a water drop
child of space and cloud
falling in fear of its loneliness
afraid in its littleness
falling
then surrendering to the ocean
it feels its infiniteness
rising through space again it knows its all-pervasiveness
it is space, it is cloud, it is raindrop
it comes in its glory
in its heart is the sun
it comes, it falls; it comes not, it falls not
it is space and cloud and raindrop
it is not these
it is
Recently, Mansukh Anand was quite incapacitated. It was, he thought, the result of carelessness in his younger days. He was quite a sports person who trained hard — perhaps indiscriminately hard. The result was some damage to his body, felt only in these later years. The specialist physician told him that apart from dosing himself with pain pills, there was little that medical science could do for him.
And so Mansukh Anand was confined to bed. For a man whose very life depended on freedom, it was a veritable death. Not only were his physical movements restricted, but his mind itself seemed to be weighed down by iron chains.
In the worst moments — and these were few — he regretted the foolish pride that brought him to his present detriment. He described his pain in the following images:
an ink- drop falling into a water glass
shrieks the silence
a wraithing mist stretching in tatters
shrouds the internal space
But in his better moments, when he could detach himself from his pain, he thought that all this pain was coming from his own distant past. And there was nought that he could do but accept it as graciously as he could.
Again when pain engulfed him, he would think that it was all a terrible evil only on the surface, that it was a blessing in the guise of a curse come to teach him and, in some inexplicable way, strengthen him.
With joined palms, he would say: ‘Welcome, O Terrible Goddess, welcome! Do with me what you will, but teach me the way out of this body!’
On my radio programme last week, we were discussing knowledge, action and agent as described by Sri Krishna in the Gita (18:20—2). A sattvic person with sattvic knowledge sees the one indestructible reality in all. He works tirelessly and without attachment, but with great enthusiasm and determination. He is a source of inspiration for everyone and gets the best out of all.
A rajasic person sees differentiation and works for his own gain. However, he becomes tired and complains. He can be violent and abusive. His moods are always swinging between elation and depression.
The tamasic being sees one thing as if it were the whole. He has no care about loss of resources or reputation. His mind may be unsteady, and he is usually vulgar and malicious.
A number of our listeners called in to tell about their experiences with the various types of people. One lady said that she was constantly abused in every way by a husband who became so unstable that he eventually committed suicide. Just as her whole life seemed to be coming together again after many a year, her whole past suddenly came alive again: her present boss himself is abusive, and is starting to treat her in exactly the way that her husband used to. The poor woman broke down as she told her story to me.
Many said that though we expect the officials in religious organisations to have sattvic qualities, they are really rajasic-tamasic in their nature. As a result, there are clashes among the members, especially during their meetings or during special functions. My own experience is that all too often an official in an organisation will address another in angry tones with raised voice – and that, too, to cover up his own short-comings. The respect due to the elders is absent.
The following story I relish very much. The chairman of a religious organisation and a few of his supporters were constantly abusive and dictatorial. The congregation could not tolerate it anymore, and with one mind and in one action they gave the boot to the villains! Glory to such heroic Hindus!
But generally, Hinduism has brainwashed us into accepting whatever treatment that is meted out to us. It teaches: It is your lot. Accept it – passively. And turn into spineless worms? What nonsense! I recall the words of Swami Vivekananda – the householders must fight to protect and defend what is their own; and that ‘only cowards and those who are weak commit sin and tell lies’.
For my own part, I do not think there is any point in belonging to an organisation, which, though its ideals be my own, heaps insult and humiliation upon me.
“O Thou Lord of Gauri, O Thou Mother of the Universe, vouchsafe manliness unto me! O Thou Mother of Strength, take away my weakness, take away my unmanliness, and make me a Man!”
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There are many occasions in the life of Sri Ramakrishna that connect him with Lord Shiva.
In the Shiva Purana, Lord Shiva manifested as a column of light when Lord Brahma and Lord Vishnu were each proclaiming himself as the greatest among the deities. This particular manifestation of Lord Shiva is known as Lingodbhava-murti.
In Kamarpukur, Chandramani, the mother of Sri Ramakrishna, saw a flood of light emanate from the Shivalinga and enter her body. And she felt that she was with child! Thus, Sri Ramakrishna was born in this age as the lingodbhava, the light of Shiva.
