Where am I heading to?
This may sound like a travel note, but it isn’t. Well actually, on second thought if you think a bit deeper, maybe it is- if you see life as a Journey. Think again, Yes, life is a journey, not the destination.
You wish to travel the world by road and the distance across the trip would be in multiples of thousands of miles. Not purely going by the ‘state-of- technology’ of present date automobile, let’s assume we change our car a few number of times during the travel. Every time the car (assumingly) outgrows it’s running life during the travel, we step out of it and get into a new one. This, THIS very event of “getting out of the old car once it has outgrown it’s running life and getting into the new one” explains the circle of our life. Me, travelling through the journey, is my Soul and the different cars that I get ‘In’ and ‘Out’ (every time it outgrows it’s running life through the journey) are the different bodies that my Soul takes to live through these lifetimes. When i’m born, my Soul takes my body, when my body outgrows it’s age, my Soul departs. And then again, the cycle of life takes my soul through a journey of lifetimes, every time in a new body. The deal is simple, we all have a starting point and we all must travel through the journey to reach our destination.
This simple analogy can amazingly teach us the way to live. What do we need for a joyful journey? Most importantly, the awareness of the start and the endpoint. Unless we know where to start from and where to go, we won’t move an inch forward towards our destination. Our start point is the realization of our ‘ignorant state of mind’ and our destination is reaching a ‘state of awareness and acceptance’.
Great! now we know where we start from and where are we heading to. What do we need next? Google Maps (yeah, thanks to technology, life has become simple with directions). Just like Google maps direct us the best way (may not be the shortest), in this journey of life, we all need a Guide, a Guru, a Compass and an anchor. Without the guiding light, we will keep on driving in circles, never reaching our destination. This exactly is the state of life of those who choose not to wake up. They keep on driving and driving, reaching nowhere, in the process changing many cars (they are born, they depart and again are reborn time and again) until a point in time when they finally fix their start point and destination and they find Google maps to guide. After as many lifecycles we may go through, eventually we all need to wake up to our present ‘state of ignorance’, learn and gather the knowledge to reach ‘the state of awareness’ and for all this to happen, adopt a Guide, a Guru or a teacher, who can show us the path.
We all get entangled with the ‘not-so-important’ aspects of our lives and forget the true purpose of this journey. The colour of our car doesn’t matter (yet we discriminate), all travel routes are OK as long as they take us to our destination in good time (yet we fight on the basis of faith and religion), we just need ONE car at a point in time (yet we lose our sleep over accumulating wealth that we may never even need in this lifetime) and we need happy co-travellers who may get-off before we arrive at our destination because they reached their’s (and still we get remorseful in relationships).
Life can be so beautiful. All we need is acceptance, awareness, a guide and the intent to enjoy the view, while not forgetting the destination…
Peace to all 🙂