Do you identify with .... Treasured Emptiness ?

Sometimes .... this feeling settles down on me .... "Is this it ??"

Although it may seem that nothing but depression can trigger this ... it is not true .... it can happen subsequent to euphoria; post some cherished accomplishment or when I look at a brilliant sunset too ( sorry to all those nature lovers who believe sunsets are always inspirational ! :) ).

I am confused when I find that this mental frame is not chased away by one's regular daily activities, music, movies, books , shopping ( :) ) , browsing, twitter ( :) ) etc

This is different .... it does not intrude in the normal course of life's events ... what it does is, give a spectator perspective .... it is a part of every activity and yet a bystander ... a strange dichotomy of being ....

It is not sadness, happiness, not anger , not futility, not animation or sentimentality ...... and it dawns on me ( sometimes after a week or so !!!! ) ... it is nothing ...... a very special barrenness .....

A strange emptiness ; an emptiness that resounds with silence .... a thing of desolate beauty .... an emptiness where thoughts are intruders .......

Vedanta Treatise - The Eternities by Swami Parthasarathy - Book Review

I bought this book quite some time back but each time I picked it up to read, I felt I was not mentally prepared for its tenets :) But now after reading it ......to say it is inspirational and profound sounds very tame !! It is much beyond that.

First of all - don't read this book unless you are ready to have your religious , spiritual beliefs questioned ! :) The author calls a spade a space and how ! :)) Secondly it starts dry - more like a textbook - and includes examples with logic, maths, poems , stories etc.

Some insights in the book -

• Vedanta - The author says that Vedanta is to be approached like a science. Vedanta elucidates truth in an analytical manner akin to how math theorems are approached. Its truth is its authority and needs no person to give it credence. It belongs to everybody and in fact needs organized study just like a professional course.

• God - The author claims that God is a concept like the unknown quantity in an algebraic equation. One needs to resolve the equation to get to the real value !! Also compares God to fuel in a vehicle ; says while the vehicle cannot move without the fuel - still the vehicle holds responsibility for where it travels and hence the responsibility of our lives lies with us !

• Religion -  The soul of religion has been killed and people are clinging on to the remains ! A most sagacious statement and so true ! Today - religion seems to mere following of rote conventions / meaningless rites / forced thoughts / inflexible beliefs without any value or emphasis being given to contemplation and reflection on any spiritual maxims or discourses.  Religious education seems to have become an acceptance and compliance of past thoughts and actions. Says thinking is a skilled activity !! :) Most consider it a natural ability !

• Who are you ? - We do not know who we are because when in dreams we think we are the person in the dreams and it is very real to us , just as the person we become when we wake up is very real to us too !!!!

• Bhagvad Gita - Says it is ironical that while the Gita is a actually a book that is a kindle towards action ( after all it galvanized Arjuna to fight !! ) most people in India seem to consider it as a retirement activity and is only for the elderly !!

• Renunciation - Renunciation does not mean abstaining from your essential duties. In fact it means that you should perform your duties and yet be a detached witness to all that happens in your life. True renunciation means you should be able to life life even enjoy life and yet know it is but transient and momentary.

• Meditation - The author's views on meditation was startling and perhaps contentious too !!! Meditation is the last step of religious procedure and not the first. Says a mind full of desires is an agitating mind and cannot truly meditate. Something like bags of stones weighting a bird down - it just cannot soar. With all the hype surrounding meditation and the blithe assumption that meditation is the first thing to do when needing to be calm - this confounded me !!

The main goal in any-one's life should be self-realization. The world dissolves on attaining this !

Would you hire someone smarter than you ? :))

One of the oft repeated mantras in management lore that I come across is hiring/surrounding yourself with people smarter than you. My personal experience in this has been somewhat ambivalent and inconclusive.

I have had people with me who climbed the corporate ladder faster than me plus there are others who are languishing more or less where they were when I left. :) I cannot claim to have made any conscious decisions towards encircling myself with brighter people than me.

 So ....... let us look at others .....

When I was a relative junior in the organization a valid query from me regarding Database design along with a viable solution was rejected by a senior person ....  I was puzzled by it at that time but came to the conclusion that there must be a very valid reason for the dismissal of my inputs.  It made the code a little messier in my opinion so I could not help wondering why that individual did not see it fit to tell me the reason. ( And yes I did ask in person too !! :)) Since when have I stopped asking questions ? :)) )

Contrast this to another boss who was also high up in the corporate hierarchy but always found time to answer my queries (plus that of my team mates ); especially those insights gained through experience. We were exposed to quick bytes of wisdom ( and justified rebukes too ! :) ) through out the working relationship. This person collaborated with people who were technically more brilliant and yet did not feel intimidated nor were the inexperienced people in the group treated in a cavalier way for the many "dumb" questions.

