Why blame (an imagined) God for the inscrutable nature of Life?

The most intelligent response to Life is to stay stoic despite its upheavals.

“What do you do when you have a problem with accepting this God theory,” asked a young lady, when we were introduced to her (by a mutual friend) as Life Coaches and Happiness Curators, at a café the other day. She went on to say that she debunked the entire God “story” as proposed by Zeno, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, who lived around the 3^rd Century BC. Zeno championed the belief that God determined everything for the best and holding on to that view was a virtue sufficient for happiness. Zeno’s followers were called Stoics – some of the more popular followers were Seneca and Epictetus. The lady said that it was impossible for her to accept that God controlled everything and so she felt that she could not accept the God theory as a pre-requisite for happiness. “How do I make peace with myself, when I am not able to accept a majority opinion or belief,” she asked.

I replied: “Simple. Replace the word God with the word Life. Now, consider this statement – Life controls everything and understanding this truth holds the key to happiness.” I then asked her: “Do you have a problem in accepting Life as a more intelligent energy than you?”

The lady replied: “No, I don’t. I surely feel the presence of a Higher Energy. But I don’t like the idea of God.”

“So, just go with what you believe in. Why do you complicate your Life by questioning the belief systems of others,” I asked.

The lady said she got the point.

Many people are like this young lady. They are spending too much time analyzing what needs no analysis. The truth is that there is a Higher Energy – call it Creation, call it God, call it by whatever name – that powers our lives. I have learnt to simply accept this truth and trust the process of Life. I realize that the best way to live Life is to, as Zeno championed, be stoic in the wake of Life’s upheavals. The Roman philosophers who followed Zeno too advocated the calm acceptance of all occurrences as the unavoidable result of divine will or of natural order. The second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita ends with describing the highest state of consciousness a human being can attain. Krishna, replying to Arjuna, says (presenting here only the relevant extract): “…He lives in wisdom, who sees himself in all and all in him, Whose love for the Lord of Love has consumed every selfish desire and sense-craving tormenting the heart. Not agitated by grief, nor hanker after pleasure he lives free from lust and fear and anger. Fettered no more by selfish attachments he is not elated by good fortune nor depressed by bad. Such is the seer….” The key operative part is to be “not elated by good fortune nor depressed by bad”.

In our lifetimes, we are seeing stoicism all around us as people deal with publicly visible tragedies – like the Las Vegas shootings or the questionable incarceration of the Talwar couple over the unsolved murder of their child, Aarushi. We also see people deal with their private tragedies stoically – a health challenge, a relationship issue, the passing of a dear one. There is immense pain for those who are caught in these Life situations. Yet we don’t see them beating their chests and wailing. They see no point in grieving and suffering endlessly. Instead, we see them, almost prayerful, moving on with their work, seemingly unaffected by the pain and grief. This is the highest spiritual quality individuals can acquire. In learning from them, we can find a better way to deal with our own, smaller, calamities.

So, God or no God is not the debate really. Seriously, why blame (an imagined) God for the inscrutable nature of Life? The most intelligent response to a Life that you can never make sense of is to accept whatever comes your way and to stay stoic, stay anchored. This is what Zeno told us centuries ago. And if we internalize that Life lesson, we too can be happy with what is!

You don’t need a wake-up call if you are awake!

A Life challenge arrives only so that you awaken from you stupor, from merely existing, and start living! 

I was asked a very interesting question by a young medical college student in Chittoor yesterday: “AVIS Sir, why do we need a tragedy or crisis in Life to start living intelligently? Can’t we in the normal course learn to live happily, accepting Life for what it is?”

I thought that was an intelligent question from a very beautiful mind!

Of course we don’t necessarily need a tragedy or crisis to wake us up from our stupor. But the problem is that most of us don’t even know we are steeped in stupor. We imagine that earning a living is what Life is all about. So we run after name, fame, money, qualifications, material things and everything else that is impermanent and perishable. We kid ourselves to believe that we can postpone our happiness, we can postpone who we are, postpone living the Life that we want to live, even while we prioritize other people and things, over ourselves. We miss the most elementary point that Life is a limited-period offer and if we don’t live a moment fully, the way we want to, then we have lost that moment forever.

So, in a way, we are lost but in a bigger way we are pretending we are lost. Don’t we all know that we will die one day for sure – sooner or later? Then why do we choose not to live fully and instead squander our lifetime accumulating things that are going to perish or are not going with us when we perish?

