The Lone Candle | Podcast #11 by Neha's Notebook

Festive decorations were being carried out. Ornaments were being dangled on the walls. Rangolis were being designed. Fairy lights were being tangled into vine-like hangings. Diyas and candles were being lit. Among these candles, there was one candle.

 

Bright orange in colour and made of scented tangerine-coloured wax. This candle had an uneven surface and its base too was not flat, it was unsteady and the wax was unevenly sculpted. When all the other candles were being lit, this candle was left out because it couldn’t stand properly. Each time the candle was balanced in a standing position, it would tilt and fall down. So it was kept back in the candle box while the other candles were lit into bright flames.

 

The following day, after the sunset, suddenly tbe electricity power went off. There was pitch black darkness in the sky. There was no candle or diya left to light up. All the candles were reduced to dollops of molten wax. When there was no option left, the imperfect orange candle was taken out of the candle box and lighted up with the support of a steel glass.

 

Yesterday there were too many candles and diyas to offer light but on this day when the light was needed the most, this unsteady candle turned out to be the only source of light. It didn’t turn out to be as decorative like most other candles, but it certainly turned out to be purposeful when the light was needed the most.

 

Similar to this lone candle, at times, we might feel left out or discarded, we might feel worthless and purposeless, but each time this happens, it is worthy to remember that the source of light is within us. We might be imperfect but when our light is needed the most by the world, we will shine bright and light up the world with our bright-bright flame.

In the short term, we may feel pitiful or melancholous at being left out or discarded, but if we persist being optimistic, a time will arrive when our light will be most needed despite of all our imperfections, and the onus will be upto us to light the world.

Patience, optimism, persistence and self-acceptance are the keys. Whether it is our work, or our life in general, these keys will help us deal with the dark and cold period of our lives. And when the time is right, our flame will glow and glitter the brightest, and our light will shine to its fullest, illuminating not only our personal world but also the world around us.

So, don’t be afraid to be the lone candle!

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A Writer's Life | Podcast #10 by Neha's Notebook

Every day I sit at the typewriter. With the keys of the typewriter, I spin galaxies and labyrinths. I paint colours and create memory books.

 

I split into fragments, disappear and reappear in a new form. I carve castles and fortresses and loose myself in their dingy explorations. I evoke fairies and demons and dinosaurs from the pandora’s box, and pack them in my bag once they have uttered their spells.

 

With every piece I write, I delve into a journey of treasure hunt. Sometimes I end up discovering mines of gemstones while sometimes I have to make peace with a trunk full of crystal baubles.

 

As the typewriter scroll rolls and pulsates, I paint new landscapes with watercolours, I draw crayon portraits and sketch ink doodles.

 

With every description I write, I open the cupboard consisting of jewellery boxes of words, and like wearing an ornament, I decorate my pieces with the rhinestones and sequins and pearls of aesthetic words.

 

While other people have two eyes, I have infinite. I hop from one eye to the other, seeing things that most others miss and discovering worlds that no one had heard of.

 

Sometimes I write because I am falling in love, and I have a desire to paint the picture of my lovable sweetheart with the words. Whereas at other times, I write to talk to my shadows and bring them to the light of my sun.

 

My notebooks are filled with jottings of moments and descriptions of monuments, quotes from books and notes from everywhere. I write down anything and everything. I make wordbooks for vocabulary, ideabooks for ideas and flashcards for thoughts. My notebooks are decorated with sticky notes, washi tapes and stickers for inspiration.

 

Talk of a writer’s notebooks, and you’ll find chronicles that relate to everything from mundane concepts of physics, mathematics and chemistry to expository worlds of fantasy, magic realism, vintage vibes, hot advertising and science fiction. Look at a writer’s search history and you will be puzzled and surprised at the same time.

 

Writers spend their days filling notebooks and curating documents of their researches, story ideas, descriptions and swipe files. They keep an eye and an ear open and dedicated to nibbling the tidbits of everyday life and secretly slipping away to scribble down their thoughts that arise in their mind like wavelets and ripples from their subconscious storehouse.

 

Writers carry ghosts on their shoulders, and they let these ghosts dictate their pains and sorrows and concerns which they, quite sincerely scribble down in their notebooks, just like a curious child writing an essay on their first school picnic, writing about the school bus and the sandwiches packed in the tiffin box by their mother.

