Reflections on Navaratri, night one
Colour: white
White, the colour of purity, of satva Guna/ideal character. The clarity that the sky’s endless expanse gives. But whence comes this purity and clarity? The orthodox texts talk of sifting and separating. They warn us of impurities, of temptations and tempt us with eternal cleanliness. But in life, is there even such a thing as eternal purity, eternal clarity? Hell, one can’t even find momentary purity or clarity. That spotless white kurta — it comes from dumping effluents into our ponds and rivers. That momentary clarity of a japam seats itself on millenia of exclusion and oppression.
So what is indeed white, pure, and clear? The great egret standing in the muck of a pond sifts its food from the muck with diligence. Is that purity? Clarity? Picking out what is good from an expanse of muck? Is there food for the egret without the muck? Is there purity or clarity without filth and confusion?
The great egret stands in endless muck sifting with its beak even as the legs wade deeper into the muck. And in the muck is its reflection pure and clear, a violent gash of white against the serene brown.
Tonight is that violent gash and that serene brown. Tonight the goddess is a confused slash of white cutting through the pristine muck of life. Tonight let us merge our malformed white ideas of purity, clarity, bhakti, and mukti with the muck of the messy muddled goddess.
Inspired by these lines from The religion of man, by Tagore.
In India, there are those whose endeavor is to merge completely their personal self in an impersonal entity which is without quality of definition; to reach a condition wherein the mind becomes perfectly blank, losing all its activities. Those who claim the right to speak about it say that this is the purest state of consciousness, it is all joy and without any object or content. This is considered to be the ultimate end of Yoga, the cult of union, thus completely to identify one's being with the infinite Being who is beyond all thoughts and words. Such realisation of transcendental consciousness accompanied by perfect sense of bliss is a time-honoured tradition in our country, carrying in it the positive evidence which cannot be denied by any negative argument of refutation. Without disputing its truth I maintain that it may be valuable as a psychological experience but all the same it is not religion, even as the knowledge of the ultimate state of the atom is of no use to the artist who deals in images in which atoms have taken forms. A certain condition of vacuum is needed for studying things in their original purity, and the same may be said of the human spirit; but the original state is not necessarily the perfect state.
