Page 31 - NAMAH-Jul-2020

Namah Vir-us to rewire us

as nations dreaming to join the league. It is time the most utterly natural places on Earth.
no doubt that very profound questions have We, who have all been living in cities for
been raised about our politics, our economics, the past many millennia, began from these
our relationship with Nature, our relationship very forests. This is perhaps also the reason
with life, and the most dreaded of all, our why instinctively we all long to re-turn to the
anxieties around death. forests, if for nothing else than a weekend
getaway. In dream symbology therefore,
When such unprecedented and large-scale forests symbolise our unconscious psyches,
crises hit humanity, it has been observed that which are in tune with the natural world of
people experience a great intensity within plants, animals, trees, rocks, minerals, but
themselves. We are suddenly faced with our not with an intention to use them for our
mortality and vulnerability in front of the awe- own interests. How different then from our
ful power and majesty of Nature, of Mother ego-selves,whose primary preoccupation is to
Nature. These very existential crises cause see how it can use things, people, resources,
the formidable ego to start breaking apart, even the sacred (including one’s gurus), for
as if automatically we all are left much more its own aggrandisement.
exposed, and open. It reminds me of these
beautiful lines in Savitri: He then describes a brightly-coloured bush
which is as if from a science fiction and knows
“An absolute supernatural darkness falls that it is a corona-bush. It is very interesting
On man sometimes when he draws near to God: again that the dream has projected the virus in
An hour arrives when fail all Nature’s means; the form of a bush in a natural environment,
Forced out from the protecting Ignorance which again suggests that we human beings
And flung back on his naked primal need, may like to believe that this ‘damn virus’ has
He at length must cast from him his surface soul been unleashed on us and it is contrary to
And be the ungarbed entity within... (1)” the natural order of things, but the truth is
everything and anything that ever confronts
I am sure most of us have taken refuge in us is natural in the widest sense of the word. Is
these very lines in times of our personal crises, there anything in the physical world, or even
but this time it is as if the Ancient Mother the mental world, which is unreal? Our bodies
is asking the whole of humanity, or at least are surrendering in front of this microbe
those who are athirst enough, to engage in because in our collective folly and egotism
casting at length our surface souls and make a we have crossed all boundaries and ventured
radical choice of utter unselfishness, taking a into those places of the natural world where
leap from living a life of ego to the life of our it was not our mandate to venture into. Is it
soul. Unless we do this, no cosmetic changes not true that we have been abusing nature
will now ever suffice. for the last two decades at an unprecedented
scale? This virus seems to remind us that this
Let me again turn back to this person’s can not continue without a pushback from
dream. He begins with the place of the dream the vaster nature. If we believe that we can
which is a lush green forest. Forests mostly abuse all other species unabated, this has
symbolise the ´unknown´ and at the same been a very tragic lesson to tell us that we are

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