A  little white bird peeping into the kitchen from the ledge outside  began to be a part of my life in Chennai. I named her Dibby and every morning as I opened the door leading from the  kitchen to the wash area where I could see out to the ledge where she sat, became a moment of joy.Dibby would always be there.Sometimes she would be fast asleep and I would hurriedly close the door lest the sound of the mixer or the cooker troubled her repose.If I was lucky she would be awake and would blink dark , sharp eyes at me. 

She would fly away as soon as she awoke to explore life.

On rare occasions  she would hang around to try her luck with the other pigeons who would throng our window for the morsels we laid out.Then I would agonise over how frail she looked and how the Big Bullies would not let her even get a bite.Most days I would wrap up my day saying good night to her as she perched on her ledge.

Then one evening as I closed my door I did not see a splash of white at the ledge. Another pigeon  was there  and the contrast of the greyness of her coat went through me like a shaft.

"That’s my Dibby’s place .” I resisited ."Why has this grey one taken her place?"

I worried about Dibby losing her place all the time I was cooking breakfast. Then as I hung up my dishcloth in the wash area, A flash of white above caught my eye.  I saw someone peeping down at me..It was Dibby ,happily hobnobbing with the new chicks on the ledge above.

She did not seem to have a problem with her loss of place.Only my mind had identified with the bird.it  calling it ‘my Dibby’ .it had then projected on it  its  human tendencies -likes and dislikes and felt the emotions that the bird didnt know existed.While the bird ,free of a divided mind was merrily going its way hopping about in the place Life had assigned  her that moment, I was creating a drama of the whole thing!

The ridiculousness of the whole thing hit me and from that moment  I was able to detach and enjoy the bird as it appeared in the  field of my awareness .I liked to call her my Dibby but I knew she wasn't mine.She  was a piece of life having her own adventure and  I felt a wonder at her acceptance of each moment .If we could just be so accepting and in the moment, woudn't life be more wonderful?

Life had become very hectic after the Chennai floods.All Saturdays were working Saturdays to make up for the lost forty school days and I had never really found the time  to unwind.

There always was something that needed attention,school work to finish, the house to be cleaned up,mail to be checked- the list was endless. 

The Easter weekend came as a respite and on Good Friday I woke up to a leisurely cup of tea and a glorious sunrise. But soon my mind kicked in and I was caught up in the usual  rush to complete work,I finally got some time in the evening to sit  in the balcony over looking the lake . It was then that I saw a group of cows ambling on the way home at sundown.My impatient mind urged me on to go to the kitchen to rustle up some snacks,as it was used to a" get into the next moment' sort of existence  and could not bear to see me relax.

But there is something very soothing in the sight of cows going home at sundown.

Some of their serenity and beingness made me stop.They were in no hurry whatsoever.They just stood there, tails swishing, enjoying the end of the day, drinking in the moment-just being and going where life took them.

It took them a good half hour to move from the shed to the main road and another half to cross the road over to the fields at the other side. All this while I too remained at the balcony, still and intent.Something of their serenity rubbed itself on me and as I went in finally, I could really enjoy making my cup of tea.I could now understand why the Japanese have their tea ceremony!

I had always wanted to experience samadhi and that evening  I had been given a glimpse of it.

So the next time I need to unwind, I know where to look-at the cows!

Draw it forth

By K Geethanjali

Instead of cribbing about unpleasant realities, K Geethanjali decides to create a desirable one for herself by drawing them on paper

Acceptance never came easy to me. In fact at my workplace, I was known as the one who always faced any challenge with a “NO, not me”. Perhaps I had never really learnt how to breathe in life to the fullest. I have heard a master say that only those who offered resistance to life suffered from breathing problems. As I huffed and puffed through life asthmatically, I would tell myself sternly “Acceptance is the key.” As British-born philosopher and writer, Alan Watts says, “If you hold on to the breath you lose it. If you release it you will get a new one.” Talk about non-resistance.

But acceptance came hard when life was a drag. It was not only the challenges that life threw that were frustrating, but also the daily grind. Why did I have to accept all the rubbish that life dealt?

