SARADESHWARI 3

It is hard to fathom who Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi was. She was the acme of feminine perfection, the prototype of the perfected woman for the Age and the fulfilment of all feminine aspirations long suppressed by the tyranny of the times, the oppressive culture of the patriarchal State. Holy Mother’s birth marks the advent of the New Age for woman if one is to put faith in her being the Universal Mother and that she had descended to our terrestrial plane to awaken the feminine power of humanity long suppressed but never quite obliterated by the persistent perversity of patriarchal power. Purity incarnate she was and this seems to encapsulate her message to humankind for in the very fragrance of her unsullied living lies the essence of her all-encompassing love for all of sentience. Mother she was, indeed, to all that came her way and to those who did not, she sent her benediction in her parting words of love, pulsations of which echo even today and will do so through the corridors of time as she gathers up her children, errant as they are, to set the course of evolution straight here on strife-stricken Earth. All these may sound to the rationally bent as effusions of the devout having little semblance to the pervasive reality and utterly incongruous in terms of dimensional estimations. But the heart never counts its beats as it throbs to the pulsations of love nor do inspirations of the Spirit seek exactitude in numbers but are content to flood the banks of the soul, bathing it in ineffable bliss. So are these heart-felt assertions of the devotee and they gain their sanction from the life-transforming power that he experiences from the loving memory of Holy Mother who never fails to reciprocate the love in an immeasurably greater abundance.

And this brings us to this singular feature of Holy Mother --- love. She was veritably the incarnation of motherly love in all its sublimity, in all its pervasiveness, a love that enfolded in its arms all of sentience from the prophet-like children of Ramakrishna to the lowliest of humanity in the garb of the sweeper or the convict. Her love knew no bounds and gently overflowed to all around, never in gushes or wild flourishes but ever like the nourishing dew-drop, like the coolness of the autumn breeze, like the first rays of the morning sun, to awaken the fortunate ones to life eternal, a veritable springtime of harvest of yesterdeeds and future possibilities brought to attention in the moment. So natural a garb she wore in love that all recognised their own mother in her who emphatically, on the rarest of occasions, was heard to disclose her true identity as the Universal Mother who has borne us all. Again, this may seem to be the facile averment of the devout that seeks hyperbolic affirmations of his beliefs and may seem grotesque to the rationally inclined with his empirical limits of statistical estimations but such is the recorded experience of many a devotee, perfectly sound in mind and body and with no disreputable history of fact-distortion or tale-concoction and who, for truth’s sake, have gone on to disclose their self-witnessed revelations of the Holy Mother as the Mother Goddess Jagaddhatri, Kali and the like on occasions when she chose to shake off her mortal garb for a moment out of her own boundless grace for her child. And all this she did out of her limitless compassion for her children on Earth, suffering, as they do, the three-fold agony of human life.

There was a softness to Holy Mother’s character, a sweetness of nature that permeated her whole being and lent it a refreshing feminine grace despite her considerable rustic background, also an aristocratic bearing with a catholicity of understanding and appreciation of the diverse cultures of peoples, almost with an innate, spontaneous perception that endeared her to all who came across her, and which marks her out as the prototype of the ideal modern woman of present and future humanity. Her innate simplicity, immaculate purity, loftiness of thought and bearing, and the subterranean current of incessant love for her divine husband which eventually overflowed in cascading terms for all of humanity, set her up as the acme of perfection of awakened womanhood of modern times, nay, of all times, and one dares to hazard that she is the descent of the Divine Mother among fallen humanity to set things right, in especial, the plight of the purest emblem of her own self, the woman of all races and climes, depressed, ravaged, despised, the bearers of the freshest flowers of humanity lying in abject misery, whose very birth is in many a clime considered ominously evil and whose existence at birth is nipped and nullified to negate the oncoming familial misfortune.

Such is our Holy Mother, holier than the Ganga, purer than purity itself, the essence of sweetness whose aroma pervaded her entire being and drew all to her from the prophet to the pariah who she embraced in her unsurpassed maternal love, the awakener of the spiritual consciousness of fallen man, the emancipator of womankind, the hope of humanity as it traverses its path of error impelled by the blind fury of the times but never quite failing to know that there is a mother waiting for all with open arms in whose love there is neither ebb nor flow and who will lift up her errant child in the fullness of time when his play is over at last. Jai Ma!                  

IN RESPONSE TO ANKITA BOSE'S APPRECIATION OF SARADESHWARI 2

Thank you Ankita for appreciating my humble offering at the lotus feet of Holy Mother. However, I am not a doctor of philosophy as perhaps you erroneously assume me to be but am a humble brother of yours and a child of our common Mother whose love has embraced us all. May Mother keep you forever in her divine protection is the earnest prayer of one that feels beholden to you for your effusive praise of my feeble effort! Jai Ma!

LONG LIVE HUMANITY

The heartlessness of the world can only be combated by the spread of true spiritual culture. In fact, culture in all its phases must be disseminated through the world, education in all the diverse disciplines man is heir to and man has the potential to discover. This is the one hope in this world of utter hopelessness where misery reigns like a permanent resident in this house of folly and erring man seems to have settled into a practised perfection of the execution of peace in this trial of life.

