A CHAT WITH LIFE AND DEATH – (LEAF -4)

I wonder how many times I have sat down in the corner of a room in total darkness cursing myself, sometimes cursing the God, who made me. “Ouph! How I wish everything comes to an end at one stroke”. I asked God “why me and me alone?”. Well friends, it might have happened to you and to many of us at some time or the other of our lives. We felt that the sorrows, pains and disappointments were exclusively meant for us. We compared ourselves with many others, who we believed were the blessed lot on this earth. We never tried to understand ourselves, our universe of existence  and our beautiful relationship with the universe. We thought God had different imprints for us and we were born to suffer. This was an indication of a sense of defeatism with which we suffered and our inability to measure our own potentials. We gave ourselves to “stones” losing sight of ‘diamonds’.

"Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is the wisdom.” Says the great Zen Master Lao-Tzu. While we make extraordinary efforts to celebrate the entire universe around us, we hardly take any effort to celebrate ‘the self.’. We least realize, or even if we realize, we consciously ignore the fact that there is no relevance of the external universe, if ‘self’ doesn’t exist. Therefore. it is important to ‘celebrate the self.’

“Your own self-realization is the greatest service you can render to this universe” says the sage Ramana Maharishi. “Knowledge of the self is the Mother of all knowledge. So, it is incumbent on me to known myself, to know it completely, to know it minutiae and to know its characteristics, its subtleties and its very atoms” says Kahlil Gibran.

From time immemorial, the human endeavor has always been ‘to search the self.’. The early scriptures came with the powerful message “Know Thyself.” The entire gamut of deliberations of Vedas, Upanishads and other religious epigrams have debated intensely on this question. They have come with several perceptions, interpretations, explanations and pathways. In doing so, they have walked through many dense forests of ignorance, misgivings, misconceptions and lost their focus a few times. Nevertheless, like alchemists, they did come with a large number of findings which throw light on our life systems, its pathways, its aims and objectives.

One of the interesting answers to their question “Who am I?” came with a reply, which is absolutely profound in itself – “Tat Tvam Asi” meaning “Thou art that”. On its face, the message appears most confusing. But this misconception would be only to an ignorant mind, not to a mind that have evolved through its conscious engagement with the inner self.  The great sage Ramana Maharishi faced the same question when he was hardly twelve years of age. His search of the inner self made him what he became and a perfectly liberated ‘Jivanmuktha’.

Possibly, one has to go back to the same experience of Kabir, who went to see the colours that existed all around him, and found that he was part of the colour. But, every one of us have to make this basic effort of ‘getting awakened’ so that this knowledge of the self is realized. They need to understand that it cannot be taught, it cannot be instructed, it cannot be capsuled into a knowledge pack. There is no kiosk in the universe where you can go and take delivery of it. “You can’t cross the sea by merely standing and staring at the water” says Rabindranath Tagore. One has to make a conscious effort to become ‘aware’ of the self.  “Awareness is like the Sun. When it shines on things, they get transformed” says the eminent Buddhist philosopher Thich Hhat Hanh.

Awareness is an inward mobility; it is a journey where you delve deeply into your consciousness to unravel the unfathomed oceans of existence just to realize that you are unique and an integral part of the macrocosm. Awareness only creates knowledge, yet it remains as a mute witness to its environment. lt has a non-participative engagement with all that is outside and a stress-free engagement with its own self.

Talking to Arjuna, Krishna describes to him his true self in the following words “ You are unconditioned and changeless, formless and immovable, unfathomable awareness and unperturbable, so hold to nothing but consciousness.”  He adds “One should strive and employ oneself to uplift oneself. One should never dishonor oneself. The self is one’s friend as well as one’s enemy.”

The ‘unfathomable awareness’ is the true self, wherein you live in harmony with yourself; you chat with your life and death, as you would chat with the friends who interact with you during the entire course of your existence.

This state of “awareness’ liberates one from birth and death; from fear and despair; from the perceptions of success and failure; from the clutches of poverty or affluence; from the pain or pleasure of all morbid things which goes on changing, their form and shape; liberates from the realms of needs and greed; and you remain a mute witness to all happenings. Just a witness!!

But then, what is the relationship of this awareness to our material existence? Let us chat with awareness!!