| SAPTHAGIRI - June 2003 | ||
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Justice and injustice, righteousness and unrighteousness, fortune and misfortune, good and bad, joy and sorrow are all universal. We should only be thankful that it is so, for the reason that this is the best guarantee of our final liberation from the bondage of illusion and limitations of lower life, and safeguard against our voluntarily becoming exiled in the lower life of material existence indefinitely. It is only when we are pressed by adversity, in the darkest hour of our despair, when we are deprived of all assistance, that we 'turn to God' and appeal to him for assistance and guidance. It will be ridiculous to expect divine assistance at that moment because our reaching him is a momentary exercise and not a real seeking. We have been all the while quite forgetful of divinity or even our own divine nature and indulging in self-seeking activities.
A true devotee is not caught in the net of dualities. A fish does not answer till the net calls. If the net has holes or is vulnerable, the fish will escape the meshes of the net, our repentence, our feeling of sadness, pity, a kind of tenderness that springs from bewilderment in the form, 'These are mine' - will never get us anywhere. We must have the urge to stake our all for Him and tear off all our desires and revolts. We cannot forget the fundamental teaching of the Gita:
karmnyeva dhikaraste ma phalesu kadacana
Ma karma phala hetur bhur ma te sango'stv akarmani (II-47)
"Perform your duty but lay no claim to its fruits. Be not be the producer of the fruits of karma; neither you lean towards inaction" Without striving to do all that we can to save ourselves, we cannot thrust our duty on God and blame Him for not rendering us help at the hour of need. God has not promised to remain as a bodyguard to all innocent men and creatures. The present is the sum total of our past for which we ourselves are responsible.
Lord Krishna has unequivocally stated that no true aspiration or effort has ever been futile.
'na me bhakta pransyati' 'My bhakta will never perish' (IX-23)
In other words, 'I will never allow My bhakta to perish'. The burden of protecting the bhakta has been assured by the Lord. When the Lord comes to our aid we spurn Him, and reject Him as something alien and when any victory is won we pride ourselves as its architects.
It happened before :
"For all that, look at the evidence of History; what was it that actually happened? First of all, such a heavenly soul - a king among men and a Godly King at that - had come to us - a Being of Love and Light - and what did we do to him? We harassed him, jeered at him, spat at him and then blatantly insisted - against the Judge Pilet's own verdict mind you - on crucifying him between two common thieves: but even that was not all - not by a long way we spurned His Grace - betrayed his trust - travested his teaching - at every turn. He had preached love and meekness: we apotheosized hate and war; he had enjoined not to judge; we become Inquisitors in his name to torture, burn and break people on the wheel for their beliefs. And last though not least trumpeting all the while that he had come to save all, we established a sect in his name and damned all who had different convictions and so could not be affiliated to a certain church sponsoring a certain formal creed". (Miracles Do Still Happen - A Novel by Dilip Kumar Roy pp. 322,323).
After a lecture an American asked Radhakrishnan "If India has a saving message as you have said, why does she not save herself?". His reply was: 'The great Jesus was born to save others and not Himself'. (Radhakrishnan His Life and Ideas by K. Sachidananda Murthy and Asok Vohra-p. 49).
Thus Christ came to save us but could not save himself from crucification. The word innocence is ordinarily used to mean guiltless but those who are militants are also innocent in the philosophical sense. Radhakrishnan while welcoming the delegates as the Chairman of the Organizing Committee of the Indian Philosophical Congress held in Andhra University in 1934, said :
"Oscar wilde has a great short story which reads thus :
Christ came to a white plain from purple city and as He passed through the first street, He heard voices overhead and saw a young man lying drunk on a windowsill and said. "At last in the middle of the city He saw an old man crouching, weeping upon the ground and when He asked him why he wept, the old man answered: "Lord, I was dead and you raised me to life, what can I do?" Here the story ends. If Jesus should visit us today and find that we are comfort - minded and we have taken to worship of the most monstrous illusions like militant nationalism and are pouring molten into the veins of innocent minds that it may be used to undreamed of heights in mutual destruction and ask: "Why do you indulge, after so many centuries of civilization, in human sacrifices on this colossal scale?" Our answer would be: "Lord you gave us eyes but no sight, you gave us brains but no soul, you gave us science but no philosophy" (Ibid page 73). Thus guiltless innocent as well as the guilty 'innocent' exist and where is the place of God in between? God is Truth and Truth is God said the Apostle of Peace, the great Mahatma. We can experience the Divine presence in and amidst us only if we are sincere and give ourselves up to Him. We cannot scotch the experience of His presence in and amidst us on the ground that those who have not experienced it deny it validity from a mental pre-occupation or a theological dogma. We must demarcate the frontiers of reason and then dismiss both prosecuting reason and defending reason to pass on to the land of the illumined experience where reason is redundant. "Reason was the Helper, reason is the bar" (Aurobindo).