Therefore, it is because we pretend to be dumb that we find a Life tragedy or crisis awakening. A tragedy or crisis is nothing but an event. Just another event. Just as your graduation is an event or your marriage is an event or your vaccination is an event so is your lay-off or your divorce or your chemotherapy. But only when what you don’t want or what you don’t expect lands up in your Life do you realize that you are not in control of your Life. That’s when you reflect and realize that had you lived your Life more intelligently then when the unforeseen and unwanted happens, when pain arrives in your Life, you can at least console yourself that you lived well and happily until now.

To live intelligently you need nothing but an awareness of your Life being a gift and a limited period offer. But to awaken to this awareness, you sometimes need a reboot, a wake-up call, and that’s precisely what a tragedy or crisis does to you! They shake you and wake you up! But if you are awaken, then you don’t need a wake-up call at all, do you? Even so, you will wake up only when you are really asleep, but if you are pretending to be asleep, you may still not wake up. Think about it – it makes a lot of sense!

How do you pick yourself up when you have been felled by Life?

The only way forward from a crisis is to get up, gather yourself and move on. 

Many a time, Life deals with you in the most brutal ways. And before you know it you have been socked and have been left devastated with the turn of events. How do you pick yourself up when you have been felled by Life? Well, there are no easy ways in such a situation. You have to take Life as it comes, one day at a time, one step at a time.

When a tragedy or a crisis strikes you – death of a loved one, loss of business or money, a serious health challenge, a heart-wrenching break-up – you feel numbed by the event. All you are asking repeatedly is “why” and “why me”? But there are no answers to any questions in Life. So, you can spend time mourning and grieving – and feeling miserable – or you can move on. Now, there is no problem really with grief. It is after all a normal emotion that follows a loss. In fact, when you encounter grief, don’t try to suppress it. Allow it to rise within you. Feel the grief, hold it, let it hang around and watch it as it first rises and then recedes. When you suppress it, when you resist it, it will persist. But if you let it be, it will fade away. In the aftermath of a crisis, when the grief begins to subside, be aware and pick yourself up again. It will appear to be difficult initially. But when you choose to move on, it will happen more seamlessly than you can imagine.

For instance, just to cheer you up, when someone asks you out for a coffee or suggests a book or watching a movie, don’t say no. In the beginning it may appear that you are “indulging in being happy” while you need to be “clinging on to grief”. But allow yourself that indulgence. Don’t feel guilty. The truth is that your feeling sad is not going to undo your Life. In fact, nothing in Life can be undone. So, to move on, after you have been dealt a Life-changing blow, you must first be ready and willing, and then you must actually, physically, move. Moving on is not a feel-good philosophy, it involves a lot of practical, doable, must-do, actions.

But it all begins with believing that there is a lot of Life after a crisis. What you think is the end of the road, almost always, is the beginning of a new journey.  When you move on, when the scenery changes, as Life goes on, you will find that there is much more to Life than just clinging on to the dead past. 

Your lifetime is counting down…

I met someone briefly yesterday who is young and who has recently lost her two-and-a-half month old baby. She came across as someone who is stoic and who is learning to cope with her loss. Yet there, naturally, was a tinge of sadness in her eyes. I reflected on the brief conversation I had had with her as I sit down to write this morning. How can you console a mother who has lost a child?

The truth is you can’t. And you mustn’t. Not about this mother and her loss. But also about any loss, any crisis, any tragedy in Life. Life’s realities have to be faced. They can’t be justified or reasoned with.

In this mother’s case, she has to realize__and accept__that death is an integral part of Life. If you are born, you will die. You know this. But it is your expectation that Life last longer. This expectation is the one that causes you grief. The moment you drop that expectation, you will be able to deal with any loss__including death__better. A friend of mine lost his grandson within a few hours of the child’s birth. The child was born in San Jose, California. Everything was normal: the pre-delivery medical reports, the delivery itself and the baby’s condition post-delivery. Apparently the baby had suffered a heart attack as his heart was weaker than that of most infants at birth. So, one minute, my friend wrote to me over mail sharing his joy at being elevated to grandfather status. And within a few hours he wrote to inform that they had lost their grandchild. A line he wrote in his mail is worth reflecting over: “We are all still coming to terms with this. But I guess each of us has a role to fulfil in creation. Our little fellow’s was to remind us that, at the end of the day, Life is fleeting and fragile. He taught us, through his brief stay with us, to celebrate each moment of it and not to ever waste it!”

To be sure, we lose a bit of our lifetime every single day – 24 hours daily to be precise. None of us knows when we will have to depart. But know for sure that you__and I__have to depart. Someday. Our expiry dates are already set. Except, unlike in all the products that we consume, that date is not visible to us. So, here’s the choice we have to make: we can live our lives pining for all that we have lost or we can live celebrating what we still have left with us – even as our clocks keep counting down to our own ends.