Attaining life in all its fullness

Attaining life in all its fullness

The goal of spirituality, said Jesus Christ, is to enable human beings to attain life in its fullness. This is the least understood, or most misunderstood, of Jesus’ teachings.

One such misunderstanding is that having life in its fullness means becoming richer. This quantitative fallacy equates life with ‘having’ rather than ‘being’. In this view, one’s life is godly depending on how much one prospers. This strange notion drives the prosperity Gospel. It appeals to many Christians, though Jesus himself ‘had nowhere to lay his head’.

The second misunderstanding is that it denotes a safe, secure life, free from all suffering. This too is strange because Jesus is known, and revered, for the unthinkable suffering he endured. Christians worship the Cross and pray for total exemption from suffering, which is strange, to say the least. At any rate, life without suffering caricatures life. It has never existed, nor will it ever exist.

The more ‘spiritual’ among Christians assume that extraordinary spiritual gifts and powers characterise life in its fullness. So, miracle-workers and the high and mighty in the religious hierarchy are supposed to be ‘filled’ with spiritual power and the extraordinary graces that go with it. But, on a closer examination, many of them prove to be pretty ordinary; well short of the spiritual benchmark of life.

What then does ‘life in its fullness’ mean?

Everything depends on how a person understands himself; for one has to seek and attain this state for oneself. One can seek only as per one’s understanding of oneself. The distorted understandings listed above arose because of a misconception in this respect. We are conditioned to think of ourselves as autonomous and self-contained individuals, sharply distinguished from everything else.

According to Jesus, we are to attain ‘life’ in its fullness, not a life of fullness. Seeking the fullness of ‘life’ is quite different from seeking the fullness of one’s life. Life is a great deal more than each one of us, and all of us taken together. The notion that we are discreet, autonomous, selves who ‘own’ their life – as in ‘my life’ – is a delusion. We are part of a seamless web of life that extends to the cosmos. This is intuited in the astrological assumption that the configuration of celestial bodies at the time of one’s birth affects a person lifelong. Ideally, the whole of life should express itself through each individual. One’s life should mirror life in its fullness.

Such ‘fullness’ embraces everything and everyone. It excludes none. That is why to the spiritually enlightened, there are no strangers and enemies. The Indic spiritual vision of tatvam asi, that thou art, adumbrates this mindset. Certainly one of its meanings is that labels of otherness should be inadmissible. The proof, therefore, that we are oriented to ‘life in its fullness’ is that we feel at one with all human beings; indeed, with the whole of creation. The entire world is my home.

Life can be had only in full, for it is dynamic. Just as we cannot breathe in half – inhaling alone – so also, we cannot live life in part. Restlessness lurks wherever what is meant to be whole is kept in part-ness. Like the two halves of an apple sliced in the middle, it will be burdened with the pressures of disequilibrium. Such a state contravenes the law of nature. Only human beings entertain the delusion that they can live as isolated atoms; or that it is an achievement to do so.