 

A writer’s life is full of medleys of glitz and glamour and oodles of whims and fantasies and dreamlike worlds. Here they create constellations with words and spark fire with the words too. With poetry I direct an orchestra and with a prose I create a new world. With a description I paint layers on a canvas and with expositions I open my third eye to let my mind wander into enchanted magical forests.

 

A writer is a toddler who uses pen and paper to cry and laugh. A writer is a child who imagines new worlds and takes others to tour these worlds. A writer is an adult too, who inspires and educates and shares their greatest inspirations, and trigger joys and ecstasies into people’s hearts.

 

Every day is a new day. Each moment is a fresh moment. A writer’s life, though, is not free of sorrow and grief, but it is also full of wonder and marvel and playfulness and gusto.

 

A writer’s life is uncertain and unpredictable. One moment there is stillness and in the very next moment, there is a gushing storm. But a writer keeps on recording every transformation, every resurrection in their log of words and notebooks of worlds. It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that a writer’s life encompasses the infinity, from stillness to storm and everything in between.

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World is a Gold Soup | Panpsychism | Podcast #9 by Neha's Notebook

Each time I visit the optician, they put some eyedrops to dilute my eyes in order to check them. After the eyedrops, the world around me appears to me to be blurry. Shapes start melitng into each other. Everything appears fluidy and colours appear to be dissolving into one another.

 

I learned something from this…

 

From the time being we have been told by the people that the world is the way it is. That, it is a rigid or a fixed entity. But the truth is that the world that appears to us, is not a fixed or a rigid thing. Rather, it is a malleable thing. It can change itself according to what we want to see.

 

It appears to us based on the functioning of our body machine, our five sense organs and the sixth sense of our mind. You change the functioning of just one sense and the entire world appears to be altogether a different place. Just like in the example of eyedrops.

 

The world is a soup of molten gold. If you take a gold necklace, a gold bracelet and a gold earring, these three are totally three different things, but they are made of only one and the same substance, gold. Similarly, this world is a zillion different things, but all of them cast from the same gold, the gold of consciousness, mind or call it anything.

 

A theory called as Panpsychism also elaborates on this reality. Panpsychism states that everything is made up of one consciousness, one mind. The same thing has been scripted in ancient Indian scriptures which were scripted thousands of years ago.

 

For instance, there is a century-long debate about paranormal and ghosts activity. While some scientists believe that ghosts exist, others argue that they don’t. In India, for example, there are forts, such as the Bhangard Fort in Rajasthan. This fort is considered to be haunted. Places like these are considered to be haunted because it is believed that the spirit or the mind of the person didn’t fully dissolve into space at the time of their death. Remnants of their mind are still hovering in the space, seeking liberation. The moment they are able to express themselves through a body, they then walk on the path of spiritual journey seeking liberation from their past. We don’t see these ghosts, but according to this theory, it is quite possible that they do exist. And they too are made of the same consciousness as the human beings who are alive.

 

Take another example. In India, there is a dish called as Pav Bhaji. In this dish, the pav is referred to as butter-coated buns and bhaji is referred to as a paste-like veggie mix. This bhaji consists of many vegetables such as peas, potatoes, tomatoes, capsicum, cauliflower etc. all mashed together into a consistency so that the resulting mix appears to be a homogenous gravy-like mix. All the things of the world, including us human beings too are just like these vegetables. We are all swimming in the same soup. The gold soup. Like gold, the world is a malleable entity. It can change and shapeshift into different forms according to us.

 

The world that appears to us appears through the filter of our five senses as well as through the filter of our mind which includes our stored experiences, perception, beliefs and desires. We see what we desire to see. Two people may see entirely different things in the same thing. Two people may think entirely different thoughts about the same thing.

 

We can have two different reactions to the same situation in two different moments. We can see the same thing with different points of view during our childhood and during our adulthood. In reality, there is no adulthood, only one awareness.

 

When we change the way we think about things, the things we see change.

 

The world is more malleable than you think, and it's waiting for you to hammer it into shape. - Bono

 

So, pick up your mallet and shape the gold of the world according to what you desire the most!

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The Noodle Effect & The Noodle City | Podcast #8 by Neha's Notebook

Have you ever wondered why in all those adventure and fantasy movies, the hero has to pass through a labyrinth or a maze-like structure to reach the heroine…? Why in all these movies and video games, one needs to solve certain puzzles?

 

Have you ever wondered why our intestines, guts and brain are shaped like labyrinthine noodles? Is there a connection between the two?

 

Just as a crumb of bread travels through the esophagus, reaching into the alimentary canal and further travelling through the noodle-shaped intestine, the hero in movies travel into mazes, labyrinths, mountains and deserts and seas to reach the heroine and fight for her.

