The heart has always ruled the human world. Otherwise religions would
not have survived so long. Religions and their gods are some of the most
powerful and widely used entities for taming the human heart. Gods long to reside
in the heart.
If gods actually resided in our hearts, our world would have been a
paradise. We know that it is dangerous to let god(s) enter our hearts. So we
keep them in churches, temples, and other such places, and lock them up too except
at times specified by us. We decide when to let gods into our lives. We decide
when gods should stay shut up in a tabernacle or a sanctum sanctorum.
If we actually take god into our hearts, we would have to request Him
(or Her, if you prefer) to avert His eyes a thousand times a day. A lot of
things that our hearts make us do are not what God would approve of. A lot of
our actions are driven by greed, jealousy, hatred, and so on.
We even go to the extent of justifying those actions which have such
wicked roots. We use even religion to justify them. Culture, nationalism, race,
etc are other elegant justifications.
And we create a lot of evils all around us. We slaughter people for the
greater glory of our god.
The world can be a much happier place. It doesn’t have to be such a
brutal place at all. We need to recalibrate our hearts. And our brains too.
Our behaviour is driven by our awareness as well as our feelings about
the world. If we change our awareness and our feelings, our behaviour changes.
Right ideas and attitudes generate appropriate emotions. Appropriate emotions
create harmony within our personality. Inner harmony leads to harmony with
others.
It is quite as simple as that. In other words, we need to make some
alterations in our hearts and brains. In our awareness and our emotions.
This is what most thinkers like Socrates and Lao Tzu said. This is what our
modern psychologists teach us.
Compared to the previous times, our own times make it more difficult to
follow these teachings. We know we live in a terribly unjust world where the
wicked flourish and the virtuous perish. How do we choose virtue then?
The truth is that it is difficult to live a virtuous life nowadays. We
live in a time when heroism has no place at all. No place. That’s worse than
heroes being persecuted. Even persecution would have rendered heroism strangely
meaningful. But when heroism is just made to vanish, what happens?
The old masters are still relevant. We need to tame our hearts with
right thinking, which in turn will generate right feelings, which will generate
harmony within and without. We need to do this in spite of our present-day
leaders and teachers! Our happiness lies within us, in spite of our present-day leaders and teachers.
PS. Prompted by Indispire
Edition 328: How can you evolve yourself
into a person with a well balanced and stable mind and heart. #lifemind
As always, wonderful and hits the mark :)
ReplyDeleteIn the words of Soren Kierkegaard, "There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to accept what is true".
Kierkegaard was a precursor to Existentialism which is what drives me even today.
DeleteI don't know how to view the present day world.
DeleteSometimes I think even the past was like the present, only we weren't around to see it.
Just like everything will fall unless it's supported, in the world the predominant tendency is to fall and disintegrate. There has to be a constant effort to prop up the good and make this stand.
The predominant theme is always the negative; the positives are the minority; and the beauty is that this world runs because of that minority and not the majority.
You're right to a large extent. The present is not very unlike the past. There were brutal people in the past too. The evil wasn't much less then. We tend to romanticise the past. Ancient heritage is just a myth.
DeleteBut this absolute negation of heroism is something new, I think. It's not that there are no heroes, but heroes are made to vanish. They are imprisoned, or just done away with. And the people don't bother!