TUESDAY, APRIL 16, 2024
By Ibonio D’Souza
According to all scriptures, the aim of spirituality is to enable human beings live life in its fullness. But in life we find that this is the least understood, or most misunderstood of teachings.
Most of us misunderstand that having life in fullness means becoming richer. This fallacy equates life with ‘having’ rather than ‘being’. In this view, one’s life is godly depending on how much one prospers. This strange notion drives the prosperity gospel. It appeals to many of us even though the truly holy ones voluntarily embrace poverty.
The other misconception is that it denotes a safe, secure life, free from all suffering. This too is strange because the truly holy ones are known, and revered for the unthinkable suffering they endured. We pray for total exemption from suffering, which is strange, to say the least. Suffering is an inevitable part of life. It is one of life’s great teachers.
The more ‘spiritual’ amongst us assume that extraordinary spiritual gifts and powers characterise life in its fullness. So, miracle-workers and the high and mighty in the religious hierarchy are supposed to be ‘filled’ with spiritual power and the extraordinary graces that go with it. But, on a closer examination, many of them prove to be pretty ordinary; well short of the spiritual benchmark of life.
What the does ‘life in its fullness’ mean? Everything depends on how a person understands himself; for one has to seek and attain this state for oneself. One can seek only as per one’s understanding of oneself. The distorted understandings mentioned above arise because of a misconception in this respect. We are conditioned to think of ourselves as autonomous and self-contained individuals, sharply distinguished from everything else.
In accordance of the scriptures, we are to attain ‘life’ in its fullness, not a life of fullness. Seeking the fullness of ‘life’ is quite different from seeking the fullness of one’s life. Life is a great deal more than each one of us, and all of us taken together. The notion that we are discreet, autonomous selves who ‘own’ their life - as in ‘my life’ - is a delusion. We are in reality part of a seamless web of life that extends to the cosmos. Ideally, the whole of life should express itself through each individual. One’s life should mirror life in its fullness.
Such ‘fullness’ embraces everything and everyone. It excludes none. That is why to the spiritually enlightened, there are no strangers and enemies. The Indic spiritual vision of ‘tat tvam asi’, thou art that, adumbrates this mindset. Certainly one of its meanings is that labels of meant to be otherness should be inadmissible. The proof, therefore, that we are oriented to ‘life in its fullness’ is that we feel at one with all human beings; indeed, with the whole of creation. The entire world is my home.
Life can be had only in full, for it is dynamic. Just as we cannot breathe in half - inhaling alone - so also, we cannot live in part. Restlessness lurks wherever what is meant to be whole is kept in part-ness. Such a state contravenes the law of nature. It’s our delusion that we can live in isolation.
