The New Year comes at a time when the days are blanketed in smog and the nights in fog, at least it is so in Delhi, where I live. Add to that the bleak cynicism that seems to characterise so much of our national discourse, the glaring social inequalities and incremental environmental disasters, and cheering a New Year seems that much more difficult. What will it bring, if not more climate change horrors, corruption scams, further examples of human beings’ savagery to one another, even as the poor struggle to eat and the rich struggle not to?
Remembering the Buddha’s first noble truth, at a time like this, helps provide perspective. There is suffering. The human condition is characterised by suffering of one kind or another. There is misery, illness, pain, loss, death. What feels like happiness, too, can lead to suffering. And yet, it is also useful to remember that the Buddha did not just stop at this first truth. He followed it up with a second, third and fourth. There is suffering, but that is not the end of the story. It has a specific cause, knowing which one can look for its antidote, which is laid out with beautiful simplicity in the fourth noble truth — that of the path out of suffering.
The actual tragedy might not be that there is suffering, but that we spend a majority of our lives stuck in it and not knowing any better. The possibility of transcendence is as real as the fact of suffering. When individual suffering triggers a spiritual search, it is not just about seeking a medicine for emotional pain.
It is an acknowledgement of the hope that could well be part of human beings’ evolutionary survival kit. On the darkest night, we cannot but hope for an imminent dawn, smoggy though it might be. In evolutionary terms, hope could perhaps be described as a determination to survive, to live to see another day, and thereby ensure survival of the species. Could we then say that among homo sapiens, the natural predilection towards hope found its most refined expression in the spiritual search?
The hope that the worst in the human condition could be transcended, that suffering of all kinds could be dealt with effectively and cease to have any tangible effect, and that a state of perfect joyfulness could be achieved. This could well be the greatest hope, and the greatest meaning, that individual human life could possibly be endowed with. With that hope, let us welcome the New Year like the supplicant in Rabindranath Tagore’s Brink of Eternity: I have come to the brink of eternity from which nothing can vanish — no hope, no happiness, no vision of a face seen through tears.
Oh, dip my emptied life into that ocean, plunge it into the deepest fullness. Let me for once feel that lost sweet touch in the allness of the universe.
Swati Chopra writes on spirituality and mindfulness. Blog: swatichopra.com
