The Puppy in the Backyard

My son  and my daughter-in-law  visited our home recently, along with their latest acquisition: a puppy dog. After spending a few minutes in our house, the puppy wanted to do what all puppies want to do, once the initial display of affection was over. We have a large backyard, with excellent facilities for the puppy to do his business. Moreover, it is enclosed by a wooden fence, so it is perfectly safe.

We opened the back door for him, but he didn’t want to go out; he was too scared. Sonia, my daughter-in-law, led him out, but he still wanted to come back inside the house. After a while, it was only Sonia in the backyard with the puppy was making himself comfortable on our carpet in the living room. After a huge amount of back and forth, the puppy finally went outside, did his business and, after a few minutes, he came back in, looking greatly relieved.

When I look back at that incident, I realize that we, too, are that puppy. By “we”, I mean most of us, if not all of us. We are all too well-established in our comfort zone and we don’t want to step outside, even for our physical or mental needs.

The backyard is symbolic of our playpen, our window to the outside world. It is perfectly safe, because the protection of divine grace is like a fence around the backyard. As Mullah Nasruddin might say: as long as we are alive, we will not die. In that case, why worry about anything?

We are also bound by our attachments. We are attached to our family and friends, and this keep us inside a virtual door to the world outside.  We are also attached to the things that we have bought and, most dangerously, to the things that we believe in. However, these attachments are all imaginary; they are created by our mind.

The puppy was actually born in a kennel in Quebec province, but he came to my son’s home as a result of a financial transaction. He became attached to his caregivers, just as the caregivers grew attached to him. If he had gone to some other household, the same attachments would have formed with other people.

It is exactly the same with humans like you and me. We take birth in a certain household, through a mysterious process that I don’t fully understand. We form attachments with the people around us, and most of the time, we start to like them, or even to love them deeply. Sometimes, we dislike them intensely, but that, too, is a form of attachment.  New attachments form all the time, and the old ones lose their strength. This is the natural progression of things.

These adjustments are the hardest for women who are, traditionally, expected to move from one household to another, to forget the old attachments and to form new ones. It is typical male thinking in a male dominated world, because not too many men would be willing to do the same.

If we stay within the come zone of our attachments, we can fall sick. If a dog does not go out to play, and to do his business, he cannot stay healthy. How can we humans be any different?

Most people believe that their culture is the best; it has given them so much comfort and a sense of security. It is very hard, if not downright impossible, to let go of the conditioning of one’s own culture. This is, perhaps, the deepest conditioning of them all, that keeps us bound in time and space and, to a particular way of life with all its limitations.

The biggest fear, for most of us is:

Log kyan kahenge?

What will the people say?

It is a groundless fear because, in most cases, people don’t say anything, except for a very short while. They don’t really care all that much, they are too busy with their own lives.

How can we break free from our conditioning and, do we really need to? We can simply accept our way of life and not try to change anything. If we take this path, we will just stagnate. We may even fall sick like the puppy who needs to go out and play for the sake of his physical and mental health. Great thinkers like Buddha, Vivekananda or Gandhi have never accepted their limitations.

We can also get stuck inside like the bee inside the glass pane, as Om Swami ji describes so beautifully in his recent blog. The bee has to move laterally just a few inches to free itself completely and fly away.

The best alternative is to go deep within until we realize that all of our limitations are our own creation.  As Bob Marley says:

“Free yourself from mental slavery.

None but ourselves can free our minds”.

No one is keeping us locked inside our house and all we have to do is open the door and step outside into the world of infinite possibilities.