The real malady of man is not outside but within him. This disease which is the source of all his errors, evil, conflicts and unease is called the “ego”. It manifests in various ways and can afflict different parts of our nature right from the body to the highest mind. Its most common underlying pathology is a ‘clinging’, an inability to ‘let go’. The result is an inability to move forward in harmony with the great universal rhythm of life. This clinging is out of fear of vastness, and a sense of security in the small. Just as men construct physical dwellings to house their bodies and then get attached and bound by it; we construct psychological houses by our thoughts, feelings, impulses, desires, etc. and get trapped and imprisoned in our own formations. This temporary shelter makes us feel secure and may be necessary in the infancy of our soul, yet must the adult soul know itself not as a child of nature but discover its own true identity. Then we no more confuse the dwelling with the householder or the robe with its wearer. The robe and the dwelling become then an instrument and means of our self-expression, a field of work and not a private property or a personal possession. If we learn to step out of the safe limits of the ego-formation, of the temporary structure created by nature, then the sun and the moon and the sky and stars, the earth and all that inhabits it become our companions and the vast becomes our natural home.
But we cling to our smallness. The result is narrowness and division and conflict and strife and meaningless conquests and absurd successes and failures. We become then pawns in a chess-board moved by cosmic forces, a plaything in the hands of Time’s lords. It is they who fight and win or loose; it is we who struggle and suffer and slay or are slain.
We cling to our littleness. The result is all kinds of phobias and grief that arise from the delusion of separateness, of the self and not-self. Groupism, partisanship, religionism, racism are all its attendant outer consequences.
We cling to people, situation, circumstances and events. The result is the stress of transient satisfactions punctuated with disappointment and frustration.
We cling to habits and patterns of living. The result is various lifestyle diseases and recurring and chronic maladies of body and mind.
We cling to our thoughts and ideas and opinions. The result is narrow-mindedness, a judgemental attitude, vanity, arrogance and ignorance. We believe we are free-thinkers but we do not realise how much we are bound by our own formations. The result is various isms and schools of thought warring and jarring with each other.
We cling to our feelings and sentiments and attachments. The result is the various emotional and social problems.
We cling to our greeds and desires and our passions. The result is temporary pleasures followed by much dissatisfactions, suffering and pain.
We cling to our hates, our jealousies and our lusts. The result is various forms of moral and psychological degradation, murderous instincts and depravity of tacte, an eventual sinking towards death.
We cling to what we presume to know and believe as true. The result is an ignorance that labours and strives but only manages to move in the same blind circle that returns back to its starting point.
We cling to our systems and techniques and methods. The result is an exclusive, one-sided formula that shuts us from the integrality of an infinite, many-sided truth.
We cling to our past and therefore grow old. We cling to our present and are therefore stuck up and unable to move. We cling to life as it is now and therefore we have to meet death and rebirth in the course of the journeying rounds of life.
We cling to our experiences and therefore get locked in the spiritual ego’s bright and brilliant shell. We cling to our path and our doings and non-doings and thereby shut the doors to an illimitable Grace.
How shall then we be free? Where shall we then find the true remedy for the malaise called ‘ego’ that source of all other diseases?
Not by the body’s self that itself clings to its habits and patterns for stability of existence.
Not by the ever-changing self of life that constantly shifts but finding no certain ground moves ever and ever in the same grooves built by the energies and patterns of its past movements.
Not by the mind that is the very source of all division and which by its nature creates and hugs the bonds it creates. It can push the limits as it must but cannot set the soul free. It can make the limits more tolerable and less rigid but still we remain bound in the small or the big box to an endless chain of determinism, cause and effect, time and space.
Only the inconceivable Truth beyond mind can set us free. To That we must turn and seek leaving behind all our neat constructions of the mind and thoughts.
Only the infinite Love and the illimitable Grace can set us free. That we must implore and invoke, Only the supreme Will can set us free. To That we must offer and surrender ourselves. For, the deepest wisdom is to know this that Truth cures, Grace cures, Love cures, supreme Will cures. And these are not separate truths but one. It is the Divine who cures.
But this cure, even when it appears instantaneous, is not a fanciful magic. He cures by setting the truth within us free. He cures by liberating us from our own mind-traps and life-grooves and body-habits and subconscient memories, – in short the fixed formations and rigid patterns that repeat themselves inflexibly and are the source of all our maladies. He cures by liberating us from the knots of the ego. But the ego-self doesn’t like it and shrinks and resists. It repels the touch of Truth, it closes its doors to Grace, it resists the action of the supreme Will, it doubts the savior hands of Love.
Therefore systems and techniques and methods multiply, therefore also hospitals and doctors and diseases multiply. Therefore do problems and half-way solutions multiply. Therefore we move endlessly in circles and grooves predetermined by the habits of the past. Therefore man struggles with the burden of his fate.
Yet there is hope. For in the wake of a new dawn there rises a great wave of consciousness like a force or a thunderbolt from God. It comes to demolish all our limits to which we cling. It comes to remove the scaffoldings of our ego and set the truth within us free from all trappings and formulas. It comes to cure us radically of all our error, imperfection, disease and distress.
Would we open to this new consciousness and give ourselves to it with joy and love? Or would we resist and revolt, doubt and distrust, hide and hold to our smallness? This is the question that each individual and group has to answer. And upon its answer hangs the balance of its destiny.
Alok Pandey
