"I am in a place where there is no fear of death."
(Abba passed away in December 1998 and said this to my mom in a dream.)

"Yes, I Love You,
but where is the I
that is separate from You?"

Abba never told me the things that must have hurt him the most in his life. Certain facts of my Being fully came to light only when I found myself trapped in a difficult marriage, trying to be step-father to a child who was too young to understand. It was a karmic debt that I had to repay and I did, almost with my life.. on a marijuana trip.

When we talk about love, I know that we hurt, and still hurt very bad. Every time love leaves us, it leaves a space that nobody or nothing can fill. And on and on we go, until our heart is nothing but a great hungering emptiness... It is that pain that we have felt in our lives that bonds us in a strange way, something that we can only try to understand, and be satisfied with only a hint of an answer.

"There you go again...
making love to me
with your eyes.
No, this chemistry
will not just be
another experiment of physics
between us...
It is simply my heart
that throbs with love
and touched very gently
by your words.
Lets take a walk someday
and find out
how far we have come?"

True Love happens in Onederland and the memory of that place lies only in the depths of our heart. Our brain, that relies only in the perception of the senses, cannot understand, cannot reach that place because, in a way, it is Here, and Now.

Onederland is about Oneness. It is about being One, not two. Not divided between hopes and reality, not struggling to realize a dream because life itself is a dream come true. It is going deep enough to see things differently, through the heart and sense the person that hides inside all the bodies... all the persons who we know...

"Oh! How I have learned to ignore
the crying of my soul. . .
in the journey to understanding
that love is more important
than the lover. . . "

Many hours, many days, many years have gone in vain... searching for the one true love... the one pair of beautiful eyes which would see the world the way that I do... and understand how I feel... That moment is gone, disappeared in the rubble of a life I tried to save, and now there is loneliness. How precious was that feeling when it warmed my heart... when I knew my dreams were true!!

I want to live, forever if I can. Only to see those moments of love... when Something happens that makes me wonder why all this has come to be. Only to see another smile on another face that says, maybe the moment is still there, only hidden in its many disguises...

"This I’ll speak with my eyes
and you will understand
without saying a single word.
Love is crazy
and life is like that,
so many wishes unspoken
so many desires unfulfilled
and time is running out."

I finished my karma of love that required me to forever change one affection for another. One pair of eyes to be deceived and stare at another, seeing nothing but strangeness. Of course, this is rare because most souls still prefer to lose their way and keep tracing the same circles of illusion, sleeping fitfully in the sub-conscious nights, trapped in bleak dungeons of desire. Life CAN be organized in another way. We can know more than our text-books can teach, find more meaning than all religions provide... if only we choose to give up this narrowness of being...

"This body, this being
that you call ‘you’
is also mine.
My power
that expresses through your beauty
is beginning to live a harmony
at different levels…"

Maybe it is a forgotten memory of Atlantis... a fresh green valley by the mountains in a sun-swept afternoon, a misty meadow, green and spotted with yellow flowers, a fragment of a dream filled with music and a painful joy. Or maybe a mountain trail by the lofty peaks of the Himalayas, a part of some adventurous life lived in a hazy past. Those memories haunt me, now that the storms of this mind is settling down. Slowly rising from the wells of a deeper memory... I long to go away. Take a car and hit the lonely highway, leave everything behind in search of a wonderland, a proverbial Shangri-La.

"Why this pseudo love affair
and yet consoling
a wounded heart?
Why this elusive trace of truth
and yet digesting
a landscape of discarded garbage?
Why this sudden encounter
and yet wandering aimlessly
along empty roads?
Why this after taste
of the real thing
and yet struggling
with Something not yet born?"

This is another day, another hour, another minute. The same sun’s rays traveling so far and touching this fragile surface of my being, while another dream slowly takes shape in the recesses to gather wings and fly away. Another pair of eyes looking so beautiful, in the haunting depths of memory. Another breeze drifting in the air, stirring one emotion, caressing another and leaving a thoughtless daze in the mind...

Love is a contact with the ultimate truth of our being. The important thing is TO BE love rather than TO HAVE love. We are immortals, trapped in the mortality of our bodies. But we slowly grow enough to take immortal bodies and our bliss is endless... like the gentle sway of palm trees against a blue sky as if everything was stuck in that moment, huddled close by to a friend who always turns up now and then, to share a smile.

"A quiet fear
lurking in the cold air
Somebody shivering
with no one to care.
It is taking me
to where you are
strolling here and there."

I sit by this window and it is morning. The first rays of the sun striking the banana leaves outside another shrub is rendered in red-golden hues. When did life become so beautiful? To think, this is where I wanted to be, this humble hour and a quiet vision, the ability to recognize what has always been... life takes us to so many places... we are invited to see our own creations, meet the demons of our own mind, the angels of our thoughts... moments wrapped in love, quiet.

It is about our adventure where things must simply be, not according to our expectations but to facilitate a wonderment, of beautiful surprises happening one after another... One can never say when this door of life opens to set us free...

