Night and Day

 

Lest I forget to enter this morning’s revelations into the journal! It has been an unusually busy Sunday but in a good way. I woke up before 6 am. It was still somewhat dark outside. I caught a glimpse of a bright Venus on the eastern horizon through the high window of the living room. Knowing there was a good chance to get a peek at more planets I hurried to the back yard and then front yard. Sure enough Jupiter was glowing high up above Venus and a little more westward was Uranus. Big Dipper was visible too. My Night Sky app confirmed that Saturn had already set below the western horizon. Daylight was not much away and soon these heavenly bodies would disappear. 

The road was quiet. It was perfect time to get on my bike and go for a ride. I had bought this toy for myself recently and despite initial feeling of overwhelm I had managed to assemble it single handedly at home with some virtual assistance from a video and technician. By now I had made 2 successful rides on it and beginning to make progress with this new activity. There was a nagging feeling in the mind that my exercise routine had taken a back seat since returning from Europe and I shouldn’t postpone it any longer. So I committed to a couple of surya namaskars for a start and then took out the bike. As I turned the corner and was going eastward daylight was already sneaking on the mountains. The sky was orange and grey and sprinkled with clouds.  I searched amidst them and sure enough I could still spot the faint light that was Venus and similarly spotted a faint Jupiter above it. That would be the last time I would now see them for the day. I kept on pedaling ahead. 

In my mind flashed the shloka from the Bhagwad Gita in context of sthithapradnya where Shri Krishna describes a man of spiritual wisdom ( dnyaani) with the following qualities:

Ya Nisha sarva bhootanam tasyaam jagarti saiyami 

Yasyam jagrati bhootani sa nisha pashyato munehe 

Where ordinary people think it is night, the dnyaani considers daytime 

Where ordinary people are awake, the dnyaani feels like it is nighttime.

For me the presence of God is most evident during the night when everything is quiet, I have solitude, others have gone to bed. Once the day arrives mind gets drawn to various duties. Although God is still very much in the thoughts, the focus shifts to tasks and people I need to interact with. The awareness of oneness, one divine principle is so much more powerful in periods of solitude and suddenly when the chaos of daytime begins, the oneness is replaced by a rather distressing feeling of duality. Me and others! 

Suddenly the earlier experience of the bright planets and starlit sky disappearing in broad daylight flashed as a metaphor for my personal experience of divine presence during the quiet hours of the night that seemed to get obscured by the body consciousness that emerged during the day. And as I drew parallels, the change of the sky’s appearance had a valuable lesson awaiting me. It is no secret that although the planets and stars are no longer visible to the eyes in daylight, they have not gone anywhere. They are in their designated positions. We just are blinded to them because something has overpowered our vision. That something in the metaphor of night and day is the sun and its bright light. Its equivalent in our personal life is the existing concept of duality, the firm idea that my body is a separate entity from rest of the universe ! Thus in this context the sun/daytime carries a negative connotation. It hides the vast view of the galaxies, stars and planets. Our body consciousness similarly blocks the view of a much deeper universe and reality. 

It is the goal to arrive at that breaking point when this body consciousness will cease to take away the vision of the full indivisible reality that, in the present stage of my maturity, becomes only temporarily perceptible during solitude, allowing the body consciousness to re-emerge when solitude ceases. The goal, metaphorically speaking, is for the stars and planets to shine brightly for 24 hours each day whether or not the sun rises or for the sun to not rise at all! It’s a truth to be experienced, not described or shown to anyone. 

Anyways. I continued on my bike, much beyond what I had done in the last two days, exploring nearby neighborhoods. As I was preparing to take the road back home my attention was drawn to the bright globe of light that had emerged from behind the mountains. This time the sun was a symbol of the divine presence and not the negative connotation of the earlier metaphor. This time it was a Darshan of God. My Prasad for today. 

Later in the morning was my weekly satsang zoom class. It was a very deep session. I will write about it in the next post.

This is not the saree I had worn today. Just one worn recently in the past week. It is Bagh hand printed, natural dyed in Madhya Pradesh, on handwoven Vidarbha tussar fabric.