Contemplation at the crossroad

Note to myself- Boredom has hit, yet again. So while I spend my time listening to Eric Clapton and digress the consideration of objectivity or the lack of it through variety of readings (short stories by Nikolay Gogol is keeping me interested these days), the fact has cultivated that abstract and intact are my ongoing relentless struggle with benign boredom. Now, on one side there are people who make me distraught with their endless talks of grandiloquent ambitions and sensational career pursuits; the other side is filled with my assimilation of spiritual garbage that has lost my enthusiasm and has brought me to a point where I have started asking the concreteness of all of it.

 I have grown up in a land where your credibility is measured by degree with no consideration of the fact that a certain dog food goes by the name “pedigree”! You need to grow up in India to understand this paranoia with having that xyz college brand while having no idea what that education is all about. It’s the fame derived from clearing some preposterous entrance exam so that your mother can have a smirk on her face when she talks about you with her social nest and your father can carry some significant ego about it.   Maybe, I am not a very ambitious fellow and I certainly do not see the point of going through all this unnecessary torment when whatever you would like to study is freely available on Internet or for a modest subscription of a nearby public library. That implies the only reason you want to have that price and glory tagged education is because you need a job to sustain yourself. Well, if the whole idea boils down to that then wasting day in and day out discussing just that is a sheer waste.

Let’s refresh ourselves and move on a bit to the spiritual side of life. Here’s a quote from George Harrison (lead guitarist of The Beatles):

“Krishna actually was in a body as a person ... What makes it complicated is, if he's God, what's he doing fighting on a battlefield? It took me ages to try to figure that out, and again it was Yogananda's spiritual interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita that made me realise what it was. Our idea of Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield in the chariot. So this is the point—that we're in these bodies, which is like a kind of chariot, and we're going through this incarnation, this life, which is kind of a battlefield. The senses of the body ... are the horses pulling the chariot, and we have to get control over the chariot by getting control over the reins. And Arjuna in the end says, 'Please Krishna, you drive the chariot' because unless we bring Christ or Krishna or Buddha or whichever of our spiritual guides ... we're going to crash our chariot, and we're going to turn over, and we're going to get killed in the battlefield. That's why we say 'Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna', asking Krishna to come and take over the chariot.”

So anyone who has not yet read a book by Paramhansa Yogananda should definitely give it a try. More than anything it’s a treatise on faith and how faith itself is the miracle. For the last 5-6 years I have underwent a tumultuous ride where my mind has quizzed and questioned variety of spiritual perspectives. The problem being that I always wanted to reach somewhere through these self debates whereas the whole spirituality has been focused on making you contented in the state you are. To make the state you are in right now a joyous state. The whole act of surrendering to God or a divine idea or a philosophical ideology is to rest your mind at some place when its flooded and tired in solving a complex problem of life. When the mind has rested for a while, its faculties are renewed and the problem is solved, either through the acts of the renewed faculties or because time has healed the problem. Hence, the various interpretations of psychological time. I have come to conclude something- the more one intellectualizes, the more one moves in mind’s labyrinth. Maybe there is an end, maybe there is none. But the journey itself is ardently complex leading from one disappointment to another. In India, there is a lot of emphasis on searching for a spiritual guide. It is a great phenomena in itself  to be in close proximity with a Buddha or a Krishna but in my own search I have come across none. What I have come across is poor children standing outside the heavily adorned temples while rich hold their strict license on God through generous downpour of wealth. None of these religious facades have been able to address the issue of malnourished children and acute hunger of that old man sitting calmly in a corner. So what kind of God are we discussing here? A tyrant one? Well, there’s another option that I have seen most of the Indians I know have chosen- insensitivity. Blame it on Karma and endless life cycles and move on with your life to chase that dream to drive that fancy car or to put on the music and air conditioner and shut the semi tinted windows in case you already possess a fancy car. Or better still, not even chase a career but be delusional and believe to be spiritual and distinct. I have lost the point for such spirituality. I am going to take some break from that sweet word. I am sure I will re-visit it again.

As you can see I am at an interesting crossroad where a new direction at the intellectual level is sought. Perhaps, even that new direction shall become stale once that path would have been traveled. Perhaps, that’s life- you try to make it interesting everyday while your own mind makes it boring in few days.

Since we have had a hard discussion, let’s unwind with this beautiful Beatles song sung as a tribute by Eric Clapton to George Harrison. Here are two related beautiful moments:

After George Harrison's death , Dhani Harrison, his son, participated in the Concert for George on the first anniversary of George's death. The concert was organized by Eric Clapton and featured some of George's friends and collaborators, including former Beatles bandmates Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr as well as Clapton, Billy Preston, Ravi Shankar, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, Jim Keltner, and Joe Brown. Dhani Harrison played backup acoustic guitar for most of the concert. Before the finale, McCartney relayed to the audience, " With Dhani up on stage, it looks like George stayed young and we all got old"

On 14 April 2009, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce posthumously awarded George Harrison a star on the Walk of Fame. After Olivia Harrison (his wife) gave a short speech about her late husband, Dhani Harrison uttered the "Hare Krishna" mantra