Will
Will to Live
The world , that you see flowing and burning, emerges from a will that is monstrous like fire of hell. It gives birth to grotesque grottoes and cavernous recesses in the underground and it arranges , deranges the streams and waterfalls, tumbling , dashing and foaming outwards dispersing sprays of moistures, that reflect the dark forces making everything mobile. The sulphurous vapours out of the rocky chasms, where the darkness sinks deeper and deeper, encircled by clouds coiling and rotating within itself in the evil's behest spew out flames. While pursuing itself, as the hero running away with the shattered spear , from which it itself has created the will-to-kill, like restless spirit bearing the storm-clouds, the flashing of lightning, and crushing of thunders it trysts upon itself. Like the rocks of grotesque, weird and fearful forms it create itself. From its mouth the tongues of fire leap from crevices; the molten contents plunge downwards, brilliant flames in fearless excitement and in exultant gesture rise upward and celebrate the joy of the nature's peril. In painful eruptions, it drinks its own annihilation from the poisonous bowl sinking downward. In a strange drama with frenzy, wrath and flash of anger it awakens its own bride from the slumbering hearth of the nature's heart and thus unites with the love before falling in a forgetfulness of his own nature and the beauty whom it loves.
In this war, contest, battle, search , and kindling one's own pyre where the beauty sacrifices itself in the burning flames shooting through the world , as the will-to-live it nourishes on itself, feasts on its own body, battles against, subjugates, and devours itself. Waging an incessant struggle and conflict with itself it separates from itself as its own double - on one side it acts like a devourer while on the other side as a befreer and creator of itself. In the contest, that constantly fluctuates between the victory and defeat, it produces incessant pain and perpetual suffering. Like a young hydra growing out of the old one and separating itself therefrom it fights with itself while it is still firmly attached to the old , with a hope to escape its own devourment. Thus it wages a perpetual battle between the two parts of the same. Like bull-dog ant , that, when cut into two, attacks the tail with its head, while the tail defends against the head by stinging it, every life is fettered to a contest between two parts of oneself as an urge of the will-to-live.
The will is its own hunter, the food and prey for itself. In a strange obscure way it also knows from beforehand its own necessity for survival and defence as well as the strategy to annihilate its prey. Like the bird building the nest for the bridling it has not yet seen, the beaver erecting a dam whose purpose is unknown to it, the bees collecting honey for the winter still unknown to them, the spider with deliberate cunning building snares for the future prey unknown to it , the instincts of actions derived from the will resemble concepts of purpose, although will-to-live is devoid of any purpose at all. In the never ending war , in constant struggle, where one specie strives to wrest from the other its right to exist, the will adapts itself to bring an agreement with its own restless self, that has no final goal, or satisfaction. This ceaseless never satisfied striving is carried through cycles of life and death, causing endless suffering, and unspeakable pain. Thus the misery of the living go on for ever with the triumph of wickedness, scornful mastery of chance, and irretrievable fall of the innocents as preys in the hands of the wicked ones.
Like a mighty storm , rushing along without any aim, it carries everything away with it in its bending and agitating sway. It brings only a constant struggle resulting in the only certainty that the life will loose at the end. It is like sailing in a sea full with overhanging rocks and whirlpools sucking all towards an abysmal depth. In struggling, in making effort to avoid the dangers, man only comes near the inevitable fate that ends in an irremediable shipwreck. This is the final goal of the wearisome voyage, that no one can avoid. Like destiny of Odysseus it drags him to the world of the dead, in order to throw him up again on the shore of the living to repeat a similar journey again. He thus always find himself as newly sprung into existence to undergo this merciless suffering. He moves through the island of the Dawn to the Island of the setting sun and back again and again. Death like the setting sun , engulfs the life and always remains glowing without as the constant source of light. It brings new days to the world with new life and is always rising and setting. We all live in this drama of life and death.
This rising and sinking world, that I describe, is covered under the veil of Maya, which always covers the eyes and the mind and causes the mortals to see a world that neither is or is not. Like in the Palace of Maya, inside the dome circumscribed by the motion of the moon and the sun, what appears as moving is actually at rest and what remains still may seem to be flowing in time. Amidst this illusion the will acts as an irresistible urge setting the wheel of life and becoming. It is blind, has no knowledge of itself before it mirrors itself in the world as object of itself. Through the images in the mirror it obtains the knowledge of itself , and the life and all objects existing and becoming in the temporal flow. Splitting into subject and object it becomes object of its own knowing as a spectator , who knows no time, and emerges as a being in the illusion of time. Through this knowledge , that arises out of nothing, man heightens himself as a subject, who is pure knowing and stands above the carving, and suffering of the sentient beings that he himself has created with his will. Thus looking at himself as a pure knowing being he steps into another world where everything that agitate the life no longer exist. Torments of passion, suffering and struggle to live cease, all differences of individuality disappear, no happiness or misery touch the mind anymore. Thus he sinks in a state where reality and dream become one and he views the world like a boatman sitting calmly on his small boat. He trusts the frail craft in a stormy sea rising and falling with the howling mountainous waves. The infinite past or infinite future appear strange to him. For him only the eternal present alone exists in the tranquillity unmoved by the boundless sufferings. Sitting in this boat, holding calm by using the faculty of reason, he surveys the universal life extending through past and future. Like a skilled navigator with highly precise chart, compass and quadrant he knows exactly his position in the violent sea and lives a life in the abstract sphere of calm deliberation. Through this reflective withdrawal in abstract contemplation he plays at the same time the part of the audience and the actor in the drama of life. He plays his role in a scene, then takes his place in the audience , and watches the play that rolls on until his turn to return to the play comes again. It goes on until he dies in the last scene. He knows this suffering is a must and therefore he views the life with perfect rational objectivity in which passions, errors, excellence, selfishness, love , hatred, fear, boldness, frivolity, stupidity, genius and so on reflect the nature of the same person, who always appears with the same purpose and fate in the stage with different masks. Only the incidents differ from piece to piece , but nothing else of the man, acting on the stage or observing it from the outside, change. He looks in a half-awake and half-dream state at the drama of life as a phantasmagoria where different chessmen of a game stand chess mate at the end and fall in the darkness of death only to join the souls in the carnival in the meadow , where the souls coming through the chasms of heaven or hell meet time and again.
Life is thus a merciless tragedy in a kingdom of chance and error where folly and wickedness , like the mime dwarfs, wield the scourge. It is a series of continual mishaps - great and small - that torment the race, to whom the hero, who has risen from the pyre, belongs. Abandoned to fate, the sufferer is always arrayed against the enemy without any mercy from heaven or hell. In this hopeless and irretrievable state the will reflects its invincible and indomitable nature - the hero himself - who acts out in the eternal drama in life's stage. Man thus creates of himself in his own image the demons, the giants and the gods. He offers sacrifice, prayer, vows and their fulfilment, pilgrimages, salutations to his own image by looking at life from an abstract sphere of pure intellectual reflectivity, that is neither real or unreal. Thus God becomes man and man becomes God in order to bring to the world the teaching the salvation from the misery that only come from the world and man himself. In surrendering this will , in dissolution into the nothingness by merging with oneself through self knowledge in the pure sphere of subjectivity, in attaining a state where there is no will and no world, there exists redemption from suffering for the sentient beings.
TEACHINGS OF UPANISHAD AND Bhagavad Gita