1: The Arduous Task of Self-Analysis : 5.
But we cannot always plant ourselves in these feelings which sometimes rise in us under these circumstances which are forced into us due to the events that take place outside, because these events will not always be taking place. Every day somebody will not be telling us something good. Every day there will not be a kirtan or bhajan, and every moment of time we will not be witnessing a solemn divine worship in a temple or a sermon being delivered to us. We will be mostly in the midst of hard staring realities of life where we have to sweat in the hot sun and be agonised inside due to a frustrated feeling injected into us due to some reason or the other – a family circumstance, a tension in the office, peculiar difficulties, physical ill-health, and harassments of all kinds. These are our realities, and not religion and spirituality.
In this world we have to live. This is a terrific world indeed. That is why it is often said that we are living in a world similar to the field of the Mahabharata battle where everything is tense and the bow may twang and the machine gun may fire at any moment. It is not for nothing that the world is compared to a field of battle. It is veritably that. It is not a temple, it is not a church, it is not a heaven; it is something quite different, a thing that you are able to see every day as the reality of life, quite different from what you hear from the scriptures or listen to from masters and others. In this world you have to live, and you cannot expect to live in a different world.
You have been born into this world somehow, and what can you do but to make the best of the circumstances of this life itself? You cannot say you shall go to another world and start practising spirituality. That shall not be, because the world that I refer to is not merely this little Earth planet which is a vast manifestation called creation. I use the word ‘nature’ to designate a larger reality than this little Earth on which we are living or the world of which we are citizens. The whole world is a powerful surge of movement towards some destination of which we are not always conscious and into whose mysteries we cannot easily enter.
It is a forbidden area. So even if you leave this world and go to another realm, you will find yourself in similar circumstances because the world as far as you are concerned is not the earth, water, fire, air, ether, the mountains and the rivers, etc. This is not the world. The world is an internal relationship that obtains between you and the circumstance outside. The world is more a kind of relationship rather than a physical object, and this relationship will persist wherever you go, even if you go to another region in the scheme of creation.
The irreconcilability that is there between yourself and what you call the world outside is your world. It is, therefore, a psychological world rather than a physical world. This is the reason why great thinkers have drawn a distinction between what they call ishwara-shristi and jiva-shristi – the world created by Ishwara, God, and the world created by you. The world of God is not your problem. The mountains do not trouble you, the rivers are not your problem, and the very Earth is not your sorrow. Your difficulty is something different.
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