Some Random Ruminations - 6 Gifts of Shirdi Sai Baba

I was interested to know of what the begging bowl that was presented to Shanthamma at the December's Homa Ceremonies  by Sai Baba was constituted. He had referred to it as Kapaala and told her that it was earlier with Shiva and that it later came to him which he presented it to Shanthamma. Shanthamma said that it was most probably the skull of some animal. I give another close-up photograph of the bowl alongside:

In addition to this begging bowl, a tiny pendant of Sai Baba and another tiny pendant of a Shiva Linga with a hooded snake perhaps made of silver was also in the bundle. The photograph is given alongside:

Every year, for the past five or six years, the members of our Bhajan Group proceed on some pilgrimage. In this effort we get to visit some out of the places that are not within easy reach of the common Bangalorean. In the year 2007 we visited Kuruvanthpura. In 2008 we visited Pithapuram. The year 2009 ended in a fiasco due to the Telengana riots in the vicinity of Hyderabad. In the year 2010 the group visited Ganagapura, Kudala Sangama, Badami, Aihole etc.

The past year in December 2011 we visited Nanded (Gurudwara established by the tenth guru Guru Gobind Singh) and later we proceeded to Karanja in Akola district of Maharshtra. This tiny town is the place where Shri Narasimha Saraswathi, the second Datta Avatar in Kali yuga, was born. By a phenomenal coincidence, when we were at that town, the birthday celebrations of the saint was held. Shri Narasimha Saraswathi gave a darshan to Shanthamma and donated a golden coin about the size and thickness of a Fifty Paise coin.

 This coin has 'Saraswathi' inscribed on one side and 'Sri Nusita Saraswathi' inscribed on the other. Both the letters are in Devanagari script as can be seen in the two photographs.  Shanthamma was told that it was the Saint's contribution, or more precisely, his 'Bhiksha' to the Kapaala or Begging Bowl.

While at the same place Karanja, Sai Baba again gave a darshan to Shanthamma and gifted her a bundle containing a pair of wooden padukas, a brass Kamandala (a vessel with a spout from which sanyasis drink water), an attractive creamy-white shell, a dark olive green well rounded polished elliptical semi-transparent pebble shaped stone (a linga? Saligrama?), cowrie shells etc. (See photo)

  

The shell (conch?) is generally used to perform 'Abhisheka' - a ritual bath of a linga. Two views of the conch are given here.

 A set of ten seashells which are called 'Kavade' in Kannada (Cowrie) and was traditionally used by children to play various games - even I remember playing them with my sister and neighbourhood children as a boy of seven or eight years - was also enclosed in a saffron bag. We haven't yet understood the importance of these gifts or what they are supposed to signify. Baba presented these items in a bundle on December 26th 2011 and advised her to retain it with her for a year and that he would tell her to whom the items should be gifted.

Among other presents of Shirdi Sai Baba to Shanthamma are 1) A silver One rupee coin with the year 1889 on it.

2) A Half Franc coin of France (1970) and a ten paise Indian coin of 1989 and a five paise coin of 1985. There was also a coin of copper but the imprints on it were not very clear. These coins materialised at the Homa and Annadana celebrations at Bangalore.

3) A beautiful polished dark green pebble which some call Saligrama and is considered sacred by the Hindus was also presented by Baba at Karanja.

One possible interpretation (I got this inspiration on 10th October 2012) that a person can give for the gift of cowrie shells (Kavade in Kannada) is that Baba wanted to draw attention to the ancient children's game of Moksha Pata (Lesson of Moksha) which could be played with cowrie shells.

It may even be Baba's intention to draw the attention of  us all that life is like the game of Moksh Pata or 'Snakes and Ladders' with the lesson that both 'virtues' and 'vices' that a person has in one's life may be determined by chance as in the children's game where the outcome is determined by probabalities of the outcome of a throw of dice or kavades. So one need not be inordinately proud to be a 'virtuous man' or inordinately be critical of himself if he thinks he has committed a lot of sins and is a sinner. I add that all these are my interpretations.

