Two Fundamental Questions

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