Shuddhaanandaa Brahmachari
Why will you celebrate Holi? Is it just another chance for mundane, superficial, ‘unconscious fun’, lacking in its true spirit of pure, unadulterated, limitless joy? Is it going to be just another excuse for a break from routine life? Or is it going to be a celebration of our true Nature?
Whether this festival of colours is going to superficially colour your skin for just a few hours of a day in a year, or whether it shall leave an everlasting colour in your soul, depends on how AWARE, AWAKE and AVAILABLE you are to the PURPOSE of this most vibrant, mirthful celebration! Happyho also provide best Meditation classes and yoga classes in Noida and Delhi NCR India area.
We all celebrated the Maha Shivaratri barely a few days ago, and now yet another festivity! India is the land of festivities, for it’s religious, spiritual and cultural heritage is timeless. Each festivity comes with its outer and inner significance. They come again and again for the purpose is to connect us back to our prisitine natural state of pure happiness. Let us do a little deeper heart searching on the very purpose of these two festivities which bring millions around the world to the core of man’s search for unlimited happiness and bliss.
Why not take a comparison between these two very different festivities. Shiva is the embodiment of dispassionate witness of creation and its mayic sustenance. He is the sky, infinite, unmanifest, as opposed to his symbolic counterpart-the divine Feminine, who is the embodiment of the manifest in form of Mahashakti or Mother Nature in Her tangible infinitude.
Shiva-Shakti uphold the spirit of Yoga or meditative contemplation, which is celebrated with the sole aim of reminding the jiva (individualised self), that he is Shiva Himself. It reminds us of our eternal existence yet merged into the confined borders of mind and body as the tangible manifestation of Divine Mother. We meditate on our eternal self as not separate from the one Consciousness which permeates every universal pore, and we assert that “I” am not my body, my mind, my sense preceptors, nor am I sin or virtue, neither I am born, nor will I ever die, for I am eternal, ever blissful ‘pure consciousness’- the detached, passive, unaffected witness of all my worldly drama of the manifest kind. When the Shiva in jiva awakens, Buddha happens.
But Krishna? He cuts a sharp contrast to the eternal Yogi. He is playful, he is mischievous, he is the charmer of every soul. He is innocence. He is the embodiment of divine, unconditional love. He embodies the aspects of devotion and surrender in his form of oneness with Radha-who again is symbolic of divine Feminine. While we celebrated Maha Shivaratri by bathing a piece of stone with the paanchamrit (five nectars) namely- honey, milk, curd, ghee, and sugar, we shall celebrate Holi by bathing not a stone, but one another with many colours. By doing so, we remind ourselves, that even a piece of stone embodies pure consciousness, provided we bathe it with the nectarine sweetness of devotional love. If a mere, apparently dead stone can be charged with cosmic vibrations through our minds and hearts, how can it be that our individual states of consciousness, which are at this moment no better than a stone in its self-forgetful unconscious state, not be transformed into self-effulgent diamonds, if we can repeatedly bathe it with positive vibrations of the goodness of love?
Holi is no different than Mahashivratri in its very essence of imposing the eternal vibrations of love on not a stone, but upon the physical bodies of each other. Just as the stone is transmuted into a powerful crux of spiritual vibrations, the slumbering state of our minds and hearts, ridden in selfishness of mundane world, is, for a moment, merged into the real eternal self of pure bliss. We are reminded of our true nature- unbiased love for one and all, forgetting the limiting bounds of rich and poor, old and young, white and black. In that moment of bathing each other with colours, we become one in our appearance, just as we all are one in the colour of our souls.
The soul is ever pure, ever free and ever in bliss. The soul is colorless, yet all colors emanate from it that brings the festivities and celebrations to life. In Holi, even the gross, superficial form is smothered in the colourless color of pure love that is our intrinsic nature of spirit soul- reminding us to be awakened to our true nature. Thus the celebration of color which is a gone global now, needs to be seen with a bit of more insight than be just a day’s festivity and forgotten for a year. It has to be a great festivity of coloring one another with the color of pure love and boundless joy. It has to transcend all religious dogmas and become the festival of human spirits that is beyond religions. It has to unite us all irrespective of color and creed. Let the color of Holi color our souls with the magnitude of spiritual unity. May peace prevail on earth and bring blessedness to one and all.
While the meditative silence characterises the worship of Shiva, exhilarating joy and playfulness characterise Holi. Silence and joy- these are the two characteristics of the eternal spirit within us, that these two festivals embody.
So, this Holi, we shall play, we shall laugh uncontrollably. We shall all become the milkmaids and cowboys of the eternal land of Gokul forgetting all pains and worries of the mundane, unreal world and dance and live our true colours by celebrating our true nature. We shall smear colours of love, love and love, boundless love, eternal love- for the one, eternal Beloved, in each one of us!
HOLI HAI! HAPPY HOLI!
