10. On Cultivating Self and Ruins
We go about our lives with so much struggling, and scheming, and striving, and worrying, and yet it will all be over in a flash. We see the fly on our hand and we laugh: tomorrow you will be dead, we think. We are barely any different, and our tomorrows come much sooner than we think!
If we know this then, how come we spend so much of our lives so vested in worry, ambition and Self? Mostly, we are forgetting how things really are ...
Spend time in contemplation of Time and Cosmos, and your human worries and ambitions will fall into their proper place. Pompeii, Knossos, Thebes, Troy to name but a few - once great centres of power and wealth, and now simply ... Ruins. And how many great civilizations have come and gone? The Athenians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Mughal, the Huns, the Ottomans. And how many of these emperors who, in their time, were masters of the world can we even remember today? A handful at most, and we know virtually nothing of their lives ... A few thousand more years, the time for Cosmos to blink an eye, and we will have entirely forgotten them.
And so you have strived in life, and you have “failed,” whatever that concept actually means, and – blink – now you, and all of us, are but dust and ruins.
And so you have strived in life, and you have “succeeded,” and become a CEO, an actor, a professor, a banker, whatever that really means, and – blink – now you, and all of us, are but dust and ruins.
How vain, how infinitesimal our human strivings and follies appear before the span of Time! Truly, Ruins are the laughter of Eternity.
We may feel that Time and Cosmos rob us of our passions and strivings, but it need not be so. On the contrary, wise is she who cultivates Eternity for it burns away vanity, intemperance and irrationality. And in its stead, it ushers into the Self a greater simplicity, detachment and peace. We can then pursue our passions, indeed our life itself, with much more ease, vitality and play, the way children and sages do, in proper balance between the Self and the No-self (Time, Ruins, Cosmos).
If you follow the common way, completely invested in Self, you will lead a suffering, rushed, and illusory existence - and you will invest enormous amounts of energy in the worldly “success” or “failure” of your Self. And we human beings are inherently skewed towards this, and therefore we need wisdom to cultivate Ruins, and to remember that we are nothing.
Wisdom says I am nothing. Love says I am everything. In between my life flows.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
If you are too much in the No-self, you may wrongly think that we are nothing, and that Time destroys everything. Yes Time destroys (and creates!) everything, but we also mean everything, for without us there would be a huge, gaping hole in our part of the Cosmos, for we are Cosmos too. And if you doubt this, imagine death and feel in your heart how much you matter to your relations, and how much they matter to you.
The art of living well therefore lies in embracing, and properly balancing, the strange paradox that we are: the Nothing and the Everything. And, I tell you, to rest the mind and the heart in contemplation and philosophy, and to cultivate both Self and Ruins, that is one of the more profound forms of soul care.