Hope in a Difficult Time

Today, at the Sunday Dialogue at the J Krishnamurti Foundation, we discussed acceptance and faith. There was a psychologist who gave an example of a person, who doesn't know swimming and is struggling to cross the river. There are three different possibilities. The first possibility is that he makes efforts to swim out of panic and fear. The second possibility is that he gives up and sinks. The third possibility is that his efforts to swim across the river are driven by certain faith or acceptance. Probably three possibilities exist whenever we enter into untested waters in our lives. We may make efforts driven by fear, or may give up, or may make efforts driven by faith.

There is a huge difference between the efforts driven by fear and the efforts driven by faith. But a question arises regarding the nature of this faith and how can we have faith in the moments of acute crisis? As soon as we undergo such a crisis, our mind first takes us to the past. We start thinking about why it happened to me. Depending upon the situation, we may experience guilt, if we feel ourselves to be the cause. We may make somebody wrong and start becoming angry or irritated with that person if we feel that the event occurred due to some other person. Thus, the past and thinking about the past take our attention away from the present moment. There is another stream of thought that goes on parallelly inside our minds. We get concerned about the future and start speculating about the future. That too takes the attention away from the present moment. These thoughts about the past and future leave little energy in the present moment to work on the solution in the present moment.

What makes some of us accept easily and move on while some of us are stuck with the past or the future for a longer time? Has it something to do with the genetic makeup. It appears a difficult proposition. All the toddlers learn to walk after falling down many times. It seems that almost all the kids are quite resilient. Then what happens in the process of growing up? 

Probably, in the process of growing up, we start framing a lot of stories in our minds by looking around and listening to our parents, our friends, and society in general. There are always explicit discussions on the importance of money, wealth, power, positions, and fame. Not only consciously but unconsciously too, the significance of these possessions gets carried to our minds. We see people giving respect to those people who are rich and hold high positions. They are invited as chief guests in the functions at the school. We see our parents struggling for small comforts due to the lack of money. We also see the rich enjoying the comforts of life. Each moment this conditioning of the mind keeps getting stronger.

Probably, some of us accept this continuous feed from society without examining the same while some of us stay more aware while this feeding is done. The less aware ones slowly end up being a mini image of the society they live in. While the more aware ones notice certain discrepancies, inconsistencies, and illogicalities. They compare such preachings and teachings coming from different sources and compare them to make sense. Some of them read books written by different authors, and meet people from different backgrounds, coming from quite different cultures and educations, and more importantly, having diverse life experiences. 

This awareness does something quite wonderful to these individuals. They start appreciating the relativity of different things that are divided by society into good and bad, desirable and undesirable. Without this awareness of contextual relativity, the goods and bads, the desirables and undesirables become absolute. That absoluteness brings an inability to accept reality in the moment of crisis and that inability to accept forces the mind to travel to the past and future and that reduces the availability of the time and energy in the present moment to work on the solution. 

That is the reason that awareness in each moment is the key. That awareness brings the ability to observe the input received by our mind from different sources understand the contextual background and then discriminate the absolute from the relative and then customize it in a different context. With this awareness one understands and appreciates that money, connections, positions, power, and fame, all of them have a functional utility. In a crisis situation, one would be able to evaluate the significance of such things in a particular context. That brings a lot of acceptance and that acceptance frees the energy of the movement into past and future. We no longer waste energy in holding others wrong or worrying about the future. Such awareness also brings wisdom to accept different possibilities that our mind is not able to foresee due to its limitations. That gives us hope and courage to move forward in life.