The Unprecedented Leela
“It is the lesson of life that always in the world everything fails a man – only the Divine does not fail him, if he turns entirely to the Divine. It is not because there is something bad in you that blows fall on you, – blows fall on all human beings because they are full of desire for things that cannot last and they lose them or even if they get, it brings disappointment and cannot satisfy them. To turn to the Divine is the only truth in life.” – Sri Aurobindo
I was guided to write this short essay on life lessons pointing to “failures”. My blog points to the daily undulations of life processes which appear darker than we perceive, leading us to live and roam like hapless creatures on this Earth. We, by the nature of cognitive hierarchy, are primed to this negativity. But is human birth equivalent to failures?
Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga points to the reality of life with much more depth than one can imagine. In His own words – “All Life is Yoga” and every chunk of our life (good, bad, and ugly) is the Divine’s Leela. By this I am referring to the failures we embrace daily, leading to sorrow, sadness, depression, despair, aggression, etc. which are meant to transform our entire personality made of five distinct visible and invisible layers or, Panchakosha (read Taittiriya Upanishad for more exposition on this topic). At times we do get this inner message but mostly, our minds refuse to accept it.
I journaled several anecdotes of failures from my own life and from others noticing that these events span a series of concerted yet random events of similar nature happening over a particular time period. It is a Divine pattern of alerting our psyche to enlightenment through action. That is why it is critical to learn from failures. Failures have a bipolar nature – sometimes they come as a subtle stimulus which can be healed within hours and sometimes, they present themselves as a mighty hammer leaving a permanent mark in our DNA. Nonetheless, we are born to embrace Her Leela as the Divine is constantly pushing us to rediscover a better version of ourselves which is wiser and calmer. Man is constantly striving to become a Superman as per the laws of evolution and Integral Yoga.
But how can we eradicate failures? The short answer is we cannot do it fully. But we can lessen the impact of these negative events upon us by becoming resistant to it. As a permanent solution, we can turn towards the Divine Mother and immerse ourselves in Her Consciousness. It is simpler than we think but harder than we perceive.
An action-oriented life with lasting tolerance to lead a clean life is one way to surrender to the Divine. Everything else is taken care of by Her glory. As Sri Aurobindo has pointed out that we can only evolve by accepting what we see around us, summed up in His words – “Brahma Satya, Jagat Satya” and slowly ascend to the Parashakti while descending Her tattwa into our physical being as a basis of cellular transformation.
Thus, let’s open ourselves to Her unprecedented Leela and take lessons from our successes and failures as mere temporary jugglery as a key to our reformation and evolution as a living proof of Divine existence within and around us.
- Abhishek Ghosh (India)
I entirely agree with you.
ReplyDeleteThank you Amal Jyethu for reading.
DeleteThank you for this post!
ReplyDeleteI see life as a series of challenges, both ordinarily ( mental, vital, physical), and spiritually.
Each challenge requires a certain level of consciousness to produce it , and another at a higher level overcome it. If we develop that consciousness in the process, then we say we have succeded, if not we have failed.
Successful resolution of challenges for me is the basis for evolution of consciousness, so every challenge counts. Moreover, specific challenges are presented to us exactly because of where our consciousness is. We will face challenges that are developmentally appropriate to where we are in our personal evolution. At higher levels of consciousness these challenges can become ever so profound as we have seen in the biographies of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother
While form a dualistic mindset we see success and failure, looking backwards form a more evolved perspective we can see exactly how we have evolved, and what remains to be done.
It's best not to set perfection as the only standard by which we measure ourselves ( seeting ourselves up for 'failure'), but also to keep our benchmark of avidya always in perspective ( to be able to track our successes).
Eventually, there may be no successes or failures as such, but a series of challenges and degrees of evolution of consciusness.