State of Mind

Coffee has caffeine, water has pesticides, the road can kill you—is life worth the risk?

Here's what I wrote for a form I had to fill on "Coffee has caffeine, water has pesticides, the road can kill you—is life worth the risk?"

"Life, like any physical phenomena, has a dual nature. Like the particles exist as a particle as well as a wave, life has its ups and downs; the means for sustainability have their advantages and disadvantages. Life exists as a careful balance, with all aspects interrelated and intertwined. Like every particle has an anti-particle that eliminates it, life and death complement each other. Each aspect of life, the living ecosystem, the noosphere, the human revolts and submission, all reach their climax and then recede, like the yin and yang. For every movement of human thought taking shape into ideas, and its spread throughout the world, the seed of a counter-movement is sowed. The journey however, through time is that of reaching new frontiers in knowledge and thought, in the understanding of the world around us, in revealing the secrets of nature, and through all this is the spirit to know, to become aware, to gain.

Similarly, the negative attitude in the question is the sowing of the seed of ignorance, and in a broader sense, a response to the ubiquitous atrocities of the ever changing human behavior, of terrorism, of pursuing global dominance through every and any means. This negative human nature in the implied question is, however, not negative in the sense of being bad or unhealthy, but is the beginning of establishing peace by bringing about a revolution. For it is only when the spirit feels defeated does the will to be arises and takes over in order to bring about a change. ‘Life is worth the risk’, is a statement that is borne out of this will that pushes life towards a fight for survival, borne out of this will to win, when once defeated. It’s the dual, the opposite of hopelessness. As the Chinese philosophical book, the ‘Tao te Ching’, commonly known in the west as the ‘I Ching’, goes on to explain –

“After a time of decay comes the turning point. The powerful light that has been banished returns. There is movement, but it is not brought about by force….The movement is natural, arising spontaneously. For this reason the transformation of the old becomes easy. The old is discarded and the new is introduced. Both measures accord with the time; therefore no harm results.”

Those who think that life is not worth the risk, and still go on living, are even worse than the dead. They are living this life of nothingness. Death is not the ending of life, the ending of pain, misery, and conflict. Living in this nothingness, with the view that life’s not worth it, is a form of escape, and like any other form of escapism, be it through alcohol or sex, this life remains a part of that misery, of eternal conflict. This form of escapism, which most of us undertake at least subtly, can only come to an end through choiceless awareness. The desire to be this, to be that, to become like him or her, to have this or have that, is what keeps us in a constant flow of conflict and misery. For we are ever projecting the images of our own future, and not living in the present, and in this cycle we forget to stay happy. This misery can end through choiceless awareness, which doesn’t mean that we should try to be aware of our experiences and have the desire to change those for our own good, for experiences are a product of time too, and this desire still brings conflict. Choiceless awareness means to be aware without the action of thought or of the mind, for thought is a product of time itself, and only when we have choiceless awareness can we be free to experience the timelessness."

All of this came from my heart, from what I believed in, and still do....Writing this put some things in perspective.
Firstly, I was at least partially right in believing that my parents were bringing me to this nothingness, this place where living in the moment, living for the moment, being aware, making my own choices and learning from them were restricted, for my dad was not ready to accept change (which I think most of us are not ready to). However, this was probably not the whole truth, for my illness started long before this belief, and the belief was distorted and amplified by the illness. This 'fight' with my parents was not the reason for my illness, as R.D. Laing would make us believe. (For the uninitiated, Dr. R.D. Laing believed that schizophrenia occured due to the family/ society...a reaction to the social circumstances, which is something hard core psychologists still believe). The reason is, I believe, still genetics (to some extent), though I still wait for the whole truth to reveal itself.

Posted by puzli at September 30, 2005 06:23 AM