ahhhhh...mmm

ommmmmmmm

बहुत गहरी बात कह डाली आपने !

इसी खोने-भटकने पर याद आया :

शहर की सड़कें गली कूचों को हम हैं जानते
हम भटकना चाहते हैं पर कहीं सहरा नहीं
--------------------------------
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-Dr.Neeraj Tripathi,Allahabad

Dear Shekhar,
These are indeed very beautiful words. To be totally free we need to be totally detached. I read a quote once which said, "If you want to be free, never seek security at all." In the material world we live in, freedom is the ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want and in my opinion two things are required for that - Money, and having few attachments i.e. travelling light all through life. We may become free by losing things but we can not undermine the importance of our dependence on others. Dalai Lama's book "The Art of Happiness" says that we can try to be alone and say that we did this or that alone, but we are so deeply dependent on others for everything from daily bread to clothes to homes we live in. So, we definitely can be free to a great degree but not completely as we are indeed part of this global family, serving each other and being part of each other's happiness.

Best Regards,
Himanshu

that was so succinctly said. very deep.
i chanced upon this website of yours when i was looking up elizabeth:the golden age. i was never aware that you are not just a great movie person but a great poet and thinker, i guess the two cant be really divorced.
you might find this wierd but one thing which sprang to my head when i read this blog was 'do you get up that early, or were you having a late night'. i can never get up early..........

i was a great fan of yours as a little girl but had never imagined i could see for myself what you think at 5 in the morning.

to lose is to gain indeed, if only we could lose our slavery to our hearts.....

Different strokes for different folks.

Freedom lies in accepting whatever we get - whether we lose or we gain. Freedom lies in embracing what life offers us - becoming one with it and moving on.

Life is too long to stop at a junction forever and too short to hold grudges. :-)

Sometimes, you're more free in chains!

Of course, an obvious question that popped up in my head was, 'Did India in (that momentous year of) 1947, lose or gain Freedom?'?

Hi Shekhar,

I watched the ndtv interview from your previous post - on ndtv.com - it was refreshing to see that you are so passionate about your indian identity and are not shy of stating things as they are. you were of course matching wits with a couple of money spinners there - indian cinema has a lot of potential - and i am still waiting to see a truly original , intellectually challenging thriller (without the dance numbers ) from bollywood - surely its time !

your lines hit upon a very profound concept in Yoga - the whole concept of 'aparigraha'- or non-attachment to objects ( which leads to 'letting go' or even the sense of 'being lost') is a vital element in the Niyamas.

It is not possible to let go so easily - or to be lost in being lost - being lost never happens - what happens is we sleep in many ways and freedom as we know it is really only limited freedom.

True freedom can never lie in what we lose - but by losing the sense of loss in giving !

Indeed, both Buddhist and Hindu tenets suggest non-attachment--and a lack of expectation. Then one is never disappointed, nor does one cling to the elusive--for whether in spirituality or in quantum physics, what is it that truly exists, and what is simply illusion based on the relativity of our own lens of perception? ;) The space between thoughts, it is said, is the place of true peace.

However, I would like to suggest--based on my own experience, too--perhaps we are here exactly to experience those highs and lows--to make mistakes, to truly feel...for how else do we learn? How else do we know we are truly alive except to love, to feel emotion, to walk across sand, grass, earth, (even asphalt)...I warmly doubt we come here for the state or experience of enlightenment without having felt every moment of the journey there--should, in some existence--we ever indeed reach that point of transcendence. I would rather warmly live life with all of its difficulty and all of its moments, however rare, of true incandescence than to try desperately to ease into detachment. I do not believe, like many Gnostics, that the body--and matter--are a prison, but a means for us to feel the visceral aspects of living life, to experience, to better learn the human experience so that at some point we will know compassion, and moreso because of the difficulty we feel or experience. For perhaps we indeed, as some believe, chose such a life to learn our greatest lessons--to be incarnated into matter (energy in a different, more dense form) for that very purpose. And as the old adage goes, only those who do not know, indeed know at all...[smile].

So lovely Shekhar,
many many more things to feeling free I am sure... but losing....
is one way :)

so simple and so clear...

hi shekhar,

while you seem lost to the world you are in the process of finding yourself !so,you can never lose.....only gain !take care.

unless what you've gained is FREEDOM ?

Dear Shekhar,

I was reading in your July 2007 blog your "partition of India, the pain" in which you somewhat guiltily refused to accept that you carry the genes of the people of Punjab that had committed these ghastly acts. Even though we both know that you have nothing to do with the insane horrors of the partition and I did not partake in the acts of the Nazis we still cannot deny our genes and our roots. I would like to send you an excerpt from my memoir in which I struggle with this issue:

....Looking back at those bombing nights of terror in 1945, when I was a young child, I have only memories of dread and foreboding. Decades later when it had become clear to me that there was never a more righteous war the Allied were engaged in and that their young soldiers who had fought for a sacred cause, many of them losing their lives, were the true heroes of this terrible conflict, I also realized that I too had become, belatedly, a victim of that war.

There has always been a sense of shame with me about deeds that the human mind so utterly fails to comprehend and my attempts to point to the pockets of humaneness that could be found amidst this obtuse acquiescence to barbarity by the German populace never helped to weaken this feeling of tribal guilt. I was trapped in a no-man's-land that made it all but impossible to express love and pride for the country of my birth. The years that have elapsed since the war ended have never instilled a complacency in me that would give rise to the notion that time is erasing the horrors of the past. Farley Mowat in his book 'And no birds sang' was saying in so many words "my country may have been a scoundrel but when I peel away these layers of imperfection there emerges the good and proud portrait of the Canada I love". I could never say that about my own country. I invariably have to cast down my eyes in silence when people speak of the huns, the nazis or use terms that depict Germans as a species that lived outside or at best on the fringes of the human race. Most of my peers in Germany do not understand such sentiments, their mental make-up is of a more robust nature.

