We are thoughts or we are nothing! We are anything but thoughts! One way or the other, thoughts are engine and we are wagon, like it or not! We don’t run thoughts. It is the other way round. It is thoughts that tell us what or who we are. What we are here for! What is our purpose and pursuit! We come and go. Thoughts live on, stubborn, obstinate, don’t go away. They don’t come with us nor do they go with us. They catch up with us on the way and become fellow traveler till the end. At the outset, they are benevolent and companionable, then they become master, then torture, then dictator, then tyrant, and eventually fatal. They prod us into becoming a bright or dark horse in the racecourse and once we break our leg or fall behind other or lose the race, they sent us to the abattoir. Parents in many a societies treat their children like horse of a racecourse. It is a pity. No tears.

The thoughts take us to the crest of the wave and we have hardly begun to enjoy it when they throw us into an abyss of despair. They set mission for us to achieve. We throw ourselves into it. We perish. Thoughts are gone. We succeed thoughts come back to us, bend us to question the wisdom of doing what we did and why we did it at all.

And yet, we cannot do without thoughts! We put ourselves at the mercy of it. We need this poison because without it we have no ways to know if we are ‘living’ at all. We need shouting presence of a thought to establish our own existence and prove it in loud voice to our own contentment. We need thoughts to convince us that we are living and that the going is good, bad, or hard. We need thoughts to connect us with our past, near or distant, to take us back as far as we want to go, to visualize what future awaits us. We need thoughts to anchor us in somewhere in our comfort zone, or else, God forbid, we get caught up in some stormy sea miles from anywhere overrun by marine predators. With thought having so much of stake in our ‘life’, bereft of thoughts will mean reducing oneself to a living corpse, a walking dead! That way we can merely ‘exist’ but cannot ‘live’! We are here to ‘live’ and not to simply ‘exist’!

Living as opposed to existing! What do they possibly mean! Are they two different things and not one and same thing?  Who can decide it for us?

What else do we have other than the instrument of thought to do the task of separating chaff from wheat? How else can we possibly know what is ‘living’ as against what is merely ‘existing’!  It is the thought that only can lend us the lens of wisdom to know it.

‘Living’ means to see, to taste, to feel, to enjoy, to experience and to do a thousand and one things as opposed to merely ‘existing’ wherein there is no thrills, no excitement, and which is bland, dreary like someone in a coma. And to do the things of seeing, tasting, feeling, enjoying, experiencing and doing a host of other things we have to turn the engine of thought on. If not, what else can pull these activities to life! Can I ever enjoy a thing without a thought! Can I ever see a thing without a thought! Can I ever feel a thing without a thought! Can I ever taste a thing without a thought! Can I ever experience a thing without a thought!

So, it is the thought again that puts temptation in our way and snare us in a web of living.  It is thought that tricks us into believing that we are here to ‘live’ and not merely to ‘exist’. Anything that can draw a line of difference between ‘living’ and ‘existing’ is nothing if not a thought.

The word ‘taste’ brought back into memory my conversation with my son this morning. We usually observe a weekly calendar for dinner subject to variations owing to the circumstances beyond our control. Wednesday is a fish day. He asked me what fish was I goanna cook for dinner tonight. I passed the buck to him to have his own way. He dithered over what to say, couldn’t make a choice. He asked me to say from my experience the tastiest fish available in the market.

I said the fish have no taste of its own. It is I who put taste into the fish. I have a recipe book of taste in me. I dig out the taste from me and put it into the fish.  He said, yeah but why some people like one type of fish and other like other type. I said, you already know the answer. I need not answer it. He said, how he could possibly know the answer. I said, if the fish had taste in it and the fish-eaters hadn’t, there would have been no likes and dislikes. Everyone would have found one and the same taste in all fish. Everyone would have liked every single fish served to them.  But, you have a framework of taste in you. You cannot function outside it. You eat a fish with a taste in mouth and if what you get from the fish correspond to your taste, it is a delicious fish for you.

So, the taste in me and the taste in you are different, the fish has no taste of its own, though. We have developed the framework of taste in us independent of each other. And, hence it is irrelevant to you if I say one fish is delicious and the other not. I only can say which of the fishes I like depending on the fish corresponding to my taste and not yours.

If the fish had taste in itself, there wouldn’t have been any debate over it.

Back to ‘thoughts’ the engine driving us. Let me conclude by saying this much, living with thoughts is living in stress and harvesting the things issuing from it. Existing can happen only when someone is absence of thought which means existing in joy, living moment to moment, in a state of flux, and all that issuing from it. Thought rules the living. Thought ceases to exist in existing. We have a choice, whether to go for ‘living’ or ‘existing’.