violence

The First Question

For those who are reading this post as the first post from my blog, I would ask you to please read the previous one first, to understand this one better 🙂

Now then, the first question – “Why am I being cheated by my partner!?”

This is generally the primary question that haunts a cheat victim. But we often tend to aggressively direct this question towards the person who has cheated on us. Initially, my approach was also not any different. But this approach gave birth to more and more animosity towards my “now” Ex. The thing which I used to know as “love” inside me turned into a revengeful monster. I was full of grudge and hatred. In my mind, my Ex transitioned from a “beautiful angel” to a “devil worshiping wench”. Yes, this is what happened when I threw this question at my partner again and again and not a single satisfactory answer came from her side. As more days passed in this demented tug of war of words, I was slipping more and more into the clutches of suicidal depression. But in the end, my refusal to fall in front of my mind’s authority saved me. That night I also understood that I am doing something wrong with the question.

I was directing the question towards a human who was also in the grip of her own mind’s slavery. So it was foolish as well as unfair of me to expect a satisfactory answer from her. But I was restless with the question so I directed the question towards myself; contemplated on it and then silently went deep within my own self and these are the answers I have got…

1. In our day to day life, most of us are living in an unaware state and in this state we generally tend to remember more of what wrong/bad things one has done to us than the right/good things they have done.

2. In my relationship, I made many mistakes, and my partner held onto them. Likewise, I too held onto mistakes committed by her and as more time passed these judgements and grudges gave birth to more mistakes and finally to more grudges between us.

3. All these had led to many moments of sourness in our relationship; my partner could not bear it anymore and so she cheated…simple as that 🙂

Then again another question popped into my head – “Why didn’t she simply break up?”..The answer is – “She didn’t want to hurt me”..Yes!!..It’s funny I know, but that’s how it works – Our Mind. I call this “With or without you syndrome”…yup inspired by U2’s famous “With or without you” song 😛 Don’t forget that she fell in love with me for all that is good in me and that feeling however faint it becomes, never goes away totally. In the end, fear of totally losing someone dear forces us to make many wrong decisions. In her case, not being open about her feelings and consequently not breaking up with me proved to be a disastrously wrong decision for both of us. Although she was cheating for long, like any other good girlfriend she always cared to give me her time, support and affection whenever I needed. This proved that she was never over me but she was not happy with me either. After our break up, she once told me that she always thought of marrying me…now one can easily see how confusing it was becoming for me to understand 😛 So after a certain point, I was finding this question, “Why didn’t she simply break up?”, too confusing and a wastage of time and energy, thus I simply dropped it. If I am not wrong, many of us have experienced the fact that scanning and clearly understanding other person’s mind-play is actually impossible.

In the end, what I was searching, I received – A Satisfactory Answer : “She, like me, is a slave of her mind and since I know now – how one becomes a slave, I cannot blame her or anyone for that. Our bodily/material reactions due to this slavery manifest in different forms in different human beings; some may become violent or extremely depressed like me, some may become sexual or sentimental like my ex, some may suffer anxiety or some may get addicted to some substance or suffer from some kind of physical illness and many more.  Everyone is suffering because of this slavery including me and her. And this suffering alone can be the launching pad towards awareness, like my suffering became my launching pad.”

One more thing I want to add here is that many of us mistake that the path to awareness or spirituality has everything to do with “sitting meditation” only. Sitting meditation is no doubt the deepest way of inquiring. But for someone, like me, who has gone through phases of severe depression, anxiety or any other similar kind of mental problems, sitting meditation is next to impossible during those phases. Personally I found two things to be very helpful during such periods of depression-

1. Physical training / Working Out on a daily basis with a physical challenge/goal in mind.

And

2. Just sitting silently and looking towards the sky, trees and birds instead of following a rigid sitting meditation method. During night time, I used to look at the night sky and the silhouettes of the trees.

