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| Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human#/media/File:Uomo_Vitruviano.jpg |
Let me tell you a story. A story about Human. Who is he? What he seeks? How is he different from an animal? Let us learn about the Human through this story.
An animal hunts for food, and a human hunts for meaning. A human keeps on searching for "Artha" or "meaning" of his life.
But the fact that he is living is what life means. The fact that he is alive, the fact that he lives and enjoys each and every moment in his life is the true meaning of life. But when the human starts looking at himself from other's eyes is when "Aham" or "Ego" is born. When he seeks popularity, fame, acceptance, adoration, is when he lets Ego take over. Ego, though a small word, but holds great significance. You might wonder what great amount of significance it might hold, but when it plays its role it only alleviates feelings like anger, hatred, arrogance. And when these feelings take hold it becomes really hard to survive. And consequently the meaning of life fades away, and the human now seems quite jumbled in his own thoughts. This makes the human constantly searching for the meaning of his life, which he already knows but is unaware of that.
Our ego plays an immense role in creating emotional drama in our lives. I know a man who thought of himself as the most supreme. He considered everyone else beneath him, and considered his race to be the only one qualified to live. Every other race either dies or serves him as slaves. You want to know who that man was, he was Adolf Hitler. What happened to him is history. All his life he kept searching for the meaning of his life, which when he was unable to find, he had no other option than to surrender himself at the hands of life.
Our ego shadows our wisdom. It makes our wisdom biased towards ourselves. When we behave badly towards someone, it then starts contradicting our own behaviour by telling us what we just did was bad. But not that way, rather saying the thing you just did was stupid, how can you do such a stupid thing? Suddenly the ego becomes the "righteous self", knowing everything. Rather than making you realize what is wrong and what is right, the voices in your head start making you feel guilty of what you have done. The person would definitely go and apologize for his mistreatment, but he won't understand the significance of that apology.
The human somehow has managed to label his ego in terms of its nature. If his personality turns ugly, he calls it ego. If one sees himself as "I am ugly", one would not want to be that way anymore. But that should not be the way. Whatever is beautiful or ugly it is the in the same person as you are. If you create a difference between your personalities, then you would always be in control of the negative emotions. No transformation in your character will be possible. If the person starts believing that whatever nonsense he is, whether the beautiful or the ugly in him are both him, then what is ugly will start changing.
There is a very famous personality who once said, "Today in the world people only have ego sense, they have no life sense. When you are like this, you only see yourself as life, no one else is life. But if you are life sensitive, everything is life in your experience, so you naturally behave very sensibly with every other life around you. The ego will no longer be a problem if you become life sensitive." Therefore in order to live in peace with yourself and in harmony with life and in order to understand the meaning of life, you will have to understand yourself and you will have to transform and become a true human.
