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The True Price of Enoughness and the Cost of Contentment : Lessons from Mitr, Zen, and a stone basin in Kyoto

The True Price of Enoughness and the Cost of Contentment : Lessons from Mitr, Zen, and a stone basin in Kyoto

by | Sep 14, 2025 | Career, Compassion, Empathy, Joy, Peace, Zen

My journey into the helping space began with Mitr, Wipro’s internal counselling initiative. Mitr was the brainchild of Kayo Shroff, then General Manager at CHRD and a counsellor at Vishwas, with Ranjan Acharya, then Head of CHRD, as its enthusiastic sponsor. They called for nominations, and I joined half self‑motivated, half nudged by my then boss, SMR. He knew I had completed a month‑long NLP course with Dr. Richard McHugh and had enrolled for an MA in Psychology with IGNOU, so he suggested I apply. The application itself was unusual — I still have a copy.

One of the questions read: “Describe yourself in 5 words. No qualifications, titles, skills etc. to be included.” My answer, characteristically, spilled beyond the limit: “I am what I (am + can be + will be). What I am = committed, sincere, open‑minded and witty.” There were a few more questions, including two essay‑style prompts: one asking me to describe a time in my life when I was absolutely broken inside and was helped by another, and another asking how I, in turn, had helped someone in a similar situation. Even before I was formally trained, those questions made me pause and look inward — a reminder that the heart of helping work is not in the techniques we wield, but in the humanity we share.

I ended up in the first cohort of Mitr counsellors. Ranjan and Kayo would jokingly call us the “co‑founders” of Mitr. It was, in every sense, a selfless service. We offered our time after hours, guarded the anonymity of those who came to us with fierce loyalty, and never discussed their cases. This work existed outside our professional duties — it could never be an excuse for unmet targets. The spirit was simple: you gave your presence freely, without any expectation of reward.

Our training was led by Dr. Uttara, a week that has stayed with me all these years. It was there she suggested a book to the group, though I felt the suggestion was meant particularly for me: On Becoming a Person by Carl Rogers. I had just finished my NLP course, and those were heady days; in that world, it was easy to feel that after a single training you could stride into the world as the next Anthony Robbins. Dr. Uttara, I think, sensed that intoxication — the seductive belief that with the right technique, you could “fix” anyone. Her recommendation of Rogers was a quiet counterweight. His humanistic approach isn’t about clever reframes or rapid interventions; it’s about presence, congruence, unconditional positive regard. It’s about being with, rather than doing to.

Years later, I became a certified leadership coach. By then, I had sat on both sides of the helping relationship — as the one offering support, and as the one seeking it. During my own struggle with depression, I was referred to a counsellor. They were helpful, and they charged for their time. And that was appropriate. Counselling is a service that offers value, and value has a price. It was a sobering but vital realization: the helping professions are not immune to economic realities. Skill, ethics, and livelihood must find a way to coexist — sometimes in harmony, sometimes in tension.

For two years, I lived a dual life: a Zen student and a full‑time breadwinner for my family, alongside my better half. Then, last December, I moved into the Zendo. Before I arrived, Fr. AMA wrote me a welcome email. He called it shokku tuddedo and reminded me that the most critical relationship we must resolve is the one with money. The world, he said, will wonderfully provide for our needs, but our wants — and sometimes our greed — are a bottomless gulf. His words stayed with me. I distributed all my wealth and possessions before I left home. I stepped into the Zendo with empty hands and a lighter heart. I still work enough to provide for Manu and Rishi’s education for the next few years, but beyond that, I am largely self‑sufficient.

And yet, I was quite at sea for a while. After living for fifty‑four years in one fashion, it is not easy to be that detached. In our minds, the lines between genuine need, want, and greed are often too thin — or not there at all.

At the temple of Ryōan‑ji in Kyoto, Japan, there is a hand‑washing basin along the rear of the building, engraved with four kanji. Alone, they have no meaning, but a fifth kanji, formed by the central water basin, completes the phrase: ware tada taru shiru. When I googled, the English brochure translated it as, “I learn only to be contented.”

Fr. AMA had asked us to have this framed and placed above his dokusan room.Last June 2025, for the first time since I began working in March 1995, no salary was credited to my account — only an automated bank message came reminding me to maintain a minimum balance. Perhaps just another serendipitous moment: the right message at the right time. There is a Zen saying, “The master arrives when the student is ready.” Paraphrased, “The teaching comes when one needs it most.” — My initiation was exactly that..

Naturally, my way of being in the marketplace has shifted. I let go of fixed prices and moved to a contributory scale — pro bono, low bono, or “pay as per your ability.” It is a natural fit for a Zen student and soon‑to‑be monk. And it works, beautifully. Often, the amount people choose to give is more than I would have asked for. There is a quiet dignity in this exchange; it trusts the other person’s inherent sense of fairness and frees me from the subtle grasping that can creep into fixed‑fee work. It feels less like a transaction and more like a shared act of respect.

This tension between making a living and staying true to one’s calling is an ancient one. History is filled with those without inheritance who navigated the same crossroads. Socrates taught without payment, relying on the support of friends. Buddhist monks lived on alms, yet debated in lean times whether they could farm or teach for a fee. Artists without patrons chose between poverty and adapting to the market. Galileo balanced his research with paid court appointments. Jane Addams built her social reform on donations from sources she sometimes questioned. The question has always been the same: how does one remain true to purpose within the economic systems available? The answer often lies in adaptation — relying on patronage, creating hybrid models, or embracing radical simplicity to reduce dependence on the market.

In Zen, there is a classic teaching illustrated in the Ten Ox‑Herding Pictures. It traces the stages of a seeker’s journey: searching for the ox, glimpsing its footprints, catching it, taming it, riding it home, then forgetting the ox and the self, returning to the source. The final picture, the tenth, is “Entering the Marketplace with Helping Hands.” The awakened one doesn’t remain in solitude on the mountaintop. They walk back into the town — selling wine, buying vegetables, laughing with the crowd — but their presence is different. They serve without clinging, they earn their keep without exploitation, they meet people exactly where they are. This is why there is nothing inherently wrong with being in the marketplace and offering a service. The question is not whether you charge, but how you show up: with fairness, justice, and integrity. In that spirit, livelihood and service are not opposites; they are two hands of the same body.

Looking back, my own journey has moved through its own stages: the initial intoxication of technique, the grounding of professional coaching, a clear‑eyed view of the helping ecosystem, the deepening of Zen practice, and now the freedom of a livelihood rooted in trust. Seen through the Ox‑Herding lens, these stages are not linear but a spiral. Each time I return to the marketplace, I do so with a little more humility, a little more clarity, and a little less need to be the hero.

In the end, perhaps the most enduring lesson is this: helping is not about saving the world. It is about meeting one person, in one moment, with presence and humility — and letting that be enough.

And sometimes, the person you meet in need of help is yourself. The one you’re called to serve is the one in the mirror. That work is beyond price — pro bono publico becomes pro bono self. And if we can make a fair living while doing so — like the avocado tree in the Zendo garden, quietly offering its fruit, the birds , the monkeys and that giant Malabar squirrel that visit without asking, or even the Bhim Zendog basking in the sun without bothering them— then we are simply walking the path of the tenth picture: in the marketplace, with helping hands.

Half‑Way Up the Mountain: Heights, Depths, and the Twilight Way

Half‑Way Up the Mountain: Heights, Depths, and the Twilight Way

by | Sep 13, 2025 | Change, Harmony, Joy, Meditation, STRESS, Zen

 

John Moriarty  wrote in Dreamtime :

“It is like setting up a ladder against a rock wall by a lake. The lake mirrors your ascent as a descent. And so, thinking that I was ready for the Heights when I wasn’t simultaneously ready for the depths, that was my catastrophe, that was the avalanche I set off, looking ever upwards, on the Mount of Perfection. It carried me down into a Deep below all depths.”

And C.G. Jung, put that in better psychological perspective :

“Nobody can fall so low unless he has a great depth. If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light.”

Two voices, two views— yet they meet in the same archetypal truth: the vertical axis of human experience is not one‑way. Every genuine ascent carries its shadow‑descent, and every plunge into darkness contains the seed of a corresponding light.

Mariana Kaplan, in her Halfway Up the Mountain  wrote of false claims to attainment. But the phrase reaches further than the problem of fake gurus and faker anti gurus and everyone else in between— it speaks to all of us. We are always, in some sense, halfway up the mountain. The summit is not a fixed point of eternal bliss, as some traditions promise. As we climb, the mountain itself rises.

The Greek philosopher Zeno hinted at this in his paradox: each time we move toward our goal, we can only cover half the remaining distance. Theoretically, we never arrive. The closer we get, the more the horizon recedes.

Buddhist teaching offers a similar lens: everything in this universe — you, me, the tree outside, the big rock near the Kanzeon Zendo waterfall, the distant mountain, the drifting clouds — is a process, not a finished product. There is no final arrival. The moment of arrival is already a moment of departure. In truth, we are always at the twilight of arriving and leaving, like the early morning and evening when sun and moon share the same sky.

And here, the metaphor meets the science: twilight is not when the Sun “shines most.” In fact, the Sun is below the horizon, its light reaching us only indirectly, scattered through the upper atmosphere. It is a softer, more diffused light — the “blue hour” photographers love — neither the full blaze of midday nor the darkness of night. This is why twilight is such a fitting image for the spiritual path: it is a time of transition, of partial illumination, of seeing enough to walk on, but never so much that all shadows vanish.

Many mistake spiritual progress for a straight, one‑way road. We imagine it as a steady climb, step after step, always forward. But the lived truth is far less linear. Sometimes it is one step forward, two steps back. Sometimes two steps forward, one step back. The rhythm is irregular, the pace unpredictable.

When we trudge toward the light, we do not leave the darkness behind; we carry it with us. The shadow is not an obstacle we “overcome” once and for all — it is a companion, a counterweight, a reminder. Light and shadow are not separate territories but a continuous spectrum, each shading into the other.

The movement is often like a pendulum swinging toward the light. But unlike a physical pendulum, the swing is not symmetric. The arc toward illumination may be long and slow, the return into shadow sudden and steep — or the reverse. The asymmetry is part of the work.

Dr. Kaustav Roy taught us phenomenology at APU, and one of the books he insisted we must read was R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience. That book held a distilled essence of human nature — a wisdom phrase to cherish in almost every paragraph. But one quote that stayed with me is:

“A good man is aware of what is not good in him, while a bad man is not.”

Awareness of the shadow is not a flaw in the journey; it is the journey. To see what is not yet whole in us is already to stand in the light. To deny it is to remain in darkness, even if our words and gestures point upward.

Moriarty’s mirrored ladder and Jung’s law of correspondence remind us that readiness for the heights is inseparable from readiness for the depths. To prepare for one without the other is to court collapse. The avalanche Moriarty speaks of is not a moral failure; it is the psyche’s way of restoring symmetry.

And so, halfway up the mountain is not a place of shame — it is the only place there is. The climb is endless, the summit ever‑rising, the path a dance between ascent and descent, light and shadow, arrival and departure. The measure of progress is not how far we have climbed, but how honestly we can stand in both light and darkness, in both coming and going, without losing our balance.

Perhaps this is why the old traditions speak of Great Doubt alongside Great Faith. The lake and the ladder, the light and the darkness, the ascent and the descent, the dawn and the dusk — they are not two journeys, but one.

In the end, the Way is not about reaching the top, nor about avoiding the fall. It is about walking with the mountain as it rises beneath our feet, with the lake reflecting both our ascent and our descent, with the twilight sky holding both sun and moon. Arrival and departure are the same step.

And in that step, the journey is complete — even as it begins again.

 

 

Rampway to Heaven… or Just Another Day in Paradise?

Rampway to Heaven… or Just Another Day in Paradise?

by | Sep 12, 2025 | Compassion, Harmony, Joy, Zen

Here at Kanzeon Zendo, a rampway rises gently from the meditation hall to nowhere— a small, earthly path that somehow feels like it could lead to heaven itself.

“Stairway to Heaven” is one of the few rock songs I’ve listened to many times. Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin released that album when I was just six days old in this world. It still carries some of the most hauntingly beautiful lines in rock:

“There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold
And she’s buying a stairway to Heaven

When she gets there she knows, if the stores are all closed
With a word she can get what she came for

Ooh, ooh, and she’s buying a stairway to Heaven

There’s a sign on the wall, but she wants to be sure
‘Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings

In a tree by the brook, there’s a songbird who sings
Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven”

Robert Plant’s lyrics have been read as a meditation on choice, illusion, and the search for something beyond the material. Jimmy Page, who co-wrote it, once admitted to altered states in those days — but even without them, the song’s imagery opens a door to other ways of seeing.

And yet, I find myself drawn just as much to Phil Collins’ refrain:

“It’s just another day for you and me in paradise.”

Chasing Cheese While Seeking Space: Are You the Last Rat in the Maze?

Chasing Cheese While Seeking Space: Are You the Last Rat in the Maze?

by | Sep 11, 2025 | Change, Harmony, Meditation, Peace, Transformation, Uncategorized, Zen

In the hush before dawn, the world is a maze without walls.
Some run, chasing the scent of cheese.
Some pause, listening for the sound of their own breath.
The path is the same, yet the journey is different.
Freedom is not in leaving the maze,
but in seeing it for what it is.

Kanzeon Zendo opened its doors on 22 December 2022. From January 2023 onwards, I began spending time here — thanks to my then boss, coach and mentor, Robert Meir. In those early months, my life was split evenly: fifteen days at the Zendo, fifteen days at home in Bengaluru. By December 2024, I had moved here fully, travelling back to Bengaluru for a week each month so I could be in the office for a day or two. Then, on 15 May, I left my job — or perhaps the job left me — and since then I’ve been here almost full‑time.

Through all these shifts, one refrain kept coming from friends, family, and coachees: “Good for you. At last you are out of the rat race.” At times I tried to explain that no one is truly free in this phenomenal life — the context and scenery may change, but in some way we are all still rats on the same ship. After being on the receiving end of a pay slip for some three decades, it is not easy to live with five or six thousand INR as your pension. Though, Fr AMA does provide me with the basic needs of life — food, shelter, medicines, and spiritual guidance. My words rarely landed. Yet the phrase “rat race” stuck with me. Why, I wondered, is the way modern humans live named after rats — of all animals?

I think, for more than a century, rats have been the quiet partners in our quest to understand ourselves. They are not just convenient lab animals; they are close cousins in biology and behaviour. Around ninety percent of our genes are the same. Their brains are built on the same blueprint as ours, with a cortex, hippocampus, and limbic system that process memory, learning, and emotion in ways strikingly similar to human minds. They live in social groups, form hierarchies, cooperate, compete, and even show empathy. They respond to stress, isolation, and reward much as we do. In the lab, they become mirrors — small enough to study, close enough to reveal truths about our own nature.

Perhaps that’s why rats have slipped so easily into our language as metaphors for human life. We talk about the “rat race” when we feel trapped in endless competition. We “smell a rat” when something feels off. A “pack rat” hoards possessions; to “rat on” someone is to betray them. We speak of “rats leaving a sinking ship” when people abandon a failing cause, and call ourselves “lab rats” when we feel like test subjects in someone else’s experiment. These phrases endure because they capture something raw and familiar: our instinct to survive, adapt, and sometimes, to scramble without asking why.

One story, often told in the spirit of B.F. Skinner’s work ( From Richard Bandler and John Grinder book “Frogs into Princes”), makes the point with a wry twist. Researchers trained rats to run a maze for cheese, and humans to run a scaled-up maze for five-dollar bills. Both learned quickly. Then the rewards were removed. The rats, after a few unrewarded runs, stopped. The humans kept going. Some even “broke in at night” to check if the money had returned. Whether or not this experiment happened exactly as told, the allegory is clear: we often persist in old patterns long after the reward is gone, driven by habit, sunk costs, or the hope that maybe this time will be different.

In the 1960s, ethologist John B. Calhoun built what he called Universe 25 — a rodent utopia with unlimited food, water, and nesting space. At first, the population boomed. But as crowd increased, social order broke down. Mothers neglected their young, aggression spiked, some withdrew entirely. Eventually, reproduction ceased and the colony collapsed. Calhoun called it the “behavioural sink” — a collapse of social functioning under crowding. It was a haunting image, and many took it as a warning about human cities. But density alone may not be the culprit. Bees live in extreme closeness — tens of thousands in a hive — yet thrive. Ants, termites,  elephants, wolves, dolphins  all live in tight social groups without imploding. The difference is that their societies are hard‑wired: every member has a defined role, communication is constant, numbers are regulated, and the survival of the group outweighs individual competition.

Humans are different. We are not locked into fixed roles by instinct. Our prefrontal cortex — the seat of planning, self‑control, and imagination — develops slowly over decades. This frees us from the tyranny of our genes, but it also means our social order is learned to a great extent and  not pre‑programmed. We can reinvent ourselves, but we can also lose our way. To thrive, we need to balance two deep drives: the need for space — physical, mental, psychological, and spiritual breathing room — and the need for cohesion — trust, belonging, and shared purpose.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s research suggests we naturally organise into concentric layers, which we can think of as moving from core to tribe. At the centre is your core — about five people you can call at three in the morning, who know your fears, joys, and contradictions. Around them is your close circle of fifteen — the companions who show up when it matters. Beyond that is an affinity group of fifty — the people you’d invite to a big celebration, who know your story and whose stories you know. And finally, your tribe of about one hundred and fifty — the size of a functioning village, where faces are familiar and belonging is real. Beyond that, ties loosen and the emotional intensity fades.

