When my mother passed away on March 18, 1978, I bemoaned her death thus :
Ma, I don't know how to cry
My eyes ring dry
Like the riverbed
Lost beneath the sands.
I'm sure youforone
Won't misunderstand your son
For his sterile eyes
Are brimful with sighs.
Tell Ma, when the doctors pumped
Their last hopes into you
And I clung to your side
Not knowing what else to do
Were you likewise as helpless
With words turned voiceless
On listless lips, halfway
Between life and death's sway ?
Did you mumble a goodbye, rife
With expectations,
My eyes ring dry
Like the riverbed
Lost beneath the sands.
I'm sure youforone
Won't misunderstand your son
For his sterile eyes
Are brimful with sighs.
Tell Ma, when the doctors pumped
Their last hopes into you
And I clung to your side
Not knowing what else to do
Were you likewise as helpless
With words turned voiceless
On listless lips, halfway
Between life and death's sway ?
Did you mumble a goodbye, rife
With expectations,
For duplication of a life
You had authored 40 years ago?
You had authored 40 years ago?
No Ma, can't be so again; this dead weight
Against slipping sands; too late
Ma; in this imperfect fable
Is there no loophole in the inevitable ?
Her hand into mine, the doctor injected pethidine intravenously and tried manually to resuscitate her.But she slipped from my fingers as easily as quicksilver.I had lost my dad some time back, and now she was gone. I couldn't believe she could leave me so soon. I felt shattered. There are so many loopholes in this imperfect world. Couldn't there be a loophole in death ? So I mused then.
Three decades on, as I write this piece, I want to let you know that there is no need going searching for chinks in death's armour because there exists a royal road to meet death. Things take an uncanny turn when we treat death as an event which it is not. Death is a process which starts the moment one is born. Death arises with life, being its twin sister. One dies every moment to remain alive. We are simultaneously alive and dead every moment. While you are reading this article, do you have any inkling that the drama of birth and death is taking place non-stop in every part of your body with lightening speed.
Our body contains from 50 to 100 trillion cells. Millions of these cells are dying and renewing themselves incessently. Our stomach renews its lining every five days. Miraculously, its innermost lining gets overhauled by the time we finish our hearty repast. Our skin gets a new coat every month. Every third month we stroll in a new skeleton. For the aesthetically sensitive I would say 'in a new frame'. Twenty five centuries ago, Heraclitus, the Greek mystic, made a zap-proof statement : You can't step twice into the same river. I reiterate, we can't step into the same body twice. It looks our body is like a building whose bricks are being replaced ceaselessly.
Our cells die so that we remain alive; we die so that human species remains alive. Stars collapse so that galaxies live on; and galaxies die, so that the universe moves on. And universes collapse so that the multiverse functions. You must have relished salmon, if you are a piscivorous, but do you know the story behind them. Let me tell you. Salmon are born in fresh water rivers, high up in the mountains. As soon as they come out of their eggs, they set out on their journey along with the river, coursing through the waterfalls in the hills, and the burning heat in the plains. Finally they reach the estuary, where in the salty waters they attain to maturity.
After they have lived most of their lives in the sea, suddenly one day they become conscious of their original home. They pack up and start on their way back home. It is an upstream journey, against the flow of the river, full of all the obstacles in the form of floating logs, rapids,and debris. They get bruised, and frazzled, but they reach the very place where they were born. What for do they undertake this tortuous journey ? Well, just to spawn. And once they have spawned, some 15000 eggs each, they breathe their last. Spawners die, so that salmon live. The smaller whole dies to keep the bigger whole alive. In this drama of life and death, the only constant is the formless consciousness. Consciousness is the ultimate Cosmic constant.
