On India

"God created men, Colt made them equal."

For the state to confiscate and restrict arms is an injustice intolerable to a free man, but one could be excused if one finds it acceptable in a nation-state where there is an easy and efficient recourse against violence, especially for the weaker sections who do not have money or power.  In most places, this recourse is The Police.

In India, guns are de facto legal and affordable only for the rich and connected.  To add injury to this insult, the police usually side with the rich and connected and shoo away or beat up anyone who dares to think otherwise.

And since the police is worthless to a common man, one might think that after all the courts will be fair.  That assumption too is badly trampled as soon as one tries to litigate against the state or against the powerful.  In the rare case that there is a just verdict, the powerful keep appealing, finality is elusive, and as they say, the process is the punishment.

For a common man or woman in India, a region replete with injustice, illegality and corruption, not only is there no recourse to arms, but there is no recourse to law enforcement, and there is no recourse to the courts.

People might say the United States is corrupt too, and the powerful have their advantages, but it is head and shoulders above a third-world hellhole like India when it comes to the right to bear arms, the right to approach the police, and the right to a fair trial.

People might want to leave India for many reasons, but I left India to escape this tangible sense of being helpless in the face of aggravations.  I do not wish to approach a well-connected bureaucrat, and to stand before him, and to lower my dignity and beg for his favors to do something that should be done as a matter of course.

For those who cannot leave India, my advice is to lay low politically, and not be brutalized by the state.  You cannot do much as an individual, and you should try this perilous path of being a lone-wolf reformer only if you have no other ambition in life, especially that of living a free, peaceful and intellectual life.

If you wish to consider joining a mainstream or alternative political party, remember that the political parties are a reflection of India at large: corrupt, brutal, nepotistic, opportunistic.  You will have to kiss the feet of men like Rahul Gandhi or Narendra Modi or Amit Shah or Arvind Kejriwal, or Mr Vijay.  That may not be abhorrent to you, but it is to me.

I find it increasingly true to say that though I love many things that have happened in India (especially as it relates to some forms of music and literature and philosophy), I hate what it has become.  It is an ugly, dysfunctional and despotic region, and I feel fortunate that I am no longer trapped in it.

The Infinitesimal and the Infinite

 A friend shared a poem with me today:

Vast Emptiness

Emotion less
Thought less
Good less
Bad less
Joy less
Sorrow lessDevoid of it all
Is this vast emptinessA few fireballs littered around as stars
A few pebbles thrown around as planets
A few specks of dust moving around as life
As plants as trees
As insects as worms
As fish as reptiles
As birds as animals
As men as women
And the non-gender ones tooWinds swirling
Rains lashing
Thunders thundering
Dust storms brewingOf what significance
But an eternal play
Of time in the lap of timelessAll of the above
But words in my head
Without words
There is but
Vast Emptiness

I used to have similar thoughts, and I'm sure many a reflective man or woman have had the same.

But here is a counterpoint to this wondrous feeling and cognition of being a mere speck in the vast space-time. And that is the wondrous feeling and cognition that in this infinite vastness, infinite duration, but at present, here and now, I am. I exist, I am aware, I see, I wonder.

The insignificance is as marvelous as the infinitely improbable existence of us. Both are marvelous, both are wondrous, both are worthy of one stopping in one's tracks and be awed.

One existence, that of space-time, is infinite (notwithstanding the Big Bang model of a finite universe), the other ephemeral: I was not aware before I was born, and I shall be not aware after I die. But in a certain sense, I am eternal too, because I am part of this universe. And I shall never cease to exist, but shall go on to appear in different forms.

And what a wonder of wonders that matter arranges itself so as to be self-aware. It is perhaps the greatest wonder of all.

On the Grand Design

Suffering is always tragic, often random and mostly senseless.

It is a worldly endeavor to lessen suffering, while the other-worldly pursuit is to "transcend" suffering since suffering is a "noble truth" from which there is no escape, only transcendence.

A friend of mine, with a network of well-heeled people in his network, writes on LinkedIn:

Seemingly adverse things appearing in abundance and without warning could be arising for one of two reasons. First, it may simply be that dealing with them is a necessary step in our development and without them our life journey will be a superficial success. Relatedly and importantly, these circumstances appear because prior volitional activity or accumulated karma making them the birth child of thoughts or actions we have taken in the past, whether we can directly recall or correlate to the present incidents.

Whatever the specific reason, I take great comfort in the fact that there is zero randomness in how my life’s events unroll and I look ahead with optimism and enthusiasm, knowing that the temporal map of these occurrences is accurately following the karmic load that I carry and strive to purify.

I quote an incident from an earlier article of mine:

Abandoned in Life and Death
Parents leave baby boy undergoing treatment at PGI

In a blatant display of extreme callousness, parents of a seriously injured baby abandoned the child midway through treatment in the PGI Intensive Care Unit.

Faced with absence of support in a critical condition, the infant breathed his last on January 7 and no one has even come forward to claim the body, which is kept in the mortuary of the hospital.

...

Although he started stabilising in the ICU, his parents suddenly vanished. After unsuccessful attempts at locating the parents, doctors informed the police.

...

Ruby passed away on January 7. 

...

