Yesterday I saw an image of a young man hugging the coffin of his dead brother.
Unseeing eyes, drawn face and unfathomable pain in every fibre of his being.
The very same emotions which hordes of others felt on seeing the lifeless body of a 3 year old Syrian child on the beach or that of some other dead body or a living relative with pained, dead eyes or more recently, with all the brutality being done in Ukraine.
But…
Does the insurmountable pain of one or the abject misery of someone else cause even a second’s delay in the whole working of the universe?
Do angst and tears hold the same intensity for everyone who witnesses them?
Does pain render anyone speechless or rivet them towards any life-altering reforms??
Lord Buddha saw sufferings and death and he changed….not physically, but internally there was a revolution, a reform. He wasn’t the same Prince Siddharth again.
But that level of consciousness, that level of empathy and that level of Love is rare. When the pain and misery of each living being becomes one’s own, when every scream makes a person shudder and weep.
Most of the times, we see, we feel bad and we move on, to other more important things in life….
A family, a job, an appointment, a vacation, a movie or just towards the sanctity of our homes, where we feel safe and protected from all worldly issues.
Isn’t there a reason that all the cemetaries and crematoriums are situated outside the densely populated areas??
Isn’t it to not make people think about death every day?
But isn’t the opposite advisable?
Most misery in life is because of our attachments and the belief in a forever. A cemetary is the very example that nothing is forever.
Everything runs it’s course,
Everything ends,
Everything diminishes….
The more profound this feeling, the less misery there would be in the heart. Then maybe, like Lord Buddha, the soul would search for something that will never end…