Dr. Vijai S Shankar MD.PhD.
Published on www.academ-advaita.com
The Netherlands
2 January 2020
Adventure (5)
“Life”
Nothing is more paradoxical than the concept of security because even trying to become spiritual is a kind of a security. Look deeply into your daily life and recognise it.
Once you recognise that the security of your daily-life wants is a paradox, meaning it may or may not happen, at the same moment you will understand that the security of any spiritual practice is a paradox as well.
The moment the paradox of life cements in you, daily life becomes an adventure to you. Then the adventure of daily life will bring calm, patience and trust in every moment of daily life to you.
Do not look for logic in life. If you look for logic in life, you will be stuck in the mind. You will not have an opportunity to live life. Life happens to you. Life is whole, complete and perfect in life.
Logic cannot be applied to the entire context. To the whole, what logic will you apply? So logic is there because you want to be secure in your life. The first point to understand is this. How can you want to be secure in life when life has already given you a moment in which you are as secure as you are meant to be.
What are you trying to secure? Can you secure a moment? Can you secure any moment in life? There is no question that you can because you cannot! So what is this security about? You begin to think.
That very moment you will know, oh, my goodness, every moment in life is as secure as it is meant be. You cannot secure it. The moment you are thinking of securing the moment, it is going in the very same moment as the next moment.
Once you try to make your life secure, you will be in bondage. You will recognise that the moment you are trying to make things secure in life, at that very moment fear will start creeping in because you made life secure.
You will be in fear of losing your security. When you understand that every moment in life renews and its content renews as well, every moment in life will become an adventure to live for you.
The enlightened realise that every moment in life is precious.
Author: Dr. Vijai S. Shankar
© Copyright V.S. Shankar 2019
Editor’s Note:
Man, convinced in his mind that he is the doer, may try to improve on the life that presents itself on a daily basis. He fails to understand life as it unfolds, having no concept or even awareness of each moment and what it contains. Consequently, he has tried repeatedly to deal with his insecurity, rather like experimenting with different medicines, drugs and even potions to shake off a stubborn virus. The means at his usual disposal may be numerous, not to mention paradoxical, i.e. sometimes they work and sometimes they do not work. In their understanding of the intelligence of life and in their compassion for man’s plight, the wise are revealing life’s paradoxical nature in these articles. Gradually, man’s awareness of the perfection of each moment will grow, if it is meant to.
Julian Capper. UK
German Translator‘s Note:
Security is obviously the basic need of every human being. When the wise proclaim, as Dr. Shankar explains here, that every moment is as safe as it is meant to be, the mind immediately asks the question: "What if?" And the security of the moment is never enough for the mind because life is transitory and everything that man has, does or knows is also transitory. So the security of which the wise speak cannot be in permanence. But that is exactly what the mind considers to be security: constancy and preservation of what exists. However, life would have to stop to provide such security! That is not possible. Nothing would evolve, however illusory. Nothing would unfold. And who could seriously want that, even if he could accomplish it? Life is, fortunately, an unpredictable and always fresh flow, in which the illusion of things and plants and animals and humans and everything that they consider worth preserving for themselves passes by in constant change, transforming itself constantly. Paradoxically, it is precisely in the constant spontaneous transformation of life that security lies in every moment.
Marcus Stegmaier, Germany.