Painting/sketch: Rabindranath Tagore. Untitled. Downloaded. 16th October - 11th November 2011: There are some liners from books, movies, and songs that sometimes play over in the head with greater frequency, and they keep one company even as one goes about one's daily life. Last year at some point I'd been pondering over 'if winter comes', (although I couldn't frame the thought). At some point when I was immersed in the first embalming shroud of a reluctant winter, and I was silent for the most part and doubting myself and there was nothing I could see particularly well, I felt like saying (although with far less excuse than Frank Slade), 'I'm in the dark here'. People fond of me were looking at me with not much fondness nor much hope almost like they were giving up on me, and there were some liners from Viktor Frankl's autobiography which made me say that if he could believe in his bit of hyper-reality, and in the midst of going through what he was and at Auschwitz no less before he was sent to Tϋrkheim, I had no earthly nor divine right to think I was in the dark. I couldn't really see much, and I do have myopia, and sometimes need new glasses without knowing it but along with Shaw's St. Joan I had to say within, 'By what other judgment can I judge but my own?' – although I wasn’t too sure what I was judging by my own judgment. Positive thinking however sometimes helps, even though one doesn't know why one is thinking positively but sure enough sometimes shining drops of much-needed hope come from other quarters, and also the everyday sort of joyous hope, which is just as important – and from older and younger friends. And sometimes that lit-up hope says that there are some other people too in this physically real world, others who live and smile...
Lately, it's been a defiant, accepting, disconsolate, and rather melancholic but proud liner, from the Abba song, 'The winner takes it all...' (and just that liner blaring out unless I’m actually half-listening to the song while doing other things). There's another line that sings in my head these days, Jo jeeta wohi sikander. Not entirely disconnected from the previous Abba liner. It's from a movie of the same title that I enjoyed watching in my school-days.
Is life a race or a game though where one wins or loses? It does seem to be a game sometimes, and a game where one gets to know some of the rules bit by bit, and a game that’s not particularly fair or square, and sometimes one isn’t so sure whether one is getting any better at actually playing the game. One takes a leap (of faith?) and seems to be racing through, and with smiles too, until one lands into a river instead of what one assumed would be a sand-pit. It seems peculiarly brutal too at times even if one is sometimes an observer to the brutality and the cruelty (which doesn’t always draw or let blood although that too does spill) and the banality. It seems hard and real at times especially in its drudgery, sadness, everydayness, bland normalcy, poverty and sickness (not just physical) but undeniably real in the sudden, sometimes fleeting, and somewhat translucent sense of mystery, magic, charm, laughter and serendipity. It also seems peculiarly individual, personal, private and even isolated but not-quite-so at times.
I sometimes wonder how we win or lose in life, and what determines winning or losing. Some great people say that it's the choices that define who we are, and not our abilities, and sometimes I gladly and stubbornly believe that and sometimes I can't help but raise my eyebrows to say, 'really?' And so, what if I make choices and I don't win or worse just seem to be losing time and with it the possible dreams? Who's going to say, 'well done' or 'well played'? And I do want to see the smiles, the satisfaction, and the happiness on real faces, and not just from the imaginary audiences who were once cheering me on in my head. One may raise the quiet question, 'what do you mean by winning though?' It's not unrelated, this question. Because we do say very sagely that life isn't about winning or losing but about playing well and hard and true. And it's also true that I don't want to win formal prizes at competitions, and stand on the number 1 spot for the Olympics 100 m race with Jana gana mana playing in the background. I'm not talking about winning races but I certainly strongly desire to be useful (as Janet Jeppson Asimov says) or to be of benefit (if that sounds better), before I pass off, and by playing well and hard and true and by making the choices that I make – that I won’t deny.
