WRITINGS

AJMER RODE

Poetry & Spirit

Spirituality for me eludes definition, even though I use the word often and like the response it evokes. Awareness of the mysterious, in its immensity as well as in the unknown element that lurks behind every thing, comes closest to my sense of the sacred. The most beautiful thing I have experienced as a writer is the mystery of a creative urge. When such an urge takes hold of me, I reach for the nearest pen, the nearest paper lying around and start scribbling. I don't ask: what's is this urge?  Where did it come from? I simply obey, with the maximum speed my hand can move at. Later on I may go to the key board, rewrite, revise, extend, edit.... Later on I may spend hours on something I initially got in a flash, in a minute or two.

Too often the creative urge loses its vitality when a mind over populated with past thinking, diction and devices tries to give expression to it. I envy those who can receive and reshape creative impulses with relatively free minds, like the poets who created the Vedas the first sacred texts of India four thousand years ago. The Vedic poets or the Rishies as they were called, did not work out their poems laboriously, that is how the belief goes. They actually 'saw' complete poems or had darshana of them and simply transcribed them. That is why they were regarded as sears. The religious faithful believe a divine power revealed the poems to the Rishies  who were merely the chosen receivers, much like Mohammed to whom Allah himself is supposed to have transmitted the Koran. Even the language of the Vedas, they believe, was given to the Rishies by God. But the real reason the Rishies were able to write so effortlessly could be that they actually lived what they wrote. They worshipped multiple deities: Agni, the god of fire, Indra, the god of rain, the god of wind, of night, of morning... they saw a god in every natural phenomenon. The concept of a supreme God had not originated at that time as the Vedas themselves reveal. The Rishies'  belief in the gods was real and full. If they wrote about the god of wind they actually felt the god within and without them. If they wrote in praise of the morning they actually felt the beautiful Usha, the god of the morning, touching them with her golden rays. 

And the Rishies were able to see things around them differently than most of us can do. There were no poetics, no elaborate theories established at that time; their minds were not prisoners of long literary traditions as Punjabi poet Dr. Haribhajan Singh notes. Every time they sat to write their minds were ready to experience afresh, their spirits were free to cherish the new. It is not as much the content of the Vedas as the process of their creation that has influenced me. At times, rare of course,  when I am able to detach myself  from the tradition, able to unlearn the past, ordinary things look different,  become interesting, fluid, responsive. Once the new awareness dawns, The mind follows its own path, ready to touch the untouched, taste the prohibited. Each word comes naked, excited, eager to assume a new meaning. The writing effort slips to the background, the pen merely collects the unexpected gifts, the fruits that suddenly appear one after the other.  

The phenomenon of awareness is a great mystery and at the center of spirituality. when I become aware that I am aware, I feel transformed; when I become aware of others of the physical world of the unknown, I feel liberated, extended, connected.  Awareness is absolute. Instant. This moment I am aware of myself, the next, of the entire universe. Imagination is different - wonderful, but a consequence of the material, lifeless as light; awareness is alive, intelligent, its origin aphysical, I believe. It can step out of the space-time-energy world of science and look at it. Yet I am reluctant to attribute the source of awareness to an all-knowing supreme being. The concept of an absolute God pleased at being worshipped oppresses me. I was born into a Sikh background , have learnt much from Sikh scriptures but do not practice Sikhism or any other religion.  

Art, and science with all their well understood differences, have a lot in common. Same creative urge that fires an artist inspires a scientist before the logical construction sets in. Science despite its seemingly awesome power humbly declares that its conclusions are never to be taken as the final truths. The reality described by its present set of laws is just one in a multi-reality existence. Science is a sub set not the whole. Its transformation in to abusive technology is very disturbing and devastating in every respect. But pure science also unfolds for me the beauty of the physical world.

Once without any specific reason I stood in the door of my house and realized that I was smaller than the door. And the door was smaller than the house and the house smaller than the earth; The Earth was tiny in the solar system, the solar system in its galaxy, the galaxy in the cluster, one in millions floating in the immense universe.  When I came back to myself I was standing on an earth no larger than zillionth of a dust particle. But I was still there, for sure, with my awareness that had saved me from a devastating sense of insignificance. But when I went the other way and saw that I was larger than my hand, my hand larger than a cell, the cell larger than an atom, the atom than an elementary particle… I got lost. I had no point to come back to. I had become a collection of zillion blinking sub atomic particles... This experience, not unique to me only I am sure, never faded from my memory and has inspired some of my Punjabi poetry.

My poetry and other writings have also been affected by human suffering. I grew up in village poverty, have lived next to city slums and have seen people fighting over half eaten bananas on garbage piles The third world poverty is overwhelming and has etched a mark on my psyche. Here the evil of poverty is lesser but it is hard to escape the feeling of imprisonment in a system that encourages greed, competition, and shameless exploitation of the environment and humans. I believe our spirituality, our sense of the sacred our talk of connectedness will remain hollow if we remain stranger to the sea of human suffering that is vast and deep.