Modern Day Ramayana
The greatest Indian epic that talks about love, wisdom, and virtue has gradually rooted itself in the every day life of our society. Not that we praise so much the part of the virtue from dawn to dusk, but that we find ourselves pondering over the questions of love and wisdom, and if those two words even fit in the same dimension?
When you are in love, the wisdom is always the last thing that knocks on your door, as you become transparent to the coherent decisions. At least in the Middle Ages the courtly love gave you, besides the slaves of passion, some of the finest of troubadour poets; although, you could have also lost your head for infidelity, since it was a mortal sin. Today, you are insane to expect poetry, it is good if you get any flowers, and the question that generally materializes is - “Are we slaves of passion, or the slaves of hormones?” On the other hand, perhaps we should not complain over the loss of romanticism in our lives, but celebrate the decree of the court of evolution not to cut off our heads when we strain from fidelity.
When you are wise, you avoid falling in love altogether, as it is not very smart to push yourself knowingly off the cliff to the ocean of amoré, especially when you don’t have a life jacket. There should be always enough friends to say something critical over the relationships you develop, so that you would at least have a vague perspective about the direction you are swimming toward. Otherwise, one day you can find yourself thrown out of the honeycomb clueless and without any explanations, inquiring: “How did I get here?” Maybe that is why, through centuries, the right to make the decisions over who you will live with “for better or for worse” was given to the parents, and not to the bride and her groom.
In “Ramayana,” it is not just good enough to be virtuous, but you also have to convince everyone else around about your worthiness, as did beautiful Sita by asking Mother Earth to prove her purity. In our modern day lives you have to persuade yourself to be virtuous, and then you become the outcast, because the rest of the world has lost its belief in it. I guess it is not about what moral codes our society has lost, but which direction we will choose from this point on. Maybe it is too much to ask from the human species to put love, wisdom and virtue all in one sentence, because, after all, we are just one of various mammals and many of them prefer polygamy over monogamy. Or maybe our world has become caught in the gray, ordinary, and far-too-serious rapids of work and schedules that we just can’t say “no” to the feeling of butterflies, even when the lifespan of our emotions is shorter than one stage of their life.
In reality, the love probably does not even exist, since it is our imagination that surrenders us to the world of enigma and gets us demoted from “extraordinary and plenipotentiary” to “chargé d’affaires.” We can be prudent and conservative in our views and manners, but once the sweet kisses are blown to the wind we become hypocritical and untamed. You quickly find out that one has to be a very good gymnast on the balancing beam to be able to reason, while the intoxication of pleasure sucks out the last cells of logic from the pinkish-gray tissue. But, yet, we agree to fall in love again and again, often without any hesitation; we let the world play us as fools over and over, before it rips out our hearts with the razor sharp nails; and we sacrifice our common sense to a moment of ecstasy time after time, even if it will destroy us later.
Maybe that is what makes us human after all, the willingness to submit ourselves freely to the torture of love and the readiness to avoid knowingly the roads of wisdom by choosing the ones that lead to the battlefields instead. We are the authors of the modern-day version of “Ramayana, ” who are trying to find the answers, in the epic of humans, to the same ancient questions about love, wisdom, and virtue in the prevailing world.
When you are in love, the wisdom is always the last thing that knocks on your door, as you become transparent to the coherent decisions. At least in the Middle Ages the courtly love gave you, besides the slaves of passion, some of the finest of troubadour poets; although, you could have also lost your head for infidelity, since it was a mortal sin. Today, you are insane to expect poetry, it is good if you get any flowers, and the question that generally materializes is - “Are we slaves of passion, or the slaves of hormones?” On the other hand, perhaps we should not complain over the loss of romanticism in our lives, but celebrate the decree of the court of evolution not to cut off our heads when we strain from fidelity.
When you are wise, you avoid falling in love altogether, as it is not very smart to push yourself knowingly off the cliff to the ocean of amoré, especially when you don’t have a life jacket. There should be always enough friends to say something critical over the relationships you develop, so that you would at least have a vague perspective about the direction you are swimming toward. Otherwise, one day you can find yourself thrown out of the honeycomb clueless and without any explanations, inquiring: “How did I get here?” Maybe that is why, through centuries, the right to make the decisions over who you will live with “for better or for worse” was given to the parents, and not to the bride and her groom.
In “Ramayana,” it is not just good enough to be virtuous, but you also have to convince everyone else around about your worthiness, as did beautiful Sita by asking Mother Earth to prove her purity. In our modern day lives you have to persuade yourself to be virtuous, and then you become the outcast, because the rest of the world has lost its belief in it. I guess it is not about what moral codes our society has lost, but which direction we will choose from this point on. Maybe it is too much to ask from the human species to put love, wisdom and virtue all in one sentence, because, after all, we are just one of various mammals and many of them prefer polygamy over monogamy. Or maybe our world has become caught in the gray, ordinary, and far-too-serious rapids of work and schedules that we just can’t say “no” to the feeling of butterflies, even when the lifespan of our emotions is shorter than one stage of their life.
In reality, the love probably does not even exist, since it is our imagination that surrenders us to the world of enigma and gets us demoted from “extraordinary and plenipotentiary” to “chargé d’affaires.” We can be prudent and conservative in our views and manners, but once the sweet kisses are blown to the wind we become hypocritical and untamed. You quickly find out that one has to be a very good gymnast on the balancing beam to be able to reason, while the intoxication of pleasure sucks out the last cells of logic from the pinkish-gray tissue. But, yet, we agree to fall in love again and again, often without any hesitation; we let the world play us as fools over and over, before it rips out our hearts with the razor sharp nails; and we sacrifice our common sense to a moment of ecstasy time after time, even if it will destroy us later.
Maybe that is what makes us human after all, the willingness to submit ourselves freely to the torture of love and the readiness to avoid knowingly the roads of wisdom by choosing the ones that lead to the battlefields instead. We are the authors of the modern-day version of “Ramayana, ” who are trying to find the answers, in the epic of humans, to the same ancient questions about love, wisdom, and virtue in the prevailing world.
Häly Laasme
posted by Häly Laasme at 2:52 AM
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