Melting ice-blocks and bear hugs during Corona-bombarded times

As you go within and start having a discourse with your real self, satsang, a tiny lamp starts shining, and many a disillusion simply disappear. You taste the nectar of mystical peace. You feel like you have hit the ultimate jackpot. You feel like you are blessed with the most valuable wealth. Unlike the other forms of wealth we are acquainted with, we don’t want to cling onto it and hide it from others. You just feel like sharing it. There is hardly any option. The knot gets loosened and you feel floating on a higher plane of existence. From this elevation, you see the world below, watch it in totality. The complete picture erases the erroneous spots born of the lower fragmented view when you saw dead-ends even in the little streets. Now you see the beautiful pattern of the maze. The riddle vanishes, simply because there wasn’t any.

The kind, old, simple-hearted retired teacher is almost double of my age. ‘My eyes start overflowing with tears whenever I hear, read, do or see something about dharma!’ I remember him telling me a few months back. He came to convey his condolences on the occasion of my mother’s departure for her further journey. We had a long talk about the issue of life and death. I remember tears of acceptance, compassion, love and joy in his eyes. Now the other day, he calls me over phone. I am humbled by his words. Torrential waters of his compassionate self eat away big chunks of my remaining ego. I myself get tears in my eyes.

‘Sant ji, you are an enlightened soul! Please be my spiritual guide!’ his words are drenched with the fluidity of emotions. I now recall the tears in his kind, old eyes when we had met the last time.

I am humbled beyond words. The surge of my emotions is the only answer to him. ‘You have already your guru in you Master ji, your soul, the real you!’ I somehow manage.

He has raised me to the vaults of heavens, but I feel belittled to the micro size of dust speck around anybody’s shoes on earth. I then add value to his devotion and honeyed mellowness by adding my own surrendering words of devotion. I speak like a student speaks to his teacher. I give him full respect. By the end of our discussion, we have learnt a lot about life and beyond. Most importantly, I have salvaged my right to pay him unqualified respect as an elder.  

In the same vein, I should mention a hardworking farmer in his 70s. He has been a karmayogi, and has toiled like a brute throughout his life. Now the hard-worked soil, irrigated with his sweat beads, has started to sprout forth flowers, the fragrant colors of divinity, of mystical messages.

‘My eyes flow like rivers as I read about the stories of saints and their pious deeds!’ I he tells me. He looks very expectantly, with the eagerness of a child, trying to know a bit more about the reason for the same from a supposedly ‘educated’ guy like me.

‘It’s a very auspicious sign Uncle!’ humbled again, I begin my modest discourse. ‘The river has started to flow. The heat and light of love beyond the self has started to melt the frigid icy mountain of ego, fear and self-identity. Your awareness is expanding. Ego is like an ice-block, rigid, knotted, imprisoned and unmoving. One’s awareness is constricted in a hard knot. As the merciful rays of divine beneficence start falling on it, it melts. A river gushes forth. These tears, this salty water, are the stream of your melting ego, the enlargement of your awareness. Your consciousness is expanding. It will flow, acquire more space and taste more of life and living. Keep journeying uncle, the heat and light will further uplift you to the endless expanses of airy travels. The river will further expand to airy free swirls as the water molecules will further lose their fluid watery grip to evaporate and turn to air. It means further expansion, more extension of awareness to the maximum limit to merge one with everything. From a frigid clod of egoistic ice to a free floating molecule in the airy sea. Well, that’s the journey. You are in an amazing state Uncle, feel blessed with this flow, this fluidity, for this is what takes you to the next stage of evolution. The basic element in air, water and ice remains the same. Just that molecular structural arrangement changes!’ here I have to stop as I feel that now I am getting bitten by the bug of bookish knowledge about molecular structure and all. His eyes are streaming with happy, graceful tears, a proof that my little effort at interpreting it has found a sweet home in his simple farming mind. Moreover, heart has its own logic to perceive reality. It can beat the best of super-brains.

He is overwhelmed. For a moment, I get panicked he may touch my feet. Thankfully, Uncle avoids the catastrophe. My head is itching to get a fatherly blessing from his rough hands and I adopt the meek look of a child ready to receive his blessings. But then he finds me too learned and supposedly wise to put his hand on my head. I am deprived of blessings by a holy soul. But we shouldn’t forget, between the surrendering touch of feet and the blessings on the head, there lies the vast and sacrosanct temple of heart, where all and sundry meet on the same plane of being the very same poor, little souls searching for the ultimate peace and joy. We two seekers of the truth meet in that temple, and inevitably the temple’s sole ritual, i.e., a bear hug, follows with effortless ease. Fuck Corona idiot! It cannot enter such pure temples, where hugs are life-saving even during the Corona-bombarded times.