The art of surrender

 

Two events, roughly 125 years apart, bear witness to the validity of the principle of surrender, of unqualified, ageless surrender to be precise. It bears fruits. The first instance dates back to 1890s. Of all the so-called low caste communities, dhanaks are known to be the least submissive to the dominant landholding castes. They are dark-skinned proud natives who have the guts and foul words to rattle the eardrums. They also possess enough stick-wielding prowess to match the previous two traits. They don’t carry social power and standing, but they hold their head quite high and can definitely quarrel when faced with casteist slur.

In the 1890s, Magni was a popular outlaw from their community. He and his group of vagabonds robbed the travellers crossing the scrub forest around the village at night. Confident of his dark-time profession, he carried extra air in his chest during the day. But then pride hath a fall.

A farmer from the village bought a beautiful mare from a fair. The majestic animal instantly caught Magni’s fancy. The barn was within the almost fortified compound of the haveli. It was impossible to enter once the main big copper-spiked wooden door closed for the night. The walls of lakhori bricks worked in lime were too strong to be broken except by hours of hammering.

Magni but had a better plan than launching a loud attack on the walls. He sneaked into the haveli around twilight and hid himself in an upper wall alcove used for storing dung-cakes and farm equipment. There he sat hidden casting greedy looks at the mare below. Unluckily someone saw him. Very silently a group of rotund farmers wielding lathis and pharsas gathered, closed the gate and peacefully stood below the hiding place. There comes down Magni with the highest probability of being lynched to death.

However, Magni was a smart guy also. He knew humility and surrender has its value. They saw him coming down with his buffalo leather juti held in his mouth as the humblest mark of surrender. It qualifies as the highest degree of self-court-marshal. There he goes, keeping his eyes on the ground, shoulder slouched to a big degree, his muddy leather footwear in his mouth, walking with the warm and majestic ease of ceasefire and surrender. Such unqualified surrender deserves consideration even among the work-brute farmers. They let him pass. But after this episode he had to keep a little less air in his chest as he walked in the village streets.

The second incident dates back a few years. There was a huge bully dog in the village. A misuser of the canine power, I would say. It was so dismissive of the lesser canine mortals. It would intimidate women and children, ate the smaller dogs’ chapattis and stole their girlfriends by force. All in all, it wasn’t popular neither among the humans nor the canine folks of the village. It had been to our yard as well. In fact it toppled over the pots containing dalia poultice for the newly calved buffalo. We ran after it but it would escape.

Then one fine day, on yet other mission of mischief, it got trapped because it couldn’t escape in time. We were successful in closing the yard gate before it could escape. Within minutes a few stick-yielding brats arrived to help us settle the score. They had their own grudges against the dog bully. So half a dozen nice sticks waited to dispense justice. Ours is a society that believes in justice, especially if we are in the authority or position to bring it about.

Had the dog growled or reacted in some angry way meaning a fight back it would surely have meant getting lynched to death. Had it yelped in piteous pleading tones, it would have meant a few severe, maybe, bone-breaking strikes. But it was a clever dog, maybe even wise, as smart as Magni was. Like him it knew the value of utmost unqualified surrender. It sat on the ground, brought out its tongue in supplication and hideous abjection and gave such a marvelous show of shivering that the attacking party was left spellbound, almost hypnotized by the show of perfect surrender.

I think had it shivered just a bit more, we would have heard its skeleton creaking and clanking. We were mesmerized. We forgot that we had sticks in our hands. We saw the waters of his surrender dribbling out from under him. He performed the surrendering feat for full five minutes. Yours truly having some poetic bent of mind or rather heart, became the first one to accept the terms of surrender and even the rough farmers agreed.

The surrender papers presented such a big victory that it wasn’t possible to ignore them. I opened the gate. There it went with its tail jutted against its balls, tongue out and body shivering. A slow march to defeat it was. I hope it wasn’t Magni repeating his surrender in a canine avatar.

Bowing with respect to the past

 

Do the past’s facts, assumptions, beliefs and theories are worthy of being put into the dustbin in the light of new emerging facts and theories? Normally we think so. But we shouldn’t forget that the past was once as relevant and useful as the present is now. The past is the building block of the present.

We lived in the caves once and hardly knew anything beyond the raw struggle for survival in the forest. We used that little platform comprising tiny bits of knowledge to construct a small stage. We didn’t even know the shape, size and basics about our planet. Were we wrong? No. That was simply our reality in the past. It was our truth at that time.

The Rig Vedic Indian sages had hardly any idea about what lay beyond the ocean. Did that stop them from evolving an elaborate system of human thought which still holds relevance for us in this modern age? Till a few centuries back we thought the sun was revolving around the earth. Did that stop us from using natural forces, resources, and contriving laws and regulations to shape fantastic civilizations? It didn’t.

