Milti Hain Zindagi Mein Mohabbat Kabhi Kabhi

 मिलती है ज़िंदगी में मोहब्बत कभी कभी

होती है दिलबरों की इनायत कभी कभी

As the years passed, thinking evolved, or so it appears. From vagueness of ideas and feelings to more clarity, structure and depth. From borrowed thoughts to personal intuitions and realizations. The mind was both cleansed and nourished, depleted and enriched. Negated yet acknowledged. Acknowledged for its individuality in the present moment and negated for its claim to absoluteness. 

One of the concepts that saw a gradual evolution was love. It is not going to be easy to put into words the journey of the mind’s understanding of love. But here’s a feeble attempt. 

It can be summed up in a single sentence and perhaps understood better that way than the usual ramble that mind tends to do. 

Love went from being trapped in a Marriage with Desire, to being Solo. From being a Fantasy to being an Experience .

As fantasy, love used to be clumsy, unkempt, foggy, inarticulate, irrational, needy, whiny, unpredictable, short sighted, ill tempered, and difficult. 

As Experience it was poised, sophisticated, understated, understanding, content, fulfilled, giving, and consistent. It had eyes. And it could see itself delegated to the shadows while a caricature of itself was flaunting itself in the past. The caricature was not just short sighted. It was blind to real love. 

Ah! 

Real love!

That’s what the fake version of the self was in search of. And in its craziness it was petting the caricature of real love. The only thing pure and real about it was madness. 

And when the real self got a chance to appear, it did not need to hold on to the caricatures. Real love was part of the real self. Just like the gratitude and humility that we talked about in the earlier post, love was found inbuilt into the pure self. 

With this new understanding another old song mysteriously came to mind today. Penned by Sahir Ludhianvi, I recall Mala Sinha singing this song to Dharmendra in the movie Aankhein. Aankhein means Eyes. In the present context, when the mind has gained a new set of eyes, the lyrics appear in a different light. 

In the opening line the lady is telling her man that to encounter love is a matter of grace for lovers and grace is elusive. Love is only encountered infrequently in life.

मिलती है ज़िंदगी में मोहब्बत कभी कभी

होती है दिलबरों की इनायत कभी कभी

To shy away from making eye contact with someone who asks for you would be a folly because it is not often that Lady Luck meets you at such a turn.

शर्मा के मुँह न फेर नज़र के सवाल पर

लाती है ऐसे मोड़ पे क़िस्मत कभी कभी

It is not everyday that small windows open for you giving a glimpse of Spring. Such resurrection, my love, only happens very rarely.

खुलते नहीं हैं रोज़ दरीचे बहार के

आती है जान-ए-मन ये क़यामत कभी कभी

It will be tough to walk alone through the lanes of youth. Only occasionally someone’s genuine need(for your love) will present itself before you.

तन्हा न कट सकेंगे जवानी के रास्ते

पेश आएगी किसी की ज़रूरत कभी कभी

Serendipity brings people together. Who can say when they will be tossed apart and lost in the vast crowds of the world?

फिर खो न जाएँ हम कहीं दुनिया की भीड़ में

मिलती है पास आने की मोहलत कभी कभी

These last lines echo the famous stanza from Ga Di Madgulkar’s Geet Ramayan as Ram tells Bharat matter-of-factly that meeting of two people in the world is a matter of chance, like two logs of wood meeting mid ocean. It takes one powerful wave to pull them apart and they could never ever meet again. 

दोन ओंडक्यांची होते सागरात भेट,
एक लाट तोडी दोघा, पुन्हा नाही गाठ!
क्षणिक तेवी आहे बाळा, मेळ माणसांचा,
पराधीन आहे जगती, पुत्र मानवाचा!!

The same opinion was expressed by the famous American scientist and astronomer/astrophysicist Carl Sagan. He stated that as much as he would like to believe in an afterlife, there was nothing that made him believe in one, since it could not be backed by evidence. He had, after two previous divorces, a very satisfying relationship with his third wife Ann Druyan for two decades. Both believed that their finding each other in the vastness of the cosmos was a matter of sheer luck or chance. Rather than live with an illusion of an afterlife pinned on the hope of such a chance happening again, they remained realistic. Instead of subscribing to a mere belief, they acknowledged that considering the vastness of the known cosmos, based on statistical laws, for such a thing to recur ever was close to impossible. They viewed death as a final parting. In Ann’s words ( they) “ knew we would never meet again”.

Sagan was an agnostic, unsure about existence or non existence of God. He did not subscribe to religious dogma until the end.  He had not ventured into exploring, proving or disproving the existence of God. And without firsthand experience, God for him was simply an idea. Fair enough.