Once it so happened that Khushwant Singh, while tattling with his friend Parashar, started bemoaning 'death' in these words: "Death erases our bodies, minds, and everything our bodies or minds may have achieved in our lives". When Parashar, reminded him of consciousness, he shot back: "Consciousness of what?...where does it survive ?... where? In the air or empty space?" As Carl Jung reminds us, it is so unfortunate, that we are conscious only of our ego. We live on ego, by ego and for ego. Beyond our ego we are a colossal mass of unconsciousness. According to Mahavir Swami, the genesis of violence lies in ego. All the misery on earth issues forth from the misplaced pride of "I'm this,I possess that/ I can do, this and that".
When the yak-yak of our mind takes up whole of our energy, we become asleep inside and a state of zero alertness ensues. All mystics , from the hoary past down the ages, have been trying to rouse us from this slumber. Awake thou that sleepest, implored Jesus christ. The Upanishads say : Arise, Awake. A mystic's forte is to serve Existence by making an art of alertness. Just being conscious of the phenomenal world is kitsch for him because this does not make Existence any the more beautiful. His aim is to become conscious of consciousness. A quantum jump is needed to attain this state of being conscious of consciousness.
Let me explain. We watch a sunrise or moonrise and we become engrossed in its beauty and get lost in it. In other words, we become asleep. It is like we are on the road, conscious of everything passing by us except ourselves. Are you aware of the one who is watching you getting lost in this beauty ? Stepping aside of ourselves and becoming conscious of this watcher is what is called consciousness of consciousness. At such moments one always feels a certain pull of this consciousness in the region of the Third Eye. Meanwhile there happens a certain loosening of I-ness's grip on the mind and the body suddenly releases the long suppressed energy which may transform one's whole perspective on Existence. As a result of this little act one may even get drenched in consciousness and one's life may begin exuding a kind of religious fragrance.
Day and night, joy and sorrow, love and hate, are all part of a mechanism of the Existence. Existence is not unipolar; it is bipolar. You name one, the other will rise up with it like its shadow. As soon as you say 'I love you', you have cranked up its ghost,'I hate you'. Don't deceive yourself believing that you can go on loving and loving only. That is impossible. Hate lurks in the wings, of course invisible for the now. The first stone always comes from the one who claims to love you, not from the one who hates you. In fact the latter is going to love you one day. He is bound to. How long can one sizzle oneself on the hate burner ? Not indefinitely. We are always moving from one extreme to the other. Why ?
Because we cling to what is desirable to us. That clinging itself saps the vibrancy of the desirable, making it undesirable. Then we drop the undesirable like we do a hot potato. Again the same game gets going. It becomes an unending cycle. As far as Existence is concerned, there is no difficulty in a one-to-one relationship between what we consider as desirable and what we consider as undesirable, because Existence does not allow of any divisibility. As soon as we choose one against the other, we give invitation to conflict. And all resistances, all conflicts, guzzle our vital energies.
How can we ever think of an unending day, or perennial joy, or non-stop love, or eternal life, unless we are asleep in our consciousness ? Because of this sleep, we have seen above,we make the desirable, undesirable. And then we embark on moving heaven and earth relentlessly, to escape the undesirable. What I am trying to say is that by cultivating consciousness, the desirable retains its charm, while the undesirable sheds its stigma. Let me recount to you how Socrates, who was described by Plato as the wisest, justest, and best of all the men whom I have ever known, looked at his death.
Plato, called the father of Western Philosophy, was one of the disciples of Socrates. It is because of him that we have today with us a graphic description of the last scene of Socrates' life. Socrates had been ordained to drink poison for corrupting the youth of Athens. Came the day of parting. The time set for it was sundown. As women including Xanthippe, his wife, who never had a kind word for him, were crying, they had been asked by Socrates to leave the place. When the time came, he said to the jailor: "I'm ready. Are you ready ?" The jailor burst into tears and went out. Socrates bade Crito, one of his followers, to tell the attendant to bring in the cup.
