One with the Essential

To Discern – The Essential from the myriad of the non-essentials,
Is the axis of existence – the internal compass – the pole star.

Going beyond the darkness,
To see the morning dawn.
Going through the transient illusions,
Through the mirage of sensuous pleasures,
Eludes the real One,
With all His Beauty!

For non-essentials are those roses,
Non-essential are the forms and contours,
Non-essentials are the fragrance and mushiness.
It needs the eyes of an artist,
To see through these veils,
The Source of all these beauty - fragmented,
The Unity – the Integrated One – The Genesis of ALL.
The invisible – but very much present,
Entwined with the mundane!

Through the eyes of the soul,
He gives small glimpses,
To few masters, after all their toil!
Through the material gross,
Sanctifies He all that is in existence,
With His invisible presence,
To all in flesh and blood,
To all in lines, letters and colors,
To all flora and fauna!

All material both in nature and artificial are but non-essentials.
They are all fleeting, transient, dynamic forth.
Changing forms from winter seed,
To Spring Blossom,
To the death of the Fall.
Holding all changes,
Is the invisible force of life,
Heading through infinite forms,
Take birth, growing and dying, and back again,
Re-affirming the Archetype – the Ideal – the One,
Flowing through eternally!

Lust is non-essential,
Love is Essential.
Anger and Hatred are non-essential,
Compassion, Kindness and Empathy are Essentials!

The seed of the acorn is non-essential.
But Essential is the blue-print of the grand oak tree in it!
The longing of Juliet was non-essential.
But Essential was Eternal Love she stood for,
Showing to the generations to come – what is Love!
Shakespeare, Einstein, Socrates, Jesus, Plato, Buddha were non-essentials.
But Essential were their timeless wisdom – always invisible, but available!
Power, fame, wealth and possessions are non-essentials,
Essential is courage, kindness, generosity, compassion and love.
Living safe cocooned by the security of materials and money is non-essential.
Risking life and reputation for a noble cause, being in love, helping the other is Essential.

Here I walk through the sands of times,
Searching for the invisible,
Sieving Through the heap of the non-essentials,
The hidden, enmeshed and ingrained,
Soul of the invisible – Omnipresent, Omnipotent!

The Invisible does not elude the disciple.
Always He is present for him,
Wearing the garb of the non-essential,
Play the game of Maya – now and always.

Here, in this heart, lives another disciple,
Eager to be one with the One!
______________________________________________

Copy Right © All rights reserved - Samrat Kar

The dance with the invisible

The Ideal

The Most Beautiful

The Most Intimate

The Archetype

The Perfect

The Divine

The Invisible!!

Thou art the context of all contents,

Thou art the source of all life and all Art,

Thou art the source of all light and love,

Thou art the source of all hope and faith.

O dear Absolute!

From thou emanates

The dark and the shadow.

The pain, hatred, destruction and violence.

The heart bleeds,

The violin cries,

The ocean moans!

All are but orientations different,

Of the same Truth,

The one Unity!

I do not know who are you.

I do not know your will.

I do not know from where you come,

And to where you go.

But sometimes,

Some moments come,

Bringing with it a transient glimpse of thee,

In a form of a deep pang of pain,

Or an unexpected storm,

A strange coincidence,

A heart wrenching solitude.

But at the same time,

That silence bathes the soul,

With that all encompassing Presence,

The Source of All,

All things bright and beautiful,

And all things dark and ugly.

Dancing in rhythm with the invisible,

Figuring out the tune,

Listening to the Song,

Amidst all the distraction of 10,000 things.

Traveler is my soul,

All alone and abandoned,

Quiet and Calm,

Throbbing with life,

Centered onto Your Presence,

My Lord.

______________________________________________
Copy Right © All rights reserved - Samrat Kar

Adding that needed depth

"Go and be somethingological directly", Mrs Gradgrind orders her children in Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854). The children are brought up on their father's strict utilitarian principles - or rather, on Dickens's ferocious satire of them. So they have "a little conchological cabinet, and a little metallurgical cabinet, and a little mineralogical cabinet; and all the specimens were all arranged and labelled", but they have no fairy tales or nursery rhymes - nothing that might encourage fancy or wonder.

Not surprisingly, the children come to bad ends. On her deathbed, Mrs Gradgrind tells her daughter: "There is something- not an Ology at all - that your father has missed, or forgotten."

Science, in Dickens's view, does immense good - moral, social and intellectual - but only when it works hand in hand with imagination and reverence. Dickens being a Protestant Christian, did not see science as a threat to religious faith. On the contrary, he argued, learning the true nature of forces or objects brings us close to their creator. In a speech he gave in 1869 at the Birmingham and Nidland Institude, he speculated that Jesus might have taught scientific truth about the "wonders on every hand", but chose not to because "the people of that time could not bear them". 

Dickens's objection in Hard Times was not to science itself, but to the reductionist principle that imposes stultifying order and leaves no room for emotion or imagination. Plenty of Victorian scientific writers would have agreed with him. Michael Faraday, for example, taught that "in the pursuit of physical science, the imagination should be taught to present the subject investigated in all possible, and even in impossible views."

Dickens was appalled by people whose scientific knowledge was not connected to imagination or feelings. As soon as we meet Bradley Headstone, the teacher in Our Mutual Friend(1865), we know that he will prove a villain, because his mind is rule-bound and sterile: "From his earliest childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage...astronomy to the right, political economy to the left - natural history, the physical sciences, figures, music, the lower mathematics and what not, all in their several places." The same tidy-mindedness that incidcates the barrenness of the little Gradgrinds' natural specimens foretells Headstone's descent into criminal insanity. 

What excited Dickens most about science was its ability to reveal an unimagined world behind ordinary objects. "The facts of science are at least as full of poetry, as the most poetical fancies", he wrote in an 1848 review of RObert Hunt's The Poetry of Science. By revealing the wonder of everyday things, science compensates us for the beloved but ignorant beliefs it destroys. "When science has freed us from a harmless superstitions" Dickens wrote in the same review, "she offers to our contemplation something better and more beautiful, something which rightly considered, is more elevating to the soul, nobler and more stimulating to the soaring fancy." Dinosaurs, he went on, are really far more impressive than dragons, and coral reefs more so than mermaids.

Accordingly, Dickens championed writers who used science to show the world as spectacular, magical or astonishing. Among his close friends were mathematician, and father of the computer Charles Babbage, and Richer Owen, the comparative anatomist who coined the word dinosaur: Owen was enthralled by Dickens's novels, following them avidly as they came out in installments. Science historian Gowan Dawson has argued that there are strong similarities between Owen's paleontological studies and the way Victorian novel readers tackled serially published novels. 

On the same lines of Dickens, many greatest names in the field of physical sciences like that of Pythagoras, Archimedes, Kepler, and more recent Neil's Bohr, Newton, Einstein, Pauli, etc, have time and again hinted on the danger of the reductionism of science.

In our contemporary world similar over simplification raises its ugly head in the way children are taught  in schools, workers work in offices, managers and clerks manage the administrative works, engineers work out engineering feats, teachers teach and do research, priests carry out religious practices, doctors treat patients. 

Time is ripe, when there is an immediate need for man to step back, and listen to the in-audible, see the invisible, reason out the non-apparent, thereby being fully human. Mankind needs to focus on depth and not breath - on quality, not on quantity - on being, not on having.

______________________________________________
Copy Right © All rights reserved - Samrat Kar