Myths and Legends (1/7) Introduction

There is a new tendency in the modern mind. It is to deconstruct thing. The logic of it is that by so doing they can find the truth behind it. That this itself is at best a myth and at worst is a superstition of the mind can be understood by the very fact that any amount of breakdown and analysis of each part cannot give us the sense that awakens within us when we view the whole object. This is true of a humble blade of grass, of the more daring Rose as much as of the galaxies and stars.

How much ever we may analyse the contents of an ocean, we will never be able to comprehend its vastness and delight and beauty and magnanimity unless we gaze at it, behold it with some inner intuitive eye and eventually dare to plunge into it. For in everything there are these two elements, the quantity and the quality. The quantity is something measurable and analyzable but the quality is something more subjective and intrinsic and not subject to analysis and measure. Of course, we can try to define a quality and to that extent make it something more objective rather than leaving it vague and merely a matter of the subjective impression it creates upon our inner being. But this effort to define, though necessary for a certain purpose of clarity for the intellectual mind, should not be considered as a substitute for the real experience that we get when we come into contact with the reality that the quality embodies. It is thus that we have to understand the total truth of things by a combination of the quantitative and the qualitative aspects.

Of course, there is a third truth also that stands behind these two but of that we need not speak now. Perhaps it cannot really be spoken. It is the truth of Consciousness that has assumed different quantities and qualities and is yet essentially the same everywhere. In fact, after we have deconstructed anything, the last barrier is of Consciousness. By its very nature we cannot deconstruct it. It is One and Infinite as the sages say. We can identify with it and understand something of it as reflected in our mental mirrors, provided the mirror itself is clean and the glass free of the stains of past conditioning.