What is an ideal? It is a notion which the individual consciousness of each person builds the person’s character on. The foundation of a character is ideal.
Say for example, if somebody’s ideal is of a personal nature then everytime he or she does something, the first thing that’ll come to mind is the outcome of it. Now that is ideal which is mixed with the reasoning of the ego. We must not confuse ideal with reasoning. Ideal is the highest form of consciousness. It is always unselfish. Reasoning is a much lower form of consciousness.
As I’m watching Mahabharat these past few days, I’ll give you an example of the difference between ideal and reasoning. Take the example of Pitamaha Bheeshma, his ideal is of the highest of calibre. Sacrificing his life to protect the throne of Hastinapur. That’s the most unselfish ideal that you can come up with. But reasoning forced him to side with Kauravas as the throne he was defending belonged to them. So his ideal was actually with the Pandavas while his reasoning was with Kauravas. That’s why he stated that ‘his blessings were with Pandavas even though he (his body) was bound by the throne to fight against them.’
Another example that I want to state here is of Lord Krishna’s. When Arjuna dropped his bow saying that he would not be able to harm his relatives who were standing in front of them as his enemies, The Supreme Being, Lord Krishna had to remind him of his ideal. His ideal was to establish good in the world. That might come at great cost, that might require him to keep aside the ego of his entire mortal life but that shouldn’t deter him from sticking to his ideal. Arjuna for a while was confused by his reasoning as a mortal who was squabbling with his relatives over their egotistical difference but Lord Krishna reminded him that it was beyond that. It was a battle between the ideals of good and evil, the ideals of One and many. Arjuna was the defendant of the good, the One, the unselfishness and he was to approach the battle like that and nothing else.
We can also use ideal in our day to day life. We need to just understand how we can be unselfish at our work. When we do something our reasoning makes us think of how the result is going to turn out. While doing the work here is ideal, thinking of the result is actually reasoning. The result may even be something like helping others but the fact that we are thinking of the result nonetheless is actually a personal notion of ‘what I will get in return.’ So ideally the ideal would be to try to work with a good intention and leave the result to itself.
Om Shanti..?
Jui sanyal
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