An encounter with life

 

Me – God, I will tell you a story.

God – Go ahead.

Me – Once I was driving by a riverside road. On one side flows the majestic, serene Chitravati, and the other side, flanked by a low hill, was a garbage heap. I noticed a rickety wheelchair parked near the heap, and a man in rags sitting in it. He had something in his hands wrapped with a piece of newspaper. He slowly opened it. It revealed a dried-up roti, and a few pieces of onion. A few steps away, on the edge of the garbage heap sat a girl with a torn frock, around six or seven years old, rummaging through the garbage, probably the daughter of the man in the wheelchair. She got a picture book from the heap, the kind children use at start of schooling. She started turning the pages, watching every picture on every page, with a hungry look. Surely, she was missing the school which she never had an opportunity to attend. To tell you honestly, God, I felt so hurt at my settled life and high education that I stopped my scooter a little away from her, and didn’t have the courage to look back at her. I stared at Chitrvati’s unruffled flow, as if all is right with the world, and I had nothing to worry. Tell me God, can you accept this glaring injustice of life as normal? Why should the innocent girl be denied food, shelter and education to find a place in your world?

God –This is not a new question, and you know the standard answer to such standard questions.

Me – Yes, you will throw at me your favourite karma theory! In spite of all the wisdom of the theory, when I imagine myself in her place, and ask myself why should I have to endure this injustice, I have no answer. Do you?

God – Um, running this huge network of life hasn’t been an easy job for me too.

Me – But since you are the engineer who set up this network, you owe an answer to all to those who fall a prey to this system, don’t you?

God – Even though I give an answer, will that help anyone? I can only point out the wrong tabs they hit, and the engine could not be interfered with. The huge network, to stay in the functional mode, must work according to its algorithm.

Me – haven’t you installed any checks when it malfunctions?

God – Say when it does not function the way you would like it to, though you are not in a position to see the entire landscape. That is no malfunction.

Me – The purpose of your network, I suppose, is to ensure healthy and happy life, bring justice to everyone, and make available to everyone opportunities to fulfil their legitimate aspirations. When somewhere the opposite takes place, is it not a malfunction?

God – I have several sets of rules installed to enable its versatility. When you access it, you are free to choose which tab to touch. That activates the set of rules you have chosen. After that you cannot undo it, because the whole system is interconnected. You cannot ask the head of the department to rewrite the system when you hit a wrong tab. The system cannot be interrupted, and by the time you realise your mistake billions of functions had been started.

Me – That is too mechanical for a living system, don’t you agree? And whatever I know of you, you don’t promote a machine-like life.

God – Um, you may be correct. I don’t really like a mechanical life. You must have seen a sitar? It has a number of strings of varying thickness. The player should know which string to touch where, when, and in what way to produce any music. But the sitar itself is a tool. It cannot take a decision which raga to play, can it?

Me – But the player can reset the tension of the wires, and when he knows a wrong note has been produced, he can dilute it, or even negate it with an innovative new note.

God – Yes, that is known only to an expert. I am not the player, you are. You must practise to earn that ability. But if you choose to stay a novice, you can only produce dreadful noise, no music. It happens to most people.

Me – Ok, let us come to practical questions. Can you give an expert commentary on the state of the garbage girl and her father on the basis of your sitar theory?

God – My boy, you already know that a good teacher explains the formula, and a good student learns to solve individual problems according to that. The teacher cannot be expected to work out each problem of each student. He might indicate where you could go wrong. He might also point out how to get out of a misstep when you commit one. But you have to carry out the remedial step yourself.

Me – In this case whose misstep has landed them in this situation?

God – Both. Everyone in this network is connected. In a dance when one person takes a wrong step, the entire performance is affected. Dhritarastra took a wrong step, and the Mahabharata war was the result. Krishna could not help it. He tried to enter the chain of actions, but could he stop the tragic war? The identity of one person is a mechanism which ties them up with the cosmic identity. The suffering of the father-daughter is both a cause and a consequence. It caused empathy in you, but suffered indifference in others, which created feelings of distress and frustration in them. All this is a symptom of being in the chain, and responding to it your way. The nature of your identity affects you, as well as other identities in the chain.

