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Most of those who have written about the emotions & human conduct seem to deal with them as if they are phenomena outside Nature. ~Spinoza
06 August, 2018: Initiated
27th October, 2019: Completed
This is in continuation, or rather an extension, of this.
Khushbuon se teri yunhi takra gaye
Chalte chalte dekho na hum kahan aa gaye.
~ Lyrics from the song, Hamari Adhuri Kahani
Warning, plot spoiler ahead.
In the song Beautiful Boy, John Lennon bequested words of philosophical caution to his second son Sean: Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. Those words, tainted by the stigma of 'pop culture', seem to pay a truer homage to common wisdom than much of what passes around for philosophy, including, to preempt the cynic, this essay itself. We must thereby heed their caution, and as they imply, turn our attention upon ourselves in a manner we may not be accustomed to.
Our gaze will find it difficult to settle upon itself. It will try hard not to move away from proclivities our minds remain deeply attached to, pop culture being an uncontested winner. Somewhat sheepishly then we allow our gaze to wander to our favourite hunting grounds, but this time imbued with a little more alertness. What do we find engaged in our heady pursuits? We find the picture of a man chasing a chimera but not knowing why, an instinct of nagging familiarity to very many of us; the travesty of an owner of over 100 hotels with a capacity and craving to acquire a few more of them bothered by a silly question, a question which led, in equal measure, to his eventual downfall and upliftment.
We see Aarav Ruparel (Emraan Hashmi) asking Vasudha (Vidya Balan) in the splendour of his home garden in the film Hamari Adhuri Kahani: My Japanese designers advise that I should copy this (garden's) design in my new Hotel. This garden has 40,000 flowers and it is grand, yet it feels something is amiss. Do you know what it is? After an expectant moment Vasudha answers: dried leaves.
She continues, 'It is difficult to imagine a garden without some withered flowers and dried leaves. This garden is beautiful, perhaps too beautiful. But every beautiful object has a flaw. Even the moon has its spots. Then why is this garden so spotless (bedaag)?'
A delicate yarn from the over-worked mills of Bollywood. We err though: no more do we see, listen, or internalize films; instead we 'consume' them. In that case how are we ought to consume a scene where Aarav, in an effort to free the husband (Rajkumar Rao) of his beloved from jail travels to Bastar, records the testimony of a Father Peters, and while returning stops along the highway, drawn in by the fragrance of flowers from a nearby field. He rushes to discover a mesmerising bed of them before accidentally stepping onto a land-mine. Smiling, he gently lifts his foot off the mine.
It should surprise no one that one man's Naxalism conscripts the death of another, one who may, seemingly, have nothing to do with it. While it falls upon the social historian to come to terms with this, the ordinary amongst us are attended to by the pathos buried within the situation, bottled on by the plaintive background score. The question does arise: why pathos, and why not resignation, or for that matter anger? What is in the story that tilts our feelings in this direction and what does our submission to it tell us about ourselves?
In answering this question we cannot expect much help from the faculty we have been best trained to use: our conscious and carefully scripted opinions, acquired through the costly mistake of gathering one too many educational qualifications; or having made the equally vile mistake of listening to those who have made this regretable trespass. The realm of hard literate logic, in which they (these opinions) are baked to rudely intrude on our awareness, will not condone our pathos but expect we sneeringly chide Aarav's foolishness. Having accomplished his mission what business did he have to let his heart loiter around in the fields of a conflict-ridden area?
Noticing Aarav's transgression, it (Logic) will command he stay put and use his mobile phone, one he used barely a moment before his death to share the landscape's beauty with Vasudha, to arrange for help instead. It is easy to imagine a series of military personnel rushed in and the event coalescing into news strips across the faces and cacophony of media presenters, with politicians of the harder hue rushing in with bated breath to claim credit and complicating the circus further.
By acting so belligerently, and if we may add commercially, Logic has, however, lowered itself a few notches within our hearts. Taken aback by its crudity, we appeal instead to our Fancy to make it all a farce: hoping the land-mine turned out to be a damp squid and it was all a grand scare for our tender over-sensitive hearts, supplying a text-book example of how to turn a moment of pathos into a giddy tickle.
Or we could have adopted an even more convenient and equally marketeable persuasion: ensuring after Aarav's death Vasudha is promptly ensnared by her grief, the kind of melo-dramatic grist which adds to the coffers of the television producers. Easy pickings, though by all accounts, quite grim and violent prompting a sensible mind to ask why?
