Crossroads: Part 2

 Crossroads: Part 2

Today I took myself out of social media. It was finally time.

The limitations of words to convey their intended meaning were becoming increasingly glaring. The resultant misery that was inflicted on the mind was becoming increasingly intolerable. For my own wellbeing I had to remove myself from that space. 

As I did that, an interesting truth unraveled before me. What I learned on my own today was actually a lesson that the universe had put forth for me almost forty years ago. I had missed it then. It probably kept on coming back in the interim years and I probably kept missing it over and over again. 

Those were days when I lived in Vile Parle. Either when I attended junior college or the first year in medical college. My father had started his catering business and had a small canteen ( mess) on our home premises in Khopoli. Many tourist buses, like the Ashtavinayak tours would stop during lunch time to eat there. Dad provided homemade meals at very low prices. He himself worked for the cooking because it was a passion for him to cook and serve people. He had a very limited staff at hand to help him. They all got frantically busy when busloads of customers arrived for lunch. 

One weekend I was home in Khopoli. The canteen downstairs was busy and dad was trying to cope with the heavy load of patrons. I stepped in to help in the capacity of putting out plates, water, serving food to these guests. A bus had arrived carrying mostly single young men. They were the most misbehaved people I had seen at the time. I was young and fairly attractive at that age. They may not have been aware I was the owner’s daughter. Or even if they were, they didn’t have the decency to treat a woman with respect. As I went about serving food and water I was subjected to cheap shots from these men. I lost my cool. My father told me to leave and go upstairs into the home. I did as told. I remained upset for a long time. We never talked about it ( my dad and me, that is). 

When I went back to Mumbai, and shared the incident with my uncle in Vile Parle. I was venting my shock, frustrations and disgust about the men I had encountered. My uncle listened quietly. Once I was done narrating the story, he simply asked me, what did you learn from this? I said : to leave the place where people are not behaving themselves. He nodded in approval because that’s the take away lesson he wanted me to learn. Alas! Although I gave him the answer he wanted me to mouth, it was only lip service from me at that age. 

It took me almost forty years to understand that I cannot possibly make indecent and misbehaved people learn about decency and good behavior in any way. A wise thing to do when you encounter such elements is to move away from them. This simple wisdom my father had tried to teach me without a discussion and my uncle tried to drive home with a discussion. And both methods of teaching failed because I wasn’t ready to receive the lesson. Not because they didn’t make an attempt to teach me. 

This is just one small example of how life tries to educate us. The universe is in a constant teaching mode. We are either mentally absent, unprepared, unmotivated or lack the humility to learn. Until the moment when the lesson and the learner get aligned completely. 

Today was one such day. I recognized the sphere in which I must limit myself to operate. This sphere is to be internally recognized. It cannot be defined with specific words. By drawing deliberate boundaries I will not be,  in a way as I previously thought, doing wrong to anybody. It wasn’t a gesture of denying recognition to anyone. It was quite simply a decision to adopt practical realities. Open mindedness is a concept that does not get compromised when pulling yourself together into a zone where you ought to put your energy into. Contrary to this, recklessly letting valuable energy dissipate in every possible direction because of a mistaken understanding of open mindedness is an error in understanding that needed to be corrected.

So here I am, forty years later recognizing the wisdom of my elders and making note of the fact that these elders are alive today in the form of their wisdom in every element of the universe that we encounter around us. 

Muktabai’s words:

ब्रम्ह जैसे तैशा परि

आम्हा वडील भूतें सारी

We are surrounded by wise elders all around us. Even in those who appear younger than us. We must stay alert to the lessons they are teaching us at any moment. 

On one hand I felt my words to others are sounding dry and hollow.

On the other hand, I find that any word or non verbal communication coming from anyone else is trying to teach me something. 

In several ways I’m standing at crossroads now. The same spiritual core that I spent my entire life trying to find, will take me from here in the direction where all that matters to me is that I be in constant contact with that presence. Nothing, absolutely nothing else matters anymore. No concepts, no beliefs, no rules, no belongings, no physical existence, no name, no credit, no recognition. Even the words I write are not mine to claim. I leave it all behind and walk in the NOW. I taste and smell each moment in its freshness. And wish the same sweet experience for all. 

A dear friend had yesterday brought up a point when we talked about only the present moment being real. The present moment for me is not the same as the present moment for someone located in a satellite in earth’s orbit, he argued. True. The present moment is not the same even for me and my husband, daughter, son or mother right now. Each of us is a point in an infinite consciousness given its own piece of present moment to experience. The absolute reality was never divisible. It has capacity however to create multiple illusory points on its surface and allow each of those infinite number of points to experience itself within their own limited illusory boundaries of space and time. We erroneously assume that these individual worlds collectively constitute a bigger real universe. They do if one chooses to buy that idea. They don’t if we don’t accept that idea. Today having removed myself from social media, that space no longer exists in my reality or what now is my world. It exists for those who have chosen to exist in that space. It is a reality for them. Thus absolute indivisible reality is not to be confused with personal reality. The absolute reality is the single common denominator for each personal reality. Once we learn to value just that part of our reality and let go everything else we have found our destination. It’s a rather strange concept to understand that from that point on, the destination and journey walk hand in hand. There is no stopping in sight for the destination nor any end in sight for the journey. Both are staring each other in the eye.Time becomes an illusion for them both.