The board game, today called Snakes and Ladders, originated in ancient India, where it was known by the name Mokshapat or Moksha Patamu meaning the 'Lesson to Moksha'. It's not exactly known when or who invented it, though it's believed the game was played at a time as early as 2nd century BC. According to some historians, the game was invented by Saint Gyandev in the 13th century AD. Originally, the game was used as a part of moral instruction to children. The squares in which ladders start were each supposed to stand for a virtue, and those housing the head of a snake were supposed to stand for an evil. The snakes outnumbered the ladders in the original Hindu game. The game was transported to England by the colonial rulers in the latter part of the 19th century, with some modifications. My wife tells me that in one version of the game, after one reaches the 'Final Square' he then proceeds by steps of one square at a time to reach the end of the game. In these squares by which he proceeds one at a time, there are neither snakes nor ladders. Perhaps it means that one would have reached some sort of 'God Realisation' and performs actions where neither virtues nor vices of those actions stick to him. In other words, he neither views himself as 'virtuous' nor as a 'vice man'. The modified game was named Snakes and Ladders and stripped of its moral and religious aspects and the number of ladders and snakes were equalized.

XXX 

Some Random Ruminations - 5

The phenomena that I have observed around Shanthamma do not seem to be reproducible. She doesn't seem to have entire conscious control over what happens, and I notice that, very often, she too seems curious to know the contents of a bundle that appears in her hand. In materialising small figurines she seems to partly will it, yet even there she does not seem to have control over what appears.

In my efforts to relate these incidents to my friends, the majority of whom are profoundly sceptical of these things, I seem to encounter a solid wall that prevents me from arousing adequate interest in these matters. Many of them believe these to be the work of a 'magician' or a 'trickster' who uses methods of optical and other illusions to produce an effect of these things materialising, but these objects do not actually materialise but are made to appear so by trickery.

For a person like me and several others who have been intimately associated with Shanthamma, we are convinced that there is no trickery involved but that these objects genuinely materialise. What convinces us of her honesty are the transparency of her expression; her body language; the circumstances of her life and the plain open way in which she discusses these things. Quite often people around her would have noticed just two or three seconds earlier that she would be empty handed but the next moment she would be in possession of a fairly large bundle that would have been impossible for her to conceal. Most of the sceptics would say that such things are impossible and do not fit into the modern scientific world-view.

As a somewhat feeble response I copy and paste with requisite modifications the comments of some thinkers that I found in Wikipedia under the heading of 'Scientism':


1.Scientism refers to a belief in the universal applicability of the scientific method and approach, and the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion of other viewpoints.

2. The totalizing view of science is as if it were capable of describing all reality and knowledge, or as if it were the only true way to acquire knowledge about reality and the nature of things. I stress this to highlight the possible dangers of lapses towards excessive reductionism in all fields of human knowledge.

3. People who idolize science and its methods are also guilty of border-crossing violations in which the theories and methods of one (scientific) discipline are inappropriately applied to another (scientific or non-scientific) discipline and its domain. The word Scientism has been used for any attempt to claim science as the only or primary source of human values (a traditional domain of ethics) or as the source of meaning and purpose (a traditional domain of religion and related worldviews).  Philosopher of religion Keith Ward has said scientism is philosophically inconsistent or even self-refuting, as the truth of the statements "no statements are true unless they can be proven scientifically (or logically)" or "no statements are true unless they can be shown empirically to be true" cannot themselves be proven scientifically, logically, or empirically.

4. E. F. Schumacher in his ‘A Guide for the Perplexed’ criticized scientism as an impoverished world view confined solely to what can be counted, measured and weighed. "The architects of the modern worldview, notably Galileo and Descartes, assumed that those things that could be weighed, measured, and counted were more true than those that could not be quantified. If it couldn’t be counted, in other words, it didn’t count."

5. In his essay, ‘Against Method’, Paul Feyerabend characterizes science as "an essentially anarchic enterprise"  and argues emphatically that science merits no exclusive monopoly over "dealing in knowledge" and that scientists have never operated within a distinct and narrowly self-defined tradition. He depicts the process of contemporary scientific education as a mild form of indoctrination, aimed at "making the history of science duller, simpler, more uniform, more 'objective' and more easily accessible to treatment by strict and unchanging rules.