The religiously-inclined might say that the child must have come to this world with his karma and that divine justice is infallible. And thus we avert our eyes from what must have compelled the parents of this poor child to desert him, and what must be improved in the hospitals, and in the mind-sets of doctors of this country for these events never to happen again. God forbid.

Truth is not comforting, it just is.  The truth is that this baby, Ruby, died of injuries and from lack of care, not of Karma.

Tragedy is not confined to the suffering of children, though it is perhaps easier to see that they did not deserve it.

I imagine the suffering of Ruby's mother as she abandoned him.  I imagine her compulsion, or perhaps her desensitized debasement.

I imagine the suffering of a father and a mother as their child is kidnapped and never found, as they imagine him or her to be amputated and made into a beggar or be raped by those who do not deserve to be called human beings.

I imagine the suffering of a noble warrior like Jaswant Singh Khalra, who, for protesting against others' killings, was himself tortured and killed by Punjab Police.

I swear, to my last drop of blood, and to my last breath, ... I swear on the still smoldering, in my heart, funeral pyre of Ruby who I never met, ... I swear on the courage of Jaswant Singh Khalra, that I will never forget your suffering, or justify it as part of a grand plan, or rationalize it as what you deserved because of your karma, but that I will hold your injuries as mine, that I will fight against what killed you, and that I will reject the abject nonsense of the eastern "wisdom" that claims that the world is perfect as it is, only if we would see it that way.

 

Though Lovers Be Lost, ...

There is no love like the love of a mother for her child, and the child assumes that love, and abides in it, and lives in its shelter and warmth.

The child leaves the mother first, to go forth in this world.  The mother holds her tears, but lets the child go.  For that is in the nature of things.  She wishes happiness and fulfillment for the child more than the child wishes for itself.

And one day, the mother, old and frail, bids her final goodbye to this world.  And only then it dawns on the child what a fragrant presence the mother was in its own heart.  When it is no more possible for the child to reach out to its mother outwardly, then the child reaches in, within, and finds the love whose intensity was so far hidden to it.

And that explosion of love and grief creates an intensity about an absence that the presence perhaps never could.  The world of the child is now absent the mother, but strangely its heart is full once again with her presence.

From being inside the mother before its birth, the child now nurtures the mother inside itself.

Though lovers be lost,
Love shall not.

And Death shall have no dominion.

On Being Well-Adjusted, part III

First seek an understanding of human affairs, THEN seek to integrate, adjust or withdraw.  Too often, whether in the case of Buddha or Krishnamurti, young, ignorant minds go off into seeking "the highest truth" while not understanding why clothes dry or why an interest is charged on a loan.

Too often, maladjustment starts at the very beginning of one's adult life.  From living a sheltered childhood, to a sudden exposure to the harsh realities of a competitive adult life.  Many are horrified at the prospect and withdraw.  But that is a failure of the adjustment process, not an indictment of society.  Parents are responsible for slowly exposing their children away from fairy tales and into the world of millionaires and courts and real estate.

After an adult has successfully navigated, to a reasonable extent, the "real world", it is permissible for him to seek to withdraw to focus on another kind of pursuit.  Not everyone has to be an entrepreneur.  One could as well be a mathematician, an artist, or an astute generalist.  But to be maladjusted, to never understand the world, and then to withdraw is not renunciation, it is an admission of failure.

Society is indeed sometimes brutal.  But the brutality is not mystical (due to "ignorance of one's true nature" or suchlike), but tangible, due to material and historical conditions.  It may indeed be justified for someone to run away from a war zone, to be a deserter, but then, he cannot live in honor as the town mayor when the war ends.  You can escape the obligations of a "sick society", but you do not, if you are moral, then get to reap the rewards of that same society.

For a sensitive individual, I recommend very much that they should seek to become financially independent, to live with thrift and wisdom so that they may have enough money to live the kind of life they want.  And to become financially independent, it is important to understand society.  Not from a guru, but from study as well as lived experience.

Innocence of spirit can be maintained only by living a life of integrity, where one does not deceive oneself.  If one has to compromise on one's integrity (say, by paying a bribe to get a driving license), it must be with complete self-awareness, and with a feeling of tragedy.  Continuing with this analogy, a morally compromised man (that Krishnamurti would consider well-adjusted) would feel happy that he was able to cunningly achieve his aim, a morally integrated man would feel dejected despite having achieved his aim, and a defeatist (but moral) man would hang himself to death at the state of affairs.

The society is rarely totally evil.  It is made of all kinds of people.  In a very decayed society, or even in jail, you may find exceptional individuals.  You must aim to understand and navigate the circumstances that you find yourself in, and then overcome those circumstances with your strength and acumen, WHILE preserving your innocence and inner moral compass.

And then, having achieved mastery over the earthly affairs, to enjoy your freedom from the shackles of an allegedly "sick society".

That, if you can manage, will be a life well-lived.

On Being Well-Adjusted, part II

 (part 1)

If we disregard the esoteric notion that the goal of human life is unearthly, then living happily and wisely on this earth has to matter.  In this earthly living, what kind of "adjustment" is worthwhile, and what kind of adjustment is a surrender of one's integrity?

