Canadian Chef Susar Lee has married the east and the west cuisines in such a way to become top 50 chefs in the world on various lists that you can think of that recognizes top chefs in the world. However, even today he says learning never stops or ends. Why? He is on the D quadrant where it is all about Do and Discover.
Someone jokingly asked me whether I can discover God there! I said yes. I also told that person if you discover your mother truly, if you discover you father truly, if you discover you teacher truly and if you discover your preacher truly, you can discover the God in them and then in you.
The God I am portraying here is not the God you think you know or the God you think that I know. I think, the way of life defines the religion you can associate yourself to. Having travelled the world and blessed with an understanding of various religions and cultures (even though I may not know them deeply enough to write commentaries), I believe it has, to an extent, re-defined my understanding of what God is. All Gods when truly discovered will converge to one thing – self-realization through learning. I attribute anything that is ‘truly discovered’ is a ‘mode of learning’ that is akin to the qualities of D quadrant of the Circle of Learning.
It amazes me, even today, to find out that some of the prayers learnt during my childhood has much more meaning now than the meaning it had at that time. While I am grateful for that to be blessed with that understanding, it is that simple thing ‘blindly follow something I say’ being asked nowadays gets questioned very heavily on its merits of doing so. Just to elaborate on this, the prayer roughly translates to my newer understanding of the same like this:
“Oh protector of the world, protect us with love; Oh the one who shines light upon us, guide us with vision; Oh the one who dispels the darkness, guide us to know the devil in us (or destroy the devil in us); Without such guidance, I cannot discover the true God in everyone”
The same prayer during my childhood was a boring chanting of the same thing everyday, day after day, before the school started. I just blindly followed what I was told to follow, even though I had no inclination to do so. But that came very handy to understand the truer meaning of learning, now.
As it goes to show, the D-Quadrant is on the opposite of the A-quadrant in the Circle of Learning. It gives me a new meaning to the wisdom with which the following saying was relayed to me during my childhood:
“Either read extensively to know what really the learning is or Travel extensively to discover the same”. I am really blessed that I could do both and I really feel happy to share the same on this blog.