The Anonymous Inspiration

We all are inspired by something or someone in our lives. We are inspired to change the way we live,  see things differently & react & in a way different than we normally do. The process of inspiration doesn't stop just there. It is the constant force of life which uplifts us, makes us stand up again after a fall. It is the element of learning, which is the ultimate purpose of living.
Inspiration is the air of change. It directs us to witness the events in our lives with an altered perspective, to move in a different, unseen direction.
We are attracted towards inspiring people, as our mind is curious to know the dimension of life they have seen. But we confuse inspirational people with successful people. Inspiration isn't something that originates in a person once he/she has achieved success, it is anonymous. It has a source in anything & everything, in the  abundance of God. It is the part of the something unearthly, of spirit that has been living forever. That is why deceased people also inspire us. They give us something from the beyond, a ray of light.
Inspiration does reside in the past & the present but it is only in the present that manifests it into some concrete action towards change. As one convert inspiration into actions, one witnesses more of the former.
A stranger walking on the street would sometimes manage to inspire more than the people you've lived your whole life with.
It doesn't matter if you know the person completely. All that matters is that there is certain similarity of situation & a room for change & it will work its charm.

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The Anima of Personality

Personality is the interface between the 'real' you & the world. It is responsible for both creating & destroying how the world perceives you.
There are certain things needed for personality to manifest itself. One of them is Truth.
Life is where the action is. Action is where change is. Change is where the truth is. Truth is undisguised expression of self. It is the space in which the personality expands & becomes free from blame & rescue.

Truth cannot be kept hidden as it supports life, change & transformation of personality in synchronization with the universe. Without the element of truth in life, it is meaningless to live. Therefore it is crucial that we do not lie to ourselves or to the ones who affect our lives, because it creates a different view of our personality, or a false interface through which only deception emerges & our real self becomes inaccessible & thus, gagged & trapped in its own trick, it becomes dead. What is personality without truth? It is structure-less like flesh without bone. True love never touches a fake personality.
The other thing that personality needs to grow is its expression. When there is truth in the personality, there is a guileless & fearless expression of what a person wants from life.
Expression entails change. If you don't express what you want, who you are, you probably will never get it.
What one deserves is only known by how one expresses it.

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The Moment of Revelation

Our life is a string of moments which signify the transition from present to future. They are the bridges of reality connecting the present to the future, on which the mind walks. Some of those are very emphatic or life-changing, whose magnitude definitively outshines the others. Once the being experiences that change, its perception gets altered, thus afterwards, everything around it seems to have changed in a good or bad way. Every little thing starts to mean in a different way.  For example, the coming of the result for an exam which would be a turning point of one's life if one succeeds. The moment before the result is announced, i.e. the present is filled with anxiety & desperation. The future depends entirely on how you cross that bridge, your outlook towards how you want to live after this moment has passed.  It could be full of happiness & cheers or of sadness & despair. Calmness in the moments of typical anxiety will result in the fixation of such outlook throughout the future. Calmness will make the present peaceful as well as the future, if disappointing, livable. Live the present without the anticipation of future. You wouldn't know when it arrived & you'll still be the same composition, without any wear & tear; a traveler, going towards another wormhole.

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A Connection for Eternity

Conception of a new consciousness is the most rewarding of all the creations. It is a rebirth of the mother. She creates a structure which will have it's own cognizance, in which she'll see her own image, her own principles being mirrored back. In this connection of spirits that will last forever, she remains a repertoire of serenity, of hope that flows from her to the child like a warm stream of water, whose source is within her, yet so beyond her. The flow remains steady even when her child is miles away from her.

For her whole life, this very bond will be cherished & nurtured. It will never break & remain invulnerable to prejudices & betrayal from others & even from her own child.

The Mother becomes the first teacher. She inculcates all that is good & bad into her child's tender perception, so he could be safe in matters of choice & decisions.She is the guiding light, in the night that is life. Her light of love & company scintillates into the darkened, secret corners of her child's mind & he reveals to her every happening, every secret & never tries to hide anything. When she talks tough & scolds, it is certain that she'll smile at the end.

To the one that has given us the gift of life, an open sky & a roof. 

May she always be safer & closer than she is now. 

