Pity No One or Pity Everyone

Pity is better than insult, but it still isn’t a positive reaction.
We often pity people who we think are below us. We use pity to establish a positive self image, when in reality, we feel superior to the other, and that feeling of superiority is not a positive trait. When someone is not able to take care of their health, due to negligence, lack of exercise, it’s easy to say you feel bad for them. “Poor guy, can’t take care of his health.” Or when someone hold a grudge against another, an obviously negative and counterproductive thing to do, we say “I feel bad for this person’s inability to end a fight.”
I cannot even count the number of times such expressions of pity have entered my mind. Because I have an easy time controlling my diet and spending my time wisely, I see myself as “above” the ones who cannot do that. There are many people who cannot do what I can do easily, but it doesn’t make me better. When we blame poor people for their circumstances, when we pity their inability to get out of their situations, we aren’t helping anyone. There are times when I sometimes eat too much. There are many times when I procrastinate. To be human is to indulge in pleasures, sometimes uncontrollably. Sometimes these indulgences lead to self-destruction. That’s what they are meant to do. That I can rise above my desires at times, does not erase all the times I have succumbed to them. For some reason, when comparing ourselves to those we see inferior, we forget all the times we have behaved in similar ways. It is so easy to judge other people, and then to pity them. Doing so creates status differences. It creates the distinctions between people who are productive and those who are not. By denying our own shortcomings, by pitying, we are just adding divisions to an already-divided world.
I think that a world without pity is a world with compassion and empathy. Because if you don’t pity the man who eats too much food, you say, “I know what it feels to over-indulge at a buffet.” And when someone holds a grudge, you say, “I can be like that too.” In a way, we will all start being self-critical every time we see someone we would previously be critical of.

We are all just human beings, and our habits are strikingly similar. So it’d be more accurate to pity everyone for being human or pity no one for being human. (I say pity no one, because being human is great!)

Daily Reminder: Change Today Not Tomorrow

I spent my entire day sitting. Have you ever spent your entire day sitting? I’m sure you have. We all have. I am always in my thoughts, worrying about a future that hasn’t come yet and forgetting that the present moment is always leaving me before I have a chance to acknowledge it.
You know what happens when you eat with this mentality? You don’t know when to stop. Then after you’ve scarfed down a two person meal, you feel guilty and promise yourself “never again will this happen to me.” It happens again. Five minutes after your stomach finally feels somewhat empty.
It surprises me sometimes, how much I take the future for granted. My little brother just came up to me and told me he was going to bed and I realized I hadn’t talked to him the whole day. I was stuck in my head, I had no time to spend with my little brother who is growing up so fast. Then I calmed myself down with the thought, “you can spend tomorrow a little better.”
Yeah. Right.
Because tomorrow seriously isn’t coming. This “tomorrow” we speak of is terrible at commitments.
In our chemistry class, we would all do pretty badly on our tests, and each and every time we’d apologize to our teacher and tell her, “next time we’ll get better.” She’d say “we’ll see.” And then we wouldn’t change anything about our study techniques or the amount of work we put into the class. We studied for chemistry the same way we studied it before those failed tests, and what do you know, we failed again. She told us after a couple failures, “you will never get a better grade if you don’t change your study habits. If you have the same habits as you did before the undesirable consequences, that consequence will occur again.”
Thinking about how tomorrow you will do something differently is an event we can all relate to. Whenever I mess up, one of the ways in which I pick myself out of the misery is by reminding myself that I can always change my habits tomorrow. But honestly, if we don’t start today, right now, then change isn’t going to happen.
I need to start from right now and get off my butt.

You, reading this blog post, what are some of the things you’ve left for a hypothetical tomorrow? If you want to write something cool, start today. If you cannot control your eating habits, make sure you do something about it today. If you want to spend more time with your family, start thinking of actual, gradual changes you can make today that will make you more likely to do that tomorrow.
Start now!
Go!
No, no facebook.
Change your life today 🙂

The Majestic World of the Mantis Shrimp

“There is a reality of paper, infinitely different from the reality of literature. For the kind of mind possessed by a moth which eats that paper, literature is absolutely nonexistent, yet for Man’s mind, literature has greater value than paper.” –Rabindranath Tagore

My science teacher was describing visual impairments when a friend in the seat behind me poked me in the back and whispered, “I’m color blind.”
“Wait, you’ve never seen green grass before?” I asked him. “That must suck man.”
“But why?” he asked. “Why does it matter if I have never seen green before? I see a color, why do I have to see green?”
At this point, I hadn’t a clue of what to say to him. Because, really, I asked myself, what was so important in green? Wait, what is green, anyway?
“It is a tragedy because you can never experience reality. Green is the real color of grass and for you it’s this dirty shade of brown.” I told him.
Smirking, he asked, “How do you even know what’s real and what’s not?”