6. “Science can stand on its own feet and does not need any help from rationalists, secular humanists, Marxists and similar religious movements; and ... non-scientific cultures, procedures and assumptions can also stand on their own feet and should be allowed to do so ... Science must be protected from ideologies; and societies, especially democratic societies, must be protected from science... In a democracy scientific institutions, research programmes, and suggestions must therefore be subjected to public control, there must be a separation of state and science just as there is a separation between state and religious institutions, and science should be taught as one view among many and not as the one and only road to truth and reality”.
                                     — Feyerabend, Against Method, p.viii

I draw upon these statements of intellectuals only to highlight that these remarks may be profoundly true and meaningful especially after my experiences with Shanthamma and Shirdi Sai Baba and various phenomena that seem quite inexplicable. Partially in humour I propose the term 'Gap Positivism' in my theorizations of these phenomena because, while logical positivism insists that knowledge is derivable either from mathematical or logical deductions and empirical observations that depend on sensory perceptions, these phenomena that always seem to happen pointedly and specifically only when one is not observing, yet happening in a manner so as to preclude the possibility of fraud, the term 'Sensory Gap' seems the most fitting!

Some Random Ruminations 4 - The gap between knowledge & wisdom

Material for this post has been lifted almost word for word from 'Continental Philosophy' by Simon Critchley.

The relation between knowledge and wisdom or between scientific enquiry and humanistic enquiry and the consequent 'meaning of life' is not reducible to empirical investigation. The gap between knowledge and wisdom is not an exploratory gap that can be filled by producing a better more comprehensive theory but is a FELT GAP.

The scientific conception of the world does not close the gap between knowledge and wisdom but rather is felt more acutely. Even when the basic exegencies of life are comprehensively met, as in the developed western world - when every man has been provided with enough food, even more food than they can eat; when you shower them with every earthly blessing Man concocts new neuroses and new pathologies and new sciences are created to deal with them (psychiatry & psychoanalysis). The question of meaning of life returns with frightening vengeance.

Attempts to fill this 'meaning gap' can be undertaken by the unjustified means of 'returning to traditional religion' or through invention of a new religion or by the 57 varieties of ways of doing it which are available in the supermarket of esotericism that could include astrology, yoga, sitting under a pyramid holding crystals or whatever. These constitute varieties of obscurantism and causes man to become a lunatic. Contrariwise, an infatuation with science and its methods leads to an equally dangerous scientism which reduces man to a beast. In John Stuart Mill's words the one doctrine is accused of making men beasts, the other lunatics.

This is precisely the point where some of the predelictions of ancient western philosophy is admirable, in the sense that there was an attempted integration of knowledge and wisdom. It was widely believed that a knowledge of how things were the way they were, would  lead to wisdom in the conduct of one's life.

The assumption that ties knowledge and wisdom together is the idea that the cosmos as such expresses a human purpose, and therefore a knowledge of nature would be part and parcel of what it means to be human. (Teleological view of the universe). Here each natural thing can be explained in terms of its final cause (Aristotle) - that goal for which a thing is the way it is. This view provided a felicitous unity of theory and practice, of knowledge and wisdom, of causal explanation and existential understanding or meaning.

With tremendous advances in science, this unity has been split apart. To quote Rene Descartes 'the customary search for final causes is utterly useless in physics'. The universe expresses no human purpose. It is simply governed by physical laws which are indifferent to human striving. The universe is vast, cold, inhuman and mechanical. Blaise Pascal writing in the late 1650s said 'the eternal silence of infinite spaces fills me with dread'. That is, knowledge of the infinite, open universe of Copernicus and Galileo, without meaning or final purpose, inspires sheer anxiety when one turns to the question of wisdom.

This is one expression of the historical and spiritual experience that is known as 'Enlightenment' : we are left with an experiential gap between the realms of knowledge and wisdom, truth and meaning, theory and practice, causal explanation and existential understanding. The scientific revolution in its undeniable truth, produced a disenchantment of nature.

It is in such a stage of things that the leela's of Shirdi Sai Baba comes to assume great value. Mankind had almost concluded that "Nature is no longer the visible expression of some 'world soul'." To highlight what Simon Critchley says "Nature is sheer, impersonal objective 'stuff', which is law governed, causally explicable, but completely cut adrift from human intentions". The question is: can nature or indeed human selves become re-enchanted in such a way that reduces or even eliminates the meaning gap and produces some plausible conception of a good life?

By the miracles that are happening in the name of Sai Baba, attention is being drawn to what sort of life he led while he was living and what sort of life he would prescribe for others. These curious incidents also draw one's attention to read the Sai Sat Charita to find out what style of living could enable him to develop these Siddhis (powers?). The occurrence of such miracles  infuse a fresh meaning to a world depleted of all meaning by an essentially empirical and rationalistic world.

