“We have to walk by faith to possess all that is duly ours.”
― Lailah Gifty Ankita
At one point or the other, we usually ask ourselves that who governs death. How does it get decided that when a person should die? We contemplate about it. We wonder and imagine what our cause of death in future will be. There is no surety of even a second, then why do we say, ‘I’ll do that work tomorrow?’ Who gives the right to decide that tomorrow will come or not? With this thought, we come face to face with the reality that the powers that conduct the affairs of life do not seem to be under the control of any human being. The days and nights pass by, whether we want them or not. There are the seasons of the year, over which we have no say whatsoever. The blowing of the winds, the rotation of planets, and the ways of nature seem to be totally unconcerned with our feelings, our emotions, our requirements and our needs, and our little joys and sorrows seem to be merely a meaningless phenomenon before these mighty operations. Why is it that some are born poor and some rich? Why is that some have disabilities and some do not? Why are we not all equal? We have no say in all of these matters and many more.
There are innumerable facts which even science has not been able to explain. We consciously talk about hell and heaven. Do we know that they even exist or not? Again, no answer ! The distance to which the world extends is astounding. The mind cannot even imagine how vast the universe is. We cannot conceive the distance between one star and another, though they all appear to be studded like gems in the blue sky when looked at with our naked eyes. The vastness of space is incalculable. It’s just that there is too much mystery to be solved.
What is this hidden secret? Is there nothing in life other than what is visible to the eyes from the point of view of the common understanding of the generality of mankind? Life seems to be only what is seen by the eyes, heard with the ears and sensed in some way or other by the organs of this psychophysical composition. But man is superior, they say, to the animal in a special and significant endowment with which he is blessed by providence, nature, or whatever we may call it – that endowment being the capacity to study what is implied in the experiences through which he passes, rather than merely be satisfied with the experiences only.
The logical deduction which one can make from the presence of visible existence is the capacity of only the human species. There is a logic in the human understanding, though there is a different kind of instinctive deductive capacity even in animals and in subhuman species. The special endowment of man is what distinguishes him from merely the instinctive level of existence or the biological life of plants and the vegetable world. This endowment is the speciality of human nature. What is this speciality? It is the insight which one can have into what is hidden behind the visible manifestation of life rather than merely be satisfied with the sensible forms of life in general. The animal or the plant is admittedly satisfied with the reaction it sets up to the sensations evoked by the public life of the physical atmosphere of the world, but is man also satisfied in a similar manner? Evidently not. He has the capacity to logically argue the circumstances out and to dig up the hidden treasures of meaning latent within the visible manifestations of impulsion and activity.
The most astonishing is our own body All the systems in our body work restlessly all the time for us. No one can help us ever the way we help ourselves. We breathe in and out. Like a bellows blowing in a goldsmith’s shop, pumping is going on inside our physical mechanism. Somebody is pushing the bellows in and out. The air is pumped out and is pumped in. How this continuous work is going on in the body we do not know because we are not doing it. We are not doing anything to contribute towards this breathing process. We cannot do any service to this essential performance in our own bodies. We cannot assist the heart in its own daily operations. We can rest when we are tired, but the heart cannot rest. It has not a single day’s leave from its performance. Right from the time we became living organisms, this centrality of operation began to work which became the heart, and no one has time even to think that there is a heart inside. We are busy people, and so busy that we cannot be aware that we have a heart, that it is working restlessly, indefatigably, without any contribution from our side, the so-called ‘we’ or ‘I’, as we refer to ourselves. In every stressful situation, we work our brain out. When no one helps, our brain does! Aren’t we so blessed to have a human life, a human body?