Tomichan Matheikal's blog

BOOKS Title: The Journey Home: An Autobiography of an American Swami Author: Radhanath Swami What is spirituality? This is a question that has bothered me for a long time. It has obviously nothing much to do with religions since religions seem to forge believers into bigots and bombers. I bought this book, written by a man who was born a Jew in Chicago, left home in search of the meaning of life at the age of 19, and became a Hindu Swami at 21, because I thought it would give me some insights into the problem I face with spirituality. The book did enlighten me though in a limited way. Spirituality is a hunger, not of the body but very similar. The spirit, soul or whatever you may call it, is hungry. It is as Saint Augustine of the Catholic Church said, “Our heart is restless until it rests in you.” If there is God, then nothing less can satisfy us merely because nothing else can be as perfect and as delightful and as charming as God. Not everyone experiences such hunger, how...

From World Happiness Report According to the World Happiness Report 2023 , Finland is the happiest country in the world. All the Nordic countries rank very high on the Happiness Index. The Finns might have found it hard to accept that they are the happiest people in the world. Because they are rather unsociable people who look melancholic. They don’t look happy. But the Finns are the happiest people, according to the Happiness Report which was prepared after a long and systematic research. What makes Finland the Utopia of 2023? First of all, the Finns enjoy the small pleasures of life . They don’t build luxurious houses, they don’t show off wealth, and they don’t compete with the neighbours. They don’t spend much time on the internet and social media. Instead, they spend time in the company of nature. Their summer holidays are all about living a simple, rustic life. A country of 56 lakh people, Finland has 32 lakh cottages most of which are located in forests near one of the 1.8...

Capitalism without discontentment is like Christianity without hell, if I may paraphrase Frank Borman. Discontentment is an integral part of the capitalist system because the system is stuck at the lowest levels of human aspirations. Psychologist Abraham Maslow arranged human aspirations in a pyramid-shaped continuum, ranging from the inferior needs which are largely focused on the body to the higher needs of the psyche, culminating in what one may call the soul. Most of us are familiar with Maslow’s pyramid. Nevertheless, let me present it below if only to remind us of certain details.  You will easily notice that capitalism is stuck at the lowest of Maslow’s hierarchy of aspirations. The most successful businesses of capitalism cater to our physical and simpler psychological needs. Oil and gas, mining, constructions, textile, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, electronics, telecommunications, insurance, banking… none of these touches those aspirations of ours that bring us deeper ...

In Richard Bach’s novel, Illusions, there is a question: If God appears to you and commands you to be happy, what will you do?  The novel doesn’t give any explicit answers except that happiness is your choice. The novel is about a man who is an incarnation of God.  Donald Shimoda was sent by God to be the messiah of the modern world.  But he quits the job.  He doesn’t want to drink that bitter cup.  Anyway, saving the world is just another illusion.  People don’t want salvation.  If they did, the world would have been a paradise long ago.  Isn’t every religion worth the name teaching its believers salvation?  Yet why have the believers not saved themselves?  Because they don’t want salvation.  They want miracles.  People come to Donald for miracles.  He becomes a prestidigitator and that’s not his job.  So he quits.  “It’s not my will, but yours, that matters,” God tells him.  Donald chooses to be ...

E-tailers like Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal are doing brisk business this festival season.  According to a report in today’s Times of India , Flipkart sold half a million items within the first hour of launching its Big Billion Days event yesterday.  Amazon India sold 1.5 million units in the first 12 hours of its “Great Indian Festival” sale.  Snapdeal had 11 lakh buyers in the first 16 hours. Pakistan is trying to nibble away India with the teeth and nails of terrorists and India is celebrating consumerism.  Consumerism is certainly not as malevolent as terrorism but it isn’t a virtue anyway.  A few years back Professor Galen V. Bodenhausen of Northwestern University concluded after a psychological research that “Irrespective of personality, in situations that activate a consumer mind-set, people show the same sorts of problematic patterns in well-being, including negative affect and social disengagement.” Consumerism makes people more greedy...

Holy men are detached from everything.  Attachment is a sin that arises from ignorance.  Ignorance prevents us from attaining the realisation that everything on the earth is maya, illusion. Ordinary mortals live in illusion.  So they are attached.  Attached to their family.  To money.  Possessions.  Holy men are not attached to anything.  That’s why they don’t even marry.  They are not attached to people.  But, as some jester said, even holy men have one flaw or another.  Otherwise they wouldn’t be just holy; they would be gods. We don’t know if the jester is entirely right.  The jester is just an ordinary mortal.  And he is making a judgment about a mortal many times greater than him.  If a man many times greater has at least one flaw, if not more, then how many flaws does an ordinary mortal like the jester suffer from?  Simple logic makes us suspect the jester’s claim.  He being an ordinary...

