i2I...

When I had the dosa this morning, I kind of squirmed looking at the charred portion. I wanted a crispy, golden brown dosa on my plate. I went on to suggest my wife about how she needs to keep the heat at the optimum level even though she has turned out the best of the dosas on my plate before. Just one bad one and I started commenting ignoring all the good ones I had had.

The clothes I wear I have preference, the movies I watch, the books I read, the friends I keep, the places I go, the mobile phone I use and so on. Not only that, the mobile phone my wife uses, the dress she wears, the way she smiles and so on. Every damn thing out there I have a preference. I question if it is not delivered to my taste and I feel bad if it does not happen according to my preference.

You know the only thing you unquestioningly embraced in life ?

It is YOU.

Yes. When this body and mind was given to me and had evolved with me, I never even bothered to know about it. I never even questioned it once. I assumed it to be what I AM.

While I question everything about everyone I forgot to question this person who is questioning everything else.

Why is this spinning things out of control?

How did it reach this point where it simply goes on and on and drags me in?

How do I get into arguments and make mine and others life miserable?

How did it make me think I have to have this much money, a car, a home and on and on?

Did we ever question the nature of this body and mind that grew with us?

Did we have the opportunity to show preference to what we want and discard what we did not want out of it?

It does not happen unless you start to observe the patterns. You find that most of the things what you do tend to repeat on and on. Your craving for money, lust, power.

You find that your mind has cleverly camouflaged it with bells and whistles all the time but at the end of it leads you to a more affirmative image of ‘I’. A more powerful, a more lustful and a more wealthy ‘I’.

Is that good or bad?

As long as you cannot see the separation or question and introspect the images built by your mind there is nothing good for the real YOU. For sure it could be good or bad for what you are now.

i2I..

As I mentioned before, the ‘I’ is a sequence of images about ‘who you are’ reinforced by your mind over time. The one that is the current image is the most powerful. You vehemently defend and nurture it than your past.

If I say, ‘What you did to that woman was wrong’ after two years of your divorce, you care less. The same thing when said as you are going through it makes you retort and even stop seeking any words of advise. That is how powerful the image you hold now about yourself.

It is almost like a buffer cache (in computers) where the old is overlaid by the new. But in us, it is not exactly same as you still remember the old, but it does not evoke as much a reaction from you as the new. So this is really not about memory. This is about your response, reaction to those stored in your head.

If you look at this, it sounds very funny and outrageous at the same time. You have been going around thinking all what you did and what others said what you did is YOU. But the reality is no more than a bunch of images that were strong in you about who you are at that point in time.

That’s why we are always able to arrive at a better decision about things on hindsight. One you have a lot more data. But the most important thing is that you have nothing to lose. I mean not monetarily. But you no more need to defend that old image of YOU.

When I was working, I was consumed by work. I thought all I have to do is work harder and harder. And I did. I had this image of being the most hard working, and as a result most knowledgeable on the work I did. May be some others had this too. And many others might have had the image that I am brash and arrogant. Again I just have to remind you that the image about me in others is a result of the image of those people about themselves at that point in time. For example, if some one thought I am brash, he may be having a much stronger image to defend and hence cannot accommodate me. Whereas, some other may not have too much image and may be OK to hear me out. Coming back, this image of me as the most intelligent and smart at work had been assumed as what I AM by myself. Until I saw a failure, when I could not deliver what I promised. That is when I have the first jolt to the image I built up, the ‘I’ I had nurtured.

There is a Zen story about a person who bragged about his archery skills. He was convinced that he is the best archer in the town. In fact he was. But he carried that image so deep and would not believe if some one said ‘YOU are not THAT archer’. One day a master came along and he started bragging his archery skills to the master. The master took him to a hill and asked him to stand on a edge of a rock. When you look down, it was staggering. The master said “Now show your skills”. The archer trembled. He could not concentrate on the archery any longer. He bowed and moved away. The master went and stood on the steep edge and shot the arrow with the same level of calmness as he was before.

What the master did was to give a ‘jolt’ to the archer by making him stand on that steep rock. A jolt to his image and a situation to allow the archer to see it for himself. It was not really about the archery. The master had little doubt about his skills. But the image and all the bragging fed by the archer came in the way of archery. He would be a better archer if he could just keep that skill as a skill and be indifferent to that.

When a jolt happens in you life, it could be a failure of the task that you invested a great deal of time, it could be someone dear to you and acknowledged how great you were suddenly backing off, it could be a disease you get afflicted with or it could be even a small burst of anger on the road, all of this gives you that window to look at your ‘I’. The image that you have carefully built over time about YOU.

But to most of us, the images are inseparable from what we possibly are. In fact it is unimaginable to understand who this person is without any image.

Does such a thing exist?

If it is what would it be ?

i2I.

Being born in India and growing up reading stories of swamis and mystiques this one question had stuck in me for a long time. “Who am I”.

Who Am I ?

I have never seriously tried to answer this question or pursue for an answer. It has always been reading this in a book or listening to some one in a video.

The standard answers like “I am not this body” or “I am not this mind” were there in some corner and had cluttered my ability to answer this question. The more I had thought in the lines of some one else’s thinking the more I felt I was away from finding an answer.

For several years now after having gone through what I call a phase of my life, working, travelling, marrying, fathering it was clear to me that there is nothing significant in this life unless you decide to make it that way. And whatever I had done before is like a hazy distant dream fading away with this person, me, left behind.

It is almost like I was washed away by a stream of water and now standing with no drops remaining on me. You are back to where you were. However I should say there are still drops from the past on you but it is no longer a stream.

I guess it was during one of my morning jogs ..

When I felt how distant I was to the childhood image of me. As a child going to school, strictly obeying my parents and teachers, spending time with friends, reading books in the library, playing cricket…where is that guy?

Later into college, the late night discussions on varied topics with friends, the occasional intensity of exams, the pressure of coming out unscathed…where is that guy?

and on and on..a million times …the so called me in various places, various avatars

None of them can be what I am now except in photographs and the quaint smile of people who have seen me in those avatars.

10 years from now, this ME, will just reside in the photographs and a new ME will fill me.

In fact if I carefully observe I am being undone and redone every moment of this life. Every little emotion adds a colour to me, brings a new dimension of me.

Small nuggets of information about me is constantly updated by me from others, from the world every moment.

If I look at this phenomenon, every thing I have identified as myself does not hold. Some die immediately, some stick on and die later. There is nothing I vigorously defend as ‘I’ is true about me.

What I think I am simply does not exist anywhere unless I decide to acknowledge it. Almost all the time this happens automatically without me.

The true ME is the decider. The one, who if I start being that, will start deciding what can be ME.

Hard as hell. But the realization will get you there some day.