Finding Peace In Uncertainty

This talk emphasizes a fundamental truth: recognizing the profound yet often overlooked reality that we lack control over the unfolding of our lives. It encourages embracing the heart's perspective over the mind's, highlighting that life's orchestration involves many unseen hands. The talk navigates through some personal experiences to illustrate how life unfolds in unexpected ways.

It encourages us to accept life's challenges and appreciate them as opportunities for growth and reminds us that happiness isn't about fulfilling desires but finding peace within challenges. It underscores the wisdom of appreciating challenges as essential for growth and the futility of seeking total control and promotes a perspective that fosters inner peace and happiness.

Ultimately, it urges us to play our part with love and let the rest unfold naturally.

Transcript

There is a little secret.

There's a little secret about our own life,

About all our lives.

It would be wrong to call it a secret because it's right in front of us.

But somehow we refuse to see it that way.

We would rather believe something opposite than to see the secret.

And the secret that I'm talking about is we don't have a clue of what is going to happen next.

We have absolutely no clue.

I remember my teacher saying this to me in one of the sessions.

All of us are falling.

But the good news is there is nowhere to land.

There is no clue of what is happening tomorrow.

But mentally,

We have a pretty good idea of what's going to happen tomorrow.

And we think that's true.

That's when we stop seeing the truth,

The reality,

And start believing an illusion.

Surely the illusion gives us a sense of control.

But it's only a sense of control.

It's not the control.

As a species,

We have evolved to find certainty,

Certainty for survival.

But in today's civilized society,

Our survival is more or less taken care of,

Our food is taken care of,

Our medical needs are taken care of.

But we are still operating under the survival instincts of the mind.

The beauty,

The most beautiful part about human experience is our heart that does not know anything about survival and doesn't care about survival.

So we need to drop into our hearts to experience this human experience.

Our mind is rigged with survival,

With fear,

With anxiety,

With worst-case scenarios,

With worries,

And with reasons for finding everything to support our worries,

Our anxieties.

As if,

If we didn't do this,

Things are not going to happen to us,

For us.

That's what happens when we get deluded in the sense of control.

All we look about is survival,

Control,

And the exasperation that it brings us is because nature doesn't care about our tiny mind's certainty.

Nature is all-encompassing.

If we look at the beauty of how our life has blossomed,

We'll find out that so many things are happening unbeknownst to us.

Forget about control,

We don't even know they are happening for us.

On a daily basis,

Maybe we are looking for three,

Four,

Five,

Ten things,

Or for some of us,

One thing,

And that is where all our energy is getting poured,

Which is not necessarily a bad thing,

But we cannot discount the fact that somebody else is running the show.

We have a part to play in this show,

But the whole stage is set up by someone else,

And we have been invited on this stage to play our part.

Food,

Drinks,

Clothing,

Shelter will be provided.

You just have to play your part as happily as you can,

As best as you can,

As intelligently as you can,

As lovingly as you can.

These words are not for your mind.

The mind cannot stand these words because these words imply that the mind does not have control,

But the heart knows the truth.

When I look back at my childhood,

I grew up in a house,

If you can call it a house,

A rickety place,

Maybe 240 square foot,

Two rooms,

Open bathroom.

We shared our toilets with 11 other families,

240 square foot,

Two rooms.

One was kitchen plus bathroom,

The other was living room,

And four of us initially,

And then three of us lived in that space until I came here.

So for 23 years,

We were in that house.

Every monsoon,

Water was leaking from the roof,

Waking us up in the middle of the night.

But I don't remember ever complaining about that house,

That lifestyle.

I had friends who lived in bigger houses.

I had my extended family living in way better houses and buildings.

My friends had vehicles of their own.

So it wasn't that I was living under a rock in a tribe in a jungle,

But having humble beginnings gave me this perspective of not being desperate.

And now that I am here,

Someone,

Third person looking outside in would consider this a success.

I have a house here in America,

With a job,

With a wife,

And they would attribute this success to me,

My efforts,

My desires.

But that's not how I feel.

Don't get me wrong,

I enjoy all these things.

I take care of all these things.

But I don't feel that this is what I wanted,

That I have done something to achieve this.

Given my engineering background,

My very rational mind,

I can tell you every stage of this quote unquote success,

There was a village helping me,

Known,

Unknown people helping me.

And there was this master hand orchestrating,

Orchestrating this whole show.

Just to give you a little glimpse,

When I came here in Cincinnati in 2008,

That was the first time I had left my mom.

I didn't have a place,

I was staying with a friend or an acquaintance.

And you get a culture of shock when you come here,

At least from a populated country like India,

Where you see people and when you come here,

There are no people.

And I was so scared.

I didn't have a phone,

I didn't have a house,

I didn't really have friends who would empathize.

But surprisingly,

My childhood friend from the same city,

Same school that I went to,

That where I shared my education with him,

He got admission in the same university as me the same year.

And we both got rejected from all other universities the previous year.

And when he came,

It was so much easier,

So much familiar to find my way around with something familiar,

Someone familiar.

Now I could say that all this is because of my efforts,

But who orchestrated this show?

Who got him here?