Me – So God, you are saying that each to his measure is the rule? Each person is part of a huge engineering layout which cannot be modified?

God – It can be modified, but not by an external agent. It can be done internally by modifying individual responses. For example, you feel empathy with them, but this is not a fixed response. The sight of the calm river flowing by might have triggered a certain mood in you which facilitated empathy to arise. There may be a hundred causes acting on you at that moment, a consequence of the way you have handled yourself in hundreds of different situations. You stopped there, and deliberated about it, which was your choice, while others passing by them might not even have noticed them. And that was their choice. I give you an opportunity to modify your responses to life, how you do it is your choice. And, you will agree, the duo’s response to life is also affected by yours. I am an outsider; I cannot alter it unilaterally.

Me – But God, you are also known for interventions in individual lives, and alter them drastically. You did that to Angulimala. You did that to emperor Ashoka. You have done so to scores of others.

God – The entire mechanism of life is built on the technique of compassion. Compassion here does not mean an out of the way response. It is a way of providing an opportunity, an invitation to modify your responses. I only facilitate this opportunity to be noticed, and the subjective experience, to switch your channel. That might, at times, manifest objective alterations. When Arjuna faced the army with Krishna holding the reins, it was an opportunity for him to take stock of his responses, and the way he struggled for an anchor resulted in the Geeta, which was a huge thing for the entire mechanism of life. Krishna had not planned this, but he allowed Arjun’s intensity to work out. You have to decide if you want to live your life intensely, or go on willy-nilly floating.

Me – Okay God, given that all you said is very wise, and irrefutable, there still remains another side to this question of human suffering.

God – What is that?

Me – When a person needs a wheelchair to be pushed around by a daughter seven or eight years old, denied her legitimate claim to food, shelter, and education, looked down upon by the world as pest, what should be their response to your elevated ideas of life? Won’t they feel anger, frustration, envy, and raise arms against the cosmic dispensation? You and I can talk about whatever we did from outside, and you admitted that you an outsider to the system, trying to justify the management, but can the people inside it see the way you see it?

God –You asked me about the mechanism, and I explained it to you. It remains in place whether you notice it or not.

Me - Shouldn’t you do something to help them notice the mechanism? However, even if they notice it will their suffering end? How do you want them to respond to their own helplessness? How do you want them to respond to an apathetic world? Do you want them to see it as cause, or effect?

God – You are making the same mistake again and again. I want you to see the life situation as a part of the entire mechanism. Your response to your suffering is part of the entire response chain. Don’t you see if you had stopped near the garbage heap, and spoken to the duo kindly, offered them a packet of sambar-rice, or offed to help the child go to a school, they would have modified their complaint against the cosmic dispensation, as you say? But you were satisfied with a fleeting feeling, and passed on.

Me – O’ I did not see this your way.

God – Their suffering caused empathy in you, but you fell short of the need to act on it, and came straight to me to accuse me of insensitivity, of a mechanical universe!

Me – No God, I am not accusing you of anything. I only imagined how I would have responded if I was them. I came to you to understand how I should look upon the huge disparity in life created by a kind God.

God – By your empathy you initiated a subtle chain, but could not carry it further. There might be several reasons. Imagine all the people who pass by them notice this chunk of life and begin to believe they are also connected with it at some level, and had some responsibility  towards the duo, would they still feel that the world is apathetic? And with that won’t their response be gradually modified? The duo’s life is not entirely their responsibility, it is part of the social responsibility. Even if their present life is a consequence, you can stop it from being a cause for more poverty and ignorance, and help rewrite the rules. In usual human relationships too, I provide you with a lot of opportunities to reset the function of the chain.

