WITHERED DAISIES
AND SHRUNKEN MEADOWS
A few years ago there was a news item that interested me. It was about a young widow who wanted to marry a person of her choice and come out of social widowhood. But the unfortunate woman was prevented and shunned by the conservative society.
As widow marriages are still treated as a sin in certain communities, this woman, defying the humiliation and social boycott, got her marriage performed in Gopinath Mandir in the famed Vrindavan. This piece of news prompted the present write up.
The Vrindavan on the banks of river Yamuna where Lord Krishna grew up as per mythology is a place where superstition inspired ignorance backdated the time period. Widows of all sorts come here to pine for deliverance waiting in the frame of life. A retrograde situation in encumbrance and a cruel gender social distancing. Dissipating the life energies in a nebulous wait for an unknown firmament is a pathetic scenario.
I happened to visit this town and felt uncomfortable at the self-defeating and self-condemning mindset of these women who live on the benevolence of visitors and donors who make contributions more under demand. The temple surroundings as they appeared to me were far from being spiritual. It was an arrangement more for the survival of the residents than can be beneficial and sacrosanct to the real seekers of truth.
The essence of the scriptures if rightly understood can never make one self-disruptive. It is the society that contrived the philosophy, not God. What you think, you become. Human timidity is exploited by the religious masqueraders on the pretext of deliverance. Self realisation is a far cry and unlikely for ordinary mortals. What use in wailing. In reality no Heaven awaits us.
Such an atmosphere sickens human consciousness. It is a sin to call ourselves weak. If you think you are weak you become weak. Swami Vivekananda was for human spiritual dignity and individual strength. No matter who presides over your inspiration.
This place has many temples and more rogue simians. They keep jumping around to the amusement of the visitors and suddenly pounce on them to steal their spectacles particularly. If you are spectacled you may lose them. If not, you lose your verve.
The prank of the monkeys to target the opticals is a hint as I inferred, that INNER VISION is more important than mere visits to temples.
We fail to realize the inner meaning
and flock to every place in search of God.
If God given life is wasted no God can be found outside life.
God or no God, expansion is life and contraction is death.
ESKAYEN
