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by Jayaram V
It is an indisputable fact that man can never be free from sorrow
. There can never be life on earth without sorrow hidden deep inside
its veins, infused in its core, inseparable from the consciousness.
Just as it is not possible for water to remain free from motion,
unless it is frozen, it is not possible for life to be free from
suffering unless it is also frozen into death or unconsciousness.
Sorrow is a state of mind born out of despair, loss of self-confidence,
sense of failure and sense of loss. It is a condition in which we
lose hope, fill our heart with vague yearnings and suffer from fear
and loss of confidence.
It is basically an affliction of the ego which is accustomed
to desire oriented actions, sense of possessiveness and its separate
identity. It afflicts us to the extent we are rooted in egoistic
actions and sensory knowledge.
Sorrow has its own character. There is some thing very dramatic
and poetic about it. It has the tendency to exaggerate things, falsify
and distort truth, color every thing in its vision with its own
color of depression and slow down the process of the mind and the
body.
It looks for excuses, false evidences and illusory reasons to
justify its existence. In acute cases it perverts the mind and forces
the individual to resort to extreme acts of insanity and cruelty.
Sorrow does not mean mere crying and shedding tears. It has many
shapes, tones and hues, grades and colours. Agony, despair, anguish,
physical pain, sense of separation, sense of loss, helplessness,
depression, these are some of its various forms.
Also sense of failure, self-pity, dependence, loss of confidence,
nervous breakdown, hysteria, self-deception. apathy, indifference,
frustration are but its other manifestations with which it plays
with our minds and drenches us with its vibrations.
Sorrow can also arise in many situations. Facing uncertainty,
accepting what is not acceptable, doing things against ones wishes,
feeling helplessness, facing competition, unable to chose the correct
path, unable to see the problem, facing the consequences can cause
deep suffering in our minds and make us feel depressed.
Sorrow and its variations are so ubiquitous and common place
in our day to day existence that as we grow and become older in
age and experience, we learn to accept them philosophically with
a sense of inevitability and become immune to the sense of conscious
suffering.
Then sorrow and suffering become the undercurrents of our lives.
We even forget that they exist at all in our lives. Like the minor
ailment that do not threaten our existence but keep us busy with
the acts of self-pity and self-preservation, they also keep us busy
with our acts of ego defense mechanisms.
Suggested Further Reading
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