Tomichan Matheikal's blog

From Yeatsvision Gyrate through life.   You are not part of the herd.   You are you, an individual with tremendous potential.   The world often sits on that potential like a heavy weight smothering it.   The society, your religion, political systems, there is an endless lot of structures which act as straitjackets that stifle your very spirit.   Release your spirit and let it fly like a free, gleeful, warbling bird in the infinite sky.   Yes, there is the whole infinity waiting for you out there, for you to fly, to smile and to warble. Live dangerously, as philosopher Nietzsche exhorted.   Build your home on the slopes of Vesuvius, he suggested. Sail against the wind and let your ship run wild on the mad ocean.   You don’t have to accept given, ready-made truths if your heart revolts against them.   Discover your own truths.   Create them if need be. Gyrate through life.   Let the eternal drink churn out of your vital dance. God does not lie hidden in locked up tab

Courtesy Pinterest “Thank the bees for their honey as though they were kind people who prepared it for you.   But I cannot say: ‘Thank them because, look, how kind they are.’   They may sting you the next moment.”   Ludwig Wittgenstein gives that counsel.   We live in a world of contingencies.   Life has become so fast and complex that we don’t know what is awaiting us the next moment – honey or the sting.   We have to deal with each event as it descends on us in its own capricious way.   We have to deal with it with finesse.   Finesse is skill and delicacy together.   Even in the face of failure, we can find what we are good at and use it to forge our own path ahead. That’s finesse.   One way of achieving finesse is to change our perspective.   Instead of looking for self-esteem, self-aggrandisement and other selfish goals, if we can develop certain social interests we will find a magical change occurring in ourselves. We live in a world of selfies and self-intere

Enlightenment is as full an understanding of the world as possible.   It goes beyond rational understanding.   It is spiritual, so to say.   It is intuitive, if you wish.   When we say the Buddha was an enlightened man, what we really mean is that he understood the world much more than the ordinary people.   Understanding leads to love or, at least, compassion.   The Buddha was one of the most compassionate creatures that ever walked on the planet.   French writer Francois Mauriac said in one of his short stories that God was able to endure our world because of his profound understanding.   Mauriac’s God was an enlightened being: one who saw the human condition so clearly that he could not condemn anyone.   Rather he would feel compassion, however wicked the person might be by normal human standards.   In his classical work, The Varieties of Religious Experience , William James speaks of American poet Walt Whitman as an enlightened person.   Whitman loved whatever he saw

Courtesy: Here “Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white radiance of eternity,” wrote P. B. Shelley.   Life stains our souls without exception.   Right from day one.   When the Buddha defined life as sorrow, he meant nothing else.   Christianity’s original sin means the same.   Every great philosopher knew it: that life stains our souls.   Only Surf Excel could market stains successfully in our own times.   That success owes itself to the plain fact that the detergent shifted the stain successfully from the soul to the clothes.   Not even to the body.   The clothes can be washed easily in the washing machine.   The real stains lie in the psyche.   “I must win people’s accolades in order to be a worthy person.”   That’s a stain we carry in our psyche.   “I must be fair and lovely if I am to be accepted by the society.”   Stain again.   “I must live up to the expectations of my parents.”   How many stains do we have to carry in order to get on in life?

ABBA “ Chiquitita , tell me what's wrong /You're enchained by your own sorrow.”   Thus begins one of the songs that kept me bewitched for quite a while during my youth when I was passing through a tough time.   ABBA had sung it long before it crept into my veins like a soothing intoxication that ached my soul dully.   I was enchained by my own sorrow. Like Chiquitita, I was always sure of myself until the confidence was shattered by a deep disillusionment that broke me irreparably.   “You’ll be dancing once again,” ABBA sang to Chiquitita.   “Let me hear you sing once more like you did before / Sing a new song, Chiquitita.” I learnt to sing my new song.   That was my redemption. We have to learn to sing a new song after each heartbreak.   The world loves to break hearts.   That is the way of the world.   That is how it is.   The storm is far too mighty for the feeble wings of the gentle birds.   The tide in the ocean can wreck the steeliest of ships.   The

Image courtesy: Redorbit Bliss it was that Santiago experienced when he returned home with the skeleton of the huge marlin fish that he had caught with much difficulty after 84 days of bad luck.   Santiago is the eponymous old man in Hemingway’s classical novel, The Old Man and the Sea .   Bad luck haunted him like a vindictive demon for 84 days.   He couldn’t catch any fish.   But Santiago was not one to give up.   On the eighty-fifth day, he succeeds in hooking the huge marlin.   However, he could only bring home the skeleton of that fish as sharks attacked it incessantly all along the way back.   Santiago did what he could to fight the sharks.   He had dreamt of selling the fish at a high price.   He knew that the people who would eat the fish were unworthy of its greatness.   There was only the skeleton remaining by the time the old man reached ashore.   “But man is not made for defeat,” as Santiago tells us.   “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” Santiago’s

“Abracadabra,” says the wizard and the magic occurs.   We are all wizards, each one of us, capable of performing miracles in our lives.   The miracle is different from those that take place in fairy tales, as Mr Lamb says in Susan Hill’s story of Derry. Derry is an adolescent boy with an ugly scar on his face.   One side of his face is burnt by acid.   Derry thinks that the scar makes him repulsive to people.   Hence he keeps running away from people.   He does not like to look at himself in the mirror.   Unlike most adolescents, what he sees in the mirror is a repulsive image. Derry suffers from an extremely poor self-image because of his attitude towards the scar on his face.   He thinks that physical appearance matters a lot in social acceptance.   Mr Lamb tells him that he can give a magical kiss to himself and a miracle will happen. It is not like the fairy coming from nowhere and transforming the beast into a beauty with a kiss.   “You have to give the kiss to yo