I am alive

You know that you are not dead yet when you are still breathing and able to command most or all of your body functions.

But are you alive ?

Being not dead is existence.

Being alive is living your life and being useful.

End.

How do You Colour Your Life ?

One has been given life and thus one must live.

It is up to you how you want to colour your life. 

Black or White Or Colourful.

Whether you want your life to be pleasant for you and for those around you or you want to make it painful for all.

Why would you not want to make it pleasant?

Does not matter the circumstances for you have the power to make it as pleasant as you want or as miserable as you want.

Really, it is your choice.

It is your life.

Choose well.

End.

Struggle between good and bad habits

Life is a continuos struggle between good and bad habits.

You know exactly what is good for you and yet you allow yourself to be dictated by what is not good for you. This is not a weakness but a struggle that you must overcome

You also know that you will become what you are because time does not wait for you to change.

What you are today will be you in many years to come if you do not change what is within.

It's really your choice.

Peace !

Chapter 3: The Devil’s Statistics

Even numbers have meanings. They have meanings that are. They have meanings that were never meant to be. The Real confused with the illusion. The illusion becoming the Real. In some languages, 4 is a bad number. It means death.

Death is an inescapable  reality.

An end to all madness and tyranny.

A way home,

 so how can it be bad?

In other cultures, 4 is in demand.. It denotes “get” or “achieve”. ‘Achieving’ and ‘getting’ takes up a major part of human life. It is about collecting as many toys as you can. The toys that will inevitably bore you and decay. The toys that will outlive your very existence on earth.  It is also about getting and achieving candies. They are very sweet to the ear and very sweet to the heart. Titles. Glamour. Prestige. Your Excellency! Honour!

Pray tell me sir, why honour me when I destroy God’s earth in the name of civilization?

And did you not bestow me with titles when I ensured poor people have no access to food and homes by raising the price of land?

A cynical thought penetrates Santim’s mind.  The number most liked are those that denote money. Thousands. Millions. Billions. Humans are born with accurate judgement skills. We grow up undoing those skills. Our judgemental ability becomes blurred. Nay, made to be blurred by the system. We measure humans by numbers. The richer you are, the greater respect they give you. They also inwardly envy you.  You are a man of society. You are uno numero.

And ah yes, the injustice I demonstrated in the name of my profession.

You called me a genius!

It does not matter how much you have plundered the life of others to enrich your own. People have short memories. They cannot see what you do. Only what you have.

Truth to many people is what they see,

Sometimes they are blind

Often times they blindfold their eyes

They wish to see only what is outside of them.

That is why they cannot see the transience of their breath

for it is within them.

Statistics - numbers of the learned and of the powers that be. Delilah Al-Karim was a 12 year old girl. She grew up in her home on a land which no State recognized. She was a sweet, pony-tailed girl who only wanted to grow up to be the best daughter of her parents and the best sister of her two elder brothers.  That was her only innocent, childhood dream. Like your sister and mine, like your daughter and mine, she was full of life inspired by the presence of her family’s love.  One day her bubble burst when they were having dinner in her home.

There was a loud explosion. Airplanes and tanks of adults playing war games against each other. This time for real. In the interest of some lofty adult ideals which Delilah could never understand. She was unfortunate to wake up alive in the rubble of what was once her home with her mother’s severed hand on her stomach. She could not cry any tears when she thought she saw the butchered meat of who were once her father, mother and two brothers.

Santim recalls that she told him she heard the radio the following day: “It was a victorious day for our troops. Our casualty was 12 and the enemies were 240”.  Twenty years later, struggling to understand, she could never find the answer to what happened.

Uncle Sam[1] calls it collateral damage.

Others call it unavoidable war casualties.

To Delilah, they will always be her father, mother and brothers whose love has been cruelly snatched away from her.

