Today I was playing with a 3-year-old kid. It was fun playing with the kid. The most wonderful thing about playing with the kids is that they are open to life. I played many tricks with the kid like to hide a coin, to hide her hankey, and she was quite attentive to find out the coin and the hankey. Then I played another trick with her to make her feel that her little wound was being cured magically. She would pay full attention to all these things for hours without showing any sign of fatigue or boredom. She was curious to know new things and explore.
I don't know where this curiosity disappears in the grown-ups. Probably, the biggest difference between kids and grown-ups is that the kids live in the present moment. They are open to all the possibilities. They observe the reality as it is. While, on the other hand, as we grow up, we start talking to different people and gather their "second-hand experiences". We talk to our parents, teachers, colleagues, and other members of society. Through these interactions, we get to know their experiences. Some of these experiences are their personal experiences, while most of these are again second-hand experiences that they have learned from their society. Thus, second-hand experiences keep changing hands and every time they change hands, they get distorted.
The sum total of the second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand, and so on types of experiences makes our understanding of life. All these interactions and experiences are woven in the form of a story, that we believe what life is. We get so impressed and fixated on our story that whenever there is a conflict between reality and the story we have learned, we ignore the reality. As we grow in age, there are more and more conflicts between real-life experiences and the story, and every time we ignore reality. The story tells us that we need a lot of money and power to be happy. The same mental stories make us happy each time we get an increment in the job or make money in the business. However, we realize soon that reality is different. We are more afraid to lose money now. Our fears have increased and actually, we are not happy. However, we do not wish to acknowledge the falsity of our mental stories because that would mean an examination of all the mental stories and our way of living.
The entire society is selling the products for comfort and pleasure. Since our mental stories are also the products of the second-hand experiences of different members of the same society, these products appeal to us and we get motivated to accumulate money and power to buy these products. On the way, many events such as death, diseases, accidents, etc, try to make us realize the fundamental flaw in our mental stories but we conveniently ignore them like a pigeon closing eyes after seeing a cat attacking it. The longer we live with these mental stories, the more we get convinced of them.
Every day, in fact, every moment, we make more and more such mental stories. That is the reason as we grow old, we start living more and more away from reality. In fact, if there are occasions to look at the reality, we get pained to see them and we wish to run away from the reality. We wish to finish off the cremation soon and return home. We have done that as a duty. We wish to take a bath and be purified again. We no longer wish to think about death. We look at the beggar and a thought flashes into our mind as to why there is so much poverty. However, we immediately get rid of the trouble by paying a few rupees to the beggar and that is how we get rid of the burden on our consciousness. As against this, a kid would ask why there is death? Why the beggar does not have food? Why do some in society have resources and some do not?
We choose to live with our stories and kill the natural questions. On the other hand, kids do not exercise such choices. They remain what they actually are. They observe the reality and ask what does not make sense to them. That is the reason why it is so boring to interact with the grown-ups. It appears as if there is a layer of mental stories between us and them. That is the reason why it is almost impossible to connect to them. People have gotten so disconnected from themselves due to their fixation on mental stories. The only hope I have is that divine spark, which is there inside all of us. That just needs the right environment to get converted into a full-fledged fire. The divine is gracious enough to keep bringing tough situations to our lives which have the capacity to turn this spark into fire. However, due to our stupidity, we keep calling the firefighters to douse the fire. We keep trying to find the material solutions to the spiritual problem and that is the reason why we remain discontented all our lives.
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