Me -- My feeling of empathy could be an expression of my subjective life. How can I spread it to others? Their subjective landscape could be completely different. How can I be part of the social responsibility?

God – That depends on the strength of your subjective life, your ability to harness your conviction and your understanding that all life is connected, and is governed by the response of each to each. This inability to comprehend and connect with the scheme affects your life too.

Me – What! I am also affected by their suffering even if I don’t have a role in it?

God – Suffering is only a symptom of a deeper malady. You have a role in helping them overcome it. If you don’t perform your role, you are drawn to the chain of consequences, and for not making full use of your capacity for empathy built into your life, you may be denied more subtle capabilities.

Me -- God, you are scaring me. Don’t you have some way of entering into the mechanism at least through a trap door?

God – I am doing that all the time. I have a constant watch over the mechanism, and make subtle changes to keep it humane. Besides, I keep sending messages to people who really need me. You never know how many ways I intervene in their lives to keep the possibilities alive, but I don’t want to take the credit. I love them to believe they have done it; they have rechartered their lives. But I must admit I cannot hide all the time. Someone figures out my hand in their affairs, or my invisible presence at their desperate moments. Of course, I love to be caught like that.

Me – God, you must be a very busy person. But if a hundred persons call you at the same time, how do you handle that?

God – O’, don’t tell me! Not a hundred, it is millions. But I love to remain connected all the time. So, if someone does not call me, I call on them! Someone long ago said I have a thousand hands, and a thousand eyes. In fact, he didn’t count them to a thousand. He was so overwhelmed that he just uttered a number for no specific number. I should justify that, shouldn’t I?

Me – And some poet said that he won’t commit the offence of describing you as an ocean of kindness, because the ocean itself is a drop of your kindness.

God – You know, I am really scared of these poets. What they don’t say about me! Sometimes most outrageous things, and sometimes they put words in my mouth which I never said! But they are nice people. Therefore, I once agreed, I am also a poet, but I made it a point to add that I am also a lawgiver. That doesn’t make a pleasant combination, does it?

Me – Is that a part of your algorithm as well?

God – Hm, the network becomes insane without some fun. I have planted some rebel seeds here and there. They manufacture viruses and release them into the system. Then I get sos calls. That gives me an opportunity to pack my tools and arrive at the disturbed place. Ravana was such a moment, and Kamsa. But they were extreme moments when I choose to be visible. I send my workmen all over the cosmos to work for me. I hate dullness, certainty, legality, predictability which steal the music from the system. Therefore, I need a Meerabai, an Annamaya, a Ramadasu, a Kabir, a Shivaji, or a Khudiram. No one is perfect, for perfection is your invention. Perfection is an eternal search, an endless dream which motivates the system to work incessantly. I like that way; it gives me work to do.

Me -- So you accept there are aberrations even in your system?

God – My boy, you create words with very limited scopes, and try to bind me with them! Words come from silence, you must remember, which is far more potent than all the noise you make with words. Even silence cannot bind me.

Me – Some people truly say God is an autocratic tyrant!

God – Get out of the tangle created by your prattling brain, and connect with me in silence. If I allowed the deprived life of the man in the wheelchair, I allowed your compassionate heart too to be moved by it. Don’t you see a design in it? I have the most enviable task of combining opposites, and installing the skill in the cosmic management scheme. You cry in pain; you cry in joy as well.

Me – I guess I have to accept two things: an apparent discord, and an apparent unity, both apparent only. I have no way to go beyond the apparent. Disgusting.

God – Even from the position you observe this is apparent! Unless I shake you up badly, you don’t wake up. This universe and its contradictory nature is a wakeup call for you. It is not structured to fulfil your ideas of justness, but to awaken your need to be where I am.

Me – Ok God, I understand you want to defeat me, so that I will work for a win?

God – Exactly.

