a Comment
Read more