Dr. Vijai S Shankar MD.PhD.
Published on www.academy-advaita.com
The Netherlands
11 January 2019
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“Action”
Human beings are conditioned to believe that an action which they do will be followed by the next action that they will certainly do. The action that they do is real to them.
This is the scenario with which humans live. It is conditioned knowledge of an action. Humans do not understand that knowing is an activity or an action of the mind. This signifies that knowing an action or knowing anything in daily life is an action as well.
The knowledge of an action and the next is not free of the shadows of emotions, which reflect approval or rejection of an action. Action that is acknowledged and approved is sought for by humans.
Humans with wisdom, however, understand the meaning of an action more deeply than knowledge suggests. The wise and the enlightened accept the action of the other and do not expect it to be another action than what it is.
Humans with wisdom are steady, patient with trust in life. What could the understanding of an action and the next action be of a wise human being, is the question?
The wise understand that knowing an action or knowing anything in daily life is an action. The wise also understand that man or woman knows a lot, which has evolved in them and that he or she does not know by themselves.
The wise understand that knowing anything is an action and man or woman constantly knows something or the other every moment of daily life. There is not a moment in life when man or woman does not know. Humans also know that they do not know sometimes.
What man or woman knows covers every issue of daily life, which includes sports, entertainment, arguments, debates, planning, education, politics, judiciary, policies, and policing.
This knowing signifies that daily life is filled with actions in every moment of daily life, whether man or woman likes it or not. This signifies that there is no possibility of a next action in life, because action, albeit illusory, is present in every moment.
When man or woman does not know something, man or woman is anxious to know. The wise also understand that anxiety to know is an action as well. The enlightened realise that life is only moving and neither an action nor the next action is present in life.
Author: Dr. Vijai S. Shankar
© Copyright V. S. Shankar 2018
Editor’s note:
Human beings play their illusory part, as they are meant to, in an illusory world – that is the world that seems, beyond peradventure, to be real. As though that were not sufficient, a game-player called Action Man has been created by the intelligence of life, especially for the young from an early age. The young know it is a game, but their mind soon plays it for real, the more so when it is coloured with competitive emotion. The deep understanding of the wise, however, clearly presented in this article and elsewhere, reveals that even the knowing is an action, albeit illusory. Understanding this releases man from bondage to action.
Julian Capper