INAARA – Beam of Light (Hope)

   With deep respect, I pray peace and strength for the ones who’ve lost so much due to the pandemic. 🙏

This blog is my personal experience and in no manner belittles the genuine issues and steak of medical problems faced.

Year 2020 – call it names but I’d choose to call it a year of awakening for me!

To begin with, in the physical dimension of living, I was roaming around wearing more layers and PPE kits, in the mental dimension, there I was letting off the mental guards one by one. Unpopularizing the panic and pathos of 2020, it actually made me come to terms with the fragility of life, of this body, of the power of saving, of the simple and healthy living – all of this in a way that I almost felt attacked by these factors and more importantly about the variability of them.

It was a million years journey of evolving from apes to human – the most adavnced species. Yet, one virus out, and one whole species was under lockdown. Even under the panic of newfound fatal disease and uncertainty of future, half the world was baking cakes and breads from scratch and the other half was celebrating the novelty of dalgona coffee! It’s not the logic, but the spirit that kept us going is what it came across to me then.

The things we all thought that would made us happy like  playing outdoors, shopping, clubbing, sports all was at halt, then how come the spirit was still high? Tell me if I’m wrong, though sobbing through the frustrations of lockdown, we’ve all sipped the dalgona coffee with mixed feelings and still found some happiness and gratitude for being alive and safe in that. It is not the external factors, but the spirit that eventually drives and makes us ‘the advanced species’. Life (jeev), deeds (Karma), liberation of soul (moksha), we are the ONLY species who can manipulate this cycle CONCIOUSLY. And I think that is what makes us advanced!

What we seek out is right within us, waiting to be rekindled. All our emotions rise from inside and subside there itself, we just wait for external triggers. The peace is in us, the chaos is in us and to whatever we feed well, it grows. It’s a straight forward calculation. The only way to touch that elixir of peace is to see beyond what we can see and the only path, in my opinion, is to be a seeker of the truth; to be receptive to the boons of being a conscious soul.

The world has blessed all living creatures and it has offered us more than we can ever repay. If nature had more, it would give more. If it had peace to give, it would give that in abundance with perennial supply. But it doesn’t have any peace to offer, it has energies. So if we are searching for peace in the outside world…would it be wrong to say that the search committee needs to reassess?

There’s this saying in Gujarati, ‘aarisa ma mukh ane sansaar ma sukh, che nai pan dekhaye che’. Meaning, a face in the mirror and peace in the world is visible to the eye, but it doesn’t exist there.

No two common people will have the exact same perception about world because we all see and perceive things around us based on the truths collected by our five sensory organs in our unique life experiences. Even if we have the same 5 sensory organs, even if all are functioning at the same capacity as someone else, still the perceptions of both stand different. Where most even struggle to get through a normal day in peace, I ask, can we rely on the uncertain tangible high variable factors to expand and to experience this grandeur called life?

I’ve realized that since we live in a world that guarantees uncertainty on every level, if you want no uncertainty, if you want something devoid of unrealizable variable factors, if you’re looking for something permanent, LOOK WITHIN! Where the physical ends, spiritual begins.

I’ll remember this pandemic as the souldemic period of my life. Documenting my observations and learnings and all that that I am continuing to learn, Grockled Dopes introduces the first series for ‘seekers’, INAARA. Unveiling the topics of this series in my next blog, stay tuned!