Hope & Numb

A system so rotten to the core, it breeds contempt. The sheer scale of misery makes the stomach churn.

Constant abuse of the downtrodden while the elites live in their airy palaces with pearly gates and no care for anyone else.

Everyone in charge of keeping a check is part of the grand scheme to keep trampling the unfortunate and making sure the status quo remains.

Some are lifted up to keep a hope alive that things could change when it never will. But without this hope, the whole system created by them would crumble as it’s built upon the dreams and wishes of the very ones that they have kept from ever attaining an ounce of happiness and freedom.

They are forced to live thinking of a better tomorrow, toiling day and night for the supposed betterment of their future generations. But they do not really want them to have any kind of freedom or lasting happiness, because if they do, who will break their backs day after day for a pittance that does not afford them a basic dignity of living. Forget living, they don't even get to have any sort of dignity in death either!

For the rest of us, who do not belong to either stratum, the easier option has always, always, been to ignore this. Out of sight, out of mind, ignorance is bliss and what not! While I do not associate with this mentality, I cannot help but spare a thought for them because once you empathize, it's very difficult to look the other way. And it then becomes extremely difficult to carry on with our daily lives since we then can see the injustice and oppression happening all around us. So, instead, we end up building walls around ourselves, because feeling nothing is a whole lot better than feeling the weight of knowing. That is to say, numbing our senses is far easier than facing the onslaught of seeing things clearly.

Soul..??

Recently I have been reading and listening to a few philosophical thoughts and also self-styled godmen and gurus, and also a few friends and family. The general consensus is to imply that the inherent destination of soul or atma or atman is pure bliss/happiness/peace/moksha/nirvana whatever you want to call it. And we, as humans, should strive towards it. That is our basic objective in life. 

They also in one way or another state that the inherent nature of the soul is never changing throughout different births. And the karmic theory kind of revolves around this absolute truth about the soul.

This made me think, if that's the truth, then, why doesn't the atman seek the same when it's in the body of a lion or a parrot? Why is it only okay with sustainability of the physical body that it inhabits then?

A lot of philosophical thinkers, especially within the Indian tradition, say the soul and body are different entities. One of the greatest shlokas from the Bhagavad Gita also reads - “vāsāṃsi jīrṇāni yathā vihāya navānī gṛhṇāti naro'parāṇi | tathā śarīrāṇi vihāya jīrṇānyanyāni saṃyāti navānī dehī”, loosely translating to - “just as we discard old or soiled clothes for new clothes, so does the soul discards old bodies for new.” Clearly marking a distinction between the body and the soul/atman.

But if the soul were to truly want moksha or whatever, why does it not make the body attain it inherently in any other form of life? Why in all other forms is it perfectly happy just engaging in daily survival and activities that help sustain its current physical form? Is it that the soul itself is lost? If yes, that means the soul is corruptible? But how can something which is supposed to be part of the Brahman or the universal singularity which is supposed to be absolute and pure, be corrupted or lost? That in itself is a contradiction. How can something absolutely pure and incorruptible be formed out of integration of impure and corruptible sub-parts? 

I think the soul, if there is something like that, wants to simply exist. Nothing more, nothing less. That is the reason that survival is the biggest motivator for any living thing that the said soul inhabits. You can say that those are bodily instincts, but then how do these instincts appear? Do bodily instincts exist separately from the consciousness or atman or soul? If, life in itself is nothing, and the soul or atman cannot die, then why does a one day old baby have any survival instinct, that too inherently? The bodily instincts come and go along with our consciousness. And without consciousness most gurus would not be able to define what soul is. So we can deduce that consciousness itself is the essence or proof of a soul or atman. And consciousness is indistinguishable from the drive to persist and survive. Where does it leave the atman or the soul as described by various philosophies then, I wonder?

Between Being and Becoming

Recent experiences got me thinking, why do so many of us live a weird life of constant internal contradictions?

The single point of misery for a lot of people is this blatant unexamined sense of being that they become.

I keep seeing so many posts on social media about being who you are, but inherently those posts try to make you someone you are not! People keep talking about karma and how they are manifesting things. That certain folks would be hit by their karmas since they did something bad to them. In all of this they forget that the universe itself manifests in everything around us, including us. So someone causing pain to you is also in a way the universe! 

I keep seeing so much gap between who people are, what they want to project and what they end up projecting. The constant bargaining that they keep doing with themselves. We throw the term “be your authentic self” around too much. But, no one really talks about what is your authentic self? Ask 10 people the question: Who are you? And I bet 9/10 won't be able to say anything apart from their work or education, or worse nothing at all. 

So much effort is being put into being someone that we forget to be ourselves! 

This constant war that we are waging in our minds, seems to be the cause of the mental exhaustion we feel. The more we work towards being someone, the more we get away from who we are!