We may be missing everything or we may be missing nothing. The mantis shrimp, with its sixteen color receptors, challenges the second assumption. When humans run around frantically trying to discover all there is to be discovered, the mantis shrimp snaps its claws, creates light from sound, a phenomena we aren’t even close to understanding, and says, “Ha, good luck with that.”
Questioning what we are missing is questioning our understanding of reality. Perhaps, to the mantis shrimp, blue is an incandescent hue, fading and reappearing, shimmering in the sunlight. The color explosion that would dull our perception of the world is the mantis shrimp’s reality.
This is a slap in the face to anyone (me) who’s ever dreamed of learning about everything. The sadistic mantis shrimp and its magical color vision crush my dreams, making me seem like a disillusioned teenager girl with impossible expectations.
“Ha, good luck with that” echoes in my nightmare, the taunting rainbow face of the mantis shrimp circles through my mind.

Here’s a scary thought: what if there is no reality? What if everything is just a figment of my imagination? Here’s an even scarier fact: for a solipsist, this thought is their reality. Solipsists actually believe that the world is a figment of their imaginations. “We’re not ‘missing’ anything,” they’ll say. “Our minds made the mantis shrimp up.” My colorblind friend won’t label a solipsist “crazy.” He’ll stand up for them saying, “How do you know what is real and what is not?”

Human minds may be flawed and incomplete, but they are all we have. I couldn’t be typing this if I didn’t have my mind. We wouldn’t know what a mantis shrimp even was if we didn’t have our minds. My three color receptors allow me to frolic in a meadow of flowers, write about it and share my vision.
Now if I could talk to a mantis shrimp, and said mantis shrimp could then boast about how spectacular the world was with 16 color receptors, we’d have a problem.
Otherwise, the bargain of never knowing what we’re missing is not entirely a bad one.

Read this Note if I Die Tomorrow

If I have died…please remember that my dog still needs a home. He also likes tummy-rubs. He’s clean right now, we gave him a bath just last week, so don’t be afraid to dig right in and give him a good scratch where he likes it (near his left front arm and a bit lower than that).

If you can, tell my friends that I always cherished their company, even if sometimes my expression didn’t show it. They know I’m not the most out-going girl, they loved me despite my flaws, but just tell them again, just so I have some peace of mind.

Oh, and if you can, give my diaries to a girl who really needs them. I usually never wanted anyone to read my personal thoughts, but I think I learned quite a bit these past few years of being alive. Maybe reading them will inspire her to be confident in herself, and to never straddle her self-worth on a boy who’s growing up himself.

Please sell all my stuff and send the money to charity. None of the items I possessed have any real value themselves, if you remove me from the equation of course.

I am dead, so my words have achieved saint-status, and I have advice for you– please live your life the way you want to. Find your definition of success and follow it. I mean, I know there will be days when you hate living, but just remember that there are good things about where you are right now. Please be happy you have time. Please be grateful you aren’t me.

Google Search= “What Can I Do With *insert degree name here*”

Something must be done to stop this.

I am a first year college student trying to decide what she wants to major in and this is what my life has become. I am living an existence of constant boring google searches. You know what I chose? Neuroscience. Why?

Because I love the brain. Not because I know what I will do with this degree or what, if any, practical applications it has. I have no intentions to go to medical school, because I know how long and hard training is and then how long and hard the profession can be. I don’t want to get a PhD and become a professor. I don’t want to go into business because I cannot see myself in that role. I cannot see myself in law school, because I am an introvert and lawyering sounds very people-intensive. I don’t want to become an engineer because I would make a shitty one. WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE ME? Nowhere.

To top it off, every adult who knows me has such high expectations of what I should become. My mom has hopes of seeing me hold a PhD in my hand. Family friends have taken me aside and told me I should become a doctor. I have this gift of further education that my mom did not have, and I have to use it, or how ungrateful will I look?

Of all the possibilities that I have read about, the only one that made me excited was the prospect of getting into the education industry. I want to be a science educator, but not just science. I want to spread awareness about social issues and injustices. I want to write about the affect of mindfulness on health. Basically, I want to be a journalist/educator.