Socrates' disciples were from the Aristocracy, and very influential. They had bribed everybody down the chain, to secure a safe passage for Socrates. But Socrates won't listen to them. His argument : We have a social contract with the state to obey it. Life and death both exist. How can you choose one and deny the other ? Can we say 'yes' to light and 'no' to darkness ? All choosing amounts to the vain effort of establishing untruth as authentic, which it is not. When the cup of poison was brought by the servant, he put it to his lips and drank it readily and cheerfully. There was not a flicker of hesitation, or loss of color on his face. Now all his followers, who had been sobbing silently, burst into loud wailing. Everybody who was there, was crying. Only the one who drank the poison was calm. Socrates implored them to calm down and let him die peacefully.
The poison that Socrates was made to drink was called hemlock. It first affects the lowest extremities, the toes, and then ascends upwards. For some time Socrates walked, as advised by the jailor, and when his legs became heavy , he lay down on his back. He then told the spectators : " Half of my body is gone, but 'I' am still whole. When the poison reaches the heart, my tongue will not be able to speak but 'I' will still remain whole. You will be burying only my body, not me". He kept on informing about the wholeness of 'I' till his tongue faltered and his eyes became set. This is the only recorded account in the whole history of mankind, of a man who remained conscious of consciousness till the end of his body.
One thing that is noticeable here is that Socrates was neither in pain, nor in fear, nor in sorrow while leaving his body. He was witnessing death, just as he had been witnessing life all along. A conscious life is crowned with conscious death, proclaimed Meher Baba. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna undertakes to take under his wing, anybody who remains conscious in his death. Obviously only one who leads a conscious life, can remain conscious in death. If we are conscious , death becomes a whistle stop, not a full stop. It loses its much dreaded sting. In his death Socrates had become so tall, we look like pygmies. Don't we make death ugly by clinging to bodies which have outlived their utility ?
Once we have begun to understand death, I think it becomes easier for us to learn to live life meaningfully. We come to realize that everything in this phenomenal world changes. What looks to us so solid and secure is neither solid nor permanent. In our sleep, when we see a dream, we are the witness. The reverse is also true. In our life, if we become a witness, we see everything in its true colors, as a dream. And then the vain pursuits, the egoistic pursuits of power, pelf, and possessiveness, lose their charm. Perhaps now when we have understood death, we would prefer bathing in the ecstasy of a sunrise or moonrise, to jumping in the feverish fray of a sensex-rise. Also helping a destitute would seem more worthwhile than helping ourselves to a lavish dinner.
Thank you very much for being with me for so long. I'll be back on the 28th of this month with a piece on Mahavir Swami, the earliest apostle of non-violence on this earth.
Om Shantih
Ajit Sambodhi
Against slipping sands; too late
Ma; in this imperfect fable
Is there no loophole in the inevitable ?
Her hand into mine, the doctor injected pethidine intravenously and tried manually to resuscitate her.But she slipped from my fingers as easily as quicksilver.I had lost my dad some time back, and now she was gone. I couldn't believe she could leave me so soon. I felt shattered. There are so many loopholes in this imperfect world. Couldn't there be a loophole in death ? So I mused then.
Three decades on, as I write this piece, I want to let you know that there is no need going searching for chinks in death's armour because there exists a royal road to meet death. Things take an uncanny turn when we treat death as an event which it is not. Death is a process which starts the moment one is born. Death arises with life, being its twin sister. One dies every moment to remain alive. We are simultaneously alive and dead every moment. While you are reading this article, do you have any inkling that the drama of birth and death is taking place non-stop in every part of your body with lightening speed.
Our body contains from 50 to 100 trillion cells. Millions of these cells are dying and renewing themselves incessently. Our stomach renews its lining every five days. Miraculously, its innermost lining gets overhauled by the time we finish our hearty repast. Our skin gets a new coat every month. Every third month we stroll in a new skeleton. For the aesthetically sensitive I would say 'in a new frame'. Twenty five centuries ago, Heraclitus, the Greek mystic, made a zap-proof statement : You can't step twice into the same river. I reiterate, we can't step into the same body twice. It looks our body is like a building whose bricks are being replaced ceaselessly.
