Elite Essays

A Vacation in God's territory: part-4

2005-06-05T11:30:00.000-07:00

-- by Vishvesh

It is strange but true that when you would imagine that your mind must be still when it is inwardly impressed by such things as Nature, Music, Poetry and arts, that are associated with a sense of calmness, it is only in fact more active than ever. It is not a mere wild excitement or a thrill but an heightened state of awareness when your mind is more readily receiving impressions and more readily responding to them as well. To put it simply, you feel the throb of life without any unnatural stimulant that is very much necessary today for the modern man to prevent him from boredom.

That was exactly what we felt during our stay and going around in Utah. We visited all the familiar places nearby in the next four days when we stayed with our friend at Orem. The mornings greeted us with the splendid sight of the snow filled Wasatch mountains seen from his balcony and it was like re-living the good old days, when we lived there.

We couldn’t make it to Moab, which has some of the best scenic places as the Utah Arches and the Canyonlands. Utah is a vast stretch of open land and you do not necessarily plan to go to a particular place for outing. Most of the times, the drive itself and your in-between adventures in the center of nowhere as taking a hike over a strange hill on your way could be even better than the experience you had at your destination.Having given up Moab because of the distance, we took a one day trip to Vernal, the dinosaur land, and Flaming Gorge reservoir which is near Vernal. At Vernal they have preserved a large collection of dinosaur fossils in the same condition as they were quarried. It must be a visual treat to the paleontologist but for us the landscape around was more fascinating: Cement colored hills all around and a muddy fast flowing Green River out of nowhere ! My daughter was exactly the same age as my son when I was there last time. The place evoked pleasant memories by its details most of which were so green in my mind yet. I was standing in a place in which time was beyond normal perception. For, it was measured there in terms of Jurassic, Triassic ages which had more than six zeroes in the number of years that separated one hill from another ! And I was thinking how different I looked, and how baby-like my daughter was from the pictures a friend of mine shot in my earlier visit! Fathomless time frozen in there and you felt how small you were in relative significance to time and cosmos!

The Green river is another major river in Utah and is a tributary of the Colorado River. No wonder it got its name based on a color, for it is a bright green colored river. They built a dam which created the Flaming Gorge reservoir, which is another breath-taking place in Utah. You wouldn’t suspect that a vast body of water existed when you drove for more than an hour among desert-like hills. And when it shows up it shows itself in its full size and splendor : a vast pool of water surrounded by hills. The dam is very picturesque as all the dams in Utah are. We wanted to spend some time as we did during our last visit in the outlet of the dam. There was lesser water flowing out than what we saw before and a few fully equipped anglers standing knee deep in the water. They must have been there since morning. More than the fish, standing there in such an environment must by itself be a great pleasure. I am sure most of them rarely caught a fish worth the time they spent to drive to a remote place as that, and the money they spent for the gear. I was reminded of the ‘expostulation’ in a poem of Wordsworth:

"Why William, on that old grey stone,
Thus for the length of half a day,
Why William, sit you thus alone,
And dream your time away?”

We spent a long time hiking around and sitting in the pebbles in the shores that were dry. The river was brilliant green (pictures attached) and surprisingly there wasn’t even the gushing sound of flowing water. It was a great pleasure to simply sit there without doing anything and let your mind merge with the beauty of the river and the rocky cliffs it made its way through. Modern man wants to be good at action and accomplishment through an action; but seldom does he realize that inaction could be a much more difficult task and that through inaction he can more frequently be himself. I think Wordsworth was suggesting that through that ‘expostulation’ aimed at him. His reply was profound in its characteristic simplicity, which touches the heart of every lover of Nature:

"Think you, mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?"

Don’t we seek endlessly for things of all sorts while a moment of self-reflection such places can arise in one could give a greater content to one’s life? I don’t know if I appreciate a poet as Wordsworth because I had a mind that responded to Nature readily, or that I appreciate Nature because I had a mind that responded to the poetic spirit of a poet as Wordsworth. There is no line, I believe, that separates one from the other, for I believe such things are, as things of the mind, inter-related by a sense of aesthesis and an appreciation of one is bound to be related to another.

There is a Red canyon at Flaming Gorge as well. It offers a large view of the Green River from an altitude of 1700 feet. The river behind the dam flows between red colored mountains and that is how it must have got the name Red Canyon. You are struck by the beautiful contrast of the green river between red mountains; the view is stunning from that altitude (pictures attached). The river winds through the mountains at quite a few places and if you can walk a little you could view some of those beautiful bends. It has a large camping area nearby and it must wonderful to pitch your tents and stay there for a night or two overlooking the view. I was waiting for a boat to pass through the river and I was glad I found one after a long time. You could see it taking a bend that must easily be three of four miles away and cutting through the green water all the way. It must be a great pleasure to take a boat down the river to the dam, but I would rather prefer a rowing boat. In a motor boat you miss the sweet sound of the lapping of water as your rows push through the water; moreover the high pitched noise of the engine could be really annoying. It was so beautiful to see the boat coming to your view, taking the bends, disappearing and reappearing in a few minutes and then finally go beyond your view. As in Bryce, there was no one here as well. I am given to being lonely and I was thoroughly enjoying our isolation. Except for the chatter of my kids there was no sound. But then, is communication possible only between human beings and that too necessarily through mechanisms involving speech and sound? You could feel at one with the elements in such a place if you could give up yourself and look beyond the barriers that are acquired as we grow up in our environment that is conditioned by so many factors. I remembered Wordsworth again:

“One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man;
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.”

With pleasant thoughts, that are certainly not of the day-dreaming and idealizing kind, but something based on certain inner realities of life that has no absolutes, created by such ‘impulses’, we drove back through the winding roads of Wyoming which we had to cross on our way back and a day later to fly back home to Albany, NY.

- vishvesh

PS : A visit as the one I had at Utah was a life-rejuvenating experience. This is not confined with Utah alone. Several people have several kinds of experience at several places. What matters is that man needs to preserve the mind that can ‘respond’, for, I believe, it is one of the dearest human qualities than make life possible. Thank you for those who read through my ramblings and took the time to appreciate by responding. I am glad that it created such impressions in quite a few to identify themselves with similar experiences, for it is a great feeling to know that there are quite a few among my small set of friends themselves who are given to such interests in life.

Some pictures shot in the above places are available at http://community.webshots.com/album/339461148LpYQbs

A vacation in God's territory : Part 3

2005-05-04T04:07:00.000-07:00

--by Visvesh.

The Colorado River is the most spectacular river I have seen in my life. I have always had a fascination for rivers. My admiration of rivers grew more after I moved to North America and saw many of the mighty rivers. While the rivers of India used to fascinate me by their typical tropical charm of greenery, irrigation and the piety attached to most of them, the rivers in North America stagger me by their might. Geographically the United States seems to me to be much blessed than any other country in the world in its water resources; the mighty rivers are the best proof of it. You feel as if you are in a water world when you read Mark Twain’s works based on the river Mississippi which was a permanent source of inspiration of his creative genius. I still remember how I was awe-struck when I had the chance to look at Mississippi though it was on a bleak winter day and most of the river was frozen. It was more than twice the size of Ganges which was the widest river I had seen before, and I have heard that it widens much larger than what I saw in many other places.

But the River Colorado is entirely of a different kind. It is a wild river and its course is perhaps the most spectacular among all the rivers. It flows through some of the most picturesque landscapes which it had carved itself. Unlike the greenery a river is always associated with, this river flows mostly through deserts. What seems to flow as a trickle in the vast depths of the Grand Canyon (in a few places it flows a mile below your feet) is a tumultuous river with rapids of all classes. The very sight of the river is awe-inspiring, by its unique dark blue green color. Not only this river but every river that I have seen in Utah is a fast flowing river. Rafting in them is a great experience with mountains around.

We were to spend a night the next day at Page, Arizona, where Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon dam is situated. The more you drove down south towards Arizona, the more desert-like it became. In the early morning hours the dry sand formations with their pale cement and orange colors looked pleasant. Nothing but miles and miles of road before you and all strange kinds of sand hills around sculptured by the winds! The land being barren except for shrubs and bushes, you could see the road stretching and winding beautifully before you for miles. Suddenly you see a lone hillock which makes you wonder if someone planted it there! A small stretch of hills with intricately carved patterns that resembled the crowded sculpture of our Temple Towers! An occasional battered road to some remote village with a few post boxes that look so strange in the middle of a desert, perhaps to save the post man from getting lost in finding the houses that were not to be seen anywhere around ! There is so much that strikes you even in that remote desert land, if you had the eyes for it. We stopped our car frequently. Since it was late April, the weather was so pleasant and it was an experience to get out of the car and walk down the desolate road with nothing but the vast desert land around you. There was an unmistakable charm and the call of Nature even in that land by its vastness. And when you were close to Page, Arizona, you start seeing flashes of the bluish green waters of Lake Powell.

Lake Powell, like Lake Mead is an artificially formed lake by the creation of a dam, and is in the Utah-Arizona border. The Glen Canyon dam and the Hoover Dam are two important dams built to tame down the river Colorado and use its water to feed the states of Utah, Wyoming, Arizona and Colorado. Both these dams have created lakes that stretch for hundreds of miles. I have been to Lake Mead but this was the first time I was visiting Lake Powell. What strikes you first is the bright greenish blue of the vast lake amidst the cement colored desert. The contrast takes your breath away by its very first sight. Add to it the sunny weather of Arizona. The water sparkles under a brilliant blue sky. All around the lake are various kinds of canyon formations. The Glen Canyon dam is a tall but a narrow dam exactly like the Hoover dam, and an engineering marvel as well. It was built in a native Indian settlement and even today most of the city (Page, Arizona) is inhabited by Navajo Indians. We felt a little strange to see a lot of Native Indians who are distinctly different to the Caucasian American race. It was like visiting a city in another country !

We had one of the most memorable experiences when we visited the ‘horse shoe bend’ of the Colorado River. The river makes an almost U turn at that point (hence the name), probably a thousand feet under your feet from the hill you view from. To reach the view area you have to walk a mile or so in the desert. Spring season in its peak, there were quite a few desert flowers and fresh green bushes everywhere. It was strange to hike on the gravel like sand. By the time we hiked uphill to the view point we were very tired. A strong desert wind began to blow even before we reached. Believe me, not only it was difficult to walk against it, but even to stand firm when it was blowing. Added to that it was like thousands of pins pricking all over the exposed skin of your body because the desert sand that was blown was bigger in its size than the regular sand. Luckily we had carried a blanket with which we wrapped our kids. And the closer we got to the view point, the more surprised we were. For, the sight we saw was one of the best views of the Colorado River that was hard to resist but at the same time very scary too. There was no fence and the wind was so strong that it could push you down into the abyss. There were a group of Chinese tourists, most of whom were elderly. They were really brave to venture to the tip of the hill for the view and to take pictures. Deep down below the Colorado River looked like a vast splash of bright green color. It was like a painting, as if a glorious moment of Nature were frozen in time. Blessed are those who have the time to take a rafting tour in that bend. As I made a note earlier, these are places which need a lot of time to spend. I remembered a quote of Francis Bacon: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention”. These places are the kind to be ‘chewed and digested’ as some books need to be. They are not of the kind where you run around, pose yourself for a few pictures and that kind of regular tourist routine. They offer a rejuvenation of life itself in their details and I felt very bad I didn’t have enough time to spend there. Meanwhile the wind was killing too and my son was scared, and we had to retreat.

Page, Arizona boasts of one of the most spectacular canyons in the world : The Antelope Canyon slots. There are two of them and we could visit the upper. It is a narrow crevice the river had carved through in a huge granite hill. It is rock dry most of the year. We bumped and bounced in our way to see it on a huge monster truck, for regular cars cannot drive through the terrain there. Only tour operators are allowed to take you in for a $30 for each person ticket! Because of the narrow size, the water that forces in through this crevice rises to the height of 80 feet and the velocity of water also has sculptured all its way through. When light passes in through the slits in the top it creates myriad colors and patterns that mesmerize you. It is red and bright orange when the sun is bright outside, and as if like magic it takes in all the possible colors of the spectrum between golden yellow and bright red as the sun passes in and out of the clouds. It is not the color alone that strikes. The changing color brings to life the various details the passing water has carved through the slot canyon. An amazing wonder (picture attached).

On our second day at Page, Arizona, it became suddenly cold and we had to drop our plan to take a boat into the lake. Perhaps, June would be a better time to visit this place, because I was told that the weather would be warmer and less windy. It must be an experience to take a house boat for three days or so and cruise the lake, visit every canyon in the lake, anchor the boat anywhere as you wished and take a slide in the water. Maybe another time I thought, as we left Page, Arizona, for Bryce Canyons on our way back to Orem, Utah.

Bryce Canyons was our first exposure to the unique beauty of Utah. I still remember the early morning we drove there with our friends jam packed in a van (8 members). I had lived at Toronto earlier for a year then and also at Michigan for a couple of months. Both were flat regions and except for lakes I haven’t found anything striking there. The Niagara Falls too was a disappointment for me. The melting of snow and the subsequent warm weather of the Spring were to expose us the heaven that lay out-doors in Utah.

Bryce Canyons are typical sandstone canyon formations that you see scattered all over Utah, but in a larger size. The very entrance to it which is called as Red Canyons fascinates you by its crumbling bright red structures that look like giant ant hills. You go further over the mountain road to a series of spots from which you could hike for miles and miles among the thousands of strange structures carved by wind and water, some of which are breath-taking by their appearance of springing out of nowhere. You have to see them in their three dimensional space and color to appreciate them fully. The beauty of this place is that the canyon structures contain more details and intricate patterns than elsewhere. If you came down the hill starting to view them from the peak, you reach the grand finale at the Bryce Point and the Sunset Point at the foot hills where you can see thousands of intricate structures all at once, glowing red in the setting sun, if you happened to be there that time. It is like hearing a Western classical musical piece which slowly builds up the mood and tempo to a grand finish. My son was often mistaking such structures, not only at the Bryce, but elsewhere as well, as Temples! It is not just child’s imagination; those places really look like our sculptured Towers of Temples. The Bryce point canyon structures have a striking resemblance to the Temple architecture of the Hoysala kingdom (compare the pictures attached with the Temples at Belur and Halebid, Karnataka. You can see the striking resemblance in the intricate sculptural carvings by man in the Temples and by Nature in Bryce).

It had snowed the previous day at Bryce and the evening was stiff and cold. I spent some time alone in the deserted view area of Sunset point when the Sun was setting, since it was too cold for my family and since they were too tired as well. We had already driven around 1000 miles in the three days, and we still had a long drive to Orem. Strangely, I didn’t feel any sense of loneliness I always feel when I am alone at home, though there was not a single soul nearby. The wind was biting cold though it was not strong. The light was fading as well from golden orange to a pale yellow. I was left wondering if we are terribly mistaken in what we term as animate and inanimate! The tall sandstone canyon structures and the tall trees around seemed to me to breath life as much as I did. Only they belonged to another world I was struggling to be conscious of. Robert Frost was probably enamored by a similar situation in life, when he was ‘walking by the woods’. I remembered his poem:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

He probably assimilated it into whatever creative experience his poetry exhibits. Promises to keep or not, the kind of response such places arise in one could make itself felt forever as a waking presence. Night was starting to fall upon me and I reluctantly had to find my way to the car for our drive to Orem.

PS : Some pictures shot in the above places are available at http://community.webshots.com/slideshow?ID=336882396&key=bIe gqf

A vacation in God's territory : Part 2 (Zions...)

2005-05-02T03:54:00.000-07:00

Apart from the beautiful Nature there was another thing that made our life in Utah so memorable: a group of wonderful friends, most of whom were young bachelors who got attached to us very much as members of a family. All of them favored to be outdoors just like us and so we were off every fortnight in a van and a car to every remote nook and corner of Utah. Except for one friend, all had left now, but we wanted to re-live some of the sensations we felt as we drove through some of the most cherished spots in Utah.

