Diwali is celebrated for many cultural reasons and one is that of Naraka Chaturdashi. The cruel king Narakasura, was eliminated by Krishna on this day. Evil need not necessarily come in the form of demons. Desperation, depression and frustration can cause much more damage to one’s life than the demons that you have not seen. Diwali is a reminder to slay all that is negative to our life.
The celebration is auspicious in many different ways.Gods and goddesses are invoked in order to welcome wellbeing into our lives. Goddess Lakshmi brings wealth, Shakti enables health and Saraswati gives knowledge. Wellbeing and celebration is the overriding theme.
Indic culture celebrates life with festivals every day of the year to bring us exuberance and enthusiasm. Today, people usually celebrate only around eight or ten festivals annually because we have to go to office or are busy with other activities. Festivals nowadays mean they give you a holiday, and you wake up only at twelve noon. Then you eat a lot and go for a movie or watch television at home. Traditionally, a festival meant the whole town would gather in a place and there would be a big celebration. A festival meant we got up at four in the morning, and very actively, a lot of things happened in a household and in the community.
To bring back this festive culture in people, at Isha, our centre, we usually celebrate four important festivals: Pongal or Makarasankranti, Mahashivarathri, Dussehra and Guru Poornima. If we don’t create something like this, by the time the next generation comes, they will not know what a festival is. They will just eat, sleep and grow up without concern for another human being. All these aspects were brought into Indian culture just to keep one active and enthusiastic in so many ways. The idea behind this is to make our whole life a celebration.
If you approach everything in a celebratory way, you learn to be non-serious about life, yet remain absolutely involved. The problem with most people right now is, if they think something is important, they will become dead serious about it. If they think it is not so important, they will become lax about it – they don’t show the necessary involvement. You know, in India when someone says, “He is serious,” that means his next step is you know where. A lot of people are in a serious condition. There is only one thing that is going to happen to them which is of any significance. The rest will bypass them because with anything that they think is not serious, they are unable to show involvement and dedication towards that. That is the whole problem. The passage, the secret of life is to see everything with a non-serious eye, but be absolutely involved – like a game. That is the reason the most profound aspects of life are approached in a celebratory way, so that you don’t miss the point.
The idea of Diwali is to bring that aspect of celebration into your life – that is why the fire crackers, to set fire to you a bit! So the purpose is not just to have fun on this one day and go. If you are a damp squib, then you need a cracker from outside every day. Otherwise, it must happen like this within us every day. If we simply sit, our life energy, heart, mind and body must be exploding like a live cracker.
COMMENT