The World Cannot Give You Direction

Morality is not a garb
That you put on
To appear better than others…
Neither is it a yardstick
By which you measure others
And gauge their integrity.

To be moral
Is to keep intact your character
So that you may stand strong
Against the onslaught
Of all sorts of demands from the world.
Unaltered. Uncorrupted.

The question to ponder on
Is who or what
Determines your actions?
And are they, or those things
Going to be responsible
For the outcomes your actions will yield?

Morality is always intrinsically determined
And almost always-
Extrinsically challenged.
The world is a mirror…
But one that stands sullied
By the dirt and grime of ambition.

To be moral
Is to reject the surface
And seek answers within a quieter oasis…
And through a clearer reflection.
The world cannot guide you
It is not designed to give you direction.

What Are You Chasing?

We create the meaningless
When we pursue the meaningful

And then,
The more we pursue the meaningful
The more meaningless it becomes.

It’s only when we stop our pursuit
That we’re able to give to
And receive from everything
Regardless of its meaning.

Grow Within

Life is not so much an externality
As it is an internal movement
Of pulse and impulse
-Unknown cause and
Its sorrowful effect….
Between which man must learn
How to be. Should he be
Defined by his fears and
Limited by his desires?
Or, refusing all definitions and
Rejecting the impulse for an identity
He should give up the idea of being someone?

Achievement (of anything in this world)
Cannot be a worthy goal
If it is pursued for its own sake.
It becomes liberating
When it entails
Leaving behind the need
To be accomplished
…To be someone distinctive
In the vastness of existence
That is the real need;
The real poverty of consciousness
We need to be free of.

Of Course, The World is Disappointing

Why expect anything
Of real value
From a world
Designed for disappointment?

Then what? What else is there
Apart from this world?
Of what purpose its enticements and its promises?
What is the ultimate fate of our hopes, our efforts?

The world’s vacuousness
Becomes your ache
A sorrow that leaves you wondering
About what counts as real happiness.

The world is a provider, not a giver
The individual can only find meaning in giving
He can neither satisfactorily take
Nor meaningfully provide.

To make something
Of what is provided
Is the art of man.
This art cultivates him.

Through his art, he transforms his ignorance to faith
He learns to stand unaffected and un-compromised
By the vagaries of the world.
His artifice reflecting a profound wisdom.

The lies of the world cannot be changed
By the activism of truth.
Truth is in being
Not in dreaming.

The truth just is-
unlimited, infinite in its possibilities.
It’s neither an idea
Nor an ideal.

If the world feels like a disappointment
It’s a time to grow
It’s an opportunity to cultivate new means
It’s time to recalibrate your perception of the world.

Adapting

Adapting
I’m coming to see
Is not as benign a process
As it is made out to be…
Generally suggesting a soft compromise…

New conditions
Can appear before you
As a real threat
To your values, your hopes, your orientations
…all that defines you.

You stand disoriented; destabilised
By the disappearance of foundational principles;
A humiliating reminder
That all that you considered to be real
Was the false at its deceptive best.

Continuity, in the world
Operates differently.
It means continuous change
Brought about by osmosis
Truth and singularity are not its virtues
And yet dishonesty and susceptibility cannot be yours…

Is the world nothing but an illusion?
Is your individuality an illusion?
To adapt means to let go
(Sometimes with great spirit)–
Of your definitions… your ideas… your certainties.
Because those are the real illusions.

To Think Deeply

To think deeply
Is to question
The known.

It is to wonder
About the origins of our faith
And of faith’s true meaning.

It is to learn…
Not so that the learning
Becomes our new way,

But so that
One can recenter
On the path one is already on.

To think deeply
Is to express life’s experiences-
Good or bad- aesthetically.

To think deeply
Is to put thought to work
And action in deference to wisdom.

What Matters

When the minute
Inspires the hour;
And the hour
Builds the day;
And the days
Deliver the week;
And the weeks
Accomplish the month;
And the months
Grow the years;
And the years
Create a lifetime…

You realize-
It’s the little things
That matter.

The Aesthetics of Education

Ugliness is an hour
In the perception of beauty.
The ugliness of darkness,
Pride, arrogance and dishonesty
Will pass…

All facades will fall
And you will find yourself
Standing exposed…
Your ignorance, you will come to see,
Was faking it as knowledge.

While you were busy learning
How to do, how to act
How to think and how to be
Those lessons were futile and
Meaningless…till you learned how to see.

But learning how to see
Is a becoming…
It is arriving to a point
Where you’re able to tell the difference
Between reality and concept.

It involves a return
To a no-man’s land
Where all the knowledge
That you have acquired
Stands in vain.

When your satisfactions
Have become your discontent
Your truth is now false
And the certainty of your ideas
Have become an ideological noose.

You wish to be liberated
From fashionable ideas
And to look at
What you don’t know
For recourse…

Your ignorance then transforms…
From being the nakedness
That you were ashamed of-
It becomes the very means
By which you will learn.

When false knowledge is dropped
A superficial ignorance too breaks…
You come to see that
True knowledge lies in understanding
What you’re ignorant about.

It’s our ignorance
That teaches us what
We must know.
It introduces us to our human-ness
And thereafter our promise.

A good education
Will free you of conclusion
You will learn how to learn
And therefore, learn how to be
And therein, learn how to see.

The Life of “I”

“I”
-an idea
-an image
-an impostor
-an individual

-an identity
-an idiom
-an illusion
-an imperfection
-intelligence

Life is a design
For sublimating the ‘I’
For losing it in life
So that it is not merely
Concluded by death.

Offer the ‘I’ through work
Dissolve it in devotion.
Learn to become…
But only to discover
Who you never were.

Learn to embrace
All the things that
The other ‘I’s in the world
Are ashamed of-
And run away from:

Failure
Loss
Solitude
Grief
Ordinariness.

Therein lies
The light by which
You will come to see
The darkness in which
The “I” was born.