There is just growth and evolution. From simpler to more sophisticated. Or maybe it isn’t even complexity. It just is—a transient stage in the stream of ever-unfolding dynamics. Truth is no static entity or something absolute. The only Truth that we may assume is a certain pattern in evolution and emergence of phenomena at any given point. Like a little plant grows in a forest. Its growth and survival are bound by the infinite possibilities of cause and effect. Cause and effect are a sequence in happening. But the trigger points for the cause-effect to take place can be infinite.

March musings

 

The month of March. Earlier we had spring in March. Now it has been relegated to just the last week of February. However, just like many of the customs that we keep following out of habit, I feel better by taking this second week of March as the spring season even though the sun is already hot enough to hit you with its rays right in the mornings.

The afternoon sun is golden yellow, showering its riot of warmth over the ripening wheat crop-heads. You can actually feel the green fading into the littlest traces of gold. The heat is building up to lead us to the harvest season. The nights however are dewy and cool and it nurtures ageratum flowers. These wild flowers have many interesting names—floss-flower, blue milk, blue weed, pussy foot and Mexican paintbrush. These wild blossoms help me keep my belief in the spring season. There are countless light purple and bluish fluffy flowers by the sides of the field-paths, foot tracks, channel bunds and the canal embankments. They have blossomed so profusely—over the thin lines of wild tracks and field divides, as if nature, taking a clue from the mankind’s intense agriculture, has done its best to utilize the thin ribbons of uncultivated land for its unwanted weeds to thrive among the well-manicured lawns of monoculture crop patterns.

They are said to attract butterflies. I hope there will be butterflies soon. There are four red semal or silk cotton trees. After the winter’s assault they are leafless with bare ashen branches at the upper end of a long straight robust silvery trunk bearing a light canopy. But they have luscious dollops of beauty to make up for their shorn-sheep look. These are big red vibrant five-petaled flowers, facing the sky upwards, receiving the grace of open skies and sunshine. They drop with a plop and then the ants have a feast. It’s also a feast for a few purple sunbird couples, bees and some odd barbet that may have delayed its flight back to the lower Himalayan hills with the passing of winter.

On one of the silk cotton trees, three parrots are having a dining gossip. Some bee-eaters are enjoying the taste of the bees hovering around the juicy big flowers. And around these solitary beacons of beauty, the long rows of bluish floss flowers are indeed still holding the banner of spring and avoid an eventuality when the spring will be an extinct season altogether.

There are a few mango trees. These are laden with inflorescence called panicles at the shoot terminals. These countless pale yellow clusters have a fragrance of procreation. So many will drizzle down with gutsy summer winds but still the tree will be left with enough for our taste and the survival of its species. During Father’s time, when they grazed cattle in the scrub forest—most of this area wasn’t tilled at that time—there were so many mango trees along the canals that they could afford to just see the mangoes come floating downstream and eat whenever they liked. Now I see just five-six mango trees in the area. Father told me there were plenty of wolves, jackals and even hyenas in the scrub forest around the village during their childhood times. And now we plough every square inch of land with a pin-pointed precision. So the wilderness is squeezed tight across the canal embankments, field channel bunds, field divides and path-sides. Here I have seen the area’s top predator, a majestic jungle cat that looks very lonely as it runs for cover on my approach. Then there are a few cobras and some jackals. Well, that’s better than no wildlife at all. This is what I consider to be my forest, stretched like narrow ribbons. I walk along these, cherishing what is left of the spring.

High in the branches of the eucalypts trees, I can see cream-colored fluffy little flowers. They spread a faint fragrance of the spring. All along the narrow paths, where the mankind is yet to arrive with pick axe, shovel and spade to turn the soil into some more productive use, there are rows of hemp plants. It has become a ubiquitous weed as if mother nature is offering her spring-time bhang lassi to make us less serious and more prone to merrymaking.

A honeybee with its one million neurons in its brain is happy with the few odd semal flowers. I, on the other hand, with my hundred billion complexities of neurons in my brain feel the loss and pain as well. I know that most of the people are running in the mad race of material progress. They are also Me. I share their fears and phobias because at the level of genome I’m 99.6 percent similar to someone else. With my 0.4 percent of genomic variance, defining my poetic individualities, I roam around in the countryside chronicling what still survives in the background of all that has vanished. It gives nostalgic pain; but it gives joy as well, like these long rows of floss flowers do. I know I’m an assemblage of genetic instructions coded in the DNA sequence; a reflection of genetically imprinted memories in my cells where each cell out of the billions contains 25,000 genes to propel my system of agonies and ecstasies. A tiny memorial bundle of love, agonies and ecstasies, here I walk bracing my fingers against the wild rows of floss flowers which line up to greet me because I recognize and accept that the spring season is still there.