Santim Raj knows too well that when humans are reduced to statistics, the Devil is in charge. Statistics have no life or form. They are numbers. They are files or profiles. They do not matter. They are dispensable. The death of 20 people in a population of 20 million can be explained away as ‘statistically minimal’.  These are sleeping pills to make us sleep better.

When your only loved one dies,

he or she is 100 per cent of what you had.

As you had ONLY cared for yourself,

When it’s your turn, your loved ones too will only be a statistic to them.

Santim recalls that the Master once told him, “Many worship the Devil though numbers”. I was then too young to understand. How could numbers be an object of worship?

When something consumes your life,

It is that, that you worship

Not the rituals that you

Innovate to deceive yourself of your religiousness.

People do not seek the Truth anymore but they seek numbers of devotees. The greater the number of devotees, the more truthful the belief is they say. A Truth of one is crushed by the millions of deceit, lies and conjectures. Majority reigns arrogantly and oppresses the minority. The might of numbers and not the Truth becomes a god.

Hence, the pathway to the Truth is but a lonely path.

Truly life is a repetition. We repeat the errors of history. We repeat the foolish ways of our forefathers. We honour and encourage development, education and improvement to better our lives. At the same time, we busy ourselves with weapons of mass destruction to destroy the very things we have built over the years. We want peace, stability and prosperity for ourselves but do not want the same for others. We think it is our birthright that the blessings we now enjoy are ours alone.

Hungry children in Ethiopia are not our children. The homeless Palestinians are merely a news report. The poor Indians, Bangladeshis, and Indonesians are below our status. They are not creative and clever like us to deserve the wealth we have. And the poor among us? Well, they too are just…statistics.

  We have bigger problems – which is the best hand phone model for our 12 year old daughter?

The cruelties we unleash creatively shames even the Devil.

Yet we insist that we are people of God, education and civilization.

Santim wonders: has the world gone mad?  He remembers the village he was born. He grew up in a kampong[2] which was surrounded by coconut trees and plants. Everywhere it was green. His wooden house had only one stand fan.  He could step out of his house onto pure sand - mother Earth. There were no fences with his neighbours, but they were not exactly next door like the expensive link houses of today.

Santim remembers a friend he had who built his paradise on earth. Santim shared in his happiness. This friend had told him his paradise is for all. He has no attachments to anything of this world. One day, Santim had, foolishly, asked him if he could bring some mortals who had wanted to taste his paradise. He forbade.

How could I share in your happiness, when you make it exclusive?

Are you now, God?

---

[1] Uncle Sam – colloquial term referring to the United States of America.

[2] Kampong, a Malay village like the kind that existed in the 1950s in Malaysia and Indonesia.

How would you know the scavengers if you never mingle with them?

In the movie "Oblivion", they are called the scavengers.

In the movie, "Total Rekall", they lived in the colony while the powerful and wealthy lived in the United Federation of Britain. The people of the colony are workers for the UFB. They travelled to the UFB via the "Fall".

In every society throughout human history, the scavengers and the people of the colony live and are oppressed.

Today, they are the normal citizens society can do without, do not care - maybe you and I.

How the leaders pretend to serve the scavengers or the people of the colony when they never experienced the experiences of these people?

How can they even pretend to lead these people when they have never lived among them?

How can they understand the pain, the struggles and the real needs of the ordinary people?

Only a leader from the ordinary people can effectively lead the ordinary people - not leaders put on stage by the wealthy and powerful system.

Why do you talk what you talk?

Everywhere you turn your eyes, you will find that people do not stop talking.

Everyone has something to say about anything. It does not matter whether what they is necessary or relevant. It seems to be more important that they say something.

Just look around you. People do not stop moving thier mouths. They just talk and talk and talk.

No one ever pauses to ask why they talk.

No one ever pauses to ask why they talk what they talk.

Because they never pause to ask, they just talk without knowing why they talk.

Because they never pause to ask, they just talk without knowing why they talk what they talk.

