Shelley had much to say about life and he did so with such mastery in his poems that we still wonder today how he could with a few lines lift our minds and hearts to heights that other poets can only dream about. Most of his poetry is suffused with a kind of mystical light that seems to emanate from the secret realms only known to great sages and philosophers of the past and which we in our woe-begone materialistic world can no longer apprehend even in our deepest spiritual strivings. Shelley once said, amongst so many other wise things, that "the mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being." And these words are, I think, as good as any other as fodder to our present meditation on life.

There is no denying the fact that the modern world, in spite of all the recent advances in the fields of science and technology, is literally gasping for breath. Having equipped ourselves with all the trappings of the modern age, both as status symbols and for our own comfort, most of us have suddenly realized that we are not happy, that there is a missing dimension in our lives. Why is that? Has there always been such a state of mind as ours? And if so, how did the people of old cope with the emptiness that pervaded their soul and brought them on the very brink of despair and hopelessness?

There may be many causes behind the malaise that has taken hold of the present generation. The American way of life while promising unlimited power and glory to those who dare to dream and act out their dreams has a flip side to it that leads many an unwary traveller towards perdition rather than towards salvation. A quick glance at societies that have copied the American model for the sake of economic success will show us that the promised happiness that was supposed to accompany material well-being has in most cases been replaced by a sense of loss and despair, in particular among the young generation. Modern values seem to encourage fast results at all costs, without a proper philosophical foundation, and if these results cannot be obtained, despondency and depression inevitably ensue. Is it then so amazing to learn that depression is currently killing more people than cancer or heart attacks?

Most of us are quite content living from day to day, without any great hope of bettering our future or utterly convinced that true happiness is to be found in the acquisition of man-made objects. In this relentless pursuit of this elusive earthbound glory we tend to forget --or have already totally forgotten -- that there is any "wonder" in the fact that we exist at all. On the contrary, we very soon become very used to being alive and taking everything out there for granted. Life stupefies us as if it were a heavy soporific. And it is because most of the time we are not even half-awake, only glancing at the sky to see if it is going to be a fine day for a nice picnic after five days of strife and stress in an environment that is made stale and stifling by bad office politics, that we lose track of the true purpose of our being in this world and of taking stock of that sense of wonder Shelley was so aware of. For to most of us, a tree is just a tree, and a sun is just a sun. Nothing more, nothing less. Most of us pride ourselves on being pragmatic and would not even consider the possibility of a realm that is more real and more lasting than what the eyes can behold. We cling to our antiquated thoughts as a domesticated bird clings to his cage, fearful of the freedom that beckons all around in the belief that the only truth that exists is the one we grew up with and quite unwilling to open our minds just a little so that a superior light can shine through and illumine some of the darkest nooks and crannies of our conventional brains.

I will certainly provoke the ire of many a reader if I said that I consider such men and women to be instances of arrested development. But I would mitigate such a reaction by including myself among the lot of those beings I consider to be literally stillborn souls. We should not be offended by such a daring statement if we only reminded ourselves of what Robert Louis Stevenson himself had to say on this subject when he wrote that many people would say of themselves that they will "never become really accustomed to being here." Indeed, most of us are born, live and die without having given as much as a thought as to the meaning of our lives and only interested in getting ahead, often at the expense of our fellow creatures, bipeds and quadrupeds alike, and now of an environment that we all belong to but which we depredate at will without realizing that in so doing we stifle the very life-source on which our very survival depends. But, the light that shines from beyond is sometimes benevolent enough to cast a ray or two on our blind eyes and allow us to know the strange experience of ceasing --maybe for a split second --and all of a sudden we feel greater than ourselves, nature seems to speak to us with strange voices and to sparkle and shimmer like never before, and just for a moment we feel that paradise is within reach and that we are very much a part of it.

What differentiates the poets among us from those who are not is the intensity and the frequency of such mystical illuminations. The poet is he or she who frequently sees the invisible light shing through the veil of appearances and seeks to perpetuate it in the real world with an intensity that he transmutes into verbal expression. All of us are given a chance to have a glimpse of what I call the "Realm of True Delights" but few are willing to keep the inner eye open and see beyond the dimensions that bar us from the vastly transcending realities of the Great Beyond. We are quite content, as soon as the moment of illumination has subsided, to look upon it as just another figment of our imagination or a mirage and would not even report it to anyone for fear of becoming the laughing-stock of society. By locking ourselves within the restraining confines of familiarity, we have condemned ourselves like my beloved canary in his golden cage to a life of limited possibilities instead of limitless potentialities.

When Plato opined that "wonder is the beginning of wisdom," he may have meant merely that if it were not for curiosity we should have acquired no scientific knowledge. Most academicians, I know, would interpret Plato's words this way and I am qualified enough to argue against it for they may after all be right. But I suspect that Plato meant much more than that. It reminds me very much of one of the Traditional Sayings of Jesus that is as mysterious and deep as any other declaration that has reached us through the centuries: "He that wonders shall reign, and he that reigns shall rest. Look with wonder on that which is before you." There are many ways of interpreting this wonderful statement and yours will, I am sure, be as enlightening as the numerous other interpretations offered previously. The way I understand it is straighforward and quite relevant to the topic at hand: Until a man ceases to take the world he lives in for granted, as we take for granted the irrational contents of a dream, he is till at an embryonic stage of development, and it is only in waking up from the world of appearances and walk into the Light of Truth that he can begin to live as a spiritual being.