The first appears repugnant, the second knave and the third symptomatic of kindergarten love. All three though possess the same merit: of closing the story, of bringing it to a place of rest, however illusory that place might be. All three also look contrived, and hence, by all accounts, an unsolicited imposition.
How do we politely refuse the force of this imposition? By gently pointing way to the expectation that facts must eventually reconcile. In this particular case, it entails finding a sense of balance between the love of two individuals with the fact that one of them happens to be married not just to another person, but to the sense of institution that lies behind the custom of marriage. It matters hardly that the husband was forced apart from his wife within a year of marriage for no fault of his, and her, and remains hostage to fits of anger and jealousy at the love his wife seeks in the attentive care of another.
The reconciliation between law, life and love must make the story persuade Vasudha to stay put for the sake of her child; compel her husband to repent for his customary and thoughtlessly conformist manners; and request Aarav to extinguish himself. (The extinguishment in this case was literal. It could have been metaphorical (a lonely man drowned in his drinks) or overtly spiritual (a formal renunciation)).
A sense of moral responsibility then to bind the lady, a growing sense of repentance to liberate the sinner, but what about the third? Who indeed is this third, who, now when one finally comes to think of it all, seems so out of place. Things would have been so regimentally routine, boring, and one might add, safe, without him. It certainly seems odd that the story came to life with his ill-timed placement and can now only conduct itself with grace through his permanent and brutal dislocation.
The irony seems all the more acerbic if the start and the finish are placed close to each other: an artificially engineered garden sparked a sweet curiosity for the other, which flowered into affection, and remained but an aching memory on account of a seemingly avoidable faux-pass into a delightfully natural garden. In both cases, there was the hand of the human: in one instance to arrogantly better nature, and in another, to foolishly despoil its pristine virginity. In the first instance, the purported motive was aesthetics; in the second it was war under the guise of betrayal of justice. In the first, it required addition of withered flowers to implant beauty, and in the second, it required removal of already implanted land-mines to reclaim it.
As the probing unravels the finer threads, what emerges at the end is a great maze of them entwined in seemingly knotty ways. It can be best caged within the phrase of 'evoking a bewildering sense of irony'. Perhaps the bitterest knot of them all, the hardest to swallow but also one the easiest to relate to is this fact: a man, in caring for a married woman, and who desired to marry her, undertakes a sincere venture so that her previous bethrotal may continue, only to find himself being rewarded for his good deed by martrydom of his own affections.
It is a difficult proposition to digest that, when viewed as a whole, the entirety of our lives reveal but an apparently mindless criss-crossing of contradictory or misaligned currents; currents which also seem to suffuse with those of the lives of others, who many a times, we wish to have no direct contact with. Such then are the sum and substance of the stream of moments that make for our lives.
For the philosopher this state of affair represents a great intellectual puzzle; but for the mind impregnated with pathos, freshly cut with the wound of severance and loss, it raises that most existential of all words in the vocabulary: why? A word, with absolutely no pretence at irony, one that can be satisfied with only the most complete of all philosophical answers. In short, it demands that the commoner will after all have to turn his own philosopher, a most uninspiring of notion if there was one.
It is this lack of inspiration that guarantees we fail to convert an event of pathos into one of searching question. The result is to remain entwined in these under-currents and never make the effort to take a momentary step-back. Admittedly, this swimmingly heady absorption has its own charm: it is hard to deny that while the period of bliss lasted between Aarav and Vasudha it was one to only inspire a grating envy in our hearts. It led to exploration of hitherto unknown for, or unexpressed, passions, to delightful adventures and surprises. Our daily lives are similarly full of such romances: with persons, with ideas, with nature, and dare we say, with our own conceits. The irony of life is not without its melliflous sweetness and it is an intoxicating one. The caveat of course being, while it lasts. But then when a moment's intoxication is enough to inflict a permanent addiction, does the caveat have any chance of leaving behind its impress without recourse to some kind of a violent jolt?
