Mother’s Laughter
The Great Mother smiles at our weaknesses and our
fealties. Indulgently helps us when we fall in our blind, unconscious or
conscious struggle to be free. She even plays tricks and pokes fun at us in her
ever-mischievous ways. But there are times when She laughs at us - times when
we are blind with our pride and the pomp of our passions. It is a deep roaring
laughter at our ignorance of our limitedness. We know for sure from Sri
Ramakrishna that She laughs at least on two circumstances.
In the simple and clear words of Sri Ramakrishna “God laughs on two occasions.
She laughs when the physician says to the patient’s mother ‘Don’t be afraid,
mother I shall certainly cure your boy’. God laughs, saying to herself, ‘I am
going to take his life, and this man says he will save it!’. The physician
thinks he is the master, forgetting that God is the master. God laughs again
when two brothers divide their land with a string, saying to each other ‘This
side is mine and that side is yours’. She laughs and says to Herself, the whole
universe belongs to Me, but they say they own this portion or that portion.”1
Ramkrishna had stressed this atleast twice, in the
Gospel. Once on his visit to Vidyasagar on 5th August 1882 while
discussing the bondage of me and mine. And again during his last visit to
Keshab Sen on 28th November
1883, he had said this to Keshab’s mother, after asking her to pray to the
Divine Mother - the bestower of all bliss, when she had tearfully asked him to
bless Keshab that he might be cured of his illness.
The first occasion is when we institutionalize me
and mine and second is when we are all at some point or other confronted with
the inevitability of death.
Medical practice and Spiritual pursuit
“Mother, Thou workest Thine own work; men only call
it theirs.” – Sri Ramakrishna
There is a principle of
indeterminacy involved in the relation between medicinal science and the
phenomenon of disease and death. It is the acceptance of powerlessness in front
of God’s playfulness. Howsoever confident one is with the knowledge of
medicine, there remains an element of randomness. Perhaps medical science awaits its Heisenberg and his Uncertainty
principle! Saints say one should always
remember the inevitability of death, which makes one realize the transitoriness
of this world and its pleasure, pains and sorrows.
Philosophers of Science of
various ages down to our own times have had tried to develop a criterion to
demarcate science from non-science. For many this problem of demarcation is one
of the most fundamental problems of the theory of scientific knowledge. Karl R.
Popper one of the most important philosopher of science of the 20th
century found it very difficult to keep Medical Science on the side of science
using his own rigorous criterion of demarcation. Neither is Popper alone nor is
he the last who reached the same conclusion. In spite of the immense growth in
medical knowledge it is perhaps the element of Mother’s laughter that has
brought unpredictability in the whole process of cure.
Mother’s laughter perhaps is
more mysterious and a bit deeper. For instance, we may choose to consider the
mortality rate among Christian Scientists who do not accept artificial medical
help and only wish to be healed by God. The interesting thing is that their
mortality rate is not perceptibly higher.2
The body is much more than a
machine. Vedanta posits that it is
divinity expressing itself through this
body-mind complex. Mother plays with this cage of flesh, expressing herself in
degrees. These are manifold expressions of the all inclusive subject in its
quest to realize its own free and blissfull nature. It has the sacredness of a
temple and more - it is ‘the Taj Mahal of temples’. It is the best temple there
is.
The ills plaguing medical
practice and hospitals are perhaps solely due to the pervasive objectification
of the human body. The sacred is
categorized as profane and more – as so many commodities in the market.
Reverential love is displaced by arrogant instrumentality. Hospitals have turned
into huge wealth producing machines, depersonalized and even dehumanized -
“ivory towers of disease”. Investments flow in and wealth is accrued at the
expense of the ill, helpless and the suffering. On one side iatrogenic
maladies, drug induced or doctor induced sickness arising due to medical
intervention, multiply; and on the other the underprivileged, not affording
medical treatment, learn to live with hopelessness.
