“What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.”
– Pedro Calderon de la Barca
Kabir – The couplet
माया छाया एक सी, बिरला जाने कोई ।
भागात के पीछे लगे, सन्मुख भागे सोई||
Transliterated:
Maya Chhaya Ek Si, Birla Jaane Koi |
Bhaagat Ke Peeche Lage, Sanmukh Bhaage Soi||
Translation:
Shadow and delusion are alike, one cannot differentiate their behavior |
They chase those who chase them, but vanish once one stands up to face them ||
My understanding:
This is in continuance from yesterday.
Until we have trained and tuned our senses, they will continue to flood us with unfiltered data that will continually make us behave like a wisp of cotton in the wind – driven in whichever direction the wind decides, with no sense of purpose or destination, absolutely immobile without the wind, and very mobile but with no purpose but rather at the wind’s whim when the wind is active.
In this state of extreme activity while immersed in ignorance (for we have yet to gain control of our senses) we believe the perceived world as presented to us by our senses to be real, and convince ourselves that we are in control and enjoying the ride – all the while riding a rudderless ship whose engines are out of all control.
We first understand our predicament when we try to stop for a moment to take a breath, our figure out our location – but by then the vehicle of life has picked up too much speed and refuses to relinquish control of any sort in even the slightest measure to us. After struggling for some time to regain control, we give up that effort and then try to extract what enjoyment we can from the unpredictability of the ride, giving it fanciful names such as fate, circumstance and the belief that someone else is controlling the reins of the horses that are driving this vehicle.
In this state, we define life as our senses allow us to perceive it – and hence are convinced that life begins at physical birth (when the senses started their control mania) and ends with death (which is where the input from the physical senses finally vanishes). In the interim between those two bookends, we vacillate between pairs of emotions – love and hate, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, possession and loss. Joy seems to constantly alternate with suffering in our life experience. Focusing only on the presented apparent div3ersity and changing circumstance and external phenomena of the physical world (as represented to us by the physical senses), we remain immersed in a peculiar duality, with our physical selves experienced by us as the subject, and everything else outside of us perceived as the object or our experience.
It is this mislaid sense of duality of subject and object that makes us perceive God as external to us, separate and different in all aspects to our own self. However, one we start to train our senses to feed us regulated input, and then train our perception to read the input properly, instead of haphazardly and without any sense of organization, the apparent duality melts away like the delusion it really is. Once the rush and craze driven by that delusion vanishes, we finally begin to see and hear our true self – which is when we will begin to understand, simultaneously, both the finiteness of the existence and utility of the physical and the infiniteness and immortality of our true Self.
And that will mark the beginning of the next stage of the journey, of which this human life is but a small part!