And when the violent jolt does arise : say an ill-health, bereavement, or an insult that we are unable to bear construing thereby that grave injustice has been inflicted upon our self-righteous self : it prompts us to send an ingratiating invitation to Fancy and Wishfulness. Its modern version entails what Lennon described as 'sitting on our ass'. That is, the flowering business of ashrams, foundations, and retreats of yoga and meditation. Such trappings are of course for the Liberals. The conservatives prefer, well the conservative route: just donate most of their sinful acquisitions, deriving in the process, or mostly imagining to, a sudden sense of release and happy expression on their previously tired faces that were always apprehensive of saving it all from the taxmen.
Of course there are those who believe themselves to be above such mortal considerations: they think they possess great intellect to not get entrapped in the tentacles of romance that life's irony seems to offer them. However their intellect seems to run its course after a point and some of them do seem to fall into the ashram trap after all. Their intellect, wizened by meditation, offers us theories to explain away this irony of life. They teach us how to control it for the better of ourselves and our Humanity. Some of them write international best-sellers, some of them write 40 national best-sellers and some of them recreate mythology. All of them become icons in their own disciplines, one which they helpfully created in the first place.
The immediately consoling answer, though, awaits hestitatingly within the maxim of natural justice: the idea that what goes around, comes around. Nature, through our passions, has a way of getting us into a mess , and perhaps through a sublimation of those very passions, offers us a possibility of escaping it, provided we do heed its whisper, a whisper which may come to us in as simple a format as the lyric of a pop song; or a love affair on the screen backed up by lyrics penned in the hall of that famous aristocrat called Urdu, one who found much purchase back in the 50's and 60's but thereafter was shamelessly disowned and disrobed.
Why moan the loss of Urdu? Because with that loss we also moan the loss of the likes of a devotional bhajan by Mohammed Rafi in Baiju Bawra in 1952; or the musically soaked and whitewashed canvass of Pakeeza in 1972; or the collective ability to express the same feeling of love over and over again by different lyricists across different films helmed by a galaxy of directors.
These losses are, in essence, symptomatic of the loss of the ability of a seemingly modern, educated and cultured minds of our time to sublimate. It is this very ability which allows a mind to instinctively feel close to its bosom the essence of the following two sentences: Once the Buddha was asked how did he cross over the flood (of dukkha). The Buddha answered, by swimming and not swimming. Or, for that matter, to feel a shudder of delight when coming across the monent laid bare in the last few pages of Herman Hesse's Siddhartha when the protagonist finally 'gets it' listening to the sound of a river. It was an 'it' that he had been searching despondently for much of his adult life.
It is an 'it' one senses was also present within the smile on Aarav's face when he lifted his foot off the mine aware that his body is about to disintegrate into irrelevant fragments. It was not a smile of conceit but one of contentment. And a man is only content when he is in possession of that which he sought out to search. Which means, that, for Aarav, whose exertions were all directed to organize, structure and attain the object of his love, found that his story suddenly had found a complete, logical and irrevocable closure.
And it is no coincidence that this surfaced to a smile when the irony of life was conducting itself at its relentless best. Indeed, it would not be incorrect to say that this smile was an effect of the fact that Aarav could so closely, minutely see through the irony that his exertions eventually presented: all his plans and pursuits led him to a point where he finally realized how absolutely ridiculous and futile all that planning was. And the greater the clarity with which a mind perceives this truth, the more it becomes amused, rather than anxious and angry, at all that went by. With a sense of amusement and delightful humour, it then feels enough is enough and there is certainly more to life than this constant serenading of stupidity. And from realization of this utter stupidity arises boredom, dispassion, disengagement and seclusion into something beyond it all.
This discourse may appear abstruse to some but in fact it harkens back to what is really happening inside our minds. It indeed is difficult to admit that the dreams we conjure, the realities we believe in, the motives we arouse within ourselves are, to put it charitably, but a figment of our imagination; or to be more clinically precise: an unfortunate, but necessary, side-effect of the inveterate and innate stupidity of our minds. The difficulty increases many-fold the more the honours a man has against his name. For what man could accept that when the other men think so highly of him, when he is blessed (in his head by the Lord above) with the peak of health, beauty, fame and wealth, he is nothing but a product of inborn ignorance, one that actually may be creating more venom than virtue?
It is easy to now see why the Christian parable of the Camel and the Needle is so true: It is easier for a Camel to enter in through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. To enter that Kingdom requires one to develop the mental powers and qualities befitting it which make one see how it all adds up, how seemingly disparate and disagreeable pieces are nothing but two sides of the same coin. Literature calls it irony, the Buddha called it this-and-that conditionality, and physicist labelled it the Heisenberg principle. Spinoza expounded upon it briefly in the Emendation of the Intellect only to bewail on it in his Theo-political Philosophy and philosophize on it in the Ethics.