Happy Mothers Day

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Imagination is Incentive

Imagination is like insomnia. Albeit it is less harmful to us in long run than the latter, it is a haunting force which takes us places, making our real world drift to shadows for a while. It is a drug for an anti-realist. Although one cannot possibly imagine anything without having given the base to real things first, one is constantly dragged into a world of incredulity, believing what the mind tells us in its subtle and strange language.
A favorable change doesn't come knocking on the door. It needs effort. Before effort, it needs awareness and before awareness, it needs imagination to fuel the search for better. Hope is also directly related to imagination. If we never imagined anything, we wouldn't hope for it to be true.
Take the task of making this world a greener place for instance. To make things right, we would have many ways but to understand the graveness of current situation, we'd have two opportunities. First, to see the jaded reality, the smoke, the vehement encroachments on nature's beloved realms. The next, to imagine a better world, to envision the breezy mornings in the cradle of nature. If we just keep seeing the bleak reality, we'd be depressed & unmotivated to change it for good. There will be no escape. While if we imagine, we'd still might not make this world perfect, but we won't make it worse too.
The light of imagination, is incentive in its purest form, a blessing for a better future.

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Terrorism: A Sad Twist of Belief

What we believe about God may or may not be true, but it certainly is an ethical idiosyncrasy. Those tenants of cultural behavior and values make sense. It certainly is the right path, at the start of which stands bright hope and at the end there is harmony and non violence.
What is truth? It is the synonym of belief when it touches the boundaries of submission and interpretation. The problem is, we sometimes fail to differentiate between these terms. Truth is a slave of perception. When the perception of an individual changes, so does the truth. Belief however is the set of rules we follow which are bound to ethics and harmonious life & has nothing to do with change. But belief gets dragged into truth and it is validated all the time. If a student prayed to God to pass him in an examination, his belief will depend upon the testing of his prayer when the result is announced. If he fails in the exam, his belief will dwindle as his prayer was unheard. This is a mistake.
What do terrorists do? They bring their own perception into belief and consider that twisted thing to be the truth and submit to it firmly regardless of ethics. Belief is not specific to religion. It is an element of submission, not validation and certainly not something to be twisted and molded.

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On Patience

Evolution is a gradual process and is about growth through the establishment of simple truths, which are the rules that reap maximum benefits for the sustenance of individuals in this world.

We are the subjects of evolution, always getting built into a greater structure on different mental and physical grounds. We are also the creatures of Egoism. The expression of egoism hinders our soul towards experiencing and assimilating the simple truths that evolutionary life has to offer.
Nature undergoes the construction process slowly. The changes towards the benefit of the individual happen gradually, over the period of several years sometimes. The time depends on whether we fight towards the change or against it. The scars heal slowly as the complex forces of nature come together to form a system.
We are the ones who resent the slowness of life's change. We want to grow faster, make fast decisions, heal faster, become popular instantly but what we forget is that to evolve is nature's own way to train us for good and it only happens if we remain patient.
Impatience always leads to people going astray, swerving away from the path of evolution, the path of good.
We must remember that for a journey of thousand miles begins not just with the first confident step, but the first 'patient' step.

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The Perception of Luck

He bent down one last time with his club in hand, staring defiantly at the sands. Surely, this would be one step too far. Everyone around him had given up hope. There was no way with the inclination so steep that anyone could lift the ball above the bunker and into the hole, not in one stroke anyway. But this guy was different. He saw the wind was moving in his direction and once the ball cleared the bunker, there was a downward slope to the hole. He selected his club, with the approval of his caddie and focused on the ball. The world around him vanished like a man with an astigmatic vision. He took one swing of the club, the ball flew out of the bunker and slowly made its way towards the hole and with each rotation the palpitation of the crowd was so loud, you could hear it. And then, VOILA!!! We had a winner. The ball slips into the hole; the player takes his cap off and bows to the crowd. He was none other than Tiger Woods himself.

Once we know the name, we are often led into believing the inevitability of that result. But just think, if that person was a newcomer, an unknown person none of us would be thinking like this. It’s as if we have classified a particular set of individuals as genius or in some cases and cultures demi-gods. For others, everyone has a threshold, a limit beyond which we cannot pass. However in our myopic judgement we don’t notice the simplicity of their thinking, the adroitness of their execution and the passion in their hearts. They simply break a problem down into simple constituents and always take it one step at a time.

