This much faith, love for just one second of hurried darshan and the energy and strength they have to carry out this beautiful tapas really really moved me to tears but I couldn’t find it in me to stand in long lines or take a dip in Ganges although I’m in Varanasi and I had many colorful reasons for that like unclean and getting sick from wet clothes. But from one point of view, the quality of water is being found to be hazardous, and the Ganges water too, from Varanasi is a little colourful. And we collect it to drink.
My question is that there is so much faith in people, and I feel like a wannabe elite who thinks I’m too good to line up or take a dip. There is so much intense devotion in them that what all the people are seeing is the Ganga Maa and the Kashi Vishwanath, almost like not bothered about the long queue and such a short time of rushed darshan, but I freaked out in the crowd and couldn’t muster up the courage to line up for Kashi Vishwanath temple darshan or take a dip.
The faith of people, the devotion and love are beautiful. But the kashi thought in mind, and it was very different, and that really made me judgy and a little sad. The condition of the Ganga. The drainage of the city flows into the Ganga. People putting thin plastic film doonas with flowers and diya in Ganga, it’s all so sad to see, but how much love they pour into those lit diyas is beautiful to observe.
Alok Da, is there a way to tap into the spiritual significance of the place and not the materialistic outward aspects? I’m not able to move past my opinions and judgments about the outer aspects of the place. Is the whole atmosphere of Varanasi rich with divine love? The soil, the trees and all or does it fade with time due to misuse of resources by us as humans?
One has to see and take account of both sides. In fact, devotion is incomplete without service and what kind of devotion would it be that ignores the house of the Lord which this earth and the sacred punyabhoomi Bharat is meant to be. Devotion is not about standing for hours to have a glimpse of the Deity manifest in the Idol, nor is devotion about singing and dancing in the Lord’s Name. These things generally create a sense of personal satisfaction and emotional excitement which does not have the power to change much. Devotion means to be devoted, given to the Divine. It implies living our life according to what He wants it to be. It means to change our life within and outside so that it can become a true reflection of the Divine within us. It is not enough to engage in outer ritualistic worship. Of much greater importance is to worship the Divine in and through our actions without which the outer worship remains a meaningless ritual, often the symbol of deception because we are contradicting in our thoughts and feelings and will and actions the One whom we claim to worship. Sri Aurobindo cautions us in The Human Cycle.
‘For the way that humanity deals with an ideal is to be satisfied with it as an aspiration which is for the most part left only as an aspiration, accepted only as a partial influence. The ideal is not allowed to mould the whole life, but only more or less to colour it; it is often used even as a cover and a plea for things that are diametrically opposed to its real spirit. Institutions are created which are supposed, but too lightly supposed to embody that spirit and the fact that the ideal is held, the fact that men live under its institutions is treated as sufficient. The holding of an ideal becomes almost an excuse for not living according to the ideal; the existence of its institutions is sufficient to abrogate the need of insisting on the spirit that made the institutions. But spirituality is in its very nature a thing subjective and not mechanical; it is nothing if it is not lived inwardly and if the outward life does not flow out of this inward living. Symbols, types, conventions, ideas are not sufficient. A spiritual symbol is only a meaningless ticket, unless the thing symbolised is realised in the spirit. A spiritual convention may lose or expel its spirit and become a falsehood. A spiritual type may be a temporary mould into which spiritual living may flow, but it is also a limitation and may become a prison in which it fossilises and perishes. A spiritual idea is a power, but only when it is both inwardly and outwardly creative. Here we have to enlarge and to deepen the pragmatic principle that truth is what we create, and in this sense first, that it is what we create within us, in other words, what we become. Undoubtedly, spiritual truth exists eternally beyond independent of us in the heavens of the spirit; but it is of no avail for humanity here, it does not become truth of earth, truth of life until it is lived. The divine perfection is always there above us; but for man to become divine in consciousness and act and to live inwardly and outwardly the divine life is what is meant by spirituality; all lesser meanings given to the word are inadequate fumblings or impostures.’
Affectionately,
Alok Da
