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

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

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Joys of Onam and a reflection

Suppose that the whole universe were to be saved and made perfect and happy forever on just one condition: one single soul must suffer, alone, eternally. Would this be acceptable? Philosopher William James asked that in his 1891 book, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life . Please think about it once again and answer the question for yourself. You, as well as others, are going to live a life without a tinge of sorrow. Joyful existence. Life in Paradise. The only condition is that one person will take up all the sorrows of the universe on him-/herself and suffer – alone, eternally. What do you say? James’s answer is a firm no . “Not even a god would be justified in setting up such a scheme,” James asserted, knowing too well how the Bible justified a positive answer to his question. “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, so that the nation can be saved” [John 11:50]. Jesus was that one man in the Biblical vision of redemption. I was reading a Malayalam period...

Lessons from Gen Z

When I was returning home after dropping Maggie off at school in the morning, two men joined me in my car. They were parents of two of my former students and were waiting for another vehicle which happened to be late. On the way, one of them asked me whether I had given up teaching altogether. “I take a few spoken English classes online for adults,” I answered, and added that young students had started seeing me as a scarecrow whose time had run out. “Come on,” he said instantly, “there are still a lot of students who value quality…” What he said after that will sound boastful on my part if I write it here. “We tend to judge the entire generation on the basis of what a few of them do,” he added having boosted my ego with some adulation. I was quick to agree with him. I told him that I’m in touch with a lot of my past students, including the last batch, all of whom are eminent personalities in their own right. It’s only a handful of students who put me off in each class, towards t...