What caused you?

Prophecies are a staple of many stories. A set life path, leading to an inevitable conclusion – usually the death of a much despised villain at the hands of the chosen hero, or the reaching of a cherished goal.

Harry Potter was born to kill Voldemort. Lord Rama took a human form to end the evils of Ravana. Frodo was chosen to destroy the ring, and with it, the lord of Mordor.

So why are these people heroes? What made them heroes? What is their cause of being?

What brought Rama into being was the climactic battle in which he chopped off all ten heads of Ravana. What makes Harry a hero is the killing of Voldemort. What caused Frodo to be a hero is the act of flinging the ring into the fiery waters of Mount Doom.

The hero’s existence is justified by the act for which he was born. The reason for Rama’s birth is Ravana’s death. Harry lives so Voldemort may die. Frodo exists to end the power of Sauron.

Think about this for a while.

The cause of a hero’s coming into being lies far out in his future. The cause (villain’s death) comes after the effect (hero’s birth).

Why is this important? Remember the tons of prophecies Harry and his friends trashed when playing with the Death Eaters? Maybe they were about us!

Maybe, like Rama, you and I were born to fulfill a cause still some distance away. Maybe you, sitting in front of your computer right now, are unknowingly doing your part towards seeking your very own holy grail - one hidden away exclusively for you. How about that?

Good luck with the demon slaying!

The bomb that decided not to explode

A short piece of fiction that chose me to be its writer was published on everydayfiction.com on the 28th day of May, 2008.

It is a simplistic story about the power and freedom each of us possesses to be anything we want -- even something entirely opposite of what might appear to be our given purpose.

Do read the story and let me know how you liked it.

About twenty minutes before it was to fall and decimate more than half a country, the thermo-nuclear warhead “Arrow” became self-aware.

It discovered something akin to happiness in its first moments. The joy of existence spread to the very edges of its circuitous consciousness. It fell in love with itself.

Continue reading 'Arrow's Way' >>

Fable of the unfortunate king

Once there was a king who was young and ambitious. He ruled his land responsibly and was loved by his people.

He wasn’t very happy therefore, when one day, the wise court astrologer foretold his death. His exact words were, "Ten years from this day, you will die. And you will die alone."

The wise one had never been wrong before. The king considered his age and decided that life was not fair. He was to die at thirty!

The king grew angry with the wise one. But he respected him too much. So instead of having him executed or imprisoned, he limited the old man to his house and forbade him from making any more predictions.

As the years passed, the king grew sickly with worry. In all but appearance, he was already dead. The thought of death occupied all of his mind. Nightmares of bloody battles haunted his nights. Seven years remained.

Then one day, a travelling merchant came by to pay his respects. The king sat through the formalities looking his usual wooden self. When the time came for the meeting to end, the merchant asked, "What ails you my king?"

"Haven’t you heard citizen?" replied the king. "I am a dead king. In seven years, I will die. At the hands of what monsters, I don’t know."

The merchant considered his words and realised nothing would console the young king. He looked about and asked a guard out aloud, "When are you going to die?"

"I don’t know," said the guard.

The merchant asked him, "Will you die tomorrow?"

"It is unlikely. But anything can happen. Anyone may die at any time."

The merchant next addressed one of the ministers, "When do you think you will die my lord?"

The minister was silent for a while. Then he said, "I should very much prefer to grow old and die in peace. But that is not for me to decide. I could die any day, if God so willed."

The merchant turned to the king at last, "When will you die my king?"

"In seven years, as you very well know," said the king, now slightly irritated.

"What if you were to face off with a hungry lion in a ring tomorrow? Will you die then?"

Realisation pounced at the king out of nowhere. "I won’t," he said.

"What if you took your forces against that dastardly warmonger king to our north? Will he be able to kill you?"

"No," said the king, beaming now.

