It all depends on our understanding of life. If our understanding of life is limited, the moment things go against our wishes, they will appear meaningless. Duryodhana will not be interested in the Bhagavad Gita’s message, even if Krishna is giving the message directly to him. His view of life is too limited to understand the message of the Gita. Dhritarashtra listens to the entire Gita through Sanjay, but still, after the battle of Kurukshetra, when Bhima goes to meet him, he tries to kill him. On the other hand, people with a deeper and broader understanding of life find meaning in almost everything. They find meaning in the chaos. They find meaning in the destruction by Shiva, as well as in the rise of Ravana and Duryodhana. Ved Vyasa understood that the purpose behind the battle of Kurukshetra was to convey the message of the Bhagavad Gita to all humanity. Valmiki understood that the purpose of the Ramayana was to tell future generations that truth always wins. We have to decide for ourselves whether we want to understand the deeper meaning of life or not and that will decide to what extent we understand the purpose behind different events in our lives.
In one of the famous experiments in psychology, every participant is given money to make some drawings. Everybody makes the drawing happily. However, when the participants of one group return the drawings, they are dumped into the trash in front of their eyes and given double the money to make the drawing again. On the other hand, the participants in the other group are made to feel that they have done very important work and their drawing sheets are properly kept and they are again given the same amount and asked to make more paintings. The participants of the first group are utterly frustrated despite double the money they get for the next round of work. In contrast, those in the second group are quite happy despite the same remuneration.
Human beings have been seeking meaning in life since perpetuity. Whenever they find meaning in something, they do not shy away from doing seemingly impossible work. Human beings have built the seven wonders of the world. They have made rockets and space crafts that can make human beings land on the moon. They have traveled to the depths of the ocean and the peaks of the mountains. People have not shied away putting their lives at risk searching for new countries. People are ready to travel to Mars as and when the technology allows without being sure whether they will be able to return back to Earth or not. People like Buddha have devoted their lives to the search for truth.
Purpose or cause gives us tremendous energy. However, the opposite is also true. When we find something meaningless, we run short of energy. sometimes parents force the kids into some career that kids do not have an interest in. Subjects do not make sense to the kids and they struggle to understand. They are not able to make out the purpose of studying those subjects. In the absence of purpose, the entire schooling becomes boring and kids lose interest and often drop out. Sometimes, organizations make us do something that does not make any sense to us. In many cases, the people sitting at the top just want to serve their own interests by projecting themselves to be go-getters and using the people down below just as tools. People in the organization feel frustrated due to the lack of purpose just like the people in the first experiment group.
Probably, we do not have the choice of the battleground always. But we do have the choice of mindset always. Arjuna did not have the choice whether to fight in Kurukshetra or not. But he did have a choice as to the mindset. before the message of Bhagwad Geeta, he had a mindset that he was committing a sin fighting against his own cousins and teachers. However, after he listened to Krishna, he understood that he was fighting for truth. Krishna just gave him a purpose. Battleground remained the same. Nazi concentration camp became an observatory of human behavior for Victor Frankl and he could devise Logotherapy to treat many types of psychological diseases.
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