Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Every secret has a certain degree of power. The moment you reveal a secret to anyone, you are giving that power to the other person. The more the secrets you keep in your heart, the greater your personal power. It is not power over other people; it is power within. You don’t know how a revealed secret will come back to you with a sting. People love to play games with other people just for the sake of preserving whatever ascendancy they have over others. People love power. Worse, they don’t know how to use power for the welfare of others. Why do you want to give your power to another person and be his slave? There are only two kinds of secrets: the kind you don’t want to share and the kind you don’t dare to share. There may be a few, a third kind, which may do a little good by sharing: like reduce a burden in your heart. It may be quite alright if you have a good friend who can share your burden. But the question is how many such good friends does anyone really have? Th

At prayer :) My religion is one of the accidents that happened to me when I was an infant. I was just a few days old when my parents took me to the church for christening. Thus I became a Christian without my knowledge or consent. For most people religion is a similar accident; it is given to them at birth. You are a Hindu or Muslim or whatever merely because you were born in a family whose members also had their religions foisted on them by others. That given religion becomes a part of our personality. Christianity played a major role in shaping my personality. It gave me a lot of guilt feelings because almost everything good is a sin in that religion. I outgrew my religion when I became an adult. I could not accept most of what it taught me. So I gave up the religion and sought truth in my own personal way. Life becomes magical when you begin to discover your own truths though the process is not easy. Religion can help in the discovery of your personal truths, no

Photo by Tomichan Matheikal In one of his poems John Keats presents a knight who met an exceptionally beautiful woman in some distant land. The knight instantly fell in love with her beauty. But the woman disappeared after tantalising the knight’s passions. The knight started searching for her. He never gave up the search though the woman seemed untraceable. If you reach that land even today, you will find that knight roaming there like a weary skeleton continuing his endless quest, says the poet. Genuine quests are endless. Saint Augustine of the Catholic Church famously said, “Our heart is restless until it rests in you.” That you was god for Augustine. Augustine was quite an adventurer in his youth who enjoyed life to the hilt like other young men of his time. He had his fair share of beautiful women too who did not elude him like Keats’ La Belle Dame sans Merci. The women did not, however, satisfy Augustine’s passions. God did. God is infinity. Anyone can go on qu

Paradigm shift, in simple words, is a change from one way of thinking to another. For example, we can think of religion as compassion instead of a set of rituals and prayers. A paradigm shift can bring about miraculous changes in our life. A prisoner, for instance, will make his life miserable if he despairs of his condition or can make his term a happy period if he chooses to do something creative under the given conditions. Aren’t we all prisoners in this world? Awareness is a necessary prerequisite to all meaningful changes. One plain truth is that we love to live in our comfort zone. Only when we become aware of facts like our comfort zone is not the best of zones available and that there are many other better possibilities and options open to us, will we be able to change. In the beginning of his novel, Illusions , Richard Bach tells a story about some water creatures. These creatures spend their entire lifetime clinging to the rocks and twigs at the bottom of the

Image from Fluidsurveys You may feel oppressed at least occasionally. Even in a well-oiled democratic system, the citizens can feel oppressed by various policies of the State. As poet Louis Macneice said in his poem, Prayer before Birth , the world can convert us into “lethal automatons,” make us “a cog in a machine,” or blow us “like thistledown hither and thither.” The State and its various machineries may decide what food you can or cannot eat, what kind of dress you should wear, how much money you can save, and so on. The State can make you feel powerless. There are even States which encourage one section of the citizens to eliminate another section. Both the eliminator and the victim are powerless. You want to overcome the lies   that create powerlessness. There is only one way of overcoming that kind of powerlessness: living in your personal truth. The State compels us to live within a lie, as political thinker Vaclav Havel said. You don’t have to accept the

We are all neurotics though we convince ourselves that we are normal especially because our society approves of most of the things we do. The society is the benchmark for the sanity of our actions. We can even murder people in large numbers and call it religious fervour or patriotism. We are doing it everyday. We are doing it indirectly perhaps like, for instance, when we glorify the soldiers who kill at the borders or the militants who kill wherever they wish. There is no need to go to the extent of murders in order to be aware of our neurosis. If we analyse our usual thoughts and actions, we will find that quite many of them are plainly absurd if not insane. One of the jokes that I have quoted again and again in my classes is from Albert Camus’s essay, The Myth of Sisyphus . There is a mad man who is fishing in a bathtub. The psychiatrist asks him with a plan to start a session of counselling, “Hey, got any fish?” The mad man frowns at the doc and gives a harsh reply,

Image from Introvert-Inspiration Viktor Frankl spent several months in Hitler’s concentration camps. It is very difficult to nurture hope and not capitulate to despair when you know that your days are numbered.   Frankl was lucky to survive. He wrote the book Man’s Search for Meaning after his release from the camp. The book sold millions of copies. Meaning is what sustains us. That is Frankl’s essential message. It is not at all easy to find meaning in a life that is about to be snuffed out in a torture camp. The first thing you need is hope, says Frankl. You know that there is someone outside there waiting for you, waiting with agonised longing for your safe return. That one person alone is enough to generate hope in your heart. That person may be your spouse, your offspring or even your god. You are very precious for that someone. All of us have someone for whom we are very, very precious. We have to live for that person. We have to win for that person. Hope alone