Recently I received a comment here on WordPress about my most popular post, “The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.” (Rabindranath Tagore). The commenter simply asked me to write more about Tagore. I took a few minutes out of my day to do some research and it turns out that Rabindranath Tagore was a famous native of India and received a Nobel Prize for literature in the early 20th century. As I read some of his poems, I was struck by his deeply philosophical themes about finding a purpose in life. This one is my favorite. Let it sink in for a minute, it’s worth it.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
It’s been a hundred years since he wrote this and I could still see myself making this same request, “Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.” I would love to live in a world where my mind is without fear, where knowledge is free, where the world has not been broken up into fragments, where words come from the depth of truth, where we strive for perfection tirelessly, where reason has not lost its way, where we seek out our dead habits and move forward into expansive thought and action. That does sound like the heaven of freedom to me.
There is a recurring theme here that I’ve encountered many times in my reading. Service to others and compassion for the least among us is the only way to achieve real happiness in life. Service is joy. We can go back thousands of years and that simple fact has been repeated forever by all the greatest minds of history. It makes me wonder why we keep trying to substitute selfishness for service. Now that we have the internet, where selfishness is amplified to the extreme, we seem to have lost our way completely. Tagore, Gandhi, Schweitzer and Bonhoeffer were all trying to turn mankind toward the heaven of freedom in the early 20th century and for a while it seemed like we might get there by the end of that century.
It doesn’t seem so likely in this century. Greed and narcissism have darkened the path so much that no one seems to know the way anymore. We don’t even acknowledge our bad habits, much less try to change them. We just preach about acceptance and tolerance like it’s a panacea for all of our human failings. That’s not a path forward to better things, it’s just giving up on everything. Oh Well just leads to Oh Hell when nothing really has intrinsic value anymore.
I think we all need to take a deep breath, ponder a while, face ourselves and our failings and resolve to do better with every day we have left. Let’s find a way to make serving humanity the greatest achievement and never settle for selfishness. Then one day our grandchildren may eventually awaken into the heaven of freedom that we’ve all been striving for forever.
©Guy R. Horst and grhgraph.wordpress.com, 2023. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Guy R. Horst and grhgraph.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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