meditation 98

Divinity

is . . .

present

everywhere –

even in ordinary

people

and things.

Nothing

exists

outside of Divinity.

Realizing thus

with

your whole being –

you are

one

with Divinity.

Note:

Verse 98.

Does anyone remember, at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, washing one's hands, then turning off the water, then realizing you had touched the handles when turning the water on, and then again washing the handles, and then again your hands?  

By Qadri Inzamam, writing for the Chrsitian Science Monitor

Late one recent Saturday night, stand-up comedian Manjeet Sarkar walked up to a makeshift podium inside a jampacked cafe in the posh city of Bengaluru. Mr. Sarkar is a Dalit, a community regarded as “untouchable” by upper-caste Hindus. The audience welcomes him with loud applause, and once everyone settles in, Mr. Sarkar cracks his first one-liner: “If anyone does not laugh at my jokes, I touch them.”

The crowd loves it.

The quip takes aim at the Hindu caste system, a rigid, centuries-old hierarchy that places Dalits like him on the lowest possible tier, below Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras. Old laws called for their physical and social segregation, and although the practice of “untouchability” has been outlawed in modern India, anti-Dalit violence and stigma prevail across the country. . . .

Mr. Sarkar’s jokes are rooted in his lived experiences as a Dalit growing up in a tribal Naxalite area in eastern India. During the show, Mr. Sarkar talks about how untouchability was normalized in his home village. He recalls how in his childhood he was yelled at by an upper-caste woman for drinking from a public hand pump. The woman later washed the hand pump with Gangajal – the sacred water of the Ganges – to purify it.

“Then I touched the Gangajal itself, and she had to purify the Gangajal with Gangajal,” Mr. Sarkar tells the audience, eliciting another burst of laughter.

This is verse 124 of the Vijñāna Bhairava. Swami Lakshmanjoo and Pandit Dina Nath Muju's 1974–1975 original reads as follows:

Divinity is present everywhere, even in very ordinary objects. Nothing exists out of that. Realising thus with your whole being, you are one with That.