THE ETHICAL UNIVERSE: ENTERING INTO A HAPPY LIVING RELATIONSHIP WITH LIFE AND SOCIETY AT LARGE

THE ETHICAL UNIVERSE: ENTERING INTO A HAPPY LIVING RELATIONSHIP WITH LIFE AND SOCIETY AT LARGE

-Dr. Jernail Singh Anand

How many of us are in a happy living relationship with life? Has our education helped us in any way to attain happiness? Was happiness on our agenda? Is happiness anywhere in the syllabus of any University? An ordinary young man, when he attains consciousness, runs after possessions. There is no one to check his passions, and tell him Happiness is also a worthy acquisition. That is why, we are living in disharmony, and very very few people have a happy living relationship with life. When you are disoriented in your own life, forget about having a happy relationship with society or even the Universe at large. It is a gone case in the cosmic reckoning.

Education means telling a man how to live in this world, what arts are required to lead a meaningful life. How life has been lived in the past, and how it should be lived in the present, so that there is a happy future waiting for mankind. Do our educated men lead happy lives? Happiness is not anywhere to be found in the agenda of any educational institution. And so far as man is concerned, he is very passionate about acquisitions, but happiness is never in the cart.

Let us prioritize human life. The first thing that comes to us is Life. It is followed by hunger and the need for food. Once the need for food is met, the stage is set for physical activity, which is needed to stay alive. After this, starts the realm of the spiritual. Transcending our boundaries and the limited existence, and involving ourselves in the life of things, proving beneficial to flora and fauna, and the humona of this earth.So, the most important thing for us is Life, which is the first come also. And education must teach us about life in the first instance. I am not talking of how it came into existence, nor I shall invoke Darwin here. Nor the Bing Bang. My occupation here is with our existence. Starting with:

LIFE ARTS [Birth]

ARTS OF LIVING [Job]

ARTS OF BEING [Marriage & Physical Existence]

ARTS OF BECOMING [Spiritual Spaces]

THE 2ND STAGE AND 3RD STAGE:

Our education, which has in most cases become an Art for seeking jobs, has not much to say anything about the first and the fourth stages of a man’s life. Education focuses on the second stage only. Is it that education has nothing to do with the first and the last stages of life? Is eating and drinking all about life?

We have a cursory and highly artificial intelligence about other aspects, but no direct interest in anything, because the RUNNING PASSION [which is also the RUINING PASSION too] of a human being is TO KEEP ALIVE, TO KEEP AFLOAT. It seems all other arts are subservient to this one ruling passion. With this is no doubt connected the idea of the survival of the fittest. Can a living being keep living unfed? In this way, the focus of the educational world on creating jobs is not entirely misplaced, because men in general DO NOT THINK MUCH. They think only of their bodies, and their families. For an ordinary man, a day is meant to be passed working in a factory or in an office, coming home in the evening, [these days, homes are struggling for breath], and then facing his wife, pleasing his kids, and rushing into his sexy [or unsexy] bed. Day in and day out, this is the routine. Nothing changes. And, one day, he is packed off.

Education teaches us only to know a few things, and then, enter a job, create wealth, and live on it. And let no one else live peacefully. This covers the second and the third stages of human life.

HOW TO LIVE? THE SPIRITUAL SPACE.

Man got life, which he thought has come to him in dowry, and never had time, nor any education, to reflect on why he came to life, how he came to life, and what is life? No doubt these are philosophical questions not in the reach of an ordinary man. But education must make him capable of understanding what he has got free of any cost, and unasked for. Education remains silent on essential issues. But, has education anything to tell us about the 4TH stage of life?

Just consider how a well-fed man, with great resources at his command, lives? He is just after creating wealth, which he does not need. And it causes misery to so many and finally it causes misery to him also. He extends the third stage of life into the fourth stage also, without realizing that it is the time for reflection. People die working and working for families, never realizing the fact that it was just a part of their life. The real life had something to do with what he had no idea of.

Man must be educated to think why he is alive? Is it only to make money, and then, earn his livelihood? Or just to create wealth and translate it into a few possessions?

In the 4th stage of life, The Spiritual Stage, man must have a mature vision of life and death, and his role in making life better. He must know where to stop, and when to start giving back to life, what he has got from it. It is the stage of getting even with life and our society from where we have sprung. The spiritual forces require of us to pay back to the people what we have got from them. This can reduce misery. This can give us joy and happiness. This can lead people into a happy living relationship with life.

Author:

Dr. Jernail Singh Anand is Founder Chairperson of The Ethical Universe, a think-tank of Poets, Philosophers, Thinkers, Scientists and Social Scientists. He is Professor Emeritus with the European Institute of the Roma Studies, Belgrade and Honorary Member of the Serbian Writers Association. Dr. Anand has authored 150 books which include 9 epics which are considered world classics. He has innovated the theory of Bio-text in critical theory. The Univ. of Neyshabur, Iran has conducted a Research Project on his Poetry comparing it with Iranian Poets, under Dr. Roghayeh Farsi. His works have been translated into 20 world languages.