What People Want
People believe they want pleasure and Hindus are able to accept that. Pleasure includes many things to keep a man busy, and it is instinctive to want pleasure, as Smith put it "We are all born with built in pleasure-pain reactors. If we ignore these, leaving our hands on hot stoves or stepping off second story windows, we would soon die" (Smith 14), and in the upanishads "The soul is born and unfolds into a body, with dreams and desires and the food of life" (Novak 19). The world is full of sensual delights and undeniable beauty and it would be foolish to deny that so India says go after it. They say "Go after it" (Smith 15) because they know that at a point the man seeking materialistic ideas will come to the conclusion that he wants more. Here are the four reasons one cannot ever be truely satisfied with pleasure:
This brings the real question to mind; what do we really want?
- Fame, money, and power is a limited resource, if everyone were rich we would not be rich at all. If everyone is famous we are all average. It becomes a competition almost everyone is damned to lose.
- The hunger for more is insatiable. There will always be more to want and greed will tell you to go for it.
- Worldly success will not feel like enough. A huge mansion and sports car will not lower the feeling that you are missing something.
- The trophies of worldly success cannot be taken from one life to the next , we envision eternity and we cannot bring money with us into eternity.
This brings the real question to mind; what do we really want?
What People Really Want
Clearly, pleasure, success, and fame, are not the final solution of what we want. When you've discovered that you want more you will come to the conclusion that you want something deeper, more meaningful. Things lying at a deeper level.
The next important point to consider is that we all have this at our fingertips. As humans we all have a body, personality, and Atman (hidden self, interconnected to the world, part of God himself). And since we have part of god in us, we are all capable of infinite being. A fitting metaphor would be a lamp so obscured by dust that the light is dull, our Atman being the lamp and the world's influences being the dust. |
The Beyond Within
So now our desires are known, but what stops us from immediately reaching them, there are three large barriers. The first is pain, both physical and emotional. A way to avoid emotional pain is to look at life from a third person point of view, like playing both sides of a chess game, one will not be drown by failure if they are also able to feel the success. The second obstacle between us and joy is ignorance. "Psychologists liken the mind to be an iceberg, most of which is invisible" (Smith 24), most of our mind is not used and that makes us inherently ignorant. The third issue we have is our restricted being. Children are so easily put in a distraught state of mind because they have little experience which would make them better set to cope. "Compared with children we are mature, but compared with saints, we are children." (Smith 25). By surpassing these obstacles we can reach our wants.