The root of life does seem to be '(hairy) desire'. This answer had erupted in my own head and upon a whispered question within from my fimh towards the beginning of the previous decade, ‘what is the root of life?’ I started reflecting upon the Buddha's second Noble Truth not infrequently, and only because of an essay written by Suvro da, which I read also towards the beginning of the previous decade. Desiring (or craving) for 'x', in some sense, is one of the things among other things which leads to unhappiness, dissatisfaction, pain and also possible and potential suffering but desire begets the experience of life itself. It seems almost like those self-evident things that one imagines that one always knew and one nods one's head and says 'yes, I always knew that' but it's one of those things that one wouldn't have known at all until somebody hits one with that question...'what's the root of life'? and until somebody also gently prods one to think about it, and earnestly and more than once. Desire, if one reflects upon it (and people can reflect upon it in different ways) can also be without the constant and insistent craving. I think it’s sometimes possible. And if one reflects upon life and living one can also gradually and quietly eliminate many things on the list of ‘things’ – material or non-material – that one seems to crave for or had seemed to matter with a ‘not this’, ‘not this’, ‘not this’. And if one engages in this enterprise there are certain factors that emerge:
It’s not a matter of repressing desires but it’s a matter of sifting through one’s basket of ‘desires’ and with directed help from the external world and one’s internal world.
It’s not a matter of an authoritarian stamping out of all desires.
It’s not a matter of being the fox who couldn’t get the grapes and called them ‘sour’.
And it's good to remember what Tagore, in his very matter-of-fact way points out, ‘mere renunciation of the world does not entitle one to immortality’.
Eventually, one may see what one desires - and it might not be terribly clear at the beginning - given the external world and reality as we know it and sense it, and from the deepest part of what we call a ‘self’. With that bit in place, one might think that one is enlightened with nothing really left to do. An exceptionally detached frame of mind or even an exceptionally aroused frame of mind may sometimes give rise to such a feeling. Genuine desires however are connected to one's purpose and meaning in life, and so one soon realizes that one is being an ass because one can't possibly sit and do nothing. So while the inequalities of life and the level of pain and suffering differ enormously – at the level of an individual life if one chooses to remain and participate in life as a regular human being and with certain desires and a certain attachment to the physical world still firmly in place (related to doing good/being useful/doing something beneficial/being happy and bringing some genuine happiness), the first Noble Truth sticks and makes its way felt through the second.
If one sort of even glances through some of the biographies of the great masters, one can spot a cardinal difference between the Buddha (in how he is depicted, at any rate) and the rest. The Buddha really did seem to have reached a state of 'imaginary grace' where everything and everyone counted but nothing and indeed nobody mattered (about the Buddha maybe some other day; I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination, a proper scholar on the Buddha, anyway), and yet that did not stop him from doing what he had to do (although there’s a story about that). He did what he could do. He became a teacher. Life then is not just a matter involving thought, reflection, and contemplation. Human beings aren’t just ‘floating minds’. Living, no matter whether it seems and feels like a game or an illusion or even a delusion or a drama or a stage-play also involves being, acting and doing along with the connecting within.
But how much and how far does one go into seeing and experiencing and connecting within with the ‘spinning wheel of life and death and what-not’ before one stops in one’s tracks (or is made to stop in one's tracks), and says, ‘that’s all I can take, thank you, and I’ll take what comes from making my choice because this is the only choice that I can and want to make given who/what I am and have become’? For as one participates in life and plunges into one’s own consciousness, one sees the glowing bits born of one’s own experiences with life and living and the relations that remain. One is reminded for instance of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha (also read towards the beginning of the previous decade), who travels far and wide, up and down and all around all kinds of paths, engages and experiments in much in his own search for enlightenment, and then finally finds his meaning in life, in and through his son begotten of a nautch-girl. I sometimes wonder where that story could go from there. This Siddhartha already knew that the choice he was making necessarily implied that he had ‘returned’ to be attached to life, and primarily in the form of his son. And through attachment then, this Siddhartha re-joins the cycle of life, and with it all the entanglements of life. Gives reason to ponder upon the Buddha’s principle of pratityasamutpada.
Space and time do not permit me to leap along this path, and so I bring my post to an end for now while having different liners floating around while returning to doing what I can (‘because nobody else can do it’), am able to, and have to even though I don't have the sure-shot prescience to know whether I'm winning or losing or doing any good or facing and engaging with life 'zestfully and with an earthy good sense' or whether that liner from a Miss Marple book, ‘Intelligent girls are so likely to become imbecilic if they are not careful’ fits me to a T. And since one doesn't know one has to say 'it ain't over till it's over', 'where there is life there is hope and light' and also a quiet 'Jesus Christ', every now and again, and hopefully see and hold on to one’s own radiant light blazing away, which is not (thank heavens...a 'Holy Moses' would be more appropriate) a speaking bush on fire in the middle of a desert.
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