Message of a master by John mcdonald

 Before the long weekend got over I wanted to complete this 66 page book I got myself many years back after Robin Sharma's suggestion. Message of a master. I raced through the book just so I can call it finished. It's spiritual in a sense, combining knowledge we learn from other places. I have to read this book a few times or maybe all my life but for now here are few things I remember.

1. Trust something in order to get the best from it. Doubt only steals you an opportunity to learn.

2. Your mind is like the ground for a seed - a blueprint. The roots are nourishment , the seed is an idea. And it reaches towards light to seek and become what it sought out to be

3. This seed if bothered with a lot will not be able to get it's growth in. The seed needs to focus on one thing. Making use of what it has now to get to the next best place it can get to

The signal you get on the radio if there are multiple signals nearby interfering is not clear. To tune in you need to be clear about the frequency you are tuning into and only have that

Externalizing what you want within by pictures, people, books and similar things that vibe with it

4. The seed - our mind has three parts. The deep, the inner and the outer. The deep is about allowing our body to do it's daily duties. The outer is everything we get through our senses and is called the negative pole. The inner is what we process and decide to bring back our attention to. Many times the outer influences the inner. With practice of bringing our attention back to one thing, we have to let the inner affect the outer

5. The resistance is important for growth. The negative makes the positive become, stronger. Like an airplane soars high by the resistance below it

6. Taking alone time each day and focusing on powerful word

7. The universal 'I am'

8. Secretiveness

9. Keeping the momentum going even after achieving something. No rest for you, dear mind

10. Keeping only the soil needed for nourishing the seed, throwing away the rubbish we don't need for the seed to grow.

11. Cooperate with the law of your being.

12. Learning what others are thinking. 

13. Nourishing

14. To get to a blank space, and decide something

the power of unwavering focus - notes

 There's a book I picked so I can learn about focus because I believe focus can help in life.

It clearly says that this book is useless if it is not practiced

The book is in 4 parts:

1. understanding purpose. and why behind focus.

2. working of the brain

3. how to focus

4. applying this knowledge in everyday settings

1. Purpose and Why

- Living a focused life or a purpose-focused life are both rewarding processes. So bottom line , learn to focus.

- Purpose is not the start of focus. You actually need to learn to focus to understand your purpose.

- Why : because happiness. getting goals done. death.

When people avoid the concept of death they pay more attention to short term things and lose track of long term things. 

- Construct a lifestyle based on your purpose and priorities where the by-product is happiness. 

Right way. consistency. Blind Obedience vs intelligent obedience.

Instead of asking 'what next?', go narrow and wide : mastering your tool.

Intention for reading this book - "

Pathologically oblivious to anything but the goal

If you could trust your mind it would tell you have three fries and then eat the salad, but the mind does not do that - it makes you want to eat the whole pack of fries. So you can't just trust your mind. You first train your mind, then you trust it.

Affirming positive statements, filtering negativity, meditate - healthier mind.

Practicing - without this no knowledge is useful.

Practicing the right thing is important. 

The reason people abandon their quest is the anxiety and overwhelming feeling that arises out of lack of clarity. If you have a guide then it inspired confidence and makes things achievable.

Being faithful to small consistent steps is an expression of understanding, love and compassion towards the needs of mind and body.

While I appear as the teacher to you,  a student of the subject and I hope it always stays that way' - Lutzenkirchen

Three floors of the mind - 

Conscious, sub conscious, super conscious

The conscious needs to understand and organize what it gets so it can be absorbed by the subconscious. 

The definitions of mind and awareness are important - similar to Buddhist concepts. Feelings are like different rooms in the mind. Awareness is like a torchlight that we choose to throw the light on. That action of choosing which room to go to - needs thought and practice. 

You shouldn't say 'Mind is wandering'. Instead say, awareness is wandering. These words and clear definitions matter for your subconscious to have a clear framework.

There are three kinds of dogs(minds)

The one that wanders around untrained and unleashed , pouncing at anything and everything.

The one that is untrained but leashed - when it gets to a bad place, the owner is able to pull it back.

The trained one is like that of a police dog. It can have a plate of great food right below it's nose and it can be full of hunger but it will wait for the cue to feed. 

Another definition is 'energy' - where you put your energy has a magnetism - it becomes easy to access these circuits. Some of us store energy in certain events over decades because of unresolved situations. We replay the event and therefore energy gets assigned to it. It takes effort to decouple the energy.

Amritsar - Mrs Gandhi's last battle

 A book on the assassination of Indra Gandhi which happened in 1984 and was republished in 2022 and still bought by athai because she likes the writing of Mark Tully , a BBC journalist who she believes knows more about India than Indians themselves.

My first book on Indra Gandhi was read when I was still in school and all I remember is that her dad wrote letters to her and that she was a great woman leader. 

Now this one starts very heavy - at the end of her life and the politics behind why.

There are 15 chapters and I've read 2, one on the assassination and the other on the Sikhs.

The assassination:

What I learnt was that she was killed by her own security (or the lack of it) because she sent army into the Golden temple which was causing trouble for her by being the meeting place of extremist Sikh groups. She enraged the already angered Sikh people against the Hindus by doing this. 

Unlike the usual narrative of the Iron Lady, here she is seen as a woman who had a court like system that was ripe with gossip, and also of a woman who did too much too late. She was also seen fatigued. Her son seemed aware of the weaknesses and strengths of his 'strong' mom.

The Sikhs who were partially divided against the Hindus, before the revenge against her death by the Hindus - now felt even more fully unsafe and divided from Hindus after the murder of many Sikhs.

Mark Tully and Satish Jacob(his ally in India) unravel what went behind this assassination and what were the roles that played both from the Congress side and the Sikhs side.

