“Stone, Paper……..?”

“Nothing is permanent in this world except change”                                                – Capt. Shoukat Mukherjee

Often, I take a journey of the mind and visit interesting places. I conjure myriad images of love and belonging. I visit places which can only be imagined, or perhaps cannot. These journeys are very refreshing for me. I always end up learning new things from it. When it ends, it leaves behind food for my creative escapades which I share with my friends.

Something like this happened the other day. I was looking to save a very important telephone number. It was important to me and I knew I could not afford to lose it in any way. So, I took my personal diary and wrote it down carefully together with the other numbers. But that was not enough for me. What if I lost the diary? So, to be extra cautious, I saved the number in my son’s mobile, but that too hardly gave me any solace. What if my son deletes the number or perhaps his mobile gets wet? – I remembered how his previous mobile got destroyed because he had accidentally dropped a glass of water on it. I saved the number in my computer, but the nagging feeling remained – ‘‘What if the mother board dies’’, and I am unable to retrieve the data from it? It happened to me once. Suddenly all the equipment in the world appeared to be unsafe and unsecured. I just needed to save the telephone number somewhere secure. I became so obsessed, that whatever I though seemed to have a failure quotient attached to it. Computers will run down, diaries will get lost, mobiles will get stolen or get wet in the rain – my God, I was losing my mind. Give me a place which is permanent, an equipment which will never falter. Give me a wall that will never break (and I don’t mean Facebook).

Like a miracle, Life sometimes provides you with answers out of nowhere. As I was ruminating and trying to pry myself away from my very own thoughts, a melody gently floated across and filled the room like a thin layer of incense which mildly caresses your senses. I closed my eyes and floated with the stream. I went a million paces with the song and then back again I came, into the room filled with the essence of a Loveland. This was one of Manna Dey’s most romantic renditions, a true Bengali classic of our times and went like this;

Jodi Kagoje Lekho Naam

Kagoj Chirey Jaabey                                                                                         

(If you write the name on paper                                                                  

the paper will tear)

Pathore Lekho Naam

Pathor Khoye Jaabey                                                                         

(Write the name on stone                                                                                

the stone will corrode)

Hridoye Lekho Naam

Se Naam Roye Jabe                                                                       

(Write the name on the heart                                                               

?the name will remain forever)

Hmm.. Jodi Kagoje Lekho Naam (Melody)

I thought, ‘What is the one thing which is permanent in this world’? Nothing. Why is nothing permanent? If you read the blog by Acharya Prashant named Words Into Silence, that talks about it at length.

Question: Why is it so certain that ‘whatever comes will go’?

Acharya Prashant: “Actually, the quoted statement is an impression that whatever comes, stays for a while, and then goes away.

The fact is a little different.

Whatever comes disappears that very moment.

It will not go; it is already gone.

There is nothing in this universe which is permanent even for a millisecond or for a nanosecond. So, whatever comes, changes immediately. ‘A’ changes into ‘B’. Now where is ‘A’?

Gone.

We live in time, whatever we perceive—any object, event, or any relationship, the whole universe, whatever we perceive, we perceive it in time. And time means change. The moment you go from the zeroth second to the first second, something has changed. Had it not changed, you would not have been able to detect time or conceptualize time or give a meaning to time.

Time is just another name for change. So, whatever is in time, which means whatever is perceptible through the senses, whatever is worldly, whatever exists in the universe is in time. And time means change and change means disappearance.

So, whatever is, will not go away; it has already gone away.

In the moment of its appearance it simultaneously disappears.

Everything simultaneously disappears in the moment of its appearance.”

Now when we speak of the mind, we are not talking of our brains. Some people think that the mind is the brain or some other part or function of the body, but this is incorrect. The brain is a physical object that can be seen with the eyes and that can be photographed or operated on in surgery. In Buddhist scriptures, our body is compared to a guest house and our mind to a guest dwelling within it. When we die, our mind leaves our body and goes to the next life, just like a guest leaving a guest house and going somewhere else.

So, coming back to the important number which I wished to store, If I was able to store that in my mind, or perhaps ‘saving’ is a better word, would it be saved then for eternity even when I died, and my mind would travel into endless space?

Who would be able to answer this question of mine? Like I said, I often take these mind journeys and travel into unknown spaces – like this one which I took that day while trying to save a simple telephone number. I realised that not everything in our world needs to have an answer. Our mere existence is a bipolar phenomenon of transition. We get attached to things and then find a way to stick to them forever, not realizing that each second bring with it a change.

But if you really do wish to tie up with a thought, then put that in your mind. It shall stay like matter, but invisible, – never to be destroyed or forgotten. This is the reason why I think Love, stays forever.

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Capt. Shoukat Mukherjee is an international award winning global trainer, public speaker and Leadership exponent. He is the author of the best-selling and award winning book ‘Mind Over Water’, a treatise into Leadership Development and Team building.

You can connect with Shoukat at:

Email: ‘[email protected]

Twitter: @shoukat1971

Fb: @shoukatsmindoverwater