Only yesterday I was doing some extensive commentaries on the Vedas and the Upanishads in a social networking site. It's another matter that my comments got mired in an avoidable slinging exercise between the rights of two religions. Those who understood me shall always will. A couple of those who didn't, didn't want to understand perhaps. I do not believe in organized religion so it is meaningless to persevere in conversations where my comments are percieved as personal bias to a specific religion and antagonistic towards another. However it's when I feel perspectives are being imposed on independent voices, I become vociferous in protest.
While I never impose my perspective even on my own shadow, I respect others having their own perspectives because I believe in man's intellectual freedom and his right to exercise it at any point of time. Personalizing a quote of Voltaire here I say that while I may not agree with one's point of view, I shall defend to my last breathe, his/her right to have it and express it.
Yesterday late night I went back to the very texts that I had referred to hours before. It is always exhilarating to re read quality literature because every time I go back to revising it, I learn something new, yet another fresh concept arises out of the pages.
The Upanishads are summarizingly called "Vedantas" as they are, in a way, a unique structure of comments on the Vedas, a set of philosophical discourses on what the Srutis reveal to express. The fact that they do not represent thoughts constrained within a specific era of evolving consciousness of the human mind and society at large, uphold the validation of the timelessness of this literature. They have been written over centuries by brilliant philosophers of yore, as they have strived to philosophize their discernment in their own ways, each being a brilliant analysis of the knowledge gathered and its application to put the essence in relevance to contemporary times.
Yesterday I referred to it as a work of brilliant philosophy on humanism - how it comments on the spiritual evolution of man and how that results in making life better for one and all. It makes me realize the actual value of human life, and what should be the essential goal of life. In the same capacity I find the Vedantas to be a wonderful reference when human relationships are comtemplated upon. While nowhere it is specifically written to be so, one does reach conclusions about its message in a broader, holistic reference frame - the reason why the relevance of these scriptures is timeless.
Talking about human relationship, it makes me stress on the absolution of Detachment if happiness and elegance are chosen to be sustained in any meaningful relationship. The Vedantas identifies Attachment as the primary factor when clashes and conflicts disturbs the harmony of a valuable relationship. Overt attachment arises out of emotional insecurity. Doubts on the strength of bonding between two human beings arise when one feels threatened by the presence of others in another's life and emotions. Spontaneous interactions appear to be antagonistic and they appear to threaten one's presence and place in the other's life. The sanctity of mutual trust and its privacy is disturbed when that happens. And naturally one begins to get misunderstood, perceptions of his entity change not only in the mind of the other one but ofor those whose presence in the other's life started the entire process. At the end the relationship breaks down as one is shunned by the other. What a waste.
Looking back at my own life, I wouldn't clarify whose part I played in relationships - one who started feeling insecure, one who shunned/had to shun at the end or one whose presence in one's life became the unintentional cause of a breakdown. But this study of relationships is very, very meaningful to me as a person without a sibling, one who lost a parent to a rather inglorious death, one who fell out with the other parent because of conflict of principles, one who got widowed, one who got divorced, and one who lost a little daughter to that divorce. Though it was never really an active participation on my side that these relationships of varying depth of emotional involvement got destroyed, they got destroyed all the same. And it's never futile to look back and analyze and learn.
The Vedantas tell me that the way out of human misery in such situations is detachment. In a way it is love/affection in a more primal, uncomplicated form. One should love the other as the person he/she is, to accept the reality of the person. The moment you bring in expectations and demands, you start restricting the other person. It is a happy story if the other person doesn't feel restricted by emotional expectations (and I personally don't see why there should be any difficulty if the intent and fondness is truly genuine), but that is not the way it plays out in reality.
Keeping yourself devoid of any expectations and emotional needs to be voiced out can ensure that the love or affection you get back in return is mostly undiluted and spontaneous. A few years back I would have percieved a dichotomy here ; is love with a hidden sense of detachment true? Does it agree with the actual character of the emotion called Love? The years that have elapsed since teaches me the futility of such a perception.
What I write here is my story, my realization. There's no need to generalize when it comes to the usual or the normal, or the common. But it takes all sorts of stories - happy and tragic, complete and incomplete, successful and otherwise, to write down the Script of Life. And with time the ego called 'I' and the needs called 'My Needs' get obliterated as the mind strives to achieve higher states of consciousness. I am awaiting my turn if there is any.
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