“Every action has an equal and opposite reaction” or so Newton said in his third law of motion. While it took him considerable efforts to prove it; the though that the same law was applicable to the equations of life never crossed his mind. So how indeed does this cycle of action and reaction work in our lives? That is a question that plagues the mind of the true seeker as he starts to self-introspect and question each of his actions in life. The question that necessarily pops up to the mind is this. Is my karmic act an act of action? Or an act of reaction? Am I acting? Or am I simply reacting?
While many people think that they are well balanced individuals; and that their actions are guided by no one else but themselves. However they fail to realize the fact that there are indeed subtle forces that act on the human mind to coerce it into a destructive spree of action and reaction. In simple words, many times, when you are acting out of impulse, when you are acting out of instinct, when you are acting out of emotion; you are not acting; you are simply reacting. You are simply reacting to some act that took place prior to that point in time; an act that left a considerable impact on your psyche.
So why is reacting so bad? One would ask. Well I would say that it is not necessarily bad; but it is an undesirable by-product of your thoughts. When you react out of impulse, you necessarily react in a hurry. Thus your reaction at times does not undergo much thought and discretion. You just give in to the instinctive need of providing a reaction. This happens owing to the fact that your ego cannot let itself be snubbed or belittled in any way. Your ego wants to come out of any situation as a winner. This holds for a fact not only in your case, but in the case of the millions of individuals who live in this world.
Thus every time you transact with any individual, both of you are determined to come out on the top. No one wants to be defeated In the war of words. Thus in the end, this incessant need to gratify the ego, becomes the only underlying motive of any interaction. Owing to this, the individual starts to lose his social credibility as others start percieving him as an ego-maniac.
Ultimately the thing that any seeker has to realize is that true spirituality always teaches him to be more and more productive and creative. Thus a true spiritualist does not give in to the mindless antics of the human ego. He does not seek gratification at every point in time. Thus owing to this, his reactions are well balanced and well-thought of. They are not tactless acts of vengence. Thus a true spiritualist, in the end always wins through in the journey of life; for in the end, people start to admire him and follow him out of sheer respect. In the end he inspires within others that same ideology which induces in them a balanced way of life.
In the end the true spiritualist knows his place in the world. Thus he needs no external validation to prove the same to his ego. He is always centered in his purpose and his goals. That makes him an exteremel affable personality. So the fact of the matter that we must realize from this story is that we must never ever be in a hurry to give a reaction. Our reactions must be well thought and calculated against all prevailing circumstances.
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Many times, as the spiritual seeker lives through his mundane life, he starts to feel that there exists a great disparity between the spiritual world and the mundane world. As he lives through his daily life, he starts to acclimatize with the worldly equations. All through this, the seeker also tries his best to see to it that his spiritual ideals and his spiritual goals are in no way compromised. However the real world is a hard place to live in; and if one has to thrive in it, one has to actively participate in life’s rat race. The seeker who wishes to strike a fine balance between his spiritual and worldly pursuits thus has to be extremely efficient at handling both aspects of life equally well.
In the real world, every individual is expected to put on a mask. Every individual is expected to be someone who he is not. Thus in a world that relentlessly admires illusions and admonishes reality, the spiritual seeker is faced with a tough task of balancing the facts against the myths. Where the spiritual path necessarily leads him to absolve his identity into the almighty, the worldly path expects him to vociferously defend his interests. Thus the seeker is caught in a paradox as he languishes amidst the diametrically opposite polarities of the spiritual and worldly way of life.
When the seeker tries to find the answers to the question that concerns his very existence in this perilous paradox, he comes to the conclusion that neither can he completely regard the worldly life to be illusory; nor can he let his spiritual motives be compromised. While living through the mundane life, the seeker learns one of life’s great lessons. He learns that the mundane world is not as illusory as it is made out to be in the spiritual dictums. He realizes that as long as he himself is a humble seeker, the relativity of this world will continue to affect him. He realizes that he cannot disregard the mundane world to be an illusion as long as he is living in it, because for him the illusion is just as real as he is. Thus through this realization, he learns to pro-actively lead his life in a way in which he can absolve his unrequited karmas through conscious acts.
The true spiritualist always leads an ideal way of life. He is aware of his worldly duties and responsibilities. He does not regard the spiritual path as a way of escaping them. On the contrary, his spiritual bearing helps him to fulfill his duties all the more diligently. The seeker always knows that even though the worldly life is not as illusory as it is made out to be, it is indeed pointless to run behind the many temptations that it showcases. The seeker is always aware of his objectives; and he only seeks to fulfill them through the opportunities that he gets. In the end, the seeker knows that he has a greater loftier purpose in his existence and thus always seeks ways in which he can truly get to a point where he could pursue his spiritual journey with no worldly interruptions. This is necessarily accomplished when the seeker is completely liberated from his worldly responsibilities; and he does not wish to willfully indulge in the temptations of worldly life.
After that point in his life, the master then takes over, as he leads the seeker further on in the journey that leads to the absolution of all his qualms; the journey that finally leads to the emancipation of the soul from the recursive cycle of misery, despair and regret that the human existence represents…
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‘God’; this single word brings to our minds a myriad of visuals. The moment we hear that word, we on our own accord try and visualize how God would look like; how he would speak like; how indeed would he think like. God has indeed been the most researched and the most misunderstood phenomenon in history. I use the word researched, for indeed there have been individuals who have been besotted with the enigmatic persona of divine power that is God. Men have often spent lives on end, trying to decipher God, trying to understand him, trying in vain to prove him. However, the only thing that they could accomplish was to realize him.
