Dr. Vijai S Shankar MD.PhD.
Published on www.academy-advaita.com
The Netherlands
28 May 2020
Precious Life (1)
“Invaluable”
Deep within you in your everyday life you know life is precious, because everyone says, make the best use of life. Don't waste your time. It must be precious definitely. Otherwise, why would man say, don't waste time.
You look forward for your future; it must be very precious and that is why you look forward for it, is it not? Your life is a headache, a perpetual, problem-ridden life. Why do you look for a future life? Would there not be problems in the future?
There certainly will be because your present life is with problems and your present was the future of yesterday, when you looked for the future. But somehow you brush it aside and long for a future, hoping that the problems of today and yesterday do not reoccur or are absent.
It is wishful thinking, is it not, because you will have problems in the future? You had them today and they were not the same as yesterday. There is no guarantee that you will not have problems in any day.
Anyway, nevertheless, all said and done, what do you think makes life precious?
Just as night and day have never met, so life and mind with thoughts have never met. Life makes it appear as if the mind with thoughts is life. It makes it appear as if the mind with thoughts controls life.
Life makes it appear as if the mind with thoughts controls the body. It makes it appear as if it is the mind with thoughts which makes a job get done and that it is the mind with thoughts which plans your day. Also, as if your mind with thoughts is required for the sophistication to happen in life.
Mind with thoughts claims the sophisticated world to be its priority and jurisdiction. So to man, mind with thoughts is paramount. It is the mind with thoughts which calls the shots in sophistication. But is it true?
The mind with thoughts attributes everything in daily life as a consequence from the function of the mind with thoughts. But is it so? And how could any concept of the mind with thoughts make life precious when problems exist every day and even in the future?
So what makes life precious? What makes life precious if it is at all precious? If life is precious, you will be certain why life is precious to you. Only your body is in the now. Your body is in the timeless and thoughtless now.
Your body and mind without thoughts are in life - not your mind with thoughts. If your mind with thoughts was in life, it would have stopped the body getting old. It cannot. The body and mind with thoughts is nothing but a collection of light and sound and it will transform the way it is meant to transform.
The wise understand that every moment in life along with the transformation in it is precious, because thoughts neither make the moment in life that is, nor the transformation that is within any moment in life.
The wise understand that the transformation within the moment is varied and precise. The moment in life is indeed precious.
The enlightened realise life is precious every moment.
Author: Dr. Vijai S. Shankar
© Copyright V. S. Shankar 2020
Editor’s Note:
We live the life that is not there. It is not there for it is a figment of mind’s imagination. The life that is there is unknown and unknowable for it is a mystery. The mind with thoughts has taken man and woman prisoner by guile and promise of a future with desirable outcomes. It begets reality where there is illusion, the play of light and sound. It begets man as the controller, the doer. Yet life gifts man with his own pathway towards knowing who he really is – not a figment of his own imagination, nor a hostage to an unbalanced mind whose understanding is speculation. Here, the light of wisdom reveals, step by step, the life that is there, transforming within every precious moment. Live life as it happens – every moment.
Julian Capper. UK
German Translator‘s Note:
A French chanson means "Je ne regrette rien." I have no regrets. Man is conditioned by parents, teachers, politicians, psychologists, priests and spiritualists to believe, that there are things that one better has not done, said or thought in one's life. They all claim that there is something to regret, especially so that one may learn from it and do better on future occasions. But the understanding of the wise is quite different. Like in the chanson there is nothing to regret in life, everything is precious as it is. Life in the mind with thoughts consists also of things that you regret, things that you want to undo. It keeps the thinking person in the past, although man can be neither the thinker nor the speaker nor the doer. And that is why every moment in life is precious. What a liberating insight that Dr. Shankar shares with humanity here and elsewhere.
Marcus Stegmaier, Germany.