"For the next seven years, neither man, nor god - neither disease nor sword... will be able to harm you. You will die on a day seven years from now," said the merchant, "But that day is not tomorrow. Nor the day after, or the one after that."

The king rose to his feet and looked around. The court house looked different somehow. The courtiers looked different. They all spelt possibility.

There wasn’t much time. The king decided to get busy.

How to be an Authority Commenter

Let me start by assuming that your name is Vijayendra Mohanty and you don’t have a blog.

Good news is – your name is Vijayendra Mohanty. It’s not a special name by any stretch of imagination. But it is your name. So it is important.

So here you are, online and trying to make sense of the blogosphere. You read up acres and acres worth of beginners’ guides on the web and chat up scores of seasoned bloggers and web professionals. They inspire and motivate but you end up more confused than when you started.

You decide to start by lurking at some select joints in the blogosphere. You pick up RSS feeds left, right, and centre and read (as best as you can) the hell out of them. You give up on all but a few of them a week or so later. This is also the time when you start paying more attention to the few feeds that you are still reading.

You start clicking over to some of the blog posts and see a veritable torrent of comments under each write-up (you wouldn’t choose anything less than a pro blog, would you?). People are speaking their minds, letting the blogger know how wise, insightful, stupid, or short-sighted he/she is.

You realise you can contribute to this conversation. A lot of these people are not really saying anything. You can actually answer some of these questions and probably even introduce angles nobody has raised (noticed?) yet.

So you put the carat in the comment field and type out your point of view. After that, you set right (politely of course) a few of the buffoons that got to the thread before you did. Then you unassumingly sign the comment Vijayendra Mohanty and leave the URL field blank (you don’t have a blog, remember?).

The next day, you go back to the thread. There are more comments. Your heart jumps! People have taken the time to acknowledge your comment. Some agree with what you say and some don’t. But you are present there alright! You even get an @ reply from the blogger.

Pleased with yourself, you learn a valuable lesson – the web is about presence. Brochure-type websites for companies, photo blogs and galleries for professional photographers, tech blogs for those who know their machines. If you don’t blog, your name is your presence.

It represents you on comment threads. It is what you are known as to anyone who has ever been to the blogs you frequent. You are a known quantity.

If all the comments you have ever made on any blog post were to be aggregated on one web page (blog?), they would show a pattern, wouldn’t they? Your interests, you choice of topics, your use of language. Your general way of dealing with disagreement and with other people. Your personality!

Actually, it is not that IF a situation. If you have ever commented on a blog that uses Disqus Comments, you already have a page like that. Here, for example, is the disqus page of Karen Swim – a commenter on this blog. People can even subscribe to your comments the way they would subscribe to your blog (if you had one). There are other comment services like Disqus, (eg: IntenseDebate and SezWho) but I only have first hand experience with Disqus.

Taking comments responsibly can prove to be a powerful pre-launch strategy if you want to start a blog some time soon. But you might want to hurry up and get that vmohanty.com domain that has become such hot property, thanks to you obsessive, incessant, and insightful commenting.

How they remember past lives

I think I just figured out how some people manage to retain memories of their past lives. It is a reasonable enough explanation anyway. Listen.

In the universe, there is energy. It is everywhere and in everything. It is like Obi-Wan Kenobi's definition of the Force, "...an energy field created by all living things, that surrounds and penetrates living beings and binds the galaxy together."

There is also mass. Loosely defined, mass is stuff and energy is what makes stuff work. Everything is made of stuff and everything is being run by energy.

If you know basic level physics, you would know that energy can't be created or destroyed, it can only be converted from one form to another. It is called the law of conservation of energy. The same energy runs our bodies, nuclear reactions, the stars, and all manner of living and non living objects.

If you put absolutely anything under the microscope, you will see molecules. Regardless of which element something is made of, there are, microscopically speaking, vast empty spaces between molecules. This seemingly empty space contains energy.

