I have always wondered about the relationship between love and hate. In the normal usage the two are regarded as two opposite poles of human emotion. We often read stories about love turning into hate. Can love really turn into hate? But stories are just that - stories, fabricated in the author’s mind. That is why they are called fiction as opposed to fact. Is it possible that love belongs only to the realm of fiction and that kind of love does not happen in real life? Here I am talking of the particular type of love in books and not of the instinctive love as that of a parent for a child.

We often hear of two people being madly in love. Literally it cannot be true and if it is, it is not love but passion. Passion can die, love cannot. I remember a story about a famous actress. She was beautiful with perfect figure and complexion to go with it. Of course, she was also good at acting. In her school days there used to be a boy from a poor family in the same neighborhood. Every morning on her way to school he came up and offered her a flower but spoke no words, just looked into her eyes tenderly.

She grew up, went to college and from there into the film industry. She moved to a posh area of the city. Now every one loved her, people mobbed her whenever she appeared in public. The boy also grew up to be a modest teacher. He still went to see her with a flower in hand but never got a chance to get anywhere near her. One day he managed to get near her but she looked at him with a scorn. He wrote a poem and sent to her.

It said something like this: “I have loved you and will always love you. When someone breaks your heart and you have nowhere to go, my house will always be open to you. When all the beauty and glamour is gone and you are even afraid of looking into the mirror, I will still welcome you. .... .” She tore it off in disgust and threw into the wastebasket. So many had professed love and wanted to marry her. She did not and this urchin from her past writes this rubbish!

Years rolled by, the beauty faded. No one in the industry cared for her. She lost fame, fortune, and everything that goes with those. She fell sick, alone, uncared for, and ended up in a hospital. The schoolteacher heard about it. He went to the hospital, she was sleeping. He sat by the bed. She woke up in pain and saw him but did not recognize. Then she noticed the flower in his hand. She realized that until that moment she had never known the true meaning of love.

The author has a website CosmosEboooks.

I have not posted anything new for a week. Partly it was due to circumstances and partly due to my persistent feeling that the topics that I write on are not of interest to most readers. Not that it really matters, as writing is more a matter of self-expression than anything else. In any case I decided to get a little personal and this post is about personal events and experiences in my early life.

I came from a modest background and spent the first sixteen years of my life in the village. The village had only primary and middle schools. The nearest high school was five miles away in a town in another state across the river that also flows by our village. The school in our state was twenty miles away. There was really no choice, so I went to the other school.

I was the only one from the village going to that school. This involved walking alone five miles back and forth and crossing the river in a boat every day. The river is one of the largest (also most sacred) in the country and more than a mile wide during the rainy season. The village across the school town was the only ferry point within miles with boats leaving every hour. There used to be ten or twelve schoolboys in the boat. At that hour rest of the passengers were mostly women taking milk or milk products for sale into the town.

In the months outside the rainy season crossing was smooth. Even then some folks, especially women, could get scared if they saw water leaking into the boat. I remember once a woman almost shrieking. The boatman jokingly asked, “Do you expect milk to leak in?”.

During the rainy season with the river in flood the situation was very different. We had to walk an extra mile upstream to compensate for the drift due to strong currents. The crossing was rough and passengers got panicky. When the winds were strong enough the boatman used sails instead of manual rowing. The wind generated waves and the boat would easily rise and fall sevaral feet riding the crests. That scared almost everyone, perhaps with the exception of us schoolboys. Thinking of that today, it was more of a foolish bravado. I can’t imagine doing it today. Of course, today no one has to do it. They now have a bridge across the river a little downstream from where we used to cross.

There was another type of crossing that we did a couple of times. Towards the end of May just before summer vacation there were days when we did not have to take books to the school. On two separate occasions two of us decided to forego the boat ride and just swam across. Even in May it was close to a mile swim, but we did not feel any worse for it. It was fun that is possible to have only at that age.

The author has a website CosmosEbooks dealing mainly with philosophy, science, and self-development.

“To be useful and effective ancient wisdom must relate to modern conditions.”

The true worth of an ancient classic is that the wisdom contained in them transcends time and space. Panchatantra is such a classic. It is the oldest extant collection of stories and is generally regarded as children’s book. This is largely because the characters in the stories are mostly animals and birds that speak like human beings and give sound advice full of pragmatic wisdom. The natural qualities of these creatures are judiciously made to delve into human nature. This is a ploy usually employed in ancient Indian literature to show a happy fusion of nature and imagination.

