An Stream of Experiences called Life

“How are you?” is often the first question, we ask while starting a conversation with our friends and even strangers. We often hear replies like “I am fine,” “Great”. Are we really fine when we are saying “I am fine”? Let us ask this question to ourselves; “Are we fine”? “Are we happy?”

We know that we are not always fine. We are feeling good, bad, bored, angry, hopeful, hopeless, frustrated, joyful, loved, hatred at different point of time. Rarely is a person in the same mood or in the same state for very long time. Even when we are hearing a song, our pleasure is wavering depending continuously. We may just stop listening when the song becomes too boring or irritating.

You go to a beautiful hill station and get enchanted by the beauty of the hills, purity of the air and peace of the valley. How nice it feels to be out from the madness of the city and relax in this beautiful divine place? Yet if you stay a little longer, just for few more days, all the charm starts vanishing like molten wax and soon the same boring and mad city life starts calling you. You are now in hurry to go back to your place once again.

Wise men have said that life is a “stream of experiences” (Hindi-anubhav -dhara). We are experiencing a new life every moment and no two moments are same. We are experiencing this world though individuals, society and media. Every moment is a new experience. Even when you are looking at the sunrise from a beautiful hill, it is not same as the position of sun is changing and the colour of the sky is getting transformed. Soon the cool lights of the sun would become brighter and you would find it difficult to stand there and stare at the sun. You are watching television and the screen is changing with new people, new faces and new dialogues every moment.

We are experiencing a new world every moment and this stream of experience is what is called life.

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Imagine yourself as a stream of a river flowing at different speeds towards the sea where you are going to merge with it and lose your identity. On the way, every moment, the experience is different, the scene is different and the landscape is different. Sometime you are moving fast, sometime slow, and sometime stagnating before a large dam - waiting for your turn to start moving again. Sometime, you are seeing beautiful sky, sometime clouds cover the sky and sometime you witness a bright sun. Sometime you are still and sometime you are moving peacefully enjoying the scenery on the way. Sometime you are angry and agitated as torrent.

Joy and Pain

We are always in touch with life and our feelings depend on our experiences with life. If the experience is pleasant, we feel happy and if the experience is painful, we are unhappy. Sometime, we have the feeling of indifference when there is neither happiness nor pain.  A happy life is one where we have more moments of happiness than pain or indifference.

Some people say that happiness is state of mind suggesting that we create our own happiness and misery without any concern with outside world. This statement is only partly true. Is it possible to be happy when your beloved in unhappy or your children are sick or you are yourself treated ill by your boss or family?  We can’t be indifferent to our surrounding as we are part of the world having hardly any choice of being alone.

You can avoid all these pains by discarding the worldly life and becoming a monk. Yet you can’t avoid world as you need people to provide you food, shelter, water and other physical necessities of life. You have to deal with people whether you like them or not. And when you are dealing with people, you have to have the stream of experiences i.e. your life.

Do we have any control over the experiences we have in our life?

The Power of Imagination

We often have the experience of the world in our imagination much before we actually experience them in reality. Before, we meet any person or situation; we already visualize them in our imagination. We rehearse everything if it is an important event or we are going to meet an important person. We create a living image of the person or situation beforehand. So when we meet the person, our joy or pain would depend upon the accuracy of our image as compared with the reality.  If the image is accurate, we enjoy the meeting and the experience is bliss. However, if our image is inaccurate then the experience could be positive or full of joy if the experience turned out to be better than expected or that of pain when the experience happened to be worse than what we expected.

It, therefore, seems to be good idea to be pessimistic, prepare for the worst by having a negative image of the person which may lead to joy as in most cases our interaction would be better than what we expect. While it may true at the time of final meeting but we have suffered much more pain in the process of imagining. We suffer all the way during the rehearsal from the pain that comes through our wrong imagination. Hence, if we are in the habit of living with a negative image of people or world, we are suffering all the time instead of few moments of actual experience.

So many experts advise people to “think positive” i.e. to be optimistic, think for the best and enjoy the journey. People with great expectation who are filled with the positive thoughts only, are shattered when they face failure. If there is only one vacancy for a top job and there are thousands of people queuing up for the post with positive hopes, there is no doubt that most are going to be disappointed when the results are announced. Here, the pain is much more as you quickly lose esteem and also feel let down by the world. The result is bitterness and pain that lingers for long time giving rise to extreme pessimism.

Hence, only when your imagination is close to the reality, you have least chances to feeling pain in the process or at the end. You learn from your success and failure and change your perception about yourself and the world. Gradually, you develop even more accurate model of the self and the world. You are neither optimist nor pessimist but a realist whose thoughts accurately mirrors the reality. The result is neither great joy nor much suffering but a feeling of bliss which comes from contentment and wisdom. You are able to take temporary success or failure with equal ease as you learn from each experience and learning from life is the hallmark and the greatest joy for the man of wisdom.