Date with Colors

As I travelled around the city on our car yesterday, and by bus day before yesterday, I could see hundreds of young men and women reveling on the road with colors, most of their faces colored beyond all recognition, and they seemed to be enjoying the fun of chasing one another to apply abir on the face and body! It is Holi, and the festival of colors had everyone on their toes, that all the eateries on the Park Street, alias Mother Teresa Sarani closed their shutters for the day, though Sunday is the busiest business day for most of them. But this is one day when the business persons cannot take it lightly; men and women fully drunk could do anything on that day.

Colors, and colors; there were long stretches of road painted with colors, and no one seemed to bother about mingling the artificial with the natural color of the earth; traditionally this is the day of licence, when persons who are otherwise prohibited by social norms are permitted to do what they wish, and it is the time for the young people to find their partners to play the game of Krishna and Radha, and in fact the festival has its roots with the divine sport of Radha-Krishna duo. Religious sanction is one that is considered more sacred and important for the modern day youth than the social sanctions and licence. Holi is not merely a festival of colors, but also of merriment and enjoyment in the company of friends and relatives.

Unfortunately Holi is associated with Hindu mythology and religious traditions and customs, and so people of other faiths might hesitate to join the Hindu friends in playing Holi. Needless to say, many of the cultural festivals of India, have been appropriated by major religious sects, and given a religious coloring. Such is the case of Pongal, the harvest festival of Tamils, and the Durga Puja of Bengalis. It may be possible to directly link Durga Puja to Hindu traditions, but the cultural festivals should not be too directly linked to religions, forcing the religious persons not belonging to that particular sect to stand outside and watch.

Most of the colors that were sold in the markets a few days prior to Holi are spurious and are injurious to one’s health, and yet there would be very few people who would abstain from using the synthetic colors, especially the colors that are applied onto the face and body. Here emotions take precedence to reason and common sense. On the other side of the spectrum is the cost of the colors that are bought at a very high price; the business people know that the colors are indispensable for the sport and so would be forced to approach the shops, and so the shopkeepers hike the price so high, some of them make as much as 200 per cent profit.

I love colors, especially the mixture of colors, and the different colors merging with one another to make myriad colors and shades. It is possible to make millions of colors with the computers, but nothing is like having the colors in black and white; artists and painters have eternal love affair with colors and some of them are married to colors that they die with the colors. But it is a different thing when the human bodies become the live canvass for one another to pain the pictures they have in their minds. On this day every one becomes an artist, experimenting with colors unimaginable. There is joy in the game, in the divine sport, and it is sad that the whole game has to come to an end within a day, though the young people would love to have the day prolonged for all eternity!

Plateful of Flowers

When someone is sick and is admitted into a nursing home or hospital, it is customary for friends and neighbors, to carry a “Get well soon” card with a bouquet of flowers. As I am recuperating from a bout of influenza, I received a bouquet of flowers, a plateful of e-flowers. Nature’s pure gift, unalloyed, groomed by rain and shine, and a little bit of human care! It is not only a feast to the eyes, but it also brings the best of nature to our doorsteps. The seasonal flowers seldom fail, even if the monsoon rains fail. They follow nature’s pre-designated cycle, and come what may, they are there with their beauty and fragrance.

The rain-soaked flowers sitting leisurely on the plate, holding each other making the best circle of friendship that can ever be imagined or re-created, is a sight that can transport us to an altogether different realm, if only we are look into the blossoms. Unity in diversity is what they uphold, by mingling with flowers of different shades, all adding to the cosmic rhythm, that the universe is still safe and secure. But don’t jump too much into their short-span of life; it is human beings who evaluate the quality of our lives by the number of years we have lived, not so for nature.

Is it not a wonderful thing to contemplate how nature has a different kind of life-guide than the human beings? The birds and insects, trees and shrubs all of them have a million stories to tell the human beings, if only we have the ears to listen to them. Today we listen to what these blossoms staring at me tell, or wish to tell at this moment! We don’t need to keep our ears to listen to them, but keep the doors of our hearts ajar, so that their words may enter into us, and transform the way we look at life at large. Once they touch us, we may look at nature with different eyes.