You will see the same vast spaces and the same vibrating molecules in pretty much everything. Your hand, your bed, your dog. The list, as cliche goes, is endless. Energy holds matter together and keeps it from falling apart.

Now, we know that memories are extragenetic (independent of genes). If you are cloned, your duplicate will not have any memories of your life. (Watch the action-packed movie The 6th Day. Schwarzeneggar alert!)

Here's my point. Cloning replicates all matter in our bodies. But what of the energy? And what of that which the matter can not hold - memories?

What if, upon destruction of the body, the energy drifts away (soul?) taking with it memories, and just becomes a part of the sea of energy that is all around us. In due time when a new body made of matter needs mobilising, that bubble of energy enters it and brings the memories with it.

Some time ago, I wrote a post called Getting Ideas. In it I suggested that ideas are just things that float all around us and come to us when we seek them. I am saying that same thing about consciousness now.

Think of it as a like-attracts-like situation. A set of memories and feelings seeking matter will be drawn towards a body. Similarly, a body in need of a feeling will draw such towards itself.

Paranormal researchers say that many ghost sightings are a result of energy signatures left at certain places. So in a way, the universe remembers. (Read an oldish sci-fi book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called The Land of the Mists)

More proof that we are all connected. We are parts of each other and belong to each other, quite literally. Maybe the bright idea you just had was somebody's dying wish. How does that make you feel?

How to be Yourself

On my way to work (when I was working a year or so ago), I saw a billboard everyday. It had a bunch of kids posing in a variety of cool-seeming poses, wearing what the fashion store labelled fashionable then. The tag line was - Be Yourself.

Being one's own self has to be the easiest of things, right? We are already what we are, and have always been that way. Is it even possible to be anything but ourselves?

And yet, we fake a lot. We work very hard to resemble the ideal of the ideal. Somewhere in the collective super-conscious mind that connects us all, there is resentment about this. The real self doesn't like being bound and controlled. It is perhaps for that reason that the phrase 'be yourself' has such charm.

So, what part of me exactly is me? How much of my nature is really mine and how much of it is things I have learned to be? How can I know if I am myself (if that is at all possible)?

I don't know. But I can make a few educated guesses. Let me start at the beginning.

I am looking for a version of myself minus the things I have learnt. So it probably makes sense to look for my answers in a time when no one has learnt anything much - infancy and early childhood.

Metaphysical author Dolores Cannon, in her book Between Death & Life, suggests that a spirit in course of its many earthly lives, develops a personality. So it is wrong to assume that when (if for all you non believers) we are reborn, we start with a fresh slate. Cannon says that in the earliest stages of life, a person remembers a lot of this 'spiritual personality' and acts and makes choices accordingly.

Babies sometimes show qualities neither of the parents seem to possess. Were you a perfect fit in your family? I am not talking adoloscent rebelliousness here. But maybe long-standing differences of opinion, orientation, and even value systems?

Cannon says a baby brings with itself many qualities of the spirit. It can sense feelings and is incredibly good at sensing good or bad vibes. These qualities are dulled and eventually disappear as worldly 'knowledge' creeps upon and claims the baby's conscious mind.

Some time ago, Ankesh pointed me towards the Myers-Briggs personality type assessment. Here is what the test advises one to do before starting:

In reviewing the comparisons in our inventory, you may find yourself drawn equally to opposing choices. In such cases I suggest you try to think back to how you were before the age of 12 or even younger if you can recall. The rationale for this suggestion is the fact that by the time we are 3 years old, the core of our cognitive organization is well-fixed... although the brain continues to allow some plasticity until puberty.

After the onset of puberty, our adult learning begins to overlay our core personality - which is when the blending of nature and nurture becomes more evident. For some people, this "learning" serves to strengthen what is already there, but with others it produces multiple faces to personality. Discovering or rediscovering this innate core of yourself is part of the journey of using personality type to enrich your life. (my personality type)

Going by either explanation, I think it is safe to assume one is most 'oneself' before he/she 'grows up'.

