The Other

Ever since the recent heinous gang rape in Delhi and its aftermath, I have been thinking.

I have been thinking of what causes such senseless violence, what causes people to fill streets, only sometimes, and what causes their blood thirsty screams for vengence, castration, and killing. And in each of these cases, I come upon an 'othering' - her and them, her and us, us and them and so on. In fact, now when I stare at the world, I realise that all social behavior relies on this fracturing duality of identifying and separation.

Kabir confronts this separation and rejects it when he sings:

"Ham sab maahin, sab ham maahin
Ham hain bahuri akelaa"

I am in all, all are in me
I am alone and together

or,

"Chalati Chakki dekhkar, diya kabira roye
do paten ke beech me,sabat bacha na koye"

Watching the two grindstones, Kabir cries,
between the to stones, no one survives (from here)

referring once again to the harsh dualities of this world and their grief.

In a similar vein, Advaita Vedanta is based on the realisation of unity of all - self with the universe and the concept of "you are that"; while Lao Tsu in his famous Tao Te Ching talks about a life of harmony when the dualities get unified following the Path. In fact, his successor "Chuang Tzu felt it was imperative that we transcend all the dualities of existence. Seeing nature at work and the way in which it reconciled these polar opposites pointed the way to the Tao where all dualities are resolved into unity" (from here).

I suspect, more and more, that it is this separation between the internal and the external, the within and without, good and bad, man and woman, natural and manufactured, separations of class, caste, language, region, food, culture and every possible fragmentation that we create, which also creates the violence filled society that we see today.

So in the dawn of this yet young year I resolve:

I am both a man and a woman.
I am a harijan, banya, kshatriya, and a brahmin,
I am a hindu, muslim, sikh, christian, jew, jain; I am a believer and also a seeker
I am the rich and the direst poor
I am oppressed and oppressor; victim and the violator, sovereign and the subject;
I am both profound and the profane,
Infact, I am all the other while I am also Me.

Let me live in awareness of this.