In the journey towards being present one comes across many questions related to his action, or reaction. For example, how should I negotiate with the negativity that surrounds me? How should I deal with my anger? How should I just be with the person I love the most? I know I have a choice with me all the time. I tend to become anxious to exercise that choice and thereby realising that the choice I made was not perfect! “I could have done that better”, this is the common feeling one is left with after he analyses the outcomes of the choice.
Questions seen above are simple in nature. I like to further complicate them by asking myself a few more questions. When to know that the choice is with me and when to know that it is not with me? To give you an analogy, in Operating systems (OS), we learn that there are 2 modes, a user mode and a kernel mode. While designing the application, one must make judicious use of a user mode. When can we recognise that this is the callback we need to implement? When we receive a call from the OS, we know how to implement a callback. And we do have our implementation ready. But here, in our life, we never know when it is time to implement a callback (exercise my choice). Think of the OS as a God and a person as the App Developer. This analogy I borrow from my revered Sir Dr. Vijay Gokhale, who has implemented LINUX on his own, and right from scratch!!
Further, if I have a choice, I am under certain pressure to implement it ideally. How would Rama or Krishna or Jesus act in this situation? Should I practice that? How would they deal with negativity? Is it possible for me to adopt their way? How can Jesus remain so compassionate even in a situation of his crucifixion? Can I do that? How would the enlightened being respond to this situation? Can I do the same? And so on. The answer is simply NO. You just cannot mimic Rama or Jesus, or Krishna. You just cannot. This is the first realisation! Our callback implementation has limitations. And the limitation is in the name itself, a callback! Otherwise I would not have just written the App but tried to write the entire OS and application as a single piece of monolithic code. No kernel mode altogether!
This might be possible if you are a genius at coding. After all you are negotiating with predictability, certainty. And because you know the machine very well. But in life, you have to negotiate with all pervading, omnipresent uncertainty. So the first thing we must know is “when uncertainty calls us back”? Only then, we will be in a position to execute our callback implementation. For this step, we need to be alert, vigil. We need to observe things carefully. We need to be aware of the moment. Like a daemon or a service which continuously listens if there’s any event and then executes its functions. This running daemon or service within us is perhaps what is called an Awareness!
By the way, I tend to think COSMOS to be a kind of Operating System. Similarly, CHAOS is also another OS. Suras dwell in cosmos whereas Asuras dwell in chaos. To deal with certainty, you have to be a genius. To deal with the uncertainty, you have to just Be!
So we just need to be aware of the things happening around us first. Like a daemon or a service! Does that mean we should be in constant service to God? We shall look into how we should devise our response in our next blog.
Reinvent The Self! 