.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/journal-awakening-into-the-truth-4/">IV Whom
The Way Calls
In
common with every other perception, experience and knowledge, the way
to truth surfaces within ourself. The witness in object–subject
relatedness is forever between the fact in our eye, the meaning in
our perception and the knowledge with ourself, including of our own
self at the foundation of our subjectivity.
In
setting ourselves up on the way to truth, we shall have to exclude
much, nearly everything, and all ultimately. This work therefore does
away with jargons common in religious texts, and most certainly their
fervour and calls on faith, though not the values or knowledge they
signify in a philosophical or spiritual discourse. This work is about
us, our being as we are and as it resonates with us. If we are a
creation, and only the vain or absolutely knowledgeable amongst us
will aver that we are not, there is an urgent need to discover its
universal matters of fact.
Each
one of us is in a material environment, with a body that is
wondrously formed – a marvelously organised physiological system.
It works excellently without our intervention, very predictably if
watered and fuelled timely, adequately and appropriately. It signals
for its needs from time to time, for particular cares necessary on
account of environmental factors, and warns us of its misuse,
activating alarms when stretched too far and even scaring us into
mending our abusive ways. And if we let it be, not deny it of rest
and sleep, it diagnoses its problems to correct, undo, regrow and
recover by itself.
But
however dire, immediate and wholly intimate it feels, our body is
only as it serves us to mutually survive and a mere means for adults
to use it as they choose. Sure, we deliberately dress it up to
impress or time its presence to surprise others, who look upon it as
we are in their perception, what we mean and how they deem. All men
and, as I hear, some women too, know how beautiful the fairer gender
can seem. We all have a story or two to tell about the powerful
impact of their inviting curves, mesmerising countenance or awesome
proportion. But mostly it soon clarifies and we begin to look beyond
the body before us, at the person behind or within it… at the one
who is thinking and opining, emoting or touching, setting the deal or
laying the trap for us !
Not
everyone is a human soul; not yet, though every person has a
line to one. Most of us are animals without their nakedness, which is
both an advance and the first lie we tell ourselves, and project to
others. The religion we subscribe to is for afterwards – to confess
and feel awashed for a new day of lust and greed, apathy and lies. In
Islam, the communal faith confers celestial merit and heavenly
rewards for what, in the eyes of you and I, is inhuman behaviour and
subhuman conduct. We are informed that it is growing the fastest !
Clearly, being with a normal human body, most of us are not wanting
in intelligence; but it is through developing of the intellect,
equipping it with universal human values, that we characterise
ourselves with humanity. Fostered in an environment of entrenched
feudal power structures, equally common in rigorously instituted
religious societies and in those with extreme Gini index, it is our
intellectual blindness that arrests our spiritual evolution to
universal values, individual liberty and creative freedom.
I
really am not sure how far the truths laid out in these pages would
resonate with the beast within us. But there are many who are prone
to be content and happy, even if disadvantaged or less fortunate than
those around. They might be hounded into moral fatigue or failure on
occasions but, by nature, are courageous enough to follow their calls
of conscience in utter honesty and truth. Their ethics is their life
and covetousness has no place in it, though they might not be
entirely free of envy. It is these individuals, I trust, who would
have the patience, love and the pure drive for the quest of truth.
Likely, I believe, they would have the richness of experience that
living against our animal propensities invariably fetch us, and the
internal instrument to intuit the facts of spirit, as opposed to
those of matter. They would sense the sinister in propaganda, however
socially acceptable, and self – promotion would be beyond the pale
of their own instinctual priority. Though not ashamed, they would be
aware of unhappy consequences of unchecked lustful impulses, and of
those easy inner processes which lead us to greed. They would value
facts, liberty and truth, and constantly initiate to add, examine,
change or modify their own views and perspective. They would be
happiest leading clean, honest lives, being monogamous in their
affection, nurturing moral and ethical values in their progeny,
extending their love to beings and having a ready regard for life
everywhere.
It
is for them that I have the pleasure of writing these essays. But
that is only to give me a start. There is no one who cannot arise,
raise himself here and now, and step up to gain from these truths I
have availed from my glimpses of Vedanta.