Would it be the same without him?

I don't know.

I don't want to be arrogant in taking credit for everything that has happened in my life.

Yes,

I did play my part,

But that part was already written.

I just had to do it with my own flair,

Being happy,

Being loving.

And there are so many other examples I could give,

Filled with serendipities,

Synchronicities,

Where this orchestration is undeniably visible.

But no matter how much I try to prove it to the mind,

It will find that one thing which is different from mine and say,

You know what,

That's why it worked for you.

And it's not working for me.

I disagree with this.

So I rest my case even before starting.

I'm not here to convince the mind.

I'm here to speak to your heart,

Whether you like it or not.

All of us have been gathered here.

We might think we have chosen to be here,

But all of us are gathered here for a little while to listen to this.

Just like I am listening,

All of you are listening,

And then we'll be gathered somewhere else with someone else.

But the illusion,

The delusion that I chose,

I chose to be here,

I decided it's mine.

The credit is mine and the desperation is mine as well.

But if we looked at it through our heart,

The credit is not mine,

The desperation is not mine either.

Our left-brained personality cannot handle poetry.

Not to understand poetry,

But to live it,

To integrate the heart of a Sufi with the mind of an engineer.

That's my part here,

At least for now.

And it's not about me.

I'm just speaking on behalf of this nature to show the obviousness of how we are all taken care of in more ways than we can even fathom.

But when we focus on one thing,

All these other ways and other things just fall into the backdrop.

And this becomes this huge mountain crushing us.

You know,

When something wrong happens,

Something that happens against our wish,

There is a popular way in India where they say,

You know what,

It's going to be all okay.

Don't worry about it.

And in my previous life,

I used to question,

How do you know?

How do you know it's going to be all okay?

Only to shut others up.

But now that I can think with my heart,

I understand that it's all going to be okay because it has always been okay.

It cannot be proved to the mind.

You cannot learn how to swim without jumping in the water.

And when you jump in the water,

It will take care of,

It will take care of you.

You will fight.

But the intelligent way would be to hire someone while you take a jump.

That's what I meant by integrating the sharp mind of an engineer with a soft heart of a Sufi.

Jump with caution.

It's easy to misunderstand when I use the word fight.

Someone would be fighting,

Drowning,

Without ever jumping in the water.

They would be tired.

They would be exhausted,

Depleted,

Even without stepping foot in the water.

Because the mind does not,

It can paint a picture where it does not know the difference between what is real versus what is imaginary.

The fight I meant was the fight of action,

Which can at most drain us physically,

Not mentally,

Not emotionally.

Your mind will probably hate me for saying this.

But again,

These words are not for your mind.

I want what I want,

The way I want it,

And I want it now.

That's the stance that our mind almost always has.

You had what you wanted,

The way you wanted it,

When you wanted it.

But were you happy?

No,

Because you found other reasons to be unhappy about.

I heard this modern philosopher explain it beautifully where he said,

When you are healthy,

You have a thousand desires.

When you're sick,

You just have one desire.

But we lose the freedom and the wisdom after this one desire gets mitigated.

And we go back to thousand desires without seeing that nothing mattered in those moments of sickness,

Which means happiness has nothing to do with one or thousand desires.

It's just that the itchy mind got scratched and felt relief for a little bit,

And then it had to be scratched again.

That's what we settle down as happiness in life.

One scratch,

One relief after the other.

That's not happiness.

The happiness and peace that I'm talking about is the happiness and peace of a football player in a stadium filled with 100,

000 people in a high-pressure game.

We all as spectators experience tension and anxiety,

But the football player is at peace.

They have trained for peace,

They've trained for calm.

Anything otherwise is not professional sports.

But we enjoy watching professional sports.

But if we zoomed in,

We will see that what we actually love is this peace and calm.

Not just peace and calm of sitting down and not doing anything,

But participating hard,

Exerting physically immensely.

And if you end up winning,

The credit goes to God.

As most of us,

Most of the players do,

Or they refer to their coach or their training.

The glory is never theirs.

And an amusing thing of our human life is,

If everything is happening exactly the way I want,

When I want it,

The mind gets bored.

It is unfulfilled.

It tries to get into problems or find problems or become problems.

And if you look around us,

That is what we complain about,

Teenagers and kids who we have provided so heavily,

We have given them all the comforts,

Especially immigrant families.

It's so easy for us to see that our kids are given everything that we don't have and they don't have appreciation for life because challenges are missing.

So the one trait that stays with us from the evolution of species is this deep desire for challenges.

The muscle won't grow if you don't work it out.

Don't tear it apart with working out micro tears.

I mean,

For us to grow stronger,

We have to be challenged.

So all of us are getting exactly what we need,

The way we need it,

And when we need it.

To see this as wisdom,

To fight it is foolishness.

I'm not saying foolishness patronizingly,

We're all doing it,

All of us.

And whenever we do it,

There is pain,

Physical or psychological pain.

Let's start playing our part.

The stage is set for us.

Let's train hard,

Let's eat well,

Let's work exceptionally,

Let's love hard.

That's our part.

What happens with all of this is none of our business.

Thank you.