In contrast to agnostics are believers. Believers fall into two broad categories. Those who are subscribed to religious dogmas for their entire lives and never bother to question them. And those who want to find the truth for themselves before endorsing someone’s views. 

The first kind of believers live in fantasyland forever. I personally find them the most dangerous of all and difficult to trust. Because many of these can manipulate the truth recklessly. Sagan becomes more trustworthy because his claims were based on evidence and reason. 

The second kind of believers are the ones who have transcended the stage of the first kind of believers or converted from being non believers. Their belief is no longer blind and unverified. It is sealed because it is backed by evidence gained from personal experience . Swami Chinmayananda is a better known example of someone who converted from being an atheist to one who tasted reality (attained to Dnyana) firsthand and became an advocate for Vedanta. 

There are more things common between the dnyanis and Sagan, than Dnyanis and the blind believers.

Neither Sagan nor true Dnyanis entertain the kind of desires and hopes that most people harbor. Hopes for something personal like let me be with my wife again in the next life, let me unite with my father in heaven, let me enjoy a better life next time, let me not go through such experience again etc etc.. Whatever has to happen will happen, my job to continue my work and efforts , that’s their outlook. In context of the song in discussion , the statistical near-impossibility of two people meeting again in the infinite universe is not lost on a follower of Advait Vedanta just like how Sagan estimated it. 

Sagan lived in the NOW. To him death was going to be “an endless, dreamless sleep “. Dnyanis live in the NOW too. Afterlife for the Dnyani is eternity in a state similar to Sushupti which is nothing but dreamless sleep. 

Most striking commonality between Sagan and Dnyani is the importance placed on gratitude towards the present moment rather than desire for the next moment. They did not stack up desires. For them Gratitude is NOW and HERE. Also for them, Love is NOW and HERE. 

Therefore when Sahir Ludhianvi writes: फिर खो न जाएँ हम कहीं दुनिया की भीड़ में

मिलती है पास आने की मोहलत कभी कभी

 it makes logical sense from the perspective of a dnyani and it certainly was how it was for Sagan.

What Sagan probably didn’t bother to analyze is that no person remains the same with passage of time. Outlook can change, behavior can change, thinking can change within a single lifetime. To believe that two people will remain unchanged from one life to next is standing on really utopian premises. Both would have to be obstinately resistant to change. These are scary options that point to close mindedness, dogmatism, possessive and obsessional traits. The foul smell of the fantasized version of love I described in the beginning of this post is found in such beliefs. 

In the matured version where love becomes a free standing direct experience without need for an outside object or circumstances for its existence, there is no fixation on a person or situation for its expression. That brand of love can express itself to a dog on the street or a child on the train. There is no accompanying desire or hope that the encounter would happen ever again. No give and take. No giver or taker. No sexuality or sensuality attached to it. No attraction or repulsion. Just pure spontaneous experience that moves effortlessly into the next moment and leaves the previous one behind. 

For sensuality or sexual interpretation and expression of love, there needs to be identification with one’s physical body and gender. That is completely transcended by the pure self. And that’s why the love that such a pure being experiences cannot be understood by one identified with the physical body. That’s the reason an embodied person experiences love in various degrees of distortion. Mind associated with the body is unable to process unadulterated love.

The language is different for a pure self and one identified as human. Every attribute is fragmented for the human mind. Peace means something different than gratitude. Love means something else. Contentment means yet another thing. Timelessness, peace, love, gratitude, humility, grace, kindness, awareness, sacrifice, respect, service and more. It is inaccurate to even call them different facets of the same reality. Because “different facets “ is how it is perceived by the mind that has cozied up to reality but not fully dissolved into it. In the pure self, all of it is inseparable. Like milk and sugar. 

Looking from my eyes, Ludhianvi’s song can be interpreted as addressed to an individual soul who receives a calling from the divine. It is a very rare chance when the Divine seeks you. Do not turn away from Grace. Do not make excuses. Most people fantasize about love. You will experience love like very few people do. In the fantasyland love is a mirage. No two minds think alike. Despite the best people around you, you could feel lonely because no one else knows the language of your heart. Besides, in the vastness of the universe even if someone understands you, the time you can count on such perfect togetherness is going to be incredibly short. Which means you will remain vulnerable to walking your path alone, and yearning to be understood, to be heard, to be seen, to be valued, to feel needed. Listen to the voice that comes from deep within, deeper than the voice in your head. The voice of goodness, kindness and true love. Stay with it in this lifetime and beyond.