We started to Zions National Park the very next morning. Zions is a stretch of tall cliffs and awesome mountains in the middle of a desert. It is rock dry everywhere. It is not entirely devoid of vegetation though. Most parts of Utah are deserts but they are not entirely brown as you see in Texas and even some parts of California. The green shrubs everywhere in Zions provide a striking contrast to the red granite. The cliffs are dashing red in color like the canyon structures in Bryce Canyon (and in most areas of the Grand Canyon), but are solid granite, unlike the sand formations in Bryce. The sheer loft of some of the cliffs takes your breath away. Down South I-15 towards Zions you first reach Kolob canyon a few miles before you enter Zions National Park. The road that loops through it is red too ! I haven’t seen red colored roads anywhere else and it is so beautiful to see it winding through the canyons with the towering red colored cliffs on both sides. Rocks everywhere of various kinds and shapes but how unique each of it was! The Kolob Arch, which is a spectacular arch by its size, is the prime spot but then you got to hike a full day to view it. Utah has similar arches scattered all over. Arches form by erosion and certain unique weather conditions. Their beauty arises due to the fact that they are carved by Nature itself and so they are so unique in all their minute details. They hold different levels of interest to a geologist, an aesthete, a regular tourist and even a child but there is one thing in common : they are simply fascinating. To enjoy a place like Utah, one needs plenty of time to hike to such places for viewing them. We have taken similar hikes to a few other arches in Utah, when we lived there. But this time, we just drove through taking frequent breaks in quite a few scenic spots.

The drive through Kolob Canyons is not very long but there are scenic places once in every mile. We took hundreds of pictures through our visit but I know well that even the best picture cannot portray a fraction of the beauty, for the canyon makes it appeal only through its three dimensional perception. Its sheer size, color and the dark shades of deep space in between the cliffs can never be captured by the best photographer, or by the best description of them, for that matter. I think this is the precisely the reason every lover of nature wants to find himself in a place he has cherished, no matter how many times he has seen them in pictures and television or whatever he has read of them. The first hand experience is simply life-rejuvenating.

To control traffic, Zion’s National Park now offers shuttle services. I remember how difficult it was to get a parking, the last time we visited. The shuttle buses drop you and pick you up from various locations. I would love to spend three days in Zions and take as much hiking trails as possible. But since we had only six hours (and more importantly, two children) we decided to take only two trails. The first one was a short trail to the ‘Weeping Rocks’, where a thin water falls is seen in a picturesque place and the cliffs around it oozing with water that drips out of them (hence the name !). There was a strong wind blowing and the thin line of water from the water falls was spraying into a fine mist of water all around. It was around 70 deg F but we were sweating after the climb and the spray of water was so welcome. The huge rock close to the waterfalls caves into a concave structure and it is an awesome sight to see the water from the falls spraying down into the small pool surrounded by mountains (picture attached).

All along the cliffs we saw rock climbers in unimaginable elevation and positions. I couldn’t believe how they made up there. They were precariously hanging on to the cliffs but going on above and above. What a sport and how adventurous they must be !

In our last visit we took a long hike into the Zion Narrows. You hike all over the Virgin River that flows between the narrow crevices of the mountains of Zion. It narrows and widens as you go deeper and deeper. My daughter was only 4.5 years old when we hiked it with my friends and I remember how she enjoyed walking on the water flowing downstream between the mountain walls of the Zion some of which had beautiful canyon formation. It is a dangerous place too, since even a moderate rain can cause a flood because of the narrow size of the river. Once you have hiked in there once, your urge only become more and more to go for as many hikes as possible. This time we wanted to go in for a mile or two, but there was a flood caused by the melting of the snow which made it impossible. But this also made possible a spectacular waterfalls falling from more than two hundred feet high at the entrance of Zion Narrows, which wasn’t there in my earlier visit. It was breath taking to see the tall line of foaming water in the background of the bright red cliff (picture attached).

We had booked a room at Mt.Carmel which is on the way to Lake Powell, Arizona (where we were to go the next morning) from Zions. The road to Mt.Carmel from Zions is one of the best scenic places in the US, in my experience. It is a mountain road. The tunnel that stretches more than two miles is a spectacular spot for the kids. And the beauties of wind ravaged mountains start right outside the Tunnel. I wish I walked instead of driving inside a closed car. Every formation on the hills was a treat to look at. I couldn’t resist hopping out of the car frequently and taking little hikes in the hills. Fortunately there was good sunlight even at 8 pm. The wind had made very beautiful patterns on the rocks. And the sandy hills around were multi-colored as well. The intense orange and yellow combination was breath-taking by its contrast in the fading sun-light. The mountain breeze was so pleasant. The tourist season hadn’t yet started and there was very less traffic in the road. Except for a very rare passing car, there was no sound except for the wind. In such moments you feel the throbbing consciousness of another level of perception, a kind of awakening of a third eye looking into things inward. Denver tried to express the same in ‘Rocky Mountain High’. He was enamored by the Colorado region, which is similar to Utah in its landscape, greener though, and it was tragic that he had his end there in a plane accident and scattered himself in the forests that he loved. I felt strongly that I had my guitar to strum along singing his lyrics :

‘…he walks in quiet solitude the forest and the streams
Seeking grace in every step he takes
His sight has turned inside himself to try and understand
The serenity of a clear blue mountain lake…’

Yes, the power of Nature in such places could make your sight turn inward for a brief moment of time at least and make you wonder how much life has to offer here, while we run around madly for material pursuits all the time !

We reached our lodging as the soft night of the mountains engulfed us.

PS : Some pictures shot in the Zion region are available at
http://community.webshots.com/album/333429750HuYIkT?993

A vacation in God's territory : Part one

2005-04-29T05:41:00.000-07:00

--By Visvesh.

I still remember (though it is seven years before) the rather discouraging look in my cousin’s face when I told her that we were moving to Utah. A few of my friends didn’t even know if such a state existed in the US! With mixed feelings we took a plane from Detroit to Salt Lake City on the third week of January. We were to live in Orem, Utah. We drove to the city on a Sunny winter day (which is not unusual in Utah). While the cold weather at Michigan was so dreary and dull, the same seemed to us even cheerful as we drove down the road to Orem. Orem lies in the foothills of the Wasatch mountains and the road to Orem from Salt Lake City made us wonder if it led straight into the majestic Wasatch Mountains; the closer we were to the city, the more we were awe-struck. The Wasatch Mountain was a huge blaze of dazzling snow and it was like entering into a dream world. Not before long we understood how ignorant my friends, relatives and most of the people in the US were about the charm and beauty of Utah, let alone the friendly people that inhabited it.

I have missed Utah from the day one since we moved out because of the nomadic life of computer consultants. But I thank God for giving me an opportunity to stay for a year in what I would imagine as one of his favorite habitats. Fond memories of Utah being so strong in my mind, I took a trip with my family to Utah, despite the discomfort of long and inconvenient flight schedules.

Orem lays South of Utah and when you lived anywhere in the South, you are surrounded by mountains, lakes, canyons, rapids, deserts and all other kinds of splendid shows Nature clothes itself in. You drive five miles in any direction and you would end up in a place that struck you by its unique beauty.

We arrived Utah late in the evening. There was bright sunshine outside and the snow capped stretches of mountains that start from Colorado were a treat to watch from the plane. The plane flew at a low altitude and we could even see quite a few lakes that were still frozen. Snow is seen in these mountain peaks even after the onset of summer. Many a times I have wondered what is so special about a place like Switzerland after one lived in this area. Though it is kind of moorlands you see in the plains of Utah and Colorado, the mountains are filled with beautiful pine trees that you typically see in the pictures of Switzerland. The mountains at Utah are equally vast and dotted with picturesque lakes as well. As luck would grant us, the flight had to hover around Orem before it landed because of traffic issues. We could see quite a few familiar places we loved to hike in the mountains.

At the counter for rental cars, the staff enquired if I came there for skiing. I said I had better things to do by driving around. I guess he understood me not as the regular east coast traveler who flies to Utah just to ski in some of the internationally famous ski resorts entirely oblivious of the greater charms of Utah. He gave me a premier car instead of a regular full sized car and wished me happy driving around Utah. A kindred soul, I thought.

It was getting dark as we drove to Orem. Memories of the pleasant time I had filled my mind as I drove through the still familiar route. Certain places and moments make permanent impressions by some special significance. Utah was one such in our life. I remember how I used to enjoy the beautiful sight of the stunning Wasatch Mountain through the front window of my apartment and the crystal blue Provo Lake from my back window. The very next morning we started driving around. Provo Canyons was one the places that was a ten minutes drive from our apartment at Orem (our friend with whom we stayed was living in another apartment complex close to it). It is a tall ragged mountain through which a scenic route leads to the famous Park City. It is a pleasure driving through such scenic routes that lay scattered all over Utah. There was a thin line of water falling at the Bridal Veil Falls. It used to be refreshing to take a small hike to the top. We didn’t have time for it. Along the scenic route to Park City there are a couple of scenic reservoirs. We went to the Deer Creek reservoir. The very sight of it was stunning. It was crystal blue all over surrounded by hills and snow capped mountains. There was a kind of silence, which was paradoxically music to me. ‘Heard Melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter…’ : Keats should have expressed a similar experience in that line when he was engrossed by the Grecian Urn. I could feel a stillness of mind that gives arise to a strange experience of ecstasy, words can hardly express; A kind of conscious feeling of an entire loss of your personal self that had merged with the greater soul of Mother Nature; you bow down in reverence to the greater being with a sensation that is not much different traveling through psychic realms of religious or spiritual experience. Shelley’s ‘Alastor’ came to my mind:

“I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain
May modulate with murmurs of the air,
And motions of the forests and the sea,
And voice of living beings, and woven hymns
Of night and day, and the deep heart of man.”

There was still so much of snow left at Sundance, which was only a 15 minutes drive from my apartment, and at Park City. Snow wasn’t a great attraction for me since I have been used to it. But what makes it attractive in Utah are the mountains that it covers which are entirely different from what one sees in the Catskill region near Albany and the hills of Vermont. The cliffs and canyon like structures everywhere make them unique and remarkable. And they are tall mountains unlike the hills of the East Coast.

There was an ISKCON Temple in a log house in a secluded place at Spanish Fork, Utah which we frequently used to visit on Sundays. The place was so enchanted surrounded by mountains and we loved those Sunday Bhajans in the typical ISKCON style of passionate singing and dancing. They have built now a very beautiful Temple near the log house. I have been receiving newsletters from the day I left and I have longed to visit the newly constructed Temple after seeing the pictures from their website. (http://www.utahkrishnas.com/). We went to the Temple in the evening since it was a Sunday and we were very happy to see RamaNavami celebrated with the soulful rendering of the bhajan and dance. The Temple is unique of its kind in its architecture. I was glad that the founder of the Temple could vaguely remember us. He was so happy when he knew that we came all the way from New York and made it a point to visit the Temple and participate in the Bhajan. The Temple is more picturesque now in its sylvan settings, its lama farm, peathingys running around and a beautiful water fountain. I have always felt very peaceful in its premises. There was a very pleasant evening breeze from the mountains around. It was an experience standing in the open second floor of the Temple when the evening Sun was becoming orange in the horizon of the vast open fields that merged into the mountains around. What more than such splendid Nature around and a moving religious experience of Krishna Consciousness can one need in life to be content about it? Strangely, one becomes very conscious of life in such self-forgetful moments that lead to philosophic queries about life. A stanza of Chapman came to my mind :

“Guise, O my lord, how shall I cast from me
The bands and coverts hindering me from thee?
The garment or the cover of the mind
The humane soul is; of the soul, the spirit
The proper robe is; of the spirit, the blood;
And of the blood, the body is the shroud:"

How I wish ‘I cast from me, the bands and coverts hindering me from’ Him, not just in such ecstatic moments alone but in my entire life ! My bliss was not a personal experience as I could see. I saw my wife perfectly at ease as I was. My children were so happy too running around, but without getting wildly excited, as children are wont to. We stayed there till twilight wrapped us up and the stars started showing up over the mountains. I wish I stayed there forever, but I knew I cannot. But then, I was sure, that such moments in life, though rare, do make a person for what he is, with permanent impressions; even if not cause an entire internal transformation, they still offer glimpses of a vital life.

PS : Some pictures shot in and around Orem are available at

http://community.webshots.com/album/331929801LUSbwe?604

Reminiscences of India : 3. Madurai

2004-09-24T05:43:00.000-07:00

Madurai is the city I was born and brought up at. I spent the best part of my life in that city. Not because of them alone I have a special attachment to this city, but because Madurai has a special place in Tamilnadu by its vibrant life and by its being a kind of cultural centre of South Tamilnadu. Even after I became an adult I have always felt a distinct pleasure whenever I was returning to Madurai from nearby cities (in fact, the older I grew the more conscious I became of such a pleasure). It was much more than the pleasure of returning home. The familiar scenes of Madurai, most of which that are typical to the city, had a kind of magic in them that always fascinated me.

Except for a few years that I worked at Dindigul, I have spent almost all my life at Madurai till I moved to North America. Possibly it is the formative influences of that city that remain deep-seated in my psyche to make me passionately attached to this city. But then I ask myself if others who came from this city, or from any other cities felt the same way as I did, and I am only discouraged to find that the answer to it not as I expect it to be.

It is a curious experience to visit a city that you had so much of passion towards and that exerted a major influence on your psyche, after a period of long absence. It was my second visit to Madurai in seven years. On both occasions, I had to fly to Madurai from Chennai, for lack of time. An overnight train-ride from Chennai to Madurai (which I have frequently traveled) used to be one of the pleasures in my life, for you passed through the greenery of the vast fields of paddy, grapes, sugar-cane and coconut groves, particularly in the early morning hours after the train crossed Dindigul. I still remember how I would, in my childhood days, refuse to sleep and prefer to pore over the soft night till sleep overcame me, by the rhythmic sway of the train. The pump sets for irrigation of the passing fields used to be typically similar. There would a small building with a tiled roof for housing the pump close to the well and it would typically have the long stemmed question mark shaped lamp post over the building with a light bulb that would be invariably dull in its light, probably since covered by the dirt over it for ages. But such a thing in the slightly visible fields in the soft night as the train whistled past them had a romantic charm for me, and I used to keep a count of them! And when you woke up in the early morning regretting that you had overslept, you find the train already at Dindigul. The station is alive by the arrival of your train and you found it pleasant even to hear the cacophony of the Vendors’ loud voices to sell their merchandise. As the train moves on, you find the enchanting green fields on one side and the stretch of Kodaikanal hills on the other. And when you reached Madurai, you had gone through that wonderful experience yet again in your life!

On both occasions I flew over to Madurai, I was remembering the pleasant memories of my life at Madurai and how much a return to the city affected me. The plane to Madurai flies not at a very high altitude and you could distinctly see the various cities as you pass by. Right from the time the flight made a take-off, all I could see was a brown piece of land occasionally green by the coconut groves that refused to give up to the drought and square patches of cities dotted all along. The flight is only for an hour and even before you finished the breakfast they serve, you are landing at Madurai! The Kodai hills are the only consolation of greenery that you see the whole hour. Your heart goes numb by seeing the long beds of dry rivers and lakes and vast stretches of land that are dry fields. Sore in your heart that you are, the first sight of the Gopurams of the Meenakshi Amman Temple still makes you feel cheerful. The plane hovers over Madurai before it lands in the small airport. You see Thiruparankunram and Sourashtra College on the hill with the two lakes on the sides of it as you land. They are entirely dry. It is unusual at this time to be dry. Till the middle of 90s they used to have water for four months a year. It would be a great sight to see when you walked up that desolate hill behind the College and enjoy the green fields and the sight of water in both the lakes. I have spent long hours in solitude in that hill and have also had a good time swimming in the lakes. It had been alarming to see what I was seeing in my life time itself as to our water resources. Later at Madurai when I was talking to my friends about the various irrigation wells around Madurai where we used to visit frequently for swimming, I was concerned to hear that none of those wells had any water in them anymore and a few of them were even land filled.