Realization is like a flash of brilliance in the darkness of the human mind. It is a flash that takes place with instantaneous cognition of the whole; simply put, you just know it all; however that does not necessarily mean that you understand it. There is a big difference between knowing something and understanding something; and realization comes in the realm of knowing things. Realization is ultimately centered on knowing things through experience. It is like tasting honey and then recommending it to others. All you can do is you can tell them that it is sweet; but beyond that you cannot prove the reason as to why it is so; the reason as to why it is so good. However a man of knowledge would aptly describe the sweetness of honey as being derived from sucrose irrespective of the possibility that he might not have even tasted it beforehand. Thus knowledge can impress someone, while realization merely expresses. To each, his own, but impressions can hardly capture within themselves the divine sweetness of life.
Thus we come to expressing God. When God is merely expressed, he is expressed as a personification of an all pervading divine power that acts in goodness; and that is the way that we should behold him; for indeed that is the only way in which we are capable of seeing him. If I were to impress upon you the true nature of God; his true form as is derived from the path of knowledge, it would hardly be of any use. The human intellect can only store within itself a finite amount of information. Mathematics can tell you the story of finiteness; of numbers. To impress upon that puny, finite intellect, the true nature of God, would be impossible, for it is indeed something that is purely infinite; and hence beyond the scope of impression.
But still to put in simply, one would say that God is nothing but the sum integral of all the energy in the cosmos. The consciousness that drives the great universe; the relativity which reigns supreme on the entire cosmic dream; the underwritten law that governs every single act of occurrence in the universe; all that put together and more in the end constitute God. God is a phenomenon that has no beginning and has no end; hence to know it, one would himself have to be like God; to be as large as God; as magnanimous as God; as universal as God; as endearing as God; as merciful as God; as loving as God. Only then would the human being realize that which is infinite; by breaking out of the human chains of finiteness; by breaking out of the human bonds of desire and weakness, finally cognizing and realizing the self to be but a expression of mirth; an expression of God. Then will the human being know God, and only then will he be able to suitable impress upon himself the true image of God; for then he would be the mystery himself and then there would be no mystery anymore.
“When we know what God is, we shall be Gods, ourselves”, George Bernard Shaw once said. However, you can only know God, by realizing him first. Thus today must we make a bid, to not try and know Him; to not try and understand Him; to not try and prove Him. Today we must simply try and worship Him; try and devote ourselves to Him; try and go beyond ourselves to search for Him; for in that way, we shall truly realize Him.
May we all taste that divine nectar one day…thus I pray…
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It might be surprising for some to see this topic being discussed here on the tlp weblog probably because people don’t generally associate ‘reality’ and ‘rationalism’ with spirituality. However in life, there are no clearly drawn lines and all subjects are indeed interwoven to make up the matrix of human existence. It is the inability of people to cognize this fact that often leads them to face abject failure in some walks of life. At times, people forfeit some opportunities just because they don’t appeal to their minds; at times they ridicule greatness just because it falls outside the scope of what they consider to be ‘rational’; and at times people even refuse to accept the truth that stares them in the face…all owing to the fact, that they just can’t sum it up.
Rationality is an important factor of life. Rationality is the mind’s scale of whether things measure up to be real or not. At times, the human mind vehemently denies some possibilities, for it simply does not feel them to be rational enough. Indeed our sense of rationality is developed owing to the influence that our surroundings have on us. For instance, a boy who has been brought up in America won’t feel the possibility of people fighting over the basic necessities of life to be rational. Similarly a child raised in the deserts of Africa would find the concept of frivolous indulgence as irrational. Thus both would simply deny the fact that does not appeal to their mindset. Fact of the matter is that reality persists beyond the bonds of rationalism. Reality does not care if you think that it is rational or not; it does not care if people think it to be possible or impossible. Reality simply exists; and its existence is the proof of its rationality.
That ultimately brings us to the topic at hand. Many pseudo-intellectuals perceive spiritualists all over the world to be nothing but superstitious fools. The fact that a person believes in a higher power and aspires to that divine entity is something that these people utterly desist. They fear to acknowledge the fact that there might be things beyond the scope of their puny intellect; that indeed there are aspects of life that they simply cannot control. The modern day rationalist is afraid to acknowledge the aforementioned fact for he lives in a constant fear; he lives in an induced sense of falsified security that vanishes in an instant, if he were but to acknowledge the unknown. Thus with denial, people satisfy themselves that there indeed is nothing more to life than what meets the eye. Owing to this, they indeed lose out upon the many treasures that life has to offer them; treasures that could be adorned upon them, if they would simply take a leap of faith.
Thus in the end, we find that it is not rationality or intellectualism that wins through in life. It is faith; it is faith that is unshakable in its very essence that is responsible for the greatest of achievements known to mankind. It is faith that in the end accomplishes greatness and a man who has faith and perseverance is a man with endless possibilities. Why? Because, faith gives us the hope that we can indeed change reality; it gives us the motivation to walk with a backload of qualms on a road of thorns underneath a burning sky; all for the sake of achieving something; for the sake of completing a purpose. Thus in the end it is faith that even considers possibilities that appear fantastic to the rational mind; and it is faith that in the end transforms those possibilities into reality.
And when faith in the end produces the results, the pseudo-intellectual mulls in after-thought…How? How could someone achieve something that was so beyond the scope of his capabilities? How something that was so irrational could be indeed true? How could I not foresee this? The reason is that faith can truly work miracles…miracles that transgress all bonds of rationality, possibility and probability; miracles that in the make you believe in the existence of a greater power. It imbibes in you a sense of greater purpose. Thus at the end, I would say naught else but leave you with only a few chosen words to bear in mind… KEEP THE FAITH…:)
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February 2, 2010 10:59 pm | 
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