And then came an insight that made acceptance feel just right. While I thought things were happening to me I just could not accept the cruel cards life dealt. Then I stumbled on the truth that life was not happening to me. Life was only responding to the thoughts that I held about it. Now acceptance began to make sense.

If I was the creator of my reality, it meant that whatever showed up in my life was put there by me and only me in collaboration with the Universe. And only if I accepted it could I take full responsibility for it. And only if I took full responsibility for it could I heal it. As Seth (an entity channelled by Jane Roberts) would say, “We have got things backwards. We don’t have feelings because of events in our life. We create the events in our life because we have strong feelings and beliefs in our mind.”

Healing and acceptance began when I began to trace all that appeared in my life to the beliefs I held inside. Once when my dog Bruno messed up my new balcony in Chennai and I was on the verge of shouting at my spouse, I stepped back and paused. The usual response would have been “How could you adopt a big dog when you knew very well that we were shifting to a flat?” But if I go by the premise that I create my reality, others in my life are only instruments to help me create it. If the dog was there in my life I had drawn it forth. And it was pointless to blame others. I suddenly remembered my childhood craze for animals, and how though I had had an array of cats, I had been crazy about pups and had badgered my parents for a pup to no avail. My conscious mind was now showing me the practical difficulties involved in taking care of a dog in a flat, but my subconscious had drawn forth this experience as it still carried the memory of an unfulfilled desire of having a dog. It would have only known that such an experience had not been completed in my life and had obligingly drawn it forth!

Leaving Bangalore, the garden city, and coming to Chennai, my hometown, was another thing I found difficult to accept though it had been a conscious decision, once my son left for higher studies in the US.  I had my close relatives living in Chennai.

But I missed everything about Bangalore – the weather, the people, the malls. I would talk at length about my love for the garden city and complain about the heat of Chennai (the only thing my mind could find to complain about) to everyone I met till my sister remarked. “Life would be better for you and others if you accepted it. After all, it was your choice.”

I did another inventory and found the crux of the problem, which was that Bangalore held memories of my life with my son, who had grown up there. These memories were creating the distress. Once the reason became clear I could let go and make a new life in my old city.

Does it mean that we should passively accept all that we created unconsciously? Nope. That’s where our power lies. We change it if we really want to, by drawing forth a new reality. Seth talks about how our current reality is only one of many probable realities and how it is not solid or fixed and can be changed. How do you change it? By drawing forth other better realities by changing your core belief in that area. He gives an exercise. Take an area of your life you are not pleased with. Think of it only as one probable reality you have drawn forth because of a belief you held about it. Draw forth the version you want to see. For five minutes hold on to the belief which will draw forth the reality you want to see.

About this time I got an email from a website I had subscribed to. It was about a children’s book called Harold and the purple crayon. It was a simple book about Harold, a boy who went out for a walk. When Harold found that there was no moon, he just took out his purple crayon and drew one. “The whole book is about Harold’s great adventures scaling a mountain, soaring in a hot-air balloon and touring a city, all created by his ever-faithful purple crayon. It’s a powerful book because it demonstrates a great spiritual truth—we are the authors of our own lives. We draw every detail—even the dragons and the oceans we “accidentally” fall into…We all have that power,” explains Pam Grout  of pamgrout.com and writer of the  book E-squared. She adds that this book taught her more than any self-help book.

By drawing what we want, we give a clear command to the universe

Harold literally draws the things he desires to see in his life. This set me thinking. We have all heard of vision boards. Could this be something like that? When we draw out our desired pictures, our subconscious gets the message instantly and we draw it forth into our lives.

Maybe like Harold, literally drawing my wishes on paper would keep me focussed  for those five minutes that Seth suggested we put in. I realised that since our world is our projection anyway, why not draw it out clearly and draw it forth into our lives? The thing I love to draw the most is a loaded table with all my heart’s desires because my favourite psalm is Psalm 23. “He prepareth a table before me in presence of my enemies… My cup runneth over.”

