Skip to main content

Worldly Temptations

We keep cribbing that we have so many problems in this world. However, ask a person suffering from a terminal disease and having few days to survive. Despite suffering from unbearable pain, nobody would like to die. Ask an old person 100 years old, he would like to live longer. Ask somebody suffering from great poverty and not having sufficient means to fill his stomach, he would also like to live as long as possible. That's the beauty of this life. It offers some or the other temptation to everybody to cling to. 

At best, few are able to leave certain temptations to pursue certain other goals. We left so many immediate gratifications in our childhood such as socialization with friends and partying etc. in order to study to get a good job and career to enjoy life long. It was also a deal. Leave the immediate gratification to enjoy life later. That's what society preaches. Leave the temptation of getting up late, and pray to God to get a good body so that you can enjoy the pleasures of this world with that body. Follow the social rules rather than following your own heart so that society validates your actions and you feel secure and comfortable.

We just keep replacing and exchanging one temptation with the other throughout our lives. In the process, sometimes, spirituality also becomes a seeking. We leave the office work and family in order to seek some spiritual experiences. Again substituting one pleasure for the other. We fail to realize that all these substitution mechanisms are just time-buying tactics. I feel that the entire human civilization is not that foolish not to understand the temporariness of all these pleasures. There are enough rich who have realized the futility of money, there are enough powerful who have realized the futility of power and there are enough knowledgeable people who have realized the limitations of knowledge. We all know that we can not have food beyond a limit and that results in diseases of different body parts. Yet we all keep running after these temptations throughout our lives. There must be some fundamental reason for the same.

I feel that the fundamental reason is the ease with which these pleasures are available to us. Nature has designed us in a way that the lesser we have the easier we get pleased. A rich person has money to spend on his luxuries. He can travel across the countries and have food in restaurants of his choice. A poor person gets pleased by going to the local park. Everybody has a different threshold for pleasure. While a rich person has a higher threshold, a poor has a lower threshold. A minister gets pleasure out of the huge number of people he represents and a Mohallah leader gets pleased with few people following him. A senior bureaucrat derives pleasure out of the impactful decision-making powers and a security guard derives pleasure from his authority to stop people at the gate. So, everybody has chosen his temptations and in the market, there are plenty of options available to choose from. 

It takes a lot of effort in the city to look at the stars because the sky is so full of street lights. In a place where a loud DJ is being played, it is almost impossible to listen to the sound of birds. Similarly, it is quite difficult to listen to the inner voice in this world full of so many temptations. Since most of the parents are themselves, infants, in terms of their spiritual growth at the time of becoming parents (and in most cases die as infants), they end up passing the same confusion to their offspring. When the entire society is madly busy dancing to the tunes of loud DJs, shouting for a louder sound, where is the space for a person trying to listen to the sound of nature? However, anybody whose mental faculties have not been paralyzed by the social virus, and who has even an iota of sanity left, can observe the reality. Once a person gets out of the intoxication caused by the "drugs of temptations", he can see that what he understood to be a "bed of roses" under that intoxication is actually "mud full of dirt". That is the first step to get out of these temptations and look inside.


 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Weak Minds

 I don't know what Rama would have felt like when he developed Vairagya looking around at the temporariness of life, and all the material objects. He had the blessed company of saints like Vashistha and Vishvamitra who could answer hundreds of his questions with example and their experiences. King Dashratha was spiritually mature and therefore rather than snubbing the Vairagya of Rama, he could request Vashistha and Vishvamitra to answer the questions asked by Rama. When Siddhartha had similar questions in his mind, he had nobody to answer and his father, in fact, tried to keep him away from the questions about life. That is the strategy of probably the entire society today. If you can not answer the question, prove the question itself to be wrong.  That is what happens to anybody having these questions about the purpose of life. The first response he gets from society is that all these questions are a waste of time. In the entire history of humanity, we have not been able to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Choice of Happiness

I often wonder as to what is the meaning of equality? Some are born into families that can spend thousands of crore rupees to make their kids happy, and many can not buy enough food for their kids and their kids sleep hungry stomach and still remain happy and grateful. Some travel by private jet while many have to travel in the locals like cattle. Some own many buildings worth thousands of crores while many sleep on the streets. If somebody knows how to manipulate the systems, the sky is the limit in this world. However, all these hold true, if we believe that happiness is a by-product of money. In fact, I see that the reality is quite the contrary. First of all, life is much more than money. There are 12 houses in Astrology representing 12 different dimensions of life. The first house represents health, the second wealth, the third initiatives and younger siblings, the fourth vehicles, properties, and everything that comes as a result of our initiatives, the fifth new direction, and k...
2 comments
Read more

Use of AI to understand the purpose of Life

I was listening to an interesting debate on the following YouTube link that ignited a series of thoughts in my mind: https://youtu.be/o2aAx3wk6dg?si=qLSwKnR0Cp4TyLPC It is interesting to imagine a world where we can get almost everything done with just a command right from driving a car to flying a plane, doing the homework to making presentations for the meeting, taking care of the plants to taking care of the parents, getting the food cooked to get the surgeries done.  After listening to the discussions, I was quite amazed at the idea of delegating the decision-making to the AI and investing our time in exploration. Decisions about whatever is in the domain of known may be taken by the AI in the future and human beings may be busy exploring new possibilities.  However, how will AI make the decisions? Suppose, during the Ramayana times, AI was fully developed. How Kaikeyi would have taken the decision? I believe for AI or anybody to make a decision, the desired goal has to be...
Post a Comment
Read more