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The pain of heartbreak. A debilitating mental disorder. The heavy cross of acute poverty.
The blinding lust for money. The chaotic decadence of drug-addled highs.
To be worth nothing or having a high net worth of things that feel worthless. An accomplished yet an unfulfilled life.
A life in a regimented straightjacket or one spiraling out of control.
Self -righteous, self- negating spirituality or hedonistic materialism.
The human condition is a panoply of breathtaking beauty and repulsive ugliness, an eclectic canvas of the loves and the hates, the blacks and the whites. Also of the greys, everything in between. The narrative of human existence, irrespective of its individuals, is an eventful ride of the highest highs and the lowest lows. With some calm plateaus in between.
No, this is not the sorry, cynical retelling of an unsuccessful, failed life but the essence of our human existence. Its successes included. If life was just about becoming richer, freer, worthier, and all such, the rich, the free, the worthy, the successful would all be blissful. But they barely are! Many people say the world has never been this advanced, we are a happier civilization than ever before. Truly? What about the unfair poverty, the killer terrorism, the exploding mental disorders, and those age-old atemporal human foibles of meanness, evil, greed, hate and murder? What about them all?
We are all happy a little and sad much more.
We succeed at our endeavours, and while we enjoy its fruits, new sufferings befall us. We can rest in peace someday, finally, when everything is taken care of, we think. We peer out into the horizon for that beautiful day, but it never arrives. The horizon just moves ahead, the goal post moves, new happiness comes accompanied by new sufferings. Don’t you often wonder what all this is about? I mean, why? We come screaming and hollering into the world; we set about netting goals the world decided was good for us; we holler and scream at its injustices some more and then we leave, with hardly much respite.
The rich want love and the loved want to be rich.
The free want stability and the fettered want freedom.
One prays for mere survival while another prays for meaning in his hopelessly pointless life of luxury.
When one has this, they want that.
We always want, and we always hurt. Almost always. It never ends. This state of affairs is life’s characteristic, you may say. Nothing can be done, it must just be dealt with! Are you sure?
Maybe there is something more. Something more than dealing with life and dealing with it comfortably.
Maybe comfort is not the end goal of our human existence. Maybe life has an inherent meaning, a purpose, an inherent goal.
Maybe life is not random, but intelligently teleological. Maybe we are all headed somewhere.
We might not be aware, but our destinations might be the same. It could be the collective human destiny: of rising above this human condition. Of arriving at a post-human, supra-human state. One where all suffering is transcended, lost, one where there is unbroken bliss. Could there be such a state?
Yes, in fact, that state is our evolutionary imperative. Our specie imperative.
It is our evolutionary impulse. It is Yoga.
The real Yoga. Not the body bending calisthenics. None of that. That idiocy was spewed out when the science of life fell into the destructive jaws of the monster called oversimplification.