A PARALYSED STATE OF MIND

The arrest of the Kanchi Kamakoti Mutt Seer Sri Jayendra Saraswathi has made me perplexed. My conscience is forcing me to write a post on the event and the person himself, who definitely is not among my list of enlightened spiritual leaders. But my respect for the institution, Kanchi Kamakoti Mutt, and the highly respected and worshipped spiritual leaders it had earlier produced, is preventing me from making any utterances that would amount to demeaning the institution.

Caught between my conscience and respect for spiritualism, my mind is not able to move forward and come out of this inertia. May be I should listen to my conscience and write with its guidance, with due respect to my spiritual feelings.

In my efforts to come out of this state of confusion, I decided to stay on a semi-fast yesterday, being the Skanda Shasthi day, living on couple of fruits and milk. It was quite hard as I had to carry out my office duties also but it was quite an experience and made me realize a lot of things, some of which I am listing below :

1) Even one day without salt, vegetables and cooked food made it quite difficult to pass through and irritating at times when my colleagues were munching away mouth watering snacks in front of me. I could well imagine the state of mind of the millions of poor people in our country who live this way for most part of their lives and it is not at all surprising that some of them indulge in heinous crimes in their effort to eliminate their hunger which later becomes a handy profession for them to survive and flourish.

2) My father is a diabetic and also suffers from hypertension. He has been advised to have food without sugar or salt. He looks a very dejected man now despite having everything else in life. Only now I could understand his predicament, that even if you have everything else at your disposal in life, if you are not able to have proper food of your choice, you still feel like a very poor man. It is not the heart but it is the tongue that is the lifeline of a person. You survive with your heart but live only when your tongue is happy.

3) I also read a book where it was written that if you continuously live on food without spices, salt and oil, you tend to become less sensitive, less emotional, more calm and lose all desires. This is so because it is food that is the prime requirement of every living being and tasty food is what drives each of us crazy. The less taste you bring on your food, the less will be your consumption and so without spices, salt and oil in your food, you will tend to consume only the minimum for survival. So if one is able to live on this tasteless and saintly food, thereby consumes only the basic nourishment required to survive, he will lose all other desires in life and that is the point where you turn truly spiritual, where you look beyond yourself and have space in your mind to seek God and see God in everything, everywhere, in every action and every happening.

As everything seems to begin and end with food, I felt it really important to analyse the food habits of the so-called spiritual leaders in our country, including the Shankaracharya of Kanchi, to check whether they have really overcome all their desires for material achievements and reached a state of mind for pure spirituality.

I AM ALREADY FEELING HUNGRY.