No Pix from Day 6

Today, I am staying at my hotel. I don’t spend a lot of time with people any more. The Day 4 festivities, with the Baby Krishna reenactment, were followed, on Day 5, by four other neighbor kids dressing up as later versions of a Krishna as a youthful man, his wife Radha, and two other characters. It was again very joyful, lots of music and dancing, and crushing of crowds. So these images are all from yesterday, or earlier.

The rituals are powerful though. On the 4th day, or was it the 5th, after the morning puja, I went to personally greet the image of my mother. Suddenly, it appeared that she was there. Her face seemed three dimensional. She seemed to be watching me, smiling. I have had this experience before in India. When at the Swami Narayan Temple (BAPS) in Delhi, in 2009, the eyes of the 4th Guru, the main founder of today’s movement, seemed to follow me as I passed his bust. Skillful sculpting? I don’t know. Later, all of the photos of the deceased who were on the “altar” of holy cow dung covered bricks seemed to be alive to me, with the possible exception of the one photo that was really old and faded and off to the side. But some of the other photos were almost as badly faded. Maybe this uncle has already reincarnated, and his spirit is not available for this event.

The power of the rituals must somehow be associated with the overall liveliness of the Indian people. A lot of effort goes into clothing. It’s so amazing to see people dressed in so many ways, from traditional to western to some mix of odd styles that constantly surprises me. But here is another beautiful sari, just because.

I was told that the “main priest” would be reading from the Gita, and offering commentary. My Hindi is limited and my Sanskrit even more so, but as I read along in my English translation, the word husband occurs NOT ONCE. In fact, there is only one mention of family members, and it’s an exhortation from Krishna to Arjuna NOT to be attached to his wife or son. Yet the word that kept coming to me in the long Hindi passages was PATI. Which is husband. Eventually I became very suspicious that the speech of the priest had ANYTHING to do with the highest spiritual message of the Gita. Which is that our true essence is not the part of us that is carrying out our daily activities. Our true essence can do nothing at all but witness the universe. There is, as I noted in yesterday’s post, an exhortation to duty, repeated and repeated, but never one word about a wife’s duty to her husband.

My French friend later confirmed that they are actually not reading from the Gita at all.

The whole thing is a circus of storytelling. Of course. Because the Gita basically says clearly and repeatedly that the people who carry out the old Vedic rituals have much lower merit than those who devotedly love Krishna as they go about their daily duties maintaining society. No. That would never do for the priests to read the real Gita to the simple, religious people. It could destroy their livelihoods.

The message of the Gita is to renounce caring whether you experience pleasure or pain, and simply abide as the one witnessing the experience. By ending one’s identification with the body and the sensory pleasures and pains it attracts, one eventually merges with the eternal, all powerful Source. It’s an inward path. Has nothing to do with hiring a band of pandits to do rituals.

But Shush. The Catholic priests for many years prevented believers from reading the Bible on their own, and I argue with a Protestant friend whenever I have the strength that he would behoove himself to make his own interpretations from his studies, instead of repeating the supposed experts’. While the Israelites, the people of THE BOOK, were encouraged to become literate and read their holy texts for themselves, the mystical traditions that teach how to merge with God have also been kept hidden from all but men over 40 who are deemed worthy.

And obviously, Hindus, Christians and Jews are not the only ones who have two religions under the same name. One that is for the people who in my Knomo Choicius novel would really like the Free Thought Church, where one is freed from the burden of having to think. And the other, the hidden tradition, is for those who have eyes to see, ears to hear, heart and feet to seek.

It is likely that my realization that the whole afternoon series of supposedly Gita inspired events is a facade for the opposite teachings was a factor in my need to stay in my hotel room today, and be an American on a spiritual path, taking a vacation from my “vacation”!