How I will get there, and what degree I need to pursue in college, I do not know. Will all the adults in my life be satisfied with my choice?

I don’t think I really even care.

A Teenager’s Fear of Death and of Dying

I think I have a disease.

Realizing that my disease, or whatever this is, is going to change the way I live life from the moment I discovered I may have it, made me realize that I too, despite my earlier belief, have an idea of what life “should” be. I want myself to have a perfect life, with minimal failure and minimal sadness. It scares me that the future does not guarantee my dreamed life. My disease is even making it reality.

I read stories about people losing their family members in freak accidents and of people having to put down their old dogs after they cannot live any longer today. The truth is, there is absolutely nothing keeping these realities from becoming my own. My dog will get old one day. My parents could get into a car accident. It makes me very scared.

I want to do anything in my power to prevent the scary future possibilities from ever coming true. But I know my attempts will be futile, because everyone tries, and at least once in their lives, everyone fails.

I haven’t gotten to that point in my life when I can write about losing someone close to me. I have yet to experience permanent loss, and I am not going to lie and say I’m not scared. Because I am. But I am also awake.

I don’t know whether to be happy that I am aware of the impermanence of life, of the impermanence of everything I hold so dearly. I am aware that we cling too hard on the continued existence of our loved ones. At certain moments, I question why I have ever been kind to anyone, why I have let anyone depend on me, if it is true that I will die one day and leave them all to suffer. It isn’t as sad for the person who has died than it is for the people who have lost. The ones left behind after a death must try to salvage what remains of their lives and keep moving on.

I read this quote today, when I was thinking about all this. Janine Shepherd said in her TED talk,”It wasn’t until I let go of the life I thought I should have that I was able to embrace the life that was waiting for me.” The life I should have doesn’t include loss, or suffering or discomfort. The life I will have is not even close to the one I want, but that doesn’t mean it is nothing, that it is bereft of meaning if it isn’t perfect. A life is a life and it should be lived, no matter what experiences it makes a person go through.

All of this is easier said than done. But after writing, and thinking deeply about all of this, I think I am happy that I am aware, but also okay with the sadness that inevitably comes with it.

Ticking of Your Clock

We notice the big changes. Moving countries, leaving school, getting a disease, death, birth. We notice only the big changes and they knock us off our feet.

What if we noticed every change?

No change would make us question the “stability” in our lives, because we’d know there is no “stability”, there is only our minds.

We lose dying cells all the time. After a few years, every organ in your body will have been replaced by a new one. Some neural connections are lost ever minute while new ones are formed. Stimuli in the environment is constantly changing.

We don’t look so closely.

What if we did?

The future is probabilistic, the past is set in stone. The only thing we have is right now. The only thing you have is your breath. It is your count, the sand in your hourglass, the ticking of your clock.
Breathe in and breathe out. Be grateful for your breath.

It’s the only thing you can ever have for sure.

Goodbyes

Tomorrow brings the end to my life in India.
There’s this pervading sense of unfairness when it comes to goodbyes. Why are they so tough? Why are we designed to hurt so much when they happen? Why do they happen so frequently?
There was this man who died in an Italian restaurant after being bit by a poisonous spider. He didn’t get a chance to say his difficult goodbyes or to contemplate his death.
When I say goodbye to India today, I’m going to feel bad and ask “why me and why now?” or “can’t I have a little while longer?”. That’s how we see our lives, we assume we deserve long stretches of times and people to develop relationships with. The truth is we really don’t and I’m just lucky I have both.
So yes, goodbyes are tough, but I am grateful I get the time to say them.

 

Mindfulness and Body Image

As I continue to focus on my breathe as it moves in and out, I’ve started putting less emphasis on how I look. This isn’t to say I’m not taking care of hygiene, but that I am just not fretting over spots on my skin and the way my hair is framing my face.
Mindfulness is all about accepting the world inside and outside you without judgement. So I look at my imperfections and accept that they are, but I do not let my mind lead itself onto the path of self destruction with thoughts like “I am ugly.” I am not ugly. I just have imperfections, and both of those are not the same thing.

