THE LAST FRONTIER

Finally it boils down to this: the challenge is to love, the goal is to love, the aim is to love.

Every human and animal and plant and tree and stone goes through the motions of like and dislike and acceptance and resistance, till winds and waves and heat and cold and age reduce it to nothing. Blessed is the tree that understands the wind, blessed is the stone that loves the crashing waves, blessed are the animals that do not question, blessed are the humans who understand the need for everyone’s being and so feel compassion for all.

The blessing is to recognise and understand that no individual acts on his own, that there IS no individual; that each one is a part of a bigger concept called God; that this God or Soul or Aatmaa or Entity stretches from infinity to infinity in terms of time, space, thought and dimension.

The craving of every being is to finally understand, accept and acknowledge that whatever will be, will be; that everything imaginable, or otherwise, does happen.

The so called ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are dependent upon each other for definition and will always co-exist. We just have to understand and accept. The terms are subjective anyway; my fault is always more easily excusable than the other person’s!

Good and evil will always compete and fight. But it is nothing personal. It is something like the way we enjoy delicious food that tingles the buds; it is so pleasing, yet it goes hand in hand with each one’s private darkness and of foul smells and excreta. But when accepted with grace, they all become normal functions of natural existence.

The acceptance of the imminence of all that is going to happen provides relief from worry, guilt and blame. It cuts down to size the big ‘I’ and elevates ‘Him’ who is the planner and the executor.

One’s own shortcomings become easier to bear. Appreciation of what one has dawns upon the mind. One learns to forgive oneself. The worry lines on the forehead start smoothening out.

As one learns to forgive or accept oneself, so the feeling of compassion for others creeps in. The only way to accept someone else’s mistakes is by being able to face and forgive one’s own.

The day we realise that each creature is following its own destiny, including humankind, we are all set for love.

DO UNTO YOURSELF

Do unto yourself as you would be seen doing unto others. All the proclamations of piety, the claims of compassion, the façades of forgiveness; must fall clear upon the eye turned inward, upon the purity deep inside your own self.

It is of no consequence how well you seem to judge people; you can only rely on your limited field of experience. It is of no value that you show much love and caring if somewhere inside you are counting the returns on your investment.

Forgive completely. Do not just forgive enough to convince yourself of your magnanimity. Once forgiven, the original sin should lose entity entirely.

It’s like when you've watched something dirty on a shared computer. After you’re done, the original sin should not be traceable. You don’t ‘Delete’ something and leave it in the ‘Recycle Bin’ to be ‘restored’ at will. No, you first Delete and send it to the Recycle Bin, then you ‘Delete Forever’ or ‘Empty the Recycle Bin’. But there are too many logs and nets and webs and paths, so you then go for the ‘Search’ button, and fill in relevant words of what you wish to erase from memory; and you watch in surprise as the little doggy wags its tail and files that contain a reference to your ‘wrong’ keep popping up. Then you Delete all these files, and Empty the Recycle Bin.

Forgive like that, completely; leaving no chance of retracting.

Freedom lies in Forgiveness. Pick out the original sin from each nook and cranny and remote crevice of your being; if it refuses to come out, ‘Quarantine’ it, refuse to look at it, close off all access to it, and in due course of time it will be Deleted automatically. The sin, the sinner, the hurt, the grief must not get pride of place in your being.

We are wronged till the day we choose to keep suffering from the wrong. The perpetrator is happy in his own world - or maybe not so happy - but our inner suffering makes no difference to him; unless he can observe it and glean a feeling of satisfaction at having brought it about.

Being free with forgiveness brings upon one the virtue of the saints; compassion, even for the tormentor. When forgiveness becomes so much a part of one’s habit, compassion enters the heart. And the world is full of creatures whom one can feel for.

THE MIST THAT COVERS ALL

“Do you want you see the lake grow larger?” asks my son.

“Hmm?”

“Keep watching! When the mist covers the mountains and tumbles down onto the water till you can’t see the other side of the lake, it becomes larger; it can even stretch to infinity!”

Now, I had been watching this lake for fifty years; it is about a thousand yards long and three hundred to four hundred yards wide, bending gently to curve into a bean shape. This is the first time that I have been able to stretch its shores as far as I like! The mist has always been fascinating. Scores of times I, or many others like me, have been rowing a boat when all is enveloped by the mist - now ethereal wisps of glaring bright, now brooding clouds laden with moisture. But the thought in our minds has always been that we know the lake too well to be fooled by the mist, and the shores are nearby, exactly where they should be.

I know! I can define…

...till a 19 year old lad shows how he's been stretching the shores of a lake till infinity.

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The mist rolls; a tumbling mass of endless whiteness, sometimes rising lightly, sometimes drooping and bending under the weight of the water it bears. It wets the walls and darkens the corridors of the old school buildings. It brings gentleness into the voices of the teachers - scolding men and shrieking women – and it dampens the screams and shouts of the children. It brings a sense of peace, this shroud of mist; it softens the edges, it rounds off corners, everyone walks a bit slower and talks a little softly, as if in a place where one must be quiet. I open a bedroom window to welcome the rolling cloud deeper into my life.

The smoke-like wisps that rise on a sunny day from the valleys and skim over the tops carry hope and cheer and promise, but the mist that engulfs deeply brings satisfaction and wholeness and peace and quiet. Maybe because it restricts the visual domain while still retaining the light, an inner glow; the fears of the unknown dark are absent, but the shroud that limits the impression of vision is very much present, benign and enjoyable; a gentle embrace.

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The tangible, the audible, the visible, the thinkable, the imaginable, are all being shrouded in a benign mist. It rolls and flows, and smoothens the sharpness. It dampens noises. It absorbs jolts. It gently swathes imaginings.

Is this mist called Naam, or Simran? And the shores of definition stretch to touch infinity?

My dear friend Ravi wanted me to write about the mist. I am grateful to god for him.