Like professor Landgon says in Angels and Demons, "Faith is a Gift". My education lured me with proof of concept and snatched faith away from me long ago. Since then I have been fighting to find meaning through logical reasoning and intellectualization. I was offered the choice of red pill or blue pill during my "aksharabyasam" and force fed the red pill. I am just narrating the facts; no complaints.
All my questions came and ended in mystical reservoirs like all rivers go and meet the ocean. But the well-trained, red-pilled, logical mind is still struggling to understand the symbols of mystical nature. One question the skeptical mind kept on asking again and again was "Are these mystical experiences, so vividly narrated by the mystics, really true?"
If they are true, why are they not more common. Why are they limited to only such short number of people? If transcending the consciousness and diving into the super-consciousness is just a matter of elevated awareness, why is it not commonplace and why are the methods to do it not rather simple? If letting go of the ego is the only step required to perceive higher levels of existence, why is it so difficult for us to do it? It is so difficult that masters advice their desciples the fatal dangers of trying such feats without proper initiation and guidance. Why is it not common and why don't we see it more often?
Those questions lingered in my head for a long time until now, before writing this piece. Once again, ironically, a metaphor came to my rescue in answering these questions, and the answer is simple like my sir sings "Thats why, thats why, because it's the human nature".
Why do people smoke even when they know its harmful; why do we eat junk food even when we know it will spoil our digestive systems; why do we keep on complaining about problems but don't take up actions to solve them? Why do we show different kinds of caring and compassion to "outsiders" and "insiders"? The answer for all these questions is simple: short-sightedness. Believing that this moment is just this moment and is not connected or influential to our futures is perhaps the crux of the problem. This is the same reason for holding on to our egos so firmly, because of believing that this life is all there is, believing that our physical boundaries are the self and not knowing that the self is actually a projection from outside to inside and does not cease to exist when the boundaries of current self are broken. The self is not just in here, but "here" which does not have space-time boundaries.
Alas! I guess just knowledge does not help, because we still eat junk food. Well, I decided not to, from now on...
Having as against being is what drives most of human endeavor, perhaps from an insecurity that is a part of our condition. At the root of having is the ego, and that is what makes just being simultaneously mystic and apparently difficult and rare.
ReplyDeleteA conscious process to be is still rooted in ego, and can only result in an intellectual appreciation of the beauty of mysticism. Why is the mystic rare? Because our ego says it is.