Social media flattens these layers. It floods our inner circles with hundreds or thousands of weak ties, blurring boundaries and overloading our social brain. We end up with crowding without cohesion — a digital behavioural sink. The result can look eerily like Universe 25: withdrawal, aggression, or the emergence of “Beautiful Ones” who appear fine but are socially disengaged.

So, though “rat race” is most often used in the context of our workplaces — or the way we strive to hoard resources, both real and imagined, to secure a comfortable never‑ending, ‘immortal’ life for ourselves and those we love — it has quietly spread its wings into almost every sphere of our lives. This is, in part, because the layers of Dunbar’s circle have thinned, and the people we believe we love — or feel closest to — shift and change with surprising speed. All too often, our movement toward the inner circles, or our drift toward the outer ones, is shaped less by shared life and more by the fleeting currency of likes and applause within our social‑media cocoons. The compulsive, addictive,  reward-chasing behaviour, “RAT RACE”  isn’t confined to our jobs; it has infected our social interactions, hobbies, and personal identities (via likes and applause) or even spiritual highways. Many are absolutely  blind to the sad reality that  their mindset can corrupt even their  quest for meaning and enlightenment.

Rats teach us about our instincts. Bees and elephants teach us about structure. Our own brains teach us about choice. The “rat race” isn’t inevitable — but escaping it means knowing when to run the maze, when to rest, and when to ask if the cheese was ever worth chasing. The maze is not the trap. The belief that the reward still exists — that is the trap. And perhaps the real question is not whether you are the last rat in the maze, but whether you still need to be in it at all.

Only when we see the rat race for what it is — a mousetrap in disguise — do we arrive at the real question. The question that really matters. And that question — not the answer — is our first and last step (infact only step) to freedom.

The Web of Relationships: Avial and Attachment

The Web of Relationships: Avial and Attachment

by | Sep 6, 2025 | Gratitude, Joy, Relationships, Transformation, Uncategorized, Zen

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his small, luminous Letters to a Young Poet:

“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.”

Whether one is rich or poor in money, life offers its riches without discrimination. Most of these riches arrive in the form of relationships.

We often speak of “relationship” as if it belongs only to people — family, friends, the dear and near, perhaps a beloved pet. But life is far more promiscuous in its affections. It binds us to everything.

Life is a paradox — an abstraction vast as the sky with its never‑ending horizons, yet made of the most concrete, phenomenal things. It is the air that enters as breath and leaves us every moment. The water that quenches the thirst of our cells. The food that fills our plate and nourishes our body. The clothes that hold our scent and our modesty. The shelter that keeps our dreams intact, even if the sky were to fall. The books that carry other minds into ours, almost like osmosis. The music that rearranges our heartbeat — sometimes faster, sometimes slower. The football match that turns strangers into a single roar, especially when divine beings like Leo, Maradona, Zico, or Socrates appear on the ground. The flowers, leaves, trees, birds, clouds, sun, moon. The vehicles and gadgets that extend our reach. The deaf and mute gods we pray to, the dogs who love us without condition, the work that shapes our days.

Life is all of these and more. In the last three years at the Zendo, learning with a Zen Master, one lesson has stayed with me: enlightenment is nothing more than living each moment fully, with awareness and compassion. Spirituality is nothing more than being a humane human. It has nothing to do with divinity, nor with gods and heaven.

Robert Pirsig wrote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha — which is to demean oneself.”

To live is to be related to all these — to be in conversation with the constituents of existence. The quality of our life depends not only on the spread of these relationships, but on their depth.

When we speak of these parts, we are, in a way, reducing the great, whole abstraction of life into pieces we can hold, taste, and turn over in our hands. It is like having both a spotlight and a panoramic view — the detail and the whole. Trouble comes when we get stuck in one: the spotlight shrinking into a microscope, or stretching into a telescope that pushes life far away. Or a panoramic view so blurred it loses meaning.

As a child, my world was fourfold: Food. Football. Books. Politics. I did not choose them; they chose me. They rose from the environment into which I was born and shaped my early years. Much later, Zen — and to an extent, music — joined the list. But those originals never left me. They were not hobbies. They were my first teachers in the art of being alive — nourishing the body, stirring the spirit, feeding the mind.

Even now, I see life as a web of relationships — each thread a chance to meet the world more fully, each knot a reminder that nothing exists alone. And nowhere is this web more deliciously visible than in an Onam Sadya.

The Sadya is not merely another lunch. It is a parliament of colours, aromas, and textures convened on a single green leaf, democratically served — the ultimate gastronomical delight. Onto that green plantain leaf arrive the emissaries of the season: the crisp pappadam that shatters like laughter, the avial — a chorus of vegetables bound in coconut and curd, the olan, pale and quiet, like a monk in white robes, the fiery kalan that speaks in exclamation marks, the tangy puli inji — my favourite.

Rice — often Palakkadan par‑boiled matta rice with its brownish hues — sits at the centre, as if holding court, receiving in turn the sambar’s earthy embrace, the rasam’s sharp, peppered counsel, and finally, the sweet benediction of payasam — four types of it, each to be savoured in a particular order lest the last lose its distinct memory.

To eat a Sadya is to be in relationship with more than food. It is to shake hands with the farmers who grew the rice, and the cooks who lovingly prepared each dish. To nod to the coconut trees swaying in the Malabar wind. To remember the grandmother who taught you how to fold the leaf just so. To sit in the company of kin and strangers, all bound by the same choreography of reaching, serving, tasting, smiling.

Even at SATORP — the greenfield refinery of Aramco and Total in Al Khobar — our project site mess offered dozens of cuisines to cater to the sixty or seventy nationalities working there, the largest spread I’d ever seen. Yet even that came a distant second to an Onam Sadya. In recent years, Thara and I made it a point to attend every major Sadya event in Bangalore. We were even the first to arrive at the Kappa Chakka Kandhari fest in Koramangala.

This year, I’m at Kanzeon Zendo. After checking around, I settled on the Onam Sadya at the Kodaikanal International Hotel — good food, fair prices, and staff who know both Fr. AMA and our Zendo Manager, Prakash Raj. They always treat us warmly.

On Thiruvonam day, we arrived early at 11:30 a.m., only to be told the feast would be ready at 12:30. We decided to wait over coffee, but soon the manager informed us it would be delayed further. So we ordered à la carte instead. The food was delicious — no doubt about that — but knowing a Sadya was being prepared next door and that we’d miss it was a small dampener.

Prakash was apologetic, and we planned to return the next day for the Sadya. But as we were paying, we learned it was being served only that day. Strangely, I felt no disappointment. I simply accepted it — not with resignation, but with the quiet ease that comes when the craving has dissolved.

Back at the Zendo, I called Thara. In her school  The Valley School  for lunch, they’d prepared Kerala‑style curries — my favourites. We laughed over my “missed Sadya” story. My own equanimity surprised me. Once, Thara and I had driven all the way from Kanakapura Road to Murugan Idli which is almost near Krishnagiri at around 70 + kms from our home, for a plate of podi idli. That was my past. Now, I find myself more willing to let life unfold as it will.

Yesterday’s koan at Dokusan was Hekiganroku 58, Joshu’s Pitfall: “The supreme way is not difficult; it just dislikes picking and choosing.” Once we stop that, life is wonderful. A parotta with Chettinad chicken curry is as delicious as avial with puli inji.

Jiddu Krishnamurti more than once said:

“I don’t mind what happens. That is the essence of inner freedom. It is a timeless spiritual path: release attachment to outcomes, and deep inside yourself, you will feel good no matter what.”

I think I realise what he meant: inner freedom is not minding what happens.

For this year’s Thiruvonam, I did not sit before the leaf. But the relationship was still there — in the remembering, in the imagining, in the gratitude for what could have been. A thread loosened, perhaps, but not broken. For in the web of relationships, even absence can be a form of presence.

The Iron Bar, Birkenstock Sandals and the Moon

The Iron Bar, Birkenstock Sandals and the Moon

by | Sep 5, 2025 | Compassion, Empathy, Friendship, Gratitude, Joy, RElationship, value, Zen

We’ve all seen those posts: a neat little parable, a clever moral, a tidy takeaway about “unlocking your value.” They get likes, they get shares — and then they vanish. But some stories don’t fit into a neat box. They stay with you, because they’re not about price at all. They’re about the kind of value you can’t measure, can’t market, and can’t steal.

“A thousand‑gram bar of iron. In its raw form, it might fetch a hundred dollars. Shape it into horseshoes and its value rises to two‑fifty. Draw it into sewing needles and you’re looking at seventy thousand. Craft it into watch springs and gears, and it’s worth six million. Refine it into precision laser parts for lithography, and it could command fifteen million. “, thus read a LinkedIn post by an  “Influencer” with a really large number of followers. The lesson seems obvious: your worth is not just in what you’re made of, but in what you make of yourself.

And yet, that’s only part of the truth. Value is never absolute. It bends and shifts with context and timing. On a desert island, the Kohinoor diamond would not buy you a sip of water. In that moment, a loaf of bread or a bottle of clean water would be beyond price. Even the humble iron bar might be more precious than a laser part if it could anchor a shelter or crack open coconuts.

The trouble with our modern world is that we’ve let market price masquerade as the only measure of worth. And in the age of social media, this distortion has taken on a new costume: the endless stream of clever, self‑promoting “insights” packaged as wisdom. Posts that sound profound but are designed to sell you the author’s brand. We scroll through them, mistaking polish for depth, applause for truth.

Some time back, in a WhatsApp group, there was a long discussion about the “right” pricing for coaching. I’ve made a decent living from coaching, but never a fortune in USD or INR. What I have earned, though, are relationships that no invoice could capture.

When I lost my day job and coaching was my only bread and butter, I called an old friend and colleague to ask if he might buy a copy of my book. I get INR 49 from each sale. I hung up, reached for my door key — and saw a message that he had transferred a large sum into my account. I called him immediately to say I wasn’t looking for a loan and had no idea when I could repay it. He laughed and said, “There are things money can’t buy. Don’t put a price tag on my friendship with you.”

Another friend once transferred INR 50,000 for a single coaching session. I called to tell him he must have made a mistake — I don’t charge anywhere near that. He simply said he knew, and that was exactly the point. And that was the highest money I got for a Coaching session till date.  ( Btw he was my first coaching client. Still he is. And he is a designated CEO of an IT company. 🙂 )

And then, more recently, there was my 19‑year‑old son, in his first semester at university. He was planning a trip to visit a friend in Jalandhar, and I sent him some extra money without him asking. Soon after, he wrote in our family group to say he could manage the trip within his monthly pocket money and didn’t need more. I was left wondering — at his age, did I have that kind of metta and muditā? That ease with enough, that relationship with money where you can receive with gratitude but also decline with grace.

Some time back, I had gifted a good pair of Birkenstock sandals to my Zen master, Fr. AMA Samy. When I returned from Bangalore, I noticed he wasn’t wearing them. Perhaps sensing my thought, he placed his hand on my shoulder and said that one of our staff at the Zendo didn’t have sandals, so he had given them to him. I half‑protested, saying they were costly, and he laughed it off: “How does it matter? A pair of sandals is a pair of sandals. There is value only when someone uses it.”

Zen master Ryōkan once returned to his hut to find a thief had taken everything. Looking out at the night sky, he wrote: “The thief left it behind: the moon at my window.” There are things that cannot be stolen: joy, peace of mind, the quiet companionship of the stars, the warmth of a shared laugh, the kind of friendship — and family — that gives without keeping score, and sometimes, the wisdom to say, “I have enough.”

Everything of value cannot be measured, and everything we can measure may not be of value. The iron bar, the diamond, the bread, the sandals, the moon — each has its moment. The art is not in chasing the highest price or the most likes, but in seeing clearly what is needed now, and offering it with an open hand.

 

Freedom, WiFi and the Wheel of Life

Freedom, WiFi and the Wheel of Life

by | Aug 14, 2025 | Harmony, Joy, Peace, Zen

14 August 2025 at Kanzeon Zendo, Perumalmalai. Tomorrow is India’s 79th Independence Day.

A septuagenarian nation remembers its long walk from subjugation to sovereignty — flags will be unfurled, anthems rising, street corners will be washed in tricolour. Freedom for a country is hard won: self-esteem reclaimed, self-made laws, and for the first time in centuries, every Indian a first-class citizen in their own land. But when that same word drifts away from the Red Fort’s parade grounds and into the quiet of the human heart, it grows slippery. A country can win its independence; its people may still live in chains — not of iron, but of craving, fear, the restless greed for more. Laws can declare you free; your own mind can still bind you.

Long ago, Siddhartha Gautama also won his freedom — not from a foreign yoke, but from the subjugation of his own conditioned mind. The Buddha called these inner chains tanha — thirst — the clinging that warps honest need. At Sarnath, as the Second Noble Truth, he taught that from this thirst springs dukkha — the suffering that binds us more tightly than iron ever could.

Translators have often rendered dukkha as “suffering” and tanha as “desire,” but these terms only scratch the surface. Dukkha comes from du (bad, difficult) and kha (axle-hole), evoking a wheel with a misaligned axle, wobbling under strain. It captures an existential friction — the deep sense that life is “off,” not just painful. Likewise, tanha is more than mere want; it is the thirst that distorts our clear impulses, contrasting with chanda, the wholesome impulse toward what sustains life. To tell them apart is to find the axis of freedom.

The day before yesterday, a senior corporate leader from Chennai rang about staying at the Zendo. His needs were crystal clear: a corner room facing the mountain, no distractions (he absolutely wanted to be left alone), and very fast, reliable Wi Fi. He might join zazen. Or not. One last question: the menu.

I mentioned another place nearby — Tamara. “Is it a Zendo?” he asked. “A five-star resort,” I replied. Silence. Then dead. I set the phone aside. This is how tanha dresses itself today — the hunger for silence braided with the hunger for control, retreat tethered to a seamless data stream. Not wrong. Not right. Simply the wheel, wobbling under many pulls.

In the original list of primal instincts, before hunger, there is breath. The first gasp in the delivery room, the last sigh at death. Breathing is the body’s oldest rhythm, the metronome that plays even in dreamless sleep. Honest breath is like chanda: clear, necessary, free of ornament. But the mind can grab it, pose with it, chase exotic pranayamas for performance.

Hunger has its own manifesto of truth too — until the mind twists it. Self-made billionaire and Thyrocare founder A. Velumani maps it in rupees most beautifully:

  • Eating for the stomach — fifty to hundred rupees: true need
  • For the tongue — two hundred rupees or more: craving enters
  • For the eyes — a thousand rupees: plating as theatre
  • For the nose — three thousand five hundred rupees: perfumed status
  • For the “likes” in Social media — an invisible currency, yet spent in restless scrolling

The higher the climb, the farther from the honest growl of the belly.

Schopenhauer caught the paradox: “You are free to do what you want, but you are not free to want what you want.” The Buddha went further: awareness doesn’t kill desire; it clarifies it. Discipline is the alchemy. When breath shortens or hunger whispers — pause. Ask: is this chanda’s call for life, or tanha’s cry for comfort? Watch craving rise like steam from a five-star dish. Don’t judge it. Don’t become it.

“When you eat,” said Dōgen, “just eat. When you breathe, just breathe.” A 100-rupee limited thali, honest breath, meeting the sensation raw. Here, tanha starves. Chanda breathes deep.

Every single morning after our zazen, we chant the Meal Gatha in the Zendo dining hall before breakfast:

This food is the gift of the whole universe:

self-giving of the earth and sky, sentient and insentient beings.

Many are labouring to feed and nourish us in the mutuality of love and caring.

May we enjoy this food in love and gratitude,

May we become a blessing for the many.

From this scorched earth, patience grows. Focus sharpens. The zen monk’s mindful bite of bread, the jivanmukta’s sip of water, the Zen master’s easy gait — all move with life, not against it.

True freedom isn’t the death of wanting. It’s seeing the feast in the frugal, the vastness in a single breath. The wheel turns true. No wobble. No scrape. Just the smooth roll of a life aligned. Hunger remains. Breath remains. The suffering ends.

In the half-dark before dawn on this eve of  Independence Day, my 90-year-old Zen teacher walks toward the Zendo altar. The air is cool and still, the mountain’s mist-clad silhouette behind the altar plays hide and seek, a few birds already had begun their sutra chanting , floorboards creaking under slow, certain feet.

Is it tanha that moves him, or chanda?

Perhaps neither.

Just the feet, moving.

 

The Sutra of Wings …a single wing that carries all the flights.  

The Sutra of Wings …a single wing that carries all the flights.  

by | Jul 27, 2025 | Change, Harmony, Peace, Transformation, Trust, Zen

16 May 2025. Early morning at Namma Bangaluru.

 In many many years, I woke up as an absolute master of my time.  May be 3/4 Master as I had to still drive all the way back to Republic of Sarjapur or Republic of Kodathy to return the “mainframe” computer, through which my “employer” controlled my life. Though at a price.  A handsome one that.

