Rebirth;- Is there life after death?

 Rebirth;- Is there life after death?

You were on your way home when you died. It absolutely was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. It was a simple(painless)death. 

The medical team in hospital tried their best to save lots of you, but they couldn't. Your body was so utterly shattered, you were better off, trust me. And that is after you met me.

 "What happened?" 

"Where am I?" 

"You died," I said, matter-of-factually. 

No point in mincing words. "There was, there was a truck and it surely was skidding." 

"Yes." "I..." "I died?" "Yes." "But do not feel bad about it." "Everyone dies." You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. 

"What is this place?" 

"Is this the afterlife?" 

"More or less." 

"Are you God?" 

"Yes, I'm God." 

"My kids, my wife..." 

"What about them?" "Will they be all right?" 

"That's what I prefer to determine," I said, "You just died and your main concern is for your family. That's a great thing right here.

" You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn't seem like God. I just look like some man or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. 

"It's nothing to worry about," I said, "They will be eventually alright." 

"Your children will remember you as fabulous in every aspect. They did not have time to grow scornful of you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but are going to be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it's any consolation, she'll feel very guilty for feeling relieved." 

"Oh... So, what happens now? Do I am going to heaven or hell or something?" 

"Neither, you will be reincarnated." "Ah," "...so the Hindus were right." 

"All religions are right in their own way. ''foot it with me." You go along with as we strode through the void. 

"Where are we going?" "Nowhere specifically. It's simply a sense of relief to walk while we talk." "So, what is the point then? 

when I get reborn, I will forget all the things like a blank sheet, right? A baby. So, all my experiences and everything I did during this life, won't matter?" "Not so. You have, within you, all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. 

You simply don't remember them right now." I finished walking and took you by the shoulders. 

"Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you will be able to possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you're. 

It's like sticking your finger in a glass of water to work out if it's hot or cold. You invest a little part of yourself into the vessel, and after that, you pulled out yourself. You've gained all the experiences it had. 

You are 48 years old and enjoying a life for the last 48 years, so you haven't extended yet and felt the remainder of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you'd start remembering everything. But there is not any point to doing that between each life." 

"How over and over have I been reincarnated then?" "Oh, lots. Lots and plenty, and into many different lives. 

Now around, you'll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 A.D." "Wait, what?" You're sending me back in time?" "Well, I suppose technically. Time as you recognize it only exists in your universe. 

Things are little demented like where I come from." 

"Where... where you come from?" "Oh yeah absolutely, I come from somewhere, some other place. And there are others like me. I know very well that you are trying to understand what it's like there, but honestly, you would not understand." 

"Oh..." you said, a touch disappointed. 

"But wait. If I buy reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point." 

"Sure, happens all the time. And with both lives only known of their own lifespan, you don't even know it's happening." "So, what is the point of it all?" I looked at you. 

"The sense of life, the reason I created this whole universe, is for you to mature." 

"You mean humanity, you want us to mature?" 

"No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life, you grow and mature, and become a bigger and greater intellect." "Just me? What about everyone else?" 

"There is no one else.'' 

In this universe, there's ''just you and me." You stared blankly at me. "But all the people on Earth?" "All you. Different incarnations of you." 

"Wait, I'm... ...everyone?" 

"Now you're getting it." 

"I'm every soul who ever lived?" 

"Or who will ever live, yes." 

"I'm Shakespeare?" 

"And you're, John F. Kennedy too." 

"I'm Abu Abbas?" you said, appalled. 

"And you are the millions he killed." "I'm Jesus Christ?" "And you're everyone who worshipped him." You fell quiet. 

"Every time you torture someone, you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness or help you've done, you've done to yourself. 

Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was or going to be experienced by you." You thought for an extended time. "Why? Why do all this?" "Because someday, you'll become like me. Because that is what you are. You're one amongst my kind. You're my child!" "Wow!," you said, incredulous. 

"You mean, I'm a god!?" 

"No, not yet. You are a fetus, You are still growing. Once you've lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born." "So, the complete universe, It's just" "An egg!", I answered. "Now it is time for you to maneuver on to your next life." And that I sent you on your way. 

I hope you had enjoyed this story, Also tell me what you think about rebirth in the comment section!!

LONELINESS - The silent killer

Overview;-

Learning objectives- After reading this article readers are going to be able to;

1. Identify being lonely and being alone.
2. Explore the consequences of social isolation.
3. How to combat the loneliness.

