Skip to main content

When push comes to shove


We live in a world that is becoming increasingly competitive and hence even more increasingly self-centred. Competition is always about the victory of some individuals over other individuals or groups or even systems. In a capitalist system everyone is everyone else’s potential rival one way or another. This rivalry soon extends to the groups or communities to which the individuals belong. Whole systems like democracy or ideals like secularism can come crumbling down in such a world. Worse, such demolitions may even be seen as virtuous victories of the good over evil.

Such battles are rampant in our world today. Some people emerge as glorious victors while some others end up as pathetic losers.

These battles need to end. The ideal way is to open our eyes and see the most fundamental reality about ourselves: that we are not only unique and separate individuals but also integral parts of a larger whole. Call the larger whole God if you choose. Call it truth or the sublime or whatever. If we learn to touch that sublime, if we open our ears to the mellow music of that sublime, our suffering is going to take a different turn.

Suffering will not vanish. We will learn how to cope with it better.

The sublime opens our eyes and hearts. In plain words, it makes us understand the reality better and deal with it lovingly. This understanding and love are the ultimate remedies for unavoidable suffering.

This relationship with the sublime is a spiritual condition. You need not be religious for experiencing it. Atheists experience it in their own diverse ways. Artists experience it through their arts. When Albert Einstein said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious; it is the source of all true art and science,” he was referring to the experience of the sublime. When Mozart said that love – and not intelligence or imagination – is the real soul of genius, he meant nothing else.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince put it most elegantly: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

The brain does help us to understand the reality. As Hinduism teaches, intellectual pursuit or jnana yoga can offer us enlightenment.

But when it comes to grappling with the riddles of life, the heart shows the way. Blake saw a world in a grain of sand with his heart, not his eyes. Mirabai, great devotee of Lord Krishna, could unfurl herself across the universe by stretching her heart, not her intellect. It is your heart that will give you the wings to fly.

Will suffering vanish when you learn to see a world in a grain of sand or to fly in the heavens on wings of the heart?

No. Suffering can never vanish from our life. We learn to cope with it. We learn to see it from a different perspective.

It is the perspective of the heart. It is with the heart we see certain essential truths clearly.

When the homo sapiens evolved from their simian ancestors, the brain continued to evolve while the heart retained its loyalty to the beast. Our species went on to conquer the whole world with the help of our evolved brains. We subjugated everything on earth mercilessly to our tools and technology. We established our mastery over everything on the planet as well as beyond it in the eternal spaces. We moved light years in a few hundred calendar years. Great intellectual achievement.

But our hearts remained simian. Very primitive. Except in the cases of those few enlightened ones, those who chose to touch eternity in a moment.

Our religions, our arts and our philosophical teachers all sought to train our hearts. But we chose to convert these entities into competitive architecture or showbiz or propaganda. They did not touch our hearts.

They were like the roses in our gardens tended by hired labourers. Passers-by admired them. But they did not touch our hearts. Because it is only when you waste time with your roses do they touch your hearts.

The answers to quite a lot of our problems lie in our own hearts. And we keep seeking them in a lot of other places.

We have wings to fly with, but we choose to walk.

If only you start flying. Once you have conquered certain heights, you won’t come down, as Richard Bach says in one of his books. You will spread your wings and fly. You hover over the suffering that belongs to the earth.


PS. This is an extract from my eBook, Coping with Suffering. I bring it here now for Indispire Edition 390: When push comes to shove, would you choose to be on a cliff? #BeingTough 

PPS. This blog is participating in The Blogchatter's #MyFriendAlexa2021 campaign. 

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    this gains only applause from me! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. very thought evoking post & so well written.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is really informative. Haven’t know this before

    ReplyDelete
  4. That's so insightful read.Very well written.

    ReplyDelete
  5. True, the answers lie within our hearts. Yet it's so difficult to find them. Sometimes, the easiest path is also the hardest one.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Well said. We learn to cope with life in its ways.

    ReplyDelete
  7. A beautiful thought evoking post! Wonderful read!

    ReplyDelete
  8. It's all in our heart! But going within is so tough. Very nicely put. Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  9. An insightful read. Sometime we just need to take a step back and look inwards. And looking for external validation is not going to get us anywhere.

    ReplyDelete
  10. A beautiful post that made me relook at my idea about suffering. I am going to be thinking of what I read here.

    ReplyDelete
  11. So true. We need to cope with sufferings and things that go wrong. Only then we get stronger and wiser.

    ReplyDelete
  12. I agree with this post in general and most of the points spelled out in particular. In my humble opinion, everybody has to be his/her own lamp because life renders every individual (and even every creature) a unique treatment different from the others. The feeling of getting a raw deal is also different for different people. Hence generalizations have limited utility. 'Sufferings will not vanish', living with this truth is perhaps the biggest suffering. You have asserted - 'These battles need to end'. Who would like them to end ? Definitely not the victors. All the sermons and advice for adjustment (coping with) are meant for losers only. And that's the eternal tragedy of this hypocrite world where only (tangible) successes are counted. A virtuous loser is, in the end, a loser only. His/her virtues can't change this status of his/hers (and the pain emerging therefrom). And still he/she has to live in this society. The luxury of quitting this world or the society (becoming a sage or hermit living in solitude) is also not available to such people. I have found in my own life that love does not come back to the loving one in the form of love (except when it is for the animals and birds). Ditto for respect. Sharing others' sorrows do not heal own wounds or mitigate own heartache. Consoling / cajoling oneself time and again by this way or that way is no less painful.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Happiness, sufferings, success, failures,challenges all are part of life. That is what makes life exciting.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Your post has opened my fresh wound. I have written on how to cope with grief but I myself am not able to. Why des suffering come to those who are already suffering?I lost my husband years ago and was still struggling until my son's demise 2 1/2 months ago. It has shattered and torn me apart. Time doesn't heal I know that. Now I just dunno how to cope.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I am deeply saddened to hear about your losses, especially your son's which is so recent. I wish I could console you. Words become futile on occasions such as this.

