We Humans are Also Forces of Nature (Non-doership)
A little while ago a friend was telling me that she was emotionally distraught to recently have seen someone showing lot of cruelty towards a dog, almost inflicting pain on it intentionally.
I told her that while I understood her all too valid feelings and that she was free to take whatever action she saw fit in such situations, I asked her to see it from a different angle also.
That is, all of us humans are also forces of nature.
In some place, Nature might manifest as a pleasant and gentle breeze and in some other place a destructive hurricane.
In some place, there could be an earthquake where why only animals but also we humans are snuffed out.
On that count, we do not say Nature is being “cruel” or “sadistic” towards us.
Nature is nature, just an “Act of God” as the lawyers and judges are fond of saying.
But, when it comes to humans, we think each one of us is “responsible” for our actions, either those of cruelty or those of goodness, because we think we are “choosing” to be the way we are. Hence, while we accept the hurricanes and earthquakes, we find it difficult to accept such “acts of destruction” on the part of us humans because we think we are acting “freely” and so we can do otherwise. While a hurricane cannot change its course midway, we humans can change.
But, not only will the hurricane change its path if it meets some other weather pattern or some man-made obstacles, similarly we humans will also “change” our path if we meet some other viewpoint or way of looking at life, etc.
But such changes are also not of our “doing” but the way the world, both the non-human and human, is running, with “no doer” other than Nature or God, because the laws determing what causes or leads to such changes and indeed what we “encounter” on our paths in life are happening without any of our say.
Now, you may ask, what is the use in such an understanding because after all we have to “stop” or “put an end” to all the evil in us humans.
To do so, no one is stopping us, but the most effective way to do so is to counteract such evils, not only in the others but also in ourselves, is to approach it like we would counteract something in nature that we try to avoid, without any emotional entanglement, like a stithaprajna.
In such an emotional frame of mind, both the action and its outcome are likley to be better, without any guarantee of ending once and for all all the evils that there be out there or within ourselves.
Otherwise, we, too, in our emotional haste to make this world a better place without its Hitlers and Mussolinis (or capitalists?) will take on upon ourselves the sense of doership, and thereby our actions themselves will be “infected” and “inflected” by our own half-knowledge, and we could well end up “complicating” the situation.
Makes sense?
Does not?
Who said I was wise.
Know Thyself 