The Sun was already up at 8.30 AM when the plane landed, and it was terribly hot. Late August was not supposed to be so, for it should be raining and hence tolerable except during mid-day. I was told that there was record heat in the past few years in Tamilnadu, because of the failure of monsoon. I have always held that such a failure is mostly out of man-made conditions. As I drove past the city, I was pained to see how the city had been mushrooming at an alarming pace. There were houses and people everywhere right from the airport, which was a remote location even at the time I left India. Billboards of motor-cycles and cars were in every walls and empty spaces on the buildings. As if the cricketers of the Indian team were not sufficient, a couple of Australian cricketers’ too were wooing the Indian consumers! As I passed over the Vaigai river, I could not but feel awful and think “God, what have we done to ourselves”. What a distortion of life it was to see it in its present shape! It numbs one’s very sensibility to see the squalor of a scene like that. Can one become indifferent to it even when one is used to such squalor? Of course, it wasn’t much different to what it was now when I lived at Madurai, except that there were a couple of ugly bridges built recently and more filth in the river. But what worried me was the rate at which things were worsening up in a city like Madurai in the past few years. For instance, Madurai district is known to be a drought-prone area. I have seen water scarcity even in my childhood days. But then it was not a long-lasting phenomenon and there was a respite by a rainfall sooner or later. I have seen the river Vaigai flowing in full every year at least for few weeks. I have seen greenery as I made a note of earlier in most of the places surrounding Madurai. I must say that in the last twenty years things have started moving towards the worst by the developments in a city like Madurai, which is applicable to any other city in India. It was not just the wells all around Madurai had disappeared, but in the last ten years or so, the water table itself seems to have disappeared. The rains do not seem to be occasional failures anymore, but a permanent feature. And added to the woes, the resources for finding water, plans for saving it and using it wisely doesn’t seem to exist too. I was shocked to see my brother buying water for domestic use, let alone for drinking, though he lived in a place where it was not densely populated and had only a few houses. I could only see greed and corruption having robbed the very possibilities, let alone any charm, of living in a place like Madurai. My brother said that he saw three gas stations spring up in a matter of one year’s period in a new development area. It is cars and motorbikes you see everywhere. It seemed to me that that was no control over development and any planning anywhere. Everyone seemed to me to live for himself! Not even thinking that his children would have to bear the brunt of his own actions! It is not the common man who could be held entirely responsible for such a scenario, for there are so many factors as the conditions of our time that governed life in a city like Madurai, of which, the common man tragically seemed to me to have lost any control over, even when he had a conscience and a wish to change things. The kids had no space to play nor had the time for it. I at least had the streets to play, if not for a few parks and play grounds that existed then! If it is the Television and the living conditions that rob the responsibilities associated with parenthood of the elders, it is the extra-ordinary amount of school-work the kids have to go through for a career that robs their innocence and childhood. Needless to say that the IT revolution has created havoc in the psyche of many I met. Fresh graduates getting paid what their better qualified elders could never dream of, high salary rates of those privileged few in the IT and related industries etc., have affected human relations a lot, as I could see. Education had become associated with cost, and a high cost at that, and I could see the strain in every parent who had children going to College.

Maybe I am pessimistic, and I only wish I am, for I wish things to change for better in my beloved country. The optimistic guys say that it is a transition that the country has to go through. I don’t believe in it, for I only saw an alarming deterioration of life that showed on every face, and affected the very human relations, which didn’t balance with any of the advancements I saw. I was afraid if the charm of a city like Madurai had lost its appeal to me. I had to resort to my sense of Spirituality and the Indian past in the great Temples in and around the city to hold my senses turning negative. The Lord seemed to me the only hope!

Reminiscences of India : 2. Courtallam, Srivilliputhur, Papanasam…

2004-09-10T01:38:00.000-07:00

The Sourashtrians of Madurai are fun-loving people and they have had the habit of picnicking in water spots at regular intervals. As a Sourashtrian who joined the main-stream Sourashtrians of Madurai, a little later in my life though, I used to regularly visit quite a few water spots in and around Madurai district.

Visiting Courtallam thus became a habit to me. I would visit it every year, sometimes even twice a year, sometimes even during non-season months. The Western Ghats have always fascinated me and they put on one of their finest displays at Courtallam. During the months between June and August, when monsoon is set at Kerala, the water falls in Courtallam start flowing in full. The mountains are all the time covered with fluffy clouds and there is a pleasant drizzle all the time. The mountain breeze is so specific to Courtallam alone. It carries with it not only very fine droplets of water, but also the scent of the flora and fauna of the kolli hills of Courtallam that makes you feel alive when you took a deep breath when it was blowing.

This is the second time in a seven year period I was visiting India. During my last visit, I couldn’t make it, and this time I made it a point to visit Courtallam though my visit was only to last for two weeks. I was told that there had been no season there in the past four or five years and that only this year it had shown up. What a loss to the fun loving people who flock those water falls every year! After coming to North America I have felt how much we Indians lack the pleasure of out-door activities. I felt sad that even a restricted activity as going to a water spot is getting lesser and lesser today not only by the conditions of our time, but also because of Nature’s failings, of which we are partly responsible ourselves.

I started on an early morning with a couple of friends to Courtallam, fully excited. It takes around four hours from Madurai and you pass through the beautiful Andal temple, Srivilliputhur. The Temple Tower is majestic and familiar by being the Tamilnadu state Govt. emblem. We had a hot tea in that early morning right outside the tower with the huge Temple car before us. Even in those shrill speakers the tea shop was blaring with, the Vinayaka songs of Sirkazhi sounded so nice; probably the early morning breeze, with the temple tower and car before us, and the streets being so deserted added to the charm. The Temple car was exquisitely carved and it must be a great sight to see it fully decorated. I remembered the story of Andal, the early mornings of Markazhi when the Temple next street to where I lived at Madurai played the Paasurams of Thirupaavai. Having seen drought everywhere in Tamilnadu even in my second visit to India, I was reminded of the line:

“thIngirRi nAdellAm thingaL mummAri peythu”

from the Paasuram “Ongi ulagaLantha…”. An internet friend of mine and who is a gifted musician, created an unforgettable composition of this Pasuram (can be downloaded at http://www.srikanthd.com/dl2.asp?ongip3.mp3). I have always marveled at the beauty of Thirupaavai not just for its lyrical beauty and technical accomplishments, but also for the kind of natural speech it displays : the speech that is unadulterated by any sentiment though the poet is praising the Lord. Such natural speech makes the highest kind of poetry. I planned to visit the Temple on our way back.

We parked our Car in a dry pond outside the city and I could see the Main Falls of Courtallam from that place. My friends were happy that there was water in the falls. The Sun was up and was burning already, which was a little disappointing to me. As we entered the city, we found it almost deserted, for the season was supposed to be over by August first week. We found lodging from where we could see the Main falls. There were signs of possible rains up in the mountains, but in the plains it was already hot and I wanted to hit the falls at the earliest.

The first touch of water was really electrifying to me. For, as Wordsworth puts it beautifully: (the only difference being the five instead of eight, in my case)

“Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.--Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion…”

Wordsworth’s experience was only visual, as I understand. He ‘saw’ some water falls, that had inspired him once, after a long absence. Here I was actually experiencing it all over my physical body. The water was cold; the sound of it splashing all over my body was music to me. Does it really matter that you have to bounce over so many bodies, some of which drip in oil that they are covered by, when you go through such a heavenly experience? I visited all the water falls. Each of it had its unique sensory experience, by the intensity of water that was flowing and by its specific setting.

The next day I wanted to go to Papanasam. I wanted to make the best of my short visit and again we started very early in the morning. Papanasam is around an hour drive from Courtallam and is another beautiful place. I wanted to go to Agathiyar falls and the Tamaraparani dam, and the Baana Theertham in the hills behind the dam, which I have never visited. Since we were very early there was no one in the dam. The dam was very picturesque but they don’t allow you to take pictures, because of security reasons. Outside the dam, we had delicious hot idlis and masaal vadai on the roadside. They even sell fried fish later in the day. We had to cross the waters of the dam to the other side to reach the Baana Theertham (some of us may be interested to know that Manirathnam shot his famous ‘chinna chinna Asai’ song in this falls). The boats that carry the people to the other side are dingy, but it is an experience you go through riding on them in that picturesque place surrounded with high mountains. It was calm in the morning, but my friend was scared to sit on that shaking boat, for he believed that there were crocodiles in the water there! It takes half hour to reach the other end of the dam and a few minutes before you reach the shore, on a turn in the mountains, the falls of Baana Theertham become visible all of a sudden. It is a stunning sight, to see the milk white falls surrounded by green mountains emptying into the vast stretch of water. What a delicacy of feeling and reverence to Nature our forefathers had to call such life sources as ‘Theerthams’, a gift of God ! Weren’t the Rivers of India glorified by the poets and common people as well with the affection and love that one showed only towards one’s mother? There was a group of men on a regular yearly mission of carrying the water of Baana Theertham to a nearby temple on that specific day. They came with us both ways in the boat; they became very friendly and they asked me if I had any special request (‘vEnduthal’), which they would pray for on behalf of me. I replied that I wanted to pray that there should be copious rains all over my blessed country and that all such dams would be brimming with water. They were very happy to hear a request like that coming from someone visiting from abroad a remote place as that. It was a sore sight all over Tamilnadu to see it becoming a desert more and more and that was the only thing I could think of at that moment though I was in the back waters of a dam.

The way back from Baana Theertham was an experience I can never forget. There was a strong wind blowing and it had a special effect in the water surrounded by tall mountains. The lake was now filled with waves and since the boat was driven in a direction that was opposite and sideways to the waves each wave lifted the boat upwards and sideways splashing in loads of water. Each time the boat lifted I thought it was going to roll over, for the boat was very short in height. The driver asked us not to move, for it would topple the balance and capsize the boat. I got used to the waves in a short time and it was like rafting in Grand Canyons on a level four rapids. We had our second shower of the day with the waters of the dam this time. My friend who was already scared of crocodiles in the lake even started chanting the name of God ! The boat must have been tossed in the lake at least thirty times before we reached the shore. The driver said such a thing only happened rarely!

The Agathiyar falls on our way back from the dam was another great water falls. The river Tamaraparani on its way down branches into various water falls. There wasn’t much crowd there as well and the water was flowing at a great force. You buy a pack of oil, open it and invert it over your head; your entire body is soaked with oil in a minute as it flows down. It must take a full soap to wash it off. But there you go, you stand in that falls for a couple of minutes, you come out dry and fresh! Your skin radiates with freshness and life!

On our way back, I had to buy bottled water to drink before I reached Madurai. It was like waking from a pleasant dream when I drank it after soaking myself with the waters of life of the Western Ghats. The label from the bottle said it was from some spring. God, how it sucked!

- vishvesh

PS : Some pictures at

http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/ovishvesh/album?.dir=6992&.src=ph&store=&prodid=&.done=http%3a//pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph//my_photos

Run a slide show at:

http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/ovishvesh/slideshow?.dir=/6992&.src=ph

Reminiscences of India : 1. Temples around Madurai…

2004-09-10T01:34:00.000-07:00

During my visit to Meenakshi Amman temple at Madurai, when I was taking
my own time in feasting my eyes and mind with the marvels that can only
belong to a civilization with ‘culture’ behind it, my friend who was
accompanying me, asked me with a puzzled look in his eyes if I used to visit the
Meenakshi Amman temple frequently when I lived at Madurai. I was a
little surprised as to why he asked me such a question suddenly. I couldn’t
get it off my mind and I could only infer later that he could have asked it to
know if I used to be attracted by the same things that held me inspired now.
Whether he meant it or not, I thought that was a sensible question to
ask myself, for it had answers that one must seek for oneself to know how
religion as related to the temples one is used to could matter in one’s
life.

I understand that Religion, for most part in one’s life is an
unconscious affair. You are not consciously alive to it when you live in an
environment that nurtures it. You feel its absence only when your mind is
sensitized to it unconsciously, and when you lived in an alien environment. The
Temples that I visited during my trip to India were not new to me: I must have
been there hundreds of times in my life earlier when I lived there. It was
either the long years of absence or my unconscious craving for
something internal that made them so fascinating. A ‘thing of the mind’ as
Religion is not something sensational but the memories of which, when one has
lived through it not as a dogma but as a faith, have the power to sustain
life when it could be brought to one’s conscious mind. As Wordsworth puts
beautifully of a similar experience,

“But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart…”

I have owed to my sense of Religion my sense of humanity and my passion
towards what made human life possible. I was glad to find that my fascination
to the Temples, as if I were an outsider, had nothing in it to be disturbed by,
and that it could only be natural to a person like me, who had to seek
for values consciously in a world that seemed to me to be ignoring and
forgetting them. With this thought in my mind I made it a point to visit as
many Temples that I used to go periodically when I lived at India.

The Shiva Temple at ThiruVaadavur is one of the most beautiful temples
I have even been. I have noticed a striking feature in many Shiva Temples in Tamilnadu: unlike the Vaishnava Temples, which are crowded even in regular days, the Shiva temples are comparatively less crowded. I wouldn’t say that it makes them more attractive for everyone. In fact, it could be inspiring to see thousands of people in a Temple like Thirupathi chanting the name of God together instinctively at the sight of the Lord. But then, somehow I have been given to solitude and so the Temple of ThiruVaadavur has always held my interest. It is around 20 KMs from Madurai and is in a sleepy village. It is also the birth place of St.MaanickaVaasagar and associated with the famous ‘Nariyai Pariyaakiya Padalam’ of the ThiruVilaiyaadal. The Temple is very well maintained, but I have seldom seen more than 20 people in the Temple at any time ! It is a fairly large sized Temple as well. The Temple tank, to my surprise had water in it! It is right outside the Temple with broken steps, but the short Temple tower makes an inspiring sight from the tank. There was a gentle breeze in the early morning which was very soothing. All around the temple it was a rocky moor land with red soil and the drive itself to the Temple could be fascinating. You go through the typical Shiva Temple architecture as you enter: the long structure housing the sanctum of the Lord, with
the typical Prakaaram around with high stone walls and coconut trees. It is typical of many rural Shiva Temples I have visited. I always get pleasantly reminded of many other Shiva Temples when I visit one, by the familiarity of the architecture (I was reminded of the temple at Avinashi and later had the same feeling when I visited the Shiva Temple at Thenkasi). Walking on the long Prakarams outdoors is a great experience with the Gopuram of the Sanctum right before you. You unconsciously salute the Lord as the gentle breeze carries with it the sweet melodies of ThiruVaasagam sung by an Odhuvar in a dark corner of the temple. You are left to wonder if it is the metallic voice of the Odhuvar in such a setting or if it is the intricate beauty of the Tamil language expressed by the divine poet that strikes you, but then you brush it aside thinking if it really mattered as long as you experienced the bliss of a religious phenomenon. I have read with a pain in my heart the various interpretations of the moving passage: “thennAttudaiya sivanE pORRi”. Was there a different South and North India with different traditions of salvation as of the different monotheistic religions? The Veda Neri or the Agama Neri, does that matter to the common man like me as long as I relish the religious experience of going to a Siva Temple or a Vaishnava Temple irrespective of whether I hear Tamil or Sanskrit? I am from a Vaishnava tradition, but my name is a name of Shiva! I do feel a subtle difference when I visit a Perumal Temple and a Shiva Temple, but which is very much different from that when I visit a Church. Isn’t it that the synthesis of some of the greatest achievements of mankind that made the Hindu Religion, despite its thousand seeming contradictions? The Shiva Temples of South India strike me for reasons that are purely personal and aesthetic. I feel the same bliss when I stand before the awe-inspiring Perumal of the various Perumal Temples as I lose myself in the Prakarams and the sanctum of the Shiva Temples; A Thirumurai, a Paasuram, or a Vedic or Upanishadic Chant, sound the same to me, except for a few degrees of familiarity I can relate with the Tamil language. The Perumal Sayanam view at the Chakrathalwar Temple, Thirumogur and the Perumal Temple, Madurai could be inexpressibly soothing as that of the serene Shiva Lingam in various shapes in the Shiva Temples; You could easily experience the vigor of a poetic passage from the Bhagavat Gita as:

“Thou who hast come to this unhappy and transient world, Love and turn to me…”

(“Anithyam asUkam lOkam imAm, prapya bhajasva mAm” : Sri Aurobindo quotes this line as an example of poetry of the illumined mind) by ‘turning’ on to the serene face of the Perumal in his Ananda Sayanam.

It was a relishing experience to visit the various Temples. India would be a Cultural force and a hope for Mankind as long as its Spirituality existed. The Temples in India are the remnants of such a hope and I wish they are not just reminders of the glory of the great Spiritual civilization they stand for, but also provide nourishment to our troubled souls in our troubled times.

- vishvesh

PS: Some pictures of the Temples I shot with my camera are available at:

http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/ovishvesh/album?.dir=/7dfe

Suzuki : The dog

2004-09-03T05:55:00.000-07:00

Many of you know about 'Suzuki' - the dog which once lingered around my home. Now it is not there, because we decided to drive it away (due to its nasty pranks and troubles ) and by the good efforts of our house-owner it was given away to a person who promised to take it away to a village. Once i thought of calling the dog-catcher..but dropped the plan by learning that they'll kill the street dogs they catch.

