Don’t play small

Our deepest fear should not be about our inadequacies. We are powerful beyond measures, beyond ordinary recognitions. It must be in our light, rather than in our darkness, that should frighten us. It’s terrifying for some of us to shine our lights as dazzlingly as we are capable, and it doesn’t bother me to say that preponderance of people out there struggle with this facet of life at some point in their lives. A lot of melancholy and frustration in the world today emanates from disinclination or incapacity to shine one’s light and to truly express the greatness that we contain within ourselves.

If you are struggling with some specific part of life, may be it’s time to sit and list out the possible reasons. To identify the problem areas is the foremost step in deducing a plan of action. If your quench for your dreams is going steel-solid, nothing should deter you from tasting success and basking in the glory of accomplishments. Don’t limit the trajectory of your dreams; flutter freely for the wings of your consciousness are as much immortal as the sky and the earth are. If there’s something you’ve been wanting for a long time but have not been able to achieve it, it’s possible that some part of your own inner self doesn’t really want that thing or situation you’re trying to accomplish.

Put in some fuel in leveraging self-belief. No cause is worthy enough to rob you off your dream. You are here in this world to make things happen; nothing special would be served to you in your plate – you have to earn every ounce of it. And here lies the beauty of life and Mother Nature; for them ore you see your affinity with your cause, the forces tend to align with you in making your belief getting final shape. You have been given a human’s life; you are capable of rational thoughts and analytical power; you are here to create your destiny yourself. The answers lie within you, and once you find them, you are well on your way to shining your light in the world and infusing life in your dreams.

Benumbed Blitzkreig

All of a sudden, your eyelids get a life. They get away from the mutually cuddled position and resume the usual role of visual sensory watch guards. As vision enters your retina, the neuronal circuits get a life and occipital cortex takes a sigh. It’s the onset of another morning; the bodily clocks never fail to astonish you with their cold-hearted accuracy. Who invented the clock? Who invented the necessity of slogging for money? Who invented that night is meant for dizzy galore? You appreciate the heightened lassitude of your body with snail-paced-velocity of crisscross thoughts. The order started appearing in your thought processes with noteworthy inclination. You sit, you yawn, you stretch your stiff musculature, and you step down the bed.

You think for the day’s schedules, the apprehension disseminates in the billion cells of your body. The iron-fisted day has blazoned its arrival. You hurriedly finish up with the daily rituals and get armored to fight for your existence yet again. Where is the time for self appreciation? Where is the time for discovering unknown horizons? Why do we allow ourselves to get occupied in the whirlpool of humdrum? You glare yourself in the mirror, tuck your hair, watch those fine wrinkles in your forehead, those crowfeet besides your eyes and you turn away. Did you really see yourself in the mirror? Can you identify yourself? When was the last time that you were turned to see yourself in the interior mirror; that is your soul?

You ate a little with you thoughts ricocheting like the bubbles of boiling water. You are almost ready to move out of your house. Haven’t you already moved out of your house? Were you there in your house? Where is your house? Who are you? Why do you exist?

Where Is My Bed?

You just exhausted your last kilo calorie meant to be burnt for tedious professional commitments of the day. You relished the succulence of your otherwise ordinary supper, the food smelled like alter-ego of divine vapors. The presumptuousness failed to die down as you feverishly gagged the buttons of the slain remote control. Effrontery caught the craze with a gall and soon you were submerged in some old classic film or the vehement debate over some breaking news. The law of relativity smells you as a potential victim and you swim in the sky of thoughts, mesmerized and frozen.

Your eyelids soon started turning soporific, nothing can help it. The signals have turned green and hypnosis would prevail with indefatigable might. You turn your posture in that comfortable cushion once more and have a glance at the old wall clock. It’s already midnight. The nature is workaholic and its machinery has no match. One more day passed with eyes open, one more night will pass with eyes closed. What are we here for?

My Supply Of Red-Bull

I love to do the activities that I have enlisted below after a lot of mind-work.

1) Performing surgeries. Nothing can match the thrill & satisfaction that I derive from performing surgeries. The moment I see an OT (Operation Theatre), my catecholamines go berserk.

2) Kneeling down to Lord Krishna in awe-inspiring admiration. I visit Vrindavan every week and on exceptions, I make it a point to visit a Lord Krishna shrine in the vicinity. The poised trance effuses a lot of canalized energy, which is the ignition fuel of my soul’s journey in the ordinary lanes of life.

