BEING AND BECOMING

Student: I want to excel in my life. Over the years, my graph of success is achieving a new height. I am doing hard work to become one of the smartest and richest persons on the Earth. Teacher: Wonderful! Who is  achiever and what is achieved? Student: I am the achiever. My name and fame are shining day by day.  Teacher: Who is this ‘I’? What is the material by which it is produced? Student: I is the ego which is the agent achieving successes and facing failures. Teacher: Whether ego is real or imaginary? Student: It is made of name, form, and function. Teacher: Whether name, form, and function are eternal?  Student: No, they are changing. Teacher: Anything changes does it exist? Whether these are real or merely fictitious images appearing and disappearing before the sightscreen of mind? Student: They are the images constructing my identity as a person. Teacher: Well said! What is the stuff by which these images are made of? Who is maker and what is made? Student: They ar...

Careerism is a ghost haunting the prospective world of spontaneous living. Whole life people invest to make a straight, soothing, and decent image with no avail. The life of a career is nothing more than a speck of dust blown away by storms. Yet, human beings are trained to create a career, to live and die for it. The whole life is wasted for running after an image which is simply a creation of mind, an assemblage of external stimulus, and fixation of identity around symbolic representations and their meanings. This symbolic rationality is deeply embedded in the collective psyche of society like a smokescreen hiding the eternal truth. Every action is evaluated on the scale of career and the price of a person is evaluated on the parameter of its utility in terms of functioning as a career, within the career, and for the career. In the end, retirement gives a sense of loss of the economic and professional values accumulated by economic man, a sense of imaginary losses, which imprisons th...