Human life appears to be a hotbed of problems. Problems do not seem to go away till human breath is on. A Western philosopher had famously responded by pointing at the burial beds in the graveyard when someone asked him who in the world were without problems.
Why do problems come and recur? Human life is evolutionary. And human beings are innately imperfect—incomplete in knowledge and understanding. This is a universal truth that all acknowledge and accept.
The imperfect humans unwittingly commit violations of the immanent laws set in by their creator and invite his retributive action. The retributive action helps in the spiritual evolution of humans. But problems and their retributive effects are avoidable.
Humans need guidance and direction. That guidance and direction cannot come from other humans or sets of humans because all humans are constrained by the above limitations of knowledge and understanding. That guidance can come only from a higher power—the dynamic, divine creator who is omniscient.
The human body, mind, intellect and ego self were created by the divine creator Ishwar and he alone knows everything about these entities. Humans can have some knowledge and understanding of these entities but they still lack much of it. Furthermore, they have very limited knowledge about other humans and other living beings and material nature.
That is why they always need the knowledge strands provided by Ishwar to live well and progress in life. The creator dwells within you and outside all over. He is omnipresent, pervading throughout the universe and beyond it.
Dwelling inside, he also gives signals of guidance to humans from time to time. But humans need to be receptive to such signals. And they can be receptive only when they are pure in their hearts—meaning that their minds and ego self are free of the pollutants caused by the imbalance of the primaeval material attributes of satogun, rajogun and tamogun.
In simpler words, the human being can grasp the internal divine signals of guidance only when his heart is free from passion, pride, anger, lust and greed. But the human being needs more from his creator for his complete guidance and course correction. Humans, as his children and subjects, were given strands of eternal divine knowledge in the form of the Vedas at the onset of creation.
This is because the creator is responsible for his creation and has to guide his human subjects on the path to deliverance. Moreover, these subjects are inherently seekers of deliverance from all sorrow. Human problems are the fallout of the violation of the laws of healthy and happy living enunciated in the divine scriptural texts of true knowledge—the Vedas.
We need to go back to these eternal divine guidebooks. Discourse of these divine texts will reveal our knowledge gaps and deficiencies and equip us to resolve all our problems and issues successfully. Since human beings are imperfect in intellect, they are liable to discount and disbelieve the threads of true knowledge.
They are often driven by passion, bloated ego, and anger, which causes them to fail to grasp true knowledge or its source. This is where correction is needed. For every problem, the solution exists alongside it.
Identifying and implementing the solution is the key. All problems spring from the transgression of the divine material and spiritual laws given to us by the all-powerful and all-knowing creator. In many cases, the problems are unnecessarily magnified and complicated because of the same known human frailties that undermine human receptivity to internal divine signals.
And the solutions are often incredibly simple. True knowledge is not necessarily the opinion of the human majority. The human majority can continue to wallow in ignorance and confusion for decades and centuries.
Course correction is needed in such cases and this course correction can come only from the same eternal divine knowledge base of the Vedas. The present generation of humans is grappling with a serious problem of environmental pollution, climate change-caused natural calamities, crime, corruption, fear psychosis and insecurity. The world at the present is staring at the spectre of a major world war which can see the use of deadly weapons and a nuclear holocaust.
Let us examine all these problems from a fresh perspective in the above framework and explore the solutions accordingly. The solutions could be remarkably simple, for all we know. Atul Sehgal is the author of Guide to Inner Wellness, published by Rupa Publications.