My sister and I decided to try drawing our reality when we were going through difficult patches – the worst in our lives. I would then click pictures of my latest intended creation and Whatsapp it to my sister. Sitting in the hospital seeing her husband through the worst time of their life, she too began to draw all her heart’s desires – perfect health, happy family outings.

It’s too soon to talk about results. I am not even waiting for my new world to show up because I know it is around the corner. It is the cosmic law. As I draw or doodle, my vibrations increase. Instead of focussing on the problems that are bogging me, I am focussing on what is possible. This is what is meant by accepting what one had already created and simultaneously doing something positive to change it.

Our world – we create it individually with our thoughts, beliefs and feelings. Even in our scriptures we are taught that there are as many Brahmandas as there are individuals. Only when we know that the world is a mirror showing us our deepest beliefs can we readily accept our creations. With it comes the breathtaking realisation – If I am a powerful creator anyway why not create things I would love to accept. Turn the tables on life and take charge of life.

I now enjoy drawing forth my world with my doodles and co-creating with God. And yes, I breathe easier because of it.

As the saying goes “The best way to predict the future is to invent it!”

From Active to Passive

As I walked into my English class I was pretty perturbed. There had been a theft  in  our staffroom the previous week  and investigations were going on. My senior had been quizzing all of us this past week. She had been asking us, if we had seen something queer or if we had seen someone hanging around the staffroom at the time of the theft.

This morning it had hit me suddenly. After everyone had left the staffroom last week I had gone back to pick up a book I had left behind and I had happened to see a colleague of mine there. Now as I recollected the event I remembered being surprised to see the fear in her face when she had seen me.

The rest of the morning I was in a dilemma. Should I tell my senior about this incident?

 “Surely I ought not to. Think of the trouble it would bring my colleague! Think of all that she would have to go through! She too must have come back like me to pick up something she had left behind. “What if she is innocent and because of me she is branded a thief?” one part of my mind told me while the other urged , “It is your duty to just say what you saw. Don’t bring personal judgments into this.”

“ But I do not want to be the cause of any harm to any one,” that part of me that prided herself  on being ‘Miss Gentle and nice’  argued. A divided mind always creates hell and finally I had to confide in a friend.

“That’s just your ego creating divisions!” she pointed out with brutal frankness.”You have created an image of yourself as Miss Gentle and Nice” and now you are scared to do the right thing, which is throw light on the investigations, because you are scared of this image being shattered.

I was shocked. I had always struggled and gone out of my way to be nice .I always acted with great care that whatever I said or did never hurt anyone.  How could that be ego? Was non violence of the ego?

“Ego is trying to be always right and good! It wants to create this image of being perfectly sweet! Your fear of harming others stems not from your concern for the other. Remember, any fear is of the ego. If you go deep down, you will trace it to an image you want to create. The ego just follows a code of right doing, every moment uniformly.

The soul is always spontaneous. The soul just does things that need to be done without any second guessing. The question of doing what is right or wrong doesn’t come into it. It just does what feels right each moment. What feels right now may not be what feels right the next moment. It doesn’t fear or care about  what others think. All it is about ,is being the best It can be at any given moment.

 “I hate being sneaky and telling tales and causing harm to people” I said defensively.

“Telling tales for the sheer joy of getting others into trouble is different from telling the truth so that justice can be done. ’

But you know if I do say what I saw, you know who will be in deep trouble. Why do I have to put her in such trouble when I’m sure that she couldn’t have anything to do with the theft? “

“How can you be so sure?” my friend asked me “…and by the way, the reason why I said you have a big ego is that you think you are powerful enough to change the course of her life. You said “why do I have to put her into trouble? You keep saying you will be causing harm. The primary factor in all of this is I do , I do ,I do. Every word shows fear and insecurity.

If you were not egoistic you would spontaneously do the right thing knowing you are just an instrument of God. You would know that it is God who runs the show.

So that morning as I walked into English class after this talk with my friend, I was not at all happy to see that I had to teach grammar- especially the Active and Passive Voice.

“How do you know that a sentence is in the active voice?” I asked mechanically.

Pat came the answer from one of my bright students. “The subject is the doer of the action. Example “ Raju is hitting the ball. Here the stress is on the subject doing the action.”

