Myths & Matters - 4. Love is Conditional

Prelude:

In this series titled as "Myths and Matters" I am presenting few "Moments of Truth" that unfolds in our life as a wisdom after we suffer due to false understanding of our relationship with our loved ones or life events. When this wisdom dawns on us we have nearly finished our life and hardly left with few years to apply these wisdom to achieve peace of mind. It is prudent to learn from other's mistakes, as we may not have time to commit all of them by ourselves, as life span is insufficient to do that. In this series I briefly cover one topic at a time about the false understanding as "The Myth" and offer few suggestions under the heading "What Matters".

Please note the serial number that appears on each topic to keep track of the serial. Although there is no sequence for reading, you will be benefitted if you read these topics in sequence for best results. I shall post one topic every Sunday to keep continuity and sustain your patronage. If you find these topics useful, kindly join this blog as follower to get automatic update through your mail when I publish any new post. To follow this blog please refer the ‘Follower’ section on the right side of this blog and click the button “Join this site” and follow through the instructions.

I would appreciate your comments at the end of this blog, which will act as a feedback for me to improve my blog in the future. Your feedback is the manure for me to continue this effort. Wish you Happy reading & peaceful life ahead.

The Myth:

‘Love’ is one of the invisible universal forces that keep us sane during our human existence. Unfortunately it is the most misunderstood and abused word in the modern civilized society. Every one understands ‘Making Love’ which term came from the west that means it is a physical act!  As Rajneesh once said “you cannot ‘make love’ as Love is not a stuff to make; but a state of a being”. Alas! We have reduced this great universal bonding force as a mere physical act. He also said that one fellow is restlessly waiting in the court to divorce the woman and the other fellow is relentlessly waiting to marry her! How come the woman who became a pain on the neck to one person could become a ‘Honey’ to another?

The other phrase pertaining to love is “Fell in Love”; how one can fall in love as Einstein said, “Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love”. In reality we have reduced this great force as a mere sexuality. There is something going fundamentally wrong in the name of ‘Freedom’ and ‘Civilization’. Part of our indulgence pursuits we have exhausted all possible combinations of ‘making pleasure’ and ended up in legalization of ‘Gay marriage’. We have started challenging the very reason nature created “Adam and Eve” for procreation. May be this indicates the ‘Kali Yuga’ which is in its advanced stage to conclude the end of the human existence which can happen due to “Tsunami” or degrading civilization. In any externally focused materialistic society, we keep exploring pleasure in all possible indulgence. I don’t mind but why in the banner of ‘Love’, which is the divine essence of life?

The so-called marriage is not a union of two souls any more as Rajneesh mentioned but a convenience for each other to have safe sex. Strange to witness the extent to which ‘Love’ has been abused. Now the law in the west clarifies that when people get married, their ‘possessions’ continues to belong to them as no one knows how long the relationship will lost! When they get separated their offspring’s are the causality. As one of the greatest thinkers of modern times said, “If the mankind would have found a system for safe sex free from social stigma for prostitution, the system of marriage would not have come into existence”. He indirectly says that the hotel system is not questioned for eating outside for quenching hunger but why not the other human needs!

When growing child reaches teens, the first thing attracts them is “Love” – the other name for ‘infatuation’. If any one of you have not experienced this strange phenomena, either you would have born as a “Prophet” or not belong to this modern civilized society. One of the hypothesis of modern times is “Love marriage is better than arranged”. If this hypothesis is the null hypothesis, then why statistics shows that the divorce is more among love married couples? If not divorced still they live with each other not as passionately when they dated each other. I heard from some of my family friends complaining that their husband who spoke hours together over cell phone is cutting calls after marriage.  Why the romance ends once they are legally wedded? When there is someone is campaigning against the lovers, they become more fiercely involved proving the nature’s law “Resistance causes persistence”.  In true sense if they love each other, then there is no start, middle and end for love as it is perpetual.

What Matters?

It is important to get back to basics of the spirituality to understand the true meaning of the word ‘Love’ and re-align us to relate to the rest of the beings in our life including the loved ones as well as other species. The following tips would help:

Tips-1: “All great forces are invisible”

In the physical universe you will find all great forces are invisible and are in the non-material form such as ‘Gravitational force’, ‘Electromagnetic force’, ‘Nuclear force’, ‘Thermal force’ etc. Similarly in the human domain great forces such as ‘Love’, ‘Compassion’, ‘Empathy’, ‘respect’ etc. are invisible and can make a huge impact in our relationship. Understanding them and their impact is more important to apply them in our life. Love is not a ‘tangible’ matter but an expression of our soul with respect to another being. It is something we always expect from everyone around us. It is not a ‘bad word’ as we discussed above.

Tips-2: Love is “Giving and not taking”:

To understand this statement you need to experience a ‘pet’ at home. The dog for example expresses its love when its master returns home without any ‘hidden agenda’. The pet enjoys giving love, as it is the true nature of any creation; but as human beings we have made everything as a ‘business’ believing that ‘Giving is to take something later’ like a politician who invests in politics to earn money later. It proves the point ‘why roads not made to last longer more than a monsoon’. If you observe nature you will find everything in it ‘gives’ more than it takes – plantation takes carbon-di-oxide and releases oxygen, coconut tree takes soap water and gives sweet nectar and so on.

