Sanya Sundar 4/30/19 Sanya Sundar 4/30/19

MEDITATION : A MEANS TO A BEGINNING

My interest in meditation came about primarily from a need to find some silence and balance to life. The rate at which we assimilate new information never seems to be proportional to the amount of time we allow ourselves to process it all. At times, we even find our waking experiences seeping very realistically into our dreams. Our subconscious tries to make sense of it before our conscious minds go on another rampage of gathering more information by the next morning.

My mind could often be compared to the safari window on my laptop - cluttered with multiple tabs open at all times - information thrown around all over the place. I switch from one tab to another, getting lost at times, wondering where a particular tab went. Secretly I’m always tempted to just close them all and start from scratch- de clutter the system so I can be just a little more organised. Thats how my mind felt every now and then - cluttered and dis-organised, full of choas. Many things being inputted each day, things from my parts of my life but not enough time to process and paint a healthy picture of how they all can come together.

I thought to myself, there are all these different aspects to life - theres my work and career life, theres my personal life, theres my spiritual & existential life- all these fragmented tabs that are parts of what I understand as my life. Conditioning has led me to look at them as different parts that exist separately, which is why I tend to prioritise one over the other. But in reality, they are a whole and all part of just one life - my life. There is no one fragment that has a bigger stake here. The quest lies within my ability to understand and create a balance. To bring all these fragmented parts together as one whole experience - that is what I came to ponder upon.

This led me to another complex thought - what are the consequences of living this fragmented perception within? Does this conditioning affect my perception of the world outside? If I am so divided on the inside, is it not likely that I am using the same logic to divide my perception of the outside? Have I divided the world into what I agree with and what I don’t ; what I aspire for what I don’t; what I believe in and what I don’t; who I admire and who I don’t; who I fear and who I don’t - what I can tolerate and what I can’t; whatever I consider as ‘me’ and ‘not me’. Are these differences and divisions creating a conflict inside me about my actions and opinions?

Is the conflict we see in the external world a physical manifestation of all the conflicts within us?

As these questions bubbled up, I realised it would be a endless journey of exploration and understanding. In seeking a balance, I must first understand the divisiveness and disorder that is bringing about this imbalance. A journey that strangely was not taught to me during my years in school. Which is odd, because this is the only journey you’re taking in a sense. How can I learn about something which had been given no prior significance during my learning years? Surely, there have been many others before me who pondered over these ideas. Others who have left a trail of dialogue and interpretation of the same. But where do I begin? More importantly, how do I begin?

Something worried me while I pondered on these ideas - while the chaos within me lead to asking these questions, I feared I just be adding another tab in my mind if I didn’t go about answering them in a healthy manner. I was not interested in adding a list of existential expectations to my already pacing mind. My pacing mind. It came back to that. If only it didn’t pace as much, if only I felt some silence, If I could breathe a little easier, I might be able to give it an actual shot and observing what is going on. Silence of the mind, thats what I seek. How can I find this silence? And is there a path to balance through that silence?

ALICE (alice.in.blunderland) sits on her desk, somewhere in the middle of the rabbit hole, going up and down to bring back little bits of perspectives as and when the situation demands. Why Blunderland? Because Alice is aware that one person’s wonder may very well be another person’s blunder! So don’t take her adventures seriously if it’s not your cup of tea.

Sanya Sundar 3/28/19 Sanya Sundar 3/28/19

A UNIVERSE WITHIN - THE BEGINNING

It’s amazing how all the planets, the stars and all other bits of rock and metal, move so fast, as the universe expands, all hurling away from each other at such enormous speeds. Its truly unfathomable. At the same time, here we are on earth as if it were all perfectly still. Life happens; days go by; we move forward constantly albeit obliviously. Species evolving, become extinct and in the middle of all that, we humans, who have lived for over 250,000 years at the least, have founded and dug to the ground civilisations that have tried to solve the mysteries of existence and consciousness. It’s truly amazing.

Ofcourse, we know why we don’t feel the movement of the universe; it’s because the speed is pretty much constant. Like when you’re in an airplane. You know you’re going fast but inside the airplane, you don’t feel it. If you look outside though, you see the clouds and can perceive your speed in relation to them. So we don’t feel the universe moving. As a result, we forget that our lives are already in constant movement, happening along with the clouds, the stars, the planets and the whole universe. We all move together, as one. Like a well choreographed dance of a musical. We’re all knowingly or unknowingly a part of this performance. We may have mistakenly assumed to be at the centre of it all; so we don’t register most movement apart from our own. What we do perceive is that which we can see; the type of movement we believe we are in control of. At times we may even have patience to perceive the movement of the people we love and admire, but the bus pretty much stops there and thats where most of our confusion begins. Truth is, we forget that the performance is much larger than us. It existed before we even entered and will most likely remain after we are long gone. We go on living, creating and perceiving; all for a better understanding of our place in the universe; because, deep down, no matter how much we deny it to ourselves, we are aware that life really is about being part of the biggest production ever seen - reality.

Now this is quite contrary to the way we have been raised to think about the universe and our place in it. We have inherited a very individualistic sense of personality. Our societies, institutions, and even our language has been designed to validate our experience of the self as separate from the universe and everything in it. We fool ourselves into believing that the ‘self’ is merely a definition of our conscious waking mind or our superficial ego; navigating and interacting with an external world with the help of our 5 primary senses. By accepting this illusion of the self as a separate ego, we begin to form an unhealthy relationship with it. We forget that we are part of a larger production and instead convince ourselves that, we, are in fact the production. My hopes, my dreams, my curiosity, my opinions, my happiness, my effort, my achievements, my failures, my anxieties, my fears, my loneliness, all these repeated patterns of thought that loop around in our minds during our waking state become our understanding of the self. We create our own narratives fuelled by our thoughts and memories. We are so deep in to this act, we fail to observe the extent to which we have divided ourselves both both internally and externally. Instead of co-existing, we dominate. We become obsessed with consumption and control. Instead of balance, we seek gratification. And so, it’s a race for survival from the get go and you have to get to the top. The top of what, no one really knows. it feels like theres a goal we’re headed towards. Some sort of dream or purpose that we have convinced ourselves of. We hold on to this idea, self serving or selfless as it may be, and march towards a finish line we can’t quite define; so we’re never really sure where we need to go, how long it’s going to take or even why we want to get there. Yet we keep going; doing less of what we want to do today and more of what we need to do to keep doing the things we would want to do one day.

Truth is, no matter how much we try to fool ourselves, deep down, theres a part within that has suspected from the very beginning that we are not at the centre of it all. For as long as we continue to trick ourselves into believing we are separate from everything else around us, we will feel incomplete. The self can only be truly understood in relation to the other. Where there is no other, there is no self. You are not merely a consciousness caged within a body of skin and bones fighting to survive in this universe. You are an intelligent being who is capable of comprehending the fact that your internal & external reality come together to create this experience of life you are leading; your skin just a layer between the two. In reality, it’s all one big happening. A harmonious & balanced relationship between the self and the other is an absolute must to experience this larger happening that we are all an expression of.

The idea is to rise above trying to carve out a place for ourselves in the universe, but to realise that in an abstract sense, we are already an expression of the universe