Krishnamurti was well-provided for right from his childhood, when he was adopted by the Theosophists.  He never had to struggle to make a career or to make a living.  Though he had romantic engagements, he never married or had children.  He lived a cocooned life, where important politicians and rich people kept him safe and free of worry.  He lived an aristocratic life despite his claims that he "gave up" the mantle of the world teacher.  He kept enough funds of the original "Order of the Star in the East" to keep himself comfortable, and his rich friends continue to support him.

Krishnamurti could rail against "society" and the pursuit of wealth and being career-focused while he himself lived comfortably and flew first class.  By all material indications, he was well-adjusted in society.  He never went to jail.  He never considered the tax laws as unjust.  He never fought in a war while letting others fight for him and his freedoms.

It is also a surrender of one's integrity to amass riches while misleading other people that one is the world teacher.  The integral act would have been for Krishnamurti to completely disavow his world-teacher status and be a common man.  But he did not do that.  He did not start working in a factory and find a rented accommodation.

All this is to say that criticism of the society as being profoundly sick, and stating that adjustment to such a society is a disease, can only come, ethically speaking, from someone who is not enjoying the fruits of such a sick society.

Let us leave aside Krishnamurti then, as he, being a hypocrite, is not worth responding to, and consider afresh how a man with integrity ought to live in this world, a world that demands the subjugation of his intellect, his strength and his insight.  How must a man live comfortably while still not allowing his soul to be sold, and his mind to be corrupted beyond recognition.

How to preserve one's innocence while being clever enough to navigate the traps of this world?

Is it doable?

(to be continued)

On Being Well-Adjusted, part I

Jiddu Krishnamurti famously said: It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

What is "society"?  What does it mean to be "well-adjusted"?  In what sense is society "profoundly sick"?  What kind of "health" are we talking about here?

If we take Krishnamurti's statement to be true, what is the recommendation for a modern human being?

Society is the structure of human interaction.  Whether it be financial, educational, religious, political, ethical, historical, legal, kinship, sexual, habitual, pertaining to manners, ...  The various kinds of interactions between human beings, and the burdens and benefits thereof, is society.  The structure is a behemoth of rules, implicit and explicit.  You are born in a family, you spend the first twenty odd years getting educated as per the norms of your society, you form friendships and relationships, you earn and spend money, try to be on the right side of law, and so on.

Nobody, anywhere, claims that their society is ideal.  But one can evaluate the health of a society in many ways.  Does it show signs of "low-trust"?  Is there a lot of hypocrisy (people asking you to follow certain rules but flouting those rules themselves)?  Is there a general sense of well-being and safety?  Is the environment healthy and clean?  Is there beauty?  Are people able to have a comfortable, dignified life?  Is there freedom of expression?  Are the institutions overburdened and inefficient?  Are hard work and ethical living rewarded or punished?  Do people feel empowered, or powerless?  Is there disease, or good health in the majority of the population?

But even in the best societies, as per our metrics, an individual faces a certain burden of socialization.  He cannot just do as he pleases.  There are rules and responsibilities, rewards and punishments, those who like and love oneself and those who are strange or hostile.

Spiritual people like Krishnamurti advise that the only true goal is salvation, and earthly and social goals are quite secondary.  Their focus is not on material conditions, but on inner growth.  To them, a man who is poor or one who is jail but elevated in his consciousness is far better than a cunning man who is comfortable and powerful, but otherwise commonplace in his thinking.

We can all agree that the former man is maladjusted, the latter is well-adjusted.  The former man has not adjusted to the rules of society and is suffering materially, while the latter has mastered the rules of his society and is prospering.

Is it possible for a happy and wise man to be materially well-adjusted?  Or is maladjustment the inevitable fate of wisdom?

Was Krishnamurti himself well-adjusted?

(to be continued)

Mechanism and Destination

Too many otherwise smart people fall in the trap of optimizing their ability to navigate modern life, and then dying.

They focus on their health, go on diets, build muscle, buy expensive goods, keep an immaculate home, get a good education, have a brag-worthy spouse, invest sensibly, push their kids into the ivy league, and then, ..., nothing.

They read self-help books, advance in their careers, post their photos on LinkedIn or on Facebook with the well-known, watch the Game of Thrones, and then, ..., nothing.

They go on picturesque vacations, eat at Michelin-star restaurants, get spa treatments, use the best skin products, keep track of their health parameters, and then, ..., nothing.

...

Mechanism is one thing, and Destination is another.  (this phrase is from my remembrance of a remarkable and life-altering essay by J Krishnamurti)

A life can be trivially wasted in shiny mechanisms, while the destination remains pithy, pitiful and prosaic.

It is fine to earn and to save money, if you have an idea on how that money can be used to go further.  If with that money you buy a bigger house, and then you spend even more money to maintain that house, then the house has transformed, for you, from a mechanism that could enable you to do bigger things, to a beautiful cage.

A meaningful destination comes naturally to some, but vast numbers struggle to create an appearance of one or have no understanding of why it might be important.  Why?

I hold that a destination is meaningful only insofar as it yields clarity, understanding and fulfillment.

If at the end of a day, you have taken ten thousand steps, and have eaten healthy, and have finished another chapter of a self-help book, that day must be recorded as a day preparing for life, not life itself.