Sri Ramakrishna has set an
ideal for medical practitioners, “the physician is undoubtedly a noble man if
he treats his patient free, out of compassion and moved by their suffering.
Then his work may be called very uplifting. But a physician becomes cruel and
callous if he carries on his profession for money. …. like the business man carrying
on his trade.” Humanity needs to attempt
at approximating this ideal.
The warning of Mother’s
laughter and tenets of Vedanta together warrants a reverential and worshipful
attitude towards the ill and ailing. It all requires an attitudinal correction
- an attitude of reverence, worship and service. Nobody can deny the hugely
beneficent role of medicine, but this attitudinal correction can transform
hospital into centers of service and physicians into seekers of spiritual
truth. It would internalize both the sole active agency of God and the
accumulated store of medicinal knowledge. It is the acknowledgment of our
limitedness and tentativeness of our knowledge inspite of our immense edifice
of medical science.
Exemplifiers
The Vedantic tradition has
many a time presented personified ideals of enlightenment through service -
Swamis Kalyananda, Nischayananda, Subhananda, Achalananda and many others. One
such who passed away some years back was Ban Baba. Swami Muktananda,
endearingly called Ban Bihari Maharaj, did dressings of the patients,
considering them as Gods, for more than sixty years in the Ramakrishna Mission
Sevashrama at Varanasi
Ban Baba would reverentially
dress and heal ‘roadside’ patient with multiple putrid wound kept in isolation
ward or wounded mad patient or any ‘narayanas’ (Gods) that were admitted in the
Sevashram. In later years, when his legs had become stiff due to standing for
long hours continuously every day for more than sixty years, he would go to the
dressing room on a specially designed wheel chair to do the dressings. The
dressing room had turned him into a saint. 3
The road of Ban Baba is the path
to sainthood, where we can all laugh with Mother. Or else Mother laughs at us
and our arrogant ignorance.
Me and Mine – a wicked delusion
‘I’ and ‘mine’ - these
constitute ignorance. ‘My house’, ‘my wealth’, ‘my learning’, ‘my possessions’
- the attitude that prompts one to say such things comes of ignorance.” – Sri
Ramakrishna
When we look at ourselves we
discern so many walls that we have constructed around ourselves. The walls that
separates our ‘I’ from others. The separateness encompasses biological
human/animal, man/ woman, and social like family, language, colour, caste,
city, country, religion and so many others. All these walls constrict and intern.
These are fetters that bind down our spiritual self. We hold ourselves free but
are driven like slaves, slaves to our senses, our property, our family, our
religion, our country and so on.
All our toil, pains and
tears are for realizing more and more freedom. And struggle we must - for
freedom is the song of the soul. Our infinite nature cannot be satisfied with
finite things. In our own ways and means we are searching for freedom -
material, mental and spiritual. Vedanta
posits that ultimate freedom can be realized only when we realize a union with
our transcendental Self - beyond our little egos and our body-mind. Our real nature is the oneness of Existence
absolute - knowledge absolute and bliss absolute. The realized souls have
asserted time and again that this oneness is just not an intellectual construct
- it can be experientially realized, it has been realized and there are methods
for its realization.
Each person has a unique
station in the spiritual journey to seek the universal, our real individuality.
Each is a unique ray to the infinite center working its way through work,
worship, psychic control or philosophy or one or more of all these. The
greatest obstacle is realizing our true nature is this tenacious clinging to
our ego our little ‘me and mine’. Renunciation of ‘me and mine’ is the
sin-qua-non of realizing freedom and bliss. One has to renounce the animal for
the human and human for the divine. The animal snatches, the human gives and
takes, and the divine unconditionally gives. One travels from instinct to
reason to inspiration.
Philosophically, whether
dualist or qualified monist or monist in all cases the renunciation of lower
nature to be one with one’s ideal is a commonality. To see one’s ideal
everywhere is the end. This oneness is perhaps the only rational explanation of
selflessness, which we all cherish, and are inspired by. When “in me all me's I have; I
cannot hate, I cannot shun, Myself from
me, I can but love.” Loving thy neighbor
as thyself has a rational basis.
