MAN, AND HIS IDEAL

Man can be happy while suffering - but he can also be unhappy while enjoying. Suffering and joy are things that happen to us - happiness or unhappiness is something that we cause. Suffering may be beyond our control; we cannot avoid it - but, as happiness is the result of our desires, we possess it, regardless of enjoyment or suffering.

Ultimately, happiness is freedom, and freedom is power.

When the great dynamic power awakens within man - the omnipotence of the dormant divine spirit in him - he becomes free from all kinds of slavery and knows for the first time what true freedom is, and that freedom makes him deeply realized.

Freedom is the “narrow path”, is the “strait gate” - happiness is the “kingdom of God”, according to the words of Jesus.

Paradoxical as it may seem, man is much more his distant ideal than the reality of his present moment; he is the power to become accomplished - in his deep and permanent attitude - than he is in his superficial and transitory actions.

Man is not the result of his transient acts - but the result of his permanent attitude. For this, man will be after death what he was when he lived. Death, as a purely physical process, cannot produce a metaphysical or spiritual phenomenon. A transitional act cannot change a permanent attitude unless that act is the beginning of a new and permanent interior attitude. A sinner who “repents and confesses” but without radically altering his inner attitude deceive itself. To convert, instead of confessing, this is the proper advice that the confessor must give to many of his unrepentant penitents.

Modern man's greatest crisis remains existential, a chaotic existential frustration. In the past, the man had lost his path; now, he also lost his address. He no longer knows his destiny or the purpose of existence. He goes to the absurd to even deny the existence of a purpose! Man is losing track of his existence. Even writers and philosophers openly proclaim that human life has no purpose and that man is a mere plaything in the event of birth, living, and dying. This is the typical anti-cosmic view of existence. It is the result of the instruction of the peripheral ego without the education of the integral man. There is no point running ever further in search of something where realization is ephemeral. What modern man lacks is guidance amid this general chaotic disorientation.

And this process of disagreement with oneself - to mention one example - makes the shelves of bookstores filled with self-help books or pseudo saviours from the chaotic situation, and even magicians influencing people with ideas that life starts at the age of 40 ... that the best time in life is retirement or the spring of existence ... Another, even less resigned, published a book entitled “Life Begins at the Age of 60”.

And these poor mortals join the army of the semi-dead in the illusory intention of trying to solve the dramas and dilemmas of their fellow men, not knowing, themselves, that the light to illuminate this darkness comes from the knowledge of themselves; comes from the exercise of controlling the mind and the ego’s tyranny.

Thayumanavar (1705-1744), spiritualist philosopher, Tamil poet and considered an Indian saint, expressed himself in this way in one of his poems:

“You may control a mad elephant;

You may shut the mouth of the bear and the tiger;

You may ride a lion;

You may play with the cobra;

By alchemy, you may eke out your livelihood;

You may wander through the universe incognito;

You may make vassals of the gods;

You may be ever youthful;

You may walk on water and live in fire:

But control of the mind is better and more difficult.”

Or, as another sage said: when the soul is in harmony with the universe, its hands can guide the steps of an elephant, with only a hair attached to its trunk!

However, what is known is that life begins where a great ideal begins, that the rest is not life but to vegetate or let external and casual circumstances live it. The main goal of human existence is to take charge of its destiny through knowing the truth about itself.

Those who do not will have lived in vain.

“Man, know yourself”, emancipate yourself from the tyranny of human circumstances and proclaim the sovereignty of your divine essence; make yourself the result of your creation, not the reflection of what you see in others.