Of Identity, Insecurity, Attachment, Greed, Desire and Anger
Lord Krishna tells Arjuna:
स्वधर्ममपि चावेक्ष्य न विकम्पितुमर्हसि।
धर्म्याद्धि युद्धाछ्रेयोऽन्यत्क्षत्रियस्य न विद्यते।।2.31।।
Roughly translated it means: Lord Krishna tells Arjuna, you must look at who you are. Nothing can be more welcome to a soldier than a war fought for righteousness. Therefore to waver and not go to war is not right, O Arjuna!
And Arjuna was one lucky dude who knew what his Dharma was — he was a soldier and his Dharma was to fight for what is right. Which brings us to the question of what is Dharma? For starters Dharma does not mean religion, religions may come and go Dharma will remain the same. Dharma means nature of something, like the Dharma of Sun is to give heat and light, Dharma of water is to cool you hydrate you, similarly everyone has a Dharma within them that they have to fulfil.
Strangely Duryodhan, Karna, Bhishma were also soldiers, and it was in their Dharma or their nature to fight and they did fight the war, but they fought the war for the wrong reasons, and they lost.
Which means there are two things at play in Dharma — the nature and righteousness. So you are using your nature to do the right thing and that is when you become Dharma Yodha — a person who does the right thing.
In essence your dharma is your identity. And now this becomes very complicated — there are 8 billion people in this world and I am pretty sure not everyone’s identity is to be Arjuna and fight the war for what is right.
So what do I do: I acquire an identity — one of the several such available in the world I become a programmer, a singer, a dancer, an actor, an engineer, a banker, a fortune teller, a manager, an entrepreneur, mother, father, a big house owner, a big car owner so on and so forth.
So far so good.
Talking about myself, I am a an engineer from a top college, worked in top corporations of the world, an entrepreneur, decently rich, semi good father of two, good son to my parents. I have so many identities and yet I have always asked myself who am I and why am I here. And I have not met Krishna who could tell me — you are this.
Who am I?
In the absence of a clear cut answer to who am I, I have acquired all sorts of identities that I hope defines or is my dharma. I have acquired degrees, jobs, business ownership, wife, children, house, money, car, expensive watches, all apple products, expensive shoes, expensive clothes. I have been to vacations to exotic locations. I have acquired everything that I could to hide myself from the question Who am I.
Now if one or some of these acquisitions are taken away from me, I become very insecure. If I don’t have a car I become insecure, I don’t have a house I become insecure, if I don’t go out and eat every week in a five star I become insecure, if I don’t buy fancy clothes I become insecure, if I don’t get likes on my tweets I become insecure. My happiness depends on these acquisitions. I am attached to them. They help me avoid the question who am I.
So what is creating attachment?
My inability in knowing who am I is causing insecurity in me and that is giving rise to attachment. I am holding on to as many things that could possibly be my identity or my dharma I can so that I am secure. This is giving rise to attachment. If I knew who am I and what my Dharma is I would be on my way to fulfilling my dharma, and that would make me happy and content, which is maybe what Arjuna may have felt once he had won the war.
Because I don’t know what my dharma is I am out there acquiring all sorts of identities in the hope that it makes me secure and happy and if someone takes that away from me I become insecure and unhappy.
So what is this attachment doing to me?
All these attachments that I have created for myself is making me happy and the more attachments I create the more happy I become and that gives rise to desire and the happier I become the more happy I want to become and so I become greedy. Audi gave me happiness, now I want Maybach and after I get that, possibly I would want a Rolls Royce. My wants are now never ending, my greed is now never ending.
In the age of social media all these attachments create more likes, more attention and the more likes I get the more likes I want, and that gets me even more attention. I have experimented that the better I look it gets me more attention and therefore more likes and more appreciation. The need to be more and more happy is just increasing my desire and greed every day.
My need for happiness is getting me attached to so many things and the need to be more and more happy is fuelling desire and greed in me.
What happens when my attachments are taken away from me?
Of course nothing is permanent, things change and I lose my attachments, I lost my car, my business failed, nobody recognizes how capable I am, including my own family and friends and that created anger in me. The more attachments I lose the angrier I become. And the angrier I become the more I am unable to differentiate between what is right and what is wrong. I fail to discriminate between who is my friend and who is my enemy. I fail to understand who I am and I fall into a loop of lashing out at anything and everything, including my own self, and in the end I destroy myself.
Happened to Ravan also, he was attached to his sister and when she was humiliated by Laxman he became angry and that eventually destroyed his golden Lanka and him.
In my anger I may end up even living the life of an ordinary person because no one recognises me and my capabilities and I would rather be an unknown obscure person who just fades away and all he does is just breathe till his last breath.
All this because of what?
Simple answer — I want to be happy.
Because I want to be happy and have that feeling inside me all the time I have created all these attachments which I thought would make me constantly happy. And if something makes me sad or unhappy I use another attachment to make me happy. If my business is failing or relationship is failing, I start drinking and that makes me happy, or I go out and party and that makes me happier, in some cases I start making reels and the likes and views makes me happy, I have sex with women and that makes me happy.
Sometimes nothing makes me happy. All my attachments fail me and I become severely unhappy.
Happiness is a curse!
Not really, happiness is not a curse, but happiness that has to be engineered externally is a curse. It creates attachment, attachment creates desire, more and more desire creates greed and lack of happiness creates anger.
If I am happy from within I wouldn’t need to create an artificial stimulus or an attachment to be happy. If I am happy all alone, sleeping on the floor, just working on something which I want, not worrying about not having a car, or a house, or a wife, children or girlfriend, then I would have no attachment.
It is not easy to get rid of attachment, but it is not that difficult either.
What is the way to be happy from within?
Not knowing who we are, not knowing the answer to the question Who am I is the biggest roadblock to being happy from within. Arjuna was told who he was, and now we don’t have Krishna to tell us who we are and what is our Dharma. The moment we know who we are and what is our Dharma we would be happy from within and not have to rely on all these attachments that we have created in the absence of this information.
One of the ways of knowing who we are is digging deep inside us and asking the question: What would make me happy even if I did not have money, car, house, family, relationships, social media followers and likes, degrees, a stable job, but I get to do this. That answer is the answer to who you are and what your Dharma.
Sometimes we don’t know the answer even if we try very hard to find this answer, then the best way forward is to just accept who you are — as is.
And sometimes the answer is right in front of us but we fail to interpret it. For example I like to move and inspire people so that they are happy and I would like to do something that makes more and more people happy, this is who I am and this is my Dharma. I do this through multiple methods and some get immediate results and social media almost always gets me zero likes, yet I keep doing it, because even if one person becomes happier because of what I said or wrote or did I would have fulfilled my Dharma. I have been doing this for years but I did not know that this is what I want to do and this is who I am, this is my Dharma. In the process I created so many attachments, and now that I know the answer definitively I no longer have any attachments.
Jai Shree Krishna!
