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.
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