Panchatantra has been acclaimed as a book for children worldwide and has been translated into almost all languages. But the wisdom contained in the stories is for people of all ages. In most cases it also transcends time and is relevant as much today as it was thousands of years ago. The passages containing them occur as part of the stories and relate to life in a pragmatic way. We present here some of these related to money and wealth. A complete collection of these will be contained in a forthcoming book and will be available on our website CosmosEbooks.

Positive Aspects:

There is almost nothing in this material world that does not require money for accomplishment. Therefore a wise man should make every effort to acquire wealth.

Wealth attracts friends and relatives. It makes a person feel important and even wise.

In this world people long to be relatives of a wealthy man, but his own relatives forsake a poor man.

With wealth an ordinary man becomes great and commands respect even without other qualities.

Wealth can make an old man feel young, while in poverty a young man feels old.

Negative aspects:

Money always causes pain. There is pain in earning, pain in safekeeping, pain in making it grow, and pain in spending. It is not worth it.

Wealth makes one ever enthusiastic but also arrogant and vain. It also gives strength and a false sense of knowledge but they all vanish with the wealth.

A person, who is poor from the beginning, does not feel as much pain as another who acquires wealth and then loses it.

Sometimes we use words in conversation or even in writing without giving any thought to their implication. One such word is the adverb infinitely, used to modify an adjective – like infinitely more or infinitely better. In this context I recalled an incident from several decades ago involving this very word ‘infinitely’.

We had among us a very senior professor who was eminently known and respected as mathematician and physicist. One day I overheard a conversation between him and one of the department secretaries. He generally preferred to do things himself. They were talking about some mundane work, which he said he would do it and not bother her. She insisted on doing it and gave the reason: “Your time is infinitely more valuable than mine”.

He said that it was not true but she maintained that it was. He then told her that he was objecting to the use of the word ‘infinitely’ and explained its mathematical implication. In order for his time to be infinitely more valuable the value of her time had to be zero, which was not true. Zero multiplied by infinity can be anything because mathematically anything divided by zero is infinity.

The problem arises because of our somewhat vague concept of infinity. In fact infinity cannot be defined. We confuse it with something large that cannot be specified or even imagined.

The problem gets more complicated when we consider qualitative comparisons. For example, we sometimes use terms like ‘infinitely more beautiful’. First, of course, we run into the problem of defining a baseline for beauty. Where is the dividing line between beauty and its absence? Again I am reminded of a line that I read long time ago and that had been in my memory bank since then. It was in the preface by the author of a novel. The author died before completing it. It was published nonetheless and to my mind even being incomplete it is one of his best creations. I quote the translation.

“In an attempt to make the picture more beautiful the artist keeps on using his brush and giving more touches until it becomes hideous.”

Is ugliness the limit of beauty? We often think of beauty and ugliness as a pair of opposites. Could it be that there is a continuum from one to the other? We don’t know and perhaps can’t know.

The author has a website CosmosEbooks devoted mainly to philosophy, science, and self-development.

Everything in this world is a conglomeration of several other smaller things. We can break it into component parts until we reach a point where further division ceases to have any meaning. This is what happened in particle physics. Breaking down matter into elementary particles we arrive at the realization that there are no elementary particles but simply packets of energy and energy cannot be separated into parts. Still the elementary particles are the building blocks and at the most elementary level everything is made up from a swarm of electrons and quarks.

But do parts themselves make up the whole? The reductionist view may be different but the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. I remember the story of a schoolboy who was at an early stage of learning English. He was asked to write an essay on some subject. He simply wrote all the alphabets from A to Z, stating that the collection contained every possible piece that can be written. This story may stretch the idea to the limit of absurdity but the fact is that just a collection of parts cannot make the whole. Something more is needed, and that is integration.

The concept of integration goes beyond physical objects. It applies equally well to abstract things like thoughts and feelings. This brings us to the main point of this post, which is mind-body integration. Normally when we talk of parts in human context we mean body parts. But man exists at different levels and the physical body is only one of them. The other levels are collectively referred to as the astral body. In philosophical terminology they are called sheaths. There are five of them including the physical body, which is the material sheath. The next four are the vital energy sheath, mind sheath, intellect sheath, and bliss sheath.

All these sheaths interpenetrate each other and there are no boundaries as such. Man’s full potential is not realized unless all these levels of existence are integrated. In an abstract sense these sheaths are parts that make up the man. It is perhaps the most esoteric example of parts and whole. This integration is the main objective of yoga philosophy and practice. A detailed discussion is beyond the scope of this post but will be covered in a separate article that can be viewed on our website CosmosEbooks.