Jo hai so hai’ -- it is what it is War, murder, theft have been going on for thousands of years and will continue for as long as the human race exists. Knowing and realising this, the yogi withdraws the focus from the transient things of the world. Yogis realise the inherent futility of having an opinion on things that have no bearing whatsoever on their immediate circumstances, or life. They look upon the world from the stable perch of Ishwar Srishti. As Ashtavakra Gita verse 7:5 says, ‘I am pure consciousness, and the world is like a magician's show. What is there to take up or reject?’
Where there is no aversion or attraction, there is peace.
A powerful expression of the futility of all earthly, human endeavour can be found in the opening lines of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. It makes the importance of having ‘academic distance’ in life all the more apparent:
Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
