Are we the Living Dead?
Just think about it. Whenever we experience something or somebody, instead of relishing and savouring these various indefinable experiences we try to conceptualise and understand them. We try to categorise them into good or bad experiences. We try to fit them into our schema. And as soon as we do this, we create a dead experience. We structure it. We judge it. We deaden it. We prevent our experiences from living and flowing.
It is very much like how we eat. All the eatables are laid on the table in separate dishes. They look neat and tidy. But they need to be ground and masticated and messed up in our bodies to become really nourishing. When inside the body, we can hardly recognise the different eatables which we have ingested. If we now try to understand and categorise these eatables within us, we would be intellectualising while standing apart from life, attempting to see the eatables just like they were in the dishes on the table. Separate and understandable but not nourishing in any way. We need the chaos of life to grow healthy.
We engage with life in a ‘deadening’ manner rather than in an ‘alive’ manner. We are like tourists. We glean teachings from various sources. I like this teaching but not this teaching. And we store these teachings to protect them from contamination, like in a refrigerator, to be analysed and savoured later because we like them but hardly ever live by them. The teachings are frozen. They are something which are nice to know but not to live by. Just like a tourist who visits places for a few days but does not want to stay and live there. We need to get back to our comfort zones as soon as possible. We do not feel free to roam and stay as long as we want to.
We seldom like to grow things on our own. That is because we are more interested in what is dead than what is alive. The earth from which all that is life grows doesn’t interest us. We find the earth too messy. We don’t want to touch it or soil our hands with it. We find growing something in the earth too tedious and slow. We need to cultivate it. Make it ready and nurture it. We don’t want to go through all this trouble to grow something on our own. We would rather have something readymade. And clinically clean. The make-believe real. Make believe food. Make believe experiences. Make believe figures through photo shop. We do not know where to stop. That is why we are so full of artificiality. We do not want to grow our own thing. We do not believe in our own capacity. We are squandering our richest resource, our original humanity. Our uniqueness.
How can we be real when we are continuously running away from pain and humiliation and suffering and frustration! We need to welcome pain. Welcome enemies. Welcome humiliation. Welcome anything which we are striving to run away from. We need to run towards it. Run into it. We learn more from painful experiences than from pleasurable ones. We are seduced by pleasure while we learn from pain. When we perceive everything that happens in our life as being meant to support us in living a fulfilling life, we become free. In a very real way, we can then ‘rejoice in our pain’ and struggle. It doesn’t mean that the pain will go away. Or that we will stop writhing in pain. But we will not fight it. But include it in our lives. We will not exclude it. We will not exclude anything. We will include everything.
We deny our current reality and escape into some heavenly space. We imagine ourselves to be some saintly personas in the making and move around as if we are holier than everyone else. But when we are faced with eating stale bread or yesterday’s food, we resent it and get annoyed. So where has all our saintliness gone! To be satisfied materially is important whatever our situation. We need to make peace with our current reality and then there will be peace within us. What is the use of focussing on some future heavenly reality and being dissatisfied with one’s current reality.
We have created a delusional world and are living in it. We need to recognise the illusion of it all and then move from one world to another at will. We need to live in the delusional world and cannot escape from it while at the same time we need to break free from it by recognising it for what it is.