'Pic credit- Sanskriti( rsansk05@gmail.com)'

INTRODUCTION;-

 Everybody feels lonely from time to time. once we haven't anyone to speak even having a bunch of friends when nobody is there from whom we can share our stuffs or when nobody has time for us at the weekend. In the UK, 60% of 18 to 34-year-old say they often feel lonely. In the US, 46% of the complete population feels lonely regularly. 

We are living in the most connected time in human history. And yet, an unprecedented number of people feel isolated. People are perplexed about the term being alone and being lonely. 

WHAT IS LONELINESS?

Loneliness may be a purely subjective, individual experience. If you are feeling lonely, you are lonely. A common stereotype is that loneliness only happens to those who don't know the way to talk with people, or the way to behave around others. But population-based studies have shown that social skills make practically no difference for adults when it comes to social connections. Loneliness can affect rich, poor, popular, introverted, extroverted, beautiful, skilled, or an excellent personality.

 Loneliness is a bodily function, like hunger. Hunger causes you to listen to your physical needs. Loneliness causes you to concentrate on your social needs. Your body cares about your social needs because a lot of years ago it absolutely was a great indicator of how likely you were to survive. 

WHY BEING SOCIAL IS NECESSARY?

Survival of the fittest rewarded our ancestors for collaboration and forming connections with one another. Our brains evolve and make us understand other's feelings and helps in building social bonds around us. Being social became a part of our biology. 

Being together meant survival. Being alone meant death. So it had been crucial that you simply got bonded with others. For your ancestors, the most foremost threat to survival was not being eaten by a lion, but not getting the social vibe of your group and being excluded. so to induce elimination, our body came up with 'Social pain'. Pain of this type is an evolutionary adaptation to rejection: a kind of early warning system to create sure you stop behavior that will isolate you. Your ancestors who experienced rejection as more painful were more likely to vary their behavior once they got rejected and thus stayed within the tribe, while people who didn't get kicked out and presumably died. That's why rejections hurt. And even more that's, why loneliness is so painful. These mechanisms of keeping us in social bonds or being attached helps us a lot in our history, until humans will evolve more and build a brand new World for themselves.

 

LONELINESS AS A EPIDEMIC;-

The loneliness epidemic we see today really only started within the late Renaissance. Civilization began to specialize in the individual. Intellectuals moved aloof from the collectivism of the Middle Ages, while the young Protestant theology stressed individual responsibility. This trend accelerated during the commercial Revolution. People left their villages and fields to enter factories. Communities that had existed for many years began to dissolve, while cities grew. As within the contemporary world, this process sped up. We meet fewer people head to head and that we meet them less often than within the past. The majority stumble into chronic loneliness unintentionally. As adulthood we become busy with work, university, romance, kids, and Netflix. There's just not enough time. The foremost convenient and simple thing to sacrifice is time with friends. 

Until you realize that you feel isolated; that you yearn for close relationships. But it's hard to search out close connections as adults then, loneliness can become chronic. While humans feel pretty great about things like iPhone and spaceships, our bodies and minds are fundamentally the identical they were 50,000 years ago. We are still biologically fine-tuned to being with one another. 

CONSEQUENCES OF SOCIAL ISOLATION;-

Large scale studies have shown that the stress that comes from chronic loneliness is among the foremost unhealthy things we will experience as humans.

• It causes you to age quicker.
• It makes cancer deadlier.
• Alzheimer's advances faster.
• Your immune systems weaker. 
• Loneliness is twice as deadly as obesity and as deadly as smoking a pack of cigarettes every day. 

The most dangerous thing about it is that when it becomes chronic, it can become self-sustaining. Our brain uses both physical and social pain as a threat. When loneliness becomes chronic, your brain goes into self-preservation mode. It starts to determine danger and hostility everywhere. 

But that's not all. Some studies found that when you're lonely, your brain is way more receptive and alert to social signals, while at the same time, it gets worse at interpreting them correctly. You pay more attention to others but you understand them less. The part of your brain that recognizes faces gets out of tune and becomes more likely to categorize neutral faces as hostile, which makes it distrustful of others.