We are not merely mechanisms, the core of being human is to think and to imagine and to dream and to elucidate and to clarify and to research and to create.

A life devoted to mechanism is a wasted life.

I believe it was Osho who once stated to the effect that for a poor man to embark on transcendence was a blessing, while for a rich man to NOT be interested in transcendence was a curse.

The aim of human life is to reach higher, not to spend all one's years in preparation of it.

All beauty, all strength, all vitality, all wealth, must be in honor of, and a tribute to, the mystery that is all around us.  The mystery of an infinite universe and of us being able to see the stars in it at night.  

Anything less seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity. 
(this phrase taken, with admiration, from the last para of the outstanding essay by David Albert about a very different topic)

Choice and Depth

In college, I was quite the tinkerer and hacker of computer systems and computer software.  It was late 90s, and though we had a local area network, we did not have internet access.  We didn't even an internet email address.

Operating systems were installed from floppies, some newer systems had CD drives.  PC magazines used to come with free software CDs and those CDs contained not just games and Windows shareware, but also free software such as the Slackware Linux distribution, or Cygwin (GNU tools for Windows).

Since we did not have internet access, we pried open, figuratively speaking, each software that we could get our hands on and explored every nook and cranny of it.  We explored all the settings, the various flags, limits, "GNU extensions", and we tried to compile it on unsupported operating systems.

I remember being introduced to perl and zsh, at that time still new things.  Perl was authored by Larry Wall, and zsh was written by Paul Falstad, a student at Georgia Tech university.  I read almost their entire man pages, and came to understand the philosophy and the interesting features in them.  I was intimately familiar with their capabilities, the differences they had with other languages and shells, and what differences existed in one version vs the previous one.

Linux was still new, and most free software with source code supported many Unix-like operating systems.  In our institute, we had access to HP-UX, SunOS 5, Solaris, IRIX, and SVR4.2, among others.  It was a lot of fun trying to make the GNU toolchain and compilers and libraries work on these varied Unix systems.

I remember that even in a limited operating system as MSDOS, we looked at almost all the system utilities and what they did and why and how.

Similarly, because the computers were much less powerful than those of today, it was both necessary and enjoyable to exploit whatever hardware capabilities were there.  With only 4MB of RAM, and 64MB hard disk, one had to be very efficient at storage and memory allocation.

That period set the tone for my professional career, as I, after a brief stint as a software engineer, veered back into system administration and network engineering.

...

When I look at the capabilities of computers and networks today, I find that there is nothing I cannot do or find anywhere in the world, but my curiosity in what I have already on my system is thereby much reduced.

The systems and software that I have on my personal computer are absolutely remarkable, and I sometimes mourn my disinclination to explore them more.

It is also true that systems have gotten more complex.  Tinkering with a simple engine is perhaps far more enjoyable than owning a complex piece of machinery which is more capable but less accepting of amateur exploration.

As an analogy for this situation, consider a man who lives in a village all his life.  He probably knows all the little ponds, the birds and their mating calls, he can identify cattle and horses, and he experiences life, dare I say, with more depth.  Each experience is deeper because of the familiarity one has with the context and the contents of that experience.

On the other hand, a man who has been given a boon to be teleported anywhere in the world will probably not find it easy to give deep attention to any one place, to any one thing, or to any one person.  He will always be going here and there, and it will be impossible for him to call any place home.  The attraction of novelty will not allow him to be bored, and boredom is, I think, essential to experiencing anything in depth.

The real learning starts when the novelty has worn off.  But if another novelty then takes its place, then the learning will remain facile.

The absence of boredom, and commitment, that an unlimited choice bestows on oneself is therefore a boon as well a curse.  It is the boon of freedom, and the curse of never delving into anything deeply.

In Defense of Cognitive Biases, contd.

Earlier essay: In Defense of Cognitive Biases.

Recently I came across this very good video on the cognitive bias related to "Loss Aversion".

A famous science popularizer asks many people whether they would take a bet with an expected return of $10, and many say "No".  He criticizes their bias, gently, but does not go into the value of having this bias.

Can this bias be explained?  Why does this bias exist?  What is the survival advantage in having this bias?

Let us ask the question in the video in another way so as to make it more obvious why the bias makes sense.

Let us assume, as is supremely reasonable and rational, that you value the life of your infant child.  Let us say a genie suddenly appears and offers you the following proposition:

If you toss your infant in the air, I offer you two possible outcomes: Your infant will die, or it will have double the lifespan that it is currently fated to have.

What would any normal individual do?  Of course they would choose to NOT participate in the bet at all.  The loss of their child is a far bigger tragedy than the joy at having the child live twice as long.

Survival is the prime directive.  For survival, avoiding situations which contain risk, pain and duress is important.  If you have a house, losing that house is going to have a drastic impact on your well-being, but being gifted another house is not going to matter as much.

Coming back to the offer in the video above, an individual has a certain amount of money.  They have that as an assurance that their immediate needs will be fulfilled, and that, as an example, they will be able to buy a bus ticket for back home, or have a meal.  They have sufficient money for that.

When offered a scenario in which they can lose that money, their loss aversion is rational, sensible and reasonable.  They have something to gain, but they were not counting on that gain, and they don't know what that gain will get them.  But they do know what that loss will mean to them.