Modern work systems are the most sophisticated prisons crafted by the ingenuity of human beings. A paycheck can be both a lifeline and a leash are a paradox that many of us to live with. On one hand, it provides security, stability, and the means to survive (or even thrive). On the other, it can trap you in a cycle of dependency, where your time, energy, and identity become tied to a system that may not align with your deeper values or aspirations.

Still the crimson Sunshine rays was on the horizon.  And I thought II saw an Eagle flying in the far east.  Though umpteen times, Manu and Thara had told me that, the ones we get to see in the skies of Bangalore are Brahmani kites and not real eagles, I still called them eagles.

Human world is constituted by linguistic and symbolic images and concepts.

Don’t remember, when Eagle seeped into my heartmind as an osmosis of a metaphor. May be after I read and reread Jiddu Krishna murti’s “The Flight of the Eagle”. That was the second book of Krishnamurti I had read after “Freedom from the known”. The metaphor of the eagle in flight represents absolute freedom—soaring beyond limitations, seeing with clarity. Krishnamurti uses this imagery to emphasize the importance of awareness and living without fear.  Much later though I read Richard Bach classic “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”.  Eagle remained.  As my metaphor for thriving in life.

It won’t be an overstatement to say analogies and metaphors run our life… They shape how we think, communicate, and even perceive reality. 

It took some effort to return the official company laptop.  On 15 May I walked out of office not with a severance package but with a corporate corpse in my bag- A laptop cold and closed. The persons in charge, insisted that as per their Asset Management Database, that computer is still in their stock and not allocated to me. When I started working in the ancestorial version of the same company some 30 years back, there were no personal computers allotted to anyone.  There were no emails leave alone other fancy systems.

The person with whom I spoke to told me, he will be there at the office only at 11:00 am. Yesterday 15 May 2025 was my curtain raiser day for the next act of my life after a livelihood mission spanning 3 decades. Almost 11,000 days.  1500+ weeks, 262980 hours and 15778800 minutes!!!!  March 1995- 15 May 2025 will be marked on the tombstone of that.  I considered making a French exit on my last day at work.  (Ironically French calls it English exit!).  But Rajdev and Wipro Travel team and my team had other ideas. May be born out of sheer compassion for me.  Travel team organized a warm sendoff full nice words, tasty cakes, crispy samosas and sandwiches with Amul cheese slices.  When I used to visit office on Thursdays, almost always I used to carry some eatables to be shared.  That good habit (though did not make it to the Covey list) was imbibed in me by my first boss R Bala. (& currently my Advaita teacher and a CEO of IT company based in London). Bala used to keep a jar of chocolates at his desk.  May be that act, helped me to one of the Travel team members.  They did consider me as one.  Even when they went to Pondichéry for team building, Rajdev ensured I was there for that trip.   It was one of the best team I had worked for in my career.

  As I looked at the flower arrangement for one last time (may be that is one of the things I am going to miss other than the monthly transfer to my parched and dry bank account.)  Komal Jain had called me. I knew he was on a pilgrimage to Kailash Manasarovar.  I thought he is back at Delhi. HE told me for some reason; he is not able to do a video call and asked me to call back.  I parked just outside Wipro SJP Corporate office gate and called back. On the small iPhone screen, Komal appeared.  He looks so serene and peaceful.  HE sidestepped and pointed to the majestic ice clad trapezoidal rock.  Kailash Manasarovar was absolutely glistening like a piece of 24 carat Gold in the evening sun.   A few seconds would have passed without me realizing it.  Unaccounted for. When he said, he got to go to the camp woke me up from my reverie.  My parents belong to Lingayat Community. So they named my elder brother Sasidharan, one of the names of Shiva. And me as Viswanathan after Kasi Viswanathan. Along time after that once I went to Varanasi for a Krishnamurti Foundation India annual get-together and seminars.  Prof Krishnanath told me I got to go and visit Sarnath. Instead of attending those “dialogues”, I used to French exit  to visit various places. Sarnath, Kabir etc.   The closest I went to Kasi temple was when I searched for a good silk saree for Thara.

  And when I saw Kailash in that iPhone screen it was as if, if you don’t go to see the God, he comes to you by himself. In the form of pixels across vast emptiness.

The laptop handover ceremony is at 11:00 am. Then Mankeerat, Kedar and Neha told me they are buying me to beer and chicken wings. Vijay won’t be able to join today.

Instead of the usual breakfast at The Rameshwaram Café, I chose Café Amudham in Koramangala.  Usually, I drive very early to beat the traffic.  And it was important to be on the other side of Bangalore separated by the great Gulf of  Silk Board junction. After the breakfast I walked across and sat on that stone bench in that park adrift between identities.  Suddenly I became aware of the swarm of butterflies… All of them had a blue and back tinge on their wings. And there they were… like a river of blue butterflies. An elderly morning walker told me that they are known as blue tiger butterflies and they are escaping monsoon – western ghats to eastern ghats.  I felt they are not fleeing rain, but dancing with it.  Not lost but on pilgrimage.  In that moment the Eagle in me – the old symbol of solitary power, talons clenched against the sky- fell like a stone. Here was a truer teaching: fragile wings moving with the storm, not against it.  A surrender that was not defeat, but sacred alignment. 

Later, I learned: Tirumala limniace. Blue tigers. Every year, millions lift off from the Western Ghats just before monsoon hits. Not fleeing rain—but riding a current older than concrete, older than corporations. They fly east, 400 kilometers or more, to the drier Eastern Ghats. No leader. No map. Just pure, soft-bodied instinct. Think of it: wings thinner than a corporate promise, carrying them across highways, cities, and droughts. They rest on wet roads. They drink from mud puddles. Some die. Most push on. Not as individuals—as a river of blue. When they arrive, they wait out the rains. Then, when the wind turns, they fly back west. A round-trip pilgrimage few ever see. Fewer still understand. That day on the bench, with a dead laptop in my bag, I didn’t just see them. I felt it in my ribs: This is how you move when you trust the body of truth more than the mind of fear.

May be a sheer coincidence as i reached back at Kanzeon Zendo on 17 May Saturday morning, was climbing down the stairs toward my room, i saw a huge butterfly… A yellow golden one with intricate design on its wings… I shared it and my spouse Thara told me it is a moth. and Google told me it is a Golden emperor.   Thara called it ‘just a moth.’ Google called it ‘emperor.’ I call it a confirmation.: When you finally lay down Christ’s thorn crown— the one you wore through exiles, firings, and the desert of dead dogma— the true kingdom appears on the step beneath your foot. So instead of rushing to have my breakfast, I was googling on what else butterflies… IT was so fascinating.  There was a great documentary on Monster Butterflies.  They migrate all the way from Canada, across Trump’s America, without passport of visa to Mexico and then back.  I chose that documentary for our Sunday evening movie at Zendo.  Everyone seems to have so much into this.

Then I thought all my exiles -from jobs, gurus and tribes- and realized. I was never cast out. Rather I was migrating. Transforming on the way like those butterflies.  We, butterflies, move when the ground drowns. We trust the inner compass that knows storm will end. New blossoms wait. So now when I think, I no longer visualize eagles – I become one of the millions of butterflies.  Vulnerable, persistent, carried by the greater than “I”. Power is not in the fist. It is the wings that bend, body that trembles but still fly.  So celebrate butterflies over eagles.  Because the world already worships force. The butterfly teaches us that resilience is softer, stranger, and more miraculous—a dance of patience and trust in unseen currents. 

The eagle rules the sky.  The butterfly enchants it. 

Eagles see from above. Butterflies feel the storm in their bones.

This time, no French exit. I stay. With wings.

Would you rather be the storm… or the wing that rides it ??

Choosing life after every great death…

Choosing life after every great death…

by | Jul 24, 2025 | Gratitude, Grief, Peace, Zen

Today is 24 July 2025. Karkadaka Vavu in Kerala… we pay homage to souls of all the ancestors .  And I am waiting or my mother’s phone call to remind me whether I had done puja to Sankara, my late father.

There is a wonderful quote from  Douglas Adam’s  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and it goes:

“You can trace every being in the Universe back to the first couple on Earth with a little imagination and a lot of paperwork.”

Else where in the same book, he writes

“The chances of finding out what’s really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied. But it is comforting to reflect that every single one of us is, by some extraordinary coincidence, here. And that we can trace a line back through our parents and their parents and their parents, and so on, to the first couple on Earth, and that every single one of them managed to live long enough to have children.”

It’s not  phrased exactly this way in the book, but this sentiment echoes Adams’ blend of awe and absurdity. The idea that we’re here because an unbroken chain of survival and reproduction—through wars, plagues, accidents, and heartbreak—somehow held together. Every link in that chain was improbably lucky.

It’s a beautiful paradox, isn’t it? That our uniqueness is the result of sheer statistical improbability. In Zen terms, perhaps it’s the koan of being both utterly contingent and infinitely precious.  From a Zen perspective, this can feel both absurd and luminous. The self that traces its lineage, step by step, becomes a narrative construct—one mask among many. And yet, within this genealogy of luck, something stirs that can’t be traced: the Original Face. That which was never born and therefore never needed ancestors.

When my father passed away in November 2006.. I did not cry..  Brij, my mentor and good friend at Wipro asked me to read  The Tibetan Book of the Dead…  Much later, during one of those chilly morning at KAUST , when I sat on facing the light tower in the Red Sea, looking for Dolphins, suddenly I was overwhelmed with grief.  And I cried. Not sure whether the sea level rose because of my tears or early morning tide. “As I felt the taste of tears, I remembered that Gibran couplet: ‘There must be something strangely sacred in salt. It is in our tears and in the sea.’ At the end of it I felt so empty and light…At long distance, a huge fish jumped up in the air and flipped.  I was not sure whether it was a Dolphin or Sankara, my late father. And I started my walk towards the café for a coffee.

 Later on 20 November , when I had called my mother, she asked me whether I did offer puja. That is when I remembered  that day was my father’s death anniversary and I also remembered I had completely lived the grief cycle at last.  It took some  8 years.

Krishnamurti wrote  ““If you pursue a feeling to its very end, without resistance, without naming it, without trying to escape from it, then that feeling runs its course and ends. But if you suppress it, control it, or rationalize it, it remains and recurs.” And this theme keeps recurring in his  Commentaries  of living and Awakening intelligence.  He also wrote ““To observe a feeling without naming it, without condemning or justifying it, is to be free of it.”

May be , on that red sea shore, I was free of the grief.  After that , no loss whatever had affected me more than it should. Whether it is death, job loss, any other psychological pain.   I just be with it.  Be aware of it. Endure the pain .

That freedom met me again when Sr. Chitra spoke before breakfast: ‘Birgit Foster has passed. Brigit was one of the earliest disciples of Fr. AMA and an early Bodhi Sangha members. For years together she had organised Fr. AMA’s sesshins in Europe. And even in her old age, when she was in a wheel chair, she used to make jewellery and sell it contribute to the school run by Sangha at Kodai Kanal. After breakfast i met Fr. AMA to offer my condolences. He spoke for a few minutes . About losing Karen, Sheela and Birgit , his disciples and friends all within a short span of time. And as I was leaving , he called me and told me “Tomorrow is Sreenath’s birth day. Pls buy a cake and let us wish him.” . So Prakash our Zendo manager bought a cake and yesterday morning at 650 am after early morning zazen , we all cut the cake at our dining hall and sang Happy birthday to Sreenath. And yesterday evening a silent prayer meeting was held at the Zendo hall in memory of Brigit.

There are many Koans which talk about life and death. Joshu’s great death for example. “Joshu’s Great Death”  is  a koan from the Book of Equanimity (also known as The Book of Serenity). The koan, found in Case 63, presents the question: “What if a man who has died a great death comes back to life?”. This seemingly paradoxical question explores the nature of existence and the illusion of death and rebirth, prompting practitioners to question their understanding of self and reality, life and death.

One day with a Zen master teaches you all about life and death and zen than all those books together. One thing Fr. AMA kept telling me is how it is important to celebrate life. When  i was working on that Koan Joshu and Great Death he asked me to read one of his articles which read. “Choose life” is one of the most important commandments of the Jewish people. It is also one of the fundamental values of  many other great  traditions. In that article , Fr. AMA  strongly disagrees with the views of the great Masao Abe. Because there is nothing wrong with loving life so much.

One got to choose life and living  after every great death of ours one every single day that we die and reborn and live.  

“Masao Abe saw emptiness; Fr. AMA sees fire. Birgit sold jewellery from her wheelchair to support a cause. Sankara waits in the salt-wind. Adams chuckles at the paperwork.

“And this Karkadaka Vavu?
I am heading to Kodai Kanal for a cup of that super filter coffee and walk through Coaker’s walk.
I chose life long ago—deep in the tinnitus-dark, dumping pills into the wastebin.
Now, when dawn’s bell cracks the silence,
I choose it again: with this breath, zazen, with a cup of coffee…
Not once. Not someday.
Now.
Now.
Now.”

A maskless face in a boundless stage..

A maskless face in a boundless stage..

by | Jul 23, 2025 | Communication, Compassion, Harmony, Joy, Peace, Transformation, Zen

All the world’s a stage, thus wrote Shakespeare in his romantic comedy play “As you like it”. It is one of the most used Shakespearian quote after; “To Be or Not be “  and “Et tu Brutus” .  

From the moment we arrive in this world stage, as tiny actors, we are  made to memorize   dialogues from scripts ((often written by playwrights far less renowned than Shakespeare) we never chose and made to enact in our respective lives.  We begin crafting masks to our faces—one for home, one for school, one for the workplace, another for the market—each mask a story we tell so well that soon it ossifies around our facial bones, and we forget the face that wore it. In that crowded wardrobe of souls, our true self is often left behind, waiting like a silent guest in the corner until some social slip reveals we wore the wrong role in the wrong scene and life exacts its toll.

Erving Goffman (1922–1982), whose seminal work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) pioneered dramaturgical analysis, taught us that every interaction is a front-stage performance of polished gestures for an audience, with a backstage realm where we sigh, fumble, and slip the mask. It remains, for me, one of the most powerful sociology texts encountered at Azim Premji University, alongside Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality and R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. Goffman’s explorations of stigma peeled back layers of our everyday theatre, revealing the frames that shape our roles.

Many may remember  Second Life which was the most popular metaverse / digital other life world in early 2000s. By the  time (  2013 ) I had created an avatar among over a million others, all seeking a moment’s authenticity beyond daily facades—beckoning us to explore the face we buried beneath our masks. This digital alias echoed a naming that began much earlier. No one called me “Vishy” before I joined Wipro Systems in 1995–96. My friends in GE’s Central Pension Accounting System began calling me that, and when email addresses arrived—short names being essential in an era of pricey storage—I chose vishy@wiprosystems. That name stuck. In Second Life, I christened my avatar Vishy Sankara. Today, more or less, I am that name; the original one from my parents seems to have vanished into that “crowded ward robe of souls”.

Now a days,  scroll through Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, or your WhatsApp groups and you’ll sense a second act of that second life unfurling: curated personas chasing applause, a polished script of likes and shares. Emojis become our tribal currency or social tax—tiny tokens of belonging we exchange to grease social gears, to murmur agreement without risking real words—yet Truth remains as elusive as Emptiness, unbought by any cascade of reactions.

As a bystander—an “adventurer” in Peter Drucker’s phrase—I drift through these currents, watching debates swirl, hidden anxieties surface, and group norms crystallize, noticing how charisma often drowns out content. Maslow’s hunger for esteem and belonging weaves an unspoken contract that steers our attention to familiar names instead of fresh ideas. The same impulse that flusters us into rushing past that janitor and  ikebana artist who creates those wonderful floral arrangements at the reception  to greet the chairman, as if status alone renders one worthy of our bowed head.

A long time back, during Six Sigma’s hey days, when GE was the “neighbour’s envy” in other corporate board rooms,  I too was one. A Six Sigma Black Belt.  During those days, we used to have a quarterly brain storming session often conducted in one of those resorts outside Bangalore.  I remember our Chairman came to address us in one of those sessions, during his speech he had asked a question to a front bencher and that unexpected question got him quite tongue tied. After our Chairman left, our Head of Mission Quality gave a rather long , boring lecture on being prepared with an elevator pitch.  That is when I first heard the word elevator pitch.  The idea that you happen to meet your CEO  in the elevator on your / his way to office and he asks you “What do you do in his company “ you may have  a few seconds to answer and make an impact. In other words, be prepared with your 30 sec mass dialogue for an act in play who never know when it may happen and on what stage you may be pushed into.  

On last  May 15, on my last working day at Wipro , I looked for Lakshmi and Sachin the  unsung artists of Wipro’s daily grace. Laksmi is janitor and ikebana artist who takes care of that wonderful floral arrangement at the reception. And Sachin who makes those tastiest ginger teas in that Corner café. It was another routine for me to have a tea with my Wipro travel team friends,  Zia, Prabhu, Hema , Bala , Denesh etc on Thursdays.  Zia and Prabhu  always paid for all of us.  Usually by the time,  we arrived at office,  the floor were clean and flower arrangement was done.  Once I asked the receptionist and she shared her name.  Lakshmi.  She was also a janitor who took care of that portion of the office. I left a thank you note for her with the receptionist.   Laksmi  told me I was one of the few  who walked into our office and who had the time to look at that flower arrangement. Everyone else either seems to be too busy or was on their cell phone.   And I was the only one who left a thank you note for her for the flower arrangements.  Probably that is the best compliment I ever got in my career. That moment taught me a quiet truth: when you really let go of yourself — your goals, your fears, your insecurities and complexes, your egoistic ways — you find yourself again. It could be in those flower arrangements, or a quiet joy kindled in the heart of someone you see truly. In that release, the mask falls away, and your very being becomes elevated beyond any rehearsed performance.

