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Plurality and Unity in Life



After a long time, I have got an opportunity to listen deeply the voice echoing in my consciousness. In listening, I find the disappearance of conceptions built from the seeds thriving in my consciousness. Those seeds are there and evolving since millennia, yet their understanding is too raw to draw any definite conclusion. It is only in observing their formations one can witness the unity of everything amidst pluralities and diversities. I am amazed to see that people often talk about plurality of choices, plurality of perceptions and understandings, plurality of thoughts and values, but they stop looking deeply to the mental formations appear on the surface level of mind. They don’t pay heed to the similarity of experiences shared by all the creatures in the universe. They don’t see how our craving to survive and the fulfilment of appetites are one shared reality. Just like every flower appears to be unique but its formations reveal the sun, earth, water, and clouds, etc. in it, and the surrounding environment has helped them to manifest as flower. This wisdom can help us understand the individuality and its separateness are an experience of surface level. Somehow, our minds do not look deeply and accept in hurry the uniqueness of individual experience. 

Buddha rightly said that being is made of five skandas, while one is material and all four are mental in character. Yet, we have fallen short to recognise the mental world, and keep praising material science as the only reality.  As long as our minds are misunderstood, the reality of existence and its pluralistic manifestations would always be a mystery. 

Nowadays, meditation has become a fashionable goods, whose producers and  consumers have only transformed it as an exotic exercise. People live their lives miserably at the cost of finding a peaceful time in future for meditation. Such a division of hard labour and leisure is like compartmentalisation of life into various zones. In fact, persons are trained to shift from one sphere to another. But in reality, such a transfer is impossible and undesirable. Only our works can give us peace and understanding and only understanding can save us from damned state of reified working space. It is important for the peace of world is that we practice today and right now the art of doing one work at a time with full attention instead of running after producing the quantity and numbers of goods and services. Numbers have enslaved human's abilities to bring quality in works. In the name of objectivity, every single human's activity expects to achieve certain numbers. In achieving the numbers, the peaceful process of life in present moment is absolutely compromised. Buddha rightly said that life is always happening in the moment, but we are accustomed to memorise the past or to project an imaginative future. In this transition, the peace inheres in us is eclipsed by anxiousness, hope, and desire, and quality is neglected as one of the considerations of our actions. What is remedy of this malady if not to comeback with attention in the present moment? And to look deeply and listen attentively the voice of life, which is not living in blissful heaven or damned hell, rather blossoming in me, you, and us, and happening every moment here and now.

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