So next time before procrastinating at a problem, ask yourself this question. Is this problem really impossible, or is your acceptance an excuse for your indolence. And then remember what Cassius told Marcus Brutus in the play Julius Caesar, “Don’t blame the stars, for the fault lies in ourselves that we are underlings.”

Guest Written By Abhinav Verma

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Athletes As A Dream of Impulse

What do we find common between a professional footballer on a payslip with 5 zeroes on it every week and an 8 year old running pointlessly in the middle of the day? Is it the spark of fulfilment in their eyes or the joy they get while doing what they love to do?

The answer to this question is also the very reason why kids idolize atheletes. Maybe its because they live out their dreams in them. Just imagine how satisfying it would be to make a living out of something you love to do! Most of us as kids must have had an awesome plan or a dream we now only wish we would have chased. So what changed?

Kids have an enviable knack for doing something with such selfless committment that it is beyond any comprehensible logic. They don't worry about the outcome nor do they need any external motivation. Whereas, we as adults are inspired only by logic, trying to do things only if there is a definite outcome we are aware of. We don't take enough chances. Children are therefore, in many weird ways braver than adults as they don't need incentives as a source of inspiration. So my advice, be impulsive, take your chances, never grow up!


Guest Written By Mohit Lakhotia

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Can Curiosity & Maturity Coexist?

It is hard to put a price on what we gain from experience but for some of us there is one great quality that gets expended in this evolutionary step, curiosity. The ironic thing is that curiosity is mandatory for discovery, success & experience and we kill it in the first place as we grow up, by manifesting ego. The first point where loss of curious outlook occurs is when we start to think 'I know', whereas, to start to know something, we should avoid thinking just that.
For those of us who put ego before experience & get hurt & fatigued with every endeavor they make, what is needed to be remembered is that every event in life is a trial. We live to experiment. If we lose the agility to experiment, our life will only be a emotionless chase to nowhere except collecting a few ideas that support our ego.
A childlike curiosity is nature's primary & most precious gift. It is like water to a tree, necessary at the very root & at every step of its growth to gain height & strength that this world demands. All that is needed is to let the water of curiosity be present in the soil of life, to moisten & tender every mature flower.

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Inside the Geometry of Sound

There are two ways for soul to leap to the higher consciousness, a state where His presence becomes undeniable & blessings, scintillating warm. One is of silence and the other of music. People have been praying in silence and celebrating His presence with devotional music since time began. These attempts have gotten instilled into the lives of those of us who grew up believing His existence. This kind of music has changed with time too, but it has remained solid in its purpose. What purpose? I'll get to that later. Sometimes I find myself at a point of confusion thinking, what would an atheist experience after listening to what we call a religious hymn. There may or may not be surprises for him/her. Still, there must be a bias created, an internal conflict rising on the boundaries of his/her disbelief.

The main sign of soul music is that it defies the boundaries of religion. Its purpose is that it unites all the perceptions of God. There exists no other way to prove that He is really one than to experience His same pristine presence in music from different religions.Those disparate yet synchronized notes in the hymn of invocation make us see that they signify the same one truth, of one being.

The devotional music, be it Sufi or Hindu or Christian in origin, leads to oneness. This sound is like a sphere with the listener in the center, reveling in the joy that is union of all religions.

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What We Take from the Poor

Read a quote on a tattered Iraqi poster : "What we give to the poor, is what we take with us when we die".
The saying got stilled deep in the heart with a chilling of bone. It was ethereal, yet so worldly. It posed a question to me, why isn't what we get from the poor that matters? I am not talking about money, just to be clear to those looking for irony.
We give to the poor the things they need that are under our self-constrained limits, but what we get from this is a belief that to live, is to help and give. This belief is precious. It keeps humanity sustained. The sense that one can help other is not a sense of pride for the giver, but of mutual happiness, in its uncontaminated form.
What you give, comes back to you as a solidified feeling of satisfaction. It stays with you like a clear sky over your head & it keeps your service recorded even after you die. Thus service is larger than life & to serve humanity, is a work of such souls whose purity cannot possibly be put into words.


"Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?"

& The King Replied: "Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did to me."