And even if offered multiple chances to play the bet, with each bet having the expected value of $10 to them, a reasonable individual could still rationally refuse to play.  Why?  Consider that it is possible that you can lose the first few rounds and be down $40, and have no more money to play the game.  Yes, eventually you will come out a winner, but will you survive till then?

If you value your survival, and have a limited amount of resources -- and the limitation of resources is almost always a fact, and is hard-wired into our brain -- it is rational to avoid needless betting of your resources.

Most people choose safety, and wisely so, over speculation.

(And of course, the weird scenario of a stranger offering you an easy way to make money triggers the scam alert in our brain.  Instead of investigating the alert and marking it as a false positive, it is a good idea to ignore the scam altogether, especially if the scam scenario is not important to you.)

Music for the Spirit

When I was in college, I happened to pick up an audio cassette for the soundtrack of Chariots of Fire, composed by the recently departed Greek composer Vangelis.  I had no idea that that would be the start of a long joyous journey into music which calms and uplifts the spirit.

When I first came to the US, my roommate had a CD of Enya's The Memory of Trees, and listening to it on his Bose AM-10 speakers continues to be a fond memory.

I grew up in Punjab, an agricultural region not known for slow or lilting music.  I found Vangelis and Enya as I stepped out of Punjab, and on my long drives through deserts and canyons, their music was my friend.

Over the years, decades rather, I have had the great good fortune of being exposed to music which had Enya and Vangelis as the initial milestones.  In the late 90s and early 2000s, it was the other works of Vangelis and Enya, the Benedictine Monks, the Canadian singer Loreena McKennitt, the mix-and-mash of Enigma (which is retrospect I consider inferior in spirit) and Arvo Pärt.  And not to leave behind the music of India, some somber ragas sung by Pandit Jasraj and Kishori Amonkar.

Some of that music has stood the test of time, and is still very dear to me.

If you visit a great vista and are speechless at the sight of a mountain peak, that is alone, ancient and silent, you wish that those who you love also one day witness that glory.  Similarly, there is the desire to share a great composition with your friends.

Music these days is less "eternal".  Songs and compositions grow in popularity quickly, and then die of disinterest.  The market rules.  There is little patience in understanding and appreciating the nuances of a composition that has a certain mood and depth.

In recent times, music as therapy has caught on.  On YouTube, one finds 8 or 10-hour tracks of what they call "binaural beats", and thousands of renditions of ancient chants or prayers.  I am sure they help alleviate the stresses of modern life.

Just today, I have started listening to the the artist Chuck Wild's compositions in his "Liquid Mind" series, and that is a great introduction to this kind of music.

Rather strangely, I have not found it beneath me to admire, at times, what is otherwise called trance music.  That music is mostly electronic, and aimed at a young audience ready to party on the beach, but some of those compositions can, I believe, hold their own against a Pandit Jasraj.

Here are some tracks from the last few decades that I would love you to listen, and enjoy, and treasure:

Enya's Hope has a Place

Loreena McKennitt's The Mummer's Dance

Vangelis' Eric's Theme (from Chariots of Fire)

Vangelis' El Greco Movement I

Cliff Martinez' And Death Shall Have no Dominion (from Solaris)

Angelo Badalamenti's Mysteries of Love

Above and Beyond's Flow State & Sunshine in your Eyes

Joe Satriani's Rubina's Blue Sky Happiness

Mahakatha's Om Namaste Asatu

There are so many more, but I hope starting with these, you will find your own path in this kind of music.

The Wisdom of Suffering

This is in continuation of the last essay, Wisdom and Suffering.

People consider physical pain to be reasonable, but mental and emotional pain ("suffering") to be somehow "wrong".  The teaching of many a spiritual or spiritualist teacher is to move toward and eventually attain the "end of suffering".  That is misguided, to put it mildly.

To make this essay more interesting, let us annotate a particular expression of this teaching, as contained in "The two arrows - Pain and Suffering — ShamashAlidina.com".

You are walking in the woods and suddenly you get struck by an arrow (someone fires an arrow at you) and it hits your arm and it really, really hurts - it's very painful and you feel that physical pain in your arm, and it's bleeding. And then immediately your mind starts to think - "Oh my god, what's gonna happen? What if I bleed to death? What if this is infected and I can't walk back properly? Or I lose energy and I can't get back to my family? What's gonna happen to my family? What's gonna be happening to my husband / my wife / my children? What's gonna happen to me or what’s going to happen to their future, how will they be doing?”

Firstly, humans have the amazing capability to look beyond the immediate.  The physical pain is there.  But it would be infantile to just respond to that.  

To continue in the vein of the story, the thoughts of a reasonable man may be: Why did someone fire that arrow at me?  Should I protect myself from further arrows?  Is it possible that I need to seek medical attention?  Is this life-threatening?  If so, do I need to not just seek medical help, but also perhaps worry about my family?

Of course, one can be unreasonably scared, but the mind is hardly perfect.  It is perhaps only in hindsight that one can evaluate whether all the worry was justified or whether it was an overreaction.  With experience, one can learn to overreact less.

