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The comedy of the soul's eternally
communing itself in the Glory of the Kingdom of God, Brahmaloka, is well
known to have turned itself into an apparently tragic circumstance of the soul
dissociating itself from that Universal Glory by means of an inscrutable
tendency to self-affirmation alienating the soul from its organic
integratedness with the Universal Life. This situation has been traditionally
declared as an epic fall of the soul headlong in a topsy-turvy way into the
vast sea of the turmoil of it being necessary at that time to visualise the
universal existence as an external world of perception and to consider every
other soul as a socially disconnected entity.
This fall from Eternity to temporality is
characterised by three tortuous features, namely,
- The immediate cutting off of the soul from the
Universal Sustaining Force;
- The consequent fear gripping the soul with
hunger, thirst, and a constant apprehension of all-round insecurity;
- A permanent involvement of the soul in a
perpetually unreliable and suspicious relationship with the outer society of
similar souls. It looks as if death yawns with its open jaws, dread in tooth
and claw.
In this threefold blow dealt at the soul
simultaneously from three different directions, which is virtually from every
direction, the soul loses itself practically in entirety. Added to this, there
is, perhaps, a fourth factor of the external world looking a mightier vastness
than the localised individual and it becoming incumbent an every individual to
depend in abject servitude on every bit of thing of which the external world
consists.
This sorrow of life is attempted to be
avoided or at least mitigated by the erroneous effort of the soul to patch up
the finitude of its individuality by accumulating and adding accretions from
the outer world in terms of material property, social power and aesthetic
enjoyment through pleasurable sensations generated by the contact of sense
organs with their corresponding objects in the world. The entire effort ends in
utter failure to accomplish anything at all worth the while by this means of an
upside-down arrangement to place oneself in a condition of security, power and
happiness. This totally mistaken meandering of the soul in a world of such
agonising tribulations has naturally to end in its defeat by the realities of
life landing the soul in a helpless cyclic movement, as if it is mounted on a
circulating wheel, through an almost endless series of repeated births and
deaths. This is a veritable drama of the soul's movement from sorrow to sorrow
in a more and more intensifying manner.
Mankind, today, with all its appurtenances
of knowledge and experience gained through the historical movement in several
thousands of years on this earth, can be said to have learned no lesson at all
as to where its true blessedness lies or what are the mistakes that it is daily
committing in its life at every moment of time. Humanity's blunders in its
entirely empirical-oriented sense-ground perception of the values of life are
as it has been briefly outlined above. If the human individual persists in this
kind of thinking and acting inwardly as well as outwardly, such a life of the
human individual cannot but be designated as a cauldron of hell-fire - which,
unfortunately, to the bound individual, appears to be a highly satisfactory
state of affairs, because of its dictum, as the poet well said in this context,
that 'It is better to reign in hell than serve in heaven'.
The hope of mankind is not going to be in
the continuance of this state of affairs even though it may go on through
millions of years of human history. The only way of true freedom and final
beatitude is to bring about a transvaluation of values and for the soul to
stand erect in right perspective instead of viewing things as through a mirror
of reflection or with head below and legs up. The whole situation has to be
reconstructed in one's own consciousness, firstly by not imagining that human
society is really external to oneself, that the world is truly outside the
process of perception, or that Eternity is removed from temporality by spatial
distance. This is so because the perception of an external multitude of society
consisting of human and other living beings arises on account of the said
topsy-turvy perception caused by one's alienation from the totality of the
Absolute. The establishment of oneself in a state of consciousness which
stabilises one's being in a non-externalised Universal Pure Subjectivity of
Selfhood is the final panacea for the sorrow of mortal existence. This is the
great meditation in which every soul has to engage itself throughout its career
in life. This is the final duty inseparable from man's aspiration, nay, the
only duty in life.
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