For those who came before us

It is amazing how something can stay hidden in plain sight. How nothing exists perhaps till you turn towards it and shine the light of your attention on it. I have said before that I only first paid any heed to death rituals when my mother passed away. Since then, there has been a further deepening of awareness how meticulous this land, this Bharat has been in dealing with its dead.

The dead are dead, you may say; better to turn our energies towards the living, you may insist. You’re right, but there is no dichotomy. Catering to the dead also takes care of the living. You are both assisting the disembodied as well as giving your own life ample room to maneuver and express itself.

Yesterday was Mahalaya Amavasya – a phrase I have been hearing for most of my life without knowing the significance of. We have so many festivals and special days in our culture, it seemed just one of those things elders made a grand fuss about. Plus, a somewhat morbid concept – a fortnight to address the needs of pitrus… generations of dead ancestors who lived centuries ago. We don’t even remember their names – what then is the need to make such a shoo-sha about offering them balls of rice and sesame? Wasteful symbolisms! Doubtless this must’ve been the frame of mind that prevented me from even observing this rite with the consideration it deserved.

Sadhguru says, “Your body carries trillion times more memory than your conscious mind. Will you remember your great-great-great-grandfather? You don't, but his nose is sitting on your face because your body remembers. Your body remembers how your forefathers were a million years ago.” I now dimly understand that we are a continuum. The latest but not the last in a series of pop-up lives on this planet. Pitru Paksha is a way of paying homage to those who came before us, and it is also a way of distancing the influence of these pitrus over our lives – loosening, in a way, their genetic hold over ourselves, so that we may live free-er and fuller lives.

In recent years, Sadhguru has been paying inordinate attention to this aspect. His book on Death is an explosive one, a revealing treatise on a range of aspects that were hitherto veiled. Also, I have been thinking a lot about Kashi, the maha smashana, where death rituals are a way of life. [Of course, any excuse to remember Kashi will do. When can I go back there, I wonder?]

Yesterday, around midnight at the Isha Yoga Center, there was a rather magnificent ceremony – they’ve done it for years but the scale this year was a bit grander. This was in preparation perhaps for the Kala Bhairava deity that my Guru is in the process of consecrating.

Some pictures:

(Pics: LingaBhairavi.org)

The Give-and-Take of Offence

Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine, is apparently once again printing the objectionable cartoons that brought upon the savage attack by Islamic terrorists in 2015. And again my feelings are complicated.

I'm for free speech, but reasonable free speech - because words can wound. Five years ago, I had found myself conflicted and I remember thinking that each side had used the weapons it had found most handy and natural. One side had used words and images and mockery. And the other party had brought guns into the battle. In spite of the violence and the deaths, I do not know which attack was the more severe.

This time, I have a touch more sympathy for the publishers - not with the idea to demean religious sentiments but because they are making a brave point after a ghastly attack. 

The most offensive of all intentions, to my mind, is the need to desecrate. Whether it is the destruction and defilement of thousands of temples and idols across North India, or the recent breaking down of the Buddha statue in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan, the building of a toilet on the remains of an Uyghur mosque in China or indeed the Hebdo cartoons - the intention to desecrate is most foul.

Sadly, it has been rampant throughout history. Always the victors have danced all too gleefully on the fragments of the oppressed. And the more the value attached to a monument, a structure or an idea, the more it has been broken down.

I am impressed with Charlie Hebdo for their gesture, but it is a disquieting keg of explosives to be sitting on.