Prisoners of Life

Death scares a person who wants to live. But for someone who isn’t fearful of death, life exists, but, without any sensation and feeling and this makes it difficult to differentiate life from death. Even the news of the active, living and dying world outside his own has a certain dream like unreality for him. The inner objective time ceases to be, only the outer subjective sense remains. As the future ceases to exist, life finds sustenance in the encased emotions of the past. There is a stillness and ever lastingness about the past; it changes not, has a touch of eternity, like a painted picture or a statue in bronze or marble. The mind becomes a prisoner of time. It serves a life term, failing to find the vital links between itself and the present with all its conflicts and problems. The person remains a prisoner. The mind becomes a slave. What should life be then – amalgamation of past with the present and extend it to the future or to break from it where it cannot be so united? Aurobindo Ghose writes somewhere of the present as the pure and virgin moment, that razor’s age of time and existence which divides the past from the future and is yet, instantaneously is not. The virgin moment, the present, emerging from the veil of the future in all its naked purity, coming into contact with us and immediately becoming the soiled and stale past. If the past has a tendency to become the present, the present also sometimes recedes into the distant past and assumes its immobile statuesque appearance. In the midst of an intensity of action itself, there would suddenly come a feeling as if it was some past event and one was looking at it, as it were in retrospect. Past merges with present and the life becomes a reality tied up with sensations of pain. As the artist who fails to draw that frame on the canvas without the muse, life too looks sullen without the passion and the urge to action which make it an enjoyable journey. Without that passion and urge, there is a gradual oozing out of hope and vitality, a settling down on lower levels of existence, a slow merging into non-existence.