Dawn At Your Doorstep 2

The other day I stumbled upon a YouTube video in which a young man was tying the shoelace of an old customer because he could not bend to help himself. This happened in a mall where the young man worked and discovered that the old man could not bend to fix his shoes. So he stopped near him, sat on his heels, tied his shoelaces, stood up with a big smile and helped him push his cart some distance. This video created a sensation among the viewers. They thought it an unusual, though a welcome gesture.

This created mixed response in me, both hope and despair. I despaired that such a natural human gesture should evoke surprise in any person. Extending a helping hand to someone who needs it should be a perfectly obvious and natural reaction. To consider it as unusual suggests how far we have strayed from the very basic qualities of being human. But all is not lost. Though people were surprised, no one thought it unwelcome, in fact all of them liked it. This shows that man is still capable of appreciating what is noble, and beautiful.

I got another proof of this inherent goodness embedded in the heart of man. In another YouTube video shot in the Stirling station, Perth, Australia a couple of weeks ago, I noticed a very heart-warming scene. A commuter slipped and fell while climbing into the train. One of his legs got trapped between the platform and the train, and it could not be extracted. Then most of the commuters got down from the train, pushed and tilted the compartment until the person imprisoned between the train and the platform was released.

Can you doubt the essential goodness of the human heart?

I was witness to another incident, both ugly and beautiful. I was travelling in a train which stopped for a brief few minutes at Secunderabad railway station. People scrambled to get down and get up. There was a great push near the door, and an old man fell down on the platform while alighting. He was trying to get up on his wobbling legs not to be crushed in the crowd. But he was falling down again and again. I was watching all this from a neighbouring window. No one even noticed him lying there. They were either climbing over him, or avoiding him. Suddenly my heart jumped in delight! A couple of teen age boys, one of them a tea carrier, and the other a shoe-polisher, stopped there, picked up the fallen man, made way in the crowd for him, took him to a nearby bench, put him there. The old man was panting and blessing them for saving him from being crushed to death. The tea-vender offered him a cup of tea, and left. The shoe-polish boy was sitting with him when our train started moving.

 I was very sad and happy at the same time. Why is it that people who are educated, who enjoy the gifts of life, are so much less human than a tea vender and a shoe-polisher in their teens? Why does our billion-dollar education system fail to teach us natural piety, and spontaneous humanity? Yet all is not lost if we see even in a tea vender and a shoe-polisher the light of a new dawn.

Is it an overstatement to say that Love all and serve all is the new mantra of salvation? It is the most human aspect of a human being, which is also divine. Is it an understatement to insist First be human before striving towards Divinity? Didn’t we witness the highest human qualities of love, compassion, and empathy and the divine qualities of omnipresence and omnipotence inhering in Swami? They were not like the skin and the shirt, but like a honeyed drink, both enriching each other. He wore them as a child wears his smile, so effortlessly, so unconsciously. He always  insisted that we look within, and manifest the human excellences embedded in our hearts and minds. Swami always pointed out that wisdom is not imported from outside; it is an awakening from inside. It is to awaken that which is waiting within us all the time to manifest itself. Kindness, love, unselfishness, empathy were never dead. Fear, hate, selfishness, greed have covered them. Just as single acts of cruelty and baseness hurts the human psyche, single acts of kindness and empathy lifts the human psyche. Swami wanted us to multiply acts that connect us to our neighbours and environment. Isn’t it re establishing Dharma, or right living? 

The tea seller and the shoe polisher at the Secunderabad station, the sales boy in the mall and the people at the Stirling station, and millions elsewhere performing little acts of spontaneous goodness demonstrate how we can upgrade our consciousness in our natural journey to Divinity. 

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MY ENCOUNTER WITH A MODERN BEAUTY

One day I stumbled upon a new Apple computer in our school computer lab. I was struck by its look; frame and screen jet black, lost in primordial darkness out of which came light and life. God stood on the brink of darkness, and said, “Let there be light”, and light was born, says the Bible. The 22 inch monitor was sharply outlined against the snow while wall behind it, but the infinite darkness, however, did not lose its glory in the surrounding light. It was sitting majestically on the crowded table dwarfing all other systems around it. The poise, the detached unconcern, the shine of its skin as if merged in its soul, reminded me almost of the ultimate truth, that the outer and the inner are a single utility.

