Life is hard and stiff - all said; and the price of being born is existence. That spoken, we must find a way of ensuring that the quality of of our lives measures at least up to the scale of price we pay. There is no rosy high road to untarnished happiness, and pain is woven into the fabric of living. There will be disease and death where there is no poverty and deprivation; pangs of separation where there is no loveless-ness; hard, unbearable struggle where there is no failure, emotional wounds where is no physical pain.Even the most celebrated act of creativity - birth - is overhung with toil, labour and uncertainty for both the parent and the progeny. There will be times when the honest shall encounter insults and disgrace and even punishment. A Cross awaits every Christ. And even if one escapes all these conditions, there is the specter of death mocking the little drama of life. In short, there is more than enough to support a dark, despairing view of life, enough to make us hum with Shelley:" We look before and after/ And pine for what is not/ Our sincerest laughter/ With some pain is fraught/ Our sweetest songs are those that tell us of our saddest thought." Keats will speak for the secret pain of our souls in a world "where men hear each other groan/ Where but to think is to be full of sorrow.."
No one will deny this landscape of despair. And yet, our only opportunity for joy and celebration lies precisely in this landscape being what it is. Just as death lends meaning and intensity to life, so does the stiff of existence make us romance our flirtations with danger and despair. Through pain alone is pain conquered. Happiness would be meaningless in a world where it lacks a reference point and pain is the only reference point it has. Pain demarcates pleasure from boredom. And the pressure death creates opens up the casements to immortality of any given moment.
But Immoratliity is nothing but the ability to shut the past and future out of the present; there indeed can be no immortality for the individual soul once it has lived out its romance with the phenomenon called life; that kind of immortality wouldn't even be desirable. In fact, that would be the most selfish pursuit, if at all it were possible.It would amount to refusal of the ego of a unit to lose itself in the whole of which it is only a part and from which alone it had originally sprung.The finest human minds - believers or non-believers in God alike - have romanced the idea of dissolving themselves into the Energy that permeates the whole creation - or Cosmos. Dissolving is another name for terminating the experiment of a particle glowing upon the floors of space for a brief moment. While the experiment lasts, the glow is immortal. Experiment over, it is time to be lost forever into the embrace of the universe that made your fleeting creation possible in the first place.The Hindus call it losing oneself int he lap of Mother; the Sikhs call ti merging with the Parmatma. Other religions have similar other expressions for it. Mystical traditions all across the globe celebrate this death -- or permanently losing oneself back in where one came from. And scientists term it as transformation of forms into various expressions that Energy seeks. Kirsna symbolizes these myriad transformations as reality and the desire to cling to a single identity as the source of all pain. Buddha thoughtfully articulated what the mystics turned into choreography of intelligence and soul. The desire to cling to memory of one's identity has pulled many a tall edifice to dust.
One of the lasting thrills of living is the ability to reflect -- to reflect on the endless, boundless nature of reality as it seems to unfold before us. As long as we are in our present avatar, which is the only way for us to exist, we have this remarkable ability to lift ourselves to a truly blissful levels of existence and turn our difficult destiny into a rollicking plaything. Never forget though that all this can be rendered utterly meaningless by something as mundane as physical pain (Incomplete)
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