The Buddha describes the first arrow as the physical pain and the second arrow is what your mind does - it starts thinking about the worst scenario that can happen. And he says "be warned of the second arrow." 

What is wrong with what the mind does, the "second arrow"?  The mind is doing its job.  Trying to quickly and crudely respond to a threatening situation with a bumble of thoughts.  A trained soldier will respond less crudely, and perhaps know of tourniquets and how to camouflage himself to be safe from further attacks, etc., but a normal individual has no such training.  If in addition to a lack of proper training, one is foolish enough to be guided by the spiritualists to not engage the mind as it furiously scans the scenarios and possible outcomes, one is not likely to survive.

The mind evolved as a survival tool.  It is because of our mental prowess that we have been wildly successful in outclassing all other species on this planet.  Spiritualists are the sworn enemies of the mind and the intellect, because their goal is a thoughtless bliss, and not an increase in wisdom and understanding.

The first arrow is represents the pain - the actual physical pain, and the second arrow represents what you call suffering.  So we distinguish between pain and suffering. 

Mental processes are not per se, suffering.  They are the human response to a situation.  The mind utilizes its collection of learning and instincts to respond to a challenging situation.  These responses are usually far more optimal, but to give up on the mind is an even bigger mistake.  One can train the mind, but to be only in the "here and now" is an invitation to living as an animal or an infant.

Which worry is reasonable, and which worry is imaginary?  You cannot know except by experience.

Consider the response of the passengers in Flight 93 on Sep 11, 2001, a flight doomed to crash and kill them all.  They fully expect to die, and are faced with fear, and thoughts for their family.  Many of them called their loved ones on the phone to send a last message of love.  One can imagine some of them telling their wives of a document in their bedroom drawer which details the various bank accounts.  Would the Buddha have called his wife, if he was on Flight 93?

Pain is something that's inevitable, we all experience that. But the suffering is something that we actually create. But we don't realise that. 

Even pain is subjective, and is created because of a living being's response to a stimulus.  Similarly, our thoughts and worries are our responses to a situation.  This second category of response is not all fantasy.  Our thoughts and worries are usually reasonable.  Can they be unreasonable?  Sure.  

Even simple pain affects people to different degrees.  An infant screams and cries at hitting their toe, but an adult can usually act with more restraint.  Someone can enjoy a cold shower, while another may regard it as a cruel and unusual punishment.

There’s a sense of resistance to it - not accepting it, not allowing it to be there and accepting the reality of the situation. We fight with the reality of the way things are right now and so we turn the pain into suffering or we add suffering on top.

"Fighting with the reality of the way things are right now" is the very definition of life.  Only a stone does not fight.  The very process of survival is to manipulate the "reality".  One can, and would be wise to, accept things that one cannot change, but to accept everything "as it is" is supremely foolish.  As a rather crude example, if you feel a pressure in your bowels, you need to find the toilet, not just accept that pressure "as it is".  If you don't find a functioning toilet, you need to find a bush.  Not accept the absence of a toilet "as it is".  And once your bowels are emptied, you need to find a way to clean yourself, not accept the "reality of the way things are".

The more that you resist or deny or fight or argue with the pain- which is already there;, the more suffering  you experience.  

The fight with a pain is because we want to lessen it.  We fight it in many ways.  We try to find its cause, we try to soothe the injury, we try to find help, we try to protect ourselves from further injury, and so on.  "Pain" is the nerves' response to an unusual state, not conducive to one's well-being.  To just wish for the pain to go away is as childish as accepting it.  The mature response is to want to lessen it and to heal it.

That's a useful story to remember whenever you have any kind of difficult situation. It could be the difficult internal experiences - there could be a difficult emotions like sadness, or anxiety, or frustration, or anger, or it could be to do with difficult thoughts; it could be difficult sensations like literal physical pain or chronic pain. 

Consider a mother whose child has just passed away.  That mother feels immense sorrow.  We hope that her sorrow will lessen and heal with time.  

Should she, when she first receives the news, act as a robot, and process the news merely as a new factoid?

Her sorrow is in a way sacred to her.  It is the other side of her immense love for her child.  Someone who tells her not to feel sad will be called insensitive or worse.  The only way she can avoid that kind of sorrow is if she holds no love or affection for the child to begin with.  

For some mothers, the sorrow can be overwhelming, and they may think of ending their own lives.  But they rarely do.  And in such cases, where the emotional reaction has veered into dangerous territory, the community tries to help.  There are other mothers in the community who may have lost a child, and they know what the mother must be feeling.

Consider "difficult emotions" as first-order emotional responses to a situation.  The second-order response of an adult might be: "No I cannot accept that I am sad", or it can be "Why am I sad, why am I angry," etc., or it may be "I need to accept that I am sad".  It is generally therapeutic to accept the first order response but not to act unreasonably on it.  If one is angry, to accept that one is angry, but not act it out by breaking things in the house.  Even better, to figure out what the trigger was and whether it was reasonable to get angry and what can one do to fix the underlying situation.