Why must the world decide what we are to do with each other? Why must it tell us how and when? Secretly in the corners of our heart, we hold each other that this dream may come true, that the same world may know and overcome its strange delirium, its awesome fear and suspicion of the Love that moves away from the object of its devotion, so that it may grow and bloom in strength.

She sensed, after a long long time that the hope in her was still alive. It had dimmed and burning low but the power kindled it again. Like a diya¹ after the fireworks in a Diwali night. An unseen hand poured some fuel and once again the flame was bright.

We were prisoners of our minds in the bleakness of night. We were groping for each other but chasing only shadows. For once, there was a faint sparkling of light. Dawn was near and we had to get rid of the nocturnal habit and face the Sun.

Every promise would reveal its color, every thing we misunderstood would reveal itself as an aspect of truth, every scar, every blemish on our weathered souls, smoothed by the winds of grace... our real eyes, our real seeing, our true body... returned to us along with the bonus of wisdom earned by earnest seeking.

How shall that day pass when it would know no end? How silly would these fears of limitation seem when our being stretches limitless? And why are so many still waiting, still looking lost when their miracle is hovering so near?

She pondered on this for a long while. Why he fascinated her? How? She realized it within but somehow the living fact of it was not quite proved. It was a guess that slowly took shape, something so absolutely wonderful, something that never seemed possible... that he had come back into her life to give her the gift of her own self.

So how many of us are given this gift? To be able to see ourselves the way we truly are? Shining with goodness down to the bottomless brim?? If those obstacles were never there, if each of us could purely be, without being a muddled heap of opinions, a waging war of conflicts from people in conflict themselves, a see-saw of our parent’s relationship, (what Father said to Mother but she did not understand or what Mother did for Father and he overlooked) the see-saw that never settled, then we would be that shining bright person we all are, not making too many mistakes or not so confused about the mysterious choices offered by an equally mysterious life!

"The color of your skin
is not always
a true reflection of your soul...
While the Gods
men have always believed
are smug in their heavens,
My God sees the tiniest teardrop
and cries
because the pain that caused it
is never necessary,
but such is the power
of mass belief in suffering..."

Why can’t reality be according to what we feel and know WITHIN us? Within that exists an island of ecstatic love and wonderful understanding. One that happens on its own timetable, one that is coming straight from The Divine???

Somewhere down the line, you will have to see that "I" consists of "Me" too! Therefore, to feel any separation in identity will always lead to pain... when you get too absorbed in your "I"- ness, when you identify with the fact that you were born in a place called India or Bulgaria or Malaysia, and the fiction that you are American, Canadian or wherever Adam Smith's invisible hand took you.. that you have an extra-terrestrial consciousness or a planetary mind. But this is the way we are evolving only so that we can eventually experience the ONE-ness. If we do not allow the separation of individuality, the cognition of being different, then we cannot discover the process of integration to become One, once again.

"Love never accepts our petty terms but fills us when we are willing to be transformed into its splendor. It is the truth of our being that we discover and all things move by its decree. What power do we have before that which is ours by nature? So why should we feel exalted when we feel love? Is it not because we deny it most of the time? We impose our own foolishness by saying it has to be like this or like that but when we are open like a flower, love is our own nature, the essence by which we breathe, by which we live."

O N E D E R L A N D is a zone of consciousness, where we are fairies with wings like a dragon-fly. It is a beautiful harmonic state of mind. The air is different there. The very experience is an altered state of perception... where everything is locked in "HARMONY.” Out of that harmony erupts a thought that whatever is experienced is an intrinsic part of us. It is time to let go of pettiness... of the idea that you are being left out as a single individual isolated from the rest. No... not anymore!!

Abba started communicating with me once again.. from "that" dimension.. and I started listening, finally.. or maybe, "it" was always there, waiting for a different wavelength, when the airwaves were completely clean from the muddied opinions of our superficial egos.

We exchanged many words, words that were not always English, words that I listened through a SONY walkman, many FM radios and a very powerful RCA LYRA mp3 player that is.. you guessed it, made in China!!

"Zarrey, zarrey mey usi ka noor hai,
Jhank khud mey, woh na tujh se dur hai..
Ishq hai ussey toh sabse ishq kar,
Iss ibadat ka yahi dastur hai.
Is mey, uss mey aur uss mey hai wohi,
Yaar mera, har taraf bharpoor hai.”³

Or maybe on a lighter vein..,

Bullah keney koi zaane, moi buli kun?*
Soulmate jong phi tang e-wei, dooja kaha na jaey.. **
Bala oy-sey aamar kholosh (ego) bangee gesey..***
Phir aaj mujhe tumko bus itna batanaa hai.. FIRST, illi RIGHT hok-bekuu,
THEN idu tumba channa-gidya!****
Wake Up, Allah is laughing inside you..!!"

(.*_*.)

1. Diya, lamp with oil and wick.
2. Diwali, a festival of Light
3. From the movie, Delhi 6.. Assamese,(*) Khasi, (**) my mother tongue,(***) Kannada (****)
Imagine what would happen if you could REALLY understand ALL the languages spoken by the human tongue?