Sadhana : the realisation of lifeTagore, Rabindranath
Religion
Sadhana : the realisation of life
Tagore, Rabindranath
Philosophy, Hindu; Values
When we watch a child trying to walk, we see its countless
failures; its successes are but few. If we had to limit our
observation within a narrow space of time, the sight would be
cruel. But we find that in spite of its repeated failures there
is an impetus of joy in the child which sustains it in its
seemingly impossible task. We see it does not think of its falls
so much as of its power to keep its balance though for only a
moment.
Like these accidents in a child's attempts to walk, we meet with
sufferings in various forms in our life every day, showing the
imperfections in our knowledge and our available power, and in
the application of our will. But if these revealed our weakness
to us only, we should die of utter depression. When we select
for observation a limited area of our activities, our individual
failures and miseries loom large in our minds; but our life leads
us instinctively to take a wider view. It gives us an ideal of
perfection which ever carries us beyond our present limitations.
Within us we have a hope which always walks in front of our
present narrow experience; it is the undying faith in the
infinite in us; it will never accept any of our disabilities as a
permanent fact; it sets no limit to its own scope; it dares to
assert that man has oneness with God; and its wild dreams become
true every day.
We see the truth when we set our mind towards the infinite. The
ideal of truth is not in the narrow present, not in our immediate
sensations, but in the consciousness of the whole which give us a
taste of what we _should_ have in what we _do_ have. Consciously
or unconsciously we have in our life this feeling of Truth which
is ever larger than its appearance; for our life is facing the
infinite, and it is in movement. Its aspiration is therefore
infinitely more than its achievement, and as it goes on it finds
that no realisation of truth ever leaves it stranded on the
desert of finality, but carries it to a region beyond. Evil
cannot altogether arrest the course of life on the highway and
rob it of its possessions. For the evil has to pass on, it has
to grow into good; it cannot stand and give battle to the All.
If the least evil could stop anywhere indefinitely, it would sink
deep and cut into the very roots of existence. As it is, man
does not really believe in evil, just as he cannot believe that
violin strings have been purposely made to create the exquisite
torture of discordant notes, though by the aid of statistics it
can be mathematically proved that the probability of discord is
far greater than that of harmony, and for one who can play the
violin there are thousands who cannot. The potentiality of
perfection outweighs actual contradictions. No doubt there have
been people who asserted existence to be an absolute evil, but
man can never take them seriously. Their pessimism is a mere
pose, either intellectual or sentimental; but life itself is
optimistic: it wants to go on.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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