Regret & Repentance

I have often said that life is a series of events that happen to an individual. Life is a series of occurrences or happenings that are simply related to each other. How this occurrences are laid out in each of our lives is a mystery that none of us can indeed fathom. In reality, however this very mystery helps us to live life with a renewed sense of hope and vigor with every breath that pumps our heart. Imagine indeed if there was no mystery left in life; how boring and monotonous it would truly be. Even greatness would lose all its sheen for indeed there would be nothing-great left about it.

05-Aug-2005 14:14, Canon Canon EOS 20D, 3.5, 85.0mm, 0.001 sec, ISO 100

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These various events that span out in an individual’s lifetime often induce some emotion in him; be it anger or happiness; be it ecstasy or depression; the varied moods of life never fail to influence the flow of our destinies. Through the many emotive phases that an individual goes through in his life, I have often noticed that there is one emotion that lasts the longest; that there is one emotion that stays forever with an individual; that is regret.

I have often said that the only lasting emotion in life is regret; that every individual at every point in his life feels regret in one form or another. Regret that he did something; or regret that he did not do something. The very nature of human life is such that an individual naturally regresses and goes into a state of mind where he feels completely lost and hopeless. This situation essentially arises owing to an individual’s unwillingness to accept the burden of his own choices.

Life is a journey in which we have to work with what has been ordained to us. We have to work with what fate we bring with us to these wretched lands. This essentially means that we have to work towards progression and no towards regression. What we have at the end of this life should be something that is far greater than what we had at end of the last one. That is the basic crux of human evolution. In the end we find that the only that stays with us through life and death is our spiritual wealth; it is only the spiritual wealth that we carry when we move on from our physical bodies; and this wealth is something that can be inculcated only through conscious acts of goodness.

Regret is an emotion that comes from deep within our hearts; it is when life disappoints us beyond count that we experience regret. So essentially what this means is that regret being a perpetual emotion, our entire lives end up being but a fallacy of endless disappointments. These arise primarily from our desires. So the basic reason as to why an individual experiences regret and repentance in his life is that he realizes that every single one of his desires ultimately lead to him losing his entire spiritual wealth. In every way, he starts to know that his desires have a heavy price indeed; that his desires are ultimately the cause for his spiritual downfall. The reason being that he hopes to derive lasting joy from the satiation of his desires; something that can never be accomplished; and hence regret forms an eternal part of his existence; simply owing to the fact that he desires happiness from desire itself. Desire in the end purges an individual of all his spiritual wealth.

So how can man truly live his life? Can he simply go about denying his desires? No that would indeed be horrific. But the simple realization and a situational awareness would indeed go a long way. When man realizes that his desires cannot indeed yield him lasting joy, he would cease to expect that from them; when man understands that desires are only meant to satiate shallow pleasures; he would take them for what they are work through them for a better future; for a more evolved future. But until the day dawns and man realizes that desires are not the source of all the goodness in this world, he would forever be plagued by the bane of this physical existence that we call regret.

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