Man’s life is frustrating. Life seems to always frustrate man. When one comes to this earth, he comes with eyes full of wonder and innocence; when one dies, he dies with eyes full of frustration. After living life, one dies in frustration that he could not do anything. He missed something. Scholars, scientists, poets, artists, philosophers, tycoons, laureates, politicians, people with positions those who seem to have earned name and fame among humans. Those who seem to have achieved something that others are in the race for such achievements. They also die frustrated.
Is there something missing in life? Why this life is frustrating, is the moot question. When one is born, one is thrilled, tantalisingly overwhelmed at each moment. Then one’s ability to be full of wonder fades away when one seems to gain knowledge about things around, definitions, descriptions, complex ideas, names, vocabularies, subjects. When as a child one looked at the flower, one would just be one with its flower-ness of being. That’s the beauty of the world. But as knowledge deepens the brain, the magnificence of flower is lost.
After gaining certain amount of knowledge the flower or a tree one would not look at it with one’s being. But a knowledge filter sets in. As knowledgeable one would say beautiful flower or would call it by its botanical name along with its characteristics. One thinks that one is so knowledgeable about the flower or the tree that one knows its botanical names also. But that knowledge created a wedge between one and the flower. That knowledge has become a bane. It looks untrue that knowledge could be a bane. But how does knowledge become a bane. Socrates says that knowledge is a virtue, the knowledge that does not make you virtuous all that knowledge is a bane.
Albert Einstein, a wellknown scientist who shook the world with his discovery of theory of relativity, has written that if he gets a chance to live another life he would not like to be distinguished or well-known; he would rather be an ordinary man doing the job of plumber or for that matter as ordinary as that. What is the matter? Why would Einstein want to become ordinary when the entire word is rushing to become extraordinary like him? Because Einstein seems to have understood that it is worthless to become extraordinary because he has already seen that one doesn’t get anything by becoming a distinguished man. Scholars, scientists, poets, artists, philosophers, tycoons, laureates, politicians, people with positions, all the knowledgeable ones, all those who seem to have achieved something—all die frustrated; life frustrates them too.
There must be something missing, what is that that man is missing. The moment I define something, it becomes untruth, it becomes a lie; it is said that every spoken word is a lie and definition cannot define the defined, the defined remains undefined. Why? Life is in the living. Living is now in the present. You are living. You are not living somewhere in future world. You are living in your being right now. So, there is no word that is defining the now-ness of being. Words cannot define the now-ness of being because words can define once it has happened; once it has become past then words can observe it from the future into the past and create a definition of the past. Like you feel thirsty and you are drinking water. In drinking your thirst is going away. In the very moment you are drinking you can drink only. You are experiencing drinking.
You cannot define the state of experiencing the moment you are experiencing it but the moment you are out of it you can. You cannot define the experiencing that was in the experience that experiencer is experiencing. If you start defining it, you may say: I drink water or I drank water. The moment you define it you are already in the future explaining the experience through your eye of observation; you cannot define the now-ness of experiencing, you can only experience it. Experiencing is like rejoicing in the being. Experiencing is being in the moment right now hundred percent and no matter what you are doing in the moment.
The moment has its own beauty in the experiencing and if you tend to describe it you lose it right away. In India it is said that truth is undefinable. Truth is beyond words. Truth is like molasses enjoyed by one who is speech-challenged. One who is devouring into the sweetness of it and enjoying it but has lost ability to speak. The scholars, philosophers, knowledgeable ones those who go on talking about the truth and the lofty ideas, rituals and what is inscribed in the scriptures. You start following the scriptures in a manner that scriptures become your bondage that frustrates you.
Truth is not embedded on those words that you read from scriptures. All those words are glimpses of the truth the glimpse of that which is so that you get enticed to be there to get it, to get thirsty so that your dream is broken but your dreams have deepened and you have created further bigger dreams out of those words. A letter that by adding many make a word is phonetic which had no hidden meaning of its own but we have assigned them with meaning so we use them into a language by giving certain meaning. This is how all languages in the world have been created like Hindi, Chinese, English, Persian, French.
The moment you speak or read the language is formed, the moment you write them down you are actually coding the past for future use so that these words could be deciphered. Words are the coding of human language. Whole life one writes in words. One thinks that one writes priceless knowledge. One captures them into words and keeps giving meaning to the words. The words have no meaning in them; all the meanings are assigned to them. The word that one wants to write is the truth that one wants to write and it always remains unworded and cannot be said or written. Therefore, it is said that every word is a lie. We write, we call ourselves knowledgeable, educated, literate and distinguished.
The whole life we spend making ourselves knowledgeable and scholarly and we become distinguished. In the end we find that no matter how distinguished and literary scholar we are, something remains undefined. Something that words have no capacity to explain. Something that we missed and it is not in our hands to explain. Because truth was not hidden there in the definition that needed to be deciphered but truth is in the knowing in the now-ness of being. In the experiencing the truth is and truth is beyond words.
The author is a spiritual coach and an independent advisor on policy, governance and leadership. He can be contacted at arunavlokitta@gmail.com.