Each is born with inclinations and a purpose of his/her own. Golu showed an amazing ability to remember things before he could even properly walk. He once amazed me and my mom by memorising an entire lullaby we used to sing to him.

Another nephew of mine, Om by name, loves wrestling. He wails until the channel flipping stops on a WWE match. He frequently cannonballs into unsuspecting sleeping relatives like a pro wrestler. He has hurt himself many times but it never stops him.

Untaught and natural, this is what they are. Of course it is possible for Golu to end up a clerk and Om an engineer, but they wouldn't be their true self then. Robin Sharma, in his book The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, says that in order to find one's life purpose, one only needs to go back to the things that gave him/her joy as a child. Barbara J. Winter is of the same opinion:

As children we were all naturally intuitive. We had more dreams and fewer doubts. As time went by, the "guidance" we received may have dimmed the dreams and fueled the doubts. By the time we began thinking about how we would earn our living, we had received considerable advice that may have led us further away from our real desires.

Now then, back to the how to be yourself question. What differentiates us from the children we once were? Two things, in my opinion.

One is simplicity. We were lucid when we were babies. I may feel I need a lot of possessions to feel happy. But if I remember correctly, a spoonful of mixed-fruit jam was all it took to make Golu the happiest person in the world. All Om wants is someone to practice his tumble and roll routine on. Such is his focus that even meals appear to be chores.

The other thing we learn as we grow up is fear. Children aren't really the most frightful creatures - not when they are doing their own thing anyway. But they realise soon enough that some things can hurt and cause them pain. They come to fear pain so much that the mere possibility of it causes them to retreat. After that it is only a matter of what pain is associated with. Independence is pain - they run. Love is pain - they run. Heck, people even associate pain with dreaming! Fear (of pain or anything else) is a crucial barrier between us and our self.

'One's own Dharma, even if followed imperfectly, is superior to someone else's Dharma, even if followed perfectly. It is better to be slain while following one's own Dharma. Someone else's Dharma is tinged with fear' - Bhagwad Gita, Chapter 3, Verse 35

When you are yourself, you will lose all fear. When you are yourself, your life will be so simple and yet so intoxicating, you will wonder why you were ever anything else. Truth be told, you will be wrong. You have never been anything but this!

What do you feed your genie?

Imagine a genie, immensely powerful, capable of the most amazing feats. Imagine it beside you, invisible, at all times. Imagine yourself in command of the genie, able to make any demand and at any time. Demands that the genie will fulfill, no questions asked.

What if all you ever needed to do was ask?

Truth is, we are always asking. Whether we do it knowingly or not, we are always giving the genie instructions. And the genie is always processing it, altering our reality by fractions, giving us exactly what we want.

Not much is known about the nature of the genie. There are many theories, some more popular than others.

One theory says the genie is our own sub-conscious mind. I will try to explain.

For the most part, our reality is decided by what we perceive through our sense organs. We believe what we see. This, in essence, is what forms the basis of our conscious mind.

The sub-conscious mind however, is blind to the world. It does not interpret reality. It merely takes the conscious mind's version of things and accepts it without question.

The senses observe the world and feed the conscious. The conscious feeds the sub-conscious. The sub-conscious makes us who we are.

The power that our sub-conscious mind has over us is phenomenal. See a point I made in my previous post - How to Get Lucky. Hypnosis takes the conscious mind out of the picture by putting the subject into sleep or a similar trance-like state during which the mind becomes vulnerable.

Ideas are directly fed to the sub-conscious mind. The sub-conscious, as is its nature, accepts everything as true. Its interpretation is not based on accepted definitions of reality or even what we believe to be right & wrong. It just listens and obeys.

Take a moment to consider what you feed your sub-conscious during an avarage day. Your states of mind, your moods, your choice of television programmes, news and cinema.

Is there a pattern? Do you find yourself telling your sub-conscious something particular over and over again? Is it a worry? An anxiety? A fear? Do you frequently feed it despair, anger, and frustration?

