Tomichan Matheikal's blog

By Loudon Dodd Janus is a Roman god with two faces that look into opposite directions.   The month of January gets its name from Janus.   Probably the calendar makers thought that the new year should prompt us to look back at the past year as we welcome the new year.   The past is a good teacher.   Those who refuse to learn from their past are condemned to repeat it.   But the past may not always be the ideal teacher.   If you have a tendency to ask yourself why this happened to you, the past is better forgotten.   Most of the time, there are no answers to the question why.   Things go wrong as they often do.   Wrongs outnumber rights in our life.   We often err.   Others err too.   Errors hit us from every side all the time.   We’ve got to accept them as inevitable parts of life, as faithful companions. Learn the lessons from those errors and move ahead.   Like Janus, look back only to remember the lessons.   Forget the hurts and the pains.   Forget the whys.   Ask ho

An integer in mathematics is a whole number; that is, a number without fractions or decimals, a number without fragments.   Integrity is wholeness.   Integrity is the wholesome condition of not carrying fragments within. More often than not, life gifts us a lot of fragments of broken hearts.   Fragments of broken promises, broken aspirations, broken trusts.   We are fragile and life delights in breaking us.   Some people gather the fragments and piece them together into a whole.   Scars may remain on that pieced-together entity, but it is whole once again.   Some people create art out of the fragments: music, painting, poetry, and so on.   Many choose to sigh upon the fragments.   For many, the fragments are a kind of excuse for not trying new ventures.   I have been broken, can’t you see the fragments, so leave me alone , they say.   Some of us enjoy keeping the wounds alive so that we can busy ourselves with nursing them, bandaging them every morning and evening, finding o

Rain, boughs and the earth: holon Holon is what you and I are.   Arthur Koestler coined that word to mean something that is simultaneously a whole and a part.   There are creatures like the ants and the bees which are autonomous individuals but choose to live as integral parts of a community.   They are ideal examples of holon.   The whole cosmos is a huge organism and we are just parts of it.   But we are autonomous too.   We have carried that autonomy too far with our selfishness.   We have exploited the cosmos as best as we possibly could forgetting that it is a living system which has its own biological processes.   We have dumped too much waste into that system which is killing it slowly. If only we understand that we are as much part of that system as a wheel is in a complex clockwork, we may realise the need to respect the cosmos.   Magic will be the result of that realisation.   You are you, but you are also the others.   You are the rock on the mountains a

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?