About ninety per cent of the
things with which we concern ourselves in life, boil down to an attempt to resolve two simple questions. Regardless
of whether you happen to be concerned with your identity, with success, with
how to win friends and influence people, or how to go ahead in life. At the
bottom of it all what we are asking is, how can I be happy? How can I be at
peace? It is just that, rather than look at them directly we prefer to address
these basic questions in a circuitous manner which paradoxically leads us
further and further away from the very answers we are seeking.
So in our search for success
for example, we get caught in a maze of contradictions called the rat race,
which sucks up all our time and energy leaving us none to look at the two fundamental
questions on which so much of our action
is based. Whether we win or lose is eventually immaterial. As the head honcho
of a reality dance show on TV, recently
put it, “at the end of a rat race you still remain a rat.”
Maybe you are not part of
the industrial rat race but still hung up on being important in some way. You
want to make a mark as a social worker, a politician, you cling to some
spurious form of identity such as religion, nationality, caste or other social
group. And perhaps a few of us have even managed to see the pointlessness of
our social goals and have realised that it is actually happiness that counts.
Happiness and peace. And yet something stands in the way of our really finding
it.
That something is the fact
that we look at the questions of happiness and peace within our own narrow
context. What can I do that will make ME happy? What will bring peace into MY
life? We look at this question in the context of our own narrow selves, our
individual lives, our limited family structure and without realising it get
caught up again in some way in the external nightmare, because it is the
tendency to seal off our interest and energy within our own narrow personal borders
that creates the nightmare of conflict, of competition, of war and related tensions
in the world.
In my zeal to ensure my own
happiness I ignore yours. I do what I
think is right, what will bring me peace even if means destroying yours
in the process. Hundred percent of the problems we face in relationships are a
consequence of this attitude. Communication takes a back seat, caring flies out
of the window, and without knowing it, we distance ourselves from that which we
most want in life. Peace of mind, real joy, fulfilment.
We hesitate to communicate
in a genuine fashion and from our hearts. We are actually afraid that if we did,
it would acquaint us with the deepest dreams and wishes of others. If we were
to get an insight into these, we might forget or be forced to neglect our own
and where would that leave us! If we
were to go deeper into the question though, perhaps we would see that our
deepest dream is actually one we have in common. It is a dream which belongs to
humanity. It is the dream of realising oneself, of fulfilling oneself, which is
something that can be done only in relation to the whole organism. There is no
point in the ear taking in sounds or the eyes registering the sights in front
of it, if the brain is not able to process what is seen and heard. The
community of human beings cannot help functioning as one, as a single entity, a
fact we are made increasingly conscious of each day when we realise how a
single act in a corner of the globe has the rest of the world twitching wildly.
Why doesn’t every school in
the world, every nation, every industrial or technological enterprise make it
mandatory for its members to ask these two basic questions each day and learn
to function in accordance with them? What makes us happy? How can we live
in peace? To find our way to “wholeness” (or wholesomeness?) we need to give up
the fragments of the dream we cling to. Rather than further cultivate the art
of greed and selfishness which is what we have learnt to do, we need to broaden
the space for true dialogue, to learn to listen to each other and to fine tune
our senses to the interplay of parts within the whole picture – the picture
within which our personal needs and goals are contained.
Uma
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