The unknowable

 

To look for the ultimate truth, or reality, or absolute knowledge, the body would need immense amount of energy because the normal levels of energy would be just sufficient to sustain the normal, collective perception that conditions our mind to settle for the base-level actualization of the infinite potential.

It’s mankind’s destiny to go for truth, now or later, in this journey or the ones to come. It’s a natural evolutionary flow, it cannot be avoided. In an unawakened state this energy will go randomly, in dissipative ways, creating sweet-sour mischief, this worldliness. But it’s merely a matter of time—the time spanning various lifetimes—before it stabilizes, develops patterns of self-discipline to touch a peak in that very individual consciousness. It enables the carrier body to look for what lies beyond the simple perception-based reality. And the still remaining stumbling blocks in the body, mind and emotions have to fall along; otherwise one learns the lessons in a tough way.

This heightened energy finds different expressions like bhakti (devotion), gyan (knowledge), karma (action), art and still much more about which we don’t have a clue as of now.

The evolution in consciousness will never hit a dead end. It’s a cosmic soup of infinite potential. What you think, feel, imagine or act sets a new point of reality. And it goes on at every point of existence.

The faith-based expression of heightened energies is a very sublime form of expression. This dimension unfolds in the corridors of bhaav. This channel is very near the soul. It’s warmly loving and draws warmth from the soul itself, the high point of joyous realization in the individual consciousness. It’s so easy to jump into the river of ‘relatively higher bliss’ from this point because it’s very near to the source of profound bliss. But before that one’s faith has to shine bright in its purity and there will be tests through situations and circumstances, just like there will be in other paths.

In its karma expression, this energetic blizzard will sire a karma yogi in the carrier body. The carrier body will express its energetic storms in setting up disciplined, righteous energetic patterns (dharma) in the society around, like Rama and Krishna did.

In its gyan expression, the individual consciousness in its carrier body will try to know more and more, observe keenly, understand, and draw logical conclusions in an effort to make a meaning of this mystery and chaos. It’s an effort to cut the mind with its own tools, using the basic faculties of the mind to undo its own framework. To allow the mind to run as much as possible in its pursuit of knowledge, so that finally it stands helplessly, falls and sees a better expression across the cobwebs of its constructs.

There is another dimension of the expression of this energetic storm, a replica of the massive stars bursting somewhere in the cosmos. It’s kundalini awakening. It’s the most tangible of all the expressions. It’s a raw, naked force. It stands in front of you, holding you in its grip with a direct maneuver. It doesn’t take any diplomatic cover. It stares in your face. It shakes you. It’s nearest to the gross body in its expression. It’s so near to the base level of ego identification that you clearly feel its storm in the body as it breaks the obstructions in its path. I would say it’s a mixture of all the three above-mentioned expressions. You are jolted off your safe zone at all levels of your existence. To make a meaning of all these psychic reshaping, the reformulation of the nervous system, the remodeling of the perception channels—which is usually tough with many instances of things going very wrong—the carrier body takes help of bhakti, gyan and karma (randomly, in various orders) as per the shifting surges of this psychic force in the system.

Whichever way it happens in an individual carrier body, I don’t think there is a final arriving. It’s an infinite potential. The so-called ‘final arriving’ is itself a self-set benchmark by an evolved consciousness who rose high, perceived far more than the normal people and agreed to drop anchor at a point in the infinite cosmic sea. It’s just like space travel. You keep travelling and never reach any edge and then accept a conceptually defined reality: Ok, let’s agree to set up this point as the boundary of the space.

At every point, in every individual consciousness and its carrier body, there is the seed of infinite expansion and potential and maybe that draws these energetic storms. And however far one goes with howsoever heightened energy, the mystery always remains the same. It all remains to be known after coming to know everything. There is always more to be realized after realizing everything that is to be realized. A bit puzzling though, right? But we have to accept it logically, as long as we believe in the concept of infinity.

The baba basking in the 'now'

 

The old babaji has picked a very suitable place to pass his days in sunshine during the winters. It’s an iron bench by the foot track on the way to the holy Neelkanth shrine in the lower Himalayas. It is the off-season, so just a few dozen pilgrims pass him, whom he accosts in the lord’s name. Some coins, some ten rupee notes, sunshine and lots of peace among these little hills are his possession. During three consecutive days of our pilgrimage to the holy shrine we have offered him some bhiksha and built up a lot of friendliness with him. He has lots of scriptural knowledge and recites beautiful lines from the holy books befitting the context of the talk. After having a nice talk, as we get up to move ahead, he hails and celebrates the occasion with a shout of joy: ‘Hey rajan, aaj ke anand ki jai ho!’ It means: ‘O king, let’s hail today’s joy!’ It’s a beautiful summary of the joy of being in the ‘now’.