It was not always like this..with suzuki - the little dog. When the 1st day it landed into our house or rather in the veranda..it was very small and consequently afraid of every little person and the movement. But the eyes of the dog appear to be more like human and could feel what the dog is thinking (!) about the world..it carried a wonder and awe in the eyes.. though there was always this fear in the background towards human beings. But in general it was this 'wonder' and 'awe' which suzuki expressed frequently..It appear to me that this little street dog is more interested to be around with humans and human surroundings than with other dogs and in the street.

There was couple of striking instances which made to think so..Once it started acquainting itself with its human friends like me, karthik (my cousin), ranjini it deeply responded by certain intonations of sounds whenever it got chance to be close around us. It appeared to me that suzuki is trying to speak through those sounds because human speech was not still in its grasp.. And there was one more incident which often repeated itself. I used to play 'Best of Bach' in the evenings..Always it came around at that time and start listening to particular piece of music by lifting its ears in a quick manner. Sometimes i became quite curious about this movement and started re-playing the same music and suzuki showed expressions of listening and enjoying the music. After this it will lay down in the veranda..with the head on the entrance with a feeling of ease and comfort. Yes. I should say that it has grown to her youth..by this time.

This particular pose with the kind of yearning and earnestness to know about the human life gave me a insight into the rudimentary presence of mind and psyche in the dog..Never i've felt this so keenly with a animal. This was my first experience but still the presence was quite strong and developed in suzuki. Sometimes i felt baffled how to answer the earnestness in its eyes..it is so true and earnest and simple in its expectant feeling that it revived the psyche in me to answer it..Ofcourse it was the silent language of psyche but i could not heighten it in me because of the human limitations in which we're encrusted.

Days passed..and we begin to see a visible change coming over suzuki. It began to consider some his human friends as his masters..and i would say ..one should have looked at the swinging tail of suzuki with a rythmic walk in front us whenever we return from office during the evenings. One cannot help feel a gentle love flowing out from us to it..as a response to this gesture.

Incourse of days, karthik and ranjini start repeating my word that 'suzuki is behaving like a human being' with ofcourse certain peculiar behaviour which is quite possilble to the animal alone...

Later things changed and when we failed inwardly to keep the upkeeping of its psyche , suzuki started coming to the outward nature of the animal..it was impossible for us to stop its pranks. But human beings has his own way to control or even get rid of what he cannot truly master.. and i too took the same path.

Sometimes a great remorse and sad feeling comes over me realizing that i've failed to respond to true movements of love and life in a dog.

Fishing in the river Hudson...

2004-07-28T05:55:00.000-07:00

By Vishvesh

With May comes in a flurry of activity in the Hudson River along Albany and Troy. The river starts thawing on early March and the awesome sight of huge slabs of ice floating all along the river is replaced by boats of all sizes, which are mostly fishing boats. You see birds all over the hitherto empty river which gets lively with all kinds of marine insects as well. The river is never an inanimate object and for a person with an attraction for nature, every single movement of it could be an object of fascination. I can’t ever forget Mark Twain’s immortal portrayal of the Mississippi and the life on it, in most of his works, particularly, “Huckleberry Finn”. When my work gets on to my nerves, I have made it a habit of taking refuge in watching the river, which flows right outside my window.   It is a treat to watch it rise and ebb everyday, to watch it sparkle on a bright sunny day or flow in a sad silence, as it seems, on many a gloomy day or when my thoughts were occupied by anything sad. The more I watch the river, the more I admire the ‘lazy’ guy in the boat who does nothing but carry a fishing rod and almost dozing over his book on a sunny afternoon. He seems to me to be perfectly at harmony with the river lapping his boat, while he waits for his lucky day when he finally caught a fish that was of any substantial size.

Fishing seems to be the one of the most favorite pastimes of most of the Americans. I have seen some of them so much obsessed to the extent that they construct small artificial ponds (I have seen some in Utah) where they breed fish just for fishing alone ! They let in fish only to ‘fish’ them out! And ice fishing is another thing that has baffled me all the time. Last winter at Lake George, I ‘drove’ around the ‘dry’ lake and had an opportunity to spend some time with a guy who was ice fishing. He was fishing from the morning and hadn’t caught anything till noon. The wind was razor sharp and it was howling as well; he had to wrap up to his eyes, but that never seemed to deter him at all. It is beyond my understanding to reason what makes him pursue such an extreme pastime or as in the earlier incident, something that appears absurd to me!   But with the guy fishing in the river on a lazy afternoon, I feel perfectly at ease, for he appears closer to me in my spirit. I would assume that he would seldom be interested in the fish than in the conditions that could let his mind be at harmony with some of the most beautiful moments in his life.

‘Fishing’ seems to me to have associated with many activities of everyday life of Americans. The other day a colleague of mine made a remark that one of my other colleagues who was supposed to attend an early morning meeting was not present since he could been “eating chad for breakfast”.    I was struck by that phrase and asked her after the meeting as to what she meant. Chad is the name of a fish which has so much of bones that it could be a difficult task to cook and eat it. But it is relished since it seems to be a delicious one, and worth the necessary efforts. Since it takes a long time to prepare it, it has come to be associated with anything that tends to become late ! And she also told me that there was a legend that Chads were inverted porcupines and created by the wish of the Lord after the porcupine complained to him that he was hated because of so many quills on its outside !

There is a step-down dam to control the flow of water that I can see from my window. It always reminds me of such step-down dams of the river Periyar in the Cumbum valley, Tamilnadu. The foam and the sound of gushing of the water makes a memorable sight. I miss the vast green rice fields in the backdrop of Western Ghats of the Cumbum valley in the Cohoes dam that I can see, and I also certainly miss swimming in the swirling waters near such dams all over the Periyar river in that area. In the united states, it seems that one needs to condition oneself to a different kind of sensory perceptions though what one sees in nature is of the same kind ! Just as the flowers here strike us by their size and beauty but disappoint us by their lack of perfume!

Sea

2004-07-06T02:48:00.000-07:00

Here is a passage on 'Sea' which i recently enjoyed reading in 'My Travel Campanion' by Maxim Gorky.You can read the full story here

...I sat beside him, gazing dreamily over the sea.

It was living its vast life, full of mighty movement.

The flocks of waves broke noisily on the shore and rippled over the sand, that faintly hissed as it soaked up the water. The foremost waves, crested with white foam, flung themselves with a loud boom on the shore, and retreated, driven back to meet the waves that were pushing forward to support them. Intermingling in the foam and spray, they rolled once more toward the shore, and beat upon it, struggling to enlarge the bounds of their realm. From the horizon to the shore, across the whole expanse of waters, these supple, mighty waves rose up, moving, ever moving, in a compact mass, bound together by the oneness of their aim.

The sun shone more and more brightly on the crests of the breakers, which, in the distance on the horizon, looked blood-red. Not a drop went astray in the titanic heavings of the watery mass, impelled, it seemed, by some conscious aim, which it would soon attain by its vast rhythmic blows. Enchanting was the bold beauty of the foremost waves, as they dashed stubbornly upon the silent shore, and fine it was to see the whole sea, calm and united, the mighty sea, pressing on and ever on. The sea glittered now with all the colors of the rainbow, and seemed to take a proud, conscious delight in its own power and beauty.

A large steamer glided quietly round a point of land, cleaving the waters. Swaying majestically over the troubled sea, it dashed aside the threatening crests of the waves. At any other time this splendid, strong, flashing steamer would have set me thinking of the creative genius of man, who could thus enslave the elements. But now, beside me lay an untamed element in the shape of a man.

Notes on Anna Karenina

2004-06-04T00:16:00.000-07:00

--By Visvesh

Tolstoy was a great moralist (he even preferred the works of Charles Dickens to those of Shakespheare !) but he was primarily an artist of the first kind, which is written all over there in this work. An artist's duty is to observe life in all its intricate nuances and present it without bias in the related art form. A painter sees it with the eye that is related to his medium of _expression. He observes the essential relation between his mind and the object in its ‘non-mental’ reality; such a relation that underlies the pure exchange of consciousness is vital to sustain human life. Needless to say that a photograph could get a far better picture of all the painting of Van Gogh's Sunflowers, he was obsessed with. These essential relations which are beyond intellectual explanations are those that preserve life which we see abounding in all our older civilizations, in its inter-relatedness between man and man, man and the cosmos and so forth.

In all the great novels we find this attempt of presenting life in its essential reality and not the outward reality alone that we are obsessed with. Anna Karenina is a passionate married woman who falls in love and enters into a life of adultery. Now, while the subject matter becomes a controversial one which our modern minds would love to argue for or against, Tolstoy by the weight of his artistic genius, which could look only at the intrinsic essential realities, never takes a stand and start talking about the moralistic issues (remember he was a great moralist), but beautifully presents the tragedy of our human life through such a condition. One must note that he miserably fails as an artist when he takes such a stand in his later work "Resurrection". It is this spirit of looking at life that makes him a great artist. And the other character Levin (who is even more fascinating than Anna) is forever evolving and doesn't get stuck up with a nauseating solution of religion, which appears so false when Karenin decides to take the role of a saint and even excuse Anna. The last paragraph of the novel is a beautiful passage of his wonderful understanding of the ever-evolving nature of 'dynamic' life and his perception that he has to remain forever in his quest to understand life if he wants to ‘live’.

His other work “Resurrection”, though it reveals the gradual unfolding of virtue in a man, it still appears to be an artistic failure. Art can point to morality and in fact, does point to it always in its best form, but it tends to become less genuine when it is ‘consciously’ expressed as when one tries to focus one's point of view.
The multi colored and ever-changing inner realities of life and its fine perception are those that make art. Tolstoy in his work "Resurrection" tries to force a moralistic point of view. It is not that there is nothing to learn from it. But when one reads great works of art one understands that when you give a static solution to a problem the issue loses its greater dynamic significance. Creativity exists only in the possibility of ever renewing sensations of one's perception that is expressed through his medium. You could see it so much in "Anna Karenina" and how it makes one get to a finer perception of the tragedy of human life.

Lenin, who is always so brilliant in his critical remarks, who had the finest sense of Marxian analysis, admires Tolstoy as an artist of the first kind, for his portrayal of Russian life and of humanity in large. F.R.Leavis, who made a brilliant study of what makes the great literary tradition in the genre of Novels in English Literature, is all praise for Tolstoy. Please don't misunderstand me when I say that Tolstoy fails as an artist in his work "Resurrection". I was only trying to compare it with his magnum opus "Anna Karenina". You would observe the movement of life in its essential elements as you read the great work. The element of tragedy that Anna has to go through is an essential element of Life itself and the masterly _expression of it in the novel only alters the sensibility in a reader as to his perception of life. You don't grasp an ‘idea’. Consider for instance, Ibsen's "Enemy of the People". When you read it, while you marvel at the level of his brilliance of looking into a social problem, while your world of ideas undergo a major transformation, there is still no major impact on your "sensibility". You don't feel you are a different human being after reading the work.

A work of art proves its worth only by its level of altering your sensibility. The problems that Anna has to live with and the psychic agony that Levin has to go through, and in a minor level the spontaneity of the flow of life of Peter (Anna's brother : this name is different in different translations) are the observations of life that come out of Tolstoy's pen from the pressure of his artistic sense, which alone can observe life in its essential elements, which alone is unadulterated by one's personal response to life in its outward elements. What matters to affecting one's sensibility is what makes a work an artistic piece, which is not there in "Resurrection". It is common that artists of the first kind get often to lower levels of _expression. Gorky, who is another great artist (not of the caliber of Tolstoy, though) who could produce such fine pieces as his moving autobiographical trilogy that express so marvelously an artist's finer sensibility in looking at the outer world, Gorky, who could write memorable observations of the bourgeoisie world in his works like "Artomonovs", could still write a propaganda kind of piece of work like "The Mother". Not to mention that these are inferior works, but just to highlight that they have something else of greater significance. To identify such greatness is more than just a matter of taste.

PS: Compiled from various replies on the same subject by Vishvesh.

The Potrait of a Lady - Henry James

2004-06-04T00:08:00.002-07:00

James prefaces are always important both as statements on the aesthetics of fiction and as inside glimpses of how he created his novels. The preface to “The Portrait of a Lady” gives a revealing account of how the idea for the novel came to him. It began with a prevision of the character of Isabel Archer. James describes the genesis of a figure, who is, by common consent, among the great heroines of fiction.

James speaks of Isabel as being particularly engaging and the phrase (like most of his phrases) is carefully chosen. For it is central to the author’s purpose that the heroine should charm the reader from the beginning much as she charms the trio on the lawn at Garden court when she first meets them. James admits as much in a revealing aside near the opening of the book “She would be an easy victim of scientific criticism if she were intended to awaken on the reader’s part an impulse more tender and more purely expectant”.

The pejorative estimate of Isabel’s career is obvious; her initial confidence can seem brash and naïve, her decision to marry Gilbert Osmond hopelessly deluded and her failure to leave or defy him merely cowardly. But this, of course, is not the way that James makes it seem in the telling. With her warmth, her intelligent and her noble aspiration’s Isabel appears a special person. In her hopes of life, she is at once universal and exceptional; her delight in human contact, travel and intellectual discovery is quintessentially youthful. Her later loss of illusions- the bitter discoveries of her marriage to Gilbert Osmond seems the pattern of human development.

This account of Isabel’s development does not, of course, take place in void. James may have begun the novel simply with Isabel in mind, but he took care to locate her life in concrete settings and to introduce some of his own familiar interests into the telling. Chief of these is that ‘international’ theme which appears in so much of his work- his preoccupation with the relations of America and Europe, particularly with the rediscovery of Europe by an American protagonist. Isabel herself, with her freedom of manners and endless curiosity, is ideally suited to this role and she is placed in a context designed to demonstrate the possible responses to Europe that Americans may take.

Henriette Stackpole, exuberantly American, and Madam Marle, so Europeanised that it is difficult to remember that she is American, represent the opposite ends of a spectrum; the various members of the Touchett family illustrate the possible intermediate shadings. Indeed the only European in the book is Lord Warburton. As James continually stress, the English peer is open and unaffected in his manners where as the Europeanise Americans, like Osmond and Madame Marle tend toward a sinister subtlety. With their assimilation into European culture and their progressive sophistication, a definite understandedness creeps into their dealings- a striking contrast to the exuberant openness that characterizes a recent arrival from America like Isabel Archer herself.

In addition to associating his beloved international theme with Isabel, James casts her career in a familiar romantic mould. The book is the history of her contact with Europe and of her love life. As James himself admits with characteristic self-irony! The plot of the novel consists of ‘a succession of fine gentleman going down on their knees to her’. Casper Goodwood, Lord Warburton and Gilbert Osmond all make direct proposals of marriage while Mr. Touchett, Ralph and Edward Rosier are all to some degree taken with her charms. It is her attitude to marriage that Isabel’s determination to preserve her freedom is most evident; and its one of the book’s main ironies that she should accept Osmond of all her suitors the one most likely to destroy not only her freedom but her identity.

It is not, of course, that Osmond is simply a fortune hunter, though Isabel’s money certainly attracts him. It is that he is purely a collector of aesthete; he has, as the others remark exquisite taste, but he has only this. This taste is stranger by no moral basis and enlivened by no human interest in his fellows. He is charmed by Isabel and adds her to his collection of beautiful objects much as he might acquire a new piece of porcelain. Though Isabel comes to know this, she finally accepts with resignation, her place where her actions have lead her because of her deep sense of commitment she made to Pansy. Perhaps his home full of dusty objects is where finally her portrait should hang.

Daffodils

2004-03-15T22:39:00.000-08:00

I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:
I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

- William Wordsworth
On 15th April 1802, William and Dorothy(his sister) Wordsworth passed the strip of land at Glencoyne Bay, Ullswater, on their way back to Grasmere after staying the previous night at Eusmere in Pooley Bridge.

Dorothy wrote in her journal :

'When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park, we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road.
I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing.

This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway. We rested again and again. The Bays were stormy, and we heard the waves at different distances and in the middle of the water like the sea'.

Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal - Thursday 15 April 1802.

Although it is not recorded, it is almost certain that this gave William the inspiration to write his most famous poem, 'Daffodils'

THE SOLITARY REAPER

2004-03-14T20:38:00.000-08:00

BEHOLD her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?--
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;--
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
- William wordsworth.