3) To listen to songs. I love to feel the melodies and it really relaxes a lot. My all time favorite being, ‘Raah mein unse mulakat ho gayi’ from Vijaypath (A Bollywood Film)

4) To call my friends and have a light time together. I am sure few things can beat the thrill of meeting old folks and have a dream time together.

5) Watching old photographs and taking a stroll in the orbit of preserved memories. I am sure all of us love to do this.

6) Learning new internet and web related applications. I know the difference between Blogger and Tumblr. Want more?

7) Watching a film or a cricket match (whatever is readily available)

8) Cooking a dish. It’s in my blood. My father had a florid flair for cooking and I got the dominant genes.

9) Checking facebook updates of my folks. Who dislikes facebook anyways? (And if anyone dislikes, who cares for him anyways?)

10) Organizing myself and my work place. This is something which comes in high priority (though has been mentioned at the bottom of the list); I believe organizing helps you in discovering the facets of your life and yourself that you were unaware of. It’s like finding your occult power and feeling its potential impact. Its like kinetic meditation.

Lesser known facts about dreams

Life is an epic and dreams are hidden directions, pointed at you by the biggest genius, your subconscious, to take help you have a smooth sashay towards your destiny.

Were you aware of these facts about DREAMS?

1. Dreams prevent development of psychosis.

2. Toddlers do not dream about themselves until around the age of 3.

3. When you are snoring, you are not dreaming.

4. Even blind people are capable of dreaming.

5. Within 10 minutes of your waking, 90% of the dream is gone. You are unlikely to recall that.

6. Dreams contain familiar faces; it’s very unlikely that you would ever see an unfamiliar face in your dream.

7. Many of us dream in black and white (A full 12% of sighted people dream exclusively in black and white).

8. People who have quit smoking, alcohol or other substance abuse are more likely to be having vivid dreams than they would normally experience.

9. Dreams storm you with the sense of external stimuli. Many of us feel thirsty, afraid, writhed, detached, depressed in our dreams and at that moment the feeling is true.

10. If you are awakened out of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, you are more likely to remember your dream in a more vivid way than you would if you woke from a full night sleep.

11. Vivid dreams help you learn.

12. Sleep paralysis is a reality. A person experiences sleep paralysis when the brain awakes from the REM sleep cycle, but the paralysis state remains. The person is conscious, but unable to move.

13. Males & females dream differently. In fact, it is believed that around 70% of the characters in a man’s dream are other men. On the other hand, a woman’s dream contains almost an equal number of men and women.

Why do we sleep?

Have we thought, as laymen, why we essentially have to switch off ourselves every night (or day, for nocturnal) and succumb to nothingness? Why are we programmed to sleep? Do we need sleep to ‘recharge’ ourselves as many of the battery operated devices need? Aristotle thought that the digestion of food created vapors which naturally rose upward, causing the brain to become drowsy.

Despite the fact that most people spend more time sleeping than in any other single activity, scientists still lack much knowledge about why we need sleep or what triggers it. Serious scientific studies only began about 60 years ago, and several different theories have been developed, none of which have been proven. It is known, however, that the higher the organism on the evolutionary chain (humans being the highest) the more important sleep becomes.

It is not an accident that the approximate and traditional 8-10 hours "sleep" period coincides almost exactly with the daily and approximate 8-10 hour period of total darkness with which the living organisms had to cope. It is widely held that organisms cannot cope psychologically with long and enduring periods of total darkness without going bananas. Hence the evolutionary value for sleep fixes its importance. The heart and brain (as well as other organs) evolved as continuous operation mechanisms that, if adequately supplied with oxygen, require no "sleep" periods. Trees and other plant life do not "sleep" because darkness presents no psychological menace since plant life is not conscious and, other than a pause of photosynthesis, darkness presents no evolutionary catastrophe. Likewise, if ancients could not eliminate total darkness, the escape mechanism evolved to adapt to it. To cope with long periods of utter darkness, primitive animal life, over long periods of time, adapted to the environment by consciously entering into a sort of "stupor" or unconscious state and with the passing times, it became a die-hard habit, the genes got modified or something like that.

Recuperative theory of sleep was widely accepted but there can be failed explanation as to why bats sleep for 20 hours per day, but shrews hardly at all (Allison & Van Twyer, 1970). In addition, Meddis (1975) claims that shrew, swifts and Dall porpoises all survive without sleep.

