The man in the mirror

Let us get dissatisfied. With the whole attempt at civilisation. Let us scowl at it, standing before the mirror, till our faces ache and ...

Let us get dissatisfied. With the whole attempt at civilisation. Let us scowl at it, standing before the mirror, till our faces ache and a pin-prick, a scalpel of light, probes through the darkness of human endeavour and teases something. Some memory, some pain, some doubt, some unaccounted feeling, and fills it up, makes it swollen, turgid. And then let8217;s resume: keeping this stimuli undisturbed, this balloon of feeling always lightly attached to the string of a routine, let us try to live as we have always done before.

After all, there shouldn8217;t be a problem. Self-fulfillment and self-abnegation, patterns of doing good and doing bad, die hard. The personalities we nurse can survive tempests, emotional or physical. We build a personality to survive, anyhow. So what happens if we force something unacknowledged, yet our own 8212; a virus 8212; in the culture? What will multiply: the identity or the microbe? And what happens if the incompatible force we have introduced is God?

Well, we have always known of theattempt. We have heard of mystics going wild, we have even looked at religious tomes and sometimes dared to read them, we have learnt of esoteric sects of Bacchus, of the Aghoris, of their divine but as yet untasted tastes, we have even sat at the feet of holy men, we have heard of the Buddha, we have known so much of religion and so much indirectly of God that it is difficult to distinguish the two.

Religion talks, and talks very sweetly sometimes, of possibility, of revelation, of great soothing. You don8217;t trust talk; you trust experience. A miracle isn8217;t a miracle unless it happens to you, though you are entitled to wonder. And if you have never seen a rose bloom, you are entitled to think there are no roses. It doesn8217;t matter if the neighbours have a garden full of them, you don8217;t.

Your neighbour can try to make you believe in roses and you can convert yourself to the great Roses-Are-For-Real cause, but you will never smell a rose. You can be a potted plant thinking you are a tree throughout life,but unless you move soil, pebble and boulder to become one, you will just be upholding your latest conversion, you will never find out. Therefore, all conversions are doomed. For you can8217;t get converted to faith; faith converts you. You don8217;t keep faith; faith keeps you.

This modern shelling out of personalities, of wrapping them around like a garment and then disposing them of, of eagerly embracing the latest dogma, the millennial truth or the 21st century dress, of jettisoning one relationship and flying to another, is an evasion of the fact of dissatisfaction, is a great show of No-Faith. The most easy thing to do in this world is to have no faith for animal, man or God. Then, all of them can be made disposable, they can serve their turns and be discarded; otherwise there are lots of strings attached.

It is at times like these, I think, that a hard look in the mirror is advisable. Is this a front? Has the polish worn off? Do we need to be groomed further? Is it me?

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Whatever the answers, a mirror is agreat motivator, the most lacerating of pin-pricks, a superb humorist. You begin looking and it starts caricaturising. The more you look, the more it depersonalises. And at the end of personality, there is identity. Different mirrors, of course, have been discovered. There are tales, there are satsangs, bhajans, prayers, there is meditation. All of these can be found in religion and used. But, the one thing that can8217;t be found in religion is religiosity, or faith, God, whatever you may call it. Be warned but: if you stare at a mirror long enough, you may end up smiling.