Obligations

Are there any obligations for anyone? Not actually, unless you have borrowed money. Really, do we owe anything to anyone? You might say our mother and father. Think, what can you give them back for whatever they have given you, most importantly, birth itself. No matter what you do, there is no way you can pay them back for whatever they did for you. The same goes for the society. We keep receiving things from different people. We cannot keep check on what we received from whom, and hope to pay them back. Neither can we expect anyone to feel obliged for the help that we might have provided.

That clearly shows that there is no way you pay your obligations off. So it surely means that there is no need to pay any obligations at all. In a sense, yes! But there is way to pay these obligations off, by doing things for others. We pay our parents off by becoming a good person, by giving birth to next generation; by passing the values that we received from our parents, by doing the same things for our scions that we feel obliged to our parents for. By remembering the things we received or wanted to receive from our parents and providing them to the next generations.

Similarly, for society, we remember the things we learned from them and try to pass them forward to others. Here we receive things from one and pass it to other. This process is not exactly called paying obligations off. But this is what we have been doing from ages. That’s how we inherited ‘Bhagwadgeeta’, ‘Kuran’, ‘Bible’.

There is one thing though, you cannot force the feelings. You cannot feel like passing anything on, till you have the feeling of possessing something that can be passed on. The feeling of being inherited something good. This feeling can only emerge if you possess modesty in first place. And losing the arrogance and self-centred attitude. All the spiritual gurus say the same thing. When you lose self-possessiveness then you realise that you are here just a means to pass on the values.

The moral of all things is that we are not obliged to anyone in particular, but the values themselves. They need to be passed on! But, in the meantime don’t forget all things that you received from parents and society and also all monetary debt though!

- UMESH SANT