Conscious living: Fortunately there are some who do the work for all the others

Academic education teaches us little about how to develop our conscious minds. We don’t learn in schools and colleges how to make decisions of our lives, how to cultivate a burning desire for what we want, how to know if our beliefs are inaccurate and need to be changed, how to concentrate, etc.

I found this interesting description of unconscious beings in the Questions an Answers 1955 Vol. VII of the Mother, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, India.

“….they come into life, they don’t know why; they know that they will live a certain number of years, they don’t know why; they think that they will pass away because everybody passes away, and they again don’t know why; and then most of the time they are bored because they have nothing in themselves, they are empty beings and there is nothing more boring than emptiness; and so they try to fill this by distraction, they become absolutely useless, and when they reach the end they have wasted their whole existence, all their possibilities – and everything is lost. This you will see: take a thousand men, out of them at least nine hundred and ninety are in this condition. It happens that they are born in certain circumstances or certain others, and they try to pass their time as well as they can, to be bored as little as possible, to have as good a time as possible; and everything is dull, lifeless, useless, stupid, and absolutely without any result. This is the majority of human beings, and they don’t even think… they don’t even ask themselves, “But indeed why am I here? Why is there an earth? Why are there men? Why do I live?” No, all these things are absolutely uninteresting. The only interesting thing is to try to eat well, to have good fun, be nicely distracted, well married, have children, earn money and have all the advantages one can get from the point of view of desires, and above all, above all not think, not reflect, not ask any questions, and avoid all trouble. Yes, and then get out of it like that, without too many catastrophes. This is the general condition; this is what men call being reasonable. And in this way the world can turn around indefinitely for eternity, it will never progress. And this is why all these are like ants; they come, crawl, die, go away, come back, crawl again, die again, and so on. And it can last for eternities like this. Fortunately there are some who do the work for all the others, but it’s only these who will make everything change one day.”

First published in Copperstrings Journals