I was always the proud one, but I was too proud to acknowledge that to myself. That is what ego does to your thinking. But, you can only realize that after an external force jolts you. In my case, an unexpected journey did that to me. Brought me out to the realisation that life and its meaning could be different.

This could only be explained by unraveling my whole story.

I was just like most people set in my ways of thinking. I learned early on in my life that the whole concept of divinity and God was false. I was not open to the idea that divinity or spirituality could just mean something else to humans psychologically. These beliefs of mine got reinforced whenever I failed in life or in handling situations. My logical mind always stroked my ego, and convinced itself that the supernatural is evoked when humans just need false hopes to soothe themselves. I often thought in patterns of victories and defeat, which I learned from the hyper-competitive culture in our society. That means failures are catastrophic symbols of your defeat because you were not smart enough, or you did not fight a good fight. Failure was weakness and my ego always punished me with negative thoughts and self flagellation of my self-image, and every time my self-image was injured I blamed the whole world for believing in any sort of hope. And, hence, I grew skeptical of any concept of god or hope. This reached a toxic level when I imposed these views on other hopefuls and tried to kill off their hope.

This all changed when my distant friend Amish forced me to take a trip to a coastal town. This happened when I was on a business trip to his town, which was relatively close to that coastal town. I had previously seen the beaches in that town, but this time when we were roaming aimlessly through the streets we saw a queue and got curious. It was an ashram, so I was not willing to step into that establishment but Amish convinced me to just tour the place. My logical mind told me that this was probably a cult compound laced with propaganda, which it was but as we entered into the controlled environment, our phones were put into airplane mode.

For the first time in my life, I felt the serene silence. I forgot about the queue and just marveled at the flower gardens on both sides of the path. The path led us to a simple looking above ground tomb; people were respectfully bowing their heads. In my mind I was sorry for the people devoting themselves to just a grave. But when my term to respect the grave came I also respectfully bowed just to keep appearances. And we sat down in the courtyard, since there was silence we just gestured to each other and sat down acknowledging that we were just sitting there to rest our tired legs.

As we sat there in silence a thought popped in my head that, “One day I will also be dead and my logic will also die with me.” Then another thought popped, “What will happen to my numerous ideas which I could not implement?” Then the most dangerous idea popped in my head “Have I lived my life with the experience of innocent love not blemished by logic and reason before my DEATH?” The answer was no, because my logic always cuts down purity of thought by impure logic. Suddenly my eyes welled up and I sobbed quietly. This was the moment I realized that flowers were beautiful not because they reflected a specific spectrum of light, but because everything means something. My perspectives also made me see the world in a specific way. 

 Earlier, I was convinced that life could hold no meaning, and love was just a bunch of chemicals messing with my brain and colors are just there to lure the intellectually innocent people to consume senseless products. All these were logically correct, but in a sense wrong because perspective matters. When you say life has no meaning it is true but you can also look at life as an empty journal waiting to be filled with meaning. Love of course is a crescendo of chemicals, but can also be interpreted as a story to be written and companionship of an intimate friend. Colors are of course light reflected out of a spectrum, but it can also be looked at as a symbol of discontinuity of pattern that changes the feel of an object. Like an image of a sunflower can never replace the beauty of a real sunflower. Colors, in essence, represent what some object can be despite its contents or constituents. Logic was always a sword to cut through falsities and illogic, but if the sword is too sharp it cuts and injures the person holding it.

This was my ashram revelation. It did not matter who was in that  grave, what that person worked on, or what he wrote. What truly mattered was what that person experienced in the small time in life. So experiences are colored by perspectives, and life is too short for us to apply logic to love.

Hello, everyone! If you liked this Poem, do check out the related posts. Comment and like if you would like to read more similar works from the author. And don’t forget to share this on your social media channels.

Hello! I am Ruchir Prajapati. I write stuff and philosophise.

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Email- edgyruchir@gmail.com

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