THE FINAL DESTINATION — Our Unawareness

one really knows what happened to him then, but a year later, when Tenzing Norgay was heading up Mt. Everest, he found Maurice Wilson’s corpse, and, with it, his diary, the last entry in which was the sentence quoted above. Maurice had planned to take a picture of himself atop Mt. Everest with his camera. His camera, he had hoped, would capture his moment of victory. But his time came before that could happen. There was no Maurice Wilson left whose victory his camera could show to the world! This, in a sense, is the same story of all of us. Everyone thinks that he is advancing towards the peak of success, whereas the reality is just the opposite. In actual fact, everyone is heading towards a destination where there will be no one to welcome him other than Death. People are all advancing in the direction of the unknown ‘tomorrow’, and yet they think that they are building a ‘successful’ world in the known ‘today’. In this world, some people nurse the desire only for worldly success, but they have not even set off on the journey to their dream-world when Death grabs them. Others manage to attain, to greater or lesser extent, the objects of their desire. Yet, this does not give them the happiness they were looking for, and so they are no different from the first category of people. After getting what they hankered after, they realize that these things do not give them true joy. And so, in this world those who obtain the objects of their worldly desire feel as deprived as those who do not. Yet, few people realize this. Human beings deprive themselves of what is truly worth having, and delude themselves into imagining that the things of this world will give them joy. Life is absolutely uncertain, yet people imagine it to be absolutely certain. People are all advancing in the direction of the unknown ‘tomorrow’, and yet they think that they are building a ‘successful’ world in the known ‘today’. How unaware people are who think they know themselves! What failures those people are who consider themselves to be the most successful of all! o