I wanted to put my new self image to the real test: visiting public places. In the past, leaving the house consisted of me worrying about how other people are perceiving me. “They must be looking at my pimple right now” or “The world is staring at how horrible my hair looks” or “Gosh, I forgot to shave/wax and now everyone is probably getting grossed out”. You get what I mean. Mindfulness is great when I’m alone, because I am accepting myself, and I am changing only one person’s perspective, but when I’m out in the crowd, I cannot tell everyone else not to color their opinion of me based on how I look. That’s what people do.
I focused on my breath and took in my surrounding without judgement. I observed everything. I looked at people and only looked. And I could see beauty everywhere. It’s so weird when people say things like “the world is so beautiful when you get out of your head” because it sounds absurd. Our heads make things beautiful, right? Everything is so wonderful when you remove judgement. I wasn’t worried about how other people saw me because I was so busy appreciating them (in my own shy, non-smiling way). I went from being observed to becoming the observer. That slight change made all the difference.

When you’re mindful and the self does not exist, you experience a freedom very few human beings get to experience in their lifetimes. I have always felt trapped inside my body, thought of it as a punishment I had to bear for existing, but the moment I focused on my breath and really, truly lived in the moment, I started thinking of my body as a miracle. With it I can taste ice cream and feel the breeze, and with it I can hug my little brother and give my dog a tummy rub. My body is my key to living life.

My body image isn’t as positive as I may think it is, but if I keep trying to live in the present, I may just achieve a near-perfect acceptance of myself.

“You” Do Not Exist And Here’s Why

Everything was going so smoothly for me. I was slowly being introduced to Buddhism and on the side I got to watch lectures about how Buddhist doctrine is supported by modern Psychology. It was such wonderful fun! Then came the Buddha’s discourse on Not-Self and my mind blew up like it was prophesied it would. You don’t think about the Not-Self discourse. You live the Not-Self discourse. However, I’m a novice Buddhist. So the idea that “I” do not exist and “you” do not exist just wouldn’t stop haunting me. The thoughts were indestructible. After hours of thinking, reading Buddhists’ explanations and a few sad attempts at meditation, I have been able to somewhat reconcile the Not-Self discourse, and I figure there’s no better time than now to write a blog entry about it.

According to Buddhist thought, there are five “aggregates” or “constituents” of the human experience in which the “self” may exist. These aggregates are, namely, consciousness, form (body), perception, feeling (positive, negative, etc) and mental formations (thoughts, opinions, emotions).
The “I” we refer to, the entity that is in control of our actions, must reside in one of these five aggregates. It is believed that your “self” is constantly yours. Twelve year old you, eighteen year old you and thirty year old you are vastly different, but in some way, they are the same person, unchanging and permanent. You define yourself by your body (form), by your worldview, by the things you own and the thoughts you think.

The Buddha, in his discourse, argues that your self does not exist because none of the five aggregates are permanent or fixed. Your body is constantly changing, the events in your surrounding that are part of your consciousness are changing, your thoughts are constantly changing as are your feelings and perception. He says, if none of these things are permanent, how can they be used to define a permanent “self”? He says none of the five aggregates can be controlled in the way we believe the “self” is in control. You cannot change your body as you please, nor can you influence your feelings, perceptions and mental formations. Thoughts flow unceasingly and cannot be changed or controlled. If none of these five aggregates cannot be controlled in any way, how can they be used to define a “self” that controls? It can’t. And hence, the self does not exist.

He goes on to tell his listeners that once we stop thinking the aggregates define us, that they are ours, we no longer feel the need to cling to them. We are able to let them go, and by letting go, we are also letting suffering go.
“This is not mine. I am not this. This is not myself.”
Your self is not your body, your thoughts, feelings and perception.

During my web searches, I found some explanations that have helped me accept the idea. Here they are:

“In short what the Buddha meant was that the body was not the self, the mind was not the self, the feelings were not the self, or anything possessed by them was not the self. The notion of Self, the belief that something was mine or yours, was a mere illusion arising from the coming together of aggregates.
From the teachings of the Buddha we understand that if you study the individual components of a being and if you separate each of them, you will realize that nothing exists beyond them that is permanent and stable.
The human personality is an aggregate of several individual components. If you separate the components, can you say that the individual still exists?” -Jayaram V

“When I first began to meditate I discovered that thoughts and feelings are fluid, ever changing, often uncontrollable, frequently illogical and irrational. It was a painful realization, since I had assumed my mind was under my direct control.

Some years ago, one friend said,”If there is no belief in self, there is no worry; there is no reason to become angry or hurt.” To her, the idea was liberating. It was freedom from being tied to self-promotion and self-protection.

Buddhism says: Don’t think you are fixed, unchanging. You are forever flowing, shifting, interconnected with the whole cosmos. Free yourself from clinging to the idea that you are separate and have to fight against the world to keep your identity intact.” -Elizabeth J Harris