What if I told you that life wasn’t meant to work?
By that, I mean that, contrary to what your ego might assume, the universe didn’t go to the immense bother of existing simply to fulfil your desires and conform to your personal preferences and whims.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow. Such a premise probably wouldn’t sell many books, which is why the author of “The Secret” is most likely a millionaire and most people haven’t even heard of Vedanta.
But it bears repeating. Nothing in the world is capable of bringing you true and lasting happiness and fulfilment. Nothing.
It took me a number of years to appreciate the futility of trying to extract lasting, unchanging happiness from experiences, objects, relationships, or anything external to myself.
The reason for this is that everything in phenomenal existence is in a state of constant flux. The object, event, or person that fills you with joy today is just as likely to bring you misery tomorrow. That’s why emotional dependence on ever-changing external factors, which are always outside your direct control, is a recipe for a life of perpetual frustration and suffering.
As we shall see, the root of human suffering is ignorance of our own nature.
By taking appearance to be reality, you identify with your body and mind and thus assume their limitations.
Feeling a sense of lack and limitation in yourself, your mind, which is extroverted by nature, projects happiness onto the world of objects.
By a process of superimposition, you assume that certain objects are capable of delivering more happiness than they actually can.
You think that if you can just get what you want — the perfect partner, the perfect job, the perfect body, or home, or car — you’ll finally extinguish the deep sense of lack and inadequacy driving your every action and goal.
The expectation that life should conform to your likes and dislikes always results in suffering. This is because, unfortunately, life doesn’t give a damn about your likes and dislikes. They don’t factor into the equation at all. The dance of creation is a completely impersonal unfolding. It happens regardless of your desires and aversions. While you have the ability to manipulate certain aspects of your life, the phenomenal reality is governed by its own set of laws and an unfathomable chain of interrelated causes and effects over which you have no control.
Vedanta teaches that the objective world, which we call maya, is NOT set up to fulfil you. In fact, it’s set up to frustrate and break you until you wake up to your own true nature.
It invites you to take a deep look at the fundamental misassumption that has compelled you to seek happiness in external factors: the sense of being a limited, lacking, insufficient entity bound by time, form, and subject to all kinds of suffering and limitation.
Life isn’t about what you, as a person, want. The field of existence is far bigger than the human ego and has no qualms about grinding that little ego to bits. But suffering drives you to seek an end to suffering; to seek liberation from your sense of limitation and pain.
The solution is not to try to control maya and get it to match it up to your likes and dislikes–which are always changing anyway! That’s a fool’s game and it never works for very long. How many times do you have to chase love and success only for it backfire and end in tears before you realise that if it was going to work out, it would have done so long before now?
You can’t beat the system — life is what it is and it does what it is. But you can transcend the system, and this is done not with action, or by chasing certain experiences that you think will make you whole. It’s done with knowledge.
Recall that the root of this problem was ignorance of your own nature; taking yourself to be a finite form. Vedanta proves that, in actuality, you are far more than a conglomeration of matter or thought. The only solution to a problem of ignorance is knowledge, and the ultimate knowledge — Self-knowledge — will change your outlook on everything. Outwardly little might change, but inwardly you experience a revolutionary shift in your perspective.
When you know who you truly are, when you inquire into the depths of your being and see that the wholeness and happiness you long-sought in external objects and passing pleasures was actually there, within you, all along, the rules of the game change.
Only then — free of the desperate need to seek, acquire, to have, be, and become — can life finally be enjoyed, no longer blighted by the existential suffering we call samsara.
This is the first in a series of articles exploring the psychology of Vedanta, examining the nature of samsara, psychological suffering, what motivates human pursuits, and how inquiry into our very nature can lead to liberation; what we call moksha, or enlightenment.
Other articles in this series
Limitation, The Quest for Liberation and the Four Human Pursuits
Samsara and How to Escape the Wheel of Suffering
Who Are You? How to Practice Vedantic Self-Inquiry