Poem's source: Wordsworth says, "This Poem was suggested by a beautiful sentence in a MS Tour in Scotland written by a Friend, the last line being taken from it verbatim." Thomas Wilkinson's manuscript, Tours to the British Mountains (London, 1824), states: "Passed a Female who was reaping alone: she sung in Erse as she bended over her sickle; the sweetest human voice I ever heard: her strains were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious, long after they were heard no more".

Wordsworth’s personality and poetry were deeply influenced by his love of nature, especially by the sights and scenes of the Lake Country, in which he spent most of his mature life. A profoundly earnest and sincere thinker, he displayed a high seriousness tempered with tenderness and a love of simplicity.

Wordsworth, described poetry as '...the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected in tranquility'. Feelings, he said, that are actually experienced. He rejected the neo-classical idea of restrained poetry, for his view - the imaginative expression of emotion and wrote using an every day language, as opposed to poets like Dryden and Pope.

He wrote: '...I shook the habit off entirely and for ever and again in Nature's presence stood, as now I stand, a sensitive being, a creative soul.'

Within his poetry he liked to explore man's mind and his humanity, as well as that of nature's beauty.

Erin Brockovich

2004-02-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

The film 'Erin Brockovich' is the true story of one woman's successful initiative to investigate the polluting of the water and land by an energy company in California. At the end of the story she has won a $333 million settlement for the sick victims, as well as for her law firm, including herself. It is also a story that we, as aspiring and growing individuals, can learn a great deal from, especially for those of us who sincerely wish to take our lives to the next higher level of success and happiness. The film not only shows the personal obstacles we must go through to that end, but also the social obstacles that are there to be reckoned with.

Although Erin has a few distinct deficiencies, such as her provocative dress and sometimes vulgar speech, one thing is undeniable about her; she has an unbelievable tenacity of purpose. She knows what she wants to achieve; in this case, to uncover and right the wrong that has been done to the community by the polluting energy utility. In our examination at Growth Online of the process by which an individual grows and accomplishes at a higher level than one's current functioning, we see that one's direction is the starting point for such an endeavor. Erin had that direction; she had the necessary vision of what she wanted to accomplish, and perceived the goals and objectives to achieve that vision. In addition, she had engaged her will and vital energies to see it through. The values she believed in, the vision she had to overcome the problem, and the will to see it through together enabled her great achievement.

Think about any initiative you hope to undertake to improve your life, or something you believe in that you would like to be part of or have occur, and consider if you have a clear vision of that which you wish to achieve. That vision should include the specific goals or objectives that you wish to accomplish to see your vision through. (By the way, the goals should include the deepest personal values that you believe in that relate to the undertaking.) Then consider if your vision and its goals are matched by an intense will to achieve them. If you then organize the endeavor to its fullest, apply your highest skills and highest personal attitudes, and make the determined, unflagging effort, you will certainly achieve beyond your wildest expectations.

Erin's tenacity of purpose that wins the day is reflective of her many positive personal attributes. Among them -- she is tenacious, courageous, positive, and persevering. In other words, she has great psychological strength of being, so crucial to one's success in life. Now, through this wholesome project, she has found a vehicle to apply these capacities. Finally, when she overcomes her negative tendencies, and applies her positive attributes to their fullest, life responds overwhelmingly. (Such a "life response" is a profound, hidden working and functioning of life, reflecting the fact that life on the outside responds to our level of consciousness within. When we raise that level, life can instantly respond from anywhere on earth with great abundance, defying our ordinary notions of cause and effect, and space and time.)

We can also consider the social dimension of the story. Erin, like all of us, is obliged to function within the social milieu to achieve the desired results. We see how she brings to bear her values, her tenacity, and her strength to the social environment -- to apply those capacities for a social good. One peculiarity we notice is that though she is working for the great benefit of the lawyer, for the law office, for the clients, even society itself, at many points she is directly opposed by the very people she is trying to help! When a pioneer individual takes on a work that is not part of the normal routines and workings of society, it often opposes that individual; even if it is opposing that from which it will derive great benefit! We see this phenomenon at work in various instances in the story -- such as when the lawyers show their misgivings about her initiative; when the people in the office are put off by her behavior and her pushiness, missing the greater benefit she is creating; when her boyfriend for a time deserts her; and, most dramatically, when the eventual great beneficiaries of her initiative, the people in the village, gather and decide for a while to oppose her efforts! This shows how the groundbreaking work of a pioneer will often be opposed by the social milieu, including those who most stand to gain from the change. It is more than an irony; it reflects a fundamental Ignorance and unconsciousness of the society in the face of a great boon.

Fortunately, for all involved, her tenacity and strength overcomes this unconscious opposition. She is courageous, and never despairs when the social atmosphere opposes. She is consistently positive in her attitude, believing in the rightness of her cause, and its eventual success. She also has great social skills, demonstrated by her great empathy and communication skills when interviewing the sick victims and their kin. She is not bothered by the social obstacles because in one sense she cares little about conforming to them. She is her own person, albeit sometimes of a somewhat crude sort. Fortunately, that crudeness in minor compared to the social strength she brings to bear, and the non-comforting nature that is a key to great success in life.

So we can ask ourselves: What social skills do we lack? Do we have the best interpersonal skills? Psychological skills? The best communication skills? Are we directed by our own selves or by the social givens and norms? Are we inner-directed, or conforming and outer-directed? Can we persevere beyond the limited views, beyond the anachronisms around us when we seek to achieve?

Another thing we notice is that Erin is driven to success by her lack of status in life. She has the very minimum of comforts, can barely provide for her children; in other words, her financial and living situation is intolerable. This status expresses as her own lack of self esteem; which ironically drives her on. This is perhaps the one aspect of her character that gives her that extra urge and determination to succeed! The yearning to improve her condition for herself and her family is what focuses and intensifies her abundant energy into an unstoppable power for improvement and change. It drives her beyond her current living condition, beyond her current level of accomplishment, to the very peaks of success, for herself and the wider community.

We can view this process in terms of energy. When a person moves to the next level of achievement in life, there is often this great compulsion, this driving urge, a flowing of excess energy being harnessed at the next highest level of accomplishment. Erin's lack of status and self-respect provide her with the necessary urge and will to move forward. She uses the vehicle of the project to further those interests. Thus, in order for any individual to move to the next level of success and growth, one needs to have the requisite urge, compulsion, and that extra not-yet-spent overflowing energy at the current level that can be utilized for development at the next level. Erin has these in spades.

In the end we see that it is through Erin -- the pioneering individual -- that society itself grows and evolves. Without her, without the pioneer, the emerging subconscious urges of society for progress remain in stasis. Interestingly, we also see that society rebukes her pioneering effort at various stages along the way. Still, in the end, life did cooperate with her effort, providing at various points the necessary information and outcomes that would in the end win her the case. Life responded positively and greatly to her clever and resourceful efforts at various stages of the project.

Perhaps we can go a step further and say that life or "Nature" has a will of its own. That Nature always seeks to establish a higher harmony or truth. The development It seeks is for the good of society, whether that society perceives it or not. In that way, we see that the emerging good is often subconscious to the society. However, through the efforts of the pioneer individual the urge of Nature takes shape. The emerging progress which is subconscious to the society becomes conscious and real.

By the way, we should also point out that the falsehood of the society is born out even at the end when Erin wins the case. She receives but $2 million out of the $333 million settlement, when she has, for all intensive purposes, single-handedly enabled this great outcome! The law firm, being a social institution, accepts the social custom of only giving Erin money equal to her social status and position, instead of what she really deserved. In addition, the law firm itself collects 40% of the reward. It is another indicator of the negative and false quality of institutions in society that reward the socially-accepted custom instead of that which is right and just.

Finally, we should reiterate that it is her distain for social convention, her disregard for the norms of her society that enables her to achieve so greatly in the first place. Had she been a middle class woman, it is unlikely that her energies would have gone into helping the poor victims in the community as she did. She would not have had that urge, which came from her lack of social status and her low self-esteem.

Ultimately, the difficult conditions of her life urged her on. We can perhaps say that Life/Nature urged her on. Fortunately, she took up that challenge with great verve, intensity, focus, determination; all with great skill and positive attitude. She became the pioneering representative for social change in the community by following the process of growth and accomplishment to great fruition. In this way, it is a great story of the secret methods of social growth and development in the world.

source: Gurusoftware/Inspirational Essays

Murder in the Cathedral

2004-02-04T01:05:00.000-08:00

T. S. Eliot's short play, Murder in the Cathedral, was originally written for the Canterbury festival and tells the story of the murder of Archbishop Thomas Beckett (1118-70) by Henry II's henchmen. It is essentially an extended lyrical consideration of the proper residence of temporal and spiritual power, of the obligations of religious believers to the commands of the State, and of the possibility that piety can be selfish unto sin.

Beckett is one of the more interesting characters from history. Rising from a lowly birth in the Cheapside section of London, largely thanks to the patronage of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1154 he became both archdeacon of Canterbury and Henry's chancellor. Theobald expected him to defend the prerogatives of the Church, but instead he became fast friends with Henry, partook of a sybaritic lifestyle, and extended the power of the State at the expense of the Church. So when Theobald was succeeded by Beckett, Henry expected to have a compliant ally running the Church, but instead Beckett adopted an ascetic lifestyle and became a fearsome defender of the rights of the Church. After dividing on many minor issues, matters came to a head when Henry tried exerting the authority of Crown courts to punish clerics who had been convicted by ecclesiastical courts. Henry determined to reign him in, put Beckett on trial for misappropriating funds while serving as Chancellor, and Beckett was forced to flee to France.

The play opens as Beckett returns to Canterbury in December of 1170, after seven years in exile. Four Tempters approach him, separately, and offer him reasons why he should cease to resist Henry. The first Tempter offers the prospect of physical safety if he will go along to get along :

The safest beast is not the one that roars most loud,
This was not the way of the King our master!
You were not used to be so hard upon sinners
When they were your friends. Be easy, man!
The easy man lives to eat the best dinners.
Take a friend's advice. Leave well alone,
Or your goose may be cooked and eaten to the bone.

The second offers worldly power, riches and fame in the service of the King :

King commands. Chancellor richly rules,
This is a sentence not taught in schools.
To set down the great, protect the poor,
Beneath the throne of God can man do more?
Disarm the ruffian, strengthen the laws,
Rule for the good of the better cause,
Dispensing justice make all even,
Is thrive on earth, and perhaps in heaven.

The third offers him an alliance with the barons and the opportunity to work against the King :

For a powerful party
Which has turned its eyes in your direction--
To gain from you, your Lordship asks.
For us, Church favour would be an advantage,
Blessing of Pope powerful protection
In the fight for liberty. You, my Lord,
In being with us, would fight a good stroke
At once, for England and for Rome,
Ending the tyrannous jurisdiction
Of king's court over bishop's court,
Of king's court over baron's court.

The final Tempter, who may be the Devil himself, offers Beckett the chance to supplant the King, but with a caveat :

Fare forward to the end.
all other ways are closed to you
Except the way already chosen.
But what is pleasure, kingly rule,
Or rule of men beneath a king,
With craft in corners, stealthy stratagem,
To general grasp of spiritual power?
Man oppressed by sin, since Adam fell--
You hold the keys of heaven and hell.
Power to bind and loose : bind, Thomas, bin,
King and bishop under your heel.
King, emperor, bishop, baron, king :
Uncertain mastery of melting armies,
War, plague, and revolution,
New conspiracies, broken pacts;
To be master or servant within an hour,
This is the course of temporal power.
The Old King shall know it, when at last breath,
No sons, no empire, he bites broken teeth.
You hold the skein : wind, Thomas, wind
The thread of eternal life and death.
You hold this power, hold it.

THOMAS :

Supreme, in this land?

TEMPTER :

Supreme, but for one.

And so Beckett resists this blandishment just as he has the others, but then the fourth Tempter cannily tempts him with his own dream, the desire for martyrdom :

What can compare with glory of Saints
Dwelling forever in presence of God?
What earthly glory, of king or emperor,
what earthly pride, that is not poverty
Compared with richness of heavenly grandeur?
Seek the way of martyrdom, make yourself the lowest
On earth, to be high in heaven.
And see far off below you, where the gulf is fixed,
Your persecutors, in timeless torment,
Parched passion, beyond expiation.

Here Thomas Beckett realizes the peril of his own soul :

Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain:
Temptation shall not come in this kind again.
The last temptation is the greatest treason
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

If he selfishly seeks martyrdom out of a personal desire for immortality, rather than selflessly accepting the risk of death while defending what he believes is right, then he will commit treason against the very Lord he is supposedly serving.

In Part Two of the play Beckett is confronted and murdered by Four Knights, acting at the behest, explicit or otherwise, of Henry. Beckett had further antagonized Henry, upon his return, by opposing the coronation of Henry's son. This prompted the King to his infamous utterance : "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?"

[The Remedy]

2004-01-27T23:19:00.000-08:00

India can best develop herself and serve humanity by being herself and following the law of her own nature.
This does not mean, as some narrowly and blindly suppose, the rejection of everything new that comes to us in the stream of Time or happens to have been first developed or powerfully expressed by the West. Such an attitude would be intellectually absurd, physically impossible and, above all, unspiritual; true spirituality rejects no new light, no added means or materials of our human self-development. It means simply to keep our centre, our essential way of being, our inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive, and evolve out of it all we do and create.

Religion has been a central preoccupation of the Indian mind; some have told us that too much religion ruined India, precisely because we made the whole of life religion or religion the whole of life, we have failed in life and gone under. I will not answer, adopting the language used by the poet in a slightly different connection, that our fall does not matter and that the dust in which India lies is sacred. The fall, the failure does matter, and to lie in the dust is no sound position for man or nation.

But the reason assigned is not the true one. If the majority of Indians had indeed made the whole of their lives religion in the true sense of the word, we should not be where we are now; it was because their public life became most irreligious, egoistic, self-seeking, materialistic that they fell. It is possible, that on one side we deviated too much into an excessive religiosity, that is to say, an excessive externalism of ceremony, rule, routine, mechanical worship, on the other into a too world-shunning asceticism which drew away the best minds who were thus lost to society instead of standing like the ancient Rishis as its spiritual support and its illuminating life-givers. But the root of the matter was the dwindling of the spiritual impulse in its generality and broadness, the decline of intellectual activity and freedom, the waning of great ideals, the loss of the gust of life.

Perhaps there was too much of religion in one sense; the word is English, smacks too much of things external such as creeds, rites, an external piety; there is no Indian equivalent. But if we give rather to religion the sense of the following of the spiritual impulse in its fullness and define spirituality as the attempt to know and live in the highest self, the divine, the all-embracing unity and to raise life in all its parts to the divinest possible values, then it is evident that there was not too much of religion, but rather too little of it - and in what there was, a too one-sided and therefore insufficiently ample tendency.

The right remedy is not to belittle still farther the agelong ideal of India, but to return to its old amplitude and give it a still wider scope, to make in very truth all the life of a nation a religion in this high spiritual sense. This is the direction in which the philosophy, poetry, art of the West is, still more or less obscurely, but with an increasing light, beginning to turn, and even some faint glints of the truth are beginning now to fall across political and sociological ideals.

India has the key to the knowledge and conscious application of the ideal; what was dark to her before in its application, she can now, with a new light illumine; what was wrong and wry in her old methods she can now rectify; the fences which she created to protect the outer growth of the spiritual ideal and which afterwards became barriers to its expansion and farther application, she can now break down and give her spirit a freer field and an ampler flight: she can, if she will, give a new and decisive turn to the problems over which all mankind is labouring and stumbling, for the clue to their solutions is there in her ancient knowledge.

Whether she will rise or not to the height of her opportunity in the renaissance which is coming upon her, is the question of her destiny.

Sri Aurobindo

[last page of "Renaissance in India" 'Arya', November 1918]

Anna Karenina

2004-01-07T20:25:00.000-08:00

Anna Karenin is a novel about a married woman's adulterous affair with another man, Count Vronsky--an affair that ends with her and the Count being ostracized by society. Unable to bear being an outcast, as well as her growing perception that the Count has ceased to love her, Anna, in a feverish state, throws herself under the wheels of an oncoming train--an event mirrored in the early pages of the book. Set against this drama, Anna Karenin is also the story of Constantine Levin, a gentleman farmer of sorts, whose search for happiness and meaning in life culminates, not with his long-desired marriage to Kitty Shcherbatskaya (the event he hoped would secure his happiness), but with the simple advice of a peasant about "living rightly, in God's way." From these melodramatic elements, Tolstoy fashions a profound novel which deals with stark questions of religious faith as seen through the eyes of the unbeliever Levin. Anna Karenin is a morality play that deals with the damaging effects of morality on Anna and Vronsky. It is also a novel about the meaning of life and the place happiness does or does not play in it, and a meditation on death and the lessons it teaches.

In many ways, Anna Karenin is Tolstoy's most personal work in that many of its scenes mirror Tolstoy's relationship with his wife, Sonya; in particular, Levin's courtship of Kitty (expressing his love for her by writing with chalk on a table, as well as the wrenching scene where he gives her his diaries to read). The writing of the final scenes of the novel, specifically Levin's fevered search for an answer to his questions about the meaning of existence, reflect Tolstoy's own process of religious conversion, enacted dramatically in his memoir, A Confession, which was written on the heels of Anna Karenin and is considered by many to be one of the most soul-searching statements of spirituality.

The publication of Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenin, which his contemporary, Dostoyevsky, considered to be "a perfect work of art," was an end to the life he had known, one of material and emotional luxury, and would signal the beginning of a deeper quest for the meaning of existence. Furthermore, this break with the past would manifest itself in Tolstoy's moral and religious writings and his rapid movement toward social reform. Although he would go on to publish other novels, such as Resurrection, and numerous stories like his masterpiece, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy's career as a novelist in many ways reached its pinnacle--its perfect balance of drama, morality, and philosophical inquiry--with the character of Anna Karenin and her (seemingly) irrational embrace of death. Equally compelling is the character of Anna's husband, Karenin, as portrayed by Tolstoy with all his complexity and emotional denial over the loss of Anna and his subsequent (brief) embrace of Christian forgiveness. Finally, there is Vronsky's startling realization when Tolstoy writes: "It showed him [Vronsky] the eternal error men make in imagining that happiness consists in the realization of their desires."

Large in scope and magnificently poignant in its use of details, Anna Karenin poses the question of how we are to live our lives when the illusions and denials that we hold dear are stripped away. As well, there is the question to what extent we are happiest (perhaps a suspect word here) living the "examined life" as opposed to the "unexamined life." With its insistence on drama over mere argument, Anna Karenin embodies the timeless struggle to make more than mere spectacle of our lives.

New Year 2004!

2003-12-31T21:30:00.001-08:00

'Ring Out, Wild Bells'

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, the frosty light;

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,

For those that here we see no more,

Ring out the feud of rich and poor,

Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

And ancient forms of party strife;

Ring in the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care the sin,

The faithless coldness of the times;

Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,

But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,

The civic slander and the spite;

Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;

Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.

-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen.

2003-12-17T00:06:00.000-08:00

Accomplishment & Human Development in Pride and Prejudice.

This is a story of individual accomplishment. That accomplishment takes the form of four marriages: Darcy and Elizabeth, Bingley and Jane, Wickham and Lydia, Collins and Charlotte. In addition, the story leads to some unexpected outcomes. Bingley, whom Darcy hoped to make his brother-in-law by marrying to his sister Georgiana, becomes his brother-in-law instead through their marriages to two sisters, Elizabeth and Jane. More surprising to our sense of justice, Wickham, who attempted to become Darcy’s brother-in-law by elopement with Georgiana, does become his brother-in-law by marrying Elizabeth’s sister Lydia. Most remarkable of all, Collins, whose highest aspiration in life was not marriage, but rather close association with his distinguished benefactor, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, actually becomes the lady’s distant relative through the marriage of his cousin Elizabeth to the lady’s nephew Darcy. Taken as clever story telling, we may be surprised or amused. Taken as profound reflections on truths of human life and action, we can only marvel at the conscious or subconscious knowledge of a twenty-year-old English author.

This is also a story of the accomplishment of English society, a society that chose an evolutionary path to social progress in preference to a destructive revolutionary movement like that which wracked France at the time. The society accomplished this evolution by opening up previously inaccessible levels of higher society to those with lesser status and wealth and by a conscious descent of those higher levels to embrace the life-renewing vitality of the bourgeois class. This evolutionary process is reflected in every thought, sentiment and action in the story and is a key to understanding the forces that lead to individual accomplishment. These two movements are inextricably bound together. They are two aspects of a single movement. The thoughts, attitudes, and actions of the individual characters express and contribute to the wider movement of the society in which they occur.

All great literature reveals truths of human character and human nature that exceed, both above and below, the standards and norms of social character and behavior. The quality, intensity, attitudes, values and motives of the individuals involved in the action, particularly the relationship of their individual characters to the specific action, are powerful determinants that very often overshadow in importance the determining characteristics of the act itself. This story brings out the crucial distinction between those whose character is simply a product of the society, the times and the class in which they live and those rare few who develop formed individual characters with the knowledge and will for psychological growth. The accomplishments of the main characters are more a result of their psychological growth than of the external initiatives they take. These individuals take a wide range of initiatives, most of which fail or lead to consequences very different than they had intended. Yet, the movement of events leads invariably toward accomplishment, propelled by a progression of apparently extraneous forces and circumstances. A true understanding of the forces leading to accomplishment requires an understanding of the psychological changes that the main characters undergo.

The results of action in the story are an expression not only of human initiative, individual and social character, but also of the character of life itself. Life is a universal field in which forces and forms act and interact with each other. Like the individual and society, it too has what may be called a character of its own. That character can be described in terms of the distinctive ways in which life events occur, repeat and reverse, and the factors that determine the results and consequences of human action.

Human action, individual character, social character and the character of life combining and interacting generate a set of results. When those results are what the characters themselves would view as positive, as they largely are in the story, we can refer them as examples of accomplishment. When they are negative, we term them failures.

Human achievements are one expression of the universal process that governs all creative activity and accomplishment at the physical, vital, mental and spiritual level. The outcome of every event is the product of these several different levels of determinants and this creative process. These levels interact with each other, reinforcing and negating each other according to their direction. The process that leads to human accomplishment in any series of events depends on the relative strength of each factor and specific circumstance of the action.

An analysis of action, individual character, social character and the character of life may provide great insight into the course and outcome of the story, it leaves unexplored the far greater field of spiritual determinants that express in and through individuals, societies and life itself. While a story of this type is not the ideal medium for an exploration of this type, we have attempted to illustrate the process of spiritual evolution described by Sri Aurobindo as it is illustrated by actions and events in the story. In Life Divine, he describes the process of creation or self-conception by which the Absolute or Divine Being manifests the universe by becoming the universe that it creates. This is the process by which the spiritual reality involves itself in material form and life and evolves to rediscover its consciousness, power and being.

Much can be learned of human character, society and life from a study of Pride & Prejudice and much can be learned about the novel by viewing it from the perspective of these factors. However, in literature as in life, we are constrained by limited information. In life, our knowledge of past and future events, the thoughts, attitudes and intentions of other people, and even much of our own deeper motivations lie beyond the bounds of conscious knowledge. The discovery of the deeper truths of life requires, first, the development of greater self-consciousness and consciousness of others, keen observation of human behavior, deep insight into human motivation. In addition, we are constrained by the arbitrary beginning and end placed on any story. Every action and circumstance can be traced back to antecedents far in the past, both the personal and historical past. They can also be traced forward far into the future. A story gives us a record of a finite segment in a line of causality that extends infinitely backward and forward. Therefore, any observations we make or conclusions we draw are limited by the lack of information and insight both into the distant past and future that has yet to unfold.

In one sense, these constraints are even greater in a novel than in life, because we have only the limited information provided by the author on which to base our insights and conclusions. But in another sense, literature provides an easier and more revealing medium, for it represents a detailed, often minutely detailed, record of a particular set of events. While in life, we can at best have access to our own inner workings and perhaps those of our closest confidants; in literature, we are often privy to the inner feelings, attitudes and opinions of several characters. In a story, the action usually spans an interval from the beginning to the end of a set of important events ending in accomplishment or failure, though we may not have access to all relevant information about antecedent conditions in the lives of the characters or the society. Because this record is written, we have the opportunity to review it over and over again, weighing each word and event, looking for correspondences and interrelationships that occur very frequently in life but are often overlooked in the whirl of the moment and soon buried in subsequent events. For these reasons, literature provides a very powerful medium for reflecting and discovering truths of life.

The Character of Life in Literature

2003-12-10T19:34:00.000-08:00

The Character of Life in Literature

Entertaining literature enthralls us with suspense, humor and the intense action of an engaging plot. Superior literature transcends mere action. It presents to the reader the author’s insights into human character and reveals the complex ways in which character and action interrelate to generate chains of consequences and results. Still finer literature reveals the complex interactions between action, individual character and the evolving character of the society in which the action takes place. The greatest literature goes still further. It reveals not only insights of individual and social character but of the character of life itself.

Does life have a character of its own? When we speak of character in an individual, we usually mean the fixed and recurring pattern of traits that are associated with a person. Such and such behavior is characteristic of that individual. We may even divide people into broad categories or types, grouping them according to common tendencies such as ruthless aggressiveness and ambition, constricting selfishness and stinginess, or expansive cheerfulness, generosity and goodwill. Underlying the individual variations of human character, we recognize some common tendencies and characteristics of the entire human race that govern all human behavior. We refer to this common character as human nature.

Individuals vary not only in the type of their character but also in the degree. Those whose lives are determined and directed by the prevailing habits, fashions, beliefs, attitudes, opinions and values of the society in which they live have at best a developed social as opposed to an individual character. Their conduct is determined by the expectations of society. The act and live within its norms, refusing to fall below the required social minimum, failing to rise above the maximum expected of a normal member of the group. On one extreme are those that do not even conform to the minimum standards, who fail to acquire the socially required behaviors, attitudes and values. They are unformed individuals, lacking even a formed social character. At the other extreme are those whose beliefs, attitudes and values are determined internally by the strength of their own convictions. These are individuals with developed minds and formed characters of their own.

Individuals do not live or act in a vacuum. They exist and act in a human social environment of other people that constantly acts on them and reacts to their actions. They also live in a natural environment of physical objects and material forces such as the weather. And those familiar with occult and spiritual traditions recognize that there is also a subtle environment of other planes of existence, both higher planes of spiritual influence and lower planes of negative forces in universal nature seeking to act on the lives and express through the character and actions of human beings. All these levels or planes including the social, material and the occult constitute the field of human activity. Each of them functions according to its own laws or principles. Each of them has its own characteristic modes of action and influence on human life.

When we speak of the character of life, we refer to those subtle laws and principles that govern the interaction between individuals and the world around them. This character reveals itself in many different ways. It has been observed and codified in countless forms by earlier, less scientifically minded civilizations, as auspicious signs, omens, symbols, superstitions, rules for action, social conventions, vital intuitions, mental insights and spiritual wisdom. Most of what remains of these earlier forms of knowledge is either unintelligible to our modern understanding or so mixed with superstition that it is of little use for modern life, no matter how valid or useful it was to societies in the past.

The modern mental individual seeks a set of rational principles by which to understand phenomenon life, not a set of blind dictates and inexplicable tenets. Fortunately, we have at our disposal three fields for direct observation, rational analysis and insight into the character of life—fiction, biography and personal experience. A study of all three reveals that life does indeed have a character of its own which at once transcends and expresses through each particular time and place, individual character and social circumstance. That character can be observed in the smallest as well as the most momentous events of our own lives. It shines through most strikingly in the literary works of Shakespeare, Hugo, Dumas, Hardy, Austen and others of their kind.

What is this thing we so vaguely refer to as life? In Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo describes life as a universal force that expresses as the individual force maintaining each individual form or object in manifestation. It is the force that creates and preserves the form, defends its survival and energizes its growth. Although we view life in terms of many separate and individual lives, it is only one single, universal existence that we perceive as many. In its origin, life is the infinite, creative force that builds the worlds and inhabits them with forms of its own self-conception and creation. It is the conscious force of Sat, the Self-Conscious Being, the Pure Existence, the Divine Consciousness, the omnipresent reality.

But here in the physical vital world we live and act in, Life does not appear to us either as consciousness or as force. We do not generally attribute conscious awareness or intention to life, even though we often find occasions that seem to indicate a secret will or fate or determinism governing our lives. We do not think of life as consciously or even unconsciously acting upon us in certain ways or subconsciously responding to what we think, feel or do.

We do not generally think of life as a force either. We are aware only of many individual forms and forces acting around and upon us – the actions of other individuals, the influence of public opinion, the restrictive and protective action of social conventions, laws and social institutions, as well as the action of the material forces of nature – rain, wind, lightning, the hurricane or earthquake or meteor from outer space. Each seems to us driven by its own inner determinism or its own natural laws, but we do not normally perceive any master script or director or set of rules or unifying principle governing the whole play of life.

An objective and in-depth study of life will reveal that it does exhibit all the attributes of a universal force with a pronounced character of its own. So vast is the scope and so great the complexity of life’s character that it cannot be fully grasped by mental comprehension. Full knowledge of life reveals itself only to spiritual vision. Nevertheless, we can identify many of the general laws and principles by which it functions.

Science, religion, philosophy, and art all strive in different ways to reveal the ultimate nature of reality. Science focuses primarily and most successfully on physical facts in search for the laws and principles governing the formation of material objects and material forces, though its researches have now taken it to the borderline where the material opens out into more subtler domains of reality. Religion in its most exalted forms of spirituality focuses on inner spiritual experience to reveal that reality directly to the consciousness of the spiritual seeker. In its more mundane forms, it provides a set of tenets to govern human behavior in a manner that appears most conducive to social harmony and moral development. Philosophy focuses on the construction of a rational mental framework for understanding reality. But since mind’s linear mode of functioning rarely suffices to embrace the subtle and many-sided complexity of life movements, philosophy normally fails by abstraction to capture the object of its search.

That leaves art, of which literature is the most important for present purposes. Literary fiction is an effort to capture the deeper realities of life by focusing not only on material facts, moral principles and mental ideas, but by portraying the chains of action and reaction among and between individuals, society, the forces of nature and in some instances the subtle forces of other planes. Thoughts, beliefs, opinions, attitudes, emotions, sentiments, impulses, desires, aspirations, anxieties, fears and cravings expressed in action are the stuff of literature. Literature focuses on the meeting point between inner subjective intention and material and social results in the external world of living beings, between thought and action, between cause and consequence, between human character and the character of life.

It is true that all these aspects of life are much more directly known to us through our own personal experience, both internal and external. But the mind and human ego finds it extremely difficult to bring an impersonal objectivity and scientific disinterestedness to the study of one’s own life. Therefore, it is in literature that we can most readily and objectively discover the nature of life. And based on the principles discovered and confirmed in the writings of the greatest authors, extract principles that can then be applied and reconfirmed in our own lives to achieve not only self-knowledge and knowledge of life, but mastery of self and life as well.

Notes: Mass Civilization & Minority Culture

2003-11-30T02:28:00.000-08:00

Cultural conservatism is distinguished by a regard for 'high culture' as something absolute, definable and measurable.

T S Eliot and F R Leavis participated in the debate about culture in the 1940s, and articulated clear arguments for cultural absolutism and conservatism. Their views have been dominant in academia and society at large, and have been the springboard for ongoing intellectual debate and dissent. When applied to a publishing context, the cultural conservative regards the publisher as having an essential role as a cultural gatekeeper: the judge of cultural quality and selector of the printed heritage. The main threat to the publisher's cultural position is perceived to be commerce and the profit-motive.

The views of Eliot and Leavis are summarized below:

In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (Faber & Faber, 1948) Eliot considers high culture to be complex, but absolute and objectively definable. Culture is the salvation of society from the materialism and barbarism associated with industrialisation and commerce. Only 'superior individuals' are able to participate in and contribute to this culture. He advocates the replacement of the existing class system by a system of meritocracy headed by a cultural elite.

'it is now the opinion of some of the most advanced minds that some qualitative differences between individual must still be recognised, and that the superior individuals must be formed into suitable groups, endowed with appropriate powers, and perhaps with varied emoluments and honours. These groups ... will direct the public life of the nation; the individuals composing themselves will be spoken of as 'leaders' . There will be groups concerned with art, and groups concerned with science, and groups concerned with philosophy as well as groups consisting of men of action: and the groups are what we call élite.' (Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, p. 36)

Eliot thus argues that efforts and expense to make culture accessible to all, predominantly through the democratisation of the education system, are inappropriate and lead to falling standards in culture and education. It is more important for a society to invest in an excellence in education, academia and culture for a limited privileged audience.