ADVERSE EFFECTS OF LONELINESS;-

• Loneliness causes you to assume the worst about others' intentions towards you. 
• Due to this, you become self-centered, isolated, and awkward than before you were. 
• If loneliness has become a robust presence in your life, the primary thing you can do is to try to recognize the vicious cycle you may be trapped in. 
• It always goes something like this: An initial feeling of isolation ends up in feelings of tension and sadness, which causes you to focus your attention selectively on negative interactions with others. 
• This makes your thoughts about yourself and others more negative, which then changes your behavior. 
• You start to avoid social interaction, which ends up in more feelings of isolation. This cycle becomes more severe and harder to flee anytime. 
• Loneliness makes you sit far-flung from others within the class, not answer the phone when friends call, decline invitations until the invitations stop. 

Each and each one among us contains a story about ourselves, and if your story becomes that individual exclude you, others acquire thereon, and so the outside world can become the way you are feeling about it. This is often a creeping process that takes years, and might end in depression and a mental state that prevents connections, even if you yearn for them. The primary thing you can do to flee it is to accept that loneliness could be a totally normal feeling and zilch to be ashamed of. 

IDENTIFYING AND FIGHTING LONELINESS;-

Literally, everybody feels lonely at some point in their life, it's a universal human experience. You can't eliminate or ignore a feeling until it goes away magically, but you will accept that you feel it and get rid of its cause. You can self-examine what you focus your attention on, and check if you are selectively concentrating on negative things. 

• Was this interaction with a colleague really negative, or was it really neutral or maybe positive? 
• What was the particular content of an interaction? 
• What did another person say? 
• And did they assert something bad, or did you add extra intending to their words? 
• Maybe another person was not really reacting negatively, but just short on time. Then, there are your thoughts about the globe. 
• Are you assuming the worst about others' intentions? Does one enter a social situation and have already decided how it will go? 
• Do you assume others don't want you around? 
• Are you trying to avoid being hurt and not risking opening up? 
• And, if so, are you able to try to give others the good thing of the doubt? 
• Are you able to assume that they're not against you? 
• Can you risk being open and vulnerable again? 
• And lastly, your behavior. Are you avoiding opportunities to be around others? 
• Are you trying to find excuses to say NO to invitations? 
• Or are you pushing others away preemptively to shield yourself? 
• Are you acting as if you're getting attacked? 
• Are you actually trying to seek out new connections, or have you ever become complacent along together with your situation? 

COMBATTING LONELINESS;-
Of course, every person and situation is unique and different, and just introspection alone may not be enough. If you are feeling unable to unravel your situation by yourself, please try and reach out and get professional help. 

It's not an indication of weakness, but of courage. However I look at loneliness, as a purely individual problem that needs solving to make more personal happiness, or as a public health crisis, it is something that deserves more attention. Humans have built a world that's nothing wanting amazing, and yet, none of the shiny things we've made is in a position to satisfy or substitute our fundamental biological need for connection. Most animals get what they have from their physical surroundings. We get what we need from each other, and we need to build our artificial human world that supported that.

•  Let's try something together
•  let's reach resolute someone today, regardless if you are feeling a little bit lonely, or if you wish to make someone else's day better. 
• Maybe write a friend you haven't spoken to in a while. 
• Call a loved one who's become estranged. Invite a work buddy for a coffee
• Or simply head to something you're usually too afraid to travel to or too lazy to go to, like an event or a sports club. 
• Everybody's different, so you recognize what's a decent fit for you. 

Maybe nothing will come of it, and that is okay. Don't try this with any expectations. The goal is solely to open up a bit; to exercise your connection muscles, so they can grow stronger over time, or to help others.

SOURCES;-

I want to recommend two of the books I read while researching about this topic;-

• 'Emotional First Aid' by Guy Winch, a book that addresses, among other topics, A way to deal with loneliness in a very way that I found helpful and actionable 
• 'Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection' by John Cacioppo and William Patrick. 

It's an entertaining and scientific exploration as to why we experience loneliness on a biological level, how it spread in society and what science has to say about how to escape it.

If you want the pdf or link of the mentioned book then please comment below. 

Dream or Memory

I had a dream

We were standing under the twilight sky

When the heavens burst open with rain

the sounds of a million heartbeats

as raindrops streamed down my face😊

You said the rain was a divine blessing

giving life to the earth after its death

sustaining, healing, restoring

you looked to the sky to give thanks

I yearned to be the auspicious raindrops🍃

that kissed your beautiful face

you whispered, 'will you run with me?'

