The experience of "Who we are" - A few thoughts

One of the things that has always fascinated me over the years is this habitual and compulsive need of Man to confirm to patterns of thinking that we have acquired over a period time -  either through the rigor of chronological education, or from acquired social indoctrination : resulting in a tacit conspiracy ( a mighty taboo) to ignore who, or what,we really are. Though every once in a while, we tend to question the Universe and Man's place in it, the mysterious center of experience which we call "I myself", the problems of life and love, pain and death, and the whole question of whether existence has any meaning in any sense of the word : - we are immediately pulled back into the humdrum of  daily mechanical life, and those brief moments of clarity fade away without any great impact on us.

Sometimes however, a personal catastrophe; or a near brush with death, can jolt us to a newer dimension of life. The entire edifice put together by inherited thought structure crumbles, and in its wake there emerges a fresh and vivid perspective of life. We discover an inner core that was hidden under the debris of our hallucinatory selves. Relationships take a new meaning and relevance, and the world, after all, doesn't seem as much a burden as it was before. A ethereal sense of lightness seems to pervade.

More importantly, we come to understand that most of our problems are mere a misuse of words and a kind of intellectual neurosis, that prevents us from getting rid of it. For example, questions such as "why this Universe" may sound sensible but is actually as meaningless as asking "Where is this universe?". when the only things that are anywhere must be somewhere in the Universe. Similarly, "Love","Envy", ","fear" -  are mere words that attempt to freeze an essential flowing pattern. Unfortunately, this is the kind of education that society would want to subvert. Hitherto, this kind of  inner revolution of the mind has been confined to rather isolated individuals; it has never been widely characteristic of communities, simply because , it is too dangerous for that. Civilizations thrive on such divisions.

This strange feeling of  inner isolation  and loneliness, is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (Scientifically and spiritually) . Just as the Ocean "waves"; each individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. Even those who know this to be true in theory, do not sense or feel it, but continue to act as isolated egos  - and the result of this self perpetuating illusion , is our hostile attitude to everything and everybody outside us. The chaos that we see around us is the direct outcome of this cosmic joke.

Lets then have more "Outsiders" in society, who can act upon the "insider" information of an illusory self . This is a transformation that is deeply needed today.................................




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