Sri Ramakrishna was born three days after Shivaratri, on 18 February 1836, a few minutes before the sunrise. Just as at the birth of the incarnation of this age, a light spread over the world, so, even today, the light of knowledge is spreading to every corner of the world, dispelling the hordes of darkness in the forms of ignorance.
As soon as the baby Ramakrishna was born, Dhani, the midwife, placed him on the floor to attend to the mother. On turning her attention to the child, she was surprised to find that he had somehow rolled into the fireplace, and was lying there all covered with ashes – like Lord Shiva! If our goal is God, the ashes symbolise the turning away from (or burning of) the sensual, a renunciation of the worldly to attain the spiritual. One Puranic story tells how Lord Shiva burnt to ashes the god of love (that is, sensual delights). Describing Sri Ramakrishna, Holy Mother said that renunciation was the jewel of Sri Ramakrishna.
Kshudiram, the father of Sri Ramakrishna, named the child ‘Shambhuchandra’, one of the names of Lord Shiva.
Sri Ramakrishna performed various sadhanas and re-affirmed the validity of each. But he realised Lord Shiva without any effort. When he was nine, Sri Ramakrishna was asked to play the role of Lord Shiva in a dramatic performance on the night of Shivaratri. As he was adorned as Lord Shiva, he soared into a divine consciousness. And the devotees themselves were transported, as it were, to the very abode of Lord Shiva. Sri Ramakrishna remained in that ecstatic state for three days!
In the samudra-manthana episode, Lord Shiva took in the poison that emanated from the churning of the ocean by the gods and demons to obtain the nectar of immortality. At the end of his earthly life, Sri Ramakrishna had throat cancer. One viewpoint is that it was the result of Sri Ramakrishna’s swallowing the poison of the karmas of the millions of struggling souls who were seeking his shelter. Both drank the poison and kept it in the throat for the welfare of the world.
Sri Ramakrishna used to say: Jiva is Shiva, and Shiva is jiva. In other words, we ordinary beings are really Shiva but ignorant and bound. Our goal in life should be to reclaim our Shivahood.
I AM DIVINE
An ancient sage addressed all humanity thus: ‘Listen, O Ye Children of Immortal Bliss!’ In the present age, Swami Vivekananda, too, spoke to us in exactly the same way: ‘Children of immortal bliss … heirs of immortal bliss, Ye are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings.’ That is his language.
This is a notion that runs counter to most western thinking which holds that one is the body. A bit of rational and reasonable thinking immediately dispels this erroneous perception. Something there was that existed before this creation, something from which everything has come. We may use the word ‘God’, or the neutral and indefinable ‘It’. And it is from this Divine that I, too, have come. Logically, I am divine, the very essence of God am I. I am the spark, and He / It is the fire.
But the generality of us do not think of ourselves in this way. Swamiji inspires us to think of ourselves as divine rather than as body, and illustrates it by narrating the following story.
‘A lioness in search of prey came upon a flock of sheep, and as she jumped at one of them, she gave birth to a cub and died on the spot. The young lion was brought up in the flock, ate grass, and bleated like a sheep, and it never knew that it was a lion. One day a lion came across the flock and was astonished to see in it a huge lion eating grass and bleating like a sheep. At his sight the flock fled and the lion-sheep with them. But the lion watched his opportunity and one day found the lion – sheep asleep. He woke him up and said, “You are a lion.” The other said, “No,” and began to bleat like a sheep. But the stranger lion took him to a lake and asked him to look in the water at his own image and see if it did not resemble him, the stranger lion. He looked and acknowledged that it did. Then the stranger lion began to roar and asked him to do the same. The lion -sheep tried his voice and was soon roaring as grandly as the other. And he was a sheep no longer. My friends, I would like to tell you all that you are mighty as lions.’
Swamiji tells us: ‘Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion that you are sheep. You are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal. Ye are not matter, ye are not bodies. Matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter.’
A successful poem (if ever there is such a thing) should have (for me at least) a profound thought, a penetrating perception beyond the mundane; and a deep and pure emotion. Then, control – even the vers libre or the ‘unstructured’ poem must have a discipline behind it.
