Life is a series of experiences happening on one single multi-dimensional plane called the experiencer. Whether it is a simple and primary activity of waking up in the morning, brushing, washing or sending shuttles to the moon—everything is an experience that brings along with it many lessons to learn from.
The one who experiences is none other than you. That is also the same in all of us. One can be healthy. Another can be sick. One can be rich. Another can be utterly pauper. One can be brilliant and another dumb. One can be so loving and receiving a lot of love too from the world. One can be loveless and going through life knowing not what love is. The experiencing entity is one and the same all through.
All our lives we make efforts only to achieve happiness. Happiness is dependent on whether we have happy experiences, sad experiences or miserable experiences. The human being indeed has no choice in the type of experiences he receives from the world.
The Bhagavad Gita in a very beautiful verse in the second chapter gives us the anatomy of an experience. Sri Krishna tells Arjuna when the five sense perceptions of hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling and touching come in contact with its five sense objects of sound, form, taste, smell and textures, experience is born. Each time an experience happens—whether it is hearing a song, seeing a person whom we like or don’t, eating something we don’t relish—the experience can be disturbing or pleasant according to what comes and whether we like it or not.
Purifying our experiences means to make it free of personal desires, kama, that leads to removal of other enemies of our personality, namely anger, greed, delusion, arrogance and jealousy. The more our understanding of events becomes free from these qualities, including fear and selfishness, any experience good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant falls gently on us just like a flower falls on a rock or flowing water without any pressure.
Krishna addresses Arjuna as the son of Kunti, his own aunt and famed for her great and glowing experiences of life borne with magnanimity and grace. When the individual contacts the world of five objects through the five senses, like a plug connecting with the electricity source through the plug point, the current of experience begins to flow into our personality. Making the right contact is important to have happy experiencing. Directly plugging in our fingers into the socket leaves us with the danger of electrocution. In the same way, if we are unaware of the situations we are getting involved in, disastrous experiences are bound to happen in the world.
Life is a discipline throughout the span and the simple discipline is to focus on the various experiences and work on making the contact better and happy.
(www.sharanyachaitanya.blogspot.in)