Let me buy insurance with a prologue, with due respect to you as a reader of this blog. Being compassionate is more important than readership and footprint.
Firstly , A Long-read warning. 3374 words. And I hope it will be worthwhile for you. You will find that out and decide for yourself , if you move beyond this line.
Then for many human beings ( at least for me ) Life is no sprint, 2 Min Maggie noodle fast food variety. It is a Marathon walk. Or “a very slow cooked over the wood embers” variety special dish. Like the Sunday sambar, my mum used to cook when we were young. It never used to fire our palates. But we were never ever bored of it. Though people with a stoic mindset, belittle our existence here in this planet, saying in the universal cosmic scheme things, we are miniscule speck in the endless universe and the number of years we spend here as living organism is so insignificant, in my humble view it is not so. Time is indeed a relative nonlinear concept.
Secondly about the readability ! I did struggle a bit to put this together . Even another reading of Minto’s Pyramid Principle did not seem to work. Like a Bee I had gathered many incidents, thoughts and knowledge nuggets over a period of time. At the end of it, I had given up on that front. So it is kind of inductive way.
Thirdly and lastly in this prologue, it is about our mortality (yes yours and mine !). It is not an easy topic to think about. And it was not since humans started their stint in this planet. All the religions are an effort to address this fear in human beings : about death and what happens after that to us. I would suggest to you, that your life will be much more cherished and more livable if you really consider the question of your own mortality in right earnest. One can’t become brave unless s/he delves into the pits of fear and face it. It is the yin and yang of it. Just imagine a world where only day exists , no night; no sorrow only joy; no sweetness, only bitterness and only life and no death !
It started with Anton. Anton was my neighbor at Mantri Tranquil a long time back and has been a Zen student at Bodhi Zendo much before me. We met after a long time at Little Flower Zendo , Perumal
malai. I was trying to recollect his face, when Sr. Chitra told me that someone had checked in at Zendo and was asking about me when he saw my name in the resident list for that week on the notice board. On that day at the evening Teatime, I met him. And one of the things he had shared was about the suicide of his neighbor at Mantri Tranquil. The poor fella was working at a Real estate firm for many many years before he lost his job. And quite tragically he chose to end his life the very next day, leaving behind his spouse and two young kids. Fr. Ama , our Zen master was present at the table. And later in his weekly Teisho ( Zen talks to students) he talked about life and death. What he said just got etched in my mind. He said to us that “Life is what happens to us moment to moment and how we perceive that and respond to it. IT is our duty and privilege to answer the questions Life asks us and not run away from it. “ I knew that he was well aware of my own life situation with many challenges in career and finance and felt he is addressing to me directly .
Though many who knew that person at Tranquil , was quite critical and angry at him, as someone who had suicidal ideation in my own mind during my own “depression” days , I was more empathetic to the deceased. Way back in February /March 2002 , Dr. Richard McHugh wrote on that black board in that training hall at Ashirwad , St. Marks Road, “Map is not the Territory” . The famous Alfred Korzybski quote. We don’t directly live and operate in this world. Instead, we create a model of the world in our mind , a smaller sample and often distorted image of the world and others in our mind, created mostly by our subconscious mind based upon our own beliefs, values and mindset. The world in general and all the people including you and me in particular are represented in that mind model. It won’t be off the mark to say that 8 billion people don’t live in the same world / universe . Rather we live in 8 billion different mind version of that “world/universe”. There could be some / many similarities of various parts of that mindverse . Or we would not be living together as a Community. But there are significant differences amongst us in that mind verses. How a person A perceives what is painful and tolerable and what is joyful is and can be very different from what person B’s mindverse. Remember the internet sensation of early 2000s The Second Life, where you can be a avatar in the virtual world. Our own first life is not much different from it.
A bit later in that year, as co-founders of Mitr, a Counselling initiative at Mitr we attended a week long training on Counselling by Dr Uttara. One of the important points we learnt at that workshop was the first question we had to pose to a client on suicidal ideation and how to respond to a Yes and No from them.
While we acknowledge the agency in each client , we will request them to make a call to some one whom they trust / love or the Counselor itself when they get such thoughts.
She also went on to teach us taught us that agency : in short the ability to make choices for ourselves. But unfortunately, due to our own skewed map of the world in our own mindverse, the menu of choices available to us could be very different. From Ford Model T car– Black color only choice to VIBJYOR rainbow. And with the concepts of hyper and hypo functional agencies, we often end up overestimating or underestimating our possible responses to the skewed mental map we have in our mindverse.
And quite ironically people who value most personal agency are the ones who don’t seek other’s help. They are just too certain about their own mindverses and choices they make. That is where the relevance of the title of this blog. And another aspect of it is the moment we discuss about our “thoughts” or be aware of it and reflect on it, we do gain the ability to distance ourselves from it. We start realizing our thoughts are just thoughts, it is not us. We can choose to act upon it or ignore it. Our personal freedom is solely dependent on that ability.
