Who says it is a blind race? It is a programmed race for installing cunningly specified mediocrity through unfair ground rules
to suit the interests of a few.
The
nature provides enough for judicious use of all. But, the resources always fall
short if we surrender to our wants, and take little care for assessing what we
actually need. It not only applies to our materialistic needs, but also to our
emotional needs. The scriptures, we often refer to; provide us the basics for
contemplating over our lives. The history of the mankind, philosophical
research work based thereon, and what we have added to this world need to be
reviewed again and again, before applying the basics into our thinking process.
If we do it, we find that we have added many intangibles in our life, thanks to
our intellectual pursuits. Such intangibles hugely influence our physical and
emotional wants and burden us with wants that would ever remain unsatisfied on
a time scale.
So
far the man has succeeded in building a human society, which is primarily guided
by a few selfish, greedy and powerful cross-sections of the human society with
much corrupted wants who lay down the norms that the others, constituting an
overwhelmingly big majority, are compelled to follow. In essence, they directly
rule the human society physically, intellectually, politically, economically
and religiously. These powerful cross-sections of the human society who organize
competitive races, according to their ground rules that the man has no option
but to participate in, for attaining perfection in a camouflaged mediocrity
that helps his rulers to corner more and more of the nature’s wealth for their
enjoyment, which, according to the laws of nature is the free entitlement of
the entire human race, without any discrimination whatsoever. The scriptures
have blamed the vacillating human mind that fails to stick to state of
contentment that the nature has gifted to the man and the equanimity that the
laws of nature continue to bless him with; but greedily to the objects of ever
insatiable human desires and sensory pleasure, much enamored by their unusually
fascinating but momentary glitter. The scriptures have warned the man about the
illusions of mind, and have even tried to show the right path of his duties in
this world and of responding to the pressing needs of exploring the essence of
his life.
However,
we have failed to fully understand and appreciate the warning given by the
scriptures relating to ‘illusions of mind’. As such, the human intellect,
revered by us for its superiority over body and mind and its ability to guide
us in our pursuits for exploring the truth, has not been found to be as wavering as our mind is; but, is prone to
seek many occupations in this material world. There is much that is unknown and
illusory about this physical world that can be known by the use of human
intellect. The man tries to know more and more about everything, using his
intellect, that is physical or not- so-physical about the world around him to
know what has not been known to him so far, hoping to extract some truth that
could change his destiny.
Occasionally, he is able to generate some knowledge
or invent a few things. Often the knowledge generated is used by those few who
have enough wealth and strength to use that knowledge primarily for their personal
benefit so that they could become wealthier and more powerful. Of course, for
generating more wealth for them, they have to necessarily deliver marginal
benefits to the vast majority of not-so-rich, the poor and the deprived. The
entire process results into more and more wealth for the wealthy, marginal
satisfaction of the needs of the ordinary and making the earth a dumping ground
of more objects hitherto unknown to the world. No one can claim that the man
has been able to satisfy the needs of the most living in this world, but not
having enough for their survival, using the enormous intellectual abilities,
the human beings possess. However, it has been seen that the wealthiest few
among us could manage to satisfy many of their renewed and magnified wants,
over and over again, with the help of keen intellectual efforts. On the one
hand, the man has been able to continually add more and more of the man-made
objects to the naturally available material objects in the world; on the other,
he went on, adding to this world much of the intangibles that have appeared as
the outcome of his intellectual pursuits.
These
intangibles have been in the form of inferences and conclusions drawn on the
basis of flawed hypotheses, observations made by prejudiced viewing and
preconceived notions about the ‘truth’ of the material world. Many of the
intangibles are the outcome of intellectual efforts directed to modifying the
theories and practices that have miserably failed due to being inherently
defective, with a view to making them workable. Needless
to say that the man, having been much fascinated by the dazzling appearance of
the products of his intellectual endeavors has begun to mindlessly churn out,
as much as possible, the tangibles and intangibles, either believing that one
day, a new order shall be created in this world, or, finding it too difficult
to take even a small step backwards. The ultimate result is that we have
started pushing our intellect very hard to multiply its output, completely
oblivious of the fact, that by doing so we have started multiplying the quantum
of illusions that existed not in a distant past of the human history.
It
will no longer be merely our vacillating minds and sensory desires that will
keep us perpetually unhappy, but also, our unnatural intellectual thirst that
will make us float in the scum of all the waste, material or otherwise, that is
being produced today and will continue to be produced in the future because of our
many affinities with continued intellectual occupations not aligned with the
universal laws. Those more powerful,
greedy and cunning among us, who are happy today to have organized an unfair race
for mediocrity for satisfying their wants, thereby adding more and more of
material, emotional and intellectual waste, are unlikely to continue in the
same manner as of today. They will also suffer under the intolerable burden of
their ill-gotten wealth unable to shed the weight of their sins away from their
ailing consciousness. Perhaps, our decisive intellect is like a double edged
sword; while it can help us to achieve freedom and emancipation, it can also
chain us with the weight of our dumb intellect and leave us to suffer forever.
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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