We live on this earth. Our mind-body complex is well adjusted to the natural conditions prevailing on this earth. However, we more comfortably adjust to our immediate surroundings where our fathers and grandfathers lived and learned all that they taught us. The climate and the food that is grown in our immediate surroundings suit us. When we grow we carry an identifiable imprint of our immediate surroundings in the form of our emotional, physical and intellectual being. Our earth may be an infinitesimal part of this universe, but it is too big for us. It can produce and take care of the infinite varieties of living and non-living things, connected to each other subtly and beautifully.
Our mind helps us in interpreting what we gather with the help of our senses from the external world and our intellect helps us to know how we are placed in our surroundings. Our intellect can, not only enable us to react and deal with our surroundings in a manner that benefits us, but also guide us to conduct in such a way that our surroundings do not lose their ability to help us survive happily and in good health.
For ages the man has worked hard to explore regions of this earth that could make his living convenient and comfortable; he lived there and nurtured them to suit him more. The natural surroundings became a provider and the mankind living in the particular region, a receiver. The man served his provider, his natural surroundings, to make sure that ‘the provider’ is never deprived of what it had always been capable of providing. There is no stagnation in this universe anywhere. One’s immediate surroundings change every moment and so does the man. The relationship of the man with his surroundings keeps on renewing itself perpetually. With the passing of every second much appears that needs to be explored afresh so that renewed efforts are made for strengthening the relationship between the provider and the receiver.
After making several blunders in a quick succession, the man has just begun to learn that we cannot indiscriminately and mindlessly extract all that we need for our survival, to live a bit more comfortably and luxuriously. But, we have yet to realize that we cannot desert our immediate surroundings that we have nurtured since time immemorial to coexist with nature, withdrawing all that we need for us and replenishing with our labour what the nature needed for sustaining its ability of renewing itself. If we desert our natural habitat, leaving it without our care and chose to live in remote surroundings, seeking artificial luxuries as greedy receivers oblivious to the fact that an ‘artificial provider’ gives only when he is paid for more than he actually delivers.
The concept of ‘value addition’ that the modern man has evolved has severe limitations of time, space and circumstances. The life as a whole sustains on the principle of ‘conservation of values’. One cannot receive more than what one gives. If the man draws more than what he gives, he does it by slowly pushing himself to his own elimination.
PROMOD KUMAR SHARMA
[The writer of this blog is also the author of “Mahatma A Scientist of the Intuitively Obvious” and “In Search of Our Wonderful Words”.]
MAHATMA 