To elaborate the above point further, a majority of modern scientific minded humans are almost convinced, or have profound doubts about the possible existence of the Divine. Such people have begun to question the sanctity of human values. When the existence of the Divine was more or less assured among humans, certain ethical values seemed to be affirmed by it. With the gradual erosion of faith there has been a concomitant devaluation of values. With  the loss of values, human life has been stripped of much meaning. The vast scales of industrialisation and modernisation accompanied by the urbanisation of human population and dense concentration in large cities together with the nature of work that is largely mechanical has led to a devastating dehumanisation of man. Science and technology has caused a strong feeling of alienation and estrangement. To me at least, and perhaps to many others like me, the occurrence of such occult phenomena seems to infuse more meaning to the universe around me.

Shirdi Sai Baba essentially led a life of utter simplicty. He inhabited a mosque but encouraged religious motifs that were, in many instances, those of Hinduism. His conduct was eclectic. He always had 'Allah Malik' on his  lips and should anyone approach him loaded with problems, he would bless them with the words "Allah bhala karega" (God will bestow well-being). He tried to unify and in some ways integrate the Hindu and Islamic experiences. While a few miracles were recorded during his lifetime, he was by no means a miracle-monger while living. Though people had noticed certain siddhi powers at various instances, he never seems to have made a show of it. He always begged for food with a begging bowl and lived a simple, frugal lifestyle. Even as he seems to have passed to the beyond, he seems to favour a simple frugal lifestyle judging by the fact that he materialised a begging bowl which he says is 'Kapaala' and presented it to Shanthamma at this year's (2011) annual austerities saying '... this begging bowl was with Shiva earlier and it later came to my possession which I am handing over to you'. Perhaps he was implying that there is dignity to be seen in frugality and abstinence. "There is kingship in poverty" as he frequently used to explain while he was living.

Some Random Ruminations - 3

Just today afternoon I happened to be casually reading through a popular style book on continental philosophy (Continental Philosophy - A very short introduction by Simon Critchley) where he has summed up, very briefly, in the first chapter the evolution in thought from the ancient Greeks onwards.  In this blog post I lift extensively from his book to illustrate a particular point I want to make.

As he puts it, for Socrates and nearly all ancient philosophers that came after him, philosophy tried to find out "... what it might mean to lead a good human life. For  them a good life meant a happy life. Early philosophers of the west felt that philosophy is the reflective life, the examined life, the assumption being that the unexamined life is not worth living.

It is also true that for the early Greek thinkers, philosophy was not divorced from the practical life of every day. "If the unexamined life was not worth living, the unlived life was not worth examining" (Simon Critchley). Philosophy was an eminently practical activity. This is markedly different from what philosophy has become since the late 17th century - a theoretical enquiry. In the ancient picture the wisdom that philosophy teaches us to love is identical with the pursuit of the good life -  a life of happiness marked by reflection and contemplation.

These days modern philosophy does not seem to be so much concerned with wisdom as it is concerned with knowledge. Knowledge of what? Of how things are the way they are! The Latin word for knowledge is Scientia. The question of knowledge - of knowing how things are the way they are, is essentially a scientific one.

All of us are acutely aware that we live in a Scientific World - meaning that we provide empirical evidence for our claims or find those claims rightly rejected. This attitude defines the way we see things and the way  we expect to see things. In such a world of science, philosophy becomes a theoretical enquiry into the conditions under which scientific knowledge is possible. Philosophy becomes a handmaid to science - clearing away the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge and scientific progress.

With rapid advancements in Science and its helpmate - technology our lives have been transformed to an extent that is unimaginable to someone from the ancient world, or indeed even to our great-grandparents. Science is therefore not only effective but it is also wonderful.

Yet despite all this OR rather because of all this, the question of Wisdom still nags us. Does the scientific conception of the world eradicate the need for an answer to the question of the meaning of life? Does the body of knowledge require the appendectomy of wisdom?


                                                        To be continued...

Some Random Ruminations - 2

Though it has been the desire of everyone to fix the precise instance when the bundle appears, no one has been privy to it. They have seen her just a second or two before, but never at that precise instant! We generally allow Shanthamma to have her interactions with her Guru in peace and try not to intervene as it is happening. If any questions are to be asked, it will only  be later after she has collected herself.