For all that, I had found solace and even a sense of pride in the fact that my father had consistently felt the war he had to fight in Russia was an immoral one. As he many years later told me he had always tried to aim low or high when firing his weapon. Killing a Russian soldier, he reasoned, would not have changed the outcome of the war, even by an infinitesimal margin but it certainly would forever have changed the lives of a Russian family......

Kind regards

Horst

freedom lies
in what I lose
not what I gain

Freedom lies in neither loss nor gain...freedom is freedom not a game....

Gud Morning Shekhar.....bahut dino baad ayi...errm is it so many din? LOl
Kedar sahab nahi dokh raheh...unse rounak lagi hui thi yaha....
Bache ki tareh long Coffee break par nikal gaye...aur chupkar khirki se sab dekh raheh honge...

"Sticking mah tongue out" Yohoo Kedarrr...
LOL Uhu ab koi outburst nahi karna Shekhar Danntenge...mew mew fir tho aap lambeeeee trek par niklenge...

Lol Hugs to You Both!
Smile

"The Soul will always be free"
The Mind is always free...
The breath is always free...

We lose our selves to win....and win ourselves to lose...tis a game...

Being is lost in becoming....life is lost in dreaming...

But Freedom will still be...
freedom!!

Dear "Sunshine"
You are freedom!!
YOur soul, your mind, your breath...your each aspect is freedom....

And chains begin from within us!!
So you are freeeeeeeeeeee
Smile

Love your those words Shekar!!

Yesterday I purchased a large poster of Mahatma Gandhi here in Sydney and put it up on my bedroom wall. On the bottom, it reads these 2 lines

"Live everyday as if you will die tomorrow"
"Learn everyday as if you will live Forever"

From someone who appreciated a Freedom, on a scale we cant comprehend!!

I think!!

"unless what you've gained is FREEDOM ?"

Freedom from thyself is freedom....
When thee emancipate thyself from all desires..and breath in your need....

Smile

Kedar laut aoh na...aapke cute waali baatein dekhti thi...tho ek smile ati rahi...laut aao na...I feel alone here.....in this world....

Smile

It's not abt
winning
or
losing,
It's
abt
being.

Regards,

Hey shekhar u're lost here man!!.So enjoy ur freedom.

Perhaps it is too early in the morning-

and the day hasn’t dawned yet,

the stars seem slightly pressed for time-

i detect no urgency,

keep the veil a little longer-

it is a beautiful night.

lost......? did you by any chance stop FOLLOWING YOUR HEART lately ? have you allowed your mind to lead you into the maze ? uh uh.....!!

follow your heart a beat at a time......YOU CANT LOSE ! :) HAVE A NICE DAY.

hey shekhar....what happens if you lose your heart as well :) then you are guided by PURE CONSCIOUSNESS ? THE WHITE LIGHT ? wow.....what a ride !

Indeed, my late night musing...[smile]. I thought I might add something which I have warmly found--that profound sense of transcendence and light--indeed comes from transcending the mind (in Western philosophy, the ego) and instead feeling the sense of true compassion--that transcendent compassion--which comes from that Schopenhauer idea (which is reflected among many other traditions, but here, speaking in terms of the West) in which you realize that everything is indeed a part of the same whole. It is what causes us to sacrifice ourselves for others, even our own lives--because in that moment, saving another is somehow more important than our own temporal safety, knowing that, perhaps, we indeed are all eternal. Matter, energy--are neither created nor destroyed, but as the laws of physics (and indeed mysticism) would state, it only changes form. But it is the resonance you give it which causes that change in how the energy resonates. That is free will. The truest sense of the Divine I have ever found is loving another human being--not possession--but that same, transcendent, incandescence that comes from transcending the self in those rare, precious moments. Parents feel it for their young, as do others in those rare moments without ego. The heart chakra resonating with such warm power that it lets go instead of clamps down. It is no wonder we here in the West would have come up with the Freudian concept of the ego--we use it far too often. It is indeed afraid of loss. It clings to the shell, rather than the heart, or what is considered the more Buddhist notion of the mind--the soul, which is informed always by the infinite. We cling when we do not have faith in what we cannot see, and what, perhaps, we yearn most to feel. But then, I think much of this depends upon what one defines, indeed, as heart and mind...[smile]. There are more things than are dreamed about in anyone's philosophy...[smile].

True freedom can never lie in what we lose - but by losing the sense of loss in giving !

Hi Shekhar,

Hi I am 27 years Old(Young !!) ,I am visiting your site these days as I am a jobless engineer now (Was in Wipro & ISRO )!!.I quit my companies to follow my passion of expiriencing a rustic life for some time between!!

I somehow find solace in the hypnotic words that you use in your site. I know that may not be too polite way to describe your thoughts but still I will dare to use it(Sorry for that Shekhar Sir).It is because I myself have seen that there exists something which I call "intellectual orgasm "which you experience when you see too much of life and you have a good cognitive abilitiy.

Nowadays I am pursuing material comforts with passion and I see that it gives you instant happiness or gratification.Though transitory It gives in that moment.
So my feeling is that, Being spiritual and doing nothing (Non Karmik)is easy but you yourself should see if everything is syncronised with world or not and decide for yourself the truth of the moment.
But at the end " Truth is a pathless land " as echoed by J krishnamurthy.Hope I have not added to the confusion.

"Enlighten thyself"
"Speak Silence & Listen to it "
--Shaan Patil

can you completely lose yourself
by allowing your heart to lead?
What a life that would be...