Materialism

For years (in fact, all life), it was an illegitimate thought in your mind - why should I run forever behind materialism? Why are people doing this all the time, and claiming all the time they are not doing it, or they are not doing it all the time, or worse, talking about spirituality as their goal (and doing the run for gold and security all this time)?

If body is perishable, and before perishing it suffers due to illnesses (that needs treatment), and if our children should grow up with education and travel the world, and absorb cultural assimilations, and other such reasons that we give (and think as the only reasons – as apostle of sacrifice and responsibility) for this ” mad rush, then what about our fear of health, death, poverty, starvation, and “standing in society” as reasons? Do they not exist? Did we never felt them, or felt them all the time and hide? Did we not hide our “sinful” thoughts, all the while claiming indifference to the society that categorizes what “sin” is and what it is not?

What happens when what you actually want to do cannot earn you money? What if you want to hear birds sing, live like a savage, or live like a nomad trekker like Christopher McCandless or Everett Ruess? What if you can quit money like Daniel Suelo? Or leave the cog wheel of capitalism behind like Helen and Scott Nearing did? Or teach like Vandana shiva, to preserve local culture, land, and seeds? We do not do it (though we may want to), because we are Smart – defined as the ability to swim with “best of the times, and avoiding the risk or cost that goes with it.”

It’s the dawn of time, and you have not even started. If God asks you “ What did you do, you idiot? I gave you brain, compassion, and support infrastructure to facilitate inference of where you should drive your life, and you blew it?”

Why did you not scatter the seeds far and wide, as requested?

Years of suppression, rationalization, and dragging has not killed that original thought – Are we not from the “Sunflower forest” (of Loren Eiseley)? Should we not see work-life balance as compassion to animals, teaching children in villages, spending a joyful moment with our parents before they ebb away, rejoice with gratitude on all mental facilities bestowed on as “gift”, deserved or not?

Should we not seek return? Why renunciate in the last stages of life (as Fakirs, Gurus, and others advise), when each moment is seeking your joyous participation in the fabric of life? The moon light is out today – walk in it. The children are laughing uncontrollable on a joke – close your eyes and hear the chuckling, the continuousness, the coherence of their voices. Go to your childhood and complete the circle of togetherness. In Vigyan Bhairava Tantra, Shiva advises “the Subject and Object are one, when focus happens.”

It is time to try, and well worth it.