By Rajeswari Balasubramanium
This is FIFA World Cup season. Once an old grey-haired lady sat with her grandchildren to watch a FIFA crunch match between two equally high-rated football (Soccer) teams. She had zero understanding of the game, nor any real interest in it. After a few minutes, she could not take it anymore. ‘Just rank stupid; 22 young boys are scrambling for passion of one ball! Can we not stop this non-sense by buying 22 balls and giving one to each?’ she asked.
How many of us enjoy the thrill of watching two powerful teams battle it out on the field? In fact, almost every sport is built on the same principle: two or more competitors striving for something limited—a ball, a trophy, or victory itself. Imagine a soccer match where every player is given their own ball. Would anyone watch it? The excitement disappears when there is nothing to compete for. The fun begins precisely because there is a challenge or a struggle.
The paradox of fun in suffering becomes even more evident in the smallest events of our daily lives. How many of us willingly pay money to shed tears watching sad films, scream on amusement park rides, or shiver inside a sleeping bag while camping in the wilderness?
Experiences that we normally label as unhappiness—fear, anxiety, stress, heartbreak or loss—do we truly always choose to avoid them? NO. We willingly invite some forms of discomfort into our lives. Happiness is not merely the absence of suffering, but something deeper hidden within it.
Sri Ramakrishna looked at the world from an even loftier standpoint. He says that this world is the sport of God. In this game there are joys and sorrows, virtue and vice, etc. The game cannot continue if sin and suffering are altogether eliminated. It is God alone who sports by becoming two opposite teams like happiness and misery etc. So even this apparent “unhappiness” is a pleasurable sport of God, by God and for God. That One has become the many and delights in the endless variety of the play.
Why, then, do we become so absorbed in this drama? The Katha Upanishad answers:
“Outgoing be thou, O senses!” – thus did the Lord curse them.
Therefore, one sees the outer things and not the inner Self.”
Our outward-turned senses immerse us so completely in the game that we mistake it for the whole of reality. In this great sport of the Lord, the winning goal will be when one can break this inherent limitation to focus inwards and know the true Self, as explained in the second half of the same verse:
“A rare discriminating man who gazes inward on the Self,
turning the gaze of his eyes away from sense objects, and desiring Immortality.”
Thus it is God alone that has kept Himself deluded by his great illusion and it is by His own Will, that he may choose to end the game or keep it going. Either way it is great fun for the Lord.
But when God decides to end the play, the individual goes through intense spiritual discipline, renounces his attachment to pleasure and pain and immerses himself into his True nature. But here is the warning given by Sri Ramakrishna – If ever a salt doll ventures into the ocean to measure its depth, it cannot come back.
Do we want the game to end? Or are we happy being unhappy and thus continue the game for some more time?
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