Skip to main content

The Body Obsession

Sunday Sermon

According to a report in today’s Hindu, youngsters in Delhi “spend the most on improving themselves physically.”  Skin complexion, hair style and dress: these seem to matter more these days. Not only in Delhi, however.

There is no harm in looking good physically.  It is even desirable.  But the problem lies in assuming that only the body matters.  What about the mind?  The ignorance of today’s youth about great thinkers and serious writers is an indication of a malady: the obsession with the body to the detriment of the mind.

The capitalist system which has taken over the entire world has what Dr Fitjof Capra calls an “object-centred consciousness” (The Hidden Connections).  Competition, expansion and accumulation are its hallmarks.  It is never satisfied however much it may accumulate.  One may have accumulated enough wealth for five generations and yet one remains discontented.  This discontent is one of the nemeses of the capitalist system. 

Possessions don’t make anyone really happy.  There is the familiar story of the woman who was searching for her lost earring in the front yard.  A woman next door, seeing the lady in frantic search for something, offered her assistance.  Both of them searched for quite a while but couldn’t retrieve the ring.  “Are you sure,” asked the neighbour, “that you lost your ring here in the yard?” 

“No,” said the woman, “I lost it inside the house.”

“Why are you searching here then?” asked the neighbour stupefied.

“There’s no light inside the house.”

Searching for happiness in objects (including the body) is no different from the above woman’s search for her lost earring.  Happiness is a state of mind.  Certain material things may help enhance the mental state, but they are not the real sources of happiness.  Unless we learn to discover happiness within our consciousness, we are destined to remain discontented.

The real tragedy today seems to be not the discontent, but the lack of awareness about one’s own discontent.  We are like those barnacles which remain stuck to the bottom of boats and imagine themselves as going places, when in fact they are just stuck to the same reality.  If only we could give up this clinging, if we only we could raise ourselves to the higher realms of reality by liberating our consciousness from its clinging, we would see a totally different world, a far superior world, unfolding. 


A new heaven and new earth are always there before us.  But we have to choose them consciously.  Consciousness, not the body, is the seat of happiness.


Top post on IndiBlogger.in, the community of Indian Bloggers


Comments

  1. Very true, Sir. We have to raise our consciousness in our pursuit for happiness :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. And that's the only way, Anita. The moment people realise it, their blissbegins.

      Delete
  2. I feel that extensive advertisements on tv and social networking sites have changed this scenario for good ! people are getting these facilities easily and the trend catches fast ! However i think that your point is valid, no one is bother to pay attention on what their real happiness is ! and there is no conscious efforts also ! As they say "following the flow" ,,

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The ads and networks are a reflection of the prevailing culture, and they affect the culture in their own way too.

      Delete
  3. So right: What about the mind?
    I try telling my growing daughters this same thing. But it seems peers will have more influence.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The peer group plays a vital role, you're right Indrani. I have seen students giving up good habits out of sheer pressure from friends.

      Delete
  4. "Happiness is a state of mind"- this is really inspiring.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't like to sound like a preacher, Namrata. But in this post I did, I'm sure. Couldn't help it. But happy that you liked it.

      Delete
  5. So true.. most of us have perceived happiness so incorrectly. A happy person is the one who finds happiness in everywhere.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, Namrota, happiness spreads itself. So the happy person finds it all around.

      Delete
  6. Very true Sir! Pursuit of happiness through material achievement is an elusive futile pursuit. But most of us don't want to understand! :(

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We refuse to understand. We choose to keep our eyes closed.

      Delete
  7. happiness within is most important. well said

    ReplyDelete
  8. But isn't ignorance bliss? When you are conscious, you are aware that you don't find happiness in your career but you can't leave your career when you need to survive! So the end result is, you work 10 hours doing something you hate from the bottom of your heart, then spend another 5 hours to do the tasks that are imposed by the society you live in (I consider cooking, cleaning and household chores that!) and then if you have got total 9 hours to yourself....you can either sleep or actually do what you want to....I do the latter. The result: sleep deprived soul!

    So I think I'd have been more happy being ignorant of my discontent.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This is a different kind of consciousness and ignorance that you are speaking of, Pankti.