Even as children, we rehearsed these impulses. In our neighbourhood Monopoly games, choices revealed hidden scripts—those afraid of losing or being paupers often rushed to become the banker, clutching that role like a lifebuoy against imagined scarcity. We learned the dance of status through plastic houses and paper currency, mimicking adult hierarchies with startling precision. Facilitators of experiential learning in corporate training halls, know that very well.  Beneath our tailored adult masks, that inner child still peers out. So they recreate those games of fish bowl circles, mirror exercise,  blindfolded labyrinth etc , trusting that behind the professional polish, someone still fears loss, still longs to belong, still performs an old script from childhood.

They think this will shine light on blind spots we cannot see ourselves—each exercise a moving koan, an invitation to unmask in action, letting awareness dawn like first light across our faces.

Yet beyond these structured plays lies Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, born in Brazil’s political crucible, where actor and audience dissolve into “spect‐actors” who freeze scenes of injustice and step in to rewrite power

While I was a student at  APU, Prof Benson Issac conducted a program of  Theatre of the Oppressed for members of   APU Counselling team.  Sooner, I almost gate crashed into a  TO facilitator program conducted by  Radha of CCDC.  In TO, facilitators are called Joker as it mirrors the Joker card in a deck of cards. it’s a neutral, impartial position that can move freely between different situations and perspectives. Like a playing card Joker, the facilitator isn’t bound to any particular suit or role. They act as an impartial guide, helping participants explore different perspectives without imposing their own views.  I found TO to be the most powerful way of unmasking ourselves.  Image Theatre sculpts our bodies into living portraits of joy, fear, dominance, and despair; Invisible Theatre stages public interventions that provoke genuine reaction; Newspaper Theatre, Legislative Theatre, and the Rainbow of Desire weave analysis, action, heart, and mind into one seamless practice. Unlike corporate role‐plays that replay the same protocols, Boal’s methods pry open power’s machinery, surface systemic constraints, and invite us to co‐author new scripts of agency—cracking open walls so ripples of insight carry into everyday life, long after the final curtain. In that praxis I became aware of my own oppressive ways, even when I believed I was fighting others’ oppression and playing the victim.

Yet beneath these performances lives Maslow’s pyramid. Clinging to its base tiers – scrambling for security and approval – anchors us in scarcity loops. Paradoxically, some vault to self-actualization through creativity springing from unmet need. Late in life, Maslow pointed toward a realm beyond his famous schema: self-transcendence. Yet that truth had struck him decades earlier in 1938, among the Blackfoot Nation — where he witnessed communities thriving not on scarcity, but sacred reciprocity. Fulfilment flowed from collective harmony, not individual ascent. His hierarchical model, built years later, could never contain that revelation. Today, corporate workshops still peddle the pyramid — blind to the fact that Maslow himself transcended it. We remain trapped on its lower rungs, mistaking survival for meaning.

After leaving his Zen master, Tozan saw his reflection in a pond and whispered: “Even now he is not what I am, and I am what he is.” In that moment, roles fell away. The mirror returned the original face – not given, but uncovered.

From Goffman’s stages to Shakespeare’s eternal echo, we return breathless to the truth: all the world’s a stage, and we are only ever rehearsing our way back to presence.

And how in their removal, we sometimes glimpse the sliver of sacred angel flickering in between. in Us. That is when we all become truly human. Humane ones.

We are never just one thing—and perhaps that awareness is the most honest mask of all. When I stopped climbing Maslow’s pyramid, I became the ground it stood on at Kanzeon Zendo.

 

The Alphabet of Presence: On Mind, Metaphor, and the Mirror That Refuses to Reflect…

The Alphabet of Presence: On Mind, Metaphor, and the Mirror That Refuses to Reflect…

by | Jul 21, 2025 | Meditation, Transformation, Uncategorized, Zen

We begin our LKG life decoding the world through concrete fragments. A is for Apple. B for Ball and C for Cat. The apple is red, round, fragrant—an object we can grasp, name, bite into. We learn first by touching the edges of things, before realising that some truths have no edges at all.

At the age of 45, I went back to Azim Premji University and enrolled for a full time MA course in Education not to learn or unlearn.. But to learn how we learn. Once I remember my spouse , half in jest and half serious, telling me as I had started early morning for my class “An Emme  (Buffalo) goes for his MA in Education “ .:-) . And I retorted immediately  quoting the name of the best book on leadership I had read “Flight of the Buffalo. Soaring to excellence”.  By Belasco.   Thara did have the last word when she said “Vikata Saraswati”.

And so learning becomes a spiral—from example to essence, from form to formless, from “This is an Apple” to “What is freedom?” to “what is consciousness” to  “What is the Observed and Observer”…. We cross thresholds without knowing it. Suddenly, we’re conversing in abstractions—justice, love, compassion, gender—not as fixed ideas, but as felt experiences. “Gender” no longer simply refers to biological designation; it blooms into a fluid landscape of self-perception, expression, and relational truth.  Manu, my elder son, who is pursuing his graduation at JGU taught me that there are more than 60 different terms to denote gender now.  A long time back , in 2004, me and Thara ended up in Troy, Michigan while I was working for a project for GM at Renaissance Centre, Detroit. Thara  who was born in Chennai, where the three seasons of the year  are hot , hotter and hottest, had only one word for  snow.  Me Too.   SNOW.  I have read some where ( May be in “Lanugague in Thought and action” by Hayakawa) that Eskimos are said to have number of words to denote Snow..  But I do know that Mallus have many terms to denote rain.  As a Mallu, I was quite proud of it ,  till a good friend told me  Hawaiian language has more than 200 words for rain.

The point is more “we” know about something, the more words our language has about it. And we really know it, only when we “EMPTY” all those words and concepts from my mind.  Words and concepts are just bridges to know something, whether  a bird, tree or absolute truth.  And they are not the bird, tree or absolute truth.  Krishnamurti or Zen, any spiritual teacher worth his salt teaches this essence. 

In Zen Way—Jesus Way, Tucker Callaway offers six types of mind—Only-Mind, Spectator-Consciousness, Stored-Up Consciousness, Turning-Over, Six-Sense Mind, and No-Mind. According to Bala, my Vedanta teacher, Vedanta adds its own lens: manas, buddhi, chitta, ahamkāra—mind, intellect, memory, ego. There are Koans which says. “No mind  No Buddha” and  “Mind is Buddha.” Yet both traditions point beyond structure, toward freedom. The koan does not inform—it transforms.

In my view and understanding, Zen tells us: No-mind. Mushin. Not the absence of mind, but the absence of grasping. The presence that remains when thought ceases to cling. This is not always easy to understand—especially when we are conditioned to seek clarity through concepts. Mind, as conceptualized in spiritual traditions—from Zen to Vedanta—is not a rigid category, but a shifting metaphor. Psychology tries to map it with models, but even here we find spectrums, not binaries.

This movement from concrete to abstract, from grasped to ungraspable, is not just epistemology—it is pedagogy. (Or Andragogy). We learn best through stories, examples, felt metaphors. It is no accident that teachers use animals, rivers, lamps, and chariots to talk about consciousness. Without metaphor, truth feels dry. Sterile. Inaccessible. And perhaps this is why some (like me) find Jiddu Krishnamurti so challenging.

Krishnamurti stripped teaching of metaphor, story, and system. He refused to be your guide. He would not tell you a parable or give you steps. He only pointed: “The observer is the observed.” For many, this was too abrupt—like trying to breathe on the moon. But for a few—like physicist David Bohm or martial artist Bruce Lee—it was ignition.

Bruce Lee, once told by his Doctor that he would never walk again after a severe spinal injury, lay bedridden and broken. And there, in the silence, he read Krishnamurti. He let go of systems, styles, rigidity. From that emptiness came Jeet Kune Do—his art of fluid expression, of formless freedom. “Using no way as way, having no limitation as limitation.” He healed. He trained. He became the river.( And he taught “Be like water my friend”.)

Fr AMA , my Zen master, told me once that ” Zen teaches you just 1/4th and you got to learn the rest”.  It teaches you just enough to destabilize the scaffolding of our concepts. And nothing more. 

So what does this tell us—not just about mind, but about learning, change, transformation? That we learn through body, story, breath. That concepts are not endpoints, but gateways. That meta learning—the awareness of how we learn—is the true curriculum. It’s not enough to know something. We must also know how we know.  ( I did write a term paper for my Epistemology class at. APU during my MA Education days.  “How do we know what we know?”  Message me if you would like to read it. )

Coaching, like teaching whether they are LKG students or  after retirement spiritual seekers, too, must follow this spiral. Begin with the apple. Then the arrow. Then awareness. Then amnesia. Then action. Then… paradox. Because there comes a moment when the client , student and seeker no longer seeks answers. They become the question. This is the Koan of Knowing. And deeper still, beneath even that inquiry, is a felt saturation—still, clear, alive. This is the Dot of Dharma. And Bindu of Being.

Between the koan and the dot, between example and essence, between Bruce’s broken back and his blazing presence, lies the river. And like the breath, it flows—not toward conclusion, but toward depth.

This reflection didn’t arrive in a vacuum. It emerged through a quiet exchange in a coaching forum—a space meant for exploration, not conclusion. Someone referred to the unfolding ideas as “shallow understanding.” I paused. Not with defensiveness, but with wonder.

Because perhaps what appears shallow is actually surface tension. The place where the sky first touches the water. The edge from which depth begins.

In that moment, I didn’t refute. I wrote instead.

That our learning often flows from concrete to abstract. That metaphors aren’t ornaments—they are bridges. That mind, gender, consciousness, god —all these are conceptual frameworks to explore what cannot be grasped directly. And that truth, in its deepest form, may wear no definitions but remain alive in breath, in silence, in relationship.

We do not teach with conclusions. We invite with presence.

And so, the coaching conversation became part of the river. Not an interruption, but a tributary.

Shallow? Perhaps. But the lotus only grows there.

 

 

Coaching and Counselling : Dreamwork of wakefulness.

Coaching and Counselling : Dreamwork of wakefulness.

by | Jul 11, 2025 | Change, Compassion, Empathy, Transformation, Uncategorized, Zen

Yesterday   the world came to me in hues of Good , bad and ugly.  

 A pizza 🍕 lunch with a 90 year old Zen 🧘 master and a 18 year old die-hard-atheist-my-own-mind- way- serene- boy at the George’s gourmet and kitchen , the best pizza place in Kodai kanal,  

worrying a bit ( or more than a bit)  about money or lack of it ,

 ticking off a troublesome and irksome person,

feeling quite happy when a Sangha member told me , your son Rishi looks exactly like you , but taller , wiser and  calmer than you

and

in the evening Dokusan getting ticked off by my Zen master for being not ready with my next koan :

and  ending it all  listening to Kitaro’s wonderful music during evening music meditation (like Hakuin Zenji who relied on Music to get relief from Meditation sickness )…

After this I slept early and I slept like a deadwood in K4, Kanzeon Zendo,.

Absolutely dreamless deep sleep.

My brain seemed to have flushed  away its metabolic waste—and I woke before 4am so refreshed  and realising I  I’ve finally arrived at a place and state of   peace and joy.

My purse/pocket/wallet/bank account is still  empty, and so is my mind. 

I recollected a while on this looking at early morning sky  glittering in the hue of  full moon.  After a very long time, I had the privilege of being coached in a peer coaching session.  May be that would have worked as a wonder balm.

Dream is an emotional reorganizer.

Our brain unpacks, reframes and repacks our half-baked experiences and  sanitizes the emotional component to an extent.  Still many experiences  (especially not so good ones) need many cycles of that process. I have left my Engineering collage way back in June 1994.  Still  on tough and low days, I dream about an Engineering exam which I am attempting with no preparation.  1994 World cup football was held concurrently with our final year Engineering examination.  And my late father Sankara wrote me  very long  letter urging me to watch only Brazil matches and focus on my final year examination  ( He used to write really long letters. One from his collection was a 16 page advice to his brother in 1960s ).  He had retired during my second year of graduation and was struggling to take care of his family. My brother and sister too were students , still a number of years away from getting a job and salary.

Unfortunately the match timings in USA was not that conducive for preparing  for examinations. All matches were during our night time and one real early morning.  So  I skipped a few examinations.  I returned back to College after 6 months to clear the backlog in supplementary exams and till then stayed with my brother and cousin in Bangalore.

I did clear those examinations.  Got a job in Wipro. Life moved on. My father too moved on  from this world in 2006. May be the guilt of having to resolve a “conflict of interest” still lingers in my mind, unresolved. Hence those exam dreams , though I am semi-retired even from a normal work life.    May be a few more cycles of unpacking, reframing and repacking may be needed. 

I loved my father very dearly. I love football too. Only thing I don’t love that much being examined/judged.  Either by  system, organization  or  other people. 

Guess, yesterday afternoon coaching was wonderful. 

Like a dream , that coaching session  took care of emotional processing and memory consolidation. While dreams work unconsciously,  Coaching work on a conscious level.   Very few of us have the ability to think very focussed and with awareness on a particular issue / matter. We all suffer from having Monkey mind, which keeps latching on to the next branch in no time.  Coaching helps us on that count.  It brings back our focus and makes us reflect on the core issue.  Thus we don’t overload our brain cognitively during sleep after a coaching session.  It helps us in clearing mental debris and emotional release.  In  a way, it functions very similarly to  unpacking, reframing and repacking of dream stage.

Sleep experts and neuroscientists say while dreamful REM sleep takes care of our mind, it is the dreamless NREM sleep rebuilds our body and reset.  Your brain cannot  do both at the same time.   My brain too. In a way, Coaching and Counselling takes care of  flushing out mental debris so that our brain is not overburdened with it and take care of physical rebuilding and rejuvenation.

That is a wonderful way to bring in change in our own life.

And the element that changes us  in Coaching and counselling does not come  by making us aware of ourselves more by the Coach. Awareness of  KPIs and data itself is inert.  If data alone would have changed a human, cigarette smoking would have been vanished from earth.

Empathetic resonance, sacred witnessing and embodied presence can be there only in a compassionate  human – human connection.

No technology , what ever you name it, cannot do this as of now…

That is still  day dream .  

Leaving us, me and you to have our drop dead dreamless NREM sleep….

 

The Alphabet of Presence: On Mind, Metaphor, and the Mirror That Refuses to Reflect…

The Stone Bridge…

by | Jun 17, 2025 | Compassion, Gratitude, Uncategorized, Zen

As such, I don’t generally post homilies and syrup dripping notes on those special days.  Fathers, Mothers, Valentines, No tobacco, Yoga days…I stopped it after the thought cloud crossed my mind sky , whether, we humans, will start having a day for compassion or living, called a life day in a calendar year of 365 days. Why compress the vast, wonderful reality of this world, love, family, friends and being alive into a single, performative day? Life isn’t a checklist of obligations to fulfil on arbitrary dates; it’s the unscripted, uncommodified moments in between.

And most importantly,  I don’t want to drown in the syrup of forced sentiments. We have fathers, mothers, lovers, sons ,daughters, siblings, friends, gurus, zen, breath, and heartbeat every damn day. Reducing them to a calendar square with forced sentiment and commercial fanfare almost cheapens them. It’s like saying, “Here’s your annual permit to feel—use it wisely before we go back to ignoring each other.” 

Maybe it is due to the deeper rebellion I am born with,  refusing to outsource our gratitude or affection to a date someone else circled. To celebrate without being told when. To reject the script that says love needs a price tag or that presence requires a hashtag.

My father was great human being, a very honest and competent civil servant, a social community do-gooder  and lifelong CPI card holder and  a committed family man and father. He also had his imperfections, fragility, low moments.  I started respecting him and loving him a lot more when I realised that those humanely imperfections are like that golden joineries in that kintsugi pottery. ( I am in the process of  joining together my broken cup of my life .:-) . No idea as of now, how it will look like when I breath last. )

Life is wonderful, mystical and worth living every moment.

 

Though I had much lesser challenges and struggles in my life than that of my father, in my reflections, I can see that I have not done that well as a father.  Infact, if it is not for my better half Thara, all of us would have endured greater suffering. Not that, our suffering is less now.   And again Nothing much can be said or written about a Father, who chooses to be a Zen monk, when his second son is about to start his graduation.

While I was a born rebel  and my sons Manu and Rishi kind of outshone me on that account. At least that is the story of our life so far.   . And this note comes from a conversation I had with one of them on  “Father’s  day”.   He had barred me from writing his “conversations/dialogue/debate with me” in my blogs. Hence I am not sharing it .

As a quote I keep sharing quite often.  ““The day the child realises that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise.” Both Manu and Rishi are fine young wise men.”

