Friday, June 24, 2011

Emptiness Or Spaciousness....??

Past few years of my life have been a great learning period for me.Life has given unexpected,shocking surprises to me. First I failed in my attempts for fixed career,as a result of which the relationship that i treasured the most came to an end. Then periods of emotional turmoil and struggle started. It has been at one time a horrifying experience for me. Months and months of rumination and reclusion from my social life to get away from the phantoms of my past was merely enough. And the most terrifying of all was the feeling of emptiness within self.

'So, you people got it?' No. Read the above paragraph again.My life was merely fulfilled because of a girl, friends, money, relatives and the social life i had. All my life i have been trying to collect more. More of what this universe has gifted me in abundance. More love, more friendship, more money and more of anything and everything that i could possibly get. A suitable word for this is greed. At one instance i lost one of those things, i got hurt, angry, sad and i even cried. I got angry and sad when a guy dedicated one of his poems to my ex-girlfriend. I got sad when she did not recieve my calls and messages. In fact, I was frustrated about everything that was happening. Emptiness for me was a existential sickness.

We all at one time or other in our life fall into this vicious circle of collection and renunciation. Our life as such keeps moving from one extreme to the other. How many times have we questioned ourselves?Despite the knowledge that universe has everything in abundance for us all, Why do we feel the emptiness? Why is it that we feel we are living with wounds that cannot be healed?Why do we keep running after these loaded subjects?

I was so exhausted of trying to fill this empty space.However I tried, it could never be fulfilled. And i know that none of you can fill it. It is so vast, unlimited and infinite. I therefore decided to stay in silence and feel it at peace.This was a beautiful afternoon and a crazy one for me. I came home after a hectic schedule of work, freshen up and texted a message to my friend. I began to feel restless. I went to my bookshelf only to see books i have read many many times. I was getting quite frisky. I needed to channelise this energy to one activity that i was not quite sure of. Something inside me was becoming aware of an unknown. I went to the store room with the same notion. A notion that both happiness and sadness,bliss and hell, beautiful and ugly are imagination. Only reality is witnessing the conscience. Emptiness is getting lost in these webs of imaginations.Huh! I was eyeing for the cartoon where i had disposed almost 300 books. Books that live with me.I was trying to open the cartoon when something banged beside me. A cloud of dust went up in the air leaving a sick smell in my nostrils. Ah! It is the suitcase. My suitcase. A navy blue coloured possession since my childhood. I opened it. There was nothing other than dust and ruts in the chains.It was utterly empty just like me. It has so much space that i decided to store my most coveted things in it.Suddenly, to my utter surprise, I got an answer. At first, I doubted myself, then it felt weird and smile spread over my face. Yes, it is unbelievable. Only thing you need to do is change the direction of your thoughts. It is not emptiness, it is spaciousness. We have enough space to bring in the world to us. There is so much space that world becomes too small for the love, riches and beautiful moments to share and life too short to live them.

There is so much within us that when we start giving, greed, possessiveness vanishes;there is so much that it never gets exhausted. Those moments came back swirling in my head when i chanted 'panchasil' from tripitak in my school days, When bhikshyu 'Kondanya' spoke out to me with his hands over my head. Yes, those times when we listened to Bikasananda, read Osho, Khalil Gibran and all those philosophers i knew of. They were so right. Rajnis was so right when he said,"experience your emptiness so totally that emptiness itself becomes fullness."