“And the passive?”

“The subject receives the action” another one quipped in. “ The ball is being hit (by Raju). Here it is the action itself that is important , not the subject who is doing the action.”

I felt that I had been dealt a blow in the solar plexus. What my friend said was true. Instead of being a detached passive observer watching the universe  happen and unfold and playing my bit with involvement knowing it was all a play of consciousness, my ego had been unduly active and entangled in the whole episode. I had not realized that there was a higher power running the universe and perhaps the reason why that power had made me go back to the staffroom at that particular moment was because it wanted me to be an instrument through which justice could be ensured.

Conditioning can be quite strong and though I had been given a message by the universe, I was still hesitant but the universe has a way of reinforcing its messages. That evening I went home to open a book of Osho’s.

“The illusion that we are the doers make us miserable” Osho had written years back but the words seemed alive now as they leapt out at me. ‘God alone does. If you ask the waves if they are rushing towards the shore they will answer  ‘No. We are being rushed towards the shore.’ God takes over the very day man comes to know that just the way the wind blows and, trees grow and flowers bloom he too is being moved. There is someone within him who moves and speaks.”

I realized in a flash that the someone within me who moves me is my Self- my highest self! As long as we think we are ‘doing ‘things  we will not only create a separate self but also sign ourselves up for misery as  we  block the universe’s flow within us and end up really doing things which are not of the truth.

I tried replacing the active- “I am reporting her presence at the scene of the theft to the authorities,” to the passive  “Her presence is being reported to the authorities   (by me).I realized that the agent  by me is just that -an  agent  through which the universe acts. What was important in this drama was not the I was doing the reporting (the body doing the action ) but the act of reporting itself orchestrated by the soul.

That is true in every case. It is not the doer that is important, for in each case it is the universe doing through various agents. It is act that is happening that is important as the very fact that it is happening means that it needed to happen.

The next day I went forward as a chief witness to the case and as it so happened, my colleague was found guilty of theft. She was treated kindly and sent for counseling- the universe is kind and steered the course of her life in the right direction.

Perhaps ego had motivated my colleague to  commit a mistake and as I allowed the universe to function through me it could be set right without further ado. If as an ego who wanted to be ‘nice’, I had kept mum, she would have gone her merry way, committing more such mistakes and harming others and ultimately herself.

“I am not the doer, The universe moves me,” is my new mantra and I find that it has really reduced a lot of stress.

What a relief to let go  of a petty little self who rushes around ‘doing ‘and let  yourself be moved by the universe.

What a relief when you are confronted with some daunting task, to surrender to the universe knowing it will move you to take right action, instead of worrying about how the little I will get things done. When I teach I am not teaching, the teaching is happening through me. The One is cooking, The One is eating ,The One moves and enjoys through this agent of the body. The result, a deep peace  which passeth understanding ,which is totally different from the emotional highs and lows that accompany the feeling that I do. I give my best to a job and then let go and let God.

Maybe that is what Krishna really meant when he told Arjuna to give up his confusion ,to take up his arms and fight- fight to uphold dharma, knowing that he of himself could never do anything .Krishna was telling him to let go and let GOD-that he was just being used as an instrument for the Divine play to unfold itself and establish perfection.

I am changing my role from the active to the passive . By passive I don’t mean that I am a pawn in the hands of a so called fate. No, I am just shifting my Awareness from the ego to my soul.The only difference is that there is no illusion of a separate self doing. And as my soul is part of the One Source that runs the universe, when I surrender to this higher power, things just happen as they ought to. It is all the One doing, the One enjoying.

By being a passive observing Awareness thus I become passively active in my life. That’s when the fun and joy of life really begins. That’s a double whammy! I get to have my cake and eat it too! I am simultaneously the wave and the ocean .They are one and the same .

A quiet Mind

When I realized that I had lost my voice, the first reaction that kicked in was despair. I am a teacher and like a singer a teacher’s main tool is her voice. No I had not got teachers nodes or anything of that sort. A throat infection ignored was screaming to be heard and had translated itself to a complete silencing of the vocal cords.