There is a famous zen koan in Blud Cliff record case 52.  Joshu’s stone bridge.

A monk said to Zen Master Joshu, “The stone bridge of Joshu is well known, but when I come here, I only find a row of stepping stones.” Joshu said, “You only see the stepping stones and not the stone bridge.” The monk said : “What is the stone bridge?” Joshu said, “It allows donkeys and horses to cross.”

And there is another unrecorded one from  “The Life of Master Yunmen”.

A monk asked Master Yunmen, “What is the true meaning of the Patriarch’s coming from the West?” (A classic Zen question about Bodhidharma’s arrival in China, pointing to the essence of teaching.)

Yunmen replied, “The stone bridge across the river.”

The monk, confused, said, “But the stone bridge is worn and broken—how can it be the answer?”

Yunmen said, “You only see the cracks. Have you ever met the mason who built it?”

The monk was silent.   Yunmen added, “Your father’s hands laid every stone.”

All of us walk across the river of life, on the bridge built by our ancestors. Some like me as Donkey. And some like Manu and Rishi as horses.  Life is wonderful, mystical and worth living every moment. 

 

Zendo Chronicles: “Shukke Tokudo”.   Moving to Homeless Home…  

Zendo Chronicles: “Shukke Tokudo”.   Moving to Homeless Home…  

by | Jun 2, 2025 | Meditation, Peace, Transformation, Uncategorized, Zen

During one of those cold twilight moments of December 2024, while I was sitting in my small study room at Manthari, home at Bangalore, received Fr. AMA’s succinct and compassionate welcome note. He wrote in Japanese Zen terms; it is known as. “Shukke Tokkudo”, leaving one’s home to Master’s home to live and study Zen further.  And there is no need of any ceremony as such.  One of the things I have observed is Fr. AMA as a very radical and revolutionary spiritual leaders, is not attached to any scriptures or rituals per se.  Even his eucharist service for Xmas goes like a flash of lightning on the clear blue sky.

 

Day before yesterday, during our question and answers in between the sesshin, AMA was at pains to explain to couple of meditators that it is very human to be attached to life and spirituality does not mean that we give away all attachments. In Zen way, samsara is nirvana and nirvana is samsara.  A long time back, almost 30 years back, in my very first spiritual meeting, I heard Swami Chinmayananda answering to a question from a devotee related to his golden vial (a small cylindrical container) he used to carry with him. Chinamyananda used to take snuff quite often (tobacco in powder form which people inhale through nose) and someone had gifted him that golden vial to carry that powder.  The questioner was questioning Chinmayananda on his carrying that golden vial. Chinmayanada and rest of the audience could sense the malice in that barb of question.  But in his inimitable humorous style he answered that question. He said, as I remember, that he won’t lose his peace of mind, if someone, even the questioner, steals that golden vial while he sleeps.  Detachemnt spiritually means not attached to anything. Not depriving anyone of it.

 

 

Zen Master Dogen seems to have high regard for the monastic concept of Shukke Tokudo or Home leaving. (in Shobogenzo, collection of Dogen’s writing).  The phrase translates to. “Leaving home, sharing the dharma”.

 

Before last December 2024, for two years, though I used to spend a couple of weeks every month at the Zendo for extended sesshins and regular Zen practice, it was not “leaving home” literally.  And even now, after moving to zendo to live here full time, it is not “leaving home” , literally and figuratively.  It is just that, one realizes, our true home is not constrained to any locale or existential circumstances.

 

As Dogen then and Fr. AMA now tell us, that one cannot relinquish one’s attachment to life and what constitutes life whether it is home, living, working, family or friends, for the sake of anything leave alone Zen.  Dogen quotes another Chinese Zen Master, “ In this life save the body, it is the fruit of many lives.”. It suggests being attached to one’s body and good health.  The honored one, Sidhartha Gautama, told us the same without telling, when he accepted that bowl of milk and rice pudding from Sujata of Senani village to end his extreme ascetism and seeking of nirvana at the cost of everything including his own health and well being.  That grace from an householder woman was a critical moment in Sidhartha’s journey to enlightenment.

 

When Fr AMA taught me it is important to be not so attached even to the Zen way, and true realization is when we I “empty ourselves of emptiness”, it just means (to me) n that even attachment to extreme detachment is another attachment.  It is when we truly are detached to even our own ideas, concepts and opinions, one realizes and what one got to be realized and wakes up from the “dream state”.

 

The best part/moments in my life, on most days, happen in the twilight zone, when night bids goodbye to the day and hands over the baton as happened for millions of years. Also when we move from one dream state of nightmares and sweet dreams to another “dream state” of “distorted reality”.  Ever since i started coming to Kanzeon Zendo regularly since the last 3 odd years, i always looked forward to these moments.  After lighting the lamp (Christa does it without fail whenever she is in Zendo and i do in her absence), I open the window and stand there in Wuji stance. One can hear the murmur of the mountains and quivering leaves whispering to  the chilly breeze with the melody of chirping birds, one realizes “nothing”. 

 

It is in this moment, when I realize that one true home is absolute homelessness, where the earth is the floor and sky is the roof, and where horizon is where the big French window is, everything there constitutes what one is or what one is makes up one’s world.  Those moments, all my pain, worries, anger just vanishes. In that sense, Shukke Tokudo, means moving to Homeless home.

 

And then the “world” fills up that void for the rest of the day till the next twilight, when the day bids goodbye to the night and handover the baton.

Navigating the Seas of Life with Relation-ships: Sailing, Sinking, and Staying Afloat

Navigating the Seas of Life with Relation-ships: Sailing, Sinking, and Staying Afloat

by | Feb 3, 2025 | Change, Compassion, Friendship, Harmony, Relationships, Zen

Not by choice-   could not write anything for a while.

Heart mind was parched and dry… In a world where even rivers dies down due to thirst, heart minds can go parched and dry too. This got written by itself. Though it is written with ink laced with my heart blood and bones from cartilage as pen.  It ended up as a long passage. Though I wrote about my life and relationships in it, the similar characters might have made an appearance in your life stage as well. It is as much as about you as well as me.

 

Yes. This blog is about ships of Relations in my sea of life … Or anyone’s sea of life… And those “ships” (relations) – while many of them still sail well calmly and collectedly  in choppy and turbulent high seas, some did sink in placid lakes and a few still stay afloat even after they got wrecked.  May be I am still holding on to those shattered pieces to stop from drowning.

Happy reading…. If you stay course till the very end and reach the other shore , pls drop in a message to me 

Unsinkable (relation) ship!

“There is no danger that Titanic will sink. The boat is unsinkable and nothing but inconvenience will be suffered by the passengers.” Phillip Franklin, White Star Line vice-president, 1912. ( The company which owned The Titanic )

Words that have gone down in history, for all the wrong reasons.

At latitude 41° 43′ 32″ north, longitude 49° 56′ 49″ west, 370 miles (595 kilometres) southeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2.5 miles (4 km) down lays the wreck of the RMS Titanic. The rust-coloured remains rest in two parts, the stern around 2,000 feet (600 metres) from the bow and facing in opposite directions.”

[https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20120402-the-myth-of-the-unsinkable-ship#:~:text=%22There%20is%20no,in%20opposite%20directions.]

 

(Pic courtesy: Copilot designer)

 

Krishnamurti on Relation-ships:

 I was a Hardcore Krishnamurti-ite once.  Devouring everything he had written.  

One of the quotes that stayed with me is:

“Relationship is the mirror in which we see ourselves as we are.”  

Rest of his quote goes like this ,  “ All life is a movement in relationship. There is no living thing on earth that is not related to something or other. Even the hermit that abandons the world and goes into some lonely spot is related to the past, is related to those who are around him. There is no escape from relationship. And in that relationship, which is the mirror in which we can see ourselves, in that relationship we can discover what we are: our reactions, our prejudices, our fears, depressions, anxieties, loneliness, sorrow, pain, grief.”

Types of “Ships” of Relations:  “I” Chose, Chosen by (Other) and Choiceless (?) “

There are relationships, where you  choose. You can choose your spouse, your friends, your neighbours (to an extent), your boss and colleagues and clients ( again to an extent). OF course you can choose your spiritual guru. In Zen tradition it works both ways. A disciple / student got to accept the Master, and the Master got to accept the disciple.  These choices are informed ( sometimes very illiterate  choices).  Though, I do know now, our so called Free will is limited, still we can exercise to an extent. We can’t blame Destiny for these set of choices and relation- ships.

Many a times, when you choose someone else, you also get chosen by someone else. Your Zen master is an example.  Same goes with your Coach or Therapist.

Then some of the relationships, are Choiceless ones … Those are the Rummy cards dealt to us by the destiny for this round of the game.  Our grandparents, parents, siblings, sons and other blood relatives. We can’t choose them. They just happen to us. They too can’t choose us. We just happen to them.  Even after the initial set of 13 cards, the cards you choose from a stockpile, you don’t have any way of choosing it by knowing that card beforehand.  So, it is luck and destiny.  We have the option of scooting and getting out of the game or it is for us to play this game in this round of life. Some discard some cards to the waste pile, have not you seen, broken relationships amongst siblings, cousins, children abandoning their parents, parents abandoning their children etc. I do have my share of broken relationships. And   Some play wisely to create melds out of the available cards and win the game. 

 

And then there are  Unconditional Relationships: Some relationships, regardless whether they are chosen by you , you got chosen or choiceless,  transcend circumstances, with people reaching out to each other regardless of situations, exemplified  closest family and friends. Especially Dunbar’s inner circles and I call them anamcara friends.  The term soul friend, comes from the Irish words anam, meaning “soul” and cara meaning friend. In Celtic tradition , soul friends are considered  an essential part of spiritual development.  ( there is a wonderful book by  John O’Donohue  AnamCara : A book of Celtic Wisdom.)n

Dunbar’s magic Number on # of relationships:

Regardless whether your relationships are chosen by you, or you get chosen or choiceless ones,  Dunbar’s magic number applies.

Dunbar’s theory, often referred to as Dunbar’s number, suggests that people can maintain a maximum of 150 relationships. This number is broken down into layers of closeness:

The tightest circle consists of five loved ones.

  • Followed by 15 good friends.
  • Then 50 friends.
  • 150 meaningful contacts.
  • 500 acquaintances.
  • And finally, 1500 people you can recognize1.

This theory highlights the cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. It emphasizes the importance of these layers in understanding the dynamics of human social interactions. 

U might be wondering what is the relevance of this.  In this era  of social media life, they all get muddled. In real life,  most of our relationships comes from family, friends , work and community we belong to.

There was one quote which says , “ “Marry the right person. This one decision will determine 90% of your happiness or misery.” .  I would add to it Work and Friends as well.  IN fact, most of our waking hours we spent in earning a living and many a times, we don’t consider that as part of our life.  People talk about Work and Life balance as if. Work happens in some other planet and not part of our life.  In my life, people whom I met at workplace, had a lot of significance in my life even in my spiritual path.  My Bosses like RBala, late SMR, Ishwar, Brij etc were all spiritually and humanely evolved.  They merit a focussed blog.  This one I am going to focus on family and friends.

Theory and Practice:

All these are theories.  The proof of the pudding is in eating.  I mean Living. The first great lesson I learnt on Relationship came from a  Jesuit priest , quite ironically.   Dr. Richard McHugh who left his family to be a priest and country in which he was born to serve another country and culture  and who never got married was an unlikely candidate to be a relationship coach.  But he ended up as on in my life and Thara ‘s life too.  

Dr Richard McHugh and NLP

It is Venerable NLP Guru. Dr. Richard McHugh who taught me how to make relationships work. I got to write about Dick McHugh, because he was the first Guru for Thara and I.  Thara used to have a pathological hatred for Guruhood, but she accepted Richard as one.

Dick McHugh was a American Jesuit Priest who made India his home.  He later worked with Tony DeMello at Sadhana in Pune for a long time. Tony DeMello was his close friend.  He learnt NLP from Bandler and Grinder, when those founders of NLP were still together.   After untimely death of Tony DeMello, Dick McHugh started travelling around the world teaching NLP.  In USA, Europe and India.  In India every year he used to conduct 3 workshops.  In Jamshedpur, Bangalore and then Mumbai.  He used to visit Bangalore in the months of Feb and March every year and used to conduct his workshops in Ashirwad at St Marks Road. Those were never advertised in any way, but seats used to get booked months in advance..  

Credit for that should go to Daniel Pacheco. It was Dan who had asked us to attend Dick McHugh’s NLP seminar.  And Dan seems to have told Dick McHugh that he is sending a mule headed rationalist left brainer to his NLP class. I was not aware of that.  On the first day, it was a normal day.  And on the second day during lunch time, Dick McHugh called me and asked me to tell Dan, that he found that “Mule headed left brainer.”. I did not understand anything.  Though I did ask him, he just repeated his instructions. That day evening, the moment I reached home, I called Dan and conveyed the message.  Dan burst into laughing and shared this with me.

After that event, Dr. McHugh kind of adopted us as his favourite guinea pigs in that workshop. For demonstrating almost all those NLP exercises, he used to select either me or Thara.

Ashirwad, the place our workshop was held, is on a narrow by lane from St. Marks Road. During  our Basic NLP training,  they had dug up that road for laying some pipe. And on an evening, I was struggling to get our car out of the compound.  Thara got out of the car to guide me.  And soon our small car was in the ditch. Luckily those workers were still around and helped us out.  Little did we know that  Dr. McHugh was watching the whole drama from his room on the first floor of Ashirwad.

The next day morning, he started his session, narrating about the incident with that Cullinan smile on his face and twinkle in his eyes and  he said to the class, this is what happens when a  person with a high visual modality way of looking at the world. Guides someone like me with a dominant auditory modality.

That is how he taught us about the VAK modalities and how it impacts the way we communicate.  Infact , on quote he had shared on that day still  rings in my ears.  “The Meaning of your communication is the response you get. “.

The Eternal North Star of My Life.

Thara and I got married an year before that NLP workshop  in an arranged marriage.  No idea what made us  say YES  to each other. She and I  was born and brought up in absolutely different environments. As Dick McHugh had said to us, here is two people as different as chalk and cheese.  One example, Thara had her school education in  Church Park , one of the best convents in  Chennai while I had my school education , in a school which had the nickname as. Kerala Themmadi Memorial school. ( which translated as. Kerala Rascal Memorial School !)  .. While I was brought up in very liberal household,  Thara’s  home is one of the most conservative one I had ever seen.

So we had our great challenges of  finding our way  after our marriage. And  the month long NLP course we did with Dr. Richard McHugh was the turning point of the tide.  And from then on , every year when he used to visit Ashirwad for his course, we used to go and meet him and gift him an XXL T shirt.  And every single time, he used to tell Thara that he got to let go an older one from his small suitcase . He used to travel  around the world and live out of two small suitcases.

Not that the NLP workshop changed  the terrain of our life. We did have our ups and downs in life. But the earliest lesson from Richard McHugh was good enough to work synergistically to ensure  an uprise, every  time. we felt, it is going to hit nadir, the ship is going to sink.

In fact at this very point of penning this, we had just another major conflict.

She has been an eternal north star in my life and helped me through navigating my life so far. Even when, I had walked out a job with  a Green card in the promised land,  resigning from a fancy IT job to be a full time student at a University  or at the end of it all, totally broken down with catatonic depression after being thrown out an NGO, or moving to a Zendo as a full time Zen student….the list is endless.

An year back, when she came to Zendo,  during the dining table conversation, someone asked her whether she is joining the Sangha as well.  And I had replied while some got to practice Zen , some lives it.

While Thara means  star or radiance, to me she was/is/will be the eternal north star.

Coming of Age and out of prison…

I was all of  4.5 years old then.  I am absolutely sure.  It might have been during the last week of May or very early  June.  ALP School    was not opened yet but the Monsoon was about to start.  My parents advanced my date of birth on record so that   – handful-trouble-maker  is not  at home at least during school hours.  One of my uncle,  then recently graduated & jobless (job seeking )  was stepping out of the house for his evening timepass  with his friends.  He said something to me and my brother , and I did reply something.  Might have been quite disrespectful, it did trigger one of those outlier reaction of anger and violence from him.   Though there were enough small sticks commensurating  for a  small  brat available in a Kerala home, he chose to discipline a 4.5 year old, by  folding  a steel wire  used to  dry  washed clothes and used as  his batascoir. That was the worst thrashing I got in my life. Never before that or never after. (so far! and Thank Goodness🙂 ).     My poor mother did try to stop it without much success.  After my uncle left,  she just held on to me and tried to stop my sobbing. I guess she herself was crying. 

That is when monsoon rain came on that day and wiped my tears away.  Old style Kerala houses, do have those long verandas, wooden bench  and wooden grill instead of the wall.  It is kind of half open to the world and nature.  When  it rains,  one can sit on those  bench, resting one’s chin on the wooden rail looking at the rain for hours.  As the direction of rain changes and with some wind, one gets   needle shower on the face too.  It is quite hypnotically and can take one to another world altogether.  It ended up   being an anchor of joy and peace for me.  There is a Zen koan which says , blood cannot wash away blood, and thoughts can’t save you from more thoughts…. But I can tell you from my experience, raindrops from heaven can wipe away the tears of heart.

