In search of the Absolute

Why do we want what we want?

2009-11-28T05:10:00.000-08:00

What do we want? What do we pursue each and every day of our lives? This is a very simple and a basic question and each person will have a different answer to it. Some might say a peaceful happy life, some others would want to become famous, powerful and most people would want to become rich and comfortable. Now most of these wants (rather than needs) can be classified in to two categories. One, we want to be secure and two, we want to be able to satisfy our desires. These are called Artha and Kama respectively in Vedanta (a school of Hindu philosophy) and are described as two of the four goals of humans. They clearly say human goals, because they seem to know that no other animal seem to want what we want and these have been our goals since time immemorial. These two also occur in our minds in that order of priority. First we want to be secure and then we want to be able to explore ways to satisfy our desires. When we get our pay checks, first we pay our rent, home expenses, insurances, loan repayment to make ourselves secure and then we indulge in treating our senses in good restaurants and theme parks. Don't we?

Now the next question is, "why do we want what we want?". Why do we feel insecure? Why do we think that to make ourselves happy, we need to indulge in our senses? Who are we afraid of? We constantly keep comparing ourselves with others and we desire to become others that we admire. We project our life in to the future, that we do not know about, and feel the need to secure ourselves from any eventualities that may befall us. We are not happy with what we are and we constantly move our happiness away only to chase it over and over again. Why do we do this? Why do we feel this way? For most of us, the answer is that we feel limited. We feel that we lack those things that could make us happy and we chase them. When we get them, we feel that there are other things which only can give us happiness. This chase goes on and being happy has thus become an Utopian adventure. Are we really so limited? Do we really lack those things that will make us happy? Can we ever not be happy now? In my previous post, I discussed how our faculties deceive us in to believing that we are what we are not. Do they play a role in also deceiving us in to thinking that we really ought to chase happiness forever?

We see the world as we are.. II

2009-11-25T11:38:00.000-08:00

As mentioned in my previous post, our limited sense perception and our mind limit the ways we look at the world around us. They are a sort of coloured spectacles through which we see the world and therefore the world looks coloured to us. The mind can be finely divided in to three - manas, buddhi and ahamkara. Manas is the part that interacts with the senses. This we discussed in the previous post. Buddhi is the intellect, the logical reasoner of our mind. Whatever facts we perceive will be used for further inference. This will be done against the rules that we have learnt already. And when the inference says its not possible, we reject the world we see and look at it again for favourable facts. Similarly, ahamkara or the ego, limits our understanding of the world. It is some kind of a resume which holds in it all things that we claim that we are or that we have, etc. When I say, "I am a Hindu", this fact comes from ahamkara part of our mind and it leads me to see everything in a Hindu perspective. Whats right and whats wrong is decided from that perspective. In short, all these components of our body-mind complex, leads us to see the world as we are, from our perspective, as against as it is, from an absolute perspective.

We see the world as we are.. I

2009-11-20T13:46:00.000-08:00

We live in a illusive reality. What we see in this world is only what our eyes can reveal to us. The same applies to all our other senses. Our senses are limited and therefore our perception too is limited. With such limited perception, how can we see the world as it is. The truth therefore is that we see the world as we are and not as it is. Behind our sense perception, there is a mind that assembles the images, retrieves similar objects from our memory and validates what we perceive. There may be a lot of noise, but still you can hear the symphony of Mozart. Because you have already heard it and you can filter out the music from the noise. While it is an advantage to have a template in our memory to help recreate the symphony from the noise, it also restricts us from listening to other important information that might be on its way to us along with the symphony. Hence, our memory and our mind that always refers to our memory also restricts us from seeing the world as it is. In addition to our limited senses and mind, there seems to be other things that also limit our perception of the world.

In search of the Absolute..

2009-11-20T12:28:00.000-08:00

And so begins.. my search for the singular supreme absolute One..