Business to the Buddha

Tag: Tender coconut

  • The space

    Last week I went to a salon to take a haircut. All this resulted in in lot of thoughts. The thoughts started from body, to space to the consciousness. For simplicity I believe until we end the contest of God let us call the God or consciousness as space. Coming back to the thoughts, the barber put a cloth around me and sprayed water on my head. In winters, water becomes cold. I was surprised by this sudden spray of water. A couple of thoughts ran my mind. Had I drunk this water, this water would have become part of me. In fact, for the world, it would have lost its existence; for the world, it would be simply Pravin no more water as an entity. At the same time, for me – or say my body – it would not have been the surprise experience of sprayed cold water.

    The barber started trimming my hair. Some hair fell on the cloth that was covering me. A thought struck me again – “my hair”. The moment I thought of my hair. I realized it is no more “my hair” it is just “hair”. We start identifying things with possession – my car, my mobile, his chair, and so on. In reality, this possession is very superficial.

    We breathe in and out every few seconds. The moment we inhale; the air becomes “my breath”; after we breathe out, it is again simply air! How ignorant we are about every tiny content, visible or invisible. We inherit it from the earth, and we will leave it here, but we start identifying it with ourselves and ownerships.

    The space

    Slowly, I have started looking at things differently. Last time, I wrote about science and spirituality. In that blog, I tried connecting the dots of space and consciousness. We have space within us and space is everywhere. Similarly, Consciousness is everywhere – some call it God.

    I was talking to my wife about it. When I told her about space within us – I went to the level of atoms. Every atom has space between the nucleus and the orbit of each electron. This space is bigger than the size of the nucleus and the electrons. I tried explaining consciousness and space relation to her. Let us say you go to the water purifier and fill your water bottle with water. Next, I go and do the same. We start saying this water in the bottle as “my water”. On one note, if someone takes water from the purifier and deep freeze it – the same water becomes ice. Our, body is like the ice, we see it separate from everything. It is part of the same whole as the ice is from the water purifier. We become from nothing and end in nothing. As I wrote in a previous blog – tender coconut. What remains with us? We start calling water “my water” or my body – in my analogy. Does it remain with us forever? No. It is the other way round – we leave the body here. We do not take anything with us. We end up in the space. When I say “we” – what is that we? It is not the body.

    The essence

    The haircut connected me to the consciousness once again. This haircut was very profound, it gave me a lot of thoughts and ways to connect multiple dots. We are not just this limited manifestation – as this Autumn leaf states. We are the past, present, and future of humankind. Every generation gain from the predecessors and leave for successors. Additionally, everything around us – the space – is conscious enough. We make an impact long after we have left a place. Our whole family has been reciting Bhojan Mantra twice daily, at mealtime. The meaning of the Mantra is very profound. The Bhojan mantra explains everything very profoundly – everything comes into existence from the Brahman and goes back to the Brahman.

  • I am that!







    Last weekend, I went for a haircut. In the big mirror of the barber, one of the rare things happened. I was staring at myself without my specks in the mirror and was surprised. I had never noticed that between my nose and eyes there is some bulge, which earlier was not there. I look at my face once again and asked myself – “is it me?” When I asked myself this question, I literally meant “the bulge” near top of my nose just below my eyes, which is mostly behind the frame. Or perhaps I never noticed.

    The question was specifically to that part of my body – the bulge – is this really me? Suddenly some different thoughts made me think even more about the “overall me”. What defines me? The body – the bulge- until past couple of years was not there it is now, when I will get older, this mass would be lost. I should not be defined by this. Earlier I wrote on a tender coconut and how nothing becomes something in this case – the bulge, and in previous blog’s case – a tender coconut. I have black hair, in few years these would be white, would I change? What is that, that defines me as me?

    Well on a philosophical level I may say that I am soul. But do I know it? This question about knowing the soul is like having information and not truly knowing the soul. These questions reminded what was suggested to me by a friend Ameet Murdeshwar a few years back. I often met Ameet while traveling to office during 2007-08. He told me read , a book “I am that” by Nisargdatta Maharaj.  This book is on Adwait Vedanta. I feel myself to be too immature to read that subject. Though I have a copy of the book, unfortunately never had a chance to read it. I am asking myself this question for a week now – am I that? I will read it now.

  • Tender coconut







    I live in a place where there are many coconut trees nearby. No doubt we get tender coconut on a regular basis. In fact for months I had been playing with my niece – Chinu – with those tiny coconuts by helping her throw them in the sea. What I never noticed while helping her play with those tiny coconuts was – “how it grows from a nothing to so many things!” That blossoming of coconut from just a tiny coconut with nothing to a tender coconut with water and coconut with oil and thick shell with husk and so on made me think.

    Source - indiaheals.blogspot.com
    Tender Coconut
    Source – indiaheals.blogspot.com

    Recently, I went to our regular tender coconut milk joint. I saw some completely ripe coconuts kept in the shop. That made me thinking. I have seen those small non-entity coconuts. I started wondering, how come this thing gets water? Slowly that water converts into a shell. The same shell then helps create the outer cover of a ripe coconut (brown in color), coconut and the outer husk. Where does the husk on that green outer cover come from? Even in a ripe coconut the husk is not visible!

    See it is very interesting, the same content converts into many forms. The tree is the same, its receive same nutrients from ground and sunlight. Tree does the same activity but different parts grow in different ways. Everything is so perfect at its place, making that non entity to a perfect coconut.

    I was lost in my thoughts that nature has strange ways to convert one thing into other. More deeper in thoughts, I started thinking about us – Humans. We also are from the same source. We get our energy, color and share everything from the contents of the earth, right! In a unique way we are different but at a macro level we are humans. If we think about future we would leave everything here – the iron of our blood, calcium of our bones and water of our body. We got everything from the earth and we would leave everything behind when we would die. Still we fight when we are alive!

    This tender coconut helped me realize this clearly that we are made from same contents. Though in my mind I always knew it, perhaps everyone of us knows this. Yet we generally think it as “obvious” and overlook it.

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