Question: how do you get multiple income groups to live in the same housing structure? Lean on to the metaphor of extended family. For those with more in the bank, there is the large ground floor spaces with parking to boot. For the floor above, the name-sake middle-classes reside. And still further up, on the second floor, the less privileged call home the spaces smaller than the ones below but with a built-in provision for these spaces to grow as they become more priviledged? How: through self-construction. This was a real LIC Housing Colony project in Ahmedabad by the architect B.K.Doshi. Compare this against public housing projects of today under all kinds of prime ministerial schemes.
Since we are on the discipline of urban planning, why not indulge in examining the famed Riverfront in Ahmedabad, a concrete monstrosity if there ever was one. Question: you have a river running through the heart of the city. What do you do? You could do what the French have done with the Seine. On, one side lies history, and on the other, the modern times. The river joins the past with the present in a not-too-loud manner and provides a genuinely public space.
If you carry that imagination closer home to a city devoid of much green cover and the very notion of a shared and collective conscience, a greener, cheaper and public-spirited solution could be: what if you plant a dense green cover on both sides of the river; beyond that green cover provide space to house all the public schools of Ahmedabad, and public parks, public libraries and like-minded public institutions. Instead what we have is an eye-sore of a stretch of concrete adjacent to which dejected looking commercial and residential structures springing up. Why did this happen: if an honest gentleman is to be believed, this proposal was once put forward to the Chowkidaar who gleefully responded: but my good friend, where is the money to be made in that quaint little proposal of yours?
For sure, there ain't not much money in keeping hallowed Kashi as it is, for imagine which tourist would want to walk through the dirt, grind and smell of the narrow alleys of Kashi to visit the famed Kashi Vishwanath temple? Breaking it all apart and creating a dedicated pathway to that temple is how you really make money. Golly, people were fools living there all these years and not having figured it out how to make more money. Maybe, and perhaps, just perhaps, somewhere deep down, those living in and around the temple felt a certain devotion, however subdued it may been.
As someone who had to bear the suffering of a bulldozer tearing apart his home remarked: we were not sure whether we were living inside the complex of God, or God was living within our complex. But, hey, as all roads lead to Race Course Road, Delhi, where the race is on to put India on the Map (as if it was missing from it all this while), who is one to argue against making money from tourists who come to Kashi to visit the Kashi Vishwanath Temple believing that the spirit of the Temple resides only and only inside its physical construct.
The modern mind will always struggle to feel this spirit; or be able to see through the irony that in attempting to glorify the sacred, it is committing an unpardonable sacrilege. For it is busy trying to stabilize, design, structure, order, predict and control. As if corruption in architecture was not enough, look at the litany of what goes for a global blockbluster nowadays: Species and Capital. There was a time when the prophet, poet and philosopher held sway; we must satisfy ourselves with handing over that sacred honour to the historian, the economist, and the neuroscientist.
Consequently, the mind of the modern man is sedated, fearful of losing that false stability it has created for itself, a mind without memory of real pain, or pleasure, a mind which at the first instance will rush to the numbing embrace of anti-depressants. For how can it be otherwise when all this while it has been taught to classify, name and co-relate without being urged to ask what does it all mean? What really is right from wrong?
Only a mind such as this is likely to believe in what appears on the mobile screen over its own lived experience. It is not a surprise that it is also a mind quite ripe for electoral micro-targeting, an inane concept called driverless cars, and an equally inane thing called AI, or accepting a $2 million pill that cures a genetic muscular birth defect as innovation, and not to say finding a way to justify the cost.
It is a mind gripped by a desire to evade direct responsibility, of handing over the reins of its own development to someone else, of afraid to face morbidity, mortality, inevitability of things as they have come to be and as they are. Prompted on, it is in an incessant motion to evade the laws of nature and to over and overpower them till eventually it will lead to realise the irony the hard way: the more a man tries to evade his own annhilation, the closer he brings it home.
So what is the way out? It is by asking what is getting us into this mess in the first place. It is this inveterate tendency and belief that once you have named things you have defined them, understood them, encoded them and made them permanent. What if what you are naming has changed its character before you even completed the naming ceremony? What if you grant for this ephemeralness, accept it as the natural course of living, and what if, and this is a big if, if you dare ask the question: is there something that lies beyond it all?