"Anger" is a four-letter word on most spiritual paths.  "Anger" is a strong emotional disapproval of a situation and wanting to urgently do something to re-establish an agreeable or a fair state.  It may involve adrenaline and increased blood flow.  Spiritualists will likely say that it is never reasonable to get angry, or sad.  But if we consider anger and sadness as emotional responses to a situation (just like pain is a physical response, and thought and worry are mental responses), as an adult we will seek not to eliminate those emotions, but to act on them in fruitful ways and not in unwholesome ways.

Moreover, as I detailed in my essay on Suffering, affective reactions are "rough and ready" responses when a more considered solution is impractical.  An angry scream at someone bullying and beating a helpless kid is likely to be effective.

Similarly, on witnessing a poor woman being robbed of her savings by an unscrupulous criminal, or learning of how your tax dollars were diverted into the coffers of the corrupt, the emotion of anger is reasonable.  Hopefully, that anger translates into a useful course of action and not in a reckless one.

A man without emotional responses like sadness or anger, is likely also without affection for another human being, and lacking the instincts for justice and fairness.

Wisdom and Suffering

 After reading an old post about "Signs of Inner Growth", a friend asked:

I noticed that you did not mention "less suffering" as an outcome of increased wisdom. I am curious if it is because:

a. This is obvious to the extent of being tautological. 

b. Not a worthy goal to pursue

c. Wisdom is independent of reducing suffering

d. None of the above

It is a good question, and worthy of a nuanced response.

I have written earlier about suffering (and I recommend the reader go through that essay first), but let me address this pointed question here.

Suffering is essentially the recognition and response to a disagreeable state of affairs.  One's response to a disagreeable state can be a mix of physiological, intellectual or emotional/affective distress.  As long as one is alive, there will always be such states of affairs.

The state of affairs may pertain to a narrow realm: to one's health, financial security, or one's family.  Or it may be about a wider realm: about the poor, about the exploited orphans, and in general about the state of the world.

One's response is also not set in stone, and one can train oneself to be stronger (physically, intellectually and emotionally).  A physically stronger person will be able to endure a long walk while the same walk will cause distress in another.  An intellectual quandary or uncertainty (how to save taxes, how to prepare for retirement, how to shield one's children from unwholesome influences) can be distressing to someone without the inner or outer tools to resolve it.  And of course, there are degrees of emotional health.  One can be a reactive, short-tempered, angry individual, or one can be patient and empathetic.

Many forms of trainings are available to become stronger physically, intellectually or emotionally.

As one expands one's intellectual and emotional horizons, it is quite possible, nay, almost certain, that one realizes that one suffers more than before.  One may become more aware of others' suffering, one may realize alarming facts which are unknown to many, one may become more acutely conscious of the need to do something, one may form new goals which hold no charm for others.  "Ignorance is bliss" is indeed true in many ways.

A fit individual may decide to climb the north face of K2 and die doing so.

An intellectually advanced man may spend years and decades and die looking for a solution to whether P=NP.

An emotionally advanced individual may leave a well-paying job and spend years creating a new kind of painting or sculpture (as was depicted in Maugham's "Of Moon and Sixpence").

You may say that the artist suffered in a 9-5 job, and so his leaving his job is not really a sacrifice, that it is a reduction of his suffering.  That will be a simplistic reading of such a situation.  The artist is not looking to reduce his suffering, he is willing to suffer for something that is meaningful to him.  

Consider Buddha's leaving of his family.  Did that cause new kinds of suffering?  Was the Buddha assured of his goal when he left his palace?  Did he carefully weigh which path was less prone to future suffering, for himself or for his family, or for humanity?  

Or did he follow his instinct, and his prodigious passion, to do something that he felt was impossible in his palace.

There are many such Buddhas around us.  They sacrifice the popular and easy pleasures for the rare and long-winded ones.

To want to suffer less is natural, but it is not the goal of human life, as we observe humanity.  The quickest and most effective way to end suffering is to commit suicide, but we know that people live, and want to live.  They endure pain and suffering for achieving something that is meaningful to them.  A mother faces immense risk and pain to give birth to a child and to care for it, but the love for one's child (the bringer of suffering) is almost universal.  An inventor or an entrepreneur plunges himself into uncertainty and possible ridicule because of his ambition.

To avoid extreme suffering is essential to human growth, and a distinction has already been made between "distress" (harmful stress), and "eustress" (beneficial stress).

If you find yourself handicapped by your distress, by all means reduce it.  And use wholesome tools to do so (rather than tools which harm you in other ways).  And then move forward.  The goal is not to be free of distress.  That is just the beginning.

And similarly, it is noble and worthwhile to want to reduce others' distress so that they may also pursue their meaningful goals.

The goal is not merely to have a shiny, smoothly-running car.  That is just a prerequisite for your journey.  

The car is washed and serviced.  Where should you go?  There is no one answer.  The world is wide-open for you.

Similarly, once your mind is free from debilitating distress, that's when you can truly begin to evolve and achieve.

So what is the relationship between wisdom and suffering?  Wisdom is to understand things more deeply, and therefore, a wise man understands his suffering because he understands himself.  He may accept a disease, or being alone, or being poor, or the corruption in politics, in ways which seem inexplicable to others.

He could be immune to certain kinds of suffering, but he may choose other, new kinds of suffering in furtherance of goals that his wisdom has now revealed to him.  

The Home and The Heart, full text

Those interested in reading or sharing this series can download it as a single PDF document.

