Rene Descartes, the French mathematician and philosopher epitomized the centrality of a reasoning mind in knowledge formation through his iconic words, “I think, therefore I am”. The irrevocable sequence is that thoughts leads to actions which influences human behavior that eventually molds our character. A universal law is that human character and destiny are inescapably intertwined. History is made every second, from the moment of our birth till our death. This interim period of grand delusions is where most of humanity forget to acknowledge the “NOW”, defined as our “LIFE”, before its slips into eternal oblivion. We treasure-hunt for happiness fleeing from the unbearable PRESENT, with our cascading thoughts seeking comfort in the El Dorado of an imaginary future, which only arrives as the familiar, loathsome PRESENT. In reality, we live in the eternal NOW…but we hate to live with it. We have a dysfunctional relationship with our PRESENT. Future is nothing but the present.
It could perhaps be life’s greatest deception that we are ignorant of the worst addiction known to man: excessive thinking. We are prisoners of our thoughts, an innocuous sensation of a singular thought pulls us into a wormhole of ever-increasing thoughts, magnifying every moment, detaching us every second from the NOW, the only true collateral of our LIFE, and transporting us into the sublime realms of future fantasies, of happiness and anxieties or plunging us into the abysmal depths of sorrows and forlorn delights that are events from the past. And at the crossroads of our thoughts, the PRESENT awaits us.
Khalil Gibran, the inimitable prophet and seer of wisdom, writes “We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them”. The Holy Bible warns in the synoptic Gospel of Matthew 6:27, “Can anyone of you by worrying, add a single hour to your life?” and affirms the power of the present and the necessity of focusing our time and energies on it as an injunction from the Lord in 2 Corinthians 6:2 as the verse starts with “For He says” and followed by “In an acceptable time I heard you, and on the day of salvation I helped you”. The subsequent exhortation by apostle Paul corroborates the divine blueprint for life, “Behold, NOW is a very acceptable time; behold, NOW is the day of salvation”. And warns of the consequences of excessive pitiful ruminations on the past and permitting our thoughts to dwell in the imaginary glories of an unborn future. Gospel of Luke 21:34-35 states, “Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life, and that day catch you by surprise like a trap”. A tried and tested formula for peace and joy is to be indifferent to the outcome of our actions. William Shakespeare reminds mankind in his legendary play, As You Like It, “all the world’s a stage, and all men and women merely players”. To quote Lao Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher, “if you are depressed, you are living in the past, if you are anxious, you are living in the future, if you are at peace, you are living in the present”. It is a litmus test to account for the focus and direction of our thoughts, whether their quantum lies in the past, present or future.
Man has a myopic and immutable view of the purpose of life, and he equates it to the attainment of peace and happiness as the singular goal. Any slightest disruption to this cause by virtue of disappointments, delays, trials, tribulations and losses, largely due to his interactions with fellow human beings, imprison him in the dark cocoons of his vicious thought sequences. Rightfully, the legendary Austrian existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre remarked “Hell is other people”. Unforgiveness is an all-consuming fire that burns the hater more than the hated. A heart filled with hatred and rage loses its grip on the present by obsessive train of thoughts to exact vengeance against the enemy. Nelson Mandela, one of the greatest apostles of peace in modern times who taught the world forgiveness of one’s oppressors, despite being imprisoned for 27 long years for championing the Anti-Apartheid Movement, famously said, “hatred is like drinking poison yourself and waiting for it to kill your enemy”. As he walked through the gates of freedom in 1990, he fully knew that if he were not to leave behind hatred and revenge, he will never leave the real prison.
The purpose of life is not enduring happiness. Life is meant to be challenging and it is the principle of growth. Natural pearls are formed as a consequence of the response, when an irritant, a parasite enters the shell of an oyster. Life uses the seemingly negative inputs, defined as trials and tribulations to peaceful chores of routine living to have a better understanding of existence, of relationships, to discover life in awareness and mindfulness, to overcome the onslaughts of negative thoughts, and thereby attain an expansion of consciousness to connect with the underlying, unruffled reality of our being. To accomplish this, life often takes us out of our comfort zones and guides us through the dark nights of our souls to the light of truth. The intended goal is to have a character purified like gold. Christian belief holds life as a journey to perfection to the point that death is the beginning of love!
Frederick Nietzsche, the iconoclastic German philosopher, muses on the recurrent nature of life’s events, its cyclical character of high and low vicissitudes of fortunes/misfortunes in his Idea of Eternal Recurrence and summarizes it in one of the most poignant and lyrical verses in the history of literature. “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself.”
Man is more than sense perceptions, emotions and thoughts and these cognitive entities are fleeting and fluid in its character and we could wrongly identify ourselves with our transient thoughts which is the deception of our Ego. Ego is inflated by our negative thoughts, and it feeds on it. The preliminary step in liberating ourselves from the tyranny of these dangerous and hazardous train of thoughts that triggers almost all of the psychosomatic diseases in mankind is the realization of awareness or presence or mindfulness of our being beyond our thoughts which is the ‘real you’.
Mindfulness is a journey, taking a roll-call of the multitude of thoughts that run riot within our minds to a revelatory knowledge that between the sequence of two thoughts lies the awareness of our true self, the shimmering presence of YOU that senses and understands that you can never dismiss the disjunct cascade of thoughts, but instead of fighting and rejecting them, should learn to accept them with gratitude. By conscious practice, we recognize this plane of mindfulness/awareness and maintaining that recognition is meditation! It provides insights into the working of human mind, alternatively called a Zen state. Man is the only animal that can think about its own thoughts and analyze, learn, relearn, modify and regulate those for its own good.
Mankind is in the next stage of evolutionary journey where the paradigm shift is towards psychological reconfiguration when he will have to constantly re-invent himself for his survival as a species in the onslaught of massive technological advancements of artificial intelligence, machine learning, bionics and robotics. This warrants greater mental stability and emotional intelligence in the future generations. Perhaps the deleterious trip of the ego will be outclassed and outgrown by the positivism of the spirit to have better clarity of reality. An awakening of the consciousness on a global scale and a dominance of mindfulness and awareness of the ‘Real Inner You’ will be inevitable to discard the myriad forms of negativism of the ego, fed and nourished in the prison of thoughts. Its universal effect maybe best expressed by an ancient Sufi Proverb “when the ego grieves for what it has lost, the spirit rejoices for what it has found.”