I trudged to school like an unwilling schoolgirl wondering how I was going to get through the day.

“It’s okay,” I tried to comfort myself. It’s a Saturday and as the children won’t be coming in there will not be much talking to do.”

But there were teachers all over the place when I reached school. As question papers were being readied, tempers were frayed .It was a busy day at school and I had no voice.

I settled down before the computer to type my paper and once my colleagues found that I could not speak, they left me alone. As I found that I just could not communicate the compulsion to have my say to, give my opinion, to offer some help died down. My mind sort of understood that there was nothing I could do and began to focus on the task at hand- setting a question paper. Once the work was done ,I settled down into the position of an observor.

The drama became more interesting when the bell rang for recess. Over cups of tea , I found human nature unfold itself. Gossips circulating, jokes were cracked ,opinions exchanged. All I could do was to just observe it all. When a colleague took the opportunity of me being ‘tongue tied’, to make a snide remark she had being dying to make all these months, something in me rose to retaliate but the words didn’t-could not come out. I became aware that the energy that had risen, died down. Maybe because I observed this energy too, I realized that it meant nothing, the snide hurtful remarks went through me and I knew even if I had a voice I just had no need to retaliate. The remarks weren’t about me though they were directed at me.. It was just about someone else having a bad day.

I also realized that I was very well able to take part in all the other positive vibrations circulating around the coffee room. I could smile at the friends trooping in , touch my friends hands in gratitude when she placed a comforting hand on my shoulder and giggle at jokes .I didn’t need a voice to enjoy the good vibes and It was good that I didn’t have a voice to retaliate to the nasty ones.

Once everyone was back at her desk, a kind of calmness settled down in me. It was as if my mind understood that it wasn’t of any use churning up thoughts as my vocal chords were paralyzed for the day. Perhaps if I had watched television or a movie I would have missed this quiet mind as the mind would have reacted to what I had seen on screen. Now with the practical mind zeroing in on the task at hand, the rest of the mind settled down and the task at the physical level being accomplished in a short span of time,I was free to  touch the deep layers of mind.

Here it was, in the middle of a busy school day! The stillness I had attempted to get in meditations.

I went home to spend the rest of the day in silence. No need to shout when my dog barked, no need to answer any phone calls or answer any questions there too.

By the time it was evening the stillness had grown deeper and when I sat in meditation the silence deepened into a blissfulness that coursed through every cell.

Two mornings later (after a round of antibiotics,) when I woke up I tested my voice feeling rather like a bird does when she is getting ready to sing.

Yes, it was in full form, rested and raring to go. I could speak. Yippee! I paused .There was a hint of sadness in me. It was almost as if I was good bye to silence.

Hey stop it,” my inner voice I had befriended during the two days of silence spoke up.”Now you know mauna means not merely physical silence .It means silencing the mind. That’s all you need to do. The rest falls into place. When you speak it will be only because there is really some thing coming from a deeper level of you that will make a difference in the world.”

I scrambled out of bed thankful for my voice knowing it was a valuable tool that I was in control of and that I could use to my advantage and relegate it to the backseat when it was not needed.  I had had a glimpse of the deeper silent mind and I knew the joy tucked away in its fold. I also knew that the way to reach that deep stillness was to give up effort- effort to create an impression, to create a relationship, to defend a point of view, to analyze, to justify, to label ,both at the mental and the physical level.

I had been practising Mauna these past few years but it had only been at the physical level .I decided that I would observe silence as part of my weekly routine-a day when I would drop into the silent mind sans TV, sans phone calls, sans mind chatter. I would have a rendezvous with myself.

Truly some of life’s greatest lessons come in the disguise of problems!

To choose or not to choose

“The end result of your life here on earth will always be the sum total of the choices you made while you were here.” said a wise soul driving home the importance of making the right choices in life.

Do we really give importance to the choices we make in our everyday lives or do we just function on automatic pilot? Aren’t most of our choices motivated by our conditioning, our belief systems and by what the people will think?

While times are changing now and we see youngsters making enlightened choices and ‘following their heart’ and while society is becoming more open and appreciative of it’s youth experimenting when it comes to career choices, the scene was quite different just a few years back. 26 year old Ratan who had a dream, bears testimony to this. His is a story that was oft repeated, (unfortunately  sometimes even today ) in many families. A child interested in music he had a dream of going to the Musicians Institute in USA to pursue his dream. His parents however gave him no choice .

“Snap out of it and get real!” was their dictum and they kindly added “We are doing it for your sake. You need to survive in the real world and earn your bread and butter, you know. Your father is a doctor and you need to take over and manage his clinic.”

The poor boy was talked into thinking he was selfish to pursue his dream. Recently I met his mother at a social gathering and she remarked. ‘How lucky it is that Rattan followed our advice . See how successful he is today.” Looking at the smart young man who seemed to have it all, I couldnot help feeling  that behind the successful exterior  something was missing.

Do you have the right to influence your child’s choice, using any means be it coercing or persuasion or manipulation or emotional blackmail? When God himself has given us freewill, who are we to tamper with other’s lives? Are we doing the right thing then by imposing our dreams and choices on our children and other loved ones  and snuffing out their right to exercise their own choices?

When your life is a tapestry made up of other people’s choices, two things happen. You end up feeling a victim. You blame fate and if things don’t work out you can happily  blame the people responsible for your choice. You naturally think that since they have messed up your life it is up to them to sort it out. Here the need to be responsible and accountable for one’s own life fades away and people tend to turn outward for solutions to your life situations.

I have always admired the way in which my friend Kavitha brought up her daughter Komal.  I was surprised to see that the child was taught to weigh the pros and cons of any decision she took very early in life. It could be a simple thing as how many chocolates she could eat.

“I told her that she could make her own decisions but I also pointed out that each decision came with a consequence. As early as seven she realized that she had the freewill to eat as many chocolates as she wanted but she also was told that the consequence of this could be a host of health problems. We would always advise her as to which was the wiser choice . But the final decision was hers. I remember the day she gorged on cake one Sunday in spite of repeated reminders of its consequence. The next day she was down with severe indigestion and had to miss her friend’s birthday party! That experience taught her a lesson no amount of nagging could have.

The real problem with choices however started when she became a teenager.

It was then that I realized that allowing one you loved dearly to experiment with her choices was a very tough thing to do. It needs us to have great faith in a higher power to take care of them.

The world today offers our children much more in every aspect of life than it used to do in our times. From the number of channels on the television to the number of career option to the number of things they are exposed through through media and the internet ,even the most level head ones do tend be confused as to how best to use their time and energy. Komal did bungle up once or twice as she refused to take our advice and made foolhardy choices especially in her choice of friends and how she spent her time. But every time she fell, we were there to help her get up and dust herself back on to the cycle of life .The result? By the time she was twenty she had a wise head on her shoulders. By the  trial and error method of  making her own  decisions  and being accountable for them ,she  bloomed into living life on her own terms and learnt the art of  making right decisions. Truly there is no greater teacher than experience in learning the art of making right decisions, in developing the ability to identify when to take a risk that will pay off and when to avoid foolhardy decisions.

Ironically Komal was there at the same social gathering I mentioned above and I could not help comparing the joy this young woman exuded .I realized suddenly that while both she and Ratan had made it big in their life the missing element in Ratan was that sparkle of life that was so obvious in Komal. That was because he was not living his own life. He was living a life someone else had designed. Komal had developed her will power and her planning abilities but Ratan who had buried his passion by allowing himself to be swayed and influenced by others,now needed to rely on others in making any momentous decision.

“  But surely we owe it to our children to  show them the way.” I asked Komal’s mother  over dinner.

“There you have it” she replied. “That’s all you should confine yourself to doing-showing them the way. Remember Khalil Gibran’s famous lines ,

‘Your children are not your children. They are sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not  from you…”

Our children are not our possessions to influence. We can advise them ,not live our  lives through them .They are individual souls and each comes with her own path chalked out .They come to earth wired to live out their  souls blueprint and when we impose our own egoistic man made ambitious plans on them we kill their spirit and their sparkle. A person who is wired to be an artist can never make a great engineer or a lawyer. Excellence can shine forth only when a person chooses to do what he loves.

