The Gross And Subtle Elements of Life

Life is complex; its nature is duality, complicated, unpredictable and multi-dimensional. But more than that, life is a chemistry of the subtle and the gross. The gross, though easy to comprehend, has its own set of conundrums and the subtle is therefore a bit difficult to understand and realize.

For instance, the body is gross, but the mind is subtle. Again, the mind is gross in comparison to the soul, or being. While moving from thoughts to words to actions, we are moving from subtle or gross. Actions and words are such that anyone can understand and control them, but thoughts are intricate to control or understand. Emotions, feelings, and intuitions belong to the subtle world, while doing is usually of the gross world. Even in emotions; anger, jealousy, greed, and worry are gross and easy to acquire, while love, patience, honesty, forgiveness, and altruism are subtle and difficult to harness.

The gross elements in life are useful, but without the subtle elements their utility gets constrained, or is usually accompanied by pain, lament ness, and sorrow. For example, any medicine that doctors use to cure an illness is a gross thing. While medicines do their job quickly and efficiently, but they also cause a lot of side effects, and proves fatal, at times.

The same effect or cure can be achieved by going deep into the mind, using positive thoughts, energies, emotions, and feelings to boost one’s own immunity and fight the disease. This subtle level treatment takes obvious time but is almost free from side effects, and is therefore not possible to preach for everyone. Only those who are highly meditative and can see inward can harness their subtle energies and bring them together in a strong manner, to achieve this. But one can at least combine both, to get better and improved results.

Once we are aware that life has these components, we can factually feel the days when the body is loaded with negative energy, and is feeling unmotivated, lethargic, frazzled, and futile. Such are the periods when you need to sit quietly and meditate with yourself, go deep into your inner recesses and find your innermost soul, or atma; which is the mitochondria of energy. If we don’t, then these frustrations will eventually act on our appetite; sleep our immunity, making us victims of disease, stress, acidity, hypertension, insomnia, diabetes, and cancer.

A rose is the gross element. Its fragrance is the subtle element. A flower is incomplete without the beauty of its fragrance. Similarly, human beings can exist as physical bodies for 70 or 80 years, but they can be fruitful only if they successfully able to uncover their fragrance. A human being is declared as being alive or dead only on the basis of the presence or absence of his subtle energy. Apart from this subtle energy that is always running through us, there is actually very little difference between someone who is alive or dead.

Hence, our aim should be to acknowledge and get in tune with this subtle force, what is often known as prana, soul, or atma. It is by connecting to this subtle element, that we get an inkling of the subtle elements, which can in turn harness boundless potential and energy, to live our lives with joy, peace, happiness, good health and security. Otherwise, we will go on living at the gross level, which is not really called for; and will make our life rather futile, meaningless, and frustrating.

Authored by:

Saptarshi Dutt
10/08/2010