Self-realization comes to us in different stages of
life.
The life-events leading ‘us’ to realize about us
and ‘about us in life’ are randomly stacked up. They may or may not lead us to
generalize about what we come to realize (something that is open to be
changed later) but there cannot be a random selection about such events because
we never know if it is the moment unless it comes into happening or unless it
is passé; because we never knew if we were to come across a particular moment at
a particular time having some self-realization lessons.
There is no hierarchy of such moments. There cannot
be one.
Life is sum-total of the moments lived and every
moment has its own vitality of individualized proportions when you live with ‘you’
only’, when you communicate with ‘you’ only. The self-realization moments form
an important measurement of such individualized moments.
And there is no defined pattern of ‘how and when’
of such moments. When we don’t know the next moment of life, how can we define
the moment next-to-the-next? Yet, we plan. That is about being human. But the
reality remains – life moves in random, unplanned ways, from this moment to the
next one. And that applies to the ‘self-realization’ moments as well.
Such moments may come to us in odd moments. Such
moments may come to us in routine moments. Such self-realization moments may
come to us in ignored moments.
Such moments may knock at the conscious in our
merrier moments.
Such moments may stare at us in the moments of
crisis and in the pal of gloom.
Such moments may pinch us even if in a state of
thoughtlessness.
Self-realization can call us at any hour. Yes,
there are heightened individualized moments when we tend to cut off; when we
move deep inward; when we feel betrayed, by us or by others; when we find us in
some difficult situation and the way-out looks nowhere in sight, when the life
gives us the clear pointers on our thought-process to ‘introspect and
retrospect’ to make sense of ‘all that is happening’, to make sense of ‘us’ in
all that is happening. It is up to us whether we listen to the call.
In our youth, we look at such self-realization
moments differently, many times not even realizing about them.
As we grow up and start making sense of ‘who we are’
and ‘what life is’, our perspective to the ‘moments of self-realization’ takes
a different approach. This is the most fruitful and so the most volatile phase
of life when we experiment the most with our identity and so about our ‘realization
of life’ and ‘us in that life’.
When we are more or less settled-down, we tend to
be less experimental and there come moments when we conveniently choose to
ignore the writing on the wall in order to sail along with the flow of life.
When we approach the final days, the days to say
the final goodbye, the time to witness the final farewell, we do come across
the self-realization moments that sum up the whole life telling us what we
collected, what we did, what we had to do and what we could not do. We feel
most positively about such moments in this phase of life because we look at
them in the light of the acquired wisdom of the countless moments (defining
and redefining our existences) sifted and assorted mercilessly by time.