My Field of Zaad
The Field of Zaad by Kahlil Gibran is not the typical bedtime story that you can tell your 9-year-old kid. But if you read it to yourself at an age with appropriate life experience, it can be your personal bedtime story to put you at ease for the rest of your life.
I read it around my 16th year and now, a few decades later, I still find that it has an important place in my life. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you read it first before going further. It’s a short story.
I am a traveller, and this vast field of Zaad is indeed my life itself. As I travel, I keep asking questions about my life, its purpose, my goal, and what I should do about it. I keep meeting different men on the road who provide different answers to my various questions on life. It was on this road of Zaad that I once met Swami Vivekananda early in my life, and I heard him say:
“First learn to be a servant and then you will be fit to be a master.”
Swami Vivekananda
There were others on the road shouting different messages. The Gita was loud with its message, “denounce the fruit of your action”. I also heard others like E. N. Gray say, “If it’s an unselfish purpose, you will be unselfish in accomplishing it”. I heard men say money is evil, power corrupts, the West is bad, the East is good, mundane life is meaningless, spiritual growth is all meaningful. I have also heard men talk about rich dad and poor dad and how to develop the art of money making, the art of persuasion, how to win friends and influence people, and about sex to superconsciousness.
Having not met that Old Man of Zaad, but having met these people all the way, my life tossed and took several turns with each man crossing my life and sharing their version of the field of Zaad.
For now, I just want to talk about a single slice of my Zaad that began with Swami Vivekananda. As an uninvited breeze on a casual walk, I heard the message “First learn to be a servant and then you will be fit to be a master”. I wasn’t specifically asking any question on my life at a very young age, and I didn’t ask Swami Vivekananda. I didn’t know him, but there came this message unexpected from him. I sowed it deep in my heart without even fully understanding the meaning, and without knowing what it would grow out to be in future. The Law of Attraction came into play. I started attracting messages that aligned with Swami Vivekananda; I started listening to the Gita, which asked to “renounce the fruit of action”; I listened to men who asked to value “spontaneity” in life and accept life happening as it is.
The Law of Repulsion also started working soon. Though evident only in a retrospective view of my life decades later, the impact of this Law of Repulsion cannot be undervalued. It shaped my life as much as the Law of Attraction, if not more. It worked in a very subtle and unconscious way. I started disliking or filtering out any men who would ask me to learn to be a leader, or who would provide me a blueprint to be a master. I ignored all those who preach struggle and perseverance as a means to achieve the goals in life, for any kind of struggle is against spontaneity and going with the flow. I gave deaf ears to people from the West who went to great depth in analysing the human mind and the ways of successful material life on the Earth. These people found out how to “be in power”, “become rich”, “manage people”, and so on. I undervalued their works due to my subconscious filters, seeing them as “mundane life is meaningless”.
I thought of Swami Vivekananda’s message on “learn to be a servant…” as the whole truth, as a complete recipe without requiring any other ingredient to complement it. I thought if I just followed it religiously, ignoring everything else, I would end up being a master.
I developed the servant habit. I liked it. I enjoyed it. It’s a habit of waiting for an order from the master at any time and doing it myself. Not to react to the varying moods of the master. He may be kind one day but angry on another day. Howsoever his mood swings, the servant does the job that the master wants. I applied that to several aspects of my life. Not that I did it consciously; in most cases it was an automatic expression sprouting out of the implanted seeds.
That master showed up as my parents, friends, my wife, my children, my clients, people who approach me seeking my help in their personal and professional life, and so on. I spent several years “going with the flow” and serving these masters in my own little ways, in whatever capacity that naturally grew with me like a wild shrub that grows on its own without anyone caring for its growth. I knew, as a servant, how to make a little money but didn’t intend to master the skill of managing wealth. I knew how to work but didn’t know how to delegate to others. I knew how to love my wife but didn’t have the vocabulary to understand her emotions. I had the means to do what my children asked of me but lacked the judgement to not follow their orders that would eventually hurt them. I knew how to deliver things that my client asked for but lacked the analytical and negotiating skills to show them what they need. In short, I had pieces of everything that I needed, but all incomplete.
It was not until the very purpose of my life started showing itself as the master that I realised how little equipped I am with the skills necessary for serving it. This master was a wholesome one, and it included all the masters I had been serving so far, but with a different sense of purpose. It also included within itself the Servant Me. I am part of this master while I am also the servant of the same. It turned out to be a different beast: the ServantMaster.
This ServantMaster demanded more of me, and I started feeling inadequate in my capacity to serve him. It was only at this point that I turned to all those people I had ignored all my journey. I started seeing that there is value in struggling and persisting as much as in going with the flow. There is value in the mundane skills of learning to generate wealth as much as in the spiritual quest. There is value in learning the ways of the human mind (how it manipulates and how to manipulate it) as much as in going beyond mind.
The Gita provided me a mental context within which I need to work. Swami Vivekananda did the same. But to think that everything else necessary to the work in that mental context will naturally flow is a folly. The Gita goes into detail to set this mental context of Arjuna. I have read it all the time, listened to it day and night, preparing my own mind. But what I failed to see is that I didn’t spend time reading about the rigorous training Arjuna went through to develop his skill under Dronacharya. The Gita didn’t have a blueprint to develop this perfection of skill that Arjuna had. What I failed to understand is that I had to look elsewhere to get the perfection necessary in my skill to do the work that I want to do.
My mom often reminds me of a Tamil adage which means roughly this: “If you blow the conch that needs to be blown, it will be heard by people when they need to hear.” And all these people who were shouting loudly with their messages on the road of Zaad had exactly the one that I needed, but I filtered them out. I am now listening to them. Life with these people is completely a different ball game. Their culture is different. Their values and practices are different. But they do serve a purpose in the larger goal of the ServantMaster. I begin to see the value in “If it’s an unselfish purpose, you will be unselfish in accomplishing it” as much as in “denounce the fruit of action”. Day and Night exist together with this new understanding.
In short, I feel there is a place for everyone on the field of Zaad, and everyone’s message indeed serves a purpose. I have met the Old Man on the road, and am now able to “add fact to different fact and make a truth thereof”. Now the challenge is to live with this new truth.