LIVE FOR OTHERS

What is yours and what is mine? Everything is God's. This very body that I wear, I cannot hold on to it for long. It will pass with my physical death. This very mind which I think to be mine, I cannot possess well enough nor can I control it. It is ever being influenced by others, fashioned and refashioned by them even as it tries to exert its influence over others. The body is changing and so is the mind. Masses of material particles every moment add to and subtract from the existing mass which is the body, inconstant and ceaselessly changeable as it is for its very survival. And this I identify with as myself and mine, what folly! The ceaseless current of thought whirling in and out of my perception system, uncontrolled and chaotic, fashions my mind and, rationalized and socialized, gives me a seeming personality which is ever adrift on the vast universal current and so, shifting and shimmering, makes a mirage of myself evanescent as a distant dream. And this I call as being myself, what fantasy, what inconsistent affirmation! Then who am I?

I seem to be there somewhere or do I not exist? It is such a powerful feeling, this sense of my existence and yet, I may or may not be actually existing. And through all this I keep attaching 'myself' to ephemeral earthly dreams here and hereafter bearing no consequence to me beyond this brief flicker of terrestrial life. Ignorant I came into this world and ignorant have I remained as to my identity despite tall pretentious claims of being educated and cultured. Whither knowledge of the Self? Through the haze of life, through the maze of Maya, I remain as rustic an individual as my great predecessors who rambled the fields in search of the fruit of the Earth. Where have I in any way evolved save in outer embellishments of life and in superficial knowledge of the principles of Nature which may be as far removed from Truth as the knowledge of the pastoral people was in days of yore from the technological know-how we now possess. We have barely scratched the surface of the mine of knowledge that Nature holds in store for us but we vaunt like one who seemingly is the monarch of all he surveys.

Attachment is fundamentally ruinous to the cause of self-identification as it covers up Truth with superimposition of things that are the non-self. Consequently, we suffer from mistaken notions of our self and labour in ignorance to acquire earthly possessions which set in the nefarious chain of competition and conflict. All earthly ambition is fraught with ignorance, all human labour the product of blind necessities where the propelling force is as much human need as human greed. As mind is more fluid than matter, it necessarily follows that human desires should far outnumber the material means to satiate them. From this follows the golden economic principle of 'limited means and unlimited ends'. Thus, with a burgeoning population, competition followed by conflict is inevitable over the possession of the Earth's resources. It is puerile to believe that at the present level of human evolution resources will be shared by men as per their respective needs for survival and decent living. Human society, for all its pretensions of organization and conjoined enterprise for the purpose of the well-being of all, remains a predatory entity where cannibalism continues in a variant form, that of brutal life-sucking exploitation of men by fellow men. And this has been the story through the ages despite religion and its morals, despite the grandest discoveries of science and despite the fact that such exploitation has reduced the masses from time immemorial to beasts of burden whose only vocation in life has been to toil for their exploitative masters. And why so? Because Nature assigns powers unequally to people and this advantage that some have over others in terms of intelligence, talent or simply brutal collective might when coupled with avarice serves to create inequities in human society which even the gods cannot redress. Divisive ideas of individuality, caste, creed, race and nationality fraught with ignorant modes and methods have ruined the possibilities of the flourishing of human civilization for ages and deluged the world with the tears of the masses silently suffering their terrestrial lot which the privileged delight as life. It is a very unequal distribution of the amenities of life, the Earth's resources which are the common inheritance of all and cannot be shut up within the confines of clusters of individuals, families and the like if social justice is to obtain in the name of civilization. Only then may we call ourselves humans and not until then. So long as this inequitable distribution of terrestrial wealth continues we are hardly removed from the savage we once were with the only difference that now we are more merciless than ever before with all our refinements of the mode of exploitation.

Capitalism like feudalism which preceded it is rotten to the core and the next stage of socio-political evolution, socialism, does not seem to be any better either if one is to adhere to its present Marxist model of State-control of enterprise and property with all its concomitant stifling of social opinion and democratic norms. A robotic civilization can scarce bring about social justice and it will be a reverting to the old feudalistic system, only a far more virulent variety in that the single Party with its omnipotence vested in the Central Committee, the Politburo and the General Secretary rules with despotic impunity playing with the lives of millions of men held in captivity in a Police State where the slightest demur from any spells doom for the one. The 20th century has seen these social experiments succeed and fail in the Soviet Union, China and the whole of Eastern Europe and I doubt if sane-thinking people would like to hand over their liberty to dictators like Stalin and Mao in the name of the furtherance of the human cause through revolution. It is a well-known fact of psychology that enforcement in a culturally cramped environment devoid of human freedom is a worse motivator of human creative endeavour than encouragement in a free society where diversity of opinion and expression abounds. Consequently, democracy seems a better alternative on the surface to dictatorial socialism in terms of its power to unleash human potential and reap its benefits thereof for the collective good of all. But the question arises, does democracy raise the masses or does it subject them to the free reign of capitalistic exploitation masquerading as social democracy? I leave it to my readers to dwell on it for the while even as I exhort all to come to each other's help in this unequal battle of life so that the wheels of this vast social machinery may be lubricated a little for the collective good.

A perfect social system is yet to evolve and in its absence the rule of the jungle continues to hold the masses captive. They who produce the wealth of the world are despoiled of it all and the crafty manipulators of men run away with the booty and all this with the sanction of the law. No wonder Lenin had called the State the organ of class rule. Although I am no protagonist of the Marxist ideology of 'the rule of the proletariat' for history has provided ample testimony as to its horrendous consequences in terms of mass genocide in the name of revolution and the utter destitution of the human spirit, I yet stand for the rights of the masses to a fair share of the fruits of their labour as the means of ending their economic plight. And why should they not have their fair share when they are the backbone of world civilization, when their labour runs the vast social machinery of the world? But to bring about this stupendous change in human society it will take much more than revolutions. It requires a complete overhauling of the human psyche, its thorough transformation. Given the diversities that exist in human society at present in terms of cultural divergences it seems highly unlikely that any advance will be possible in the near future. The world will war and suffer for ages yet till the bulk of its population will be rationalized, its thinking sanitized and humanistic impulses become the possession of the majority. Only then will any grand theory, religious or socio-political make any tangible difference to the lot of the multitude. Till then the misery of the masses will continue, be it at the hands of the industrialists or the politicians or religious bigots.

I had begun this essay by asking the question as to what is yours and what is mine? I shall now answer it. Yes, I am yours and you are mine and we all are God's. If we remember this simple formula then in our individual lives we can make a difference and with it some difference for the better in our collective social life. I understand that all this will be achieved in the exploitative society where all the forces of economic coercion will still be silently operating, crushing the life out of millions by the hour. But then brother, what can you or I or even an Avatar like a Ramakrishna do in the present scenario? The accumulated karma has to run out before a change may be effected. But will such foul play ever stop? One wonders. Till then remember that you and your brother man are one, so says the Vedanta. Therefore, love all, care for all, share your wealth with all and bring about some sanity to human life. Jai Ramakrishna!.