Tips-3: Love is ‘Un-conditional’:

We want our children to take care of ourselves during old age since we looked after them when they grew up. We say “I will love my children when they study well”. This is a ‘conditional love’; love subject to someone meeting your expectations. Love is un-conditional as it is a state of a being. Just imagine human beings are de-foresting damaging the ecology – if the trees make a condition saying that “I will take oxygen and release carbon-di-oxide”, we will all perish. Only when parents don’t attach a ‘price tag’ for their love, they can expect their children to reciprocate it. Let us not make ‘Love’ as a business.

Tips-4: Love is contagious:

Love is like a virus and contagious as it spreads beyond caste and creed - It has no bound. It is not limited by religion and the color of the skin. If hate replaces love, it is a sign of the decaying humanity. We make choices in every aspect of our life and love towards other species is one among those choices. Love and hate are the two options we have and when we make the choice, we have no options to expect different reciprocation from the other party. When I chose to hate someone, I have already made the choice to get hatred from that person. Let us make the right choice.

Tip-5: The entire universe is the essence of the same entity:

It sounds philosophical when we hear from Sankara who postulated “Advaida” philosophy saying, all that we see in this universe are none other than a single entity. The forms are different but the essence is the same. All gold jewelry is looking different but they are none other than gold, which was excavated from the earth once. The same philosophy expressed by Einstein as “Singularity” theory stating that there is only one force that expresses this universe instead of electromagnetic, nuclear and gravitational forces as believed earlier. We are willing to believe the science but not Sankara’s vision. Which ever is your belief, it explains love with a different perspective. Loving other being is nothing other than loving yourself, as you are present in all the other beings. This explains the ritual of bowing and saying “Namaste” when you meet the other person by which you symbolically acknowledge the common essence present everywhere.

Tip-6: Love yourself first

If you don't love yourself, you cannot love the other person; self love precedes love towards others. Our self esteem is the foundation for our self-expression. Self pity is different from self esteem; the former is a sign of mental sickness and later is a healthy sign. Most of us are unhappy about some aspects of ourself; education, personality, shape of our nose or color of our skin etc. This perennial sense of dissatisfaction leads to a void in us which is responsible for our inability to love other beings. Hence the starting point is to accept ourself as we are and complete our self love before we relate to other beings.   

Let Love rule this World.

Many more Myths and Matter to follow.

Love

NC  

Myths & Matters - 3.0 "Our children must be an Engineer or a Doctor"

Prelude:

In this series titled as "Myths and Matters" I am presenting few "Moments of Truth" that unfolds in our life as a wisdom after we suffer due to false understanding of our relationship with our loved ones or life events. When this wisdom dawns on us we have nearly finished our life and hardly left with few years to apply these wisdom to achieve peace of mind. It is prudent to learn from other's mistakes, as we may not have time to commit all of them by ourselves, as life span is insufficient to do that. In this series I briefly cover one topic at a time about the false understanding as "The Myth" and offer few suggestions under the heading "What Matters".

Please note the serial number that appears on each topic to keep track of the serial. Although there is no sequence for reading, you will be benefitted if you read these topics in sequence for best results. I shall post one topic every Sunday to keep continuity and sustain your patronage. If you find these topics useful, kindly join this blog as follower to get automatic update through your mail when I publish any new post. I would appreciate your comments at the end of this blog, which will act as a feedback for me to improve my blog in the future. Your feedback is the manure for me to continue this effort. Wish you Happy reading and peaceful life ahead.

The Myth:

One of the mental obsessions of all modern parents is to aspire that their children become either an engineer or a doctor – the so-called ‘professionally qualified’. I appreciate the anxiety to take care that our children settle down in their life with a good job and get married on time; but why only as engineer and doctor. The craze for medicine has come down marginally as not all doctors are able to neither establish a lucrative career nor get a well paying job. Strangely this obsession is seen only in India and no where else. This has become contagious and crowd behavior these days haunting the parents right from the time their child is born. To illustrate this behavior here is a real life anecdote:

  One of my friends from the south said that she was crying as though some one died in her family while her son could not get engineering admission. She was proud to say that there were more than 100 cars parked outside her house, which belongs to the people who came to console her. She said that she was rolling in the floor and crying un-consolably – normally the way people cry when someone dies in their family.

 Eventually when her son got admission in one of the private engineering colleges, she was saying, “I felt miserable to tell my friends that my son is not studying in the well known engineering college”. The boy who was very intelligent, always obsessed of becoming a movie director and cinematographer; he felt that he was born for that. He reluctantly went to the engineering college to satisfy his mother and got his engineering degree. On the day of his convocation he handed over his degree certificate to his mother and said, “Here is the degree you wanted” and pursued his movie career and eventually became what he wanted.

