Vipul Agarwal, Delhi, 19 August 2024
“Strength is life, weakness is death” is a very famous quote from the sayings of Swami Vivekananda. The older I am growing, the more I am connecting to this statement. Since the broad mindset of society is to maximize pleasure, most people work hard to get a job or set up a business whereby they can earn money and maximize pleasure. In the process, a calculation always goes on in the mind to maximize the pleasure. When we undertake any hard work, such as kids doing studies, businessmen putting in hard work to set up a business, or employees giving extra time for a project, we all keep calculating the expected outcome of the hard work and whether that outcome will give us more pleasure.
Thus, we keep calculating the opportunity cost in terms of the pleasures we forego and keep compensating the cost with the anticipated pleasure. In the process, we develop certain skills, build wealth, build business empires, get positions and powers, and so on. However, we suffer significant damage during the process. We lose our capacity to enjoy the present moment. We lose that inner connection that a baby enjoys without all this hard work and keeps exploring whatever comes his way. We keep always thinking of the future and that makes us anxious.
What seems to be our strength in the world outside becomes our biggest weakness in the world inside. I have had an opportunity to interact with many so-called powerful people such as businessmen, senior bureaucrats, politicians, and so on. They seem to be quite strong in the external world but internally they are in constant fear of living up to their image and fulfilling their dreams. Unless we connect to the consciousness that gives birth to life, we will always feel insecure and weak, and out of that weakness, we would like to cling to one or the other object to feel secure. Most of us cling to the self-images that we project in society, and some cling to material possessions. We feel that such clinging will give us safety and make us strong. We do not know that the ship we have anchored our boat to, is itself sinking. All the material possessions and self-images exist in thin air and can disappear overnight. What stays is that consciousness and all the rest are just a manifestation of the same.
I feel that falsity can never give us strength and, therefore, unless we realize the truth of this life, we will always remain weak.
Weakness creates many insecurities and behavioral eccentricities. People want a good subordinate but the moment that subordinate has his independent views, they feel insecure. Parents want quite intelligent kids but when the kids start making their own intelligent decisions that do not fit into the value system of parents, they become uncomfortable. We all are insecure to a large extent and weak since we are not strongly connected to the real self. That is the reason society and each one of us keep playing different psychological games and while playing these games, we just forget that all these games are the results of our inner insecurities and weakness, and the more we play these games, the weaker we will become.
Finally, we have to realize that the ship is sinking and mentally reconcile that the ship is not going to save us. In the process, there will be a valley of despair since whatever support was visible is gone now. However, like most people, if we keep anchoring ourselves to the sinking ship of material possessions and self-image, we will have a well-known fate. We are born intelligent to explore this world but have lost it somewhere on the way. We can regain that intelligence only after de-anchoring ourselves. That creates some anxiety in the beginning because we are used to the mental comfort of social validation and the psychological satisfaction of looking at the numbers in our bank accounts. We do not understand the hidden cost of that comfort. The moment we understand, we just throw that out and explore. Strength is not psychological safety by clinging to the sinking ship, rather it is coming to the mainland. It is connecting to the inner, that self puts an end to the seeking itself. That gives us strength and that strength is life.