 

Similar to all these metaphors, the human mind or the psychological world too is a noodle city where our point of attention travels through the labyrinth of our thoughts.

 

If you take a bowl of noodles and try to untangle one noodle from the other, it is quite possible that you may be able to do it. But when it comes to untangling a human mind, it is next to impossible. Besides, you don’t even need to do that. It is designed only in that way. Yes, human mind is the greatest and brobdingnagian noodle city.

 

The more we think a certain thought, the more electricity fires in that particular neural trajectory, and this is how, a whole electrical circuit is formed in our brain, which, if we could witness, then it would surely look like a noodle city, an electrical noodle city. Our mind is a part of the subtle body, not the gross body. Hence, even though we can’t see this electricity, it is there like the current in a wire.

 

Just as the hero navigates through a labyrinth, our point of attention navigates its way through this electrical noodle city, and we feel this process in the form of thought after thought popping and streaming in our mind.

 

Each time we take a decision, each time we resolve a confusion into clarity, each time we make a plan or recall a past memory, or simply each time when we are daydreaming or thinking, what we are actually doing is taking a short trip through this noodle city of our mind. The thinker is the traveller. As the process of thinking begins, the thinker travels through this noodle city, and each time it reaches at the centre of this noodle city, the process comes to a completion.

 

In astrophysics, there is a process called as spaghettification, or the noodle effect. In this process, an object near or falling into the black hole, under the influence of the gravitational force,  experiences vertical stretching and horizontal compression like thin spaghetti noodles, to the point that it is ripped apart and lost and dissolved completely into the black hole.

 

This is the image of an astronaut going through this process. See that the astronaut is vertically stretching and horizontally compressing like a noodle till the point that it ceases to appear.

 

The noodle city of our thoughts also depict this noodle effect. When one meditates, then the magnetic gravity of the space of our awareness stretches, compresses and magnifies our thoughts to the point that they are ripped apart and dissolved into the awareness. And then one is able to step away from the thinker identity and the whole noodle city.  

 

So, each time you feel confused, directionless, indecisive or overwhelming, just tell yourself, that I am just travelling in the great noodle city, but there is always a way out!

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COOKIE PALACE | Podcast #7 by Neha's Notebook

Each of us human beings is a cookie palace. There are several cookies that we are made of.

 

One cookie is the food we eat. The food we eat becomes our body. Another cookie is thoughts we think and the beliefs we harness. Remember to cultivate self-empowering beliefs and remove the weeds of self-limiting ones.

 

The next cookie is the emotions we feel. If we feel happy and loved, it has an altogether different effect on our system than when we feel self-pity or bitterness. There are a whole lot of sciences dedicated to blossoming the positive scale emotions and minimizing the negative scale emotions. The positive scale emotions consist of love, joy, happiness, playfulness and wonder, while the negative scale emotions consist of jealousy, gossip, comparison, resentment, hatred and the like. Cookies are meant to be sweet after all, aren’t they? So do we humans are meant for, for being sweet and cute and wondrous…

 

Beyond our thoughts and emotions what matters the most is the material of which the cookies of our cookie palace are made of. The dough of consciousness needs to be kneaded properly and the sugar of sweetness needs to be added in appropriate amounts; add the nuts of spiritual knowledge and sprinkle the choco-chips of liveliness. Bake the cookies neither too hot nor too cold.

 

Cookie after cookie, we are born as cookie palaces – so fragile, yet so beautiful so sophisticated. Through this cookie palace, we churn memories and create new experiences. Our experiences reflect back to us the parts of our unconscious that want to come to our attention, giving us a rebirth every moment, every now and then.

 

Through our cookie palace, we explore the world, and the sweeter cookies we build, the sweeter we discover the life to be. If we cultivate bitterness, our life experiences turn out to be bitter too.

 

These cookie palaces wander around the round-round world, collecting memories and connecting with other cookie palaces.

 

Each one of us has our own cookie palace. If you simply take a moment to just observe the human life, you’ll notice how funny, wobbiy and weird are we. We move around the world searching for something, discovering something, searching something else; we keep on moving and interacting and acting in ways that is more interesting than the most interesting movie characters.

 

A grand drama is going on in which we crazy little cookie palaces play our own strange characters. We become fearful, we become joyful, we become sad and we become ecstatic. And so the life goes on…

 

During all this activity, the excitement happens when we step away from our own cookie palace and look at ourselves as the dough that connects all the teeny-weeny and giant cookie palaces. A butterfly, a tree, a cow, an apple, a table and all of it.