Sikhs

Reading about the Sikhs was great validation to how I thought about religion. An analogy that played out in my mind was that of an adolescent son who was trying to fight for his own identity and space by revolting against his two alpha parents. One of his alpha parents was Hinduism and the other , Islam.

Guru Nanak wanted to combine the learnings of both Islam and Hinduism , removing all the superstitions, corruptions and focus on the essence - this had no idols, was monotheistic and no castes like the Muslims, and had reincarnation and karma like the Hindus - all well.

It was brought together by space assigned by Akbar for the practice of the prophets and mystics of that time. It became quite popular that Akbar's son Jehangir saw it as a threat and decided to dilute it. 

Over time because of the push and pull of many kingdoms , the religion had turned its learnings and teachings into artillery and army, out of the need to save it's identity. He did not want to reabsorbed into Hinduism. Identity became very important for this son. It was very important for him to let the world know that he is not his mom,  nor his dad - he was his own. The identity was the long hair, the bangle, the knife... (5 k's)

The brave son who was nothing like his parents was now facing the world. But he was a little confused, indeed. The practicalities of the world corrupted him - caste and sub divisions founds its way into him. Idols found its way into the golden temple. When Mahatma Gandhi spoke about non-violence and Bhagat Singh became popular for his heroic fight for Lala Rajpat Rai, the Sikhs were conflicted. Generations and marriages alternated between Sikhism and Hinduism. When the Sepoy Mutiny was formed from Bengal , the very Sikhs who were against the British were now part of the British army because of how much they embraced the identity of the army and worked hard to be the best there with interests in guarding their own identity with British's help. But when the same Britisher's attacked them later, the very folks who fought all over the world on British's behalf were again conflicted. Finally when the partition occurred, the divorce in a family where a child was already looking to find his identity, the child is enraged feeling like he neither belonged in Pakistan(40%) nor in India(60%). A holocaust emerged.

Ranjit Singh (his story is key in the Sikh religion) was one of the kings who built his empire in Lahore which was lost to Pakistan. 

Arya Samaj (Dayanand Saraswati) was trying to reabsorb the Sikhs. 

Aranyaka

 There are so many books here in AJ's Madurai house and the only one I picked was an Indian graphic novel called Aranyaka by Devdutt Patnaik and Patil. 

This would be my second graphic novel , the first one being about a Mexican family that moved to California near San Luis Obispo , a beach town , met neighbors and celebrated the Day of the Dead, and the journey of the younger sister battling severe respiratory conditions.

These have a way of transporting you to a new world. I'm sure plain fiction can do this too, but graphics just are so much easier to follow along and allow imagination into.

Aranyaka is a story about a woman who leaves her home - a home that could not contain her character - in search of the forest. She learns how the forest has no rules. That hunger is violent whichever way you see it and yet when hunger is satiated you move on from the fear of hunger. Fear is imagination, in a way. 

In the forest she finds love with a man - a man seeking liberation - trying to be brahman. 

They move into a house - as two different people , making peace at times , and eventually letting go as the forest taught them.

On his side, life is about staying away - abstinence - about knowledge disclosures and finding infinity - what's beyond the beyond. He develops a reputation, finds seekers, collaborators.

On her side, life is about cooking, about craving , about the bodily functions - eating and cooking at will, eating meat, about making pots and keeping in touch with the forest. Her side has a natural disorder. She wonders if her meal making generosity would be challenged by the nature of the students she meets. She realized that no one has intellectual hunger when it was time for actual hunger.

As students come by some seeking knowledge, most seeking comfort, she sees them , understands them and wonders what they are seen for - are their minds seen, what are they seen for?

Between the obvious differences in approaches to life , the two do make peace at times being inspired from either side of their worlds - some students are even sent her way for some purpose.

There's a woman who does things always feeling indebted. There's one woman - who learns all the arts and her mind is not seen, the guy who grazes the cows and questions the hierarchy of why the cows are holier than the deers the tigers kill. 

Then comes a point, where people have to leave and somehow the rule-less-ness that the forest taught her lets her let go with wisdom.

Okay what did I like about this book:

Like the previous graphic novel I read this one too let me hanging a little bit at the end , when the world suddenly closed and I'm still mentally somewhere near Aranyaka.

At first I wanted to judge the book because Devdutt was someone I judged before for what I thought at the time was very loose interpretation of Indian scriptures.  But recent wisdom has taught me to read anything and everything from anyone that I take upon without letting biases interfere, to go for that thing only this person can impart. 

What was interesting about this book was the rule-less-ness - how the so called world of rules can sometimes be unfair, whereas in the world of rule-less-ness , things are fairly simple - if you are hungry you take it - and that's the only rule. It was interesting to compare the so called Godly pursuit with the nature of a woman that served someone everyday with food. It was interesting to see the body image issues of women and the sexual interests and contrast it with asexuality and abstinence. 

What was most interesting was that this book was based on Upanishads, apparently while I was just wondering how a forest life was explored by a city woman.

What I learnt later:

The story is inspired by Vedas and builds upon forest symbolism from Vedic literature. The novel tells the story of the sage Yajnavalkya and his two wives, Maitreyi and Katyayani. Rishi Yajnavalkya is remembered today mostly for his philosophical debate with Gargi at the court of King Janaka. Instead of Yajnavalkya, the authors put the women in forefront and tell the stories of Katyayani the Large, Maitreyi the Fig and Gargi the Weaver. Through these characters, the authors explore the basic human attributes like, hunger for food, hunger for knowledge, fear, and sense of debt.

Some key lines:

"To eat is to stave off death. To kill is to stave off death for a while. To reproduce is to stave of death in futures to come." (9)

"Only someone who has never known real hunger will make villains of all predators and victims of all prey." (23)

"Those who can't imagine tomorrow's hunger must forage without respite."