THE LAUNDRY JUNCTION OF TIME & THE UNDER BELLY OF HUMAN EXISTENCE
Dr. Jernail S Anand
Where three rivers meet, we call it Triveni. Time, too, is a river that keeps flowing interrupted. Past, present, and future are human constructs that help us understand it better. These three rivers of time meet at a juncture called present which acts as a laundry junction where the waters after the wash, are released into the lake of the past.
We celebrate life when people are born and also the moment of marriage when they can create more life, and finally, the time when they part away from the stream. I was looking at a recently watered field from which water had evaporated, leaving the earth dry. Where is the water that has evaporated? It is in the air because air sucks the water from the earth and deposits it somewhere else. Life too is taken away from a person here, and supplied at some other unknown place. The forces which are overseeing these operations are not only precise and perfect, but also, ever present, though always invisible.
As soon as we hit the earth, the first thing that we do is to forget that we are here on an errand. He who sends us here is always watching our progress. When we go wrong, he pulls the strings and brings us to woe.
Is suffering an equalizer and a synthesizer?
When we suffer for our wrong actions, how can we presume that there is no Big Brother always watching us? It is a very uncomfortable thought to realize that we are under a CCTV camera, and all our movements are being recorded. Even when we are at our worst in our loneliness.
The only thing that off sets this adverse situation, and nearly balances it is the fact that men are given to believe that they have wits and they can use them no end. As a consequence, they make calculations, buy properties, sell shares, and when they make millions, celebrate ‘their’ success. When they lose, they curse gods. Here lies their ‘error’ [remember: to err is human] If all the losses can be ascribed to the invisible forces, why not the success?
The Underbelly of Existence
Men nurture huge reserves of hubris. Individuality is for which we wage wars. Freedom is another ornament for which young men have laid down their lives. Our only problem is, we understand these things in the context of our physical life and the political conditions. The fact is, we are much more than that. We have to understand man in his ‘viraat rupa’. We try to see him in his ‘aviraat avtara’. We try to create him into a person who looks after his family, creates wealth, raises skyscrapers, and finally like Zymandias, is reduced to dust. We never look into that stuff in man which is indestructible, of which Lord Krishna talked to Arjuna. We forget that when we die, it is not more than drying of up water from a field which stays in the air. Similarly, we too are in the air, and can be deposited back in some other place.
Man’s ‘Viraat Rupa’
What is the ‘viraat rupa’ [cosmic identity] of man? He is simultaneously connected with the entire past that stands behind him and provides him a background, like a series of mountains. In that backdrop, he is here to perform certain deeds which are already scripted for him. Here we err. We err in thinking that we are independent, we have nothing to do with the past, we have nothing to do with the future. We are present, we have a free will, and we can do what we like. This is the error mankind is prone to commit, and which we people often make, and then, it is a saga of suffering all through.
Malovian Overreach
The genesis of the error lies in the knowledge which helped to make man proud of his bearing, and think of himself as an independent entity, a demi-god who can run parallel to god’s creation. What is happening today, it is annoying to gods, because, man has distanced himself from nature, and is headed on a self-destructive march into the heart of the mystery trying to undo its mystical mechanism. In trying to prove himself equal to God in creative prowess, he has actually shrunk into a small entity, who can be upset if there is no electricity to charge his mobile and laptop. He is a laptop genii, or bottled ‘Jinn’ of Aladdin. The marvels of man’s creative power mock at reality from the ramparts of fantasy. Man is fast receding into that fantasy, that virtuality, and while he thinks he has garnered heaps of knowledge, he has failed to realize what his past holds out as a lesson of life. Ravana still remains an epitome of knowledge in its greatest perversion. The Kalyuga has failed to see a man of his stature in whom we could see wisdom gone on furlough. We have yet to see a man like Duryodhana, whose ‘wisdom’ leaves on a pilgrimage of non-sense from where, there is no return. AI cannot replace the Gita, nor can it de-arm Arjuna. Man is under grave threat because he has chosen to isolate himself from the benign powers of nature and aligned himself with the toxic universe of the laptop. AI has the potential to make man far greater than himself. But the more his size increases, the more he dwindles in his humanity as well as his divinity.
In spite of the past offering a variety of intense wisdom, and the future holding out great promise, man’s present is locked in a futile search for himself. In fact, he has opened too many windows on his physical existence, that keep him confused and confined to his physical existence. The wisdom that he used to get from proximity to nature has been replaced with knowledge-based perceptions of reality. Passion for success and pursuit of pleasure have divested the divine aura that stuck to a human being. We are now ordinary persons, a subhuman race, even below the animals and vegetation, who talks of stars but has lost touch with the ground.
Dr. Jernail Singh Anand, [the Seneca, Charter of Morava, Franz Kafka, Maxim Gorky and Signs Peace awards Laureate, with an opus of 180 books, whose name adorns the Poets’ Rock in Serbia] is a towering literary figure whose work embodies a rare fusion of creativity, intellect, and moral vision.