Out of Wine. Life is Crap.

That's what the woman's shirt said yesterday at work. It was a pink t-shirt with an illustrated chalkboard sign next to an empty wine glass. On the sign it said "Out of wine." Underneath that there was a handwritten font that said "Life is crap."

I had to laugh in my head at the absurdity of the t-shirt's frank boldness. It also made me wonder about the character of the woman wearing the shirt. Does she really think life is crap without wine? Was it simply tongue in cheek? As it's said, there's always some truth in our joking.

Taking the message of this shirt in a literal way it's saying, "Without being constantly intoxicated, life is miserable and unbearable". The frightening and sad thing is that so many people have this type of mindset, if not in an overtly way than in their psyche. We need some type of intoxication, (which can manifest in a variety of sense gratifying activities from drugs to sex to shopping) in order to feel some sense of happiness, joy and satisfaction in life. It's the completely materialistic conception of life, i.e. - that the purpose of life is simply to pursue sense gratification. This is the ultimate goal of the materialistic person.

When I was looking for that above image, I found out that there is a company called "Life is Crap".

http://lifeiscrap.shop.musictoday.com/Default.aspx

They make all kind of t-shirts and accessories on the theme of when and why life is "crap". The themes are essentially when bad things happen to us. From a Krishna Conscious perspective we could look at this website and realize that life is not "crap" because bad things happen to us, rather bad things happen to us because of our past and current vikarma. And the only thing that makes us perceive these things as being "crap" is our mind. From a perspective of transcendence one can understand, "These things are happening to me from my previous misdeeds. They are simply happening as a reaction. All I can do is tolerate them." Of course a devotee wouldn't be running out of wine and thinking this! But as aspiring devotees seemingly bad things happen to us and our loved ones all of the time: illness, loss of money, loss of business, accidents, etc.

These events in and of themselves are not "crap", rather it's our crappy consciousness that makes them appear as "crap". (Wow...there's a lot of crap in this post!) It's all about how we perceive and codify the events in our lives. There's really nothing "good" or "bad" happening to us, but it's our minds that codify it as such.

It always comes back to the Avanti brahmana. You want to talk about life being crap! He had people taunting him, stealing his stuff, hitting him on the head, even farting and spitting on him and peeing on his food on a daily basis! Most of us would not be able to endure what he was experiencing, but never once did he say, "Life is crap!" Rather he understood his transcendental position as a spiritual being and could realize that everything he was experiencing was simply the three modes of material nature acting as a result of his past karma. This is the consciousness we're after! This is genuine Krishna Consciousness! Not the type of consciousness that says, "Oh, I don't have this, I don't have that, this bad thing happened, etc., so therefore my life is crap!" The only reason we should lament is because we're not genuinely Krishna Conscious. Now there's a t-shirt for you:

No Krishna Consciousness. Life is crap.