We normally begin our lives by focusing on what
others are doing. Whether we think as individuals or as nations or societies;
we set our goals on the basis of what is going on around us and taking clues
from what all has made others apparently ‘successful’ and ‘happy’. We set our
goals in alignment with the parameters of ‘success’ and ‘happiness’ achieved by
others without paying enough attention to our needs, abilities, limitations,
historical and cultural backgrounds, resources available to us, our potential,
and inhibitions etc.
After
setting our goals, we do whatever we can do and achieve whatever is possible.
We classify all our achievements as ‘successes’, without even bothering to
review if all what we could achieve was actually needed by us. To celebrate our
success, we try to believe that what we achieved was needed by us and try to
relegate our true needs to the background. We feel sorry about what we failed
to achieve (without even realizing that we never needed what we had been trying
to achieve), and, get busy in finding ways and means to convert our ‘failures’
into ‘successes’.
We
lead a life heavily deprived of what we needed, submerged into the corrupting abundance
of what we never needed; ostentatiously rejoicing our ‘successes’ with others
who are as pretentious as us; and mourning
about what we are deprived of in the loneliness of dark and hopeless
nights.
By
focusing on others, we do not remain ‘we’, snapping all the connections with
what we have been, once upon a time, when we stepped into our lives. When we
fail to connect with us, we fail to connect with all others who sail in the
same boat as we do.
We
were born as human beings, with all the divinity and limitations naturally
associated therewith. We have ever been inclined to explore the divinity within
us and freely dwell in it, struggling against our limitations that chained us.
A world with an infinitely huge reservoir of resources was made available to us
free of any cost. We were, individually and collectively, expected to find for
ourselves what was enough for us, relieving us all the burdens, so that we live
in peace and accomplish all that was needed to make us free of any captivity
and accumulate what we needed to live like a human being. We were expected to
keep in sharp focus what was humane about us. To do it, we had to imploringly
look within us to know what we needed. It was meaningless to focus on ‘apparent
images’, when we had the ability to elevate ourselves and come closer to what
is real.
PROMOD KUMAR SHARMA
[The writer of this blog is also the author of “Mahatma A
Scientist of the Intuitively Obvious” and “In Search of Our Wonderful Words”.]
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