Did we not make the earth a spreading,
The mountains tent-pins?
We created you in pairs,
And made sleep for you to rest,
The night
a covering,
And the day
for seeking livelihood,
We raised over you
several secure (skies)
And placed a lamp therein
brightly burning.
~ Al-Ma'arij 78: 6-13
Know that the life of this world
is only a frolic and mummery, an ornamentation,
boasting and bragging among yourselves,
and lust for multiplying wealth and children.
It is like rain so pleasing
to the cultivator for his vegetation
which sprouts and swells, and then begins to wither,
and you see it turn to yellow
and reduced to chaff.
~ Al-Hadid 57:20
All that is on the earth is passing.
But abiding is the glory of your Lord,
full of majesty and beneficence.
O society of jinns and men,
cross the bounds of the heavens and the earth
if you have the ability,
then pass beyond them;
but you cannot
unless you acquire the law.
~ Ar-Rahman 55: 26-27, 33
These of course are verses from different chapters of The Qur'an. One can read them as poetry and leave it at that. But one can also read them as something else, as a prayer, adoration, worship, devotion and supplication to something or someone. If for a moment we adopt the latter posture, then these may appear as the voice of someone speaking to us: a voice that is within us but not 'us'. A voice that calls the sun a lamp placed by a certain hand, that calls upon us to see the world as a magical creation by someone and engage with it as it is meant to be. Not to ignore it, not to disdain it, not to turn away from it with a sigh of resignation and despondency but engage with it with the full vigour that one can possess. Not with an attitude to find fault with it but to be awed by the magic weaved into its everyday routine. One wakes up, one works, one sleeps, one consorts. It calls forth the mind to see how even this supposedly mundane has the hand of the divine permeating it.
For it cautions us, beckons us, steers us, alerts us, pushes us to attend to what is immediate, what is real, what lies around rather than conjure a fancy, retreat into a world of our own making in the process abandoning the world that He has so generously gifted to us, with all its variations, ebbs & flows, vicissitudes and cycles. It is easy to picture a man in front of his television admiring how the 'nation' he is part of is so great, all the while bedeviled with a road made unmotorable right outside his home due to unwanton construction, all in the glory of the same nation we presume. To an amused observer the picture that man represents is quite likely the picture we represent to possibly the One who gave birth to us in the first place. One may choose to call that One God, a cosmic force, or in Einsten's words, the God that Spinoza painted, or the divine law itself. Whatever be it, reading more into a few lines of poetry can certainly lend a sobering look upon ourselves.
But subsequently the same voice also calls out how futile that world of its own creation is, how fickle it is and then exhorts us, nay nags us to look beyond it, strive for something to not only cross the 'bounds of heaven and the earth' but move beyond them. Only a Creator so confident of its creation would call upon its creatures to first soak themselves in one of its creation, then get over it and move onto its more exotic, exquisite and sublime versions.
Isn't this somewhat like what one would be expected to feel when surrounded by affection in the heart, an unending field of flowers for the eyes to soak in, and an inevitable death lying in wait beneath one's feet? Is it now easier to understand why the heart murmurs pathos and not sadness? It takes this kind of grinding for the modern mind to possibly start believing in a voice that is of its own calling but not of its own making. The pathos is a reaction, somewhere deep down, of a brutal recognition of this ultimate irony.
So what would separate the mind that would read those verses as poetry, or a piece of religious literary criticism, versus a mind that would be mystified with those very lines? The hint lies right there: 'unless you acquire the law'. Any law decides what is restrained and what is allowed. What then has a sense of restraint got to do with mystification? Well, it appears everything. In itself it is a topic of a separate essay, but one can attempt to make a few tenuous remarks here.
What really is restraint? Is it hesitation? Trepidation? Confusion? No. It literally is to hold back. Hold back from what? An excellent question one might say but not the right forum to get into. Rather, let us flip the question. When does the question of holding back arise? When there is an impulse to the contrary. So in holding back, one is attempting to overcome a habitual impulse. What happens when one does so?
