Miracles can happen when you let go
Everything is not as it seems to be. We have no answers. ‘Will she live or will she die? We give her three years.’ Doctors were skeptical I will make it through. I was skeptical about yoga when I enrolled to study it over three decades ago. Does yoga work? But with the failure of the popular belief—“You become famous, earn doodles of money, you’ve made it!”—I thought of a gateway to peace and prosperity. Success did not do it for me, in fact, it did quite the opposite.
When you are unhappy especially when you seem to have achieved what most desire, it is hard to explain to them. Failing all else I was open to giving yoga—not so popular in the 90s—a chance. I was doubtful that it would work; I have been a skeptic since birth. A quality that has been applauded by our Indian rishis, and understood by the Greeks, the Chaladians, even Eastern philosophies.
But words like “cynical” and “skeptical” have mutated over the years. To be skeptical today means to be doubtful. It’s to question, challenge, and be somewhat disbelieving of an idea or person. Yet in the ancient world, skepticism was more extreme. Mass opinions can be a scam. Cynicism, stoicism and epicureanism in Greek philosophy have all too often been misrepresented.
According to Pyrrhonism, we waste so much time and effort seeking and demanding answers or resolution where there’s only doubt and ambiguity, that we’re destined to be unhappy. Pyrrho, who is considered to be the first skeptic Greek philosopher, began with the observation that there are two sides to everything and that we are all invariably bound to our own opinions. Thus, we will always see the world differently.
It’s highly likely that Pyrrho witnessed first hand, or at least had heard of, the Eastern religions that repeatedly made the claim that the world is illusory, knowledge is limited, and human intellect is an infantile, narrow thing. For Pyrrho there’s no possible way to determine what’s “actual”. It’s like the Indian concept of maya. In Samkhya philosophy and Upanishadic view maya is illusory: “that which appears when there is no object like silver in a shell and which does not appear in the atman”. It is described as the power that creates, maintains, and destroys the universe.
And yet, we all stubbornly, angrily, and even violently, insist that others are wrong and that we are right. The key to living a fulfilled, happy, and flourishing life (which is called eudaimonia in Greek and was the end goal, too, of cynicism, epicureanism, and stoicism) is simply to stop the pointless pursuit of resolution. Instead, we ought to adopt a position called epoché, which means “suspended judgment”. Buddha called this “Let go”; to accept it as it is. This has been a hallmark of my miracle healing.
Anu Aggarwal
Actor, speaker, yogi and author
Instagram: @anusualanu