May The Force Be With You

Photos: Deenanath Mangeshkar with his wife Shevanti. On her lap is Asha. Lata stands between her parents. On the right is Meena; The Mangeshkar siblings: (from left, front row) Usha, Lata and Meena; Asha and Hridaynath; LeBron James with his mother Gloria; The philosopher Osho

By Shevlin Sebastian

Recently, I read a book on the life of the legendary playback singer Lata Mangeshkar. In it, she recounted a memory when she was nine years old. She did her first performance with her father at the Bhagwat Chitra Mandir auditorium at Solapur in 1939. After the duet, she fell asleep on her father’s lap while he continued to sing through the night. She felt her father’s love enveloped her. It also gave her a sense of security.

Lata adored her father, Deenanath Mangeshkar. He had realised his daughter had talent and strived to encourage her. It devastated the family when Deenanath died on April 24, 1942, at the age of 41. Lata, as the eldest, bore the responsibility of looking after the family. It comprised her mother, Shudamati, and siblings, Meena, Asha, Usha, and Hridayanath.

Throughout her life, Lata always remembered her father with great fondness. She recounted the incident of her sleeping on her father’s lap many times.

Because she had such a good relationship with her father — the first male in her life — her later encounters with men were positive. Many of them helped her during the early stages of her career. These included composers, singers and directors.

It led me to a conclusion. The first relationship with the opposite gender played a vital role in the way a person regarded himself or herself. It would colour their reactions to the opposite gender later on in life.

When a daughter had a father who was loving, she usually made the right choices in men in her later life. But if the relationship was one of fracture, lack of respect, and emotional damage, this had an opposite effect. Her attraction would be for a man who displayed the same qualities. This resulted in unhappy and violent relationships.

The same is the case with the boy’s relationship with his mother. One of America’s greatest basketball players, LeBron James, spoke about the influence of his mother Gloria on his life. Gloria was only 16 when she gave birth to James. His father, Anthony McClelland, a career criminal, had abandoned the family when James was a child. But it was Gloria’s faith and undying love that saved her son’s life.

Parents play a phenomenal role in shaping their children’s mindset and attitudes. But too many parents take their responsibilities casually. Many fathers appear distracted at home. Like their children, they are also constantly staring at mobile phones. Many are reeling under immense office pressures. Sometimes, they take out their stress by saying hurtful statements to their children. They do not realise it then, but this has a lifelong impact.

As for the mothers, they have to balance the pressures of running a home, as well as having a career and being a mother. It can get overwhelming. Mothers, under stress, can also say things in anger that might hurt their children. And there is the added problem of parents not having successful marriages. This results in arguments and shouting between them in front of the children. Sometimes, there is domestic violence.

All this has a devastating effect on the children. When they grow up, they will inflict the same damage on people around them and to their children. And the cycle carries on.

So, how to break it?

Mindfulness is one way.

This is something I have been reading a lot about these days. How to watch your thoughts and get detached from them. How to create a gap between the mind and the thought. In online research, I read that we have about 60,000 thoughts a day.

Wellness guru Deepak Chopra wrote that behind every thought, there is a chemical reaction in the body. That means, daily, we have about 60,000 chemical reactions. Most of them are reactions to negative thoughts. Our body is a roiling furnace of negativity. No wonder many of us have health issues.

Self development author Wayne Dyer said that our thoughts make or break our life. While some thoughts are operating on a conscious level, and are easy to recognise, others are embedded in the unconscious.

Almost all these thoughts are negative. How to get rid of them?

John Selby, author of the book, ‘Quiet your mind,’ wrote, “When you feel any negative emotion in your heart, it’s time to catch the thought or memory or buried assumption that is generating the emotion — and process that underlying thought so that it no longer determines your mental and emotional condition.”

This is easier said than done.

The key is to live in the present moment. The philosopher Osho said we cannot do this by using the mind.

“The mind cannot exist in the present,” he asserted. “It exists only in the past or it projects into the future. It never comes in contact with the present.”

Osho felt we could live in the present by silencing the mind and its stream of thoughts. He called it the No-Mind. This requires a superhuman effort. Spiritual seekers take decades of meditation to achieve this inner silence. How can ordinary people do it? But we have to make the attempt.

Deepak Chopra believed that higher consciousness is the only answer to the dark side of human nature. “It is that part of you that is beyond the thoughts and feelings of the moment, the part that never tires and never sleeps. Can you feel the deeper current of consciousness within you?”

This current is also called God, the Cosmic or the Universal Energy or the Source.

In January, American Grammy Award-winning record producer Rick Rubin published a book called ‘The Creative Act: A Way of Being’.

In it, he said, “The Source is out there. A wisdom surrounding us, an inexhaustible offering that is always available. We either sense it, remember it, or tune in to it.”

If parents can transform themselves by silencing their minds and learn to live in the present moment, they will experience a life-changing spiritual experience. For this, they will have to set aside time every day for meditation practices. Physical exercise also has a calming effect on the mind. If parents can change, this will have a profound effect on their children. They will grow up psychologically healthy.

Parents will then be able to unearth many more versions of geniuses, like Lata Mangeshkar and LeBron James.