The bonds of the transient
world are the cause of our miseries. Our “I” and “mine” is the principle which
forges the chains and keeps us bound. The apparent individuality forming our
egos are akin the ephemeral eddies in an onrushing stream. In the words of Vivekananda
“Our bodies are small little whirlpools in one unbroken ocean of matter. So are
our minds and spirit. Just as a rushing stream there may be millions of
whirlpools, the water in each of which is different every moment, turning round
and round for a few seconds, and then passing out, replaced by a fresh
quantity, so the whole universe is one constantly changing mass of matter, in
which all forms of existence are so many
whirlpools. A mass of matter enters into one whirlpool, say a human body, stays
there for a period, becomes changed, and goes out into another, say an animal
body this time, from which again after few years, it enters into another
whirlpool, called a lump of mineral. It is constant change. (CW v. 1, p.
150-151)
“This mind is a part of the
universal mind. Each mind is connected with every other mind. And each mind,
wherever it is located, is in actual communication with the whole world. (CW,
v.2, p.13)
“The world is one, it is one
physically, mentally and in consciousness.
.. It is sort of tapering existence; the thickest part is here, it
tapers and becomes finer and finer. The finest is what we call spirit; the
grossest the body. (CW, v.2, p.16)
“This is one great theme of
the Vedanta, this Oneness of life, this oneness of everything. … it
demonstrates that all our misery comes through ignorance, and this ignorance is
the obsession with manifoldness, the separation between man and man, between
nation and nation, between earth and moon, between moon and sun. Out of this
idea of separation comes all misery. But, the Vedanta says, this separation,
does not exist, it is not real. It is merely apparent, the limitations imposed
by the five instruments of knowledge man is bound with - the five sensory
organs. In the heart of things, there is Unity still. And that Unity is God.”
(CW, v.2, p. 153)
We know today that many
scientists and scientific writers are converging to this oneness. Scientist
term it is as ‘unbroken wholeness’ or ‘implicate nature’ or ‘Universe is one
individual’ or ‘Atman = Brahma postulate’. Many scientists toy with the idea
that though the sensory world appears to be diverse and distinct, the fine
perhaps is mere forms in a continuum of space and time.
This oneness has manifested
itself throughout human civilization, in bits and spurts, in thought, word and
deed. It is more so perhaps in the present than ever before. Vivekananda had
prophetically asserted more than a century ago
“The problem of life is becoming deeper and broader every day as the
world moves on. ……. One atom in this universe cannot move without dragging the
whole world along with it. There cannot be any progress without the whole world
following in the wake, and it is becoming every day clearer that the solution
of any problem can never be attained on racial, or national, or narrow grounds.
Every idea has to become broad till it covers the whole of this world, every
aspiration must go on increasing till it has engulfed the whole of humanity,
nay, the whole of life, within its scope.” (CW, v.3, p.269)
This impersonal,
non-sectarian boundlessness is to Vivekananda a grand foundation of global
spiritual fraternity - “If there is ever to be universal religion, it must be
one which will have no location in place and time; … It will be a religion
which will have no place for persecution or intolerance in its polity, which
will recognize divinity in every man and woman, and whose whole scope, whose
whole force, will be centred in aiding humanity to realize its own true divine
nature.” (CW, v.1, p.19)
The Alternatives
The greatest of
possibilities beckons us and ironically at a time when the most devastating
conflagration chase us. The greatest of
expansion of human spirit is possible when the most virulent hatreds are
contracting the human heart.
Life itself is a struggle of
the free being to express itself under circumstances that tries to press it
down. Jumping out of the little selves is the road to freedom, all the snares
of our little selves, our attachments, hatred, jealousies, selfishness are the
road to slavery and bondage. Slaves to our lower nature - we continuously throw
ropes around ourselves and designate them me and mine. Only slaves injure and
kill and oppress. The free love and help and serve without distinction.
