MEETING WITH MAHASHAKTI

Neither Small Nor Great

Years ago I had a student named Monali. Not your favourite Monali Thakur. She was Monali Mohapatra.She read fiction and poetry voraciously. I liked her a lot for that. Once I had given her three of my books. After two days when I reached her home she told me she had read all the three books...!My surprise was great."Are my books so absorbing?" I had asked myself in disbelief.

I was in a bad mood and when she used the word "great" to praise me,I glared at her and told her to read my books but never to use any adjectives like small  or great to admire me. She was hurt and upset but didn't hesitate to ask,"What is the problem if I use  "great" for you Sir...?"

I said to her,"You can't understand all this. Let me check your homework."

But she insisted on getting the answer. Ultimately,I said to her,"When you use the word great,you are not flattering me. But you are doing me some great harm. That very word might create a sense in me of a sphere of influence.That makes me feel I have some limits and I don't like those limits. I want to be fixed in my unlimited state in which the mind has no role.The moment someone calls you great or small,the devil called the mind is sure to feel tempted to be elated.This could stimulate the ego which is now asleep deep within me.In our country,even sadhus and sanyasis of means prefer begging to destroy the ego and be released from every sense of limits and limitations. Union with the Supreme Soul is possible only when you have no sense of any limits.Did you get me?"

Monali was listening to me with eyes wide open.Did she really understand me? Another grown student of mine Sarmishtha would enquire whether I had experienced something transcendental in my life.I couldn't feel sure whether they understood my meaning. Even if they did,it would not enable them to make out whatever other pieces I had written so far. This was because I was sure they couldn't help clinging to the world.As long as we are rooted somewhere,we can never attain the supreme knowledge;we can't judge anything impartially as we can't see all sides of a matter. The worldly wise intellectual is like a lamp;he can see everything except his own base.This puts a  stop to his being truly wise.Earlier when I was reading Swami Vivekananda,I wondered why the dashing saint emphasised that unless you realised Truth,you couldn't gather full and complete knowledge about it. This knowledge could not come from religious texts and holy books.Nor could a self-realised person give you the notion of self-knowledge.

If you are a seer of Truth,nothing can remain unknown to you and every problem  has a most satisfactory and hundred percent effective solution to it.Knowledge is power.This doesn't mean bookish knowledge is power. Knowledge of Truth must mean power.

Once I was at a cyber cafe and had a chance to meet a young man who came there with a strange demand:"Do you have "sex email" here?" The cafe owner was a haughty young man who snarled at him contemptuously
:"Get lost. No such thing is available here." The young man appeared to be not so literate. I have seen many young men and women who are victims of  an irresistible sexual behaviour. You might call it natural but I don't. Such behaviour is the outcome of a self-centric approach to life and the usual greed to acquire more and more of things for your personal use.

Young men including my own students have asked me how to conquer sexuality.One of them once said:"Sir, is it not very boring to have a single wife all life?" A close friend Ashok once told me in Nagaland or Manipur,a woman said  to his missus
:"Madam,don't you get bored? Living so many years with the same man?" She was struck with wonder and the friend's wife with shock and astonishment.

Anyone suffering from this obsession try the talisman I suggest.Look at the man who being completely mad is sitting under a flyover and trembling with extreme cold. Go to him and give him your blanket. Think of the men from our villages who have nowhere to sleep at night and share shop verandas with stray dogs and wandering cattle. Think of the people living in the mud huts in the slums.Think of the bull whose front leg is swollen, putrid and is rotting away unattended.Think of the gang of dogs who have stayed hungry since you went away to visit your relatives without making any provisions for their feeding.If the suffering of such living beings stay in your minds,you can never be attracted by the temptations that sex and women offer.Does any middle  class young man who has no employment feel interested in marriage and sex? It is rightly said when poverty is at the door,love is out of the window.

Service to the poor is service to God.The poor and God share a lot in common.The poor like God don't have any belongings and expensive clothes,shoes,gaudy furniture
,luxury cars etc.This reason made our great sages discard all their possessions and they knew this was the fundamental prerequisite to reach God. But it is wrong to say that God is indifferent to the rich.Your belongings can't bother Him because He is present in them too.

Once we have had our goal attained,we need not bother about our belongings because we have known the truth of them.But human nature is such that man very quickly forgets his suffering and clings to the joys that come his way. This is common. Even the gods have not succeeded in conquering the all pervading "maya."

This part is devoted to the conquering of our limits and limitations. How mistaken we are if we think either we are small or great.