In Yoke

The wine of life is oozing drop by drop, The leaves of life are falling one by one.   – Omar Khayyam Easwaran muses: Like leaves, we come into this life, are here for a few days, and then are gone. Nobody remembers us, and nobody misses us. As long as we believe that we are separate, we inevitably have to die. Our immortality is in the whole, which never dies. In living just for personal profit and pleasure, no matter under what philosophical name we may call it, our real personality withers away. It cannot be otherwise. When you become aware that you are not a leaf but the tree , something amazing happens in your life: you are able to act spontaneously, almost effortlessly, for the good of all. This is the proof of your awareness that you are the tree: everywhere it will motivate you, everywhere you will see what contribution you can make. You won’t have to deliberate the pros and cons. You won’t need a computer to provide you with a plan of action. You will kn...

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to us. -Leon Trotsky When the first grey hair appears on our head, it is a critical juncture in life. We go to the mirror with a sinking feeling of dread and try to pluck out the evidence - one here, two there. But the more we pull out, the more seem to come in. I tease my friends by asking which of them would like to relive their adolescence. It always brings a groan. Youth has a lot to offer, but so does the experience of age. In India, there is a joke about a man going to a barber and asking, "Do you have anything for grey hair?" "Yes," the barber says, "respect." Just because we don't have wrinkles or a grey hair, we are not necessarily alive in the fullest sense of the word. Real living comes from making a contribution to life. This is the paradox of life: when we cling to the body, it loses its beauty. But when we do not cling to the body - and use it as an instrument given us t...