 

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THE AVATAR PRINCIPLE

 

It is popularly known that the avatar comes from a higher plane of existence to the lower plane to protect and uplift the lower. He teaches love for and dedication to truth in order that we recollect (smritirlavdha-Arjuna) what we are, and understand the significance of His work for our regeneration. Though He can achieve all that by just willing it, He plans his entire avatar time to teach us how to achieve it ourselves. In other words, he wants to convince us that the quality of our own lives and the life around us can be vastly improved, and we have the means for that, if we allow our higher nature to take over. That means, he wants us to believe that the essential human nature is a participant of the divine, and in order to manifest that we must live accordingly.

If we look at it closely, and examine the idea, we shall notice that to bring into this earth-life, dominated by fear, hate, selfishness, suffering and death the quality of love, happiness, health and beauty is the purpose of the avatar principle, and we are not aliens to it. We would like to do so, but when we are seized by fear and doubt, we fail to visualize the strength inherent in us and thus we turn away from the Avatar in us. When the tremendous possibility inherent in a human being is misdirected, a Ravana, and a Kamsa is born. They follow their own grammar in order to obtain brute power which ends in their own destruction, and destruction of peace and happiness of the humanity. Tapas is an unfailing means of achieving any end. If the power of Tapas is used for establishing a dharmic kingdom on earth peace and happiness would be phenomenal. But they changed the direction of their tapas power, and dissipated all of it. Their objective was to establish their suzerainty, and exclusivity, which is not the basic nature of life. Avatar comes to re-establish life’s grand inclusivity.

 The avatar willingly dons human frailty to restructure our strength. True strength lies in connecting with our true nature, which is wholesome life, not life in pieces.  When we understand that, we begin to practice the principle in smaller fields; we begin to love more unselfishly, sacrifice more willingly, work towards establishing order where disorder ruled, and live more transparently. The Avatar assumes human nature to teach us how to reconnect with Him, and reconnect with life.

The avatar principle, therefore, is the principle of life. Life always seeks and needs to expand, not live only for itself, but live with others. Therefore Swami always said Expansion is my life. All that we need for this ceaseless expansion we receive from the higher planes; we hold them in our non-physical cup, but we need to pour it on our physical nature if we would transmute it. This action is very similar to the avatar work. The principle of avatar is built into the nature of life; the divine nature descends unto the human to bridge the differences. Therefore the Avatar is so close to us, and we to him. Swami once wrote to a devotee, “You are the God of universe, creating it out of yourself, and absorbing it unto yourself”.

 That takes us to another dimension of our lives. If the Avatar embodies the shadowless truth of life, why does he want to engage with unreal shadows? The physical life, anyway, does not define the possibilities of life, except that it can at best be a useful stopover in its journey towards its own completeness. Then why doesn’t the Ultimate Truth stay in his own completeness without involving itself in life’s apparent self-deception? Avatars have never said that this earth life is unreal, and is to be dumped. This earth life is an extension of the Supreme truth which Avatar embodies. It is like the shadow which proves the Original image, and we have to learn to see it like that. Otherwise why should God care for it, and Avatars come to reconnect the shadow with its reality? Truth is not exclusive, it is all-inclusive; that which is apparently unreal also has its roots in reality. Even that which is not, arises from that which is; in fact ‘not’ is part of ‘is’. Therefore the avatar appears to don the incompleteness of human life in order to give us a glimpse of totality of life, its pains and its ecstasies, its immanence and its transcendence. The avatar doesn’t destroy evil completely, because complete destruction of evil is also complete destruction of good, and each individual has to achieve that in their own lives in order to experience life in its fullness. Avatars stitch us back to our real nature.

The avatar teaches us love, sacrifice, faith, compassion, detached happiness by helping us open the valve which we had closed in fear. He removes this fear by living a life which is completely fearless. All that makes life touch its own fullness is within access, stored up on another plane. The avatar teaches us how to access this plane and let it fill our empty cups. He does not import it from another loka. He virtually tells us that just as he connects all levels, all lokas, we too can; if he is God, we too share the same identity. He comes as avatar to awaken his own nature in us, embedded in the very structure of our lives.