Three men were marooned on an uninhabited island.  As they sat desperate and disheartened, unable to find a way out of the dreadful place, the spirit of the island appeared to them.  Having had no association with human beings hitherto, the spirit was untouched by malice or evil.  “Make a wish and I can grant it,” offered the spirit genially.  “Get me back to my people,” wished the first man and his wish was granted instantly.  The second man too wished the same and he too joined his people back home.  “What about you?” the spirit asked the third man.  “I’m feeling so lonely here without those two friends.  I wish they were back here.” A good friend of mine made a couple of comments on one of my recent blog posts.  In one of the comments she suggested that I should learn to personalise success when I had argued that living in a world run by crooks and sharks good people would find success too elusive a thing.  A few minutes back ...

Happiness and intelligence seldom go together, said Ernest Hemingway.  Malayalam poet, Akkitham (who will be turning 90 exactly a week from today), illustrated it with an example in one of his poems.  The little son joins the father on the latter’s morning walk.  On the roadside they see the body of a woman who was raped and killed in the night.  The father tells his little son, Light is sorrow, my son, Darkness is solace. Was the Buddha a happy person?  Was Jesus?  The existential sorrow that haunted intelligent people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus is reflected throughout their brilliant novels as well as non-fiction works.  Can Mahatma Gandhi be described as a happy person? On the other hand, can we describe any of the above as essentially unhappy persons? They were happy at a level that the mediocre people don’t ever achieve.  Wealth, luxury, possessions, power, entertainment, delicious food – the list of th...

Mat wanted to die because he thought life was too frivolous an affair to deserve itself.  He had already consulted many experts on the matter before he ran into me. The doc whom he approached for medical assistance bluntly refused.  “You want me to spend the rest of my life in prison?” asked the doc furiously.   “What prevented the doc from giving me the injection was fear of the prison,” Mat explained to me.  "Not any love of life." “If the law did not prevent suicide, would you have helped me?” Mat asked the doc.  “If I try to commit suicide and fail, will the law be punishing me for failing to live or for failing to die?” The doc stared blankly into Mat’s eyes.  Then the blankness became fury.  “Get out,” he said. Then Mat went to his pastor.  “Nowhere in the Bible is it said that suicide is a sin,” explained Mat to the pastor.  And the pastor thought Mat was right.  The Old Testament’s Yahweh was very fond of ...

Sunday musings “... if God spoke directly to your face and said, ‘I command that you be happy in the world, as long as you live.’  What would you do then?” That’s one of the questions that has remained with me ever since I read Richard Bach’s Illusions as a twenty year-old man.  It remained somewhere within me without affecting me really in any significant way.  Later on, as a teacher, I used it many times in the class for conveying certain messages effectively. Disclaimer: I don’t believe in God. But I don’t question anyone’s faith.  What I question is the exploitation of people in the name of gods and faith.  I have seen many people drawing the much needed psychological (call it spiritual, if you prefer) sustenance from their religious faith.  I’d be the last person to take away such sustenance from anyone. There are times when I felt that religious faith would be a blessing.  It can be a free panacea for certain ills that pl...

Happiness is when I lie down on a beach and listen to the relentless music of the ocean. Happiness is when I touch a flower and feel love in my heart. When I sit on a mountain top feeling the mist washing my soul. When I know that people are what they are because their circumstances made them so.  And so I can understand them.  I can accept them.  As they are. Knowing that everyone is driving the car at the best of her/his potential.  Hooting is a cry for help. Happiness is when I help.  Happiness is knowing that helping is the most painful task I can fulfil. Happiness is the realisation that I don’t need anything more than I already have.  That I can call it quits if I want.  Because I don’t want anything more.  Happiness is the realisation that less is more. Mulberries outside my temporary residence Happiness is the situation in which I can do the job I know on my own terms.  Teach without lesson plans....

Sunday Sermon According to a report in today’s Hindu , youngsters in Delhi “spend the most on improving themselves physically.”  Skin complexion, hair style and dress: these seem to matter more these days. Not only in Delhi, however. There is no harm in looking good physically.  It is even desirable.  But the problem lies in assuming that only the body matters.  What about the mind?  The ignorance of today’s youth about great thinkers and serious writers is an indication of a malady: the obsession with the body to the detriment of the mind. The capitalist system which has taken over the entire world has what Dr Fitjof Capra calls an “object-centred consciousness” ( The Hidden Connections ).  Competition, expansion and accumulation are its hallmarks.  It is never satisfied however much it may accumulate.  One may have accumulated enough wealth for five generations and yet one remains discontented.  This discontent is one of th...

Material success and career advancement need not necessarily bring happiness.  Genuine happiness radiates from the core of one’s heart.  It implies that one should discover it at the core of one’s heart.  Possessions and achievements have little to do with real contentment.  They remain at the superficial level of existence.  They boost the ego. Pip, Charles Dickens’ protagonist in the novel Great Expectations (1861), is an example of this great lesson in happiness.  Pip is born in a poor family in the English countryside and he soon loses his parents.  His sister, married to Joe, looks after Pip.  Joe becomes Pip’s foster father.  As a young boy Pip is sent to the house of Miss Havisham to carry out certain works and he is enchanted by the beauty of Estella whom he meets there.  Miss Havisham is an eccentric woman who has c called a halt on her life because the man whom she had loved ditcher her.  She continues to wear...