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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