Every week in my life has days when I'm high, energetic, creative and happy. There are days when I'm sad, feeling low, irritable and angry. Cycles of birth and death don't come once in a lifetime or once every rebirth, they happen around us, always.
Saints and philosophers have spoken enough about the cycles and the means of beating them. So what really are these cycles? Here I ponder...
Natural law has a way of perfoming a balancing act. It gives us equal amounts of pain and ecstacy, equal quantities of hardships and joy. I've come to understand that when there is a ascension in one direction, the other side tends to go down.
In all our sorrows, we have a lesson to learn. We come in tune with the inner self. We understand one more aspect of our being. So what does happiness have in store for us? Whenever we are happy, we forget to think of ourselves. We become extraverts. We rarely think of the inner being when thing are going the right way. Natural law suggests that happiness too has learnings out of it. The learning I got is that any happiness has a equal and opposite sorrow, if not now, going forward, or has happened sometime back. Now how forward or back is a tough one to answer. It could be minutes or years or rebirths. The deeper we imagine, the tougher it gets. But one could find it for oneself.
So next time you are filled with unhappiness, understand that a karma is being served or a happiness is on the charts. Don't take my word for it. Observe your own lives and then realise how often the cycles repeat. Is there a way to beat the cycle. Yes they say and I agree with them.
Meditation
Meditation takes us to a median. It makes us moderate and liberates us from the cycles of birth and death... sorrow and happiness. Liberation is not for the outer world, it's for the seer of the world. The way we see things change and we are able to liberate ourselves from the position of a victim or a doer to the level of a witness.
As a witness, it's like watching a soap opera. Laugh when there is a lighter scene and sob when you can't take it. As a witness, it does not happen to you, it happens to a person you are watching. Just sit back and relax. That is the state meditation can take us to. It can't rid us off sorrow, it can't give us happiness. But it can liberate us from the clutches of these cycles. It can put us in the seat of a referee.
Meditation is not the only way out of the never ending roller-coaster called cycles of birth and death. There are other ways too. For the grounded and introverted, meditation works best. For others (depending on their temperament) they could try any of these:
- Bakthi
- Kriya (Yoga)
- Slokas (Veda)
- Karma Yoga