 

I am a cookie palace, but this cookie palace keeps on changing – shaping and reshaping, so I can also say that I am the dough of which the cookie palace is made of. I am the dough of which all the cookies are made of. And all the cookies reflect back to me the taste of the dough.

 

Thoughts are cookies and dough is consciousness. I am the power of life which transforms dough into cookies. I am a cookie palace, I am the cookie, I am the dough and I am the hand which converts dough into cookies and cookies into cookie palace.

 

Love from one cookie palace to the other!

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COLORS OF LIFE | Podcast #6 by Neha's Notebook

From jewellery bazaars slinging with festive ornaments to milk shops crowded with daily customers, from chaat-bhandaar stalls stirring with feasty people to school walls decorated with colourful paper decorations, from blue sky to green-green treetops, life, at all times, is bubbling with a panorama of colours.

 

These colours are not only in surface appearances but also in our thoughts and emotions. While some thoughts trigger us to feel the emotion of sorrow, some others cause us to feel the emotions like love, bliss, joy and ecstasy. Life sprouts with a magnanimous variety of bright-bright colours.

 

Words are colours. Food is colour. Everything has a colour attached to its appearance. In one moment, while I may feel yellow, you may feel green or blue or pink or purple. In one moment, life may turn out to be a pastel colour while in another moment it may appear like a scorching sizzling palette of hot colours.

 

Desire is colour. A wish is a colour. Positivity and inspiration are yellow, while love is orange and red and pink. So if you look into the eyes of someone you love, your world sparkles with a palette of reds and purples and pinks. Similarly when you remember a childhood memory, your world suddenly twinkles witb a crystal jingle of all things golden, green and yellow.

Isn’t everything got a colour? Yes, everything does.

 

Colour is one of the sweetest gift of life. It is a fish in the ocean that everybody watches all at the same time. It connects everything to everything. Love is colour. But hate is colour too. Joy is colour but sorrow is a colour too. There is nothing in life that is colourless. Ask an artist. They will tell you what appears to be colourless too is made up of colour.

 

Look at the butterflies and the flowers. They are dripping with vibrant colours. Look at someone falling in love. They are ebullient with colour.

 

More than anything else, look at your body. The flesh, the blood, the mucous, the bones and the eyes – isn’t everything got a different shade of colour? There are a whole lot of rainbows endowed to human beings than any fairy land, do you agree? Then, look at the mind, its got colour. Thoughts are colours. Emotions are colours. Feelings and sensations are colours. The life is a vibrant palette of colours, a mesmerising gradient and a unique conglomeration of hues.

 

It is a barrel of rainwater that reflects a different colour each time you look from a different point of view. In fact, a point of view is a colour too.

 

It is our attention that is the light behind every colour.

 

A billion people, all may look at the same thing and see a different colour in it. We taste colours and breathe colours. Through our attention, we create new colours every moment. Throughout our life, we create, only god knows, zillions and zillions of colours. Some colours are dipped in happiness while some are drenched with sorrow. But these are just different colours. Change the point of attention and you can change the colour too. In every moment, life has a unique colour.

 

So, what is the colour of your life right now?

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SEIZE THE MOMENT! | Podcast #5 by Neha's Notebook

Do you remember the fresh chemical smell of new set of books and notebooks we used to buy at the start of a new session in school? Or do you remember the summer vacation breakfasts while watching the series of Oswald, Noddy, Hatim and Bob The Builder? Do you remember playing with your neighbourhood friends or do you remember dancing at the tunes of Kisi Disco Mein Jaayein? Do you remember mom-dad returning from the grocery market and bringing a packet for you? Do you remember reading graphic story books while hiding them with school’s textbooks?

 

Those childhood days are long gone. All we are left with is a faint memory of these days. The moment arrived, we seized the moment, we lived it to the fullest, and then they were whoosh! gone.

 

Time and moments are just like this. If you spend too much time in thinking, the time is spent but the moments won’t come again. The time is also spent when you fully seize the moment, but this time, its memory causes us to bubble with bliss rather than thinking that we should have seized that moment.

 

It is easy to look back

and love the memory

To look further

and fantasize a new one

 

Don’t look back

at the past

Don’t look further

into the future

Seize this moment

to the fullest,

right now, right here.

