Monday, August 11, 2008

A life without desires!

Religions usually drill down to one simple way to happiness in their simplistic sense - being free from desires. A famous slokha in Sanskrit says "He who is addicted to desires is a slave to the entire world and he who controls desires controls the entire world". This might be true in the sense of being free from the clutches of desire and forcing yourself to do something that you don't like; purely because you have no other choice to get your desires fulfilled.

But let us look at the other side of it; from the first person singular perspective. If I start becoming free from desires, how would my life be? Will it be totally different from what it is right now? From a bird's eye perspective yes! It might be completely free from all bondage and my soul would be filled with happiness... But let's dive deep into that imagination of freedom to understand how such a life will be.

Getting free from desires is pretty much equivalent to getting out of all possible relationships because to me it doesn't make sense to have someone depend on you and ask them to believe what you belive in. If they love their lives, cherish their desires and dreams and derive happiness out of it; they are free to do so. With a major portion in a human's life viz., the social circle cut off, life is nothing more than existence. I mean, you are free from desires and you have no one/nothing in this world to be called your own. So what's left out apart from just existing as one of the gazillions of dust particles in this universe? What is the purpose of that life? Why should the creator get you into the cycle of birth? Just so you exist? That is sheer nonsense in my terms.

Let me look at the whole thing from my current perspective. I'm here at the US and almost everyone I seriously care about is at the diametric opposite end of the earth's sphere. I do some crap work all through the day, being totally unhappy about what I do and of course earn money out of it. The possible sources of happiness that one could assume in a life like this are the happiness of his parents, the so called status quo, the trips that he makes, the friends that he meets and the places that he sees. The bottom line is that everything is desire-driven. If I stop these along with the interactions with my family/social circle back in India, how would my life look like? The only filler to my completely empty life is this feeling of belonging to the world; and if that is cut out life is nothing more than pain and I'm not a masochist to derive pleasure out of this pain! Without a dream to pursue, without a plan of action, life seems as empty from both corners of the world and the everlasting illusion of things being better at the other end applies to life too. I can vouch for it because I had a feeling that life would turn towards betterment if I earn some money traveling overseas and now I feel that life back in India is much better.

Perhaps people who had everything at the snap of their fingers felt that life sucks big time and came up with the concept of shunning away everything; believing the greener grass at the other end. But here I am, saying life sucks no lesser; and the only way to make it meaningful is to dream big time and chase them. A perfect Catch 22!

No comments: