| 21 August 2010
Karmas are what we have done, do and will do, and life is an endless series of Karmas. We move through life acting out our karmas in the hope that life will improve. Life is never perfect and our hopes are for the future. We collect ideas to relieve our plight and embark on a path in the hope that we can either solve our problems or escape into a new domain free from the trammels of present day life.
The agony is within and there is a root cause. The great thirteenth century Sufi poet, Rumi, calls it lament: the lament of the reed flute plucked from the riverbeds of reeds; it laments with the agony of being separated from its source and the player of this reed flute also laments with his separation from his source.
And what is this source we come from? Well it seems we don’t know, or rather we have forgotten. According to our great traditions and teachings, we were once part of that source and it was a seamless consciousness.
According to Sufi traditions it is pure love. The love that is so pure that there are no barriers or distinctions between the lover and the beloved. It is all one; and just as the drop in the ocean is part of the ocean and at the same time is the whole ocean, in the same way our origins are that drop, a part of the whole, and this is the ecstatic state of being. It is pure, it is boundless, it is unchanging and it is beyond description, yet it is an inspiration to ecstasy, a transport to transcendental bliss.
We know that the path is from the particular to the general, from worldly actions to inner truth, but where is this path? Is it just in the mantra and the meditation? Is it just in the karma yoga and the kirtan? After these things don’t we remain with the same understandings and identifications as before? We read and we know everything, yet have we learnt that hope in external effort is bound to end with disappointment. The successful man flying first class to Los Angeles is driven by the will to escape his longing to reunite and the subsistence farmer is driven by the same longing. We suppress our original lament. The lament is the sorrowful tune doled out in our hearts, for we have separated from our source just like the reed flute that plays its mournful tune.
Every church, synagogue, mosque, gurudwara and temple has but one altar, an altar to that one perfection, and everyone born into this world of hope takes a position or stand either acknowledging or denying its validity. Yet who has come close to it through intellectual analysis?
This draws us into a debate on faith and conviction. Faith surely holds the upper hand, the hand of experienced knowledge, knowledge gained not by intellectual conclusion but by a truth, a vision or an experience. Then we, the knower of that experience, know what is true. When a truth is so obviously definite, then faith is born and a conviction is also. Seeing the truth, or seeing the dawning of an idea which is so obviously and definitely true because it has been seen in the form of spiritual experience, is seeing through the eye of intuition, Ajna Chakra.
To purchase Ajna Chakra by Rishi Nityabodhananda, published by Yoga Publications Trust, India © 2009, please email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or phone 02 66846026
