WE DON'T REALLY EXIST!
WE
DON’T REALLY EXIST
The following quote from
Speaking Tree, September 25, 2016 has not made me wiser:
“WE DON’T REALLY EXIST
Some years ago, I was
walking downtown San Francisco with a great friend and a learned Tibetan scholar.
I asked him about one of the most striking ways that the Tibetans express the
uniqueness of the human condition….
I pointed to the crowds
of men and women rushing by on the street…. “Tell me, Lobsang,” I said, “if it
is so rare to be born a human being, how come there are so many people in the
world?” My friend slowed his pace and then stopped. He replied, “How many human
beings do you see?”
In a flash, I understood
the idea. Most of the people I was seeing, in the inner state they were in at
the moment, were not really people at all. Most were what the Tibetans call ‘hungry
ghosts.’ They did not really exist. They were ‘busy’, they were ‘in a hurry’.
They- like all of us- were obsessed with doing things ‘right away’. But ‘right
away’ is the opposite of ‘now’- the opposite of the lived present moment in
which the passing of time no longer tyrannises us.
_Jacob Needleman”
But the quote left my
thoughts disturbed, making it dig into the past. The Bhagavad-Gita I purchased
in 1963 for 25 paise to Being and Nothingness (Satre) and Idea of Justice (Sen)
came to my mind. Of late, the thought about ‘existence’ has started to bother
me too. In a hospital bed on July 2, 2016, I wondered, if I just ‘disappeared’
from the normal ‘communication system’, how many will bother to find out
whether I still existed! I am still scared to come to a conclusion, on this.
M G Warrier
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