Tracing back some of the events that took place in our country in the recent past and abroad, a believer in God asks, "Where was God". He writes : "The 1947 brutalities on the sub-continent, Cambodia's killing of the mid-1970, the Delhi massacres of 1984, the Rewanda heartlessness of 1984, and the Gujarat program of 2002 invite the same question which however is as old as time".
He begins by saying :
"Remembering the Holocaust of the 1930 and 1940, the Jews, worshippers of God for centuries ask where He was at the time. Reminding God of the several -- times a day prayers of millions of fellow Muslims, the poet Iqbal composed his famous complaint that God had let the faithful down".
However this believer in God has omitted to note - is it not that these Jews, worshippers of God for centuries - that mercilessly crucified Christ, the son of God, jeered at him saying "If thou be the son of God come down from the cross. From the cross this son of God cried with a loud voice saying 'E'li, E'li la' - ma sa-bach-thani? That is to say, 'My God, why hast thou forsaken me?' (Bible St. Mathew 27-46). It is recorded in the Bible 'He saved others; himself he cannot save' (ibid 42). Do not the same Muslims who worship thrice a day kill every day - and that too in the name of religion - thousands of innocent persons in Jammu and Kashmir? And the very same question voices forth loudly from the cries of these victims?
What appears therefore seems to me to be that God has not 'crippled as the European Lecturer would say that God having endowed man with intellect and the power of reasoning, has also given him the freedom to act as he feels but at the same time the consequences of his acts must be borne by himself. Every action will have reaction. The choice of action belongs to men and God does not interfere. Lord Krishna warned Arjuna which he does not wish to do owing to indiscrimination (XVIII-60). At the end of the teaching the Lord told Arjuna :
iti te jnanam akhyatam guhyad guhyataram maya
vimsyaj'tad assesena yathecchasi tatha kuru
"Thus has wisdom more profound than all profundities been declared to you by Me. Reflect upon it fully and act as you choose".
The action is that of Arjuna and the reaction also must be borne by him and God has no part or share in either of these. We cannot become Inquisitors and put God in the dock for our unwise acts. Our belief is only intellectual. Until it stabilizes into a conviction and resultant faith, these questions will never remain unsolved.
Our devotee says that while there are several methods of reaching Him, he wishes to accept the relationship of child to his parents and take liberty "to pound the Almighty's door with bitter complaints". Knock and the door will be opened but not when the knocking is for testing God and put Him in the dock.
Lord Krishna has unequivocally stated in the Gita and has also given an undertaking :
ksipram bhavati dharmatma sasvacchantin nigacchati
kaunteya pratijanihi na me bhaktha pranasyati
"Soon does he become a man of righteousness and obtain lasting peace.
O Kaunteya, know for certtain that My devotee never perishes". In other words, the Lord promises that He will not allow His devotee to perish. The Lord says that He undertakes the 'Yoga-kshema' of His devotee. Even when the promise appears to be absolute it is qualified by His earlier statement, qualifying the nature of His bhakta. In IX-22 the Lord says :
ananyas cintayanto mam ye jana paryupasate
tesam nityabhiyuktanam yogksemam vahamyaham
"To those men who worship Me alone, thinking of no other, who are ever devout, I provide for his yoga kshema the acquisition of what they lack and the preservation of what they have, for the maintenance of the body, even though they do not hanker for it'.