Expansion is life and contraction is death. The ‘I’ does not go so easy. Saints
say the best way is to keep the ‘I’ as servant of God or to reverential serve
the deified world.
In our ignorance we
sometimes idolize and institutionalize the differences and boundaries and in
our conceit and arrogance we fight and kill over them. The more we create and
sanctify borders and boundaries the more we are forging fetters that bind us
down. Denial of the oneness of the universe results in the movement of
civilization ‘red in tooth and claw’. As a phenomenon humanity, or the
universe, is manifold and diverse, but in essence it is one. Unity in Diversity
is the plan of nature. Today’s world perhaps is more than ever in need of this
gestalt switch of diversity and unity.
In Jayramabati at the end of
December 1918, in front of the Holy Mother, Sri Sarada Devi, her two brothers
started having a heated altercation regarding a fencing put up by one to
demarcate the boundary of his part of the family land. A scuffle was about to
ensue and the Mother rushed to pacify them. Her intervention stopped them from
coming to blows. Nevertheless she could not stop them from exchanging hot
words. The monks came to her rescue, and the brothers walked away cursing each
other. The Mother was excited but the very next moment she burst into a fit of
laughter that lasted pretty long and she said ‘What a maya (magic/delusion) is
this of the Mahamaya (Conjuror)! There stretches the infinite earth, and these
possessions, too, will be left behind. Can’t man understand this simple fact ? 4
Man has yet not internalized this simple fact. And today we hear her
laughter all around much more than perhaps ever before. Ramakrishna’s two
instances of the Mother’s laughter manifests today in multiple forms. The
present is a violent, ferocious and barbaric dance of tortured humanity around
‘me’ and ‘mine’ and of ‘we’ and ‘they’.
We hear her laughter ring and reverberate through the corridors of hospitals
that look like five star hotels, around the helpless stares of the poor in
front of dazzling dispensaries for the rich and the powerful, through the
electrified barbed wire fences and the mine fields, over the spiked boundary
walls, through the fortress like colonies enclosing out the ghettos and the
homeless, around the armed gendarmes and soldiers facing each other on the
political boundaries, and around all the tussles and violence of our egos and
identities - individual, social, cultural, national and religious. Or perhaps
She laughs with ecstasy at humanity’s arrogant desire to fragment the whole.
For possibly through this tumult humanity, at its own peril, will understand
the ‘simple fact’ of oneness of the universe and the Mother’s eternal play. It was perhaps truly said She has rapture for
torture and passion and pain and delights in our sorrow and drives us to
weeping and lures with her joy and beauty again.
The gentle way of
transcending the barriers of the other and me, is Sarada Devi’s final
benediction “If you want peace, don’t find fault with others, but find fault
rather with yourself. Learn to make the
world your own. Nobody is a stranger, my dear; the world is yours.” This applies of course if one desires peace.
And the Nazarene has promised that blessed are the peace makers for they shall
be called the children of God. From the tranquil beatitude in the depths of
this wholeness of God we can sing with Swami Vivekananda:
They know not truth who
dream such vacant dreams
as father, mother, children,
wife or friend.
The sexless self whose
father he whose child,
whose friend whose foe is he
who is but one,
the self is all in all and none else exist,
and thou art that, sannyasin
bold, say Om Tat Sat Om.
1. Swami Nikhilananda's
traslation of Kathamrita uses the masculine gendre for God in this quote but
from the bengali original the traslation can as well be feminine.
2. For and Against Method,
Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerbend, p. 26, University of Chicago Press, 1999.
3. Much of the material on
Swami Muktananda is from “Health, Medicine and Religion” by Swami Brahmeshananda,
Sri Ramakrishna Math, Mylapore, 2004.
4. ‘Holy Mother Sri Sarada
Devi’ by Swami Gambhirananda, p 308-309. Sri Ramakrishna Math, Mylapore, 2001
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