I was struggling with chores, relationships, and feelings; just like many of us. And that’s what we call life. And we live it like the Battle of Kalinga. Feeling soft and cute and fresh, is generally not the story.
Neither was I feeling like that too.
Then a sudden trip to India got on my cards. I felt choice-less while having a choice. Now on hindsight, I know why. Some freedom was pending. And I had to get that.
I went to India. It was supposedly the land of my dreams, that I had been deprived of because of circumstances. It was perfect in its own way like it always had been. But my heart seemed away this time around.
Life had a totally different feel, look and rhythm. It wasn’t my life. Yet it was still life but it was simply a different setting. Even as my mind couldn’t get around it, and it felt bizarre as if an unreal scene had been planted in my real story of life, I did have to accept this part of the world and time in my life as true as my life back home.
However, it still felt untrue somewhere. Because it suddenly had none of those issues, fights and things to do like I did back home. I was suddenly expelled from the humdrum of life. But that made the life back home look unreal now, if India was the truth, by virtue of me being there at that moment in time. I was confused. Something was the matter with my vision of truth or the truth must be something else altogether.
Since it was a trip after all, it ended and I returned home which is in a very different country, time zone, and with a very different feel and style of living than India.
I had missed home. I realized. There is no dream to be realized away from the reality of the present moment. When the present moment is realized fully, it becomes that dream you’d been dreaming to come alive.
So, anyway, I had been away from home and now coming back made home feel very different and new. It looked too good to be true. A newness had dawned on it suddenly. I couldn’t believe that in a short stretch of time and in the same lifetime and on the same planet, life could be so different and yet perfect in its own way in every place.
And then it struck like lighting — it’s all a pretty play. It’s untrue while being true in essence only.
Life is not made up of concrete realities and houses that can not be changed and are rigid, but it’s a series of pretty doll houses lining the roads on either sides as I drive my car through. They are there to be enjoyed and felt for their beauty and softness, and we walk through them and life like a whiff of cloud that simply wafts through the skies.
However, reality being still away from the doll house like life and truly being the inner feeling and quality that supplies beauty and joy to the physical reality or makes the physical world seem harsh as the case may be. Of course, perceiving it as pretty being the best case if we are intelligent enough to understand.
Because, it’s perceiving the outer world as the ultimate reality that makes it hard and harsh to deal with and life feels like an unchangeable reality set in stone that one must come to terms with like having to swallow a piece of rock.
But if it were to be a doll house then life would be a play to be enjoyed and not fretted about. And we’d know and nurture the inner quality which is the truth “ultimate”, and live in the physical world in a way that will supply it with joy and life.
We’d focus then on our own selves and inside us, rather than dealing with what’s outside. While its the highest way of living and the crux of human existence and the purpose of life realized. But once gained, understood and learnt, then life seems pretty as a doll house.
We then live and enjoy life like it were a play than having to deal with life. And life becomes a journey of learning rather than a game of profits and losses. It’s a pretty cloud that can shower you with coolness, but it’s still temporary in a way that’s not heavy and not to be worried about.
Cidakasha 