Eliot's elitist notion of culture develops the views of F R Leavis, the influential Cambridge English Literature don. In Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (1930) he pronounces that culture can only be appreciated and judged by a small minority:

'In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends: it is (apart from cases of the simple and familiar) only a few who are capable of unprompted, first-hand judgement. They are still a small minority, though a larger one, who are capable of endorsing such first-hand judgement by genuine personal response ... The minority capable not only of appreciating Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Hardy (to take major instances ) but of recognising their latest successors constitute the consciousness of the race (or a branch of it) at a given time ... Upon this minority depends our power of profiting by the finest human experience of the past; they keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of the tradition. Upon them depend the implicit standards that order the finer living of an age, the sense that it is worth more than that, this rather than that is the direction in which to go. In their keeping .. is the language, the changing idiom upon which fine living depends, and without which distinction of spirit is thwarted and incoherent. By 'culture' I mean the use of such language'. (F R Leavis, Mass Civilization and Minority Culture, Cambridge: The Minority Press, 1930, pp. 3-5)

The cultural conservative regards Mass culture as the antithesis of culture. As Leavis and Eliot argue, 'Culture' is the preserve of very few in society: art, literature, music and intellectual thought which few can create or even appreciate. Mass culture, by contrast is regarded as the mediocre, dull, mundane entertainment to be enjoyed by uneducated and uncritical 'low-brow' hoards.

The Cultural conservative regards culture and commerce as binary opposites: commerce is the key threat to culture. Commerce is associated with mass production, and with mass-culture. The bestseller is thereby defined as the opposite of literature, and the publisher of popular fiction is criticised for delivering sub-standard literature for mass appeal.

Queenie Leavis (wife of F R Leavis) articulates this view in Fiction and the Reading Public. This report, published in 1932 is a study of the reading habits of the British public, which laments the poor quality of literature consumed by the masses: 'the reading habit is now often a form of the drug habit' p.22. Mass fiction is published for commercial ends:

'The effect of the increasing control by Big Business... is to destroy among the masses a desire to read anything which by the widest stretch could be included in the classification 'literature'.' (p.29)

There is here a close association between fiction, commerce, limited education and the masses, in binary opposition to literature, culture, education, and the upper class elite.

Geoffrey Faber (founder of Faber and Faber) gives an equally damning verdict of mass publishing. He equates mass culture with herd mentality and ignorance:

'Literature is now in the hands of the mob; and the mob stampeded. It moves in a mass, this way or that, and all its thinking is done for it. For those who will hit the taste of the masses the reward is very large. Hence and ever-growing temptation to write for the herd, to publish for the herd, to buy for and sell to the herd .. The whole nation reads to order. Books are, increasingly, written to order. Unless a whole-hearted effort is made to counteract these tendencies, the life may be squeezed out of English literature in a very few generations.'

Geoffrey Faber, A Publisher Speaking London, Faber & Faber, 1934

This interpretation of mass culture rests in the popular consciousness, and reflects a still-dominant attitude

Beethoven - the greatest of them all…

2003-11-27T01:42:00.000-08:00

"Among the great modern musicians there have been several whose consciousness, when they created, came into touch with a higher consciousness. Caesar Frank played on the organ as one inspired; he had an opening into the psychic life and he was conscious of it and to a great extent expressed it. Beethoven, when he composed the Ninth Symphony, had the vision of an opening into a higher world and of the descent of a higher world into this earthly plane. "

Beethoven - the greatest of them all…

"How can I, a musician, say to people 'I am deaf! I shall, if I can, defy this fate, even though there will be times when I shall be the unhappiest of God's creatures... I live only in music... frequently working on three or four pieces simultaneously" - Beethoven wrote in a letter to Wegler.

And yet, his greatest and most grandiose compositions were achieved in the last decade of his life, when he was afflicted with the worst of problems, which he defied stubbornly.

Ludwig Van Beethoven…One of the greatest composers ever, was born in Bonn, Germany in December 1770. He began taking his first lessons on the piano from his father at the age of 4 or 5 and by the age of 10, became an apprentice musician at the Bonn Court. His first music composition was published at the age of 12. He moved to Vienna, when he was 22, where he found patrons among the music-loving Viennese aristocracy and soon enjoyed success as a piano virtuoso. His public debut was in 1795; about the same time that his first important publications appeared - three piano trios and three piano sonatas.

1802, however, was a year of crisis for Beethoven, with his realization that the impaired hearing he had noticed for some time was incurable and sure to worsen. The shame of being a deaf musician created so much bitterness that he even contemplated suicide. But he came through this period with his determination strengthened and entered a new creative phase, called his 'middle period', in which he composed his best works.With his powerful and expansive middle-period works, which include all-time classics such as the Pastoral symphony No.6, Eroica and symphony No. 5, Beethoven was firmly established as the greatest composer of his time. His piano-playing career had ended in 1808 (a charity appearance in 1814 was a disaster because of his deafness).

Inspired by nature…

Beethoven by nature was impulsive, unreasonable, intolerant and given to fits of anger. Deafness in his later years and failure in personal and romantic relationships also had a great impact on his compositions. These caused him to create music of an increasingly inward style. He shunned crowds, as he feared mockery, being a deaf composer.

Beethoven had a great love of nature and took long walks in the woods and under the stars, where inspiration would come unhindered. Beethoven composed directly from his musical imagination onto the page, but at times he would place a stick in his mouth and press it to the body of the piano so that he could feel the musical vibrations through his mouth. He had the habit of sketching in innumerable notebooks, which he carried regularly with him. He was a laborious composer. He would sketch or jot down glimpses of music and later shape them, molding and remolding his compositions, sometimes note by note. His rework on some compositions would go on for several years, and he could also work on several compositions at a time, some of them very different from each other.

He would see the music in his mind and then he would put down rough snatches of melody in his sketchbook, and then like a sculptor, who has glimpsed a statue in a rock, he would slowly start clearing away all that impeded the vision. At times Beethoven would start a composition, then leave page after page blank, and suddenly catch the music in mid-flight. It was as if he had the whole composition in mind, of which some passages were clear and he would note them down lest he lose them, while some passages were still unclear. Beethoven was a perfectionist, and worked on the all-or-nothing principle, refusing to accept anything but what he considered perfect. He made exceptional demands of himself.

He died in Vienna on March 26, 1827, after a protracted illness. His compositions totaled nine symphonies and 32 piano sonatas. This German composer had earned his position as the best composer ever due to his triumph over his personal tragedy, which is also translated in his music. He lived only in music and it was his only method of communication…

Some of his compositions:

The String Trio in E Flat Major, Opus 3

The Three String Trios, Opus 9

The Six String Quartets, Opus 18

The First, Second… Ninth Symphony

The Piano Sonata in F Minor, Opus 57, known as the Appassionata

The Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, Opus 58

The three Razumovsky Quartets, Opus 59

The Violin Concerto, Opus 61

Two Sonatas for Piano and Cello, Opus 102

The Piano Sonata in A Major, Opus 101

The Hammerklavier

Shiva's Cosmic Dance

2003-11-27T00:26:00.000-08:00

Tandava – Shiva's Cosmic Dance

Shiva, the lord of the Lingam, the consort of Shakti-Devi, also is Nataraja, King of Dancers.

Dancing is an ancient form of magic. The dancer becomes amplified into a being endowed with supra-normal powers. His personality is transformed. Like yoga, the dance induces trance, ecstasy, the experience of the divine, the realization of one's own secret nature, and, finally, mergence into the divine essence. In India consequently the dance has flourished side by side with the terrific austerities of the meditation grove- fasting, breathing exercises, absolute introversion. To work magic, to put enchantments upon others, one has first to put enchantments on oneself. And this is effected as well by the dance as by prayer, fasting and meditation.

Shiva, therefore, the arch-yogi of the gods, is necessarily also the master of the dance.

The dance is an act of creation. It brings about a new situation and summons into the dancer a new and higher personality. It has a cosmogonic function, in that it rouses dormant energies which may shape the world. On a universal scale, Shiva is the Cosmic Dancer; in his Dancing Manifestation (nritya-murti) he embodies in himself and simultaneously gives manifestation to Eternal Energy. The forces gathered and projected in his frantic, ever-enduring gyration, are the powers of the evolution, maintenance, and dissolution of the world. Nature and all its creatures are the effects of his eternal dance.

Shiva-Nataraja is represented in a beautiful series of South Indian bronzes dating from the tenth and twelfth centuries A.D. The details of these figures are to be read, according to the Hindu tradition, in terms of complex pictorial allegory. The upper right hand, it will be observed, carries a little drum, shaped like an hour-glass, for the beating of the rhythm. This connotes Sound, the vehicle of speech, the conveyer of revelation, tradition, incantation magic and divine truth. Furthermore, Sound is associated in India with Ether, the first of the five elements. Ether is the primary and most subtly pervasive evolution of the universe, all the other elements, Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. Together, therefore, Sound and Ether signify the first, truth-pregnant moment of creation, the productive energy of the Absolute, in its pristine, cosmogenetic strength.

The opposite hand, the upper left, with a half-moon posture of the figure (ardhacandra-mudra), bears on its palm a tongue of flame. Fire is the element of the destruction of the world. At the close of the Kali Yuga, Fire will annihilate the body of creation, to be itself then quenched by the ocean of the void. Here, then, in the balance of the hands, is illustrated a counterpoise of creation and destruction in the play of the cosmic dance. Sound against flame. And the field of the terrible interplay is the Dancing Ground of the Universe, brilliant and horrific with the dance of the god.

The fear not gesture (abhaya-mudra), bestowing protection and peace, is displayed by the second right hand, while the remaining left lifted across the chest, points downward to the uplifted left foot. This foot signifies Release, and is the refuge and salvation of the devotee. It is to be worshipped for the attainment of union with the Absolute. The hand pointing to it is held in a pose imitative of the outstretched trunk or hand of the elephant (gaja-hasta-mudra), reminding us of Ganesha, Shiva's son, the Remover of Obstacles.

The divinity is represented as dancing on the postrate body of a dwarfish demon. This is Apasmara Purusha, ?The Man or Demon (purusha) called Forgetfulness, or Heedlessness (apasmara). It is symbolical of life's blindness, man's ignorance. Therein is release from the bondages of the world.

A ring of flames and light (prabha-mandala) issues from and encompasses the god. This is said to signify the vital processes of the universe and its creatures, nature's dance as moved by the dancing god within. Simultaneously it is said to signify the energy of Wisdom, the transcendental light of the knowledge of truth, dancing forth, from the personification of the All. Still another allegorical meaning assigned to the halo of flames is that of the holy syllable of AUM or OM. This mystical utterance stemming from the sacred language of Vedic praise and incantation, is understood as an expression and affirmation of the totality of creation.

A – is the state of waking consciousness, together with its world of gross experience.
U – is the state of dreaming consciousness, together with its experience of subtle shapes of dream.
M – is the state of dreamless sleep, the natural condition of quiescent, undifferentiated consciousness, wherein every experience is dissolved into a blissful non-experience, a mass of potential consciousness.
The silence following the pronunciation of the three, A,U, and M, is the ultimate un-manifest, wherein perfected supra-consciousness totally reflects and merges with the pure, transcendental essence of Divine Reality – Brahman is experienced as Atman, the Self. AUM, therefore, together with its surrounding silence, is a sound-symbol of the whole of consciousness-existence, and at the same time its willing affirmation.

Shiva as the Cosmic Dancer is the embodiment and manifestation of eternal energy in its 'five activities' (panch-kriya)

Creation (sristi) – the pouring forth or unfolding
Maintenance (sthiti) – the duration
Destruction (samhara) – the taking back or reabsorption
Concealment (tiro-bhava) – the veiling of True Being behind the masks and garbs of apparitions, aloofness, display of Maya,
Favor (anugraha) – acceptance of the devotee, acknowledgment of the pious endeavor of the yogi, bestowal of peace.
Shiva is the personification of the Absolute, particularly in its dissolution of the universe. He is the embodiment of Super-Death. He is called Yamantaka – 'The Ender of the Tamer' , He who conquers and exterminates Yama the God of Death, the Tamer. Shiva is Maha-Kala, Great Time, Eternity, the swallower of Time, swallower of Ages and cycles of ages.

Shiva is apparently, thus, two opposite things, archetypal ascetic, and archetypal dancer. On one hand , he is Total Tranquility – inward calm absorbed in itself, absorbed in the void of the Absolute, where all distintions merge and dissolve, and all tensions are at rest. But on the other hand, he is Total Activity – life's energy, frantic, aimless, and playful.

Introduction to Oedipus & Sophocles.

2003-11-24T21:46:00.000-08:00

The Oedipus Trilogy was originally written by Sophocles and is meant to be told in a story-telling fashion. But this Grecian tragedy was revised and translated into English by Paul Roche and put into a novel form. The Oedipus Trilogy is a novel that deals with destiny and fate. The reader is shown a series of events plotted out from which Oedipus (the man who knows) cannot escape and leads him ultimately elsewhere. When we begin to read this story, we must remember that Greek society was based around myths and legends. They, much like today’s society, had the need to explain everything. Their myths were a way of explaining such things. They had a series of gods and muses and fates to explain why things happened the way it happened. They believed in a force greater than their own controlling their every move. Sophocles took their beliefs and used the Oedipus Trilogy to explore the irony of how the Fates work more closely. The Oedipus plays are separated into three main plays: Oedipus Rex (The King), Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone.

The story starts in Oedipus Rex, and the city of Thebes in which he is ruler is in plague. The city calls upon the ruler Oedipus to find a way to stop the plague. At this point in time, it is 15 years after the prophecy given to him by the Oracle of Delphi of his father dying and him marrying his mother. When he hears of this he promises never to return so he may outsmart the fates. He eventually ends up in Thebes through his travels and gets into an argument with an old man. He ends up killing the old man in a brawl. Little does he know that this old man is King Laius, his father. He goes to Thebes where a Sphynx is harassing it’s people for an answer to it’s riddle. Oedipus solves the riddle and the Sphynx throws itself from its perch upon a rock outside the city. Its people make Oedipus the new King. Now he is faced with another challenge, to find the killer and banish him from the city to rid them of the plague. We are faced with an interesting plot indeed. When Oedipus pledges to find the murderers, he puts himself in the ironic position of having to hunt himself down. The story shows Oedipus following his own tracks until he finds the shepherd who gave the infant Oedipus to the king of Corinth, from King Laius. Once the story becomes clear, Jocasta, his wife, kills herself in a bloody rage and Oedipus stabs his eyes out and goes in search of his 'true' self realizing that when one has become nothing that one truly starts realizing - the man who knows to the man who has realized/illumined!

When we go to Oedipus at Colonus, the whole story then goes to the eminent defeat of Thebes by whomever holds Oedipus’s tomb. Oedipus promises the knowledge of his tomb only to the kings of Athens. The story of Antigone is of how Oedipus’ daughter defies the will of Creon and gives Polynices. When a person is faced with the possibility of committing an unfavorable deed, a person will take whatever steps necessary to prevent them from committing the act. It is a basic human instinct to prevent ones self from committing the act. And the basic overall theme of the Oedipus trilogy is defiance. We see the attempt to defy throughout the whole trilogy. Oedipus tries to defy the Fates by avoiding his destiny. Creon tries to avoid the will of the Fates by getting Oedipus to come back to Thebes so he can save it from being taken.

View the world in a whole new way!

2003-11-11T20:52:00.000-08:00

Which makes us think that the events in history and in our own lives seem to defy our simple, superficial analysis of right and wrong, and good and evil. It is true there is great evil, and great wrong, as we have seen in Hitler, Stalin, and terrorist attacks; however, there are other faults to be accounted for on the other side as well. Life is not so perfectly black and white; it is filled with subtle shades in between; and if we are to be sincere in our efforts to know the truth, we must address these as well.

If we are true to the truth, then we must recognize that life seems to function in a more complex way than what first meets the eye. For one we must see that the conflicts between two parties, such as the ones we're facing now, bring out the limitations and negativities of both sides. This is in fact the wondrous way in which life progresses, by which Nature evolves. A secretly conscious Nature takes two parties, whether they are individuals or nations, who have specific sets of complementary limitations and negativities, and brings them together in contradiction and conflict so that each side can overcome its own internal limitations. It is in fact only through this conflict with that particular complementary party that the negativity of each side can be overcome, enabling an eventual higher harmony to emerge. This is a striking process of Nature's Way; i.e. how Nature evolves.