If egotism+arrogance+shorttemperedness+lackofgratitude managed to get a pair of hands, legs and a head, in my view, that would have his name on its forehead. And he used to treat /bully everyone else in his life the same way, he treated a 4.5 year old kid.   I could narrate many  many stories.  But i don’t want for two reasons.  At the very point of time, he himself is facing a moment of truth in life. It won’t be empathetic to add to his woes. And secondly this is about me more than him.

It took me many many  more years, unfortunately,  to realise that I don’t have to live in a prison cell I made it for myself when I was  a small kid.  Infact  45 years to realise that I am no more a 45 year old child.  Zen might have helped me.  The moment it hit me, when I was sitting in a  Marriage hall in Chikamngalore, I just ticked him out of my life.  And it was just liberating for me like coming out of age and out or prison.

Each one of us’ prison cells gets built when we were children.  We can’t get out of it, since those  prison bars are invisible to our mind.  Only when we become aware of those prison bars in our mind, we can set ourself free.  In Acceptance and commitment therapy, there is a wonderful exercise named  Observer exercise.  Even Zen meditation does help. Enlightenment is not some esoteric ever lasting bliss, but setting ourselves free from ourselves. When we become truly aware of Witness consciousness, then we realise that we are the prisoner , prison cells and guards too.  It is in that realisation, everything gets sublimated. 

 

Eternal ships of Friends….

 A long time back, we had a friends group called Tennis Mafia, (we still have that group, though some of them have moved out of Tranquil).  Some of us were good in Tennis. Some of us were learning to play.  And I and others, had organized a tournament (that too prize money one) . During one match, Sheik and LP@HP were playing against irrepressible Erode Subbu and his teammate.  I was trying to officiate the match.  On some incident, there was very heated argument between Sheik and me. And as I was storming out of the court literally fuming, I heard Sheik saying, “Vishy you are my friend and you won’t walk away, regardless of what is the matter” and I turned around. That was kind of walking over the water and reaching out.  And that match ended.  Subbu and his teammate won that game. Sheik and LP@HP lost Tournament got over. Prize money was given.  Subbu and his teammate got that purse.  I had moved out of Tranquil.  Life continued and our friendship too. Still, he was one of those to whom I reach out in hours of distress. I can count on him. So he can too.

Btw there are a few more in my group of anamcara friends.  That was one of the real blessing of my life.

If the previous one is on the left side of the balance of challenge, the next life story is on the right most side.  I met Komal some 25 years ago at a Landmark Forum seminar. Others whom I had met there and with whom I am in still touch are  L.H. Rao , ( who has been kind mentor) and Deepa Vaishnavi ( A good friend).  In those 4 days of workshop, Komal and I became of best of friends. And Even after 25 years in between, we feel the same way even now.

In between I did endure a catastrophic experience in my life ( leave alone traumatic).  Lost my job, my father, my father in law, another close relative  etc. all within a few days.  And the brutal merciless job ouster came after some 8- 9 months of Satyagraha after I let go a green card to the green apple. (  Don’t want to share many details about that  as almost all the characters in that story are still alive and kicking. Some of them Gods with legs or spine of clay.) That time I did feel, quite deeply and strongly that I was left on my own to bear the pain and suffering and I strongly felt, Komal could have helped me out a lot more. Every time Komal  used to visit Bangalore,  he used to have dinner with Thara and I at our home. During those time, once he landed for dinner and I hardly spoke to him. Thara did all the talking. After dinner, we did take a small walk outside for some after dinner ice cream. But silence continued. I did feel that day, was the closure of one good chapter in my life.  It did not end that way, only due to his large heartedness and compassion.  Currently he is a Business leader, may be responsible for close to couple of Billion dollars of annual revenue and thousands of people.

An Ephemeral Comet of friend- ship

To start with , in this instance, I rather  limit the story and descriptions  to bare minimum so that the identity is not compromised at all. She is a fiercely private person and got to honour that. Secondly, due to the recency effect, any detached and nonprejudiced way of presenting the story is not possible. And thirdly but most importantly she was my Coachee once and I have a solemn commitment towards her wellbeing in all respects.

This story starts , when she sacked me as a Coach as she started considering  me as a friend. And then that  ship too got wrecked in just 14 days. The  following pic from my good Bodhi sangha brother Inaki Roldos collection, ‘https://in.pinterest.com/pin/261419953350887398/   , beautifully and succinctly captures the essence of what went wrong.

Then both of us were/are  good enough human beings who really meant well for each other and quite graciously wished each other well and moved on. ( Surely not before some heated debates and heartburns ) .

Then, we all, in our innermost existence, share common longings for joy, peace, love and freedom. Regardless, how well intentioned we are,  we all makes mistakes, sometimes we are utterly confused, and we inflict pain and endure it too. . Most importantly , we all get entangled in our personal narratives and perspectives, facing deep disappointment and making and breaking attachments. The truth of the matter is those who hurt us might be seeking the same things we desire for ourselves. Once we peel away all the layers self-righteous storytelling, anger, and pain, we can find an oasis  of peace and gratitude.

Some time back, a friend showed me the Winter triangle of stars on the western skyline of The Little Flower Zendo as we were all stepping out of the Zendo after evening music mediation. The other day , as I stepped  out of the Zendo  after closing the door  for the day, rather quite unconsciously, I glanced up to see on that distant skyline, whether a comet passes through over there.. Then, I wistfully reminisced  that even Halley’s comet, only known short-period comet visible to naked eye from the Earth, returns once every 75 years. That too for a few fleeting seconds!

Some friendships are like that.  Like the friendship between Halley’s Comet and Earth.

Zen concept of Mono No Aware

In fact Zen has a beautiful concept called: Mono No Aware … It refers to the awareness of the impermanence of things and the bittersweet feeling that comes with it. The sadness or wistfulness that comes from  the awareness of things’ transience.

 That is the reality of life.

A  solitary walker , on “The Way”  should be thankful for everything….Because no matter what happens , everything is perfect in its own way.

Some insightful  Home Truths

The strength of the Chain is its weakest link.

  A relationship between two humans are made by many points of connection.  Those connections could be blood bonds in case of family , bonds of love, common interests, likes and dislikes, our need to survive, our wants , spiritual path chosen, areas of work,  etc.. While there are many visible chain which ties the ship of relation quite safely, like common interests , likes, dislikes etc, it is the invisible thread of  Trust and commitment between two hearts that is the weakest link.  As long as that thread stays unbroken, the ship of relations always sail regardless of the rough weather we face on our life.  Only the challenges and tests of day to day life can strengthen those chains.  In my life, the relationships which lasted were the ones which did survive all those storms of high seas.  Fair weather ships of relations may be safe at harbour. But they may sink at the first turbulence it meets at its wake 

There are Bonds which sets you free

 The moment we think about chain, many may picturise imprisoned by relationships.  One got to realise that there are strongest of bonds we have in our relationship, which really sets us free. And those bonds are the invisible threads of trust, commitment and unconditional love which sets each one of us free in a relationship.  Whether it is a marriage or friendship.

  1. We are all Processes and not Products

When we nitpick and do accounting of the good and bad in others who are related to us, it is important to realise that every human is a process on the way to be better and not a finished product.  Every saint has a past and every sinner a future.  It is essential to give another a second chance. But never a third one

There are no angels and very few devils out there.

  As R. D. Laing wrote , “The Good men are aware of what is not good in them, while the bad is not .”  Almost all of us, are the in the grey band between absolute Lilly white angels and  black  band of devils.  Every time we point a finger at other self-righteously, we got to realise there  3 of our fingers points at us.

Love is a verb and not a noun

Love is an active expression and much beyond and feeling.  When you really love someone as in a marriage , friendship or other ships of relations, you actively show care, affection and commitment through actions.  Those actions, could be washing dishes or making a tea or just listening to them

Anicca , the Buddha’s law of impermanence

 Lastly but most importantly, everything is transient and temporal in nature. Even the ships of relations is not beyond the law of impermanence.  In this universe nothing lasts forever.  Even The Titanic has its shelf life.  Once it is wrecked, we can never create another Titanic with its pieces.

 But we can all create another ship of Relation.  That applies to ships of relations between  spouses and between a father and his children or between friends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Out of Office!  or “Out of Life “  : Replies ….“In the presence of absence”!

Out of Office!  or “Out of Life “  : Replies ….“In the presence of absence”!

by | Jan 15, 2025 | Compassion, Empathy, Friendship, Grief

A long time back, almost 15 years back, while working for an IT company, i wrote a blog on the funny, wonderful poetic and entertaining “Out of office replies” i could collect from my colleagues at work.  Yes! Like people collect stamps, coins etc., I used to collect Out of Office replies.  That blog post came out well.   

 Only one person, whose OOO message, I quoted in that email, got really infuriated and send me a rather strong email.  I took that in my stride, though it was my pre-Zen days.  (Now with Zen in my flesh, bone and marrow, I can take a lot of ridicule,  sniping and even a knife stab at my back quite well.  ).

 Almost an year back, a good colleague and friend of mine, as she left our Org to start something on her own,  wrote to me in her parting message , “  hope you are well!

wanted to let you know that I will be transitioning out of XXXXX on the 15th of Jan.

I wanted to take a chance to let you know that I will miss working with you! Though our interaction was brief, you are one of the warmest people I have interacted with at XXXXX and will miss working with you. Your OOO emails were always my favourite to read! 

I would love to stay in touch outside work as well and hear more about your incredible stories and experiences.”

 That brought back my old hobby   to my PFC. ( Pre Frontal Cortex .)  And I was on the lookout for Out of Office messages again.   But I could not find anything worthwhile to my list. In fact my own OO replies was poetic if  compared to those staid messages !

   I remember I did share my concern with my reporting Manager, mentor and good friend at work Robert M.  He was in charge of Cultural transformation, and I said to him, “Did we become too serous fellas at work and life for our own good! Do we take ourselves too seriously and instead our work seriously!  Are we losing our happiness, laughter and soul in our work.”

 And I started writing a blog …  “IN the presence of absence”. At that point of time, i did not know Mahmoud Darwish too had written a book of poems with the same title.  I had to buy a copy and My new year went in devouring them and making it my bone marrow. He sounded far better than Rumi, Gibran and Rilke put together…   Let me share one such bloodstone !

 

It takes a lot of pain in one’s heart, to write with own blood! And it sinks in the mind and soul of a reader.

 Will i ever be able to write like him!!!   

May be. May be not…    

 Especially with Zen,  I think,  I won’t be  hurt that much  or  broken inside to write poems with blood as ink and bones as pen.

 Mahmoud Darwish knew it well that he is going to die soon and he put his soul into those poems.  And he died within a few weeks of publishing those poems.

 I recommend his book highly… Must read…

Get the poem back in your mind, heart and soul.

 Happy or Sad reading…

Zendo Chronicles: An Extraordinarily ordinary life of a Zen master…

Zendo Chronicles: An Extraordinarily ordinary life of a Zen master…

by | Jan 12, 2025 | Meditation, RElationship, Transformation, Uncategorized, Zen

“When the student is ready the teacher will appear. When the student is truly ready… The teacher will Disappear.”

― Tao Te Ching

In my case,  Teacher  Zen Master AMA had appeared a long time back and was waiting patiently for his student to get ready. When I was hesitating momentarily, he told me once,  Zen Way demands  that  “I got to live my life as it happens”.   

Which means we got to go with the flow of life, accepting events and experiences as they arrive at us without being a control freak.   So rigid plans and expectations are out of the window, keeping the main door open for accepting the unexpected.  Being flexible and adaptable. Only then living in the present happens.  WE got to live our life and when we keep planning for the next moment, our present moment always slip by.

He told me more than once , during Dokusans,  “Vishy , When  Life calls , you got to respond to it moment to moment.. “   Dhamma is not in your mind, nor in Buddha. Once as an answer to a Koan he made me read the last stanza of. The Song of Zazen by. Hakuin Zenji.  “At this moment what are you seeking : Nirvana is right here before your eyes: This very place is the Lotus land!  This very body, the Buddha!”

And the most important point he keeps telling us is all experiences , how much ever pleasant or diving it seems to us, are delusions.  Whenever I tried to discuss about Kenshos and satori and samdhis , he always told me they are all makyos. 

“The Japanese word makyō (魔境) is a figurative term in Zen Buddhism that refers to self-delusion that arises from clinging to experiences. The word literally translates to “realm of demons/monsters” or “uncanny realm”. In Zen, it can refer to people’s attachments to experiences in their everyday lives, or to illusory experiences that can occur during meditation.”   ( From Wikipedia)

There is nothing mysterious or out of the world in spirituality.  Ordinary mind is Zen mind.  Ordinary life is Zen life.  Maybe for those who are self-realized , ordinary life becomes and extraordinarily ordinary life.

As Oliver Wendel Holmes had written,  “The True Simplicity is  the simplicity on the other side of complexity. “

Truly ordinary life in Zen is on the other side of self-realization. Which is extraordinarily ordinary life.   

When your  90 year old Zen Master, takes you all out for a Pizza party and helps you choose a good topping, when on the way, he asks with a concern, whether we have fed , Kutti, Robert Amor’s puppy and at what time is your evening  bus to Bangalore in the evening,  is he teaching you Zen. 

No! Not at all !

 He is living Zen.  

The second part of the Lao Tzu’s quote says, “When the student is full ready, the teacher disappears”.

Am sure, It will take an eon of time for someone like  me  (dumb, dumber , dumbest !) to be fully ready.  

(At George’s Gourmet Kitchen with Fr. AMA Samy, Christa , Nicholas, Prakash, Nancy and Rohan Prince.)

 

Zendo Chronicles: The ENSO of life!

Zendo Chronicles: The ENSO of life!

by | Jan 10, 2025 | Compassion, Grief, Joy, Meditation, Peace, Uncategorized, Zen

In Zen, the ENSO represents. The emptiness and No mind of Zen Mind. Usually it is expressed through calligraphy, typically drawn in one fluid stroke.  The Space inside the circle represent the state of emptiness.

(Thanks to Dr. Meath Conlan, Zen Teacher , Bodhi Sangha member and Friend)

Enso Circle also denotes the no end and no start of this mysterious universe.

A long time back, my late father was having his last sleep in a mortuary freezer box kept in the front hall of our home at Mannarkkad.  A lot of people had gathered in and outside of our small home.  One could hear a lot many people sobbing. As I was sitting in the verandah, I noticed a small girl, trying to catch a dragon fly and she was humming. Quite oblivious to the stark atmosphere of grief.  At that point, it hit my mind that life goes on. With us or without us.

Just a few months before my father had expired, I had attended a Vipassana session at Igatpuri.  After a long one-year standoff satyagraha, the Director of HR of the company for whom I was working. (not working) had granted me a paid leave of 100 days. ( He might have thought, I would utilize that time to hunt for another job and disappear.  But I went back after those 100 days, regaining my strength and vigor for another stint of teaching him some humane way of leading people. ) I had heard about Vipassana from Master NLP trainer Dr. Richard McHugh.  Dick McHugh, taught Thara and I , NLP a couple of years back. And it was our routine to buy him a. T shirt as a gift every time he used to grace Blr.  That time, when I shared my “traumatic experience” , he suggested I should go to Vipassana. He shared with us, how he could cure his illness after going to Vipassana and off I went to Igatpuri. But those 10 days, added to my trauma. It was the month of June. Monsoon.  Mosquitoes. Mud. Flies.  The pungent smelling mosquito repellent and sonorous voice of  Goenkaji’s, cramps in my legs. And on the last day, when it ended, it was the first independency day for me.

I came back to Bangalore.   Lost my job. My father-in-law. My Father. Thara’s granduncle…. One by one … all within a few weeks.  As I was feeling overwhelmed and suffocated, I thought I got to try out Vipassana again. I had immense trust in Dr. Richard McHugh . And I went back to. Igatpuri.

Igatpuri Vipassana center is a big meditation center which can house almost 1000 people at the same time.  Each one of the meditators gets a room.   As I was completing the check in formality , I did not notice what room was allotted to me.  As I started looking for the door number and when ended up at the same place as I stayed in my last vipassana, it really shook me. I was wondering what is the probability of me getting allotted the same room after one year! The same room was allotted to me, as if the Enso circled wanted to tell me, I got to start again where I had left without any progress what so ever.  But the Second innings of Vipassana was good for me. That was the turning of tide in my spiritual quest.  When I came back home, as I was filing my  accommodation card, I  found out, the only change was the laundry token number was 117 instead of 116. May be the universe would have thought, I had my mind to washed clean as well.

 

Our Life does not progress linear.  In my case, it is always in a circle.  Even when Dr. Richard McHugh did the NLP timeline exercise,  my timeline of life was almost a circle. And he told me that in my case past and future meets twice. !

Time Circle did roll on…

And   I had moved from Vipassana to Zen as my spiritual path.

    from Igatpuri, Nashik to Perumalmalai, Kodaikanal

   Goenkaji’s  recorded voice to AMA Samy’s silence.

   And Mindful to No Mind….

Last two years I had spent half of my life at the Zendo and since December I am full-timer here as a. Zen student.

During the Xmas to New year eve sesshin, the zendo was quite full.  One of my erstwhile colleague and good friend, Sam too was attending the sesshin.  After one evening’s music meditation session, as all of us were moving out, she called us all and pointed to the western skyline , above the hillocks facing our Zendo.

