When a friend described his father-in-law as a cheerful realist, I thought it a good disposition to have while navigating this world in search for understanding and realization of why we exist.
The holy books tell us that the reality of material life is birth, death, disease, and old age. Each of these carry inherent suffering. Along with that we have the three sources of misery – from others, from nature, and from our own mind. The mind is actually considered the source of all our unhappiness.
Add to that–living with uncertainty, financial worries, trying to have enough time for everything, and the speed of today’s technology-soaked world. How do we catch our breath? The Bhagavad-gita describes reality in a nutshell – ‘From the highest planet to the lowest, all are places of misery wherein repeated birth and death take place.’ Is there anything cheerful about that?
I remember when I first read the Gita, I felt great relief as my suspicions of the nature of this world were validated. Then, the same wonderful book told me that being the body, being material, is only half of who I am. The real realism, the other side of us, the true better of us, is the spiritual part.
If we look objectively at ourselves, we can remember the past and envision the future. We can see our young body, and as we hear of the death of an elder, we can imagine ourselves there too. Who is doing the seeing, the experiencing as our body changes, time ticks away, and happiness and distress, success and failure come and go? The seer is the spirit soul, the life force within, who is “sat, cit, ananda” – eternal, full of knowledge, and full of happiness. We existed before this present life, this present body, and we exist after it.
Being a cheerful realist means knowing both sides of life – material and spiritual. It means balancing both sides of life. Being a cheerful realist means keeping things in perspective and not taking ourselves too seriously. It means searching for the soul deep within all living things and being grateful for all the goodness around us.
Ultimately, being a cheerful realist means accepting that we are not in control, God is real and this is His gig. We are part of Him as the sunshine is part of the sun. The logistics of our well-set life may break down in a second and the daily grind can wear us thin. But what doesn’t change is our connection with the spiritual reality, with Krishna. We may take advantage or not, we may connect or not, but that is the true source of living cheerful realism.
Without it, without shoring up our relationship with all-attractive Krishna, the source of our life, the source of all life, we will live life as Shakespeare’s Macbeth describes:
“Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
We deserve better than that. This is the promise of the practice of Krishna consciousness. It is a call to step out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary, into the awareness of life in this world and beyond. Cheerful realism at it’s best and an open invitation to all.
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