‘Nirvana’ or supreme knowledge as we call it is more often than not a synonym of acquiescing that life requires nothing but the most basic of necessities. They say that subordination to god and the acceptance of life sans desire is the path to nirvana, the essence of life. We as children have been told never to be ‘over-ambitious’, never to strive for things beyond our reach, never to build castles in the sky. But isn’t the desire for what seemed impossible once the sole reason for our evolution into humans?
How then can spirituality be clubbed with disinterest for worldly pleasures? If we hadn’t aimed for or coveted more we would never have been what we are today. We wouldn’t have stopped walking on all four of our legs if we hadn’t stretched or jumped for things beyond our reach. We wouldn’t have moved out of the oceans if we hadn’t been inquisitive enough to see what lay beyond the waters. We wouldn’t even have been anything other than unicellular organisms. Why then should we settle for the basics?
Isn’t our quest for more in itself the essence of life, the will of nature?
Birds fly because they wished for it, they worked for it. As reptiles they looked at the skies and never once did they think that it was beyond their reach, they jumped higher and higher every generation. And one day they were no longer lizards, they were birds. They flew.
That to me is Nirvana.