How then can we apply this principle in our own lives? How can we move our conflicts to resolution as higher harmonies in the shortest period of time?

Our first obligation in any conflict is to see not only the wrong in another, but also the wrong, the falsehood, the limitations in ourselves. If we can identify the root causes of our own limitations, we are well on our way to solving our serious conflicts through positive means, rather than through the slow pain and suffering of negative contradiction and conflict. For example, one individual who was in conflict with his boss clearly saw that the boss was acting ruthlessly. It was only later that he also saw that he himself had been in a weak position, enabling his boss to act as she did. When he recognized the weakness within himself and moved instead to a new position of strength, the conflict instantly evaporated. To make the point all that more compelling to him, a six month physical pain also suddenly disappeared!

The difficulty in this approach is seeing ourselves for what we truly are in the first place. When we observe ourselves, we are blind and partisan; ignorant of our own false nature. So what can we do to recognize our own blind spots? The answer is that we must become more self-aware. We must know ourselves truly, including both our strengths and our weaknesses. On the other hand, that is not an easy thing to do since we live in our ego-sense, in our separateness that perceives all from our own narrow and prejudiced perspective. So what can be done to gain true insight into our limitations, to our own fault and responsibility in the conflicts we encounter in our lives?

First, we can decide to objectively look at the situation at hand, and examine our limiting attitudes, opinions, and actions. This would surely be a great beginning. However, since we are prejudiced in our understanding of our own selves, this approach may not always be effective. We must somehow find a way to see with true eyes. To enable this we must find a way to move away from our prejudicial ego-sense which gives us a skewed, false view of our selves. One approach is to move away from the surface of life, to a deeper consciousness within where we perceive our truer nature. By withdrawing from our surface consciousness, from our surface connections with life which are subject to the push and pulls to what is around us and influencing us, we begin to experience a truer perception of ourselves and the world around us. We begin to see our own character in its truer light; in its mixture of positive and negative qualities. Moreover, from that deeper poise we able to see our own responsibility in any situation of conflict that we are involved in.

By perceiving our responsibility, and then taking appropriate action to rectify our shortcomings, we will see life suddenly and miraculously respond in kind. Just like the man who reversed himself and acted from strength with his boss, which ended in the evaporation of conflict and pain, we can take actions that can end our own conflicts, enabling a higher harmony to suddenly emerge. An individual, a family, a community, a nation, or a society can follow this approach and learn to function and view the world in a whole new way.

Translation of Mandukya Upanishad

2003-11-07T23:50:00.000-08:00

1. OM is this imperishable Word. OM is the Universe, and this is the exposition of OM. The past, the present and the future, all that was, all that is, all that will be, is OM. Likewise all else that may exist beyond the bounds of Time, that too is OM.

2. All this Universe is the Eternal Brahman, this Self is the Eternal, and the Self is fourfold.

3. He whose place is the wakefullness, who is wise of the outward, who hath seven limbs, to whom there are ninteen doors, who feeleth and enjoyeth gross objects, Vaishwanara, the Universal Male. He is the first.

4. He whose place is the dream, who is wise of the inward, who hath seven limbs,to whom there are nineteen doors, who feeleth and enjoyeth subtle objects, Taijasa, the Inhabitant in Luminous Mind. he is the second.

5. When one sleepeth and yearneth not with any desire, nor seeth any dream, that is the perfect slumber, who has become Oneness, who is wisdom gathered into itself, who is made of mere delight , who enjoyeth delight unrelated, to whom conscious mind is the door, Prajna, the Lord of Wisdom, He is the third.

6. This is the Almighty, this is the Omniscient, this is the Inner Soul, this is the Womb of the Universe, this is the Birth and Destruction of creatures.

7. He who is neither inward-wise, nor outward-wise, nor both inward- and outward-wise, nor wisdom self-gathered, nor possessed of wisdom, nor unpossessed of wisdom, He Who is unseen and incommunicable, unseizable, featureless, unthinkable, and unnameable, Whose essentiality is awareness of the Self in its single existence, in Whom all phenomena dissolve, Who is Calm, Who is Good, Who is the One than Whom there is no other, Him they deem the fourth ; He is the Self, He is the object of Knowledge.

8. Now this the Self, as to the imperishable Word, is OM : and as to the letters, His parts are the letters and the letters are His parts, namely, A U M.

9.The Waker, Vaishwanara, the Universal Male, He is A, the first letter, because of Initiality and Pervasiveness : he that knoweth Him for such pervadeth and attaineth all his desires; he becometh the source and first.

10. The Dreamer, Taijasa, the Inhabitant in Luminous Mind, He is U, the second letter, because of Advance and Centrality : He that knoweth Him for such, advanceth the bounds of his knowledge and riseth above difference : nor of his seed is any born that knoweth not the Eternal.

11. The Sleeper, Prajna, the Lord of Wisdom, He is M, the third letter, because of Measure and Finality : he that knoweth Him for such measureth with himself the Universe and becometh the departure into the Eternal.

12. Letterless is the fourth, the Incommunicable, the end of phenomena, the Good, the One than Whom there is no other : thus is OM. He that knoweth is the Self and entereth by his self into the Self, he that knoweth, he that knoweth.

- Sri Aurobindo

On Mandukya Upanishad

2003-11-07T23:44:00.000-08:00

Traditionally, meditating upon and reciting the Mandukya Upanishad in Sanskrit could be described as a complete and enriching experience- a feast for the mind, heart and spirit. No other ancient civilisation is as sophisticated as the Hindu in the exploration, shaping and transmission of the unfathomable complexities of the world of sound. It is through sound that we express the rhythms of our bodies and the environments in which we interact, and shape our worlds of meaning and purpose. The Mandukya Upanishad is a worthy subject for tapping the cumulative Hindu experience of the multi-faceted world of sound.

The Mandukya Upanishad is traditionally ascribed to the Atharva Veda, one of the four ancient branches of Hindu scriptural learning. It is composed in a language called Sanskrit (which means “well wrought”) and can be dated to about the beginning of the Common Era. As an Upanishad it is regarded by many as belonging to a section of the Vedas – the Vedanta - that sums up in depth and wisdom, the teaching of these scriptures, Sanskrit, for the learned, is the language best suited to the elucidation and harnessing of the powers and meanings of sound.

The Mandukya Upanishad is only twelve verses in length, yet it is an excellent example of the distinctive method of the Upanishads. It reveals – as an exercise in contemplation - the significance of the mystic syllable Om (Pronounce”Oh-m”).This sound, which reverberates throughout the philosophy, ritual and contemplative practice of Sanskritic Hinduism though the ages to the present day, is a composite of three units A, U, and M (in combination, A and U are pronounced “Oh”).

Verses 1 and 2 declare that the syllable Om encapsulates everything – space, time and indeed the horizon beyond – in which we have our fullest being. This All is Brahman identified with our deepest Self (Atman). Verses 3-7 take us on an interior journey of discovery towards this all-sustaining, all-encompassing, inmost reality. First we pass through the waking-state and its multi-faceted variety, then through the dream-state and its surreal experiences, next finally to the state – Beyond – the turiya – the “unseen, the ineffable”, the utterly peaceful and non-dual. Note that this is an increasingly “subsumptive” hierarchy, that is, outward and transient multiplicity is unified and drawn (“subsumed”) into a more subtle state which in turn is subsumed into a higher state which finds its culmination in the most enduring one of increasingly expansive, unitive, blissful awareness. Subsumptive hierarchies of this kind are typical of Upanishadic method, and we have a prime example here.

Verses 8-12 show how the syllable Om is caught up in this subsumptive process; the letters A, U and M correspond to the first three states respectively, and the sound in its totality encapsulates the deepest reality, the Atman itself. But this whole experience is not just an inconsequential exercise in knowing: it makes a difference to the kinds of lives we live. Verses 8-12 also indicate that the knower of this process progressively integrated his/her being and achieves a unitive understanding of the multi-layered world, which results in positive (shiva) action. The lesson of the Upanishad thus purports to be both descriptive as well as benignly prescriptive: know, and in the process of knowing act constructively.

- Dr. Julius Lipner,
Faculty of Divinity
University of Cambridge

The Wasteland

2003-11-04T03:15:00.000-08:00

T. S. Eliot is the major creative writer of the 20th century English literature. He is a many-sided genius, expressing himself in poetry, drama, literary criticism and social criticism. His influence on younger writers like W.H. Auden, Stephen, Spender and Empson, has been enormous. Predecessors of Eliot like Georgian and Edwardian poets wrote about daydreams only. They could not grapple with the problems of modern civilisation in their poetry. On the other hand Eliot succeeded in expressing the complexities of modern life in his poems.

Eliot’s diagnosis of the modern sick society is at its best in the epoch-making poem – ‘The Waste Land’. The Waste Land is the most famous poem of the 20th century. As there could be no vegetation in a wasteland there is no sense of fulfillment in the modern world. In this modern world man-woman relationship has degenerated to the level of animality. Spiritual grace should come like rains and revive the moral life on this earth. This religious theme has inspired Eliot to write “The waste land”.

     The Waste Land is divided into 5 sections.
        1. The burial of the dead
        2. A game of chess
        3. The fire sermon
        4. Death by water
        5. What the thunder said.

In the first section the emptiness of modern life is described. In the 2nd part the ugliness of automatic sexuality is condemned. At the time of Spenser, lovers made dignified love on the river Thames. But in modern London anonymous lovemaking is carried on near the river Thames. This method of juxtaposition was learnt by Eliot from James Joyce. In the 3rd section religion is contemplated as an escape from the sordid materialistic civilisation of the 20th century. In the 4th section merchants without spirituality are shown as dying in the water. The final section suggests the redemption of mankind through spiritual discipline. Thus the wasteland is a comprehensive presentation of modern life.

When a land does not generate vegetative life, it is known as a wasteland. So also when a civilisation does not develop ‘spiritual graces’, it becomes a wasteland. In one sense Europe was such a wasteland where life is lived without a sense of purpose. Marie is a wastelander to whom, “April is the cruelest month”. To the pilgrims of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”, April was the fit time for pilgrimage but the wastelanders have no purpose in life. Nothing grows there. Barrenness is mourned by Tiresius in the first section of wasteland: ‘The burial of the dead’;

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?”

All the machines of technological civilsation are seen as mere rubbish by Eliot. The wastelanders have no true faith in god, but they seek to know their future from Madam Sosostris. London is therefore described as an ‘Unreal city’.

Tiresias meet Stetson and question him about the condition of the corpse, which he had buried.The burial of the corpse is related to the theme of the ancient Gods - Adonis and Osiris. After the death of these gods, they came back to life in resurrected glory. But to the wastelanders, neither life nor death was any means. The Death-in-life is caused by the mechanical sexuality of the scientific age. This theme of mechanical sexuality is elaborated in the second and third section of the poem wasteland: “A game of chess” and “The Fire Sermon”.

In the drama,” women beware women”, a seduction goes on while chess is being played down-stairs. Likewise, in Eliot’s poem, the Red –Carbundar, seduces the typist. A set of sordid lovers are found in “A game of chess”. A working class woman expects her husband who is a demobilized soldier. He would like to have a nice time with her. But her teeth are rotten. This woman named Lil is advised by her friend to get a set of new false teeth. The falsity of life is suggested by this incident.

Most of the wastelanders are burning in the fire of lust. Tiresius wants to escape from fire of lust, the poet recalls St. Augustin and Buddha. But there seems to be no escape from the painful condition of modern life who conceived of lust as fire. The desperate prayer to god, requesting him to save him from this fire is expressed in the lines:

“Burning burning burning burning
O Lord, there pluckest me out
O Lord, there pluckest
Burning”

This modern civilisation is similar to the phonecian culture. A phonecian wishing to earn money by trade was hovelling in a ship; but he was drowned in the sea and met ‘ Death by water’. A man without spiritual values ends like that. But in Egyptian and Greek culture trade was carried on for the sake of building temples. Heroic persons were ready to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the community. Those Heros went in search of the Grail, so that they could revive the potency of the ‘Fisher King’ and his country.

Thus journey is a symbol of spiritual effort. A few members of the wasteland also make a journey to the ‘Sacred wood’. In the Hindu ‘Brahadaranyaka Upanishad’ God, Human and Asura went to Prajapathi for guidance. That Supreme god spoke in Thunder-Da. That sound meant three different things to the three different species- Gods, Humans and Asuras. The Gods must control their desires and this is suggested by the injunction Damyatha (control). The human beings must give their possession to others and this is suggested by Datta (give). The Asuras must sympathise with the weaker beings and this is suggested by Dayadvam (Sympathy). If these orders were obeyed there would be ‘Shanthi’.

In this long poem Eliot has achieved a penetration of the mechanistic modern age, which is suitably given the title “The waste land”. Eliot’s enormous erudition and craftsmanship work together in this achievement. Post Eliot poets like W.H.Auden and Empson have learnt a great deal from this poem. Thus wasteland is a greatest poem of the 20th century.

Read the poem : The Wasteland

Tradition & Individual Talent

2003-10-20T22:56:00.000-07:00

It would be a good start if we try to understand Eliot by extracting ‘ideas’ from him. In this essay, Eliot looks back over the past of the European Civilisation and contemplates the kind of relation in which the young practitioner ought to read it in order to enable him to compose poetry with the rich consciousness of the past. The idea of tradition is related to his consciousness of the past. Of course tradition is not just remembering the past nor repeating it either. But it is a remembering from the past ‘that which is relevant to the present and rather it is feeling the present by remembering the everlasting in the past’. The consciousness of the present will be in a poor state of mind unless it is formed by the consciousness of the everlasting in the past. It may be but in the other way that you can’t know neither the past nor the present without having the relation between the eternal in the past and of the temporal in the present. The young practitioner must live for the sake of forming his mind and for the sake of continuing the tradition. To feel the point of contact between what he says and the past, he has to study the various minds of the poets who make up the literary achievements of the past, so that he may look at them as if he is looking into a living order of these achievements.

What the poet (young practitioner) says, becomes a point of view from which we find the past changed and it is also a point of view from the impact of the past on his sense of contemporaneity. A mind with such a consciousness of the relation between the past of the present and with a sense for the necessity underlining such a relation will of course be conscious of its own place. The practitioner in such a relation must know that the mind of the civilization to which he belongs is far more important than his own mind. It means, in the poet, an inwardness of the distinction of the mind of Europe and of its own country from its own private mind and hence according to Eliot of the priority of the former over the latter. The poet will then know what is important in the conversation to which he must surrender his own mind in the sense that the promptings of his private mind must be disregarded. This surrender of the valuable is termed as the “extinction of personality”. The two aspects of what Eliot calls ‘the impersonal theory of poetry’ are in the first place the relation of the past to the poet and in the second, the relation of the poet to his poem.

The poet’s mind is regarded as a medium in which the poem is composed which is a combination of experiences. A further explanation is that, the mind’s store of experiences goes through a period of ‘incubation’ before the poem of combination emerges.What must be noted here is the pressure under which the combination takes place. And this pressure is related to the poet’s consciousness of the past. So the mind, instead of being active, acts as a medium leaving to the pressure to bring the combination, which is the poem.

Poetry is made of emotions and feelings. Warning the poet of novelty- Eliot shows how the poet makes his own contribution using the common emotions ”the business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones, and in writing them up into poetry to express feelings which are not in actual, emotions at all”

The line of argument in this essay is that by relating himself to the past, the poet knows that the mind of Europe and of his own country is far more valuable than his own and that he must not use his mind to compose poetry out of his won personality but on the contrary, he must let the mind act as a medium in which experiences are fused into a poem. A poem thus produced will be a result of arduous discipline or feeling or knowing what is important. The condition for producing a poem is that of emancipation from the private emotion and personality. It must be seen “that under the impact of past on him. He will sense the insignificance of his private emotion and personality.”

There is a good deal of gesturing in the essay as to what kind of mind must one have in order to be a poet but, Eliot is reacting here, against facile composition and irresponsible poets and critics making claims for that which is obviously not only poetry but that which is “produced by minds with no sense of the poem’s relation to the civilization to which he belongs.”