Our cells die so that we remain alive; we die so that human species remains alive. Stars collapse so that galaxies live on; and galaxies die, so that the universe moves on. And universes collapse so that the multiverse functions. You must have relished salmon, if you are a piscivorous, but do you know the story behind them. Let me tell you. Salmon are born in fresh water rivers, high up in the mountains. As soon as they come out of their eggs, they set out on their journey along with the river, coursing through the waterfalls in the hills, and the burning heat in the plains. Finally they reach the estuary, where in the salty waters they attain to maturity.
After they have lived most of their lives in the sea, suddenly one day they become conscious of their original home. They pack up and start on their way back home. It is an upstream journey, against the flow of the river, full of all the obstacles in the form of floating logs, rapids,and debris. They get bruised, and frazzled, but they reach the very place where they were born. What for do they undertake this tortuous journey ? Well, just to spawn. And once they have spawned, some 15000 eggs each, they breathe their last. Spawners die, so that salmon live. The smaller whole dies to keep the bigger whole alive. In this drama of life and death, the only constant is the formless consciousness. Consciousness is the ultimate Cosmic constant.
Once it so happened that Khushwant Singh, while tattling with his friend Parashar, started bemoaning 'death' in these words: "Death erases our bodies, minds, and everything our bodies or minds may have achieved in our lives". When Parashar, reminded him of consciousness, he shot back: "Consciousness of what?...where does it survive ?... where? In the air or empty space?" As Carl Jung reminds us, it is so unfortunate, that we are conscious only of our ego. We live on ego, by ego and for ego. Beyond our ego we are a colossal mass of unconsciousness. According to Mahavir Swami, the genesis of violence lies in ego. All the misery on earth issues forth from the misplaced pride of "I'm this,I possess that/ I can do, this and that".
When the yak-yak of our mind takes up whole of our energy, we become asleep inside and a state of zero alertness ensues. All mystics , from the hoary past down the ages, have been trying to rouse us from this slumber. Awake thou that sleepest, implored Jesus christ. The Upanishads say : Arise, Awake. A mystic's forte is to serve Existence by making an art of alertness. Just being conscious of the phenomenal world is kitsch for him because this does not make Existence any the more beautiful. His aim is to become conscious of consciousness. A quantum jump is needed to attain this state of being conscious of consciousness.
Let me explain. We watch a sunrise or moonrise and we become engrossed in its beauty and get lost in it. In other words, we become asleep. It is like we are on the road, conscious of everything passing by us except ourselves. Are you aware of the one who is watching you getting lost in this beauty ? Stepping aside of ourselves and becoming conscious of this watcher is what is called consciousness of consciousness. At such moments one always feels a certain pull of this consciousness in the region of the Third Eye. Meanwhile there happens a certain loosening of I-ness's grip on the mind and the body suddenly releases the long suppressed energy which may transform one's whole perspective on Existence. As a result of this little act one may even get drenched in consciousness and one's life may begin exuding a kind of religious fragrance.
Day and night, joy and sorrow, love and hate, are all part of a mechanism of the Existence. Existence is not unipolar; it is bipolar. You name one, the other will rise up with it like its shadow. As soon as you say 'I love you', you have cranked up its ghost,'I hate you'. Don't deceive yourself believing that you can go on loving and loving only. That is impossible. Hate lurks in the wings, of course invisible for the now. The first stone always comes from the one who claims to love you, not from the one who hates you. In fact the latter is going to love you one day. He is bound to. How long can one sizzle oneself on the hate burner ? Not indefinitely. We are always moving from one extreme to the other. Why ?
Because we cling to what is desirable to us. That clinging itself saps the vibrancy of the desirable, making it undesirable. Then we drop the undesirable like we do a hot potato. Again the same game gets going. It becomes an unending cycle. As far as Existence is concerned, there is no difficulty in a one-to-one relationship between what we consider as desirable and what we consider as undesirable, because Existence does not allow of any divisibility. As soon as we choose one against the other, we give invitation to conflict. And all resistances, all conflicts, guzzle our vital energies.