Life itself is a poem. Every encounter, every event is a poem. And I fashion them all. (Oh, the joy of it!) but with tools I am ever refining.
We fashion them, these artefacts that make up life — never changing their structure. We are not meant for that. We were never meant for that. Re-creation is not our lot! But to fashion every perception, every experience with the knowledge ‘I am divine!’
Dissatisfaction, anger, the thousand attendant hordes — all are because things do not fit my mould. They will not. Never will. They were made differently — as you and I and the myriad elements that constitute this universe.
But still — behind the darkest smoke is the divine sun hid. Though we may not be able to blow away the smoke at first, we remember at least that in the hearts of all things a light is bursting forth. It is the nature of smoke to obscure, it is the nature of the scorpion to sting. And it is my nature to know behind them all I myself am lying hidden!
THE SONG OF THE FREE
Swami Vivekananda’s teaching in the west often brought him into conflict with others, especially Christian ministers. Once he had argued with a Presbyterian priest who became abusive and left in anger. Then he had a longer fight with Mrs Bull. Mary Hale therefore advised Swamiji not to state his philosophical position as strongly as he was wont to. Swamiji gave much thought to this, but replied (in a letter on Ist Feb 1895) that he could not, would not, change his stance: ‘I do everything to be sweet, but when it comes to a horrible compromise with the truth within, then I stop.’ Manu’s advice to Sannyasins, ‘Live alone, walk alone’ became very clear to him. He saw that all friendship and love was limiting and exacting. While the ordinary ones follow the commands of society, he wrote, those such as he stand alone and draw society up towards them. It was a path of thorns, he said, but ‘the children of truth live for ever.’
In the letter, which is ‘full of the fire of a Sannyasin’s spirit’, Swamiji states his position in clear terms. A fortnight later Swamiji wrote to Mary Hale again, this time in verse, to assuage her hurt feelings. In the first three stanzas, he playfully tells her: ‘You need not be sorry/For the hard raps I give you’ because ‘With my whole heart I love you.’ And he would ‘Life, name, or fame forego/ For the sweet sisters four’. The rest of the poem has been entitled ‘The Song of the Free’.
Through four powerful images, Swamiji describes his response to her criticism. When the cobra is injured, it unfurls its hood; when the lion is heart-struck, his rage echoes through the desert; when the flame is stirred, it again starts to blaze; and when lightning cleaves the clouds, then falls the rain. The imagery is suggestive of Swamiji’s own power and his being foremost among all men. He concludes with:
When the soul is stirred to its inmost depth Great ones unfold their best!In his letter, he tells Mary: ‘The Lord … will not allow me to become a hypocrite. Now let what is in [me] come out.’
Then Swamiji presents the frailties of the human being. The physical body is subject to the laws of nature: there is change, deterioration and decline, and death. The human spirit also wanes with the passage of time (‘heart grow faint’). Friendship similarly is impermanent. In the language of Shakespeare, it alters when ‘it alteration finds and bends with the remover to remove’. Nothing in this world endures. He had written: ‘Youth and beauty vanish, life and wealth vanish, name and fame vanish, even the mountains crumble into dust. Friendship and love vanish. Truth alone abides.’
He is neither afraid of Fate and its ‘hundred horrors’ nor of the ‘clotted darkness’ that will ‘block the way’. These horrors of fate are really self-created. Swamiji says: ‘I am responsible for my fate, I am the bringer of good unto myself. I am the bringer of evil. I am the Pure and Blessed One.’ About fear he had written ‘I am not afraid. Fear is the greatest sin my religion teaches.’
Apart from people and fate, nature itself tries ‘To crush you out’. As long as we think of ourselves as a body-mind complex, so long are we subject to the terrors and travails of the world, and (like Hamlet) suffer ‘The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ and we are heir to ‘The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks.’ Swamiji remarks: ‘Life itself is a state of continuous struggle between ourselves and everything outside.’