There in the clear dark Kodai sky were 3 stars forming a perfect trirangle. She shared with us that  it is called Winter triangle formed by. 3 stars: Sirius , Betelgeuse and Procyn.

 

(Photo and knowledge nugget courtesy: Sam a co meditator , Bodhi Sangha member and friend at Little flower zendo)

I did remember, an old Malayalam novel written with the background of Kodaikanal Astronomical observatory. “Pullippulikalum Vellinakshathrangalum”.   (Spotted Leopards and Silver starts) . It was serialized in Mathrubhumi Weekly  and I might have read it when I was in high school. Some 40 years back. Written by C Radhakrishan , a famous Malayalam novelist known for his wonderful fiction work with a lot of metaphysical background.

After the sesshin got over, we went to a Pizza place known as. George’s gourmet kitchen and on the way back, I saw that Kodaikanal observatory.  I did share with Fr. AMA about the novel I had read some 40 years, written by a scientist who worked there and with a lot of metaphysical underpinnings.  And laughingly but very  affectionately, Fr. AMA told me no wonder you have reached the same place.

I felt some 40 years just disappeared as if in a time warp.

 

 

At the Zendo, my neighbor, Robert Amor is a dog lover. Already two dogs are being taken care by him.  A cute Labrador named as. Bhim and another indie Birdie.  So when he brought in another small puppy to the Zendo, I was thinking, we are kind of getting into trouble. Robert told me , Kutti’s mother abandoned her and she would have died lying on the road, hence he got her to the Zendo.

Not every meditator who comes to the Zendo are not dog lovers. Though both are enlightened Zendogs, the new visitors come in with a bit of apprehension. And usually, when they realize those are “enlightened Zendogs”, they do change their mindset too. Still I felt, 3 dogs is like making our zendo into a kennel.  Robert told me that we will look for an adopter for the puppy. We named her Kutti.

One day , as he took the bigger dogs to for his daily walk, Robert came in and left Kutti in my room and asked me to take care till they return.

After a thorough surveillance of the room, Kutti slept soundly , when she realized this palce can be trusted.

At that point, she just reminded me of  Jackie Mu, our original Zendog at Little flower Zendo.

She was gentle beast of a dog. She knows when and whom to be gentle and who should be scared away. Very tragically she was poisoned to death.  On 14  July 2023.

I had never felt so much grief on the death of a canine before.  And I wrote to Fr. AMA.

“Dear Fr. Ama 

     Tithy messaged me at 9 37 pm  saying. “Laddo / Jackie. Mu passed away. “

Suddenly I felt a pang in my heart. As something within me had died down.  I never had a pet before in my life leave alone a dog. And I just happened to remember the koan .  Mu.

As you used to teach us, all beings are connected in a way. 

Regardfully 

Vishy Sankara “

And he replied  immediately “I too was saddened by the death of Laadu. It was fond of you, followed you often. I am in tears. Peace to Laadu and to you and to me. Ama samy”.

As I was babysitting  Kutti,  I I had to message Tithy, my sangha sister , “Tithy,  Jackie Mu reborn as Kutti” !

At the very moment I pressed the send button of that message, I knew deep within that.

Life always happens in circles.

In Enso Circles. 

Nothing is lost. Nothing is dead.  

It will all come back to us in one form or another.

May be even formless…. In Emptiness.  As the first Koan in Zen  “Mu” ! 

 

Zendo Chronicles: Old year irresolution….

Zendo Chronicles: Old year irresolution….

by | Jan 1, 2025 | Harmony, Joy, Meditation, Transformation, Zen

Hmmm…

 Again, it is that day of the year. New year. And time for New year resolutions too.  There could be few gigabytes of content in Internet world on keeping new year resolutions and goals and achieving them too.  Several memes are also in circulation. 

As someone, who lives across many calendars, (in addition to World’s standard calendar Gregorian, Shaka Indian official calendar, Kolla Varsham Malayalam calendar and Tamil calendar), I often wonder what this fuss about is only Gregorian one! Especially with respect to making, keeping and breaking new year resolutions and goals.  The epidemic starts usually in the second week of December. Humans, get it into the act of “Reflecting the past year”. Some feel quite happy about what they achieve against the previous resolutions made…  Many even if they come very closer to their set goals, remain unhappy!!!  For them, their self-appraisal is always hovering about “On plan” or “Below plan” … They live by the dictum, unless you aim for the stars, you won’t even reach the sky.  And then there are many, who feel totally guilty about their lack of resoluteness, will power, look at their friend or neighbor, get a bit depressed about where they are in life stations and then buy the next step of self-help books and tapes…. And again, make another set of new year resolutions.

I know for sure, because I did live in each of those phases in different years in my own life. Luckily for me, I have outlived those and moved to living life.  One of the key learning from Fr. AMA was, we got to respond to life as it comes. Respond is the key word. Not react. It means, in a way, live day to day, even if not moment to moment. Only a true sage lives his/her life moment to moment. 

Since last year, I live life irresolutely.

Before last year as I started coming regular to Zendo, I made a new resolution that I will wake up and meditate every singe day.  And I did. I did wake up at 4:00 am or before that and meditated.  Even if I had slept after watching a El Classico or Champions trophy well past midnight, still I woke up at 4:00 am and meditated. When I travelled to Kodaikanal and back to Blr. Even in bus.  It continued. And I kept track of it in insight timer.

 

I also remembered the last paragraph , almost verbatim  the “Zen and art of archery” by  Eugen Herrigel.

Last December during the Xmas tine, when my count reached 360 and Ego at the top of Perumalmalai, very euphorically I shared the screen with Fr. AMA at the dinner table.

He had a good laugh and told me, “Vishy, what you are doing is not Zen.  Do you count your breath too and keep a tracker for it. You got to learn to be aware of your need, want, desire, ambition and greed. Our needs need no tracker. So too is Zen. You don’t practice it, You live Zen. “ .. That instant, my Ego balloon which was on top of the hill and closer to the moon, got deflated and I came back to the dining table there and then. I just let it go.

Not only I stopped tracking. I also stopped making those resolutions. I don’t have fixed goals now.  But I do maintain a checklist. Like file IT returns, Health insurance renewal for family etc.  But I stopped making those goals and create milestones on my WAY like AAA roadmap.

I do now know that my life and its way is not a mountaineering trip.  When I wake up, may be that day, I may have to cross a desert, or swim across a sea, or even walk and cross a busy Blr street or a small mountain stream in Kodaikanal.

For me Being takes precedence over becoming.

I knew that for quite some time.

 I did have a quote from Viktor Frankl at my desk for some 15 years. It read, “For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself”. 

I also remembered the last paragraph , almost verbatim  the “Zen and art of archery” by  Eugen Herrigel.

 

“The Master turned on me a glance which made me fear that I had insulted him  and then said:   “Come and see me this evening.”

I seated myself opposite to him on a cushion, He handed me tea, but did not speak a word. So, we sat for a long while. There was no sound but the singing of the kettle on the hot coals. At last, the Master rose and made me a sign to follow him. The practice hall was brightly lit. The master told me to put a taper, long and thin as a knitting needle in the sand in front of the target, but not to switch on the light in the target stand. It was so dark that I could not even see its outlines, and if the tiny flame of taper had not been there, I might perhaps have guessed the position of the target, though I could not have made it out with any precision. The Master “danced” the ceremony.  His first arrow shot out of dazzling brightness into deep night. I knew from the sound it had hit the target. The second arrow was a hit, too. When I switched on the light in the target stand, I discovered to my amazement that the first arrow was lodged full in the middle of the black, while the second arrow had splintered the butt of the first and ploughed through the shaft before embedding itself beside it.  I did not dare to pull the arrows out separately but carried them back together with the target. The Master surveyed them crucially.  “The First shot”, he then said, “was no great feat, you will think, because all these years I am so familiar with my target stand that I must know even in pitch darkness where the target is. That may be, and I won’t try to pretend otherwise. But the second arrow which hit the first, what do you think of that? I at any rate know that it is not I” who must be given credit for this shot. “IT” shot and “IT “made the hit. Let us bow to the goal as before the Buddha!”

The Master had evidently hit me, too with both arrows, I no longer succumbed to the temptation of worrying about my arrows and what happened to them.

Fr AMA too hit the arrow straight at my heart mind with his dismissing remark “Do you count your breath and keep track of that too!” 

I stopped that.

Not only for breath, but for goals in my  life and milestones on “THE WAY”.

Zendo chronicles: The doors of Compassion….

Zendo chronicles: The doors of Compassion….

by | Dec 28, 2024 | Compassion, Empathy, Joy, Peace, RElationship, Transformation, Uncategorized, Zen

“We don’t teach meditation to the young monks. They are not ready until they stop slamming doors.”

– Thich Nhat Hanh to Thomas Merton in 1966.

Fr. AMA Samy opened the doors of Little flower Zendo on 21 Dec 2022 and I entered the Zendo for the first sesshin in Jan 2023, thanks to my boss Robert Meier.  Due to some urgent tasks at work, I was about to cancel my trip to Perumalmalai; Robert very compassionately told me he will cover for me and not to miss my meditation sesshin.

   Ever since, I have come to Zendo, almost every month. Some months I stayed for 8- 9 days and some months almost 15 days.  Robert had only one condition. Work should not suffer.  And Fr. AMA too was very particular about me attending all meditation sessions and being on time for it.  He is a stickler for punctuality.  Often, he will enter the zendo a few minutes before the session starts, and the Zendo doors will get closed.

Mainly we have two important Zazen sittings. 530 am to 7 am and 530 pm to 6:30pm. Morning was easy.  But sometimes, evening time was kind of touch and go.  Often, the tcon meetings used to end at 530pm or just a few minutes later, and I found myself facing a closed door of the Zendo. I tried to open the door and sneak in without making any noise and tried to tiptoe to my meditation seat.  And I used to be quite happy to have made it many a times, without getting noticed. Except for once or twice, when the door did make that creaking noise to my bewilderment, I did make it like thin air and tiptoed to my meditation seat. After a few such forays into Zendo, once during teatime, AMA gave me a dressing down for being late to meditation sessions.  I did try to apologize and bring to his attention my work pressures. 

Later during that day’s Teisho, he shared with us what Thomas Merton had written about Thich Nhat Hanh. Fr. Ama also  said he happened to remember that, due to Vishy’s  struggles with the doors of the Zendo.

Thomas Merton is a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky.  Fr. AMA said, Merton is a very good writer in spirituality and a must read.  After that I did download his book on Chuang Tzu. One of the books in Q to be read .:( Merton is said to have written about Thay that that he could tell Thich Nhat Hanh was an authentic monk by the way he opened and closed doors. Merton observed that Thich Nhat Hanh closed doors quietly and with full attention, which was a result of his monastic training. 

To quote form Thay’s article on Plum village “ Memories from the Root Temple: Closing the Doors”.

Thay at 16 years

Thay as a novice monk 16 years old.  ( Photo courtesy: Plum Village website.)

“One day, when I was a novice monk, my teacher asked me to do something for him. I was very excited to do it for him, because I loved my teacher very much. So I rushed out to do it. But because I was so excited, I wasn’t mindful enough, and I slammed the door on my way out. My teacher called me back and said: “My child. Please go out and close the door again. But this time, do better than you did before.” Hearing his words, I knew that my practice had been lacking. So I bowed to my teacher and walked to the door with all of my being, every step with mindfulness. I went out and, very mindfully, closed the door after me. My teacher did not have to tell me a second time. Now every time I open and close a door, I do so with mindfulness, remembering my teacher.

Many years later I was in Kentucky with Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, and I told him that story. He said: “Well, I noticed that without you telling me; I have seen the way you close the door.” A month after I left his monastery in Kentucky, he gave a talk to his students and told them the story of me closing the door.

One day, many years later, a Catholic woman from Germany came on retreat to our Plum Village practice center in France. On her last day, she told us that she had come only out of curiosity. She had listened to a recording of Thomas Merton’s talk, and she had come to see how I closed the door.”

[This story is an excerpt from At Home in the World: Stories and Essential Teachings from a Monk’s Life by Thich Nhat Hanh, published in 2016. ]

As I was reflecting on my two years of stay at Little Flower Zendo, what came to my mind was the doors of my heart, I had slammed on the face a few people. They are not many in numbers, not that a few as well.  Some dear and near, some friends, some neighbors, some Bosses, some organizations, some people known to me not in person but through news.. the list goes on.  While I don’t have any compunction about the ones not known to me personally, others I wonder whether I could have closed the doors of my heart with some compassion, quite slowly and with awareness, instead of slamming it on their face.

One of the things I have learnt from AMA over the last two years is: Self-realization has no meaning without compassion.  The key step to self-realization is being compassionate. I can tell you that he lives that to the dot in ‘i’ and cross in ‘t’.  Ama speaks about the people who have let down him, with compassion and care.

Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a model for understanding our motivation and behavior.   Physiological needs, safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization.   By Self-actualization Maslow means that one realizing one’s full potential.  I interpret is realizing oneself or finding answer to one’s spiritual quest.   Maslow also states that we cannot reach the top of the pyramid unless we take care of the bottom layers.  He also seems to have stated that Humans can truly thrive only after meeting all five needs.  I am not sure about it.  Many of those who take a dive to the spiritual void, need not necessarily do that after ensuring safety needs etc.  It need not be hierarchical. How does one explain someone like Ramana getting his enlightenment at such a young age.

Another point of contention for me is though he does mention about love and belonging, he does miss out about Compassion.  Many may argue that love does include being compassionate. But I feel it is not the same thing.  Love and belonging is focused on the need of the self and does include a range of emotions such as affection and intimacy etc.  But compassion is all about alleviating another’s suffering. Without any doubt, love is indeed a positive emotion towards another person or sentient being.  But compassion, empathy with a desire to alleviate suffering and other’s pain is in higher plane altogether.

Unlike other spiritual paths, Zen practice starts with the realization that eternal self in all sentient beings.  Zen in practice is a great attempt to realize the truth itself without letting the hypothesis created by words, images, language and symbols , be the wall between the knower and the known. Unity of all living things means we each one of us are more than our own being. We are all connected in eternal self, though phenomenally we all have taken different forms. This formless selflessness is root of compassion. It is like we all part of spheres of infinite diameter, with each one of as centers.

In his phenomenal world, for each one of us, without any doubt, our most valuable and sacred possession is ourselves.  And when that sacred self includes everyone else, why would we slam the doors of our heart on ourselves.  Even if we do that once in a while, can’t we do that gently with care and compassion.  And even better, we could open those slammed doors in our heart, one by one.

 May be who knows, the ones  i have closed the doors on, may be right there on other side of the door, with their smiling hearts…

May be then i am really ready for ZaZen, Shikantaza, Kinhin, Samu, Dokusan, Teisho and life.

 

Zen Chronicles:  the Orange to Joy on the WAY…

Zen Chronicles:  the Orange to Joy on the WAY…

by | Dec 23, 2024 | Harmony, Joy, Meditation, Transformation, Uncategorized, Zen

I might have got this during the times when I read Jon Krakauer’s “Into thin air”, a wonderful book on an Everest expedition.  It was on my pin board in front of my desk for a very long time.  It read

““Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one commits oneself, then providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”

― William Hutchison Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition

Though later I found out that couplet attributed to Goethe’s was not entirely correct (What Goethe wrote in Faust was: “Enough words have been exchanged;
now at last let me see some deeds!”), that wonderful paragraph had/has a lot of character, energy and beauty in it. That passage did inspire me to no end, I did dive headlong into many initiatives in my life, without much preparation of planning, quite mindlessly I should say. Many a times I did end up getting the wrong end of the stick, burnt my fingers. But many a times, I did have a perfect landing… Right parents, right siblings, right schools and teachers , Right friends, right books, right music and movies, Right spouse and children, right mentors and coaches, right bosses, colleagues, team members and clients etc. .. endless list got to end with the Right way and Right Guru as well. But then occasionally also landed into rough weather, especially with career choices and monster bosses…  Still the adventure was quite worth it though not in cash or currency  .

 

Though I learnt from Zen practice and living that, all sentient being’s energy fields are mysteriously interconnected, I don’t know whether “the providence moves in our favor, the moment we commit.”  But it does not matter.  The moment we commit, it moves our will and action in life starts at the very moment.  May be the providence moves through us for what we commit.

 

It has been more than 12 years since I started coming to Perumalmalai for Zen.  And since 2014 have been a disciple of Zen Master AMA Samy. Usually, I just spend my spare time in reading a book in the Zendo. It was one of those days, AMA asked me what I am reading and then suggested, I got to start walking as an exercise.  Perumalmalai do have many superb walking, hiking and trekking trails.  So, I started my daily walk in Perumalmalai. My favorite walking route is through the St. Joseph’s farm and estate, away from the main road.  It is a coffee estate with a lot of orange and avocado trees.  Thara came to little flower zendo with me during last December and I took her through my favorite walking path for our morning walk.  After a bit of climb, she was sitting on a kerb to get her breath back, and that was the moment, two oranges fell just in front of her.  And she laughed and told me, the nature knows to give when we are tired.  Those oranges were just ripe, and in that early morning dew on them, perfectly cool and tasted so delicious.  And that passage by W.H. Murray came to my mind, at that moment.   I did hear Thara sharing that with Manu, when he was getting ready to accompany me when I was shifting to Zendo a few days back.  And our son, who is a hardcore atheist, just laughed it off.  We did spend a couple of great days exploring Kodaikanal and he went back to Bangalore last Sunday.