Much work has been done regarding the basis of its genesis and importance, however, the issue is multifarious. No single foolproof theory has contented all the spectrums of need of sleep and its occurrence is mystifying. There are certain things which our labs are yet to explore, perhaps from the exaggerated lateral thinking. Why our minds are restricted from the light of essential knowledge? The perplexity is there for some reason, waiting to be chased and conquered.

Where is the remote control?

Why are we destined to experience the sights and sounds every night that we haven’t called for? Why do we dream? Don’t you think that dreams occur involuntarily but compulsively, who or what controls the nature of this obvious occurrence? Are the dreams just an outburst of suppressed subconscious or do they represent the designed deliverance of planned but occult messages?

What I believe as a doctor is that every phenomenon associated with body has a special goal, if pupils don’t work we can't appreciate the light, if heart doesn’t pumps our organs would stop working due to lack of oxygen. The body is crafted by a super brain and every cell is destined for some special but vital function. So it would be a little bizarre if we yet again jettison the occurrence of dreams as something without purpose. Enough of imprudent heedlessness. Moreover since about one third of our life is taken away by some forces in making us see sights that we don’t have a control over and the nature of which ranges from subliminal to horrendous, I guess this phenomenon must have an imperative role in our lives. Who controls them and with what purpose? Are we being given some clues every night? How else can one explain the immense infiltration of our minds with sights and feelings carrying the assailant force? Where lays the remote control that decides & shows us sights of its choice? Had the scope of this role be more evident, who knows what kind of power is waiting to exalt our mind & body.

Some hidden but very powerful message, must be of essentially vital role (evident by the quanta of time it swallows up in our lives) is waiting to be decoded. As it is known it took a lot of time and resources to understand the basics, spectrum & applicability of genome (300 billion base pair combinations and a single mismatch has a sense, bless the innovative precision of the super creator) and now we can relate how big a role it can play in controlling an ocean of fundamentally fatal and debilitating medical conditions. Why not its due share of importance is is being given to fathom the original source of sights that are caught by our neuronal radars and give our sensory system a superfluous hullabaloo.

What does this regular emotional tumult aims at? Can we control our dreams? Why in spite of all the cerebral somersault that we necessarily indulge in for a good 60-70 years of our lives, we are told that we use only 10% of our brain. What is the role of rest 90% isn’t the figure too large. Why aren’t the efforts being done to decipher the equations occurring every night in the lives of more than 6 billions of us? What accounts for maximum entropy in our minds at the time when it is least in the body? Why our subconscious roars and experiences turbulent flow of unbridled energy, when we are supposedly resting? Why are we chosen?

Don’t sink, keep swimming

When you seek unending source of discipline, look out for the sun. It blooms up every morning to salute us lesser mortals and showers shines in our lives with no casual breaks. And it has been doing this for millions of years (may be more), perfect example of bleeding discipline.

When you seek unending source of inspiration, look out for the bunch of cacti. With virtually no water or minerals beneath their roots, they continue to extract the best from sand and remain plump happy.

When you seek unending source of hope, look out for the face of an ailing person, who knows about the notoriety of underlying terminal illness, yet makes attempts with gusto to keep the spirits of acquaintances flowing high. (I witness it so often in medical practice and it strengthens my belief that faith flows in defined direction, it multiplies in its magnitude and produces effects appreciated by eyes and mind)

When you seek unending source of belonging, just try to feel what your mother must have gone through emotionally and what dreams she must have crafted and protected for you with eyes full of high hopes when you were cocooned in the womb.

When you seek unending source of happiness, look out for a bunch of teenagers, who chuckle & chirp with their eyes full of glitters, oblivious to the sweltering realities of life.

When you seek unending source of dynamism, just think what the heck our primordial 2 cells undergo to produce a body full of 100 trillion cells.

When you think lost in the lanes of learning a new language, Try imagining a member of the royal family of Thailand. Deeply revered by the Thai people, the royal family speaks a private and ancient language known only to themselves and a privileged few.

Spare 60 dedicated seconds of your life with closed eyes to think about the unfortunate folks who are devoid of sight and you will understand the power of blessing (that you have been bestowed with)

When you think you do enough hard work, think of ants. They travel 1.09 km in a day, and going by the approximate size ratio of 1:660, an average person must walk for approximate 720 km a day. Have you ever done this? (Will you ever attempt this?)