      We need to deal with the emptiness left in the core of our being by such losses. How? Meaningful engagement like service to others, art, music, any other deeply creative activity, spirituality... The options are available. We need to choose. There's no other way but make a choice.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Country where humour died

Humour died a thousand deaths in India after May 2014. The reason – let me put it as someone put it on X.  The stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra called a politician some names like ‘traitor’ which made his audience laugh because they misunderstood it as a joke. Kunal Kamra has to explain the joke now in a court of justice. I hope his judge won’t be caught with crores of rupees of black money in his store room . India itself is the biggest joke now. Our courts of justice are huge jokes. Our universities are. Our temples, our textbooks, even our markets. Let alone our Parliament. I’m studying the Ramayana these days in detail because I’ve joined an A-to-Z blog challenge and my theme is Ramayana, as I wrote already in an earlier post . In order to understand the culture behind Ramayana, I even took the trouble to brush up my little knowledge of Sanskrit by attending a brief course. For proof, here’s part of a lesson in my handwriting.  The last day taught me some subhashit...

Lucifer and some reflections

Let me start with a disclaimer: this is not a review of the Malayalam movie, Lucifer . These are some thoughts that came to my mind as I watched the movie today. However, just to give an idea about the movie: it’s a good entertainer with an engaging plot, Bollywood style settings, superman type violence in which the hero decimates the villains with pomp and show, and a spicy dance that is neatly tucked into the terribly orgasmic climax of the plot. The theme is highly relevant and that is what engaged me more. The role of certain mafia gangs in political governance is a theme that deserves to be examined in a good movie. In the movie, the mafia-politician nexus is busted and, like in our great myths, virtue triumphs over vice. Such a triumph is an artistic requirement. Real life, however, follows the principle of entropy: chaos flourishes with vengeance. Lucifer is the real winner in real life. The title of the movie as well as a final dialogue from the eponymous hero sugg...

Abdullah’s Religion

O Abdulla Renowned Malayalam movie actor Mohanlal recently offered special prayers for Mammootty, another equally renowned actor of Kerala. The ritual was performed at Sabarimala temple, one of the supreme Hindu pilgrimage centres in Kerala. No one in Kerala found anything wrong in Mohanlal, a Hindu, praying for Mammootty, a Muslim, to a Hindu deity. Malayalis were concerned about Mammootty’s wellbeing and were relieved to know that the actor wasn’t suffering from anything as serious as it appeared. Except O Abdulla. Who is this Abdulla? I had never heard of him until he created an unsavoury controversy about a Hindu praying for a Muslim. This man’s Facebook profile describes him as: “Former Professor Islahiaya, Media Critic, Ex-Interpreter of Indian Ambassador, Founder Member MADHYAMAM.” He has 108K followers on FB. As I was reading Malayalam weekly this morning, I came to know that this Abdulla is a former member of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind Kerala , a fundamentalist organisation. ...

56-Inch Self-Image

The cover story of the latest issue of The Caravan [March 2025] is titled The Balakot Misdirection: How the Modi government drew political mileage out of military failure . The essay that runs to over 20 pages is a bold slap on the glowing cheek of India’s Prime Minister. The entire series of military actions taken by Narendra Modi against Pakistan, right from the surgical strike of 2016, turns out to be mere sham in this essay. War was used by all inefficient kings in the past in order to augment the patriotism of the citizens, particularly in times of trouble. For example, the Controller of the Exchequer taxed the citizens as much as he thought they could bear without violent protest and when he was wrong the King declared a war against a neighbouring country. Patriotism, nationalism, and religion – the best thing about these is that a king can use them all very effectively to control the citizens’ sentiments. Nowadays a lot of leaders emulate the ancient kings’ examples enviabl...

Violence and Leaders

The latest issue of India Today magazine studies what it calls India’s Gross Domestic Behaviour (GDB). India is all poised to be an economic superpower. But what about its civic sense? Very poor, that’s what the study has found. Can GDP numbers and infrastructure projects alone determine a country’s development? Obviously, no. Will India be a really ‘developed’ country by 2030 although it may be $7-trillion economy by then? Again, no is the answer. India’s civic behaviour leaves a lot, lot to be desired. Ironically, the brand ambassador state of the country, Uttar Pradesh, is the worst on most parameters: civic behaviour, public safety, gender attitudes, and discrimination of various types. And UP is governed by a monk!  India Today Is there any correlation between the behaviour of a people and the values and principles displayed by their leaders? This is the question that arose in my mind as I read the India Today story. I put the question to ChatGPT. “Yes,” pat came the ...