Thus in the case of His devotee the Lord arranges for his yoga-kshemam. But with regard to others, He arranges their safety by arousing self-effort in them. Aurobindo explains the above verse in masterly way thus :
"The God-lover advances constantly towards this ultimate necessity of our birth in common through a concentrated love and adoration by which he makes the supreme and universal Divine the whole object of his living - not either egoistic, terrestrial satisfaction or the celestial worlds - and the whole object of his thought and his seeing. To see nothing but the Divine to be at every moment in union with him, to love him in all creatures and have the delight of him in all things the whole condition of his spiritual existence. His God vision does not divorce him from life, nor does he miss anything of life; for God himself become the spontaneous bringer to him of every good and of all his inner and outer getting and having Yoga kshemam vahamyaham. The joys of earth are only small shadow of his possessions; for as he grows into the Divine the Divine too flows out upon him with all the light, power and joy of an infinite existence".
And in verse XVIII - 66 of the Gita the Lord reiterated the condition for reaching Him and obtaining His assistance thus :
sarvadharmam parityajya mam ekam saranam vraja
aham tva sarvapapebhyo moksayisyami ma sucah
"Abandon all dharma and take refuge in Me alone;
I shall liberate thee from all sins; grieve not".
The promise is emphatic. One who sacrificing all notions of 'I' and 'mine' surrenders at His Feet and has absolute Trust in Him will be protected, said the Lord. This attitude is termed as 'marjara bhakti' or 'markhada bhakti' - or self-clinging to the Lord without any sense of feeling of 'I' and 'Mine'. Are all those innocent persons who sacrificed their lives were bhaktas as stated above? Most of their bhakti or the call of God must have been roused by the compulsion of the moment; it was only to get over a particular predicament. And those who were real devotees would have escaped, by a mystery as it were. Mysteries still happen. In a book 'Miracles do still happen' the author narrates with vividness the story of a devout Hindu woman who was a great devotee of Lord Krishna. During the communal riots the leader of the Muslim gang himself saved the woman from the hands of his fellowmen, by compelling her to impersonate as a Muslim woman under pardha, took her to his house miles away - the lady always in trepidation, hugging her idol of the Lord close to her body. They stayed in the Muslim's house that night, the lady was always praying as she did not know, what would happen to her, being in the enemies house and helpless. Initially she was unwilling to accompany the Muslim and it was with great effort she was made to agree to his desire. On the way, the car was stopped by the rebellious Muslims. They peeped through the door and finding a lady in Pardha they thought she was a muslim and therefore the car was allowed to proceed. At daybreak at her request, she was taken to a nearby Ashram of a Hindu saint. The saint was at that time teaching his disciples. The lady sat along with the disciples and the Muslim at a distance. The saint called the Muslim and asked him to sit by his side. The Muslim was very much pleased and from the next day the Muslim regularly visited the Ashram and became a disciple of the saint. Such is the faith in the Lord that matured into a trust viz. that the Lord would save her from all untoward situations. Many of us possess only belief, which is only an intellectual acceptance; and thus we entertain doubt about getting help from God. When the needed help is not obtained we believe that the Lord has got crippled, and may at times doubt even His existence. Have we not witnessed in the recent times how the great Apostle of Peace, the great Mahatma, in spite of objections from his own men, marched through the streets where the Muslims were staying at the time of Naokhali riots? Faith in himself and the Lord (Hare Ram) gave him the soul force. No Muslim dared to challenge him. If the universe is a living one if it is spiritually alive nothing in it is merely accidental. "The moving finger writes and having writ moves on". He who runs the galaxies would never fail to render assistance to a soul in distress. "The world is a whole and we are members one of another, and we must suffer for another". (Radhakrishnan in An Idealist view of Life p. 280). Silence or absolute stillness is the mother of creation and an agitated mind can never pray really in order to be in tune with the Universal soul.
tadejati tannaaijati taddure tadvantike
tadantarasya sarvasya tadusarvasyasya bahyatah
'It moves, it moves not, it is far; it is verily near. It is inside all this. It is verily outside all this'.
Those who are in danger, seeking Him as if looking somewhere beyond, will miss Him, and therefore they become victims of the dangerous situation; but those who constantly batter the doors of their heart will see Him sitting there and they will be protected as promised by Him, in the Gita. Let them knock and the door will be opened. It is man who fails; God never fails to keep up His Promise. If we have faith in God there is no need to worry says the great Thyagaraja in Makelara Vicharamu.
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