In the Bhagvad gita, Krishna urges Arjuna very firmly to live an authentic life according to his Svadharma . He warns us that performing duties to please others (para dharma) will alter the course of our lives for the worse.

Even the great masters are careful not to interfere with the freewill of their disciples, it is thus that you will see that a true Master will just point the way. A Master will never compel anyone to make a choice ,for a Master knows that ultimately all choices have to be made by the individual. He is aware of the amount of karma he will incur by dictating and tampering with another’s freewill, even if the other is a close relative like a child or a spouse.

If the soul has a plan for us it stands to reason that the best choices we make will be those that are made in communion and alignment with our souls. That brings us back to the question of awareness. A person who is awake, alert and aware of what he is choosing therefore is one who chooses wisely. It is rather ironic that half of the time we are on automatic pilot and we choose unconsciously, even though many of our choices can be life altering. Any person who is following the beaten track and living out choices that are not his own is blocking the plan his soul has charted.

 “I took the road less travelled by

And that has made all the difference”

says poet Robert Frost in one of his best loved poems.These lines stress the importance of choices and reminds us  that regardless of the choice we make, our life will be enormously affected by it. Frost speaks about making a choice based on one’s interest and one’s passion. He symbolized this in his poem The Road not taken, by showing himself standing at a fork in the road. He knew he could walk down but one path and he knew the decision lay solely with him. The sad part of life is that most people do not even realize that the decision of how to carry their lives forward rests solely on them. They choose not to choose but even that is a choice, a weaker choice that will hamper their journey towards their pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

What helped Frost take the road less travelled and leave safe shores of America  for an unknown land (England)  where he tried his hand at poetry? (and succeeded!) Was it merely the abilty to take risks? Or was it that he was aware that he had been given freewill and had the freedom to make a choice?

In a period of time when people unconsciously followed the herd, choosing not to choose, Frost epitomizes the freedom of choice that is every human’s birthright.

Yes, the power of making a choice has been given only to the human. And the intellect is the instrument that he has been endowed with to aid him in exercising this mammoth responsibility.

Yet how many of us really sit and think out our choices? Aren’t we rather swayed by emotions while making a choice? The world is in this shape today because of decisions taken in haste.  “Decide in haste repent at leisure” our ancestors warn us stressing the need of taking time out and making responsible choices.

A calm and collected mind thus seems to be the ideal before making a crucial choice. Though one needs to at times consult near ones, and move from emotion to intellect while making a choice, the highest choices remain those that are motivated by the soul. Managing our self thus means making smart choices in tangent with the Higher self.. I say smart choices instead of right choices for what may be a right choice for one need not be the right choice for another. If Dad is a doctor and loves the profession, that is the right choice for him but Ratan is totally a different entity and the same choice may mean suicide for him, if   his cells are filled with the sound of music.

Finally the most important choice we can make is the way in which we choose to see life. If we choose to see ourselves as alien separate beings in a hostile world, that will be our destiny in this world of relativity.

If on the other hand we choose to see the world as One huge unit then naturally the actions that stem from such a choice will be of love and peace for how can you hurt others if all others are part of this ONE? And so our choices made out of oneness will chart out a beautiful destiny .

As one gets into the flow  of following the nudges of one’s Higher self ,one then slips into the enviable state of what J.krishnamurthy calls choice less awareness, where one just responds to the present moment spontaneously without any preconceived ideas. Where one’s actions are directed not even by choice but just awareness.

Till we reach this state where the chooser and the doer cease to exist and there is only the soul witnessing the experiences it has created with Life, we need to take small steps in being aware of even the littlest choices we make. Choosing to shut out external noise once in a while and connect to the stillness within and thus Choosing to connect to our Higher Self goes a long way in helping us make all other choices.

 When we choose to allow others to create their own painting on  the canvas of life using their own  colours of  choices, we truly choose to give the greatest gift to self and others-freedom-the birthright of every soul.