Imagine a person talking with restraint versus one without. What really is the essence of the difference? The first one is talking with reference to some set of rules, laws, some kind of guidance. The other is simply talking with reference to himself. This then is the difference between acquiring the law and not acquiring it. Nothing has changed except the frame of reference. The first one submitted himself before something apart from 'himself'. He came out of himself but at all times remaining within himself. Is it now possible to grip with our minds how this actually feels? Does now the saying of the Buddha: I crossed the flood by swimming and not swimming: seem as close to hand as a cup of vanilla ice-cream?
The next question is: what prompts men to act under restraint? What prompts a child to act with restraint in front of his father? The simple answer is: fear. Not fear of reprisal but fear of letting down someone whose respect the child yearns to solicit most desperately. The child craves for his affection, his favours, his time. Why? Because he looks up to his father. The only reason men would act with restraint is that they fear something or someone that they genuinely love and cannot think of bearing loss of detachment from that someone. The unfortunate part is, as men grow up, much sooner than later, they tend to love themselves over everything else. Conceit comes first, puberty much later. And the span of time between the two is quite wide. That is, man discovers a kind of love that procreates himself, and the one that procreates the species seems almost like an after-effect of the other one.
And hence the idea of conscious restraint in thought, speech and behaviour is quite alien to our species, even though the capacity for it is right there for the taking, by the bucketful dare we say. But we dither. Let us come back to our little child and his father. What really would happen if the child does restrain himself at the thought of letting down his father? Think about it: he would avoid actions that would move him away from his father. Now what are those actions? Actions that are disagreeable to his father. What actions are disagreeable to a person? Those that do not become of his character. That is, if a child is consistent, diligent, meticulous, scrupulous in acting with restraint with an avowed aim to please his father, to gain his favours, to seek his grace, he, by his very actions, comes closer and closer to the image of his father.
All we must now do is substitute the child for us and the father for, let us say for lack of a better word, the Creator. The exact chain of cause and effect sets itself in motion, and through enough persistence and skill we can, nay dare we say, must, logically become the image of the Creator itself. That is, we acquire the law that represents the Creator and governs his Creation. Thereby, in some sense, we raise ourselves and free ourselves of the very creation we are part of, just as that child frees himself of his own persona and becomes the person of his father.
What holds back that child to master this process? A clinging, a habitutal roving around the sense of his own unique identity. He will struggle to stretch himself apart from his own habits, afflictions, lusts, objects of anger and hatred, his dislikes, his confusions, in short his 'I'. The same reasoning applies when so-called adults decide to improve themselves. They, to repeat the phrase, will fall into the ashram trap, where they will discover a brilliant technique to hide and submerge the 'I', believing they have discovered God, while all they have accomplished is to deceive themselves to fullest.
When those verses proclaim and exhort men to rise above the earth and the heavens, they are hinting at something far beyond comprehension of our minds. Consider the following sample of words:
(I) the unfashioned, the end.
(II) the effluentless, the true, beyond.
(III) the subtle, very hard to see.
(IV) the ageless, permanence, undecaying.
(V) the fearless, non-differentiation.
(VI) peace, the deathless.
(VII) the exquisite, bliss, solace.
(VIII) the exhaustion of craving.
(IX) the wonderful, the marvellous.
(X) the secure, serenity.
(XI) nibbana.
(XII) the unafflicted, the passionless, the pure.
(XIII) release, non-attachment.
(XIV) the island, shelter, harbour, refuge.
(XV) the ultimate.
These are but a sample of words used to describe the goal of following the path that Buddha taught so ably. Someone else might say these are nothing but the qualities manifested by The One. Spinoza might add that these are but a tiny fraction of qualities that are The One and that The One of infinite modes with infinite attributes is the conception that the mind is really put on earth to comprehend, and become.
When the goal is so metaphysical it indeed is an irony that all the wise books say that its path seems to begin from the most mundane. How to speak, what not to speak, how to think and what not to think, what livelihoods to adopt and what to avoid, how to be responsible, how to build character and so forth. Or for that matter how to desperately fall in love and through that love die and discover God. In short, how to acquire the law so as to restrain ourselves and thereby, through its practice, sublimate our minds, not sedate it.