At present I do not suffer such attacks of depression anymore. So I have started practicing Zazen and I have started with only two “20 mins a day” sessions. It has taken me deeper into my own self, revealed more about my mind’s play, made me more determined as a person and also mellowed me down to a great extent 😀

Phew!! That’s another one completed. I again failed to contain my post to 500-600 words 😛 Anyways, hope it did not bore anyone and if anyone has any doubt, question or criticism about the post or my approach towards life, please feel free to share it in the comments section below or tweet it (Click the green gear sign above :D)

May we all experience true happiness, love and peace _/\_

Cheated!! Is it so?

May be the title is not appropriate so I feel a need to first elaborate the subject of this post. I want to share my realizations and the answers to the three basic questions that haunts a cheat/fraud victim.

1. “Why am I being cheated by my partner!?”

2. “Why didn’t I suspect about it earlier!?”

3. “How do I treat the one who has cheated me?”

So what actually happened? I was being cheated for almost five years among the six years I had spent with my partner…Yes, Five Years!! That’s laughable I know. I too laugh at myself for not being able to find about it any sooner. Initially, when I found about it 9 months back I reacted violently and after that, I spent months as a lonely depressed being. I even hit the rock bottom of depression and started seeing suicide as a viable option. But then something amazing happened. I was there, ready to end it all. But suddenly I heard a voice inside and it said to me, “Anyways you are going but at least for the last time try to find the answer to this riddle…Who is trying to kill whom and who is responsible?” So with ruthless honesty and meditative silence, “I” went inside to dig up the answer. “WOW!!” and a laugh was my reaction to what I had found. It was not my partner’s ignorance or other people’s misunderstanding of my condition but I found that at the core it was one of my own mind’s thought which was trying to kill the body using the same body (Wicked isn’t it!?) A thought which was saying, “End it all and you will be fine.” I was laughing out loudly at this…it was the joke of my lifetime…kill yourself and you will be fine!? 😀 I suddenly realized the fool I have been. But I still was not convinced so I went in with another question which just popped up, “But how…how can I see it!? Am I not the mind itself!?”. This inquisition took me to the verge of a place in me where I have never been before. I encountered an experience which I cannot describe because even the “I” who came in, vanished and nothing was left except “that” which I cannot describe. May be the closest word to describe that feeling is “unbounded peace”. The state didn’t last long but for the first time I got the taste of which masters throughout the ages has acknowledged as the “supreme” or “one’s ultimate truth”. I knew I cannot return back to my old depressive state; the old personality and the false concept of myself has started crumbling and an intense urge to experience the answer to the question ~ “Who am I really?” has emerged in place of the depression.

Life had somehow tricked me into living again 😀

Although I was taught in Vipassana as per S.N. Goenka’s teachings and have been reading Osho’s discourses for a decade or so, I hardly ever practiced them. So I knew a lot about awareness/spirituality but most of it was at intellectual level which actually counts to nothing when it comes to actual spiritual living. But after that day’s, actually, that night’s realizations it was clear to me that I need to adopt this way of living and never look back. So I can say I started my journey of awareness in a pragmatic manner from that night onward.

Now coming back to the questions. The aware way of living made me realize about the nature of human mind. I understood that my partner like me is also a slave of her own mind and she is stuck with the false concept that her mind and body is what she is in reality. This single realization gave birth to all the three answers which are actually axioms.

1. “Why am I being cheated by my partner!?”  ~Because her mind wanted her to and she followed her mind like any good slave does.

2. “Why didn’t I suspect about it earlier!?” ~Because I was my own mind’s slave and I too followed my mind like a good slave. My mind’s attachment towards my partner crippled my awareness and sensitivity.

3. “How do I treat the one who has cheated me?” ~With compassion aka loving kindness 😀

The last question is the most important one as it is the only one which is concerned about the “present”, the other two are from the realm of “past”.  Although the answers are complete in themselves, I know that these answers would not satisfy many as they may find them very brief. So I will be posting one new post exclusively dedicated to each of the above questions to elaborately express my findings. This post has now become quite long and I hope nobody finds it boring 😛

May all* you be happy and peaceful in your life _/\_

*The “all” includes my Ex as well 😛 😀