How can we ever think of an unending day, or perennial joy, or non-stop love, or eternal life, unless we are asleep in our consciousness ? Because of this sleep, we have seen above,we make the desirable, undesirable. And then we embark on moving heaven and earth relentlessly, to escape the undesirable. What I am trying to say is that by cultivating consciousness, the desirable retains its charm, while the undesirable sheds its stigma. Let me recount to you how Socrates, who was described by Plato as the wisest, justest, and best of all the men whom I have ever known, looked at his death.
Plato, called the father of Western Philosophy, was one of the disciples of Socrates. It is because of him that we have today with us a graphic description of the last scene of Socrates' life. Socrates had been ordained to drink poison for corrupting the youth of Athens. Came the day of parting. The time set for it was sundown. As women including Xanthippe, his wife, who never had a kind word for him, were crying, they had been asked by Socrates to leave the place. When the time came, he said to the jailor: "I'm ready. Are you ready ?" The jailor burst into tears and went out. Socrates bade Crito, one of his followers, to tell the attendant to bring in the cup.
Socrates' disciples were from the Aristocracy, and very influential. They had bribed everybody down the chain, to secure a safe passage for Socrates. But Socrates won't listen to them. His argument : We have a social contract with the state to obey it. Life and death both exist. How can you choose one and deny the other ? Can we say 'yes' to light and 'no' to darkness ? All choosing amounts to the vain effort of establishing untruth as authentic, which it is not. When the cup of poison was brought by the servant, he put it to his lips and drank it readily and cheerfully. There was not a flicker of hesitation, or loss of color on his face. Now all his followers, who had been sobbing silently, burst into loud wailing. Everybody who was there, was crying. Only the one who drank the poison was calm. Socrates implored them to calm down and let him die peacefully.
The poison that Socrates was made to drink was called hemlock. It first affects the lowest extremities, the toes, and then ascends upwards. For some time Socrates walked, as advised by the jailor, and when his legs became heavy , he lay down on his back. He then told the spectators : " Half of my body is gone, but 'I' am still whole. When the poison reaches the heart, my tongue will not be able to speak but 'I' will still remain whole. You will be burying only my body, not me". He kept on informing about the wholeness of 'I' till his tongue faltered and his eyes became set. This is the only recorded account in the whole history of mankind, of a man who remained conscious of consciousness till the end of his body.
One thing that is noticeable here is that Socrates was neither in pain, nor in fear, nor in sorrow while leaving his body. He was witnessing death, just as he had been witnessing life all along. A conscious life is crowned with conscious death, proclaimed Meher Baba. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna undertakes to take under his wing, anybody who remains conscious in his death. Obviously only one who leads a conscious life, can remain conscious in death. If we are conscious , death becomes a whistle stop, not a full stop. It loses its much dreaded sting. In his death Socrates had become so tall, we look like pygmies. Don't we make death ugly by clinging to bodies which have outlived their utility ?
Once we have begun to understand death, I think it becomes easier for us to learn to live life meaningfully. We come to realize that everything in this phenomenal world changes. What looks to us so solid and secure is neither solid nor permanent. In our sleep, when we see a dream, we are the witness. The reverse is also true. In our life, if we become a witness, we see everything in its true colors, as a dream. And then the vain pursuits, the egoistic pursuits of power, pelf, and possessiveness, lose their charm. Perhaps now when we have understood death, we would prefer bathing in the ecstasy of a sunrise or moonrise, to jumping in the feverish fray of a sensex-rise. Also helping a destitute would seem more worthwhile than helping ourselves to a lavish dinner.
Thank you very much for being with me for so long. I'll be back on the 28th of this month with a piece on Mahavir Swami, the earliest apostle of non-violence on this earth.
Om Shantih
Ajit Sambodhi