She was sitting there, ‘like a spider amidst its self-created net’, as the Upanishad says, and inviting the passerby to get caught in its silken wonder. It swallowed me up, and I became its devotee. Truly, I realized, devotion is all about being swallowed up. You retain a semblance of your personality, as much necessary as to feel how slowly you are disintegrating into your God. It was a piece of poem which was singing the greatness in its creator, Man. It had utility and beauty; mathematics, aesthetics, architecture, and ecstasy blended into a form, the dream of computer users. The keyboard stunned me, as if I encountered a prodigy, a child of complex intelligence, just a shade bigger than my palm, worthy of being held up in both, appreciation and reverence fused into its immaculate contours.

I stood at a distance, forgot (or feared?) to take a chair. Someone came and switched it on. Ah! She lighted up in all her glory, like a maharani suddenly unveiled, her dominance complete and unassailable. The fastness and promptness of her response to the tap of keys, the uncluttered opening and closing of programmes, the sharpness of the functions it performed took me to a world where harmony of thought, word and deed is the password.

Ah! Harmony! In a world ‘out of joint’ as Shakespeare called it. In a world ruled by ‘passionate intensity’ of ‘the worst’, where ‘the best lack of conviction’  (W.B.Yeats), here is a sage sitting on the table in front of me, wearing with great ease beauty in form, clarity in purpose, cosmic in vision, and harnessed power in its operation; all this an intelligent aligning of lines and numbers, of shape and colour, of matter and philosophy. “What a piece of work is man, how infinite in faculties”, wondered Shakespeare. “The greatest wealth of man is his creativity”, said the Dalai lama, and what a tantalizing thing is this creativity! While I stood there admiring the harmony of form and faculties of the little queen, somewhere out there she is being used to precisely destroy humanity and its creative genius, the civilisaton! ‘And yet, the quintessence of dust’, to remember Shakespeare again. Is contradiction an essential component of ‘all things great and grand’ ?

All things man has achieved have glittered and passed, appeared again with a new glitter and faded away. But man is going on, unfazed by the rise and fall of the great and the small, in his insatiable thirst for the infinite. He has not halted in his search for the ultimate achievement, though sometimes questioning it, pushing it away, yet never abandoning the search. From ‘the quintessence of dust’ he has risen to ‘in apprehension, like a god’, fallen back again, not satisfied even in a god. Even when ‘things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’ as W.B.Yeats lamented, like a phoenix he is born again and again to integrate himself and the race into the search for transcendence in transience. 

Is this little queen the new saviour? If anything can save man, lead him further in his journey towards the ultimate achievement, it is his knowledge harnessed to truth and beauty. It is not new to him either, he has done this several times in history, and will do it again. Man is moving from the individual identity to his own universal identity, and this is a perilous journey, fraught with unforeseen challenges, most of them coming from within himself. There is a constant struggle in his consciousness, like a baby eagle which emerges from his egg shell to come face to face with the limitless sky, finds suddenly it needs to grow and fly. We are discovering the inevitability of being the mankind within the small frame of our body and mind, and the exploding awareness of expanding consciousness we find difficult to manage.

This overwhelming feeling of being defeated by the borderless dreams man has cherished over time immemorial, bursts into a creativity unknown till now. In science, in power both military and political, in writings reviewing the human predicament, in search for comfort and unbridled pleasure, and in the total quotient of unhappiness, our times are bursting at seams to expand beyond all limitations. There is so much knowledge available to us, but sadly  we have failed to harness it into what we are looking for – a unified field of truth, joy, and balance. It is no more ignorance which is a threat to human existence, but unharnessed knowledge. But after my encounter with the Queen, the Apple computer, I was convinced, on a metaphorical level, that we can save ourselves, we can recreate ourselves. When the inherent limitless Self is impatient to break through imposed limitations, the time for turning of an age arrives. It can be a new big bang, a new melt-down into another mass of cosmic waste, or, if man can use his staggering knowledge acquired over centuries of painstaking search for the meaning of life, a new AUM to vibrate us into a world of truth, beauty and balance.

Can science be the Second Coming for a confused humanity?