Therefore, we have our avatar moments when we connect with the divine in us, though briefly. Everyone has their moments when they get intimations from the higher nature within themselves, and become aware of what has been missing in their lives. With this descent of awareness they feel filled with joy, happiness, understanding and strength to deal with life. At these rare moments they touch a beauty and fullness which, they feel, had never been alien to them, momentarily forgotten though. Wordsworth writes in his ‘Intimations of Immortality’ ode The Soul that rises with us…. / Hath had elsewhere its setting, / trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home. During such avatar moments he travelled back to his own childhood, and relived the innocence and sweetness of the essential nature of life. This ‘rise of soul’ is the awakening of the primeval memory embedded in every creature. That is what Arjuna refers to when he wakes up from depression, and tells the avatar, “I have got back my memory”. That is the avatar moment when the inherent divinity in man is awakened, and the lower nature is ‘put to flight’ as Omarkhayyam describes it cryptically.

Just as we have our avatar moments, we have our evil moments too. When the higher nature is blocked by the lower nature, and life is covered with darkness, suffering and death, it can be very alarming; it can overshadow our memory like Rahu. It is a sort of Rahukalam in human life. Then we cry out for God to bring light into this darkness. This is one part of life crying out to unite with the other part. When individual nature is overwhelmed by greed, selfishness, and the powers of ego, the evil moment dominates. This had happened to Angulimala. When he was sent out of the school by his guru for

some misunderstanding, and the society rejected him, the devil caught him, and he remained in its grip till he met the Buddha, and the avatar moment awakened in him. Even if that person is unaware of the avatar moment which alone can save them, the avatar moment awaits almost round the corner for some sincere desire to connect it. And then it happens. At the descent of the divine the individual receives a flash of recognition, of memory of another loka they are not unaware of, and starts to turn around. It is not destruction of the lower nature, the shadow is gone. The higher nature is not external to us, neither is the lower nature. The struggle is within, growing from the human to the divine, the prodigal son coming back to his father’s house, we return to our origin, and He celebrates it.

But no growth is achieved without going through the grind. We have seen how Swami willingly went through the ‘human woes’; he hardly had any ‘comfort’ in his life, took upon himself innumerable onslaughts of our lower nature without batting an eyelid, but stayed grounded in his highest nature. That is the message of the avatar – transmute your lives holding on to your avatar nature, through pain and suffering if need be. Sri Rama too had hardly any ‘comfort’ in his life. The epic is therefore described as built on Karuna Rasa, the experience of pain and suffering as a purifying agent. I think Jesus Christ too invoked this karuna rasa through his own crucifixion in order to awaken the divine nature in his followers. Even the Greeks had conceived of tragedy as a purifying experience, a catharsis.

A Rama, Krishna, Sai Baba at Shirdi or Puttaparthi is not only worshipped, he is held so dear, because we are in reality not a divided existence. Swami has so often reiterated this. We feel a surge of love and devotion in their presence, and carry it in our hearts to renovate our lives. Bhakti helps us open the valve for our own avatar nature to take over. Isn’t that renovation of Dharma, and protection of that which is incorruptible in us?

 

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The sunbeam in the tree

 

What is the sunbeam doing in the tree?

Just being playful with the leaves,

Struggling to escape their trap,

Feeding their kitchen fires,

Drying the paintings dabbed in fresh colours,

Or, drawing unsteady shapes on earth?

When clouds join the game,

Until the night swallows them all,

Each day is a story in excitement.

The grass under the traveller’s feet,

Isn’t however amused.

He has no fascination for sunbeam’s

         gimmicks, a needless distraction.

He has to catch a train

To go beyond these shadowy hills,

Not join the sunbeam’s shadow-plays,

The sun’s long hand notwithstanding,

An enchantment for a short day.

The sunbeam is itself,

The leaves are what they are,

The grass, a green innocence;

Why must the traveller

Tell an endless story

To be what he is?

 

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