Have you seen a sandwich
Two pieces of bread held together
By a layer of seasoned meat
Or some veg fry ?
When I first saw one,
I cried.
You know why ?
God spoke to me –
If only you placed me between
You and your wife,
You and your neighbour,
You and your son,
I could hold the whole humanity
Together.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Sunday, July 17, 2011
INSTITUTION OF MEMORY
Why do we go gaga over opening of Bhagawan’s Samadhi, or Mahasamadhi, as reverentially termed, its holiness notwithstanding?
Isn’t it celebrating what we have lost?
Isn’t it canonising after crucifixion?
Why should we call it Good Friday, the day Jesus allowed himself to be nailed on a cross, so that we understand the meaning of love?
Is it celebrating love, or celebrating our failure to recognise it when it was available?
Why aren’t we ashamed of glorifying someone who gave himself up to our insensitiveness?
But what else could we do in order to remember our shame?
Yes, what else could we do?
Do we, however, remember our shame by ending our insensitiveness?
We remember it by forgetting it.
Isn’t it a cruelty that we worship memory, but do not adopt it?
Cruelty to ourselves.
Once Bhagwan asked, “Why are people so ready to die for religion, but not live it?”
Why should we justify life in its death?
He told us several times, “Live, so that you shall not die again”.
But death seems to be a greater reality than life!
So while they live, we forget what they live for; and when they quit, we want to remember once they lived!
When they try to show us the way, we think, anyway, the Way is here; and when the guiding finger is no more here, we remember that the Way was here.
The difference is, the calendar has turned over a page.
Or, has it?
And nothing more?
From Janaki-Ram to Janaki Ramachandran, have we travelled long?
Ah, the Mahasamadhi is beautiful.
Made of imported marble, exquisitely crafted.
There is a touch of gold too.
You can go near the platform, lay your flowers at its foot.
People in their thousand jostle just to pass by it.
You feel Swami is actually present there.
We always like to freeze the water, and admire the ice .
We are filled with awe at the wealth found in a temple, and debate endlessly how to spend it, and hardly notice the Temple standing there endlessly waiting for someone to say You are beautiful.
We raise a storm over who paid how much, and when, for the marbles, and yawn at the sweaty marble maker.
He is, becomes He was, ending up in He has been.
New deluxe editions of what he said, and what he was, take the pride of our collection.
New visuals created testimony the ultimate technology we fathered.
New Arts fuse him into our tired lives, and we point to each other the new way of the golden dawn, though none of us has seen it.
Journeys become easier, dinners tastier, transport more comfortable, residences cosier, relationships faster, and the memory shorter.
A new Institution is born.
But where is He?
Isn’t it celebrating what we have lost?
Isn’t it canonising after crucifixion?
Why should we call it Good Friday, the day Jesus allowed himself to be nailed on a cross, so that we understand the meaning of love?
Is it celebrating love, or celebrating our failure to recognise it when it was available?
Why aren’t we ashamed of glorifying someone who gave himself up to our insensitiveness?
But what else could we do in order to remember our shame?
Yes, what else could we do?
Do we, however, remember our shame by ending our insensitiveness?
We remember it by forgetting it.
Isn’t it a cruelty that we worship memory, but do not adopt it?
Cruelty to ourselves.
Once Bhagwan asked, “Why are people so ready to die for religion, but not live it?”
Why should we justify life in its death?
He told us several times, “Live, so that you shall not die again”.
But death seems to be a greater reality than life!
So while they live, we forget what they live for; and when they quit, we want to remember once they lived!
When they try to show us the way, we think, anyway, the Way is here; and when the guiding finger is no more here, we remember that the Way was here.
The difference is, the calendar has turned over a page.
Or, has it?
And nothing more?
From Janaki-Ram to Janaki Ramachandran, have we travelled long?
Ah, the Mahasamadhi is beautiful.
Made of imported marble, exquisitely crafted.
There is a touch of gold too.
You can go near the platform, lay your flowers at its foot.
People in their thousand jostle just to pass by it.
You feel Swami is actually present there.
We always like to freeze the water, and admire the ice .
We are filled with awe at the wealth found in a temple, and debate endlessly how to spend it, and hardly notice the Temple standing there endlessly waiting for someone to say You are beautiful.
We raise a storm over who paid how much, and when, for the marbles, and yawn at the sweaty marble maker.
He is, becomes He was, ending up in He has been.
New deluxe editions of what he said, and what he was, take the pride of our collection.
New visuals created testimony the ultimate technology we fathered.
New Arts fuse him into our tired lives, and we point to each other the new way of the golden dawn, though none of us has seen it.
Journeys become easier, dinners tastier, transport more comfortable, residences cosier, relationships faster, and the memory shorter.
A new Institution is born.
But where is He?
Sunday, July 10, 2011
THE PROCESS AND THE PURPOSE
Is living a process or a purpose?
Is dying beginning of the road, or end?
To live for a purpose is to raise the purpose above living, to monitor living by the purpose.
To live for the sake of living is to cut the goose for golden eggs.
One who pays any price for living, can not tell the difference between
dinner and the dinner plate, the clay-pot and the pot-clay.
One who does not pay any price for living, asks his cook to make him
a cup of coffee with no coffee.
Can you live truthfully without a truth, and lie without denying it ?
Can you make a dish without dressing that which it is made of,
or dress that without a pan on fire ?
Can you have an eagle without a sky, and a sky without a distance from earth ?
Can you have a child without childhood, and a mother without motherhood ?
And yet we talk of ends and means, when neither can manifest without the other.
And yet we talk of becoming apart from being, while we hardly know one from the other.
Words are weeds, thoughts a bounded pool;
Roads to arriving mirror the arrival.
The beginning a blur in end, end a blur at start
Like eternity and time, each of the other a part.
The intervening space an entertaining tale,
That connects the ends, and ends the tale.
Is dying beginning of the road, or end?
To live for a purpose is to raise the purpose above living, to monitor living by the purpose.
To live for the sake of living is to cut the goose for golden eggs.
One who pays any price for living, can not tell the difference between
dinner and the dinner plate, the clay-pot and the pot-clay.
One who does not pay any price for living, asks his cook to make him
a cup of coffee with no coffee.
Can you live truthfully without a truth, and lie without denying it ?
Can you make a dish without dressing that which it is made of,
or dress that without a pan on fire ?
Can you have an eagle without a sky, and a sky without a distance from earth ?
Can you have a child without childhood, and a mother without motherhood ?
And yet we talk of ends and means, when neither can manifest without the other.
And yet we talk of becoming apart from being, while we hardly know one from the other.
Words are weeds, thoughts a bounded pool;
Roads to arriving mirror the arrival.
The beginning a blur in end, end a blur at start
Like eternity and time, each of the other a part.
The intervening space an entertaining tale,
That connects the ends, and ends the tale.
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