I am fascinated by the instance in the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna pleads with Lord Krishna that he might receive His cosmic vision. Krishna chides Arjuna saying that with human eyes he cannot behold his eternal, celestial beauty, and so He offers his disciple a third eye, with which he would be able to have the cosmic vision of the Lord. That is what we all need today, to look at the footprints of the maker in all that is around us; then even a blade of grass, or a still, stationary tree may have a message for us, what they are and what we are.

It is time for me to pass this plate on, so that the joy of beholding their beauty may not stop with me, but become contagious, very much like the swine flu, the H1N1 virus, so that after a few years, or decades or even centuries, we may have a humanity which is in close contact with nature and her bounty. On that day, there will not be a plateful of flowers, but only nature gathering plateful of human beings around her chest, treasuring them as if they were her very own. Is that not what many religions call Paradise!

Confluence of Consciousness

Listening to the audio books of Esther Hicks on the teachings of Abraham is opening up new vistas of thinking in me. It is obvious that much of the concept surrounding the making of The Secret by Rhonda Byrne is from Hicks (Esther and her husband Jerry). Maybe it is through The Secret that I had come to appreciate the wisdom of the teachings of Abraham, and as I went on listening to her talks, or rather conversation with Jerry, I was suddenly stuck by one idea : Christ consciousness. I felt as if a thunderbolt had stuck me hard, and suddenly I began to see things, imagine things, and out of the blue I begin to understand something wonderful and new. I rushed to my room, pulled out a scrap book and began to put down a few lines, which I was sure to elaborate in future.

At the top of the page I wrote "Christ-Krishna Consciousness", and hopefully this will be the theme of a long writeup or a book in the future, dwelling not so much on the religious tenets of these two personalities whom we meet at every nook and cranny of this subcontinent, but on how we all of us share in their consciousness... or to correct myself... in the One consciousness which flows in the universe. In fact, I begin to see a few characteristic features of consciousness which can be the life-spring of the universe: it is beyond all religion, it is amoral, it is there everywhere, it can be attributed with all the qualities of God - omnicient, omnipresent and omnipotent.

What is so special about Christ-Krishna consciousness? We climb the ladder of divinity or sanctity in proportion to our awareness of consciousness. What we call enlightenment is nothing but an entry point into the world of consciousness... once we begin to be conscious of what we are, how we are, why we are - we are transformed beings. But the world will not allow us to enter into the state of consciousness, because a mere taste of this ethereal reality negates the mundane world, and one who has tasted the fruits of consciousness, would not turn to the world and what she would offer to him/her.

I would think that Christ and Krishna are not embodies selves, but pure consciousness, and we may give them any name and shape and form, and we are all capable of entering into such a consciousness and can truly become like unto them... Maybe that is what St Paul talks about in his epistles - becoming like Christ; it is not a passive experience, but entering into the world of Christ; becoming a Christian - alter Christus (another Christ). Once we truly enter into His self, then we forget the world; and in such a state, we even forget the label of Christ, because in his true self and identity, he becomes the nameless one, the formless one, the ever present, the ever eternal... He is Krishna, he is Allah, he is Buddha, he is all the spiritual beings who had populated this universe.

The role of religion is basically to open the gates of consciousness and help us in getting a taste of this eternal consciousness; but unfortunately all the religions have remained only in the level of materialism, not taking us beyond that. We have for the most part remained with labels, names and forms of Christ and Krishna. Today let me pause for two minutes, making a sincere attempt to enter into the ever-flowing stream of consciousness; let me float in, and enter into the great confluence of consciousness, where I can meet Christ and Krishna, Allah and Buddha... where even my enemy is Christ or Krishna, everyone is a carrier of that eternal consciousness. And that is the birth place of sheer unalloyed bliss - ananda. For consciousness opens the floodgates of bliss to all of us! Am I ready to enter into such a consciousness?