These were all theory for me till I could get a deeper understanding of it , when I myself was faced with that situation. I became aware of Tinnitus when I stepped out a plane way back in 2012. At first I though I got enlightened. But then Dr. Ravi Kaushik told me it is just Tinnitus. It could have been triggered by one of those statin medicines and there is no going back on it. I just got to learn to live with it. And I did learn to live with it till a bad experience at Work with my then Boss. That was during my NGO days. I was already kind of overwhelmed by guilty thoughts of ditching a well paying IT job to take plunge into a full time PG course at Education and NGO world. Sooner it hit upon me that it was a classic case of “the other side is green” disease. So one fine cold winter Bangalore morning, I woke up with the sound of two Boeing engines blaring at each of my ears and I just could not take it. Life simply was unlivable in my mind. Many a times life ending thoughts crossed my mind as sleep eluded my tired eyes and mind. To make matters more complex, the shrink, with whom I had consulted was an absolute believer in one’s personal agency. He discussed at length the pros and cons of medicines and let me decide whether to take it. Only thing the Dr. Hiremani and my good friend Guru insisted was to go for long walks, which I did religiously. And for each medicine prescribed had a 1 Terra byte worth of information on side effects and opinions in the web. 😊 .. As a last recourse, I reached out to Dr. Radhakrishnan , my childhood mentor and family Doctor and friend. He has been the go- to- Dr for me since the age of 15 and he does have magical quality of empathy in addition to medicine to cure any disease. He and his spouse are the most generous people who helped everyone. He was at hospital undergoing some medical procedure. And still attended to my call when he realized from his spouse that I am facing some “huge challenges” in life. He heard me at length and then suggested not to rely on medicines for long and try out meditation, walks and exercise and watching comedy movies. And to stop the medicine when I started feeling better. And that advice did the trigger of recover for me. Having a caring and compassionate family and a few friends just hastened and ensured the successful journey back to life. Sooner I was back at life. And it was that wonderful experience of being in that dark alley which made me me take my Zen meditation a lot more serious. It ceased to be just a stress buster for me and came out a spiritual path. Later , though I did face with more trying situations, I did face it with more serenity.
So a compassionate word or gesture from another being, is the magical potion which really opens up our mindverse with more possibilities and helps our own personal agency to make the right decisions. And often that is the distance , a rather short one, between life and death.
Again, one’s life becomes more meaningful, when one start being aware of the mysteries of death. I became aware of it when my own father , Sankara, passed away on 20 November 2006. Even when he was ushered into the operation theatre by a well-known cardiothoracic surgeon in Bangalore ( who said my father had one of the lowest risk rating in the Euro score), he was very calm and collected. After some four days he was the only one left behind in that 15 bed Surgical and soon he had slipped into the unknown as graciously as he had lived leaving us all behind. For some strange reason, as I stood beside his bed, as those attendants were cleaning up his body, I did not feel bereaved nor did I cry.. Tears came back to o my eyes much later. Soon after that, I had chanced upon a book titled “The Tibetan book of the dead” , among the piled up books, in the no longer alive “Premier books shop” @ Church street corner. And it remained one of the books I did not make much progress…
Deep sorrow and sadness stayed with me for another 6 years. In 2012 November, when I called up my mom , she said that day is a death anniversary of my father. I had forgotten about his death and then I realized he is living in his mind and there wont be an end to it.
And I wrote about it in my old blog the way I see that: “ Classic ends: immortal stories about mortal deaths”.
During these last 3- 4 months, there were many news about promising teenagers ending their life in the most tragic fashion. One was from my alma mater. A bright teenager who had his schooling from one of the best alternate education schools in India chose to end his life by jumping out of his hostel room. News reports said, the “Liberal” Uty had punished him for finding a cigarette packet in his room. ! At that rate, many of my Engineering classmates including me would have never completed our degrees- some 30 years back ! It was indeed a tragic story. When I read that story, I thought , it is important to remind the rest who are still alive, the best way to use the divine abilities “ ability to reflect and be aware of our thoughts and personal agency to choose actions and being compassionate to others and ourselves” is to give a Classic end to our wonderful life than tragic ones.
I became a chronicler of classic ends after that book “The Tibetan book of the dead” came to my shelf and I ended up writing a blog on it on 2011. Let me add a few excerpts from that blog.