 

Don’t be the beggar

holding onto scraps

of memories, happy or mild

or begging for some,

just live the adventure

walk right through the

thick of the wild

Don’t be an adult

melancholous at the loss

Neither be a toddler

ignorant of the mud of the wild

Just seize this moment

like a wonder-filled child!

 

Seize this moment.

Pay attention. Be wild.

 

‘cause when this passes away

you’re going to want to

seize it anyway

so do it now,

don’t look back, don’t look further,

just be here, seize this moment

Seize it like a fresh adventure and just be wild!

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GOOD FOOD, GOOD LIFE! - I am Food | Podcast #4 by Neha's Notebook

Nothing is more soothing than sipping a cup of hot coffee and crackling choco-chip cookies on an autumn morning.

 

A platter of potato chips is always a comfort food while watching a movie with your family or sibling…

 

A bowl of fruit salad is a must have, while a bar of silky chocolate can heal all your worries in an instant.

 

Pizza, burger, noodies, street food, fruits & veggies, nuts & berries, chocolates, biscuits and baked goodies, chips & crisps, buttery Indian delicacies, dosas, samosas, golgappas, mithais and breads and buns…or simply a dish of homecooked daal and chapatti…

 

When consumed rightly, food can turn out to be a medicine, a soothing ointment and at times, a wagon of pleasure. Food is that experience which connects all of the humanity. It is like sipping the molten sun or cherishing a wine-like moon. Like eating a star or drinking a galaxy. Like relishing syrupy honey-berries or snacking on streams of wildflowers.

 

As the telephone of hunger rings, food is what can kickstart the conversations and even lead to exciting ideas. Food is what can make relationships stronger and blossom the flower of love in the heart. Food can be the hearty retreat during all interactions.

 

Food is also colour. Like colors, different foods have different experiences. Is it spicy? Is it smoky? Is it crunchy or is it creamy? Is it puffy or is it flattened? Isn’t it so wonderful that there are tons of adjectives to describe the different kinds of foods?

 

In Vedic sciences, food is considered as one of the sheaths that cocoons the human body-mind system. In fact, the food we eat becomes the body we have. Body is nothing except for the food plus the intelligence that transforms food into the body. From our flesh to our bones and blood, even the photonic energies in our aura, it’s all the food we ate.

 

Food is the material of which our life experience is made of. With every morsel or bit of the food we eat, we also swallow a chunk of the universe, and this universe then transforms itself into our body. And also into our mind.

 

So it is not an understatement to say that I am food. I am food.

 

Food is a present moment experience. No matter how many technologies emerge, facebook, whatsspp, ecommerce cannot deliver food. Because food is me. I am food. It is where I am.

 

Every day we add a piece of ourselves to ourselves and delete a piece of ourselves from ourselves. What a mouthwatering intelligence the food is. Isn’t it so?

 

So, what is your favourite food of all time?

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SONG OF THE WINTER - The Sound of Stillness | Podcast by Neha's Notebook

Birds migrating to the south to taste some heat, bears and squirrels snoozing into hibernation, misty dewdrops settling longer on the droopy leaves and milky frost layering the space outside the window frames…winter has so much of melodious music embroidered into it.

 

Like musical dots or drops of music, winter sings a goldfuzzed song, the song of stillness, the song of silence, the song of ether.

 

Amidst this stillness, winter brings to light what was earlier hidden beneath the shadows of the darkness. This song of silence reveals a music that is sweeter than the music of rainbow and music of all colours. During winters, when everything is silent and still, one can listen to the song that has always been present but got buried under the noisy layers of thoughts.

 

But when the winter arrives, the thoughts, all of them like reptiles go into hibernation and this reveals the song of stillness, as if a glassy lake, a mirrory sunbeam, a crystal-like fireball, a starry raindrop.

 

Herein is the space where stillness speaks, where silence sings, where lakes dance. When the noise created by the thoughts rests into hibernation, the spaciousness of the mind reveals itself, singing an eternal song, that which resides beneath all the unconscious layers of the mind. Thereupon, all the memories turn into a land of gold, into sparkling dots of music that plays itself with freedom, mightiness, majesty and power. But this power is not alike what the mind perceives as power. It has no competition. It is independent of the dualistic nature of the mind. It just plays its own beat perfectly.

 

Apart from silence and stillness, the song of the winter plays a note of soothing healing energy. When the layers of memories come to a standstill, the emotions surface themselves so they can be heard, felt and healed. Healing happens of its own accord.

 

So, winter is arriving. Can you hear the song of the winter yet?

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