Find Your Corner

There is no doubt that this universe is a beautiful place to live in; but more beautiful is the universe that lives within us. Sometimes we forget the universe within us & become more outer-centric. We start looking for the reason of every problem outside us instead of looking within. And after a continuous ignorance of many years the universe within us starts decaying slowly. The day it dies, we experience our first near-death experience.

We also pollute the universe within like we do with the universe outside. Outside universe is polluted by hatred, power-struggle, war-cries & many such ideas. The universe within is polluted by selfishness, greed, ego and connected ideas. When we think in terms of cleaning the universe outside and making it a better place to live in, we get scared by the enormity of the task. We argue that we cannot mend the whole world as it is a task beyond our control. We leave it as it is & continue with our struggle for survival. But the universe doesn't stay that way; the decay continues & we reach to a situation that we are facing now. 

This happens because we forget an important fact about ourselves or are never made aware of it. This fact is expressed succinctly in following quote-

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

If we understand the fact that we are spiritual beings, these ideas that pollute our mind won't enter us. These will be nipped before they take shape. But, because we accept that we are limited, small & transient, we try to achieve maximum in this 'minimum' life. We struggle to get everything & in doing so we compromise with our ethics, character, soul & everything that forms the universe within us. The light that forms our being starts dimming & once the light within us dies down we cease to become human beings- we become human doings. Then on, we exist not to be, but to do. This transition from spiritual being to human being to human doing to nothing is smooth & we don't even realize it. 

It might be an enormous task to clean the universe outside & might seem beyond our control, but cleaning the universe within us is in our control. And once we do it, we will certainly make the universe outside a better place to live in. Your emphasis should not be to clean the whole universe but to clean only one corner of the universe- and that corner is 'you'.