The Divine Spark

The Greek philosophers had understood the essential nature of human beings in its most profound manner, when they said that every human person has a divine spark in him/her, and we cannot exclude anyone from this category. All of us are born with the divine face, but this face is marred in the world, as we come in touch with the notion of good and evil. Unfortunately it is only the human beings who have this sense of distinction between good and evil; look at the plants and animals, for them everyone is the same; there is no difference between friend and foe, they go beyond this marked distinction, and that is what makes them so happy and contended with life on earth. They have nothing to grumble about, nothing to complain about. All is well with them.

One of the most important role and function of religion is to help humanity recognize the divine spark in them, and attain it through a disciplined way. In very simplistic terms, all religions show us the way to recognize that we have the divine spark in us, and it is possible to regain it. And the Bhagavad Gita, one chapter of the epic poem the Mahabharata, shows us one simple way, which is possible for every person. In chapter 9 of the Gita, Lord Krishna teaches his disciple Arjuna the path to eternal friendship with the Lord. Answering the question who is dear to the Lord, Lord Krishna shows his disciple the path of equanimity, or to use an Ignatian term ‘indifference’.

We are so used to black and white distinction, that we cannot think of grey, the in-between, and strangely the Lord teaches Arjuna he has to be untouched by happiness and sadness, not desiring holy and unholy; the one who is the same to friends and foes, to cold and heat, such is dear to the Lord. Ultimately what matters is that the devotee is able to offer himself/herself to the Lord of the Universe, in whose hands is our destiny. But it is not easy to reach this stage, and it is next to impossible to find persons who have reached this stage. We could call the people who are close to this stage as saints and sages, and it may be possible to find one or two persons during one’s generation.

The spiritual sages of our nation have shown that the path to freedom and sanctity is not easy to reach; one has to renounce everything, including the desire to attain complete freedom and remain in perpetual ananda. When we seek this freedom, we realize that everything on earth is equally good and valid pathway to reach the divine in us. We realize that the divine spark is in all beings, both animate and inanimate, and the moment when we realize the divine even in our foes, those who do evil to us, and relate to them as if we are relating to the divine personality, then we can be sure that we are closer to reaching our destination.

It is true that true saints and sages would talk to the plants and animals, stones and rocks as if they had life, just as human beings. What is more surprising is that often they believed they received a positive response from these so-called inanimate and animate beings too, which is quite unintelligible to us mortals. It is possible that we do not take pains to learn the language of the birds and plants, stones and rocks; it might take just a life-long sadhana to really understand their language, and that is the language of divinity. For when we have mastered this language, everything around us becomes divine, and the whole world is charged with divinity. We become part of God-head, and we are gods!

Beauty and Beast

Today the Indian subcontinent witnessed one of the most spectacular diamond rings in the sky, when the annular solar eclipse was sighted from the Southern most tip of the country, and there were a lot of people flocking to Dhanushkodi and to Kanyakumari! One may still remember that these are the very places which had witnessed some years ago one of the worst onslaughts of tsunami! The spectacular show has come as a consoling factor to the tsunami ravaged coastal region of Tamil Nadu, which is still to rise from the harvest festival Pongal slumber. So the wonderful celestial sight was a feast to the star-gazers, if not the coastal fisherfolks, for whom the eclipse was nothing more than a sophistication of a natural event.

But day before yesterday nature showed its ferocious face in Haiti, when an earthquake devoured over 50,000 men and women. Seven richter scale is nothing so low to bring down buildings, and there were people who were buried under the debris, and never to see the light of day. There are more and more natural calamities over which the human beings have too little control. Nature however had its own mechanism to avert major calamities which would cost the earth dearly; but the human intervention has undone these mechanism, to such an extent that it is hard for nature not to be stern. And when nature is hard, the first casualty is the human persons en masse!

If the earthquake has shaken Haiti day before yesterday, our turn may come any time; we are called to be prepared to face the tune of the angry earth. The human race which had mercilessly killed nature’s sap, are to replace them with their own blood, and yet it is doubtful if the earth would tally the accounts and start life anew! But one of the most nagging questions which disturb many of the underdeveloped or developing nations is, why they be held responsible for the destruction of the earth and her resources by the developed nations? Who are the people who have plundered the earth’s resources and filled their pockets? Is it not unfair to make the innocent people held responsible for what they do not know?

The irony of earth’s divine sport is that on the one hand she reveals herself as one of the most charming, beautiful of all created things; and on the other side is her ferocious side! Beauty and beast seem to co-exist, and who else but Lord William Blake can try to reconcile these contradictions. Without contraries is no progression, Blake was to have told, and that is why he brought in Lamb and Tyger (Blake’s spelling), representing innocence and experience. True, the humanity was innocent some centuries ago, and today the experienced men and women would only find ways of exterminating any beauty still left on earth, and it is proper that we see the beastly face of earth!

Humanity is all in praise for the wonders of the earth, and they will make melodies to sing her praises, so long the charm is still there, and she shows her beautiful face, spilling innocence. Humanity is frightened of the other side of the earth, the angry planet, ready to teach humanity a fitting lesson, so that they do not play with fire, which can devour all that is, and is yet to be! As we admire the most spectacular diamond ring of the century, let us not forget the hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti, who are fighting with their lives for no fault of their own, and bring them to our consciousness, so that their cry, pain and anguish may heal our greed and selfishness, so that we may in turn heal the wounds of the earth!

Passion with Com-passion

In the entertainment world, which is dominated by commercial films and videos, a film of this sort is rare and rather unheard of! I am not talking about the films of the sort which Indian film doyen Satyajit Ray made, which ran empty halls in the city, while acclaimed all over the world. I am talking about Bommalattam (Doll's play), a full-length feature film in Tamil made by the famous film director Bharati Raja! It is not that I am fond of the films of Bharati Raja, who always had a social issue to present in his films, but as I sat to relax in front of the television, I found something very different in this film, very different from the usual soap-operas and the tear-jerkers!

