Sunday, September 27, 2009

IF WE JUST HEAR AND NEVER LISTEN……IT MAY LEAD TO OPPRESSION AND MISERY


Image thanks to this site.

There was a puddle of water on the ground. I was moved to peek into it and suddenly I found myself pulled deep into it. I was falling weightlessly and perceived Hime floating along whispering the following thoughts into my mind:

“You can have all the discussions that you want. After all, while there is a mouth, there is always the inclination to want to talk. If you observe carefully at people in public places, they are always talking. The lips never seem to stop. It keeps moving and keeps making sounds. It leaves you wondering that people have so much to say about so many things.

One often overlooks that compared to one mouth; nature had decided to give human beings two ears. But how many do actually listen. They may hear what you say, but do they listen? Do you listen to what you hear?

To listen is to understand what is being said. To hear is to hear the sounds, the words - not the meaning.

Listening is one of the major activities of human beings that have been grossly overlooked. You mortals have never made the time and effort to cultivate this skill. Hence, you have many problems.

People listen to what they like to hear. It does not matter if it is simply a myth or an untruth or a deep seated prejudice born of ignorance.

They simply hear what they do not want to listen; even if it is the truth that can save them.

If you insist only on hearing and never listening, how then can you ever “progress to higher levels”? How then can you ever, ever live as one? Refusing to listen, mortals can never live as one in true harmony on this transient planet called earth.

For expediency sake, you live a life of mutual tolerance until you reach the brink of it. Without acceptance born of understanding and knowledge, there can never be lasting, genuine relationships. You simply move on from one relationship crisis to another, with short spans of occasional truce.

What is the point of discussions when each partakes with preconceived ideas cast in stone? While the other is expounding his views, you hear what he says but in fact you are listening to what is in your mind that you want to say when the other has finished.

You do not allow at all for what is in your mind to be tested, to be challenged or to be verified by facts and alternative perceptions. Hence, your ignorance and your standards remain with you and your clan. Completely incestuous level of thinking.

Your refusal to listen enables your views to be fortified over time until it becomes not only the truth but the absolute truth to you. Over centuries of faithful repetition and rote learning by your descendants, even the lie becomes the ultimate truth.

Any other alternative viewpoints hurts you and you are willing to hurt back harder. Centuries of repetition has made even the lie your true culture and value. An invitation to reevaluation is seen as an affront on your “sacred’ way of life and culture.

Each clan with its insistence of its own ways, buttressed by the support of its very own experts in its midst. Clan struggle and futile aggressive proselytisation of the others to your ways without inviting thinking has become a norm among you.

Hence, you should never be surprised that mortals will orphan another, make another a widow, kill a son or a mother, or father or the beloved one of another simply in the name of maintaining one’s own ways.

Your refusal to listen to each other solidifies the bridge that is between you. The bridge will forever be there, without which your relationships will cease to exist. With the bridge, the relationship will never grow into one unity, especially if the bridge is merely a convenient tool.

Humans have become such fools they keep repeating the phrase “to bridge relationships” when a bridge is nothing more than an intermediary between two terrain and two things. As long as the intermediary is there, the two can never be one. AT each end of the bridge, each crawls back into its accepted cocoons. Shouldn’t you be forging relationships instead? Shouldn’t you be accepting each other as unique creations without the need to be uniform like a factory product?

Of course you can never allow your diverse nature’s to come alive as each of you do not listen to what nature has been telling you for ages. ‘Since each of you wants the other to be like you, the strongest tribe among you will succeed in dominating the others’. Domination invariably equals oppression. Anything oppressed, over time naturally springs back. The natural law of the coil.

Any and every type of domination is bound to create strife, discord and tension within the community of humankind. Call it culture, call it religion, call it laws, call it norms or call it by any fancy name or jargon but domination is never the same as structured living. Hypocrisy for a while, and rebellion or revolution at the end. Your refusal to listen to each other creates miseries for you all.

If not listening is already dangerous, consider the indoctrinating techniques that are systematically used to make you not listen to each other. My dear mortals, ironical though it may seem, humans are being trained and indoctrinated in the art of NOT listening to each other for centuries. Mortals are not aware of this because it has become common place like breathing. That is how successful the techniques are.

The techniques are given various labels – religion, race, class, family honour, country, love, culture, belief, language, etc, etc. Labels meant for convenience of understanding have become monstrous tools of division and hate and misery.