Or do you tell your sub-conscious you are happy? Do you tell it you can deal with anything? Do you ask for power and strength? Do you tell your sub-conscious that even though things may seem bleak, they will not beat you?

The ask-you-shall-get premise is not limited to the mind-body analogy alone. I have found this same message in various kinds of literature. The idea of us not being alone is something you can find practically anywhere you care to look (fantasy novels, religious texts, spiritual literature, self-help books, comic books etcetera).

Personally, I find the concept very much in line with the practice of praying. The same kind of doubts apply to this theory as well. An atheist may say praying is a waste of time and will not work. He doesn't pray because it is not effective. In reality, it does not work because he doesn't pray.

You could say that the sub-conscious doesn't matter. You could argue that the world is what it seems to be. You could call yourself practical and trust what your senses feed you.

Guess what? Your sub-conscious will agree with you. Without a question. Always.

How to Get Lucky

Do you know Shalu? She was a classmate of mine in college. She was unlucky (or so she thought). She told everyone about how terribly lacking in prosperity her life was. She looked at smiling faces and found reasons to explain why she could not smile like that.

She whined day in and day out about how unfair the world was to her. She believed everything was futile and had a million reasons to prove why nothing would ever work and why life is terrible and why it would never get any better.

Most likely you don't know Shalu. But you are sure to know someone very much like her. Someone who is never happy and in fact, seems to go looking for unhappiness. Someone extremely talented when it comes to looking for faults. So talented that even when good things are pointed out to them, all they can see is faults.

I learned a lot of things from Shalu. I learned that depression can become an addiction. I learned that depression can be contagious. Most importantly, I learned the secret behind good luck from her.

Of course, I didn't know it at the time. The lesson kind of grew on me in course of the years that followed.

Luck is a strange and powerful word. We throw it about in daily conversations, seek it more than anything else, even grow jealous when others show signs of possessing it. Most of us seem convinced it is a crucial deciding factor in all matters in life. Many also believe there is little we can do about luck. You either have it, or you don't.

I have been called lucky all my life. At times, to the point of frustration. Imagine working hard for something, getting it, and then the credit going to your lucky stars.

Perhaps this was because I never looked like I am working hard. And when I do look like I am hard at work, I fail, miserably (Want to see my high school math grades?). Then again, areas that I have done well in, have never really been hard work either. I have had fun doing things that brought me happiness and success.

I do believe luck exists. But not as something outside us. It is not something we all must reach out for. Something that is short in supply and must be guarded with jealous zeal.

We are all born with all the luck we are ever going to need. We become lucky or unlucky depending on whether we accept it or deny it.

I have this thing with my attitude. Some have called me a bullheaded optimist. Barring the flowery language, I have nothing against the definition. I have mostly been, from as far back as I can remember, utterly blind to the possibility of failure. I have always believed that the odds don't apply to me. I admit there have been times when events have come close to shaking my faith, but I am happy to report that the demons returned empty handed.

Of course, this theory is rooted in the general faith that one's mind rules one's reality. You may have heard of the case where a hypnotist told a subject he was being touched with a red hot iron and instead touched him with a pen. The subject instantly developed a blister at the point of contact. What determined his reality wasn't what happened. What was eventually real to him was what he thought was real. (see details here)

How about if you stop saying, 'That's it. I'm screwed.' or, 'I'm never going to make it now!'?

What if you started, instead, to tell yourself that you can do it. No bright and flashy, "YES, I CAN!" trip. A moderate affirmation will do. Something that will convince you. Something you say as if it can't be anything but true.

Here's an example. Try saying, "I will make 50,000 bucks more this month," in the same tone as you might say, "I take the bus to work every morning."

If you make a habit of it, nothing like it. Don't sound dreamy. Don't sound like you wish for it to happen more than anything else. Just say it like its true. Like it has already happened.