      Delete
  9. Finding happiness in material things is like making fool of one's ownself. one may feels good by wearing gold or diamond or living in a bungalow but still discontent inside and one may be living in a 1bhk house is filled with eternity, the real happiness . But problem is that how many of us really do care , what we really feel inside , what our soul wants or why are we here , what is our purpose of being in this world .

    ReplyDelete
  10. Problem with the people is that they find happiness when others says so, like for ex if someone has done some good work but he will wait for others to comment on the same and he finds happiness /sadneess according to comment of another person , inspite of the fact that he should feel what he really feels about his work.. our happiness depends upon the perception of other people around us which is so pathetic... What is real happiness for any person can be judged only by looking into his /her innerself and noone else can decide this

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Grandeur of the dooms

John Keats by William Hilton [Wikipedia] One of the poems included in CBSE’s class 12 English literature is an extract from Keats’ Endymion . A question that has come to me again and again from students as well as teachers is: What does “the grandeur of the dooms…” mean? It is a line that has perplexed me too. I have been amused by the kind of interpretations given in the guidebooks for students. Quite many of these books interpret the word ‘dooms’ to mean the Doomsday. Look at the following answer given in one such guidebook made available online by a well-known educational establishment.  That is very amusing considering the fact that Keats was an agnostic, if not a confirmed atheist. Keats would never accept a God who would come riding a majestic cloud on the day of the Last Judgment to apportion the good and the evil souls to Heaven and Hell. Evil is an integral part of life, Keats knew too well. No human can avoid evil any more than “a rose can avoid a blighting wind.” How...

Broligarchy

A page from Time Broligarchy is a new word I learnt from the latest issue of the Time magazine one of whose lead stories is titled ‘ American Broligarchy ’. Wikipedia teaches me that ‘broligarchy’ is “a neologism and portmanteau combining oligarchy and broism describing the rule of government by a coterie of extremely wealthy men (occupying leadership roles in the tech companies and tech-enabled businesses).” The Time article informs us that Trump’s greatest “bros” are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, the three men who were given the most prominent seats, ahead of Cabinet members, at Trump’s Presidential inauguration. These wealthy businessmen play crucial roles in Trump’s way of governing America. They pump a lot of unregulated money into politics for their own selfish reasons. A menacing outcome is an unhealthy (for the public) expansion of presidential power with fewer checks on the Congress. The Time laments that this “would be a recipe for more corruption under an...

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

A Crazy Novel

Jayasree Kalathil, Sandhya Mary, and the book Book Review Title: Maria, Just Maria Author: Sandhya Mary Translator: Jayasree Kalathil T his is a crazy novel. It is hard to find a normal human being in it. There is more than one place in the narrative where we are told that every human being is insane to some degree. I won’t disagree with that. However, there are certain standards or wavelengths which are generally considered to be ‘normal’ if not sane and it is that normalcy which keeps the world going. Sandhya Mary’s debut novel flings a huge question mark on that normalcy. As I was reading this novel, I was constantly reminded of a joke that Albert Camus narrates in his brilliant essay on the meaning of life, The Myth of Sisyphus . A madman is sitting by a swimming pool with a fishing rod in hand. Seeing his serenity, his psychiatrist [I think in Camus’s own version it’s just a passerby – but I find the psychiatrist more appropriate] asks him whether he has caught any fish....

Anyone for a better world?

The above video was sent to me on WhatsApp by a friend who also asked me to write a blog post on the injustices of capitalism. The friend quoted Lenin: “Capitalism is going to give us the rope with which we are going to hang them.” I wasn’t particularly enthused by the message or the demand for a blog post because I am like Benjamin the donkey in Orwell’s Animal Farm . Benjamin is cynical when it comes to politics. He knows that no party or ideology is going to make any substantial difference as far as the common folk are concerned. What can be an alternative to capitalism, for instance? Socialism/Communism? Benign dictatorship? Theocracy? The video above shows the absolute heartlessness of capitalism. But has socialism/communism been any better in the erstwhile USSR, China, and present North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba? Dictatorship and theocracy are not economic systems, but have they saved any nation from injustices? I believe the problem is not with systems or ideologies . T...