 |
| James Stockdale |
Vira Chandra: There are truths that come to us like sudden thunderclaps, shaking everything at once.
And there are truths that do not shout, but arrive with the quiet persistence of mountain air — cold, thin, and impossibly clear — truths that can only be breathed slowly.
Among these is the truth about endurance.
It is not the bright, sugar-coated optimism that promises quick deliverance. Nor is it the grey resignation that folds its hands before the first step is taken. It is a rarer thing, a paradox: to look directly into the face of hardship without denial, and yet to keep the flame of faith alive without tying it to the clock.
This paradox is not merely a principle for surviving war or prison. It is the same narrow path a seeker must walk when the years pass and the goal remains hidden. In the silence of solitary worship, as in the silence of a cell, one learns that both the impatient dreamer and the hopeless realist collapse before the summit.
What remains is the one who walks on, day after day, without bargaining with time — holding the certainty of the destination, and the honesty of the present moment, in the same breath.
They call it the Stockdale Paradox. The name comes from Admiral James Stockdale, a U.S. Navy pilot shot down over North Vietnam in 1965. He was leading a raid when anti-aircraft fire crippled his plane. As he ejected and floated down into enemy territory, he told himself something few of us could bear to think in that moment: I will be here for at least five years. The prediction proved too short. He spent over seven years in captivity in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton,” much of it in solitary confinement. He was tortured repeatedly, denied medical treatment, and once cut his own face with a razor to avoid being paraded for propaganda photographs.
Years later, in an interview with Jim Collins, Stockdale was asked how he survived. His answer was stark, the kind of sentence that is not born in theory but in the long cold of lived reality:
“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
He explained that this balance—unwavering faith in the ultimate outcome, joined to clear-eyed acceptance of the present—was not simply comforting, it was essential. Lose faith in the end, and you drift into despair. Blind yourself to the reality of now, and the disappointment will crush you.
When Collins asked who didn’t make it, Stockdale’s reply came without hesitation:
“Oh, that’s easy. The optimists.”
By “optimists” he meant those who pinned their survival on specific deadlines:
“‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
He saw it happen again and again. The problem was not hope—it was hope with appointments. Each missed holiday, each broken prediction, was a fresh wound until the spirit could no longer bear it.
And yet, Stockdale did not credit the pessimists with much better odds. They gave up soon after arriving, surrendering to futility. To him, they were just the mirror image of the optimists—both equally unable to carry the flame over years of deprivation.
The survivors were those who lived in that rare, almost paradoxical balance: the discipline to face the most brutal facts of the present, and the faith to know—not merely to wish—that you will prevail in the end.
Another voice, from a different prison and a different war, confirms the same truth. Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and survivor of Nazi concentration camps, watched closely as men perished or endured under conditions that erased almost every human comfort. In Man’s Search for Meaning he wrote:
“The first to break were those who believed that everything would end soon. Then those who didn’t believe it would ever end. The ones that survived were those who focused on their affairs without waiting for something else to happen.”
Frankl noticed the same two fatal illusions Stockdale had seen in the Hanoi Hilton. One group staked its life on a near horizon—“by Christmas,” “by spring,” “when the war ends”—and when that horizon receded, they collapsed in despair. The other group saw only an endless corridor of suffering and gave up almost immediately.
The survivors carried neither the fever of deadlines nor the frost of resignation. They anchored themselves in the work of the day at hand—repairing a shoe, sharing a crust of bread, silently reciting a prayer—while holding, somewhere in the hidden places of the heart, the certainty that there was an end, and that they would meet it.
In both camps—the barbed-wire hell of Europe and the humid cells of Hanoi—the human spirit was kept alive by the same posture: faith untied from the calendar, and attention rooted in the smallest duties of the present.
What Stockdale and Frankl learned in the harshest of human prisons is no less true in the hidden chambers of the heart. The same two illusions—impatient optimism and cold resignation—also haunt the path of devotion.
Binod Bihari das Babaji, writing in Sadhu Sadhu: A Life of Baba Sri Tinkadi Gosvami, describes the life of those who come to Vrindavan with burning longing for the Divine Couple:
“Many practitioners come to the holy land, Sri Vrindavan, with a strong desire and enthusiasm for worship in order to reach the lotus feet of Sri-Sri Yugala-kisora. In the first stage, the strong enthusiasm they have for solitary worship (bhajana) is clearly visible… But, after doing solitary worship for a long time, the hopelessness ‘I have not achieved anything’ arises and covers the practitioner’s mind… If an unshakable certainty is in the mind of the sadhaka that ‘Radharani will surely bestow mercy on me in this birth,’ then the enthusiasm for solitary worship and longing will gradually increase. Such faith is absolutely necessary for attaining the lotus feet of the Lord.”
It is the same paradox Stockdale named, now spoken in the language of bhajan: never lose faith in the end, never lie about the now. A vow that is neither tethered to a date nor surrendered to apathy.
In my own seeing, this is one of the rarest qualities among seekers. I have watched friends burn out on both ends: some waited for years on an answer they thought was “due,” then walked away in silence when nothing came. Others abandoned belief altogether, deciding the goal was too far to matter. And perhaps more tragic still are those who keep their “spiritual career” intact—the robes, the titles, the polished image—while the inner flame has quietly gone out.
On the genuine path there is no such thing as “waiting until Christmas.” The Beloved cannot be scheduled, and the absence of Her call is not a verdict. The only faith worth keeping is the one that can survive long silences, long winters, and still wake before dawn to light the lamp.
For me, this is the essence of perseverance: a heart that knows the end is certain, and hands that are willing to meet the raw stone of the present without flinching. A life given entirely to the work of this day, yet lived in the fragrance of an unbroken promise.
And so, like the survivors of both cell and kutir, I say to myself:
“The Beloved will come — but when, I do not know. Until then, I keep the lamp lit.”
The faces and landscapes are different — the concrete cell in Hanoi, the frostbitten barracks in Europe, the quiet lanes of Vrindavan — but the law of endurance is the same. The soul that lasts is the soul that holds two truths in unbroken tension: the end is certain, and the present is to be met exactly as it is.
It is a discipline without glamour. Some days it feels like chiseling at a mountain with a pin. Some days the silence is heavier than stone. And yet, those who keep walking discover something the calendar-bound never will: that the flame grows brighter the longer it burns without reward.
This is why the mystics speak of waiting not as a pause, but as a practice. To light the lamp when no one comes. To keep the vow when no one sees. To trust that the unseen path is leading exactly where it must, and that the One who called you will, in the fullness of Her own hour, call you again.
And so the journey continues — without deadlines, without resignation — beneath a sky too vast for endings.
No comments:
Post a Comment