What a waste of human life! What vanity in ignorance does humankind exhibit when it throws everything into the chaos of violent modes and methods and plunges the world often in the grief of war! Can violence settle anything? If one party takes up arms then defence through arms is legitimate and even the righteous course of things for patronizing wickedness and evil can never be condoned. The tyrants of the world will perpetrate terror and the civilized people will endure it non-violently, this can never be an option for weakness masking as virtue is a pernicious vice indeed. But the roots of violence must be sought and one will be astounded to find them in the recesses of a violent home where behavioural disorders are set up, attitudes stiffened into unbending arrogance and destructive tendencies are activated which will cause devastation to millions lying in the radial path of the evil one as he advances in his triumphal march of terror. Thus, the disturbed home is the hotbed of violence and all malevolent influences that afflict society and unless the atmosphere of the home be made congenial for the healthy development of the child, there can never be any hope of permanent peace in the world.

Doctrinaire religion and political philosophy must not be taught to the child-mind in its most impressionable years and a liberal education should supplant all such nefarious influences. There is no heaven or hell that man should be enticed into the belief of before he learns to square on face the reality of this world into which he is born. Let man learn self-confidence from birth instead of faith in invisible forces that may or may not be there to guide the destiny of man. A healthy rationalism and never a pernicious one, for essentially all violent rationalism intended on conversion to its fold the multitude is also a variant of faith that destroys the dignity of man, ought to be the diet of the child-mind and along with it the fine arts to refine its sensibilities such that the sheer restraint bred in the formative years and the appreciation of beauty will act as a deterrent in later life when the impulsions of situations and circumstances will tend to quicken up passions and dangerously draw distressed souls into the maelstrom of megalomaniacal madness. The seeds of destruction must be nipped in the bud and, that too, in an enlightened way, else, there will be the inevitable recurrence, the periodic manifestation of these symptoms that will draw their adherents to their fold and heap on humanity the same horror which has brutalized its past and driven civilizations to despair. Most importantly, we should create an environment where violence and vice shall not find a fertile breeding ground for ceaseless flourish as history has thus far borne testimony to, and only then may we see a semblance of a lasting peace here on this strife-stricken world of ours.

The problem is one of the harmony of disparate forces, arrayed as they are in opposition, seeking resolution through combat but never quite assured, thereby, of an eventual alignment which will have put paid to all such future feuds. There are no easy solutions to these human problems in the external world, especially in a dynamic scenario of evolving situations and circumstances and the evolving consciousness of man battling with the inertia of man's chequered past. Understanding cultures, their diversity, their roots, milieu, attitudes, hopes and aspirations, their growth patterns and meanderings, all these will have to be comprehended if a harmonic human society will obtain based on pluralism. Exclusiveness is the bane of human society and intolerance its basis. The vast terrain of the world with its diverse climatic conditions and anthropic evolution necessitates a diversity of approaches to solving the riddle of existence and thus diverse disciplines of the spirit termed as religion or tradition have evolved in different places across the globe. To hope that the world will be a happy home for humans if it is a monolith in culture and conception is vanity indeed bred in vice and ought not to be entertained by right-thinking people if peace is to be pursued in all earnestness. The diversity of human modes and methods must be accepted as intrinsic to human culture and the progress of civilization must be along the lines of the development of these tools of human endeavour. Exclusiveness, be it of religion or political philosophy or privilege, is so divisive and vicious a means that it invariably causes fractures in human society and is never conducive to the attainment of peace on Earth. Liberalism is civilized and is the way forward as we march towards the ever-elusive millenium. Its appeal is not fanatical nor its adherents in the billions but it is the way for all for it includes all in its wide arms and leaves out none save the ones that cling to their fanatical forms of ideology or faith and choose to stand outside the ambit of the harmony of human forces, the plurality of human existence. This liberalism must be inculcated in individuals right from their childhood through their academic curriculum. Only then will its catholic principles of mutual goodwill and acceptance be absorbed and assimilated in the nerve-fibre of every being ushering in the Age of Peace and Enlightenment.

Eventually, though, it will have to be Vedantic education that will have to be imparted to the future citizens of the world for humanity to be conscious of the essential divinity of all that exists and of the imperative of human evolution of the unfolding of such spiritual possibility for all. Man will then realize the utter folly of territorial gains or any material advancement of a section of humanity at the cost of others and will look towards the higher pursuits of life as the means of human advancement. Culture will flourish once more and this time it will be based on the secure foundation of spiritual and scientific knowledge and not on brother man's blood. The ideals of civilization and the high idealism of liberty, equality and fraternity in all its catholicity will then, for the first time, be realized and segmented, tortured, fractured growth of man through a deluge of blood will then be a thing of the past, never to visit humankind again. The pestilence of the past having been relegated to the dustbin of history, humanity will arise like the phoenix from the ashes of the dead past with the voice of truth and hope and of the Spirit enthroned within. Man will mark out a new destiny for himself, no more a tool of Nature, subject to its vicissitudes or his own violent passions, no more a creature of his own concoctions, of his misapprehensions of his mission of Earth, but a renascent being full of the exaltation of a high hope and a common sympathy for all his brethren and all that they are heir to. A golden age of human living will then ensue which will see no war save the one against ignorance that ever threatens to shroud the awakening consciousness of man. May the heavens open up to shower benediction on such a future of man! Long live humanity!