One of the most quoted lines of Swamiji come from that famous sutra of his:
”Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship or psychic control, or philosophy, by one, or more or all of these – and be free. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas; rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details.”Therefore, Swamiji reminds his soul (that is, himself): ‘You are Divine.’ And then adds those bold words of encouragement, in the context, to his soul; but it is addressed to all humanity:
March on and on, Nor right nor left, but to the goal!These words are an echo of the lines from the Katha Upanishad (from which Swamiji often quoted): ‘Arise! Awake! Stop not till the goal is reached!’
The theme of the divinity of oneself is further developed in the next stanzas. Swamiji’s elucidation recalls for us the ancient Greek philosophers, but characteristically, he adds a further dimension to the thought. One is neither an animal nor an angel, nor a man. And then the lines that follow present some of the thoughts in the ‘Nirvana Ashtakam’, a favourite of the Swami: ‘Nor body, mind, nor he nor she’. The body, of course, is beyond maleness and femaleness. (What a wonderful truth lies hidden here in our mortal cage of flesh and bones!) Therefore the soul and God (Brahman) are called ‘It’ in the scriptures. So wonderful and marvellous is it that our Upanishads declare that the mind cannot comprehend it nor speech express it. But our rishis in their divine ecstasy have sung thus: ‘Brahman is Truth, Brahman is Pure Consciousness, Brahman is Infinite!’ (satyam-jnaanam-anantam brahma).
In a lecture, Swamiji tells how a philosopher poet sang: ‘Behold the sun and the moon and the stars: I am the light that is shining in them! I am the beauty of the fire! I am the power in the universe! For, I am It! I am It!’ He explains that the Self is all that exists. ‘The sun exists because I declare it does, the world exists because I declare it does. Without me they cannot remain, for I am Existence, Knowledge, and Bliss Absolute — ever happy, ever pure, ever beautiful.’
Thus he glorifies the eternal nature of the soul. So powerful is the language, so graphic the image, that we are swept away in the current of the poetry, and we feel (momentarily though it may be) our own eternal and infinite nature. Such is the power of his language and thought! Jay Vivekananda!
In these lines we hear the echo of the Rg Vedic ‘Hymn of Creation’, and the question asked in wonderment by our ancient rishis: ‘When there was neither aught nor naught, and darkness was hidden in darkness, who projected this universe? What then existed?’ In the poem, Swamiji’s answer: ‘I was, I am, and I will be!’
We may forget this truth. Thus Swamiji, in that beautiful lecture entitled ‘The Open Secret’, says that we should remind ourselves of it always – as he did. He recounts: ‘Many times I have been in the jaws of death, starving, footsore, and weary. For days and days I had no food, and often could walk no further. I would sink down under a tree, and life would seem to be ebbing away. … I could scarcely think, but at last the mind reverted to the idea: “I have no fear nor death; never was I born, never did I die; I never hunger or thirst. I am It! I am It! The whole of nature cannot crush me; it is my servant. Assert thy strength, thou Lord of lords and God of gods! Regain thy lost empire! Arise and walk and stop not!” And I would rise up, reinvigorated; and here I am today, living! Thus, whenever darkness comes, assert the reality and everything adverse must vanish.’
Though there is so much beauty in creation (‘The beauteous earth, the glorious sun,/ The calm sweet moon, the spangled sky’), yet ‘They live in bonds, in bonds they die’. In the lecture entitled ‘Freedom’, Swamiji says: ‘This universe is only a part of infinite existence, thrown into a peculiar mould, composed of space, time, and causation.’ By this universe is to be understood ‘only that portion of existence which is limited by our mind – the universe of the senses, which we can see, feel, touch, hear, think of, imagine.’
In another lecture (‘I am that I am’), he says: ‘When I am bound by nature, by name and form, by time, space and causality, I do not know what I truly am.’ And ‘The awakening of the soul to its bondage and its effort to stand up and assert itself – this is called life. Success in this struggle is called evolution. The eventual triumph, when all the slavery is blown away, is called salvation, Nirvana, freedom.’
Then, he is ‘beyond all sense, all thought, / The Witness of the Universe!’ In this state, there is only the knowledge or experience of Oneness. Beyond duality, beyond multiplicity, he realises that he is the sum total of all the souls. There is no differentiation, and so he can only love.
In the final stanza, he urges his soul to awaken from this dream and be free from all the bonds of relative existence, to ‘Know once for all that I am He!’
