no, they aren't. I have seen, read, felt, processed stuff through life - all of it comes back to me as my thoughts.
yes, they are. they are very much mine. i m not sharing anything that i don't believe in. And my connection of everything i every ate, are my own. and they are original.
the thoughts become choices, choices become direction, direction become depth, depth becomes creation. so BEWARE of crap entering your mind. or learn to flush it out.
when i started looking for my answers, in 2009 - who i am, what is my religion, my philosophy, how do i make my decisions, what is right and wrong to me : I happened to read a book by Alan Fletcher, Picturing and Poeting - and i came across this absurd zen story.
Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said: "The flag is moving."
The other said: "The wind is moving."
The sixth patriarch happened to be passing by. He told them: "Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving."
it made me very curious about zen. i was in search of freedom, and questioning the need of a social alignment in an individuals life. Right from things like religion, education, teachers, social rules, ethics, rights and wrongs - zen showed a space, which was free from all this, while being within this very space. It was shocking. Something so fundamental, so pure exists.
i read a quote "when a flower arranger arranges flowers, he not only arranges the flowers, but arranges his own mind and mind of the person who looks at the flowers."
nobody in my entire life of 29 years gave me this perspective. i had never seen things as they were, in such a beautiful detail. it was amazing. i loved the way it reached me - nobody taught me, nobody introduced me, yet it was free and open for me to practice. I could make my decisions by being true to what i felt, how i saw the world. it was liberating and concentrating. it was making me take responsibility of my doing, with a realisation that i can only do what i think is right, irrespective of what happens as an outcome.
zen was like a puzzle. it didnt advise, it didnt direct me. it made me curious. i went back into my life, to find answers to this puzzle. I did thought experiments. Answers i was, even before i could know, became a part of me. i found it very evolved, and the insistence
after a few years, i read krishnamurti and came across the same ideas, which were now held in his words, in his question and answers. i could appreciate the purity, the intelligence, the clarity, yet i could not internalise them. i read oshos commentary on zen - it was right, correct, yet i couldn't hold it within. it was advice, it was in words... may be, it was not mine. what zen puzzled me was in my actions, it became mine.
it also changed my work. i used to write well, it took my words away from me. my work talks to me today (i took about 3 years to start hearing them). my works don't have a form, a subject - but they have colours (at least today)... when somebody asks me, what does this work mean, or put a word to it, no word explains the work. these works have a language of themselves.
my work has changed, completely. i am starting to feel it in my gut now.
शब्दांवाचून कळले सारे / शब्दांच्या पलीकडले