A Little Lantern of Truth

 

Ordinary beings possess extraordinary potential to win against odds, to jump over hurdles, to smile over tears, and, most importantly, to be happy when there aren’t enough reasons to be. They are the faceless constituents of a massive commonality. They are surrounded by a swiping generality. They are colored in the monochromes of mundane reality. Still they are special. We have to acknowledge and celebrate the extraordinary in the ordinary people. I see heroes and heroines in the small protagonists on the stage of life. They fight, and oftentimes fail, but write a little passage in the infinite book of life: an ordinary life that was lived substantially. On the small stage of life, they live very intensely. Somehow, the world would not be the world that is still beautiful without their contribution. They heave humanity onwards in its march to some better destination.

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Of all types of death, including by disease, accidents and ageing, the death born of someone's hate is the worst. Hate-born death slaughters the core principle of being human. It strangulates the basic constituent of our collective consciousness to survive individually as a part of bigger collectivity at the social level, a literally must-have for our identity as much as oxygen is must for our biological survival. Hate has potent carriers. It breeds death with the weapons of religion, caste, creed, race and ethnicity. From Nazi Holocausts and communist purging to modern day ISIS slayings, hate wreaks the worst form of death. Death born of hate is the very negation of the meaning of life.

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The death of a moth! Don’t feel guilty if you find it inconsequential like the shifting of a speck of dust. Does nature evaluate things on the scale of huge and small, like the death of a moth and the collapsing of a mammoth star? Maybe, maybe not! I definitely find it a momentous occasion when the moth takes its last sigh! Kindly don’t laugh at me and condemn me as someone prone to making mountains out of molehills. Even physics is now going into super-small entities in the tiniest wombs of sub-atomic particles to unravel the ultimate mystery. Coming back to the moth, its corpse shakes involuntarily today like it fluttered consciously yesterday. The only difference is that yesterday its littlest ounce of consciousness was still inside this tiny milligram of a body. Today but that ounce of consciousness has spread to become part of everything. The matter now moves to the force of everything around: Transition from life to matter. What about the consciousness that moved it? Here I stand and there flutters the moth corpse to free winds. Yesterday, exactly at this time, I saw it crawling on the floor. Little did I realize that it was on its death bed! Now it becomes part of everything to take its consciousness at this frequency on the further march of evolution of consciousness, just like species have evolved at the level of biology, at the level of matter. Matter and consciousness both evolve. There are parallels. We just need to be aware of it and it becomes a very much realizable process.