I am grateful for the many letters and notes and messages that you have sent after reading this series.  Thank you.

Those who wish to read it online, here is the table of contents in order:

1. The Last Supper
2. The House of Usher
3. The Five Words
4. The Compliment
5. The Pain of Love
6. The Way Home
7. The Weightless Weight
8. A Few Thousand Words
9. Post Tenebras, Lux
10. Postscript

The Home and The Heart, Postscript

I trust I have not wasted breath:
I think we are not wholly brain,
Magnetic mockeries; not in vain,
Like Paul with beasts, I fought with Death;

Not only cunning casts in clay:
Let Science prove we are, and then
What matters Science unto men,
At least to me? I would not stay.

Let him, the wiser man who springs
Hereafter, up from childhood shape
His action like the greater ape,
But I was born to other things.

I had not intended to write this series.  But over time, I realized that the pain of that period still lingered in me.  I felt responsible for all that had happened.  To see a loved one go through so much pain and suffering is not easy, especially if that pain and suffering is a result of decisions that were made.  She trusted me to make those decisions, and I made them with the utmost care.  I read every medical journal that talked about valve thrombosis, the various approaches to treating it, the risks of thrombolysis versus re-do valve surgery, the mechanics of heart bypass, the mechanism and aftermath of embolic strokes, and so on.  I asked innumerable questions to her doctors.  I got second opinions.  I read of thrombolytic agents and which ones to use and what dosage was to be applied.

But in the end, our hand was forced by her deteriorating condition and by the many doctors who told us there was no other way but to operate on her.

Before giving our consent to heart surgery, I had asked her a question.  I had asked her if I was in a similar situation, if my heart had failed, and all the doctors were telling us that surgery was my only option, would she have tried to persuade an unwilling me to go through with it?  To my continued distress to this day, she had said that she, gentle and loving as she is, would have not.

Perhaps she did not realize the gravity of her situation.  But the fact remains that I, advised by the doctors, made her agree to the re-do surgery.

We, or rather I, made the decision to go in.  I was the one who signed the consent form, acknowledging that I understood the risks.  I live with that decision, and its aftermath.

Though it is not part of the standard protocol, I wish I had asked the hospital to do a brain scan on her during the 40 hours that she was unconscious after her heart surgery.  I wish I knew that there was major risk of a vascular accident during or after her surgery and I wish we had caught the stroke in time.  In the aftermath, I asked the attending surgeons and doctors to revise their protocol to include this check, but I do not know if anything will come of my recommendation.

But I was not, and am not, a medical professional.  I trusted the hospital and the doctors and the medical journals.  But my wife - she only trusted me.  I cherish this trust, but I also have to live with the responsibility of this trust.

If I was an illiterate man who had little idea of pressure gradients in the heart, I would have taken the relatively easier path of just accepting the doctors' decisions.  I would not have made them "my" decisions.  I would have obeyed the experts and accepted every procedure, every complication, fatalistically.  But I was born to know, and to question, and so I also have to live with the limits of my knowledge and with the limited knowledge of the experts.  They, and I, tried to do their best, but it was not good enough.

The difference is: the doctors went home and attended to other patients the next day.  My wife's post-surgical complications would be a statistic in their long career.  But for my wife, and for me, our life was transformed in those few days.  We, as all patients, have to live the rest of our lives with the consequences, while for the doctors it is, hopefully, a learning.

It was not their fault.  I believe they tried their very best.  I hold no bitterness toward them.

This pain in me is mine own.  It is irrational, but I do not deny it.

It is not unlike the pain of a mother who kissed and goaded her unwilling child into the school bus, and the child later bled to his death in a bus accident.  She was hardly "responsible".  She did everything out of immense love and with the very best of intentions.  But if you are at all human, you will understand her guilt.

To heal the pain of that decision of mine, and the immense suffering for her that followed, this series is an attempt at what I can only term as Penance.  It is my cross to bear, and through my writing, I hope to, perhaps, forgive myself.

The second reason is to give anybody who reads this series a message of hope and love.  To give the reader a sense of home and of being away from it, and what it means to one's heart.  To communicate the power of love.  To tell the reader that it is possible to transcend tragedy and darkness.  It may not always be possible, and every story is different, but our story ends as a beginning.  We were fortunate, and blessed, to have come through, and I wanted to share this tale of overcoming.

Lastly, this series is a tribute to my wife, and to the love in her heart.  She is a marvelous woman: simple, loving and truthful.  She has not seen much of the world, and perhaps because of that, she is innocent in a way that is rare and remarkable.

She will perhaps never want to, or be able to, write her story in the way I have done.  She may never read it.  It will be too traumatic for her to recall those times in this detail.  But her story needed to be told, I feel.  She is of this earth, an unknown woman, but this story of her struggle needed to be better known.  It is my homage to her resilience, her patience, and to her fortitude.

I thought I knew much.  But she has taught me much more.

...

Through this, I remain grateful to our two friends, and our siblings, especially my younger brother, who all shall remain unnamed, and who gave us their time, their energy and their affection.  To her parents, and to mine, who worried for us and sent her their prayers.  And to our well-wishers, who remained concerned for our well-being.