Being takes the form of giving.
We are most fully in existence, most fully present, most fully ourselves, most authentic, pure and real, when we are giving. This is perhaps why we experience life as most meaningful, purposeful, and worthwhile when we are kind and generous with each other.
Nothing true or lasting about what we are, concerns what we have, what we had or might some day have. To ‘have’ means to be formed by what we at some earlier time did not have. It is to be determined by something we have acquired, which by something we in some future moment will no longer have, either because we consume it, lose it, destroy it, or simply because it withers away.
To understand ourselves in relation to what we have is be determined by something that is not us, something foreign, external. If I define myself by the nose on my face, I will soon find that what I am changes shape and colour with time. If I define myself by the house I have and live in, I will be forced to watch the house wear and decline with time. If I define myself by my clothes, my job, my money, my status etc. I will sooner or later discover that what I am changes and varies, often declines, as time itself changes the quality and value of these things.
However, what is true, genuine and real is what we never had to acquire and will never lose. It’s what we have never been separated from, never not had, and never will be without: the soul.
The soul is something we experience as always given. It’s what we cannot imagine ourselves without. While we can easily imagine ourselves existing without the car in our garage or even without the nose on our face, we surely cannot imagine ourselves being without a soul.
The world in which we have a soul is the only world we can possibly imagine and the only world we can possibly live. It’s the world in which we our soul is not taken, bought, traded, or acquired. It is given.
This is the strange and mysterious experience of every jīva, every living entity: we discover ourselves as soul-beings without any understanding of why. We wake up and find we are that we are jīvas, beings endowed with a soul. And cannot remember not having a soul. Nor can we imagine a moment in the future when we will not have a soul.
At the dawn of our lives, we awaken into our souls. At the sunset of life, we close our eyes and into the slumber of the soul we go. There is no life before the soul and no life after.
In material words, we talk about ‘birth.’ But in spiritual terms, we were never born and will never die. ‘Birth’ is simply the material form that our soul takes during its stay in this material world. If we say sometimes that we ‘take’ a body at birth, it is really to say that we ‘borrow’ a body for a brief moment of consciousness when we can be engaged in the purpose of creation.
The life of a jīva is therefore a gift. But not the kind of gift that is given by one to another in a sort of celestial birthday party where the deserving receive the gift and the undeserving do not.
The life of a jīva—which means the same as the life of a soul—is a gift in the sense that it does not need to be deserved. There are no conditions, no qualifications. There is no merit, no reward. Life is mercy: perfectly causeless, completely inexplicable, unprovoked, unearned, spontaneous. It has simply been given, a gift.
We can only begin to know by what or whom it is given when we begin to examine our own soul. We cannot become aware of this causeless gift until we have asked the very question of the soul:
What is it I feel, and toward whom or toward what do I feel it?
Rather, it is a given in the sense that it has simply come to us.
Life is mercy.
There are two possible responses to this realisation.
Either we can spend our energies trying to outsmart mercy, trying to solve the mystery, to answer the question of what the world is doing with us or to us, what the world means for us, what the reason is for our being here, and what is expected of us.
Or we can use our abilities, our skills, and our hearts to go deeper into the realisation that it’s not our ego that matters, but our soul. It’s not the fleeting comforts of material things that will bring peace and happiness, but the enduring comfort of the heart.
For modern Western minds, this is a nearly impossible thought. We are raised to live and flourish in a world where the ego is the beacon of all things. It’s a world where all good that comes to us comes because of us, and where all bad that comes to us comes despite us.
And so we run and run after life. We put all our acquired qualities—work, money, education, prestige—at the service of mastering the world, of bringing it to do our service. We chase fleeting opportunities; we invest in immediate material gains. We sprint, we turn, we shift, we adapt, we reinvent. We will be the masters.
Yet only if we stop running after life will life come to us. And only when we gently set aside the life of the ego will the life of the soul find us. Only when we at last drop the sweetly naïve idea that we are the authors of our lives and that the world exists for our pleasure, and replace it with the understand that happiness comes when we serve the pleasure of the world—or more exactly, the pleasure of Divine.
To live the life of a jīva is to stop incessantly doing and rather let be done. It’s to stop chasing life and let life simply, sweetly, gently come.