This time she told us that she happened to see a 'madman' sweeping the corridor leading to the rooms at the rear of the marriage hall. She is supposed to have crossly told the madman to scoot from the scene as the Rudrabhishekas were about to start or were underway. The 'madman' is supposed to have glared at her in rage and shouted back 'You ask ME to leave? Who do you think I am?' and is supposed to have grown immensely tall and caused the building to heave and shake violently. That is when she turned back and shouted for support and cried "Sai Shiva, Sai Shiva". We just saw her turning back and running towards us with a huge bundle wrapped in bottle-green cloth.

Much later, after she collected herself, she carefully opened the bundle to see what it contained. We were also around her. We noticed that there was a bundle for Poorna-Aahuthi; a black coloured bowl with grains of rice and wheat and burnt out match sticks which is actually supposed to be a Begging Bowl (Kapaala); a blue coloured cotton lungi with checks; a smaller green bag with vibhuthi, rudraksha etc.; a green scarf or hand-cloth; dates and figs, cashew, almonds, onions and Dharwad peda; a packet of chappathis with Chutney-powder wrapped in a Marathi or Hindi Newspaper.

Later she was given the inspiration that her son was to carry on the good work after her. She is supposed to have queried "But he is a grihastha (householder) with a wife and two children...?" and Baba is supposed to have told her "Everything will be in order after he comes to me as a sharanagatha (one in a state of complete surrender)"

Some Random Ruminations - 1

Every year on a suitable weekend of December the members of our Bhajan Group numbering about 70 to 80 people who consider Shanthamma as their spiritual guide, organise a big mass feeding of people. Every year these celebrations are organised in a spacious marriage hall and Rudrabhisheka with the chanting of the Rudra and various homas (Gana Homa, Navagraha Homa, Mritynjaya Homa, Vishnu Sahasra Homa and Sai Sahasra Homa) are performed with quite intense devotion and subsequently after the Noon Sai Baba Aarathi, a delectable lunch is served. This year too, a gathering of almost two thousand devotees had assembled at Aadi Chunchunagiri Marriage Hall in Vijayanagar, Bangalore on December 18th 2011. The day's celebrations commenced at around 5:00 am with the morning aarathi, followed by welcoming of the Padukas with full devotion and a Nagara-Sankirtana (a procession on the streets adjoining the marriage hall) accompanied with women dancing and singing with the tapping of coloured wooden sticks (called Kolu Aata in Kannada).

The Sankalpa (Intention) for the entire celebrations were  done the previous (December 17th , Saturday) evening and all the necessary arrangements and decorations of the hall were done the previous day itself. This time Bhagya (my wife) and I were the couple chosen to perform the Sankalpa and the homas.

These celebrations are being done every year for the past five or six years ever since Shanthamma exuded a greyish-green egg shaped stony Aathma Linga from her mouth some years ago. This happened at Shirdi. One day, while in the room of a hotel at Shirdi, my wife put in great effort to comfort Shanthamma as she developed a violent fit of cough. As she was coughing violently, an oval egg shaped object as I have described above came out of her mouth. She was given the inspiration that it was an Aathma Linga and was instructed that a mass-feeding and homa and abhisheka must be done each year. A committe of volunteers donate a considerable sum of money each month and ensure that the celebrations are held each year.

It has also happened that since the past few years Swami (Shirdi Sai Baba) himself makes a contribution to the Poorna-Aahuthi (the main offering at the end of the homa) and this is in the form of a cocoanut and other things suddenly materialsing. It is always true that no one else has seen the precise instant of time when the bundle appears, but in a matter of one or two unobserved seconds a fairly large bundle is seen in Shanthamma's arms and she is seen to converse quite meaningfully with someone or something and is reduced to intense tears of devotion.

This year I was too keen to see the appearance of the bundle at the precise instant of its appearance, but both my wife and I and one or two other ladies just noticed Shanthamma pleading for one of us to give her support as she suddenly turned around shouting "Sai Shiva, Sai Shiva" with a fairly voluminous bundle in her arms. As my wife and other women held her they heard her pleading in Telugu "... but the building will crumble. Please desist as it will cause so much of suffering..."

                                                                                        To be continued...