Just this morning, while developing a flower-centred spiritual principle by which to live and review my journey regularly, a bomb was exploding a few blocks away in Madivala.
“Not anything specific or strategically placed; just a general ploy to create a state of panic,” the BBC commentator informed his worldwide audience.
Which was pertinent timing, considering that I had just realized that the synthetic blue kumkum flower I found to commemorate my mom’s death (I always buy real blue irises on her death day, but Bang yielded nought) was eternal because it was not alive.* Well, certainly as dynamic as any religion, and just as liberating a meditative focus as an Om.
That it was not really an iris, but a kumkum (flower of saffron, the spice used to make bindis) worried me as much as the fact that it was man-made at first, but then I didn’t enjoy the Punjabi curry at Serengeti, complete with plastic jungle and diminutive Indian waiters in khaki hunting gear, any less than I would have if I had been eating at the Maharaj.
Authenticity? She just another suburb in Global Village.
As real as her copycat sister, Syntheticity, and as trustworthy as her unpredictable brother, Synchronicity.
* This has worried me ever since I wrote it, because there seemed to be something incongruous in calling a synthetic flower eternal. Indian spiritual guru Osho, who both enlightens, abets and disturbs me, must’ve gone through a similar process at some stage: a plastic flower may be permanent, but it is not eternal. A plastic flower is like the ego: dead.
“The ego is a plastic flower – dead. It just looks like a flower, it is not a flower. You cannot really call it a flower. Even linguistically to call it a flower is wrong, because a flower is something which flowers. And this plastic thing is just a thing, not a flowering. It is dead. There is no life in it. You have a flowering center within. That’s why Hindus call it a lotus – it is a flowering. They call it the one-thousand-petaled-lotus. One thousand means infinite petals. And it goes on flowering, it never stops, it never dies. There are some reasons why you are satisfied. With a dead thing, there are many conveniences. One is that a dead thing never dies. It cannot – it was never alive. So you can have plastic flowers, they are good in a way. They are permanent; they are not eternal, but they are permanent. The real flower outside in the garden is eternal, but not permanent. And the eternal has its own way of being eternal. The way of the eternal is to be born again and again and to die. Through death it refreshes itself, rejuvenates itself.”
And therein lay a new arrival: every year my perspective on my mom and her death’s effect on me changes, matures, but, having done an intense 10-day vipassana course (which Osho recommends) in which I surrendered, partly out of exhaustion, my attachment to her and the grief associated with it, I am not sure that meditation doesn’t anaesthetise and disable the emotional centre necessary to flower, die and be eternal.
