Tension as many consider is a sickness that requires medication. However, human life does not exist without tension and it is the gravitational process that runs through the human mind till death. Tension pulls man to one thing and then pulls to another direction at the next moment. Attachment and detachment take place at every second through which life achieves its targets. At certain moments this coming in (attracting) and going out (leaving) becomes unbearable for the human and views these changes as causes of unrest and turns to clinical support. This is a serious misunderstanding and requires in-depth study on why tension is essential to human life.
The human form is a need of the consciousness to reach maturity. The realm of consciousness which is invisible and non-material governs the whole cosmos to help thinking to mature. Human form becomes one source to achieve that maturity and a short life span given to human is to learn and experience what is made available in the planet earth. Therefore, tension comes into human life from the moment the baby is structured in the mother’s womb and the struggle goes on to relieve itself from the confinement and darkness. It is from this imprisonment – mental and physical – that the human wants to vindicate himself / herself and tension becomes the tool for same.
There are innumerable structures the man is born to through which he/she learns and gain experience: poverty, hunger, and mental/physical disabilities, becoming a prisoner, administrator, philosopher and sage. And all these are experiences and learning processes which people treat as positive or negative. There is a whole set of emotions that work with these experiences and they establish the tension required in the human life. Joy, sorrow and fear keeps the life moving as it is from one action that the man always switches to another and all that action ensures a progress of maturity in mind.
School, prison, concentration camp, hospital and mental asylum are places where fear reins and many lessons are learnt through such fear. The school provides punishment and discipline, prison provides confinement with fewer facilities, concentration camp brings fear of death, rape, torture, hospital brings surgery, death and medication and mental asylum gives the learning of what shock treatment and medication is and the totality of all that is tension of what would happen next. The thinking of the next moment always puts the man into a mentally chaotic state as he/she visualizes of uncertain conditions. The inability of the man to see that all these conditions are essential components of human learning creates a nervous breakdown that thrusts the man into medical treatment.
None of these structural experiences are negative according to the teachings of Lord Buddha or Jesus. Man needs to bear these conditions because such strength provides the necessary input for maturity of consciousness or thinking. A transformation is possible in life to make it better only through such maturity. One needs to endure the conditions and accept them to broaden the thinking. A story told by a Tamil girl[1] who was in a refugee camp in Sri Lanka proves how suffering needs to be accepted and endured: ‘(She) said that on arrival at the camp, near the northern town of Vavuniya, she was put in a large tent with several people she did not know. The camp was guarded by armed soldiers and ringed with high fences and rolls of razor wire. “The first two or three days I was alone there still scare me. When I arrived at the camp I put my bag down and just cried. That feeling still won’t go. I just don’t want to think about those two or three days in the camp, the fear about what was going to happen to me.
“For the first few days I didn’t eat anything. We didn’t know where to go to get food. I thought, AM I dreaming or is this really happening?’ I never thought I would end up in a camp.” Tens of thousands of people were crammed into flimsy tents which provided little respite from the intense heat. Toilets and washing facilities could not cope with the demands and food and water were in short supply.
“You have to bathe in an open area in front of others, which I find very uneasy. I stayed next to the police station, so every day I had a bath with the police officers looking at me, men and women. Everyone can see you when you are having a bath. So I would get up early in the morning about 3.30am, so it was dark,” she said. “It is not a standard a human being can live in. The basic needs like water and food [were] always a problem. Most of the time you were queuing for water and the toilets were terrible, and there was not enough water, so we could not clean them. There were insects and flies everywhere. After two or three days of continuous rain, the sewage was floating on the water and going into the tents and everyone [was] walking through it, up to knee height.”
This story proves that living in tension trains people to accept challenges and it is this strength in mind that is required for inner maturity. One could get raped, tortured or killed under these circumstances but still facing such event in courage is the supremacy of being a human. Gandhi, Luther, Mandela, Rachel Corry, Steve Biko and many more people in the history experienced this truth. They all lived in tension and that made them to go forward to make the life better. They never considered uncertain and risky situations as dangerous and had nervous breakdowns or wanted clinical treatment for any fear. They either gave their lives or stayed in prisons for longer periods for the well-being of humanity.
Finally, human life is not free of tension and goes in a cycle making the man to attach himself/herself to diverse events that propel his/her life till the end. Hence, an understanding is needed to face these events courageously and challenge them with a mental equanimity as Lord Buddha said. Our consciousness starts acting and reacting from the time we are born and it is our thoughts that matter primarily in order to make the conditions better for us. A positive outlook is needed so that one would enjoy tension as a mechanism to pursue better levels in life.
[1] Vany Kumar, British medic aged 25, Essex, locked behind barbed wire in a refugee camp (Menik Farm) for four months revealed this story .
