Search for the Whole

What’s the purpose of life? All would say; happiness. This is the highest truth; experience happiness. How is it possible? By making a huge amount of money? Riches may give some sort of happiness, true, but not fully. Greek Philosopher, Socrates says; “know thyself”.  Knowing oneself is a key to happiness, it seems. We are in a world where everyone is going after different expeditions and explorations. Many of us do not know who we are! This is a paradox which we may not be able to digest easily. This is a hard nut to crack. One may call the highest truth is the divinity within or the indwelling spirit or by other names Allah, Iswar, God, etc. We all have some ideas about ourselves and we have not yet reached anywhere; we are stranded somewhere. Are we still under the spell of Cartesian Dualism? Typically humans are characterized as having both a mind (nonphysical) and body/brain (physical). This is known as dualism. Dualism is the view that the mind and body both exist as separate entities. Descartes / Cartesian dualism argues that there is a two-way interaction between mental and physical substances. (Saul McLeod, 2007)

If we divide the world into 2 groups; one group may say that there’s something divine about ourselves; we are not like any other species that have no wisdom about their life. The other group would emphasize that there’s nothing divine about and we are not different from all the other species. Both views have their own arguments. There are a lot of chances for convergence despite divergence.

Humans on this planet move in accordance with the intuitions, insights and worldly knowledge. The world is so slippery that the majority of us tend to go after the worldly pleasures and forget ourselves as we are in a New Media Age. All the systems of education are meant to uplift men and bring out the divinity in us. However, both the educationalist as well as students fail to realize that there are more important things in life than wealth for one’s peace and happiness. The price we are paying for comes in the form of various kinds of stress disorders, psychosomatic illnesses, depression, increased divorce & suicide rates, addictions, personality problems and so on. Stress in the workplace is increasingly common. How can we achieve the quality of health, i.e., pure happiness in life? Swami Vivekananda says; “no matter what our station, stage and profession in life are, cultivating our spiritual or higher nature alone can bring lasting peace and joy in our lives.”

Whether science has any role to play in the pursuit of happiness? Western psychology and psychiatry are confined to modern medical science. Eastern psychology is confined to oriental literature. Both are not self-sufficient to serve the people. Western science is after a disease model and Eastern science is after mythologies. There are lots of links to converge and diverge. But both are boasting of each other.

Let us not cling to a little room and paint on a little canvas, thinking that we have grasped life by hand. We have not yet. We all have the love which is more like bodily/divine, emotional/sentimental and immature/juvenile but not factual/ honest. Our factual and honest love is enough to discover oneself and achieve happiness; the way we love the birds, the trees, the flowers, our clients, our customers, our teachers, our parents, our children and beyond our parents & children, the whole humanity, the cosmos and the entire universe. This can be called pantheism and panentheism, immanence and transcendence.

J Krishnamurthy says, “Without this feeling of intense love you can never have the perception of the whole; therefore you will always be miserable, and at the end of your life you will have nothing but ashes, a lot of empty words.”