Bliss in N-O-T-H-I-N-G-N-E-S-S

Dr Vijita Ningombam *

I thought I was being very smart by trying to train myself to be happy all the time. I also thought I had succeeded until something used to go wrong and I had a gust of emotions that travelled through me. Sometimes it was sadness and envy of those who I thought were in better positions. Sometimes it was loneliness and sometimes pure rage.

I told myself to try and try again through another way. I looked at religion and God but I was not convinced. I found some flaws in every religion and religious books. All the different ideologies made me wonder if God even existed.

I started talking to people of different backgrounds, religion and culture. I quietly listened to them speak. There were two things that I found that was constantly a highlight of all those conversations. One, they all made me have this strong urge of arguing with them and second, all of them had a belief so strong that if I had to say anything against their views, it would end up building anger in them. All of this made me wonder if I already had a belief of my own. Why I was trying to argue in the first place? To convince them or to convince myself?

I knew that God was not my solution. So I turned to science. Being a doctor it was easy to understand the work of hormones. I understood that emotions are of course the work of hormones. But how was I going to control my hormones?

I started reading a lot about psychology and as much as I started to understand how easy it was to control your own mind, it became a very vast syllabus to be understood because psychology as a subject has not matured yet. We still haven't understood the mind fully.

Failing at my attempt, I turned to something more neutral. Neither religion nor science and perhaps both. I turned to meditation.

The escapism felt good the first day I tried it but it was only for that little while. It didn't help me to be happy all the time. I was disappointed and I thought I was asking for the impossible. The better word here was stability so I replaced happiness to stability. How could I have a stable mind all the time?

One afternoon I remember looking at maps of the world. I wondered how significant the state of events in my state and my country were on a global scale and if all the drama that happened in society was really that relevant. I wanted to go a little further away so I started searching for videos of other planets on the solar system. I could still visualise the earth well enough to recognise it but as I zoomed out to the Milky Way galaxy I couldn't see the earth or our solar system clearly. I couldn't stop there so I zoomed out further to the edge of the universe. The entire Milky Way became a speck in a supercluster of galaxies and our supercluster was just another supercluster in the universe which was just one of multiple universes according to some theories. We still don't know what lies beyond but that didn't really matter to me now.

In my mind, I didn't want to find what was beyond but I was instead trying to figure out where the earth was in all of this.

I couldn't really find it. Yes, this whole earth. The one that is so big. The one that is home to the whole human race and the animals and trees and insects and billions of other living and non living things. The one where different religions and ideas exist. The one where people die to save their race and language. The one where we try creating boundaries after boundaries. The one where we worry about losing our ethnicity and culture. The one where people find so many problems.

I zoomed in and then zoomed further in billions of light years until I could finally see that speck. It was smaller than a speck of dust and yet it was the biggest size of it I had seen after traveling to the edge of the universe. I grinned a little to see such a tiny thing floating in that gigantic alien environment.

I realised it was impossible for anybody who was living on that dust sized planet to become the master or owner of anything at all. It's just not in our control.

I was finally satisfied with the answer to all those questions I had been asking. The only way out for being stable all the time is by accepting the fact that it is impossible and it is beyond my control, but what is in our control is this moment.

This moment which is never constant. This moment when we sometimes get dragged away to thoughts of the past or the future. It is constantly travelling back and forth. And it's okay, it's okay let it go where it wants, it's okay to drift away but remember to train your mind to come back to where you are because this moment is the one that is the safest and it is the most stable place for you.

The past might bring regrets or the future might create anxiety in your mind. Learn to come back every time your mind drifts off. Because this moment itself is beautiful. Be in it as much as you can and don't try to change anything because look around you, there is nothing wrong with this moment. Look around you, everything is stable and you are blessed to be able to experience it.