Needless to say - working for the second person was much more fun and there was hardly anyone who found it difficult to go the extra mile when deadlines loomed !! :)

So my musing is this - Exactly what kind of person can hire other people around him/her who are more sharp, talented and clever than himself / herself ?  Someone --

• who is articulate ? ( May be my boss could not tell me why my design was wrong ! It is one thing to know and another to explain ! )
• who is secure ? Security not based on position / title alone. ( Think of the number of  CEOs sacked so unceremoniously ?? ;) ).
• who enjoys learning
• who knows he/she is employable ( even if the recession bites ! )
• And someone who is office-politics-savvy if he/she is gunning for that promotion while being surrounded by exceptional people and actually wants to keep them happy too !!!! :))

Pace of Life .... :)

I read this great article by Nandu - Pace of life and this blog is in response to some of the queries he has posted there. ( My answers turned out to be too long !!! )

The main topic .. is pace of life and how we seem to be rats in a spin wheel. Not a new topic ... but .. :))

The psychological/medical explanation of why we are addicted to searching, tweeting etc is given in this article . For those of you who have a short attention span - this is a long read but you can directly read the first para and last 3 paras to get the gist !!

First I must say I don't believe in balanced life. :)) I don't believe any generation ever really had it. We might think looking from a perspective of 15-20 yrs that they were happy - but they faced their own challenges. Plus we were kids !! :) It may make more sense to see what the adults were doing.

If we see; our parents spent a lot of time in physical work ... I don't remember a time when my mom / grand mom really goofed off. May be only when they visited their maternal homes !! :) My grand mom would do patchwork quilts when she was free ... !!!! Otherwise she was cooking, working in the fields, winnowing, running behind us kids , making butter, tidying the house etc etc etc. No cleaned rice, wheat , ready made butter etc off the shelves for her !!! My granddad was busy in the fields or with his photography .... He was engaged most of the day .. and night time was good for his photography work ..... Similar story for my Mom and Dad - Mom worked too ...

Yes the pace of life was slower I think - but then that generation had its own stresses to cope with.

Now for us a quite a few our stresses are self-inflicted. This is not to say that there is no compulsion to be better, faster and more efficient on a daily basis. It is there ... and I don't see it getting less any time in the near future. What we can do is instead is stream-line the areas that we have to focus on and eliminate the chaff.

Here are few of my observations -

First I think - we should forget the 5 day week and 2 day weekend concept. It is a 7 day work / weekend. That means pockets of leisure have to be taken during the week itself. You may think - Not during the working hours ... but I knew people who would go for a jog in the afternoon which worked as a stress buster and helped them get their exercise. It also made them come back to work with a fresh mind !!! Some would go to their patch gardens near the office - to do half an hour of weed pulling !

We have to choose what our stress buster is - be it 2 min meditation, slow deep breathing, going to a comics website , reading a few inspirational thoughts, watching a movie , a walk in nature etc ... It is a fact that there is no longer a clean divide between work and leisure time.

Secondly I think it is easy to get lost in the thick of thin things. ( Borrowing from Stephen Covey's - First things First ). How many times have we found that just googling on one topic leads to another and then another and you have ended up spending 3 hours ... almost doing nothing ? Personally I can be online all day and all night ... and still feel that I can continue ! :)

Yes technologies are addictive no doubt but much of the online experience also comes from
what we decide to look for. Being online itself is not the main thing - it is what we do online that matters. Mere zombie browsing is obviously a time waster.

RSS feeds, Twitter updates, iTunes podcast subscriptions, Online university material, News updates - how many times do we prune this to get only material is important and relevant to us ? Undoubtedly we have some searching to do to get the best out of the net but we forget this involves deleting too ! I personally unsubscribe/unfollow blogs/people that I don't feel are adding value to my online experience. Yes it may mean that I might miss that fantastic article on the perfect way to blog ....but if I have to hunt through 200 articles for that one ... I am better off without it !! :)

Same goes for the need to know the latest news asap. C'mon - current news is old news tomorrow. Lots of days we can live without reading the newspapers / news updates too !! :)) You just have to go and browse for top 10 news of last week / month to get the relevant details when you get back online ! :)

Another thing is ... time taken for a few tasks - especially the mundane ones !! We can limit them - fixing a time may ensure we do not squander time on non-essentials.

On the whole awareness is what will help .... being online cannot make us efficient unless we evaluate what we do - all the time ! :)) There are lots of books and tips on how to be more productive and I will not get into that but the bottom line is that it all fails if we do not tailor it to our needs.

Mind you - these are my inputs and a lot of you may think it is easy for me to say this since I am not working and juggling home life and office life. But the addiction to being online all the time affects me too ! :)

May be though; sometimes nothing but cold turkey works - so get off the net / twitter / facebook etc for a couple of days - the earth will still revolve around the sun !!!! :))

And sadly may be nobody will miss you ! ;)