Even a snake occasionally sheds its old skin. But each of you not only want to continue wearing the old skin but want others to follow suit. Other wise, you deem others as negatively different and that is bad. Human beings – even in death they insist on differences. Alas for this species and its preservers!”

I struggled and finally pulled myself out of the puddle, scarcely drowning. Puffing for breath, I realized Hime was gone and I was left accompanied by myself again.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Busy with Living or just busy?

Image thanks to Jonathan.

And there I was walking through the forest of life in my half-wake moments when I chanced upon Hime.

Hime said, “have you seen the one who busies himself in life?”

I did not understand the real question. I thought it was good to be busy in life. Busy means living life is it not?

“No, “said Hime, reading my thoughts. “Being busy is certainly being active. But being active does not necessarily mean one is living. Look at life. Life is never static. It develops, it improvises, it enhances, it overcomes. It is active but never busy”.

“There is a difference between being active and being busy. Difference between being busy and living”, he continued.

My mind did not understand what sounded to me like some mumbo-jumbo that is so irrelevant to this modern fast phased life.

Again reading my thoughts Hime responded, “ Modern fast phased life. What is that? We often forget that there is no hurry to meet death as it will be on time. The question is: have we been living or have we been busy before it arrives. Many mortals often ask when they reach old age: ‘where has my life gone? They would not have asked it if they had lived. But nay, they had been too busy to live”.

I looked at Hime and concluded that Hime could read thoughts. Hime was a cloudy appearance in my eyes or maybe in my mind. Hime seemed both concerned and unconcerned with the dialogue that was occurring between us.

“That is because, once you learn to live, you just live and no longer are concerned as to whether you are concerned or not. You are no longer inclined to thinking in boxes ad life as a whole cannot be boxed into specific categories except for mere understanding by mortals who have yet to attain understanding”. Hime did it again with my thoughts.

“Being busy is yet another manifestation of mortal’s strong sense of selfishness. Everyone is trapped in this evil culture of busy-ness so that mortal relationships are strained at all levels. Busy-ness assists in relegating relationships to the level of superficialities, expediency and convenience. Long lasting and sincere relationships became as extinct as the dinosaurs. Busy-ness makes one a stranger to oneself because being so busy one has never had the quality time to seek who oneself is. This is the evil of the culture of busy-ness that has crept on to you mortals”.

I was trying hard to understand what Hime was saying but I let Hime ramble on while I tried thinking. Could this be the reason why we have so many miseries in life, I asked myself.


“The world of mortals is made up by the mortals themselves, collectively and individually. Everything that you experience and see around you is the collective manifestation of the inner experience and what you see from within collectively”.

I do not understand.

“Of course you do not – yet. You have allowed yourself to be blinded by what is not as what is. You have collectively gone against the laws o nature and not live by its rules. Alas, the laws of nature will overcome you mortals”.

I do not understand the external-internal thingy, I thought.

Hime explains: “In this forest, what I see is the tree, for example. I see a tree as a tree being part of a whole process called the natural life. You mortals see a tree as potential tissues, a potential house, as timber, as a hindrance to progress and so on. What is destruction, you see internally as progress and construction. You all collectively busy yourself with this process of destruction of all that is natural and go about it the most evil way possible calling it efficiency, etc, etc. You create positive sounding labels to hide your guilt and give awards to each to other for the damage that you unleash. You are busy but never living”.

“If you never had cared to know who you really are, how real can your caring be for others? To avoid meeting yourself in private, you keep yourself busy”.

“Do you know that the system has made you busy so that you can be slaves?”

Now, this was really getting a bit too heavy for me. Me a slave? Nahh, I am always in control of my choices.

“Really? That is a mass delusionary syndrome that has infected all of your mortals. The busy culture has succeeded in taking away your time for self reflection and for deep evaluation of what is occurring around you. All of you mortals have been reduced to workers and have been frightened to become acquisitioners. The more you acquire, the more enslaved you become and the further you move from yourself…you only wait to die”

“The busy culture is intended to deflect your attention from the grand plan of controlling you, to keep you dependant on the system, to lay out the choices that you are allowed to make, to reduce you from a being human being to becoming just a small tool of the system, “ He paused and then said, “ to prevent you from living”.

Before I could think any more thoughts, Hime just disappeared living me alone in the silence of the forest. For the first time in my life, I realised that I was accompanied by someone I had ignored all my life – myself. Who is he???