We laughed and off we went, hand in hand😊

like foolish lovers chasing the moon before the sun caught us🌞

of course, it was not a dream, but a memory from before

I woke up remembering you are gone; you are here no more. . . 😕

Nothing good ever happened after 2A.M

When it's just 2A.M, just go to sleep. Nothing good ever happens after 2A.M.

2:45A.M- I stare at the clock and it's hand-stretched apart and I can't help but think of us "NEO". It's been 5 months since I last saw you.

2:48A.M- I text you and ask if you are awake and you reply almost instantly. You tell me you can't sleep because of all your exams and this helps you to keep you from thinking about us. I talk about my fears, haunting me inside and you open up about how you are fighting with depression because you anticipate a utopian world. I look at the clock and it's hands crawling towards each other.

3:04A.M-  I start telling you about my playlist. How I shifted to Louis Tomilson and john Mayer's songs from Taylor swift. I send you some of my favorite tracks and tell you how I still Love Coldplay's 'yellow' more than anything else. You laugh at how bad I've always been at choosing and prioritizing things. I tell you how I never hanker to choose my studies with a broken heart emoji. The hands of clocks start running at each other leaving everything behind.

3:17A.M- Text by text, emoji by emoji, we move closer. You said me 3rd time that you miss me too. I know you still keep visiting my Instagram profile, my blogs and you read it. You keep silent and send me a GIF. I replied when you are not able to express you use this weapon with a laughing emoji. You said that I should thank you as when I write about you I get super skilled.

3:28A.M- Thanks for the pain then. You replied ' it's kind of some special feeling that a person is giving so much time upon someone then I must have a special place for myself in your heart. I replied then you must appreciate or at least commented on my blogs but you will not express it as it hurts your ego. You said that I can never understand you. We fall asleep as the hour and minute hand become one.

10:28A.M- I see you online but you haven't texted me yet. Then you suddenly text me that you didn't mean your last line and the intention wasn't to hurt me again. I didn't replied. I believe we have our pieces to sweep.

I recall the quote that- Once it's 2A.M, you should probably go back to sleep because nothing good ever happens after 2A.M.

I look at the clock's hands. They are infinitesimally close, yet parting

I guess they are gonna be away for quite some time.

5 Ways To Take Care Of Your Mental Health During The Lockdown

Most of us wake up in the morning and turn the TV on or use our mobile phones to consume information about this rapidly evolving pandemic.

This news can trigger anxiety and hopelessness. so what can we do?

here are six ways to take care of your mental health during this pandemic;

1. Meditate/ Excercise;

Instead of waking up to your phone, start your day with meditation. Meditation helps in reducing the symptoms of anxiety. A good meditation of 10 min can help us in being calm and quiet. But if you are not interested in meditation you can do a few suryanamaskar and workout at home to start your day. 

you can find online videos on youtube and many trainers also giving their live session on Instagram. so just start your day by giving time on your body rather on your phone. Also, I will suggest observing the sunrise daily as it is the most beautiful part of it.

2. Stick to a routine;

While most of us would love to sleep in, because we don’t have offices or schools or colleges to rush to, having a set time is important for our mental well-being. So eat your meals at regular times, and have set times for sleeping and waking up as you were doing before. Sleeping for 6-7 hours will be enough as if we will not take care of it then it will create boredom in our bedroom.

you can also make a list or target something to do.

3. Talk to family and friends;

While some of us are living through this lockdown with our families, many of us are not. We’re away from home and the situation is getting the worst of us. So, pick up your phone and talk to your parents. sharing your feeling or anxiety makes you feel lighter. Also, take some time to connect with your old friends. Do the video conferencing, play games, or gossips. sharing thoughts, feeling makes you feel better.

4. Do something Creative;

 Pursue that hobby you’ve been long ignoring. we all have some hidden talent in us and this is the best time to follow our hobbies. you can do anything like- painting, singing, dancing, playing an instrument. Actually, this is the right time to learn a new language as it is definitely icing on the cake.

Also, you don't need to do things perfectly or take things seriously as you can do anything for fun.

 5. AVOID NEWS;

This is most important among all. When it gets too much and you feel stressed, it's better to avoid news, switch off your T.V and just breathe for a while. Just limit your consumption of news its not necessary to watch the news channels every day. Also, you can read some positive stories or article publishing that will rejuvenate your mind. 

I know it's difficult but we can keep doing these all. So, stay safe, connected, and breathe. Also, keep visiting my blog. That's all.