Yesterday, I visited three different places and spoke with children and women going through difficult times. I really don't know what to say. Feeling different emotions. While the girls, whose characters have been tainted, are struggling to get assimilated back into society and facing anxiety over these issues. The boys in the juvenile home are struggling to get over their anger. Some women are lost and struggling to remember their home addresses so they can get home. I had a lengthy discussion yesterday morning about the meaning of life with a young, inquisitive boy. His question about the purpose of life, given how temporary life is, stayed with me. What are we all trying to do in this life?
Why do we experience such a wide range of emotions? When we fall in love with somebody, it seems that we do not need anything else. We feel complete. Then, when we are separated, living becomes a torture. We have thousands of movies around this theme. We watch a movie like Bobby or Maine Pyar Kiya and feel the emotions of the hero and the heroine. We feel happy when they are together and are pained when they get separated. What is our fundamental quest? Why do those girls want to be assimilated back into society? Why do those boys in the juvenile home get rid of their aggression and go back to their families? Why do those lost women want to get back to their families? What are the hero and heroine of the movie seeking in each other? We crave being together. Why?
When we enter the body and are born as human beings, we lose awareness of that unity. Probably, all our efforts to be together are to regain that unity. However, since our awareness is very limited, we seek union with a person or a few persons. Some seek union with a cause, some with God through Bhakti, and some with nature through exploration and inventions. However, the ego keeps playing its game in the background. Even when we are united with our family, when we get to marry the person we like, when we get to discover some hidden secrets of nature, when we get to do the things we like to do, and when we pray to God in the form we like, the play of ego continues. Basically, the ego is a unit of consciousness. A unit that has lost awareness of the whole and feels insecure. It wants to become stronger, more powerful, and more resourceful to get rid of those insecurities, failing to realise that a unit can never be the whole. The more it tries, the more insecure it becomes.
Thus, the two movements continue. On the one hand, the ego wants to grow stronger, more powerful, and more resourceful; and on the other hand, it also retains faint memories of that oneness and tries to unite with a person or a few people it likes. Just like a bouncy ball, the ego jumps high to love somebody and again falls low to accumulate resources and power. Just like the ball, as it goes up, the gravity of greed and fear pulls it down until it gains escape velocity and leaves the field of gravity. Generally, we keep bouncing between the highs of love and the lows of greed and fear. Unless we gain self-awareness, we are unlikely to muster the courage to escape this gravitational field. That awareness requires complete attention. Not a false hope. The ball needs to see that bouncing up and down has not helped it. It just needs to set itself free from gravity. The moment it sees clearly what this field of gravity is doing to it, it will drop its attachment to the field of gravity, and in that state of non-attachment, it is free to achieve escape velocity. That state is not a target or achievement, rather it's a complete transformation into a world where a "unit" is not influenced by the field of separation, rather it lives with complete awareness that all the units have the same source and therefore has nothing to be afraid of or to prove or achieve. Like a plant in the garden, which is full of flowers, unaffected by the fact that many people look at it and appreciate it.
Comments