The fact that Nana Patekar, whom I consider as a serious actor, happened to act in a Tamil feature film meant that it was not going to be yet another love story! The theme looked so very complicated, but after the denoument, one realizes that the plot has been weaved in such a way that the story was hanging together, and one could vibrate with the hero fighting a fierce battle against a society which only knows how to condemn the vulnerable! The director had handled the characters in the film not only with the usual passion, but more with com-passion, and that made this film a very different sort for me!

I consider myself a person who has limited, selective memory! In certain cases, my memory is shart, though I cannot claim it is photographic, but fairly good; but when it comes to storylines, novels, and even blogs, I have a bad memory! Sometimes when I go back to some of my old writings, I feel amazed and ask myself if I had done it! I might have read a novel some years ago, but when I read it again, without realizing that I had read it earlier, I can vaguely remember some isolated characters, but not the story. I feel terrible when many of my friends can remember the storyline of a novel or a film they had read/seen many years ago. I even envy them.

In all walks of life today, the slogan is 'passion', and if there is one life-force which is keeping the present world alive, it is the passion of a handful of people, igniting the lives of others. Passion in life, passion in workplace, passion in relationships, and passion in being. What perhaps the today's world lacks is com-passion! I am not talking about charity or gift or obligatory social commitment corporate houses are expected to fulfil, in order to get the tax exemption! Compassion goes beyond all scales and measurements, and one gets countless number of opportunities to show one's compassion today: it would be wrong to consider that only the human beings demand our compassion, the plants and beasts, the earth and the universe - all are in need of human compassion.

Compassion also demands that we throw away our law-books in order to uphold humanity, or life in one form or other. If the law of the land becomes the most important criteria for judging people (and I would not belittle the importance of the law of the land in any way), then we would be forced to throttle true justice, which goes beyond laws and regulations. The Doll's Play fortunately upholds such a kind of compassionate justice, which can change the face of the world sooner than we think! Every human person is invited to become agents of compassion, and the day when even a toddler looks at the plants and beasts, other toddlers with compassion, then we can see a thousand suns and moons rising around us!

Breaking the Benign

If we term a group of animals as ferocious, often we see that there is no greater ferocious animal than the human beings; it is only men and women who can be very ruthless, and heartless. Some are so hard hearted that nothing can move them. And that is a tragedy that is responsible for so much of terror and bloodshed in our world. We blame the circumstances, and even point an accusing finger at the up-bringing, but more than all, we cannot but blame the new-age value system, which still believes in survival of the fittest and the fastest (imagine the notion of speed that is at the helm of all present day advancements!). Anything can be dispensed with in order to soar high in the business ladder or to achieve the targeted goals. That includes even the life of innocent men and women, the voiceless, deaf-dumb-mute human beings, who cannot be given the dignity that befits them.

Three days ago, we got the news that one of our companions was going through a minor depression, and felt lonely. Some of the past events and incidents had aggravated a sense of loss and insecurity in him, that led him to think that he was not worthy of being what he had been for the past thirty years. He was in tears when he narrated to me how some of our friends had humiliated him in public, without even the least qualms of conscience. That this friend of mine could go to such a situation was something that I could not imagine. So some of our friends began to call him up to boost his morale and bring him back to a feeling that he was wanted and his past efforts to contribute to the institution he was attached to was worth its while. One of his regrets was that no one acknowledged how much he had given himself to build the institution where he had been for the past fourteen years. Instead of some good words, there were brickbats and accusations that chased him to take recourse in brooding and finally to minor depression.

It was quite surprising for me to hear from a close associate of mine, who said that one friend had told him, that the man undergoing depression was in fact feigning. Another important friend warned me not to give undue importance to him. I found it extremely difficult to understand how crude and hard we could be in the judgment of our companions. Many of us at sometime or other go through such moments when we feel that all our efforts were in vain, and it would be better to move out to some other place where we may at least be noticed. If I cannot be sympathetic towards my neighbor, how much of sympathy can I expect from others when I am in trouble? We all of us wish to be treated fairly, and is it not just that we too treat others in the same measure?

I am quite convinced that there are times in the life of persons, when we need to go across the boundaries of familiarity, friendship, relationship and legalities. When the very life of a person is at stake, we cannot afford to bargain with mean and silly issues and things. If we think that the life of a person can be sacrificed in order to prove a point right or wrong, then the time may not be far off for us to bear the consequences of such a notion. The modern society has taught us to be tough with ourselves and with the outside world, even encouraging us to be strict with our feelings and emotions. No wonder many of us turn out to be more of machines than lively human persons. That is where the danger lies; if we cannot look at others as an extension of myself, all my philosophies and world wisdom will be of no value. I am called primarily to be human, fully human, fully alive.

Today I take a few moments from my busy life, to quieten myself and enter into my inner self to look at the corners where I still carry certain amount of stones that can break a soul and shed blood. Let me look at them, and see them slowly transformed into soft, gentle wool. Let me also look in my mind all the people whom I had treated with ruthlessness and made them realize that they were not wanted, and deep down feel sorry for such moments. I also will think about the moments when I could have reacted differently to people and incidents, instead of going by the letters of the law. Let me see that the brother and sister whom I ill-treat or mis-treat is my extension, and they too demand the dignity that I claim for myself. It may not be possible that I am transformed into a different being in a day or two, but if I am aware that I have a heart that is capable of turning men and women into beasts, then there are chances that one day I may truly be able to enter into the shoes of others, and truly empathise with them. And that is the moment of self-victory for me!