Matthew 25:31-46

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Everlasting Friendship

Horizon is ablaze with the light of the sun shining through the clouds. Friends are just sitting together. Not a special day.The strangest fact about this mundane scene is that out of all the days memory paints out to us, we feel saddest for those with this sight in it.

Some of these days are meant to be 'special' in a way that they involve friends going away, drifting farther to a shattering possibility that they may never see you again. It is soothing enough that this is a thin possibility & to think that they may meet you in future, at one of the anticipated coincidences meant to revive your friendship.

Sadness once seated into mind, grips it for a long time. It is better not to think about the 'going-away' with such negativity surrounding it.

Still, days pass with the odd feeling of alienation. New friends seem just a cheap replacement. For the fragile ones of us, days get shorter and the nights, endless. Walking down the same road, going back to the same place traces eerie & all consuming doubts about acceptance.

Believe, at those moments that..

True friendship is never affected by distance. It is this testing stone that sets it apart from other type of relationships. It is never meant to be a weakness because the degree of compassion & wish of well being for a friend, grows with the distance, just like the horizon becomes clearer with the distant, descending sun.

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Find Your Comfort

In this fast paced life dominated by money, forget about measuring it, can you at least see it? Do you feel comfort in those quiet, passive moments in which you and your soul don't share problems, just ambitions. For many of us, these silent moments have either not occurred or they just pass with the odd kind of loudness and more discomfort to sit through. The silence seems loud to the discomforted.
If you are one of such, then there exists quite a reason for you to slow down a bit & appraise yourself. Through this uncomfortable assessment, you will be presented with the possibility that the comfort zone you live in, is false. You are not who you should have been. Comforts will shift to different meanings. You realize that you didn't actually comfort yourself with the things you wanted to risk it for, but chased it to futile disappointment.

You tried to forge your comfort zone in gaining money or love. The only one to correct this misconception will be you. It won't require much effort after this to find your true comfort. The bravery that you showed in introspection will reward you. You will be far braver and more comfortable about yourself than you thought you could be. Brave souls find faith in themselves in the most sinister of situations.
Being brave and faithful to yourself is all there is to comfort. You have found yours.

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The Devil

There wasn't a time when he ceased to exist. He has always been present in our lives like the shadowy past for a repentant. Having infiltrated his way into the darkest corners of our soul, he lurks and covets for an expression that would blunt the hideousness which we are made of.

This isn't any secret that our very composition has a hint of darkness to it. We don't come to know its origin just like we remain unaware of the origin of our faith in God.
The Devil's work is to make us experience the coldest truths of life, those utterly jaded and depraved figments of reality that we fail to behold in good times. The Devil, also referred to as Lucifer indeed has a literal meaning, 'light bearer' which clearly interprets to his very deep purpose in our lives, that is enlightenment. He introduces you to the life you'd hate to live, but he is a necessary evil. He clings to the existence of God. He comes with him.
Whether or not we feel his punishing presence soon after our wrong doings, he arrives to correct us.
What is needed for us is to acknowledge, not banish his presence, see him as a teacher & see the dark times as a delayed boon because even if we hate, in the darkest of hours, lie the brightest of realizations.

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Answers, Don't Matter

Mind is a sky. A clear, open eye takes its enormous dimension into it, imbibing its contents like a cherished perspective.
Kites, resembling to thoughts fly about at the brim of its soaring endlessness, taming its pride with their determination to scale it.

Is holding on to a thought only a matter of commitment? Some thoughts are shrugged off on the grounds of their unconventional and unusual structure. This is just that, our insecurity and inertia to think beyond what society or environment allows us to. Then it is negation of the purpose of the thought, whose wish is just to fly and reach the farthest, trigger new questions and see the unseen.
Through this flow of thoughts you realize something, that it is not the answers that we need all the time. It is more important that we are questioning ourselves, that we are finding new ones all the time without coming to answers of the previous ones.
For the new year, think about how many path breaking questions arose in your mind through the year. It is not important that you found their answers, it is important that you asked yourselves those. That was the purpose of thoughts, to engage you into meaningful questions. Just let them climb the boundaries this new year and see where they take you..
Maybe you'll realize the fun in just flying that kite.

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Why is it Hard to Look in the Eye of a Beggar?