Any robust thought process is always circular. We started from the law and we were led to God. Let us start the other way around. What if like the child, we start with kneeling before The One prompted on by whatever reason: our own sparse droplets of wisdom or our own misfortune. The humbling does a delicate and barely noticeable severing with our 'I'. We indeed yearn to gain its favour and grace and feel disgruntled, ashamed, angry when we act out of line. In doing so, we imbibe gradually an understanding of what is right from wrong and develop an admiration for it. As the admiration strengthens, we start becoming it. As we become it, we start restraining ourselves. In restraining ourselves we deliberately create for ourselves a different set of events than was otherwise possible. These events in turn further aid this process and so forth. Over time, as this process gains a level of sublimity certain fundamental qualities of mind are triggered, the most powerful being the kind of unwavering mindfulness necessary for elevated (transcedental) levels of concentration and thereby the highest form of knowledge.
But it all begins with an ability to humble, worship, devote and serve something much higher than ourselves. That is, it all begins with developing the ability to generate a certain bhava within us and stay with it in every little action of ours, including managing our work, managing our finances, carrying out household chores. For how else is it possible? Can a child learn ideas without understanding the sensations that lie behind those ideas? Where do those sensations first arise? In contact with real material things. Likewise, our ability to be mindful, to concentrate and to discern must arise from practise with real things: real people, real emotions, real conflicts, real passions, real pleasures, real anger, real envy.
And when we have too much of the real thing, we do indeed realise that it is all a mummery and ornamentation. But when we do realise that we are not disgruntled but moved by a certain delicate sentiment that is hard to describe. The journey from a garden of 40,000 flowers to a mesmerising bed of them was a long one, and one that certainly was not scripted beforehand.
And it is this ability to supplicate, or to surrender, which is the most tragic loss of the modern times and the modern mind. For without a deep sense of conviction in something higher, something incomprehensible, something indescribable no further movement is possible. To acquire the law, one must first believe in the law even if one has no real inkling of it. For the child to become like his father, he must certainly believe that the man he adores is his father though he has little, if any, knowledge of how reproduction really works. For the child, the gestures, the sense of warmth, the sense of protection that arises from an underlying care and concern in the mind of the father for him is enough for the child to place his whole-hearted faith and trust in him.
But if the child is blind, deaf and dumb to not even sense this, can he really move any further? The child, without question, must be open to the signs and signals of a certain relationship. Just as we are, or were, expected to be open to, be awed by, led to wonder about the many-fold signals present before us everyday: from the rise of the sun to its setting, from the synchronicity between the sun and the moon, of how water leaves the land as vapour and returns to it as rain, how an embryo develops into a fully functional human being. Losing this ability to feel these signs means losing the ability to rise beyond. No amount of reading of philosophy, no amount of contemplation will yield results unless and until it is anchored in this sensibility, and the primary question that springs from it: what governs this? Is there a stage beyond this? Is there indeed a possibility of forming a relationship with it?
Like the first gear in a car, the start is always the most difficult. If we master that, the rest follows as the moon follows the sun. It also takes a long time to really find the starting point and develop the patience to stay around it before being prompted by an invisible hand to move on. What is the technique to befriend that invisible hand? That, as mentioned earlier, is a different essay in itself. But the analogy of the child is a powerful one and holds enough within itself to guide any person seriously interested in exploring that sentiment of pathos when the land-mine did finally blow-up.
As we started with a Bollywood song we must also end with one, or rather a snippet of one, to the voice of Shreya Ghoshal, to humble ourselves a little more:
Kya khoob Rab ne kiya
Bin maange itna diya
Warna hai milta kahaan
Hum kaafiron ko Khuda
[What Grace did HE indeed shower
Without asking He gave so much
Else was it ever possible
for us non-believers to deserve Him?]
By all accounts, we all have what we need, so maybe it is time to remember how we got it in the first place (serendipity) and how it all may go as easily as it came (serendipity). An unending remembrance of this may get us all out of the miasma we so masterfully gravitate to. Masterful we certainly are, except our skills are being deployed in a completely wrong department. We simply need to resign and apply for a different job. There is a recession going on we hear, but this particular job market is always looking for able employees.
Those who listen, observe, think and serve.
Those who are critical but not judgemental. Those who see the wrong yet wake up feeling as if the world is full of hope. Those who know that their death is round the corner but see that fact as a great opportunity to learn and set things aright, at least for themselves. Those who believe in a law that is divine and make every effort to stay away from false laws spwaned by a delusional belief in false Gods. Those who eventually see everything as it has come to be, as it was always meant to be. Those who read the metaphysical and can discover the most physical in it.
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