What is inner life actually?

“The man who has no inner life is a slave to his surrounding”, this quote by Swiss philosopher Henri Frederic Amiel is very relevant to people in today’s world.

Every man has two lives that he lives in this one life. Thinking about our success, what we want to achieve in life, what material wealth we want to possess etc are all a part of our outer life which we live very actively. We feel joy, sorrow, agony, frustration and experience many emotions as a result of our surroundings. But, deep inside we all have one life which remains intact of all these worldly affairs. That is the inner part which doesn’t become week with our growing old age but becomes younger and nourished with each passing day once we realize about its existence. This inner part is our inner life.

Inner life is not a religious or spiritual term. It is ones connection with himself. If the person is not connected with himself, he is like without soul. Living for earning money and fame, not thinking what he actually wants in life, what makes him peaceful, or what makes him satiated with life and himself means that his inner life is not active and he is not in the connection with himself.

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Being a social animal, attending parties and having hundreds of friends also cannot make us feel satisfied in life if we are not satisfied with what we do. “What would people think about us if we do this?” , “I should do that because my friend has done that” ,”that job is lucrative.” “ I should do this because others feel good while doing this”… all these statements coming in our minds imply that we are doing things in life not because we want it but because we see our surroundings and feel like doing them. This means that we are slave of our surroundings.

A person with no inner life basically is one who lives life by seeing others around him, wants to do what others are doing, and tries adapting his surroundings. In these circumstances, when he is not surrounded by people, he feels that he doesn’t have anything to do for himself out of interest or wish and he feels all alone because he has no inner life.

Inner life makes us feel the emotions which are not germane to the repercussions of the actions that we take in worldly affairs to gain wealth or success. It, on the other hand, makes us feel the divine or peaceful happiness and satisfaction from either worldly affairs or from inside. In today’s world, every individual from waking up in the morning till going to sleep at night thinks about the affairs cause affect from outer side. But inner life deals with what we realize from inside. It totally depends on an individual as to what are the matters that he or she wants to think upon. For example, if a person is going through a phase in which he has been betrayed, it totally depends upon him if he wants to continue it to disturb him for life or he wants to make it a past and move ahead. A person with an inner life will not think about it for a long time and would move ahead with taking it as a learning experience. But the fact is that most of us are not even aware of what an inner life is and how does it make us happy and satiated in life.

A person without inner life is like the one devoid of an arm or a leg; this is indeed true but with an inevitable fact that even a person without an arm or leg can have an inner life which can make him much more satiated and happy in life than a person with leg and arm and that too with all the material possession of life because despite of having all the wealth and possessions and having realized all the dreams seen by him, if he does not know how to be happy and satisfied with his life, all the wealth possessed by him would be like the piece of pebbles and stones. If we won’t be able to realize the blissful joy and our conscience is dormant, then no matter what we do, achieve, and possess, we will always be unhappy in professional life as well as our personal relationships with only few transitory happy events.

Man has always been in dilemma about his existence on earth and has been trying to know it. But as the time passed, man stopped living in caves all alone and started living in communities. He developed many traits which vanished the thought that he had in mind regarding the prime goal of existence of its race on planet but as we say no one can go outside the cycle of the nature, man, after six millions of years of its existence on earth is again moving forward towards the fact that without an inner life, he is nothing more than an animal. The ways to realize inner life has changed though today for humans all over the globe. Some try to find it with their religious texts, some with the help of preachers, some by living solitude on mountains and travelling and some by not believing in any of these mediums but with the notion that humans are about humanity and no one is above it and if we really want to live life with an ultimate joy and bliss, we will have to understand that living only for one’s own inner peace, happiness and satisfaction won’t let us realize and live our inner life. And having the feeling of compassion and empathy with self motivation and dedication with forgetting the barriers that man has made on the basis of country, color, caste and creed would make it the easiest way to achieve the ultimate bliss and joy with an active inner life.

 

By-Shekhar Srivastava

2 Comments

  1. Tony says:

    This is a inspiring piece of writing which certainly resonates with me. Thanks for your appreciation of my blog also. Tony

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Shekhar Srivastava says:

      I’m delighted to know that 😊 I’m glad to follow your blog.
      God bless you
      Shekhar😊

      Liked by 1 person

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