Talking of embryos, I would like to bring to your attention the well-known fact that a human embryo, as demonstrated by scientists in the past, briefly recapitulates the history of its human and pre-human ancestors. Anyone who has studied biology or watched documentary films on the various stages of fetal development knows that the fetus, at a certain phase, has vestigial gills and, at another stage, an unmistakable tail. At seven or eight months, the fetus is ready to be born as a human body. Nowadays, a human birth is so routine that it hardly makes the headlines unless it is extraordinarily abnormal or if a mother gives birth to quintuplets or sextuplets. All the knowledge regarding human reproduction as well as animal reproduction has been made possible because of man's scientific curiosity of finding out how the wheels go round, so to speak. But, if we step away just a little from all the scientific jargon and the hupla and muse with emotion and imagination on this wonderful act of nature called childbirth, we cannot help but marvel at the "wonder" of it all. You and I, when we come to think of it in real terms, live inside bodies that have gone through the genetic changes of many thousands of years. Why, may we ask, should the body repeat the history of all life before being suffused with sentient being? If we are right in divining that a man is a body, a life and a soul or spirit, and that the long process scientists refer to as the evolution of the species is actually a step-by-step involution of spirit within life and body, then we might infer from this that the body in its embryonic stage is evolving towards a new phase of development at which it will be able to admit the new element of spirit. Is the modern man ready to welcome this new spirit, having gone through many centuries of cellular development? Or has the body been made so imperfect through environmental and hence cellular deterioration as not to warrant man's ascension to the next level of development, i.e. the mystical and the spiritual? We may have only a few years to wait before Nature provides an ultimate answer to this puzzling question.

Our brief sojourn through time and space seems to be punctuated by events great and small, joyful and tragic. Before we can make any sense of what a few years of our lives have meant to ourselves and to the world at large, old age has already caught up with us and reminded us willy-nilly of our own insignificance in the cosmic scheme of things. There are many sad events that come to mar the very best of times and they impinge on our subconscious mind to a far deeper level than we care to admit. But of all the great calamities that strike at our peace and balance, none is as sad, I think, as when we lose our sense of wonder at life itself. If we could preserve what babies and children possess so naturally, we would find the most boring task or the most annoying person a source of enjoyment that would help us lead more fruitful lives. Babies are said to clutch at the moon and scientists will tell you that it is because to them all outside things are nothing but a flat picture. Because their minds have not yet taught their eyes to acquire a sense of perspective or distance, the moon in the sky seems to them as close as any bright little object that is only a few inches away from their noses. Or is it because they have not yet learned to analyze or rationalize everything they see, hear or touch as we do when we grow up? Philosophers would couch it in other terms by saying that the baby cannot correctly focus the objective as opposed to the subjective.

Sadly then, when we allow our minds to become too objective or scientific and leave no room for the subjective or the imaginative, we fail to see the real beauty of the commonest things that surround us and even when we do notice such beauty we tend to take it so much for granted that our imagination is not allowed to roam wild and free and chase after the mystic firefly. What a pity we cannot grow up into children again, crying and laughing whenever we feel like it and unafraid of touching mud and dirt! When was the last time have we been able to strip away all our clothes and run freely in the wind on a sun-drenched sandy beach without anyone ogling at us or pointing the accusing finger at our moral depravity? We all bear part of the responsibility for the loss of innocence that turned Eden into Sodom for we have opted for the immediate satisfaction of our sensual needs which Hollywood has always extolled and promoted throughout the world and not given much thought to the fountain of true and lasting happiness at which we slaked our thirst as children but which we let go dry to our own demise. When Wordsworth proclaimed that "The child is the father of man," he was only stating what should be obvious to all: the whole world was offered us on a silver platter when we were children and all we did in growing up was to soil and tarnish it to our own detriment.

Philosophers of the future --if the world does not blow itself to bits before then -- will probably have a lot to write about this sense of loss that has doomed the world to a cul-de-sac of depravity and insanity that is being perpetuated even as I write this letter in many parts of the world. Children in Asia are being corrupted by adults for sex and lucre and the world does not seem to care a whit about it. At the other end of the spectrum, nations that barely have enough to feed their people purchase nuclear reactors from irresponsible industrial powers with the express intention of building nuclear weapons to feed their megalomaniac propensities thereby posing a considerable threat to the future of humanity. Others use the pretext of international sports events to wave their flags and their own brand of tribalistic chauvinism instead of working for greater peace and harmony among nations. By the look of it, humanity is hell-bent on the road to total annihilation and most people are now resigned to salvage a little bit of security whenever and wherever they can find it without worrying too much about the fate of the earth or the children of tomorrow.

Is this a fair assessment of the state of the world in which we live? If so, is there something that can be done to turn back the wheel of time and if that is not possible to delay somewhat humanity's relentless march towards self-destruction? I would rather hope that the doomsday clock can be stopped before it strikes twelve for otherwise, like the dinosaurs, human beings as a species would cease to exist but unlike the dinosaurs there won't be any man or woman left alive to relate to posterity how utterly stupid we were to have allowed such a beautiful world to go asunder and not to have done anything or enough to preserve and protect what was given to us so abundantly by an omnipotent and omniscient Creator who created us in His own image even if we never really did anything to deserve it. And we could have saved it all if only we had not lost our sense of wonder!