Kabir was a mysitc poet who lived in India in the 15th century. He tried to untie people of Hindu, Islamic, Sufi, and other religions together, believing that the unity of a single God that was at the base of all these religions. He was critical of both the Hinduism and Islam and their isolation from others (these were the main religions he tried to unite and that were prevalent in India in his time). He also believed in a more personal spiritual path to understand and feel the Divine for oneself, something that is in everyone and the world. It is a sort of pantheism that connects everything and everyone together.
Here is a quote from one the poems:
From Songs of Kabir (~mid 1400s, translated by Rabindranath Tagore):
"The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it:
The moon is within me, and so is the sun.
The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it.
So long as man clamours for the I and the Mine, his works are as naught:
When all love of the I and the Mine is dead, then the work of the Lord is done.
For work has no other aim than the getting of knowledge:
When that comes, the work is put away.
The flower blooms for the fruit: when the fruit comes, the flower withers."
So too is the sun within us, the giver of light and life. The principles of male and female are also represented by the sun and moon, and these qualities are within us all. And the "unstruck drum of Eternity" seems to me to be the One, the Tao, Brahman (or Aristotle's "unmoved mover"!), the one being that is the world and also beyond it. This is more panentheism rather than pantheism: pantheism is that God is the world, but panentheism is that the world is in God but that God is also greater than the world.
The next part about the "I" and "Mine" has a distinctively Buddhist flavour. If we continue to think of things as distinct from us, then we will either be in a state of lack or wealth with respect to them. We will "have" the American Girl doll, or we will not have it. And if we don't "have" it, we will (presumably) suffer. Instead, we must learn to see it not as something to gain or lose, but a part of the universe that we are already at one with. We don't need to have things for ourselves, we don't need to possess the world, possess other countries, or other planets and solar systems even! It's not about owning, because anything we own can be taken away. And anything that can be taken away from us has some control over us: we will always be striving to protect our things and strive to get more and more (e.g. "don't touch my American Girl doll!", "I will put it under lock and key!"). And isn't that what so much of our life is focused on in our society? Getting money, getting a car, getting a house, getting an American Girl doll...and even for those who want to gain knowledge, it's about "getting" the best book to do so. With this mindset, we will always be 'clamouring' to get this and that, instead of focusing on what is important.
And what is important, then? Here, it seems that Kabir is saying that the pursuit of knowledge and truth is, and I would agree with him. And based on what he's written elsewhere, I would add that this gaining of the truth is to experience the oneness of the universe and our unity with it. God is the universe, and so to know God, we must experience him through out lives and perceptions, not only grasping him in thought. It is to love the world in its entirety, which might be achieved by the realization (through learning or direct experience) of how we are connection to everything in the universe. This isn't just mysticism, but has correspondences to physics as well, such as the entanglement of particles and the equivalence of mass and energy (see The Tao of Physics, in particular).And so we must go beyond seeing the world as opposites and separate beings to perceive what underlies it all. Perk your mind and ears to hear that unstruck drum of Eternity...
Tweet
0 comments:
Post a Comment