Why want anything?

Hari Om

(Originally written a couple of weeks back)

I wrote something like this in an entry on boredom much earlier on, but here's the deal. The trap set is an abyss; there's no easy getting out. In fact, its just easing you in more and more and then some more. An unsolvable mystery, something that you're trying to solve, yes, but you don't even know the question clearly. Its vague. Its out there, its felt, its within, still we don't know. Imagine no shadow while in the sun, can you? Its something like that, always with you. But, across lives, you've got yourself zilch!

Its a crazy life if you spend a little time with yourself and watch your mind crave for anything, be it a little, be it unimportant, be it just, or not! Why want any thing, or be it any person? Why have more people in your life, why possess more things than what you are already stuck with, having a choice or not? Need a good friend, a shoulder to cry on, a beautiful wife, loving children, parents forever, all the things that bring pleasure? Just so that it makes life easier to live with! It helps forget that we're alone. All of us. Individuals. So much so that you can't even try to stay alone while asleep. The freaky mind goes ahead and dreams people and things that it couldn't satisfy itself with during the waking hours! More wants, more craving. But, mind ya, the happiness still isn't there out in the dreams either! Where does the mind find it then, but in sleep? Try living an insomniac's life for a while and you'll know exactly what I mean. The mind gives up hunting nonsense after a long fed, unquenchable, hunger of wants and finds solace in the deepest of sleep when truly left to oneself. That, my friends, is the non-craved, want-free world of the Self. Thats what we all are searching in things and people, in relations, in quarrels, in love, in sensual pleasures. Having such an unstoppable love towards the deep sleep state, strangely enough, we all are scared of the longest and the best of all sleeps, an ironic fear of death!

Back to wants, forget others for an instant, lets take the selfish gene: me. Why want money, land, a house, a garden? Just because I can put a fence around an area where I can live with myself, deprived of the world of pleasure and pain? But what about the crooked mind that I've to live with? How am I gonna tame it, if at all it is tamable? They say, by meditation. But God only knows what meditation is, its sitting in a corner, fencing yourself from the mind too. And then, you're stuck with another piece of junk that comes up, and you fence it, and then you've another and yet another and its ad infinitum. Wouldn't it be frustrating then? You've isolated yourself from the world of wants, but all that is within you, within the confines of yourself! The money and land that comes deservingly, comes without pain. If it pains, its coming with a feeling of guilt, cutting into a bigger piece of a pie when others are starving; its like stealing!

So what am I saying here? That there's no happiness in the world out there as we know and there's no success in the world within that we're trying to know? No. What I'm saying is that as long as you regret what you're doing, be it in the world outside or that inside, the mind will always want you to change things as they are and then its all gone. The change will come in the form of a want and that want, unmet, will be a craving. Once it craves, you don't have the want anymore, the want has you! Instead, let it go. If the change imposes itself, go with the flow, carelessly. Then the change is no longer a want, its a happening. Don't hang on to even meditation, its just another drug then. As much as you want it, its not meditation anymore. Meditation is a happening, you can't resist it, it flawlessly flows. Else its a hypnosis, self-imposed, nonsense, fooling others and yourself. Pray. Not for anything in particular. Pray because you have to. No attachments, nothing, a prayer. A prayer for yourself, since you're part of that everything: vasudhaiva kuTumbakam; not a selfish prayer meant for yourself alone: sah vIryaM karvAvahai. Don't hold on to the today, turning into yesterday. Things *always* shape up the way they're meant to be. Let go and let it pass. Someday, the coming tomorrow will have in its hands, a deserving break, a break from all shackles. Till then, live unto this sickening world so that you can die unto it, painlessly, effortlessly, with pleasure, with bliss, the point of no return.