Life has no goal!
All our lives we are taught to have a goal and put all that you have, to achieve it. Real life motivators to online gurus are all raring and roaring about the will power and our ability to become richest, best, strongest, most talented etc etc. They claim they will help you get it.
Strangely enough, I am trying to learn a new art nowadays without any famous/formal teacher (through just acquired wisdom from books/online references) — a complete counter-proposition though to conventional wisdom.
Here are some beautiful pointers to that. Not much prose or politics — pure poetry. There is a strong sense of solitude, reflection and elevation without any external props.
In the words of UG Krishnamurti, who says that there are no great men or women, no inspirations, no goals to achieve and no need to plan our lives — because the force of life is bigger than the sum total of what we are thinking, aspiring, planning and scheming. We need to just ‘be’.
There are tons of videos on YouTube of this Indian philosopher who famously said, “I am just a barking dog….just ignore what I say..I have no message”.
Or in the words of Alexander Pope -
Ode on Solitude
Happy the man whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air
In his own ground.
Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire;
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.
Blest who can unconcern’dly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,
Sound sleep by night; study and ease
Together mixt, sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most does please
With meditation.
Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.
Or in the words of the great Indian ascetic Kabir -
चदरिया झीनी रे झीनी, रे राम नाम रस भीनी
Body is like finely woven cloth and is permeated by the elements of the supreme creator
अष्ट कमल का चरखा बनाया, पांच तत्त्व की पूनी
Eight-petaled lotus was used as a spinning wheel, and the 5 elements as yarn
नौ दस मॉस बुनन को लागे, मूरख मैली कीनी
took 9–10 months to knit (conceive a child)it, only fools soil it!
जब मोरी चादर बन घर आई, रंग रेज को दिनी
When I got my sheet, I gave it to the dyer to dye the sheet(meant a guru).
ऐसा रंग रंगा रंगरे ने, लालो लाल कर दिनी
It was dyed such, totally red in color (transformed me)
ध्रुव प्रह्लाद सुदामा ने ओढी, शुकदेव ने निर्मल किन्ही
Dhruv Prahlad and Sudama wore it, Shukdev made it pure (great inspirations)
दास कबीर ने ऐसी ओढी, ज्यों की त्यों धर दिनी
Kabir wore it such, that he returned it as it is(as he got it)
The last line (Kabir wore the chaadar -here meant ‘life’- in such a way that it was as returned as new, as he got it) is the grand essence of what is being discussed. “Can I live a life such that at the time of death I can return the body to my creator, unblemished.”
Or my another favourite poem — The Cold mountain- By Han Shan
Among a thousand clouds and ten thousand streams,
Here lives an idle man,
In the daytime wandering over green mountains
At night coming home to sleep by the cliff.
Swiftly the springs and autumns pass,
But my mind is at peace, free from dust or delusion
How pleasant to know I need nothing to lean on
To be still as the waters of the autumn river!
Again the last line repeats the universal invocation of ‘nothing to lean on’.
Another para from the same poem -
I climb the road to Cold Mountain,
The road to Cold Mountain that never ends.
The valleys are long and strewn with stones;
The streams broad and filled with thick grass.
Moss is slippery though no rain has fallen;
Pines sigh but it isn’t the wind.
Who can break from the snares of the world
And sit with me among the white clouds!
Finally, Warner Brothers film Enter the Dragon, when Bruce Lee is asked, “What’s your style?”, he replies, “My style?…You can call it the art of fighting without fighting.” (He propagated Jeet Kune Do as a martial arts style, which essentially freed the fighter from ‘styles’ and proposed ‘act in the moment’. Supposedly Bruce Lee’s was influenced by then thinker J Krishnamurti)
Some messages are killed once we try to explain them.
Just read and figure your own :).