Most people love to talk so much without knowing why and hence, most people love talkers. It does not matter what the talker talks about as long as he is able to talk and talk. If the talker is able to talk about the most irrelevant and insignificant matter, he will be held up in high esteem.

If the talker is able to sensationalise his talks, he will be held up in higher esteem. The talker must not pause from his talking, for pause means silence.

Silence is held in contempt by most people. Silence forces them to be confronted with thier inner selves. It forces them to think.

People do not like thinkers. They like talkers.

Talkers entertain and fill up thier self created void in thier lives. Thinkers force them to think about the void in thier lives.

Thinkers advocate silence. Seclusion. To be comfortable in a cave, in darkness, to confront with the Self. To accept the Reality.

Talkers advocate noise. Exclusion of Self. To be comfortable with the crowd, in bright blinding light. To embrace the Illusion.

Most people love illusion as opposed to Reality - cosmetics, superficialities, rationalizations, grandisosity, pomposity, and anything that inflates the ego. Talkers can deliver all these to them. Thus they love talkers.

Talkers talk about laughing and do not encourage crying. Their sense of happiness is limited to the illusion of laughter and the denial of the joy of crying.

Thinkers love simplicity and embrace Reality with total happiness. They love the silence that brings them back to their Self. They neither cry nor laugh within though outwardly they do.

Are you a thinker or a talker?

End

Why Do You Remain in the State of Unhappiness and Misery? – Part 2

Life is a balance.

It is the balance that gives tranquility, serenity and peace. When the balance is tampered, there is no tranquility, serenity nor peace. It is that simple.

The balance in life is natural and eternal. The opposite is transient. You must allow the natural forces to maintain that balance. You must understand and know what the natural forces are. You must swim and flow WITH it, not AGAINST it. Nature left to itself behaves like water – finds and returns to its own balance always. It always returns to a state of tranquility, serenity and peace.

But you are different. You are human. You are a part of nature but have been given the power to choose to be WITH or AGAINST the forces of nature. Either decision will determine whether you will be happy and not miserable or otherwise.

Choice is not necessarily a good or bad thing.

It can either lead you down the garden path or down the path of fire. The power of choice without wisdom is devastating. Choice in the hands of the foolish is destructive. You need wisdom to make the right choices.

Wisdom is not knowledge alone.

There are many knowledgeable fools roaming the earth causing further untold unhappiness and misery. There are many more who are confused between the accumulation of information and knowledge. Can we call a computer knowledgeable despite the vast information it may have?

Understanding and knowing is the essence that differentiates the fool from the wise.

Wisdom comes from being one with nature. Wisdom comes when we learn to understand nature NOT as we want to but as how nature itself wants to be understood. You simply let the cards fall where they may and learn from the natural design.

The true understanding of nature leads to acceptance of nature and hence ourselves. It is like the rain that falls onto a mountain and flows all the way to the sea. You may call it a waterfall at one stage, a stream at another, or a river, or the sea at the end.

Water knows that it is water at all of these stages. It does not confuse the stages with its true nature. It does confuse the process with itself. It accepts the natural process without rebellion nor hesitation while not losing sense of its own nature.

But you are different. Being a human living this life based on beliefs which you do not know, you confuse the stages in your life with your true nature. In the process, you forget who you really are. You forget your nature. You cause a conflict between your beliefs and your true nature upsetting the balance within you.

Thus, you end up being unhappy and miserable and keep repeating this cycle all your life.

While nature will find its own balance naturally, you, the human, have been given choices. So, you have to choose to find the balance again – if you want to.

To find this balance, you have to return to its source – you.

You have to get to know yourself putting aside what you believe about yourself. Belief without knowing is mostly futile.

Are you ready to know yourself?

Will you allow yourself to be known to you?

Do you want to know why you are reading this in the first place?

The key to breaking the cycle of unhappiness and misery to know your self, your nature.

END.

NEXT: Why Do You Remain in the State of Unhappiness and Misery? – Part 3 (IF it is meant to be written)