I could not find out the exact genesis of this obsession but I am sure that it is the result of two social developments happened in the last few decades. One of them is proliferation of private engineering colleges and the other is highly paying software engineering jobs. When I was young in sixties there were very few government-engineering colleges. The parents on those days felt that their offsprings must at least become a graduate, as engineering college admission was very difficult to get.

About two to three decades ago politicians started private engineering and medical colleges to make money in an easy way and the concept of “Capitation fee” started. Degree has become a commodity like investing in politics to rob the public money. The other event happened is the ‘Campus Interviews’ for graduate engineers by the software engineering companies. Our engineering community supposed to ‘engineer good products’ have ended up as ‘software engineers’. This migration plus “US fever” has kept the GDP growth of manufacturing companies with a stunted contribution at 27% for the last 30 years. The growth of any economy comes from manufacture and agricultural produce as all other enterprises are support services and have no independent existence. Who cares about the social needs these days, as everyone is busy in taking care of him or herself. The famous saying is “If you want IIT’ians and good Indian coffee, go to US to get it”

What Matters?

Parents are the custodians of their child with a duel responsibility; one is to secure their offspring's future and other as a citizen of the country. If every parent refuses to send their child as a Jawan or a cop, there is no way the the country can survive the onslaught of the enemy waiting to storm us. There is a social system which needs mutual contribution for survival. As parents let us re-educate our mind to relate our role with our child using the following tips:

Tip-1: There could be a Jesus in your child

There was a ‘Buddha’ hiding in Siddhartha, which ultimately manifested in spite of his father king Soddhodana's efforts to suppress. As I have mentioned in my previous topics on Myths and Matters, every human being have come to this planet with a ‘Mission’ to accomplish which is evident from the child prodigies. If not an eight-year-old child won’t sing like Latha Mangheskar unconsciously in front of large celebrities. A mango seed won’t grow as papaya tree and vice versa. Let us find out what seed is waiting to grow in our child and nurture it, as that is all the purpose of parenting.

Tip-2: Education is a passport & not a visa

Education only sharpens the learnability and provides a lead in the career as it is a “Passport and not a visa”. As leaving the country needs passport but entering the other country needs a visa. Like this, to get a job one needs a degree but to grow to higher positions needs talents which is a like a visa. As parents we need to empower our child with talents and behaviours through strong values right at the toddler stage rather than believing only degree will get them everything.

Tip-3: Society needs all talents

Lets look at this social disorder with a different lens. Like a wheel has many parts like rim, spokes, and hub, a forest needs lion, elephant, deer, snakes and the other kind of animals; then only it is forest. If it has only lions then it will perish soon. It is wrong to say that axle is more important than the spokes as all are needed to make a wheel. Similarly the human society needs all kind of skills for its perpetuity. The society is an assembly of various skills such as farmers, bankers, scientists, doctors, clerk, plumber, biotech engineers, and others. If every one is doctors and engineers the society cannot function. The civilization would not have come this far if the multi-functional skills were not available in this planet.

Tip-4: Education & position have no correlation

Most of the celebrity CEOs in the US are not from premier universities but are well known leaders who built institutions. Leadership is a state of a being and has nothing to do with the professional qualification. There is no education, which is superior or inferior to the other. If you are a commerce or science graduate you need not have to feel inferior to any other professionally qualified person. Your ability to lead has nothing to do with your basic education as all education has given only outdated information. The society has created a stigma on certain educational qualification due to ignorance.Please read my book "Pragmatic Leadership" under publication by Tata Mc Graw Hill (under print). 

Tip-5: Great people were school drop-outs

Interestingly many great achievers like Einstein and Edison are school dropouts who were heavily criticized for their lack of academic performance as no one could see the genius in them. Their IQ was so high looking for a breakthrough for mankind. They could not adjust to the history and geography, taught in the school, which were information of the past and has no significant value for what purpose they have come to this planet. This made them to think, “Education is for birds”. They belong to the category which Bernard Shaw once said, “Few people see things as they are and ask why; others see things that were not and ask why not. I belong to the later one”. May be your child belong to this community and we may be forcing it to the mundane former category.    

Tip-6: The society will always find holes – Ignore it

We always attach more importance to the thought “What people around us will think” rather than our own feelings and needs. Psychology refers this as ‘FSD – Fear of Social Disapproval” which is one of the childhood conditioning by parents making us shameful in the eyes of others. Fear of social disapproval of the parents is the cause of these social parasite due to which parents are looking for the approval of their friends and relatives for validating their children educational qualification. This is clearly a “Ghost’ which has no real existence. If we validate ourselves by the societies opinion, it shows that we have no self-esteem of our own and feeling empty internally. The so-called society is not going to do any dam for our children except this empty threat of commenting about them. Ignore it and listen to your inner voice and feelings.

In summary:

Our children are our assets and the very reason for our existence in this planet and let us not invalidate them based on their academic pursuits. Let us extend an un-conditioned love towards them and let them blossom as what they have come here for. If they have born as ‘Jasmine’, we cannot make them a ‘Rose’ and if we do, they will never be Jasmine or rose.

Many more Myths and Matters to follow.

Love

NC