And I continued my morning walks. Am a borderline diabetic and without morning walks, body and mind becomes dull and of less energy. Before she passed away, Zendog Jackie Mu was my walking guide and partner.  She kind of fended off, other street dogs, who often approached me a bit menacingly and led me on the path through the estate roads.

Today morning, as I reached the usual spot of resting and turned back, I suddenly felt a bit weak and tired.  May be over dieting of no carbs and no sugar, might have hit the sugar mark in the body.  And the regular tea shop Surya snacks was a good 1. 5 km away.  I did search for a candy in my cross-body bag and there were not any.

Then as I turned a hair pin bend in the downhill road, there was an orange lying just a few feet in front of me.  Seeing that, mind became still, and heartbeats stopped for a moment. It was not that ripe. Quite tangy and not the sweetest best. 

Still it tasted wonderful to my soul.  In no time, I send the picture to Thara. And she replied “Adipoli”. Which translates to something superb or fascinating. In the mind of a rationalist, it may mean nothing.. What else will one find, in a huge coffee estate full of avocados and oranges.  My need there was just an accident.  Coincidence is a mathematical probability to say the least.

Then I remembered the wonderful story written by Yakov Perelman in his classic book , “Physics for entertainment.”.   Let me quote that wonderful story verbatim.

“It is 1941 and the Germans are bombing Moscow. Most people in Moscow flee to the underground bomb shelters at night, except for a famous Russian statistician who tells a friend that he is going to sleep in his own bed, saying that “There is only one of me, among five million other people in Moscow. What are the chances I’ll get hit?”

He survives the first night, but the next evening he shows up at the shelter. His friend asks why he has changed his mind. “Well,” says the statistician, “there are five million people in this city, and one elephant in the Moscow Zoo. Last night, THEY GOT THE ELEPHANT!”

So we can indeed ,can calculate the probability of an orange falling at the feet of a traveller who is in real need.  They call it small probability event.  But when an absolutely small probability even happens in your life, at the most needed moment, is magical and mysterious.

Now what I have on my heart , note book and pin board is the poem by Spanish poet Antonio Machado.

Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.

And May be, as a traveller when you look ahead, you may see , life gifting you oranges to energise you and keep you walking on your way.  Our world is indeed mysterious.  To paraphrase “Beauty is the eyes of the beholder,  mystery is revealed to Mindless No Minds and No brains “

 

¡Felices Fiestas!  ( Happy Holidays and Season’s greetings.)

¡Felices Fiestas!  ( Happy Holidays and Season’s greetings.)

by | Dec 20, 2024 | Change, Communication, Compassion, Empathy, Friendship, Joy, Uncategorized

 A long time back, while working  on a consulting project at Muscat for PDO, Our team was truly a potpourri mixture of cultures. A Spanish,  a New Zealander, a couple of personnel from Scotland, two English, One American, an Arab from Syria who had moved to Jordan with his family, for a short period of time, we also had a team member who had dual citizenship of  Brazil + Italy and an American, in addition to  Rukmuddin, Senthil and I.

Gab Pico Benet was our Project Manager.   Rukmuddin, Senthil, Gab and I had shared two apartment suits in  City Seasons hotel at Muscat.  Gab hailed from Barcelona, and no prize for guessing, he was an out and out Barcelona club fan, had a great zest for life, beer, soccer and humour.  One of my great memories, when went on a boat ride on the coast of Muscat, for seeing those wonderful sea caves and dolphin watching, Gab just removed his shoes and dived into deep sea for a swim to our horror!  The teenage boy, who was the driver of our boat, was shouting saying , he will overturn the boat …

(pic courtesy: Social Media)

No other work stint in my life had exposed to so many different cultures at the same time, and it was real life school on the balancing act. Everyone in the team had a different way of working, communicating, humour sense and time sense.  ..

I remember one long after dinner discussion, on sense of humour, and someone in the group remarked, that those  ( as a community) have suffered a lot tend to develop a great humour sense and they learn to laugh at themselves.  And he shared the below Irish blessing as an example. Ever since , almost all year, I had shared this with my dear and near as a Season’s greetings .

One never get tired of a good thing. Especially when deep philosophy  is   it is laced with a pinch of humour.  So here we go… 

“May you live as long as you want and

never want as long as you live.

May you be in heaven a full hour
before the devil knows you r dead.

 

May your heart be light and happy,
May your smile be big and wide,
and may your pockets always have
a coin or two inside!

 

Always remember to forget
the troubles that passed away.
But never forget to remember
the blessings that come each day.

May you always have a clean shirt,

a clear conscience, and enough coins

in your pocket to buy a pint!

May the face of every good news and

the back of every bad news be towards us.

May neighbours respect you, Trouble neglect you,
the angels protect you, And heaven accept you.

May you have the hindsight to know where you’ve been,

the foresight to know where you are going,
and the insight to know when you have gone too far.

May misfortune follow you the rest of your life

and never catch up.

May your mornings bring joy
and your evenings bring peace…
May your troubles grow less
as your blessings increase!

May you get all your wishes but one,
so that you will always have something to strive for.

May be their history, or beauty of the land or way of living, they do have a great collection of wishes.  And i too have collected many of them. 🙂 

 

(pic courtesy:  toosweet4two.com)

Wish your dear and near happy holidays and season’s greetings.

Be happy.. Peace and Joy.

by | Dec 18, 2024 | Uncategorized

Describe a man who has positively impacted your life.

Zen Master AMA Samy , founder of Bodhi Sangha https://littleflowerzendo.in

Recipe of Getafix’s magic potion!

Recipe of Getafix’s magic potion!

by | Dec 17, 2024 | Compassion, Empathy, Joy, Sports, Zen

Those who still wonder who Getafix is!! 

Getafix is the druid and creator of the secret magic potion, which gives all the strength and ability to those Gaul’s to bash up those stupidly authoritarian Roman Empire. And he is one of the central characters of the Asterix series cartoons by Uderzo and Goscinny.  ASterix , Obelix and Getafix came to my life through my  good friend and engg college hostel mage Goofy Sudhakar Raju. Both of us were members of the Dagar gang in our hostel and were real experts in whiling away time. We always had so many good interests other than Engineering subjects. We both did read quite a bit. I remember, once we got a copy of the novel “Gone with the Wind” just before a final exam. Still, we both found time to read it end – end and then went for that exam.  During those days, I happened to get a big poster of Obelix from the pages of The Sunday Observer and it adorned the wall of our room in Second hostel.  That name stuck to me and still many of my  Engg college friends call me by the name of Obelix, after all these years !

Just a few days back, after I returned from a trip to hometown, I told my sons, Manu and Rishi , that I wanted to send some books to Saanvi, bibliophile daughter of Dr. Anju. Since my sons knew very well that both Anju and Appu are quite dear to me, they happily handed over their Asterix book collection to be shipped amongst some other books.  While trying to pack those books in carton boxes, I ended up reading those great comic books again.  It was kind of going to back to our dear room ( Next to Partha’s room   That is another great story  ) in  Second hostel.

 

 

Getafix Photo Courtesy: https://asterix.com/en/portfolio/getafix/

The very next day, I read the below LinkedIn post , really early morning, as I was sitting in rest room..It was posted by a X Partner from one of the premier Consulting firms in the world. In it, under the photograph of Vinod Kambli and Sachin Tendulkar

Pic courtesy: SM Linkedin Post

The global “thinktank” wrote and I quote,

“Talent + Luck = Vinod Kambli

Talent + Luck + Discipline + Determination + Commitment + Humility + Learning ability + off field behaviour + Ability to digest success and failure both + Treating the game as bigger than self +++ = Sachin Tendulkar

The gap between cricketer Tendulkar and cricketer Kambli is the gap between talent alone and greatness. “.

I really wanted to send in a blood red hot stinger reply to it. Those who had seen Vinod Kambli bat , in his prime, with those silken touches and left handed graceful elegance , really owe it to him.  It is like G R Viswanath vs Sunil Gavaskar.  Sunny might have scored a way too many runs than Gundappa.  But those who have seen GRV bat still vouch for him.  But then Zen practitioners , practice meditation beyond the Zendo and Zazen. We try to carry the calmness and compassion from sitting meditation to walking (kinhin) to working (Samu) and then even to rest rooms.   Infact   Japanese Zen practitioners belief toilet gods, guard toilets and we got to snap our finger to request them to move on… … So can’t  let oneself  be less compassionate to any one even while in rest room.:-) 

Also, it is a bit difficult for me key into , the small phone screen without my specs and I ended up typing in “Let us be compassionate and let Kambli be ! We don’t have to use every life as a tool to dish out management theories .”

By looking at the responses of many, it was not difficult to conclude, many were in sync with that thought.

In our relentless pursuit of success has created a cottage industry of how to be success.  As a leadership and life coach who tries to make my living out of it, I too plead guilty of it.  Book shops / internet / Social pages etc. are inundated with magic potion/formula for success.    Four steps for this and 6 steps for that !  “ Walk 5 steps in front looking east, turn 30degrees to left, move forward another 6 ft , take u turn .. There you get your success” types !   Osho tells a wonderful story about a meeting between Henry Ford and Napolean Hill, the author of “Think and Grow Rich”.   It is worth listening to.

Secondly and most importantly, we live in a standardized world.  Some amount of standardization is necessarily to keep our life simple.  Like distance in cm, m or kms. Time in seconds, minutes and hours, alcohol in small, large and extra-large etc.

But when that standardization we bring into the spheres of success, love, national pride and spirituality, then it ends up a great disaster.

Some one’s benchmark of hard work for the nation is putting 70 Hrs per week. And someone else standard of being a successful batsman is being a Sachin Tendulkar. And. Someone else’s benchmark of being rich may be Ambani.  No less!

Those who are sports aficionados and soccer enthusiasts, still rate Brazil football team (of Zico, Socrates, Falcao, Eder etc.) as the greatest football team ever assembled. Though they lost out.  George Best, whose life almost rhymes with Kambli still reckoned as one of the best footballers ever played.  There was even a wonderful article/obituary on him by Nirmal Shekar in The Hindu titled, “It was Best, could have been better”.

My Zen Master Ama Samy, who walked on a spiritual path for more than 70+ years, whom many consider as an authority in Zen , Buddhism, Advaita and other religious streams and philosophy, may have around a few hundred disciples.  And we struggle quite a bit to run our Zendo, Bodhi Sangha and affiliated social work we are into. That surely pales in comparison with the other “Gurus” , in numbers, power and wealth ! And I am sure there are many evolved individuals who live low key and anonymous.

 

The moot point, is there a one shoe size fits all kind of measure for success for all beings ?   If there is one, if everyone else becomes a roaring success and there are no “failures” in our world, what will be labelled as success and whom we will call as successful???

 

And lastly, I did ask that ex Big % think tank, that if there was a sure shot recipe for success and Sachin did have it, why he could not hand it over to his son and why someone like Yashasvi Jaiswal would find that recipe by the side of the tent, he used to make and sell chats to make ends meet!

 

It is not just the spiritual world a path less land (as Jiddu Krishnamurti had famously said), even the ordinary life is indeed a pathless land. Each one got to create our own paths and lead our own life as per our standards. Many a times, regardless of our talent and capabilities, privileges we are born with, choices we make for ourselves and the probability of luck in this world clears our way.

 

When we really starts to live by the standards we  set in our own heart, mind and soul, be content with what life gives that day, be compassionate and loving to others , and do our value contribution to the world ( 1 or 70 hr /week) and take care of our and our dear and nears needs ( and not wants), and can rest with a good night’s sound sleep… then that is what I would call it a Life… Who cares whether someone labels it as a success or failure.

 

And that is the recipe of Getafix’s magic potion and my realisation.

 

 Though in the comic strip,  Getafix, the venerable druid always  say firmly to  Obelix: “No, Obelix, not you!”, when Obelix insists on having a portion of the magic potion. !

by | Dec 17, 2024 | Uncategorized

Is your life today what you pictured a year ago?

Visualizing future and try to manifest it is a cookie cutter solution. If your life journey is akin to mountaineering with fixed base camps towards the summit then it works. Or may work as nothing is certain in this BANI world . ( It is not even VUCA) ! Often instead of mountains if it happens to be desert to cross for that day , why you had visualized your mountain milestone in your mind what you would do?? While we are busy planning for yesterday, tomorrow is already knocking on your door. So take your life one day at a time. Take it as it comes … Lower your gaze on your next step and than staring at that horizon . You may cover well that next step for sure … and then the next step …

An Egg Song. A proem to “Fallen flower, fragrant grass”

An Egg Song. A proem to “Fallen flower, fragrant grass”

by | Dec 16, 2024 | Gratitude, Meditation, Transformation, Uncategorized, Zen

This is an egg song. Those who wonder, what is an egg song, it is a celebratory crackle from mother hen, whenever she lays an egg. It is a Hen’s Song and is called an Egg song.   Usually, other hens too join the celebration creating a symphony or cacophony. ISBN estimates that “there are roughly 158,464,880 unique books in the world as of 2023”!  These are published ones. And if you add other content to it, it would be quite safe to presume that there are more authors than readers in the world as of now.  Hence the need for the Egg song by a writer, so that the egg gets some timeshare and mindshare from readers. 

The oldest book which was printed  is The Diamond Sutra, a long time ago in China dated  868 AD.  The Diamond sutra is one of the very significant Buddhist text. The earliest surviving written literature is from ancient Mesopotamia, and the Epic of Gilgamesh is often considered the first great composition. 

May be those days authors never had to sing the Egg song. As one of the most famous persons, Buddha never ever had to market or sell his sutras. People from his times to now, King to pauper were all ears whenever the enlightened one had to say something.

I need one for sure as I am not much of a writer leave alone an accomplished author.  It is not that I am much of anything else , not  accomplished in any other avenues that modern life offers.  Sports, Music, Career etc.

I have an ordinary mind, ordinary form and ordinary life.

It was my Ahaa moment in life, when I learnt from my Zen Master AMA Samy, after a number of Zazens, Dokusans for Koans  and teishos  that, in Zen Way, ordinary mind and ordinary life have greater significance than anything else.

I owe the title of the book to Kumaranasan and my Zen Master AMA Samy.

Kumaranasan is the most read, discussed and famous poet in Malayalam. As one of the foremost disciples and close confidant of  Sri Narayana Guru, he was  much more than a poet. His poems had deep spiritual, philosophical and social underpinnings.

“Veena Poovu”. ( Fallen flower) is his most read and well known poem. It was written by when he was staying with his ailing  Guru in Palakkad. (my home town!).

I read this poem when I was in 9th standard student at KTM High School Mannarkkad.  Kumaran Master ( His son Manoj Kumar was my classmate , is a good friend and current Head Master of the same school!)  had a  great way of teaching poems and it kind of got etched in my memory.

The poem is about a fallen flower from a tree lying unwanted on the ground. The great poet uses this a metaphor for transient nature of our life, and everything associated with life.  A flower, once which had great beauty and might have been much in need to adorn the hairs of humans to deities, now lay there on the ground, half decayed and on its way to fully integrated with mother earth.  He was depicting the phases of our own life, birth, growing up, glory, death and decay.

Much later in life, when I started walking on the way of Zen as a student of Zen master AMA Samy, I saw in his bookshelf a book written by him. The title read. “Falling Blossoms and fragrant grass”.  It triggered my memory of 9th std Malayalam class and this poem.

When I read it again after some 40 years, I could realize that the poem Fallen Flower (Veen Poove) very much is in line with Buddhist view of the world.  The poet, very subtly, stresses the impermanent nature of life and the noble truth of suffering.

But Ama Samy’s book wonderfully told me that a fallen flower still can spread the fragrance in this earth. Still there is time before becoming part of Earth.

And this anthology of blogs / mental scribbles (written over a period of 15 years) depicts me as a person. I am A Fallen flower, nevertheless a fragrant one. Still working towards doing some good in this wonderful and beautiful world before I go back to mother earth…

Before ending this long note:  Would like to express my sincere heartfelt gratitude to

  1. Thara my better half and our children Manu and Rishi, who are so generous, selfless and loving, they just let me be.
  2. My late father Sankara who was the most significant one amongst  the 3 Sankaras in my life. The other two being, Adi Sankara and second one EMS. And my siblings Sandhya and Sasi. I was the middle child in our family, so they took care of me from both sides, left and right.
  3. AMA Samy, Zen master, Founder of Bodhi Sangha and Little Flower Zendo Perumalmalai, Kodaikanal, who is my sage and guide on The Way.
  4. Rasna Baruah, Editor par Excellence, who took the challenge of transforming my scribbles into readable passages.
  5. Late Ranjan Acharya, some 15 – 16 years ago wrote back to me that, the only way to become a writer is writing
  6. And readers who belong to the Dear and Near group in my phone, who always the first uncut copy of my blogs and who put up with my writing and still encouraged me, nevertheless.
  7. Lastly to all the Buddhas, past , present and future, who walk/ed along the WAY.

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