“A few weeks back, one of my wonderful colleagues (who is really one of the rare species in the corporate jungle… a kind of Zen master or would be saint), told me it is really a nice book.. That brought that old dusty volume out of the book shelf into my reading list again… I also started jotting down the imprint I had in my mind from my readings on what else, classy deaths.. Here I am jotting down a few of them… I am retaining the original, for fear of killing the life in those wonderful lines…
The first one has to be one of the Americans I admire a lot…. Richard Feynman… When LA times, sent him an advanced copy of his obituary, he thanked the author but said, “I have decided it is not a very good idea for a man to read it ahead of time, it takes the element of surprise out of it.” He knew he was not recovering. He was 69. The cancer had relapsed. Pain had wracked one of his legs. He was exhausted. In one corner of his dusty office blackboard @ Caltech, he had written a pair of self-conscious mottos and a running list under the heading “To Learn”….. He had not accumulated much: A hand knitted scarf, hanging on a peg, a photograph of Michelle with her cello, some black and white pictures of aurora borealis, a van painted with chocolate brown Feynman diagrams. On Feb 3, he had entered UCLA Medical center again. His remaining kidney had failed. One round of dialysis was done. Feynman had refused further dialysis that might have prolonged his life for weeks or months. He told Michelle calmly, “I am going to die.”… He had anticipated his own death as he had shared with one his friends “You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible belief. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far I can tell. It does not frighten me.”
.. He drifted towards unconsciousness. His eyes dimmed. Speech became an exertion. He drew himself together, prepared the last phrase and released it; I had hated to die twice. It is so boring… Soon he was gone…
This one I got it from the Outlook obituary of Bhimsen Joshi… Saba Naqvi writes about the death of Mallikarjun Mansur, the saintly Hindustani classical singer legend from Dharwar. “. He had lung cancer. The doctors had given up. So his daughter was instructed not to keep him away from things he loved most. The last thing he asked for was a bidi to smoke. He was humming Raaga Jogia, almost inaudibly. His daughter placed between his lips a lit bidi. And his head rolled over. He was gone. I told this story to Bhimsen Joshi. He heard the story with a distant look, smiled and a tear rolled down his cheek.”
And continues in the same story about the Abdul Karim Khan.
“Singing at platforms links up nicely with a story from Abdul Karim Khan’s life or rather his death. On his way to Puducherry at the invitation of Sri Aurobindo, Khan sahib had a premonition that his end was nearing. He left the train at an unknown railway station, spread out his prayer mat and sang his last song. He died on the railway platform. The news was carried to Sri Aurobindo by the disciples accompanying him. “
Though I had penned this a few days back, was procrastinating posting it. May be a bit of reluctance from some part of my unconscious mind.
Then Last night , after we came back home after watching Aavesham , a Malayalam movie, Thara had send a one liner Whatsapp message though we were both sitting at the living room. She did not want to share it Infront of Rishi. The youth who had jumped out his balcony from our apartment tower day before , had succumbed to his injuries and passed away. He was a fine young boy. Quite tall , lean and athletic and quite smart looking. During my morning walk , he used to run and sprint from the opposite side. And he would run across me many times for every single round of my walk. He always had an over the ear headset and only time he would pause for a moment is to check on his smartphone. Maybe he was choosing the Music for his life. While I made it a point to wish every other walker and offer a smile and share a pleasantry, this boy I remember vividly, never made an eye contact. He was so focused on his runs, he just kept to himself and ran in his life and now with his life into his death.
When I woke up early morning, after a troubled night of sleep, Fr. Meath Conlan , a fellow Bodhi Sangha member’s advanced copy newsletter was waiting to be read in email inbox. And the below article is from that newsletter. May be just another coincidence … And it was on “Facing Life and Death”. Written by Fr. Ama Samy, my Zen master in his book “Fragrant grasses and Falling Blossoms”.
And I quote that verbatim to end this.
Wish you all a happy long life of less suffering and more joy and peace before a happier short death.
As one of Sanskrit slokas , I chose to learn by heart says:
“ Anaayesaena maranam ,Vinaa dhainyaena jeevanam
Daehi mae Kripayaa shambho ,Thvaya bhakthim achanchalam”
“Facing Life & Death
Our life-choices and attitudes affect how we die, and our attitudes to our death condition our course of life. The end of life can come any time, any place. And it can happen also that our bodies are destroyed, minds ravaged, and spirits broken. Bodies and minds will be both afflicted and destroyed. It can be disease, and it can be perpetrated by some against others. It involves inevitably degradation and humiliation. It can be prolonged or can be put to an end soon. How will we face and endure this affliction? Viktor Frankl says if you have a meaning to your life, you can endure any torture. Meaning alone may not be enough….In the final analysis, it is not our efforts, exertions, management, and maneuvers that are our freedom, peace and liberation. It is the self that is the mystery of Emptiness, the mystery that is graciousness, that is our abode of peace and freedom. How do you realize this abode of peace and freedom? — Ama Samy, ‘Zen, Fragrant Grasses, Falling Blossoms.’