Probably, the most important factor that decides our spiritual growth is "space". The space between us and our thoughts. But how is that possible? A human being is what he thinks. How is it possible to have a space between ourselves and our thoughts?
That is the fundamental problem. I was observing my niece who is just one year old yesterday. She wants to freely explore the whole of the home without bothering with anything. Does she have a thought process? Probably not. Even if there is a thought process, that is changing so fast that when we grow older, we hardly remember what was going in our minds when we were young kids. Probably, the oldest of memories that we can recollect belong to the age of around 6 years or more. Does that mean that we do not exist till around 6 years of age because we do not have any fixed thoughts?
Definitely, we exist. However, our thoughts are changing very fast. We are coming into contact with so many new things and each exposure is redefining us. However, as we grow old, we start getting fixated on certain thoughts. This so happens because the people we meet by and large belong to the same society school or organization and that is the reason all of us share the same perspectives. Therefore, these perspectives start appearing to be so real. Our framework of thought is built around the narrative of society. Each society has certain rights and wrongs, good and bad. Since we are born and brought up in a family where generally parents and most of the relatives share a common thought process, we keep listening to the same thoughts again and again.
We never get to examine the contextual background where all the rights and wrongs, good and bad, desirable and undesirable come from. For example, almost all of the kids are told to study hard. Obviously, there are questions from the children about why should they study hard and not have fun. The most general answer is that there is a lot of competition in the market and in order to survive and have a comfortable life, we need to get a good job, and that is possible only when we clear the competitive examinations of IIT-JEE, or NEET or Civil Services, or other similar examinations. Since the competition is so intense unless we crush our competitors, we are not going to secure a seat for ourselves in a good university. The poor child accepts that. There are so many correlations that are being drawn in his mind. If he works hard, he will score well in the examinations, which will ensure a well-paid job for him, which will give him joy and comfort, and which in turn will make his life fulfilling.
Wherever the child goes and whoever he talks to gives the same perspective. The teachers, tutors, friends, family members, and relatives, all share the same perspective. All of them would have had all these dreams that they could not fulfill and therefore are not aware of the reality. Now they passed on their unfulfilled dreams based on unverified information to their kids. I am often surprised to see that most of the civil servants do not want their kids to be civil servants. It is because they joined civil services under false beliefs and now since they have seen the reality, they just want their kids to stay away from civil services. Most of them want to send their kids abroad so that they can earn well. Now they have not experienced the pain or pleasure of going abroad, yet they keep influencing the thought process of their kids.
I carried out a Google survey sometime back with some of my friends in their 40s just to see how fulfilled they feel in life. I was surprised to see that most of them are searching for the meaning of life. When most of the adults are still struggling to find meaning in life themselves, how are they so sure to tell their kids the meaning of life? If we start promoting any product or a political thought process, without verification of the same, how stupid we look. Aren't we doing the same thing daily? We are telling some unverified meaning of life to our kids based on our conjectures and surmises about certain career options that we could never experience.
Some will argue that if not the parents, there are many other people who have experienced those options. In a society, the popularity of the options depends upon what the masses like. For example, the choice of civil services, as an option career, depends upon the perception of the public. They see a lot of powers and privileges associated with the career, they see quite diverse opportunities and an opportunity to make an impact in society, and that is the reason why the career of civil services is put quite at a high pedestal in society. I have a question to ask every parent. Do we ever examine what is the meaning of life? Why have we taken birth and what are we supposed to do in this life before we leave this body? After all, whatever we do almost whole day long can not be dissociated from our purpose of life.
The problem is when as a parent, we are not clear on the purpose of life. Everybody's purpose in life has to be different. Even at the time of Mahabharata, Krishna is a charioteer, Arjuna is fighting the battle, Vyasa is writing Mahabharata, Sanjay is narrating Mahabharata to Dhritrashtra, and Draupadi is motivating her husbands to win the battle. Everybody has a different Dharma. Can we tell all of them to pursue the same career? When people are born with so different purposes for life, why do we not make efforts to find out what is the purpose of life or the Swadharma of the kid? Why do we just want to pass them through the conveyor belt of a mass production factory of making engineers and doctors? Is it because of our incapacity or laziness? Are we not missing the critical element in the decision-making process and wasting the lives of our kids? Unless we help our kids explore their own purpose in life, how can we help them make the right choices for their careers?
It needs a lot of effort to build that thought process. Unless we are clear on the meaning of death, how can we live life? There are always two possibilities in the absence of that understanding. Either, we will be afraid of death and will keep creating the meaning of our life around survival. We will put all our energy around survival. We would like to play safe and opt for a profession or occupation where fewer challenges are there. Travel safely, be conservative in making relationships, be cautious in meetings, and play safe. That way we will make our lives quite restrictive and narrow. The worst part is that death will still come and by that time, we would have wasted our entire life in routine and fear. The other possibility is that we know that death will come anytime and therefore we decide to enjoy life. We become restless to have fun. We want our ambitions to be fulfilled so that we can have more fun. More money and more powerful positions become the aim of our lives. We want to have fun by partying, entertaining, gossiping with our friends, roaming around different places, and having exotic food.
In the entire process, are we not running away from the real questions? We did not have the courage to examine life as it is, in a naked form and that is why we have made some meaning of life that is comfortable to us. It continues so long as the circumstances are favorable (in fact unfavorable to be really true because these so-called favorable circumstances keep us engaged in the falsity). We keep running from the real meaning of life and pass on the same confusion to our kids. In fact, we brutally kill any genuine effort of the kids to find out the meaning of their lives. We crust their dreams under the pressure of the examinations. We never allow them to think about themselves and their lives. Probably that suits us as parents. Because if they think differently, we will prove to be failures in their eyes.
Isn't that brutal? Can't we allow that little space for our kids? The space between what society feels to be right and what their gut feeling is? The gut feeling may be wrong in certain cases and in fact, may actually be called an impulse. But why don't we allow our kids opportunities to commit mistakes? How will they learn to distinguish between impulse and insight unless they experience both? What will they achieve by just surviving or having a comfortable life? The same mid-life crisis which most of the people in their 40s and 50s are going through? The same meaningless life and phases of depression that most of the society is passing through? Why do we act so brutally against our own kids, whom we consider to be our lives? Probably the reason is that we have never ever examined the reality. We started to run the race before we could understand the utility of the prize in our lives and by the time we became parents, our perspective became so linear that we did not have any alternative viewpoint to share with our kids.
After all, unless we allow that little space between our thoughts and ourselves, we can never see reality. It's very difficult to get out of the endless thoughts. We can try it ourselves. If we try to be aware of our breath, thoughts disappear for a moment. But the very next moment, some or the other thought comes back. At a time, we can either be aware of the thoughts or the breath. However hard we try, most of the times, the awareness of thoughts take over and the awareness of the breath disappears after a few moments. However, once we gain control over our attention, we can examine not only our thoughts but also sensations in different parts of our bodies. That act of observation with awareness creates that required space between us and our thoughts. That space does something magical to us. We learn to examine our own thoughts as a third person and that helps us repair our own machinery. Like an astronaut coming out of the spaceship to repair the ship. That process allows us to understand the meaning of life and when we understand the meaning of life, that helps us listen to others, their confusions and conflicts and help them also create that space so that they can examine their own thoughts and their purpose of life.
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