I saw a beggar around the corner of a street some days ago. Rarely has anybody seen them. Years of development have been frozen for those dejected by the community. Even if a curious squinting of the eyes reveal the raw and gloomy human condition to us, on its face, with gaze averted we pretend to be busy in our demanding lives. Ah, the lives of trance. It is too hard to get away from work and family to have a clear perception of anything else. Well, we can't be fully denied of such an excuse because to pretend is a human condition too, far too prevalent than penury.

I wondered what was there so repulsive in the eyes of that beggar. Upon meeting of the eyes a shearing sense of embarrassment and guilt would surface, a guilt so large that consumes the whole of sympathy for that poor creature of God and makes us walk away.

It is nothing but our insensitivity to the obvious truth of life. It is our own frailty. We all are beggars here. It is just the matter of degree which separates us from those impoverished and devastated. It is about losing the cloak of unaccounted status that we wear all the time to save us from embarrassment. It is about opening our eyes and have them meet with those deserted of happiness, pleading for first love.

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The Knots of Resolution

Resolutions are tiny figments of our idealistic imagination that keep us happy in the holidays with the warmth of positivity and grit that they breathe into our real life, a life where only some promises are kept, and the rest forgotten. Resolutions are promises to self, to advance us constantly towards doing anything or averting a bad habit. Each line in the page of resolutions is a small packet of incentive to fuel good work through the next year. Each of these are adorned on the tree of festivity each year along with the others, like tiny pieces of red cloth tied into knots symbolizing memory and stability. If a knot is low on strength, it slips off into the darkness of the tree itself, or blown away by the wind. The promises which are unknowingly abandoned are left loose into the flurry of forgetfulness. This cold, snowy wind never returns anything that is given to it, not even a faint sense of remembrance of what is lost.

There is nothing that we really keep, from the promising tree, apart from a sense of speculation that some promise existed. 

 The same inspirations left loose never come back next year, the tree and the wind may. Faith allows us to preserve our inspirations into a beautiful tree symbolizing life, but real life is too cruel to let all the inspirations tied in the same place, next year.

What we need to remember is that each of these red knots of faith and belief are as necessary to a tree as the forgotten resolutions to us. We cannot really avoid losing them, but we can avoid not believing in what good they could do to us.

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On the Loser's Side

Life is full of impressive people. People who possess tools of sleight, to inveigle you into their charming outlook. They proclaim their power, their win. They hail it. They feel nothing is wrong about it. Neither do you, at the moment, when you join them after being a spectator of their thriving win over the other side, the ones who are eventually abandoned over the thought that they would never cope up and fight back or even win. Those people did not appear impressive enough at the moment when you, decided to be on one of the sides. It was not much of a decision as it was more of a predisposition towards the winning side.

Why is it always the winners, the momentarily more impressive people, that the mob takes side of? Why are the losers left alone by the spectators and even their own people, to just dream of eating the fruits of cornucopia? A Loser has no companion. All he has is a stiffened ego, not willing to amend, only at first.

It takes courage to back a loser, to give him a shoulder and a hand, but it is where you really understand the other side, the winning side. You should take the solitude, the loneliness as an opportunity to talk to yourself. The winner will never get this chance. The mob will surround him, bathe him with deafening adoration that would muffle his inner voice for long. The Loser will hear what the heart has to say, in the loneliness. He will see what it takes. He will change himself and his friend towards good.

From change come wonders.

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Should You Enjoy Certainty?

There are a lot of moments in life where one is very certain about something good. Many things, not one, seem to fall right into place as if the coming events were part of God's routine work, destined to happen with a clockwork precision. What do these certainties entail? Is there actually a real clarity in the individual's perspective to see through the sheath of time and revel about the favorable result?

There are two kinds of certainties reveled by an individual. One is of endeavor-originated; Those contingencies that arise as a result of work of commitment and diligence. Another is the superficial one, having been deliberately firmed up to support hope, which later turns out to be a mirage. Both of them make us happy beforehand, about the good things to come. To be hopeful is a completely different thing than to be certain as it doesn't involve the scientific analysis of possibilities and it is a matter of inclination.

There is no real revel in revelation beforehand. It is in the anticipation and hope. Thus you should take certainty with equipoise and enjoy hope. 

Certainty of events has no adventure. The adventure lies with being hopeful.

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