The caterpillar is a crawling worm,dragging its body on mud and stones, it’s only occupation in life is to search for food and keep eating continuously.
He serves the body to fattened capacity and then huddles up to an hibernating sleep. The sleep is almost comatose, and the crawler seems dead to all who may observe it. Slowly one day it’s old body sloughs off and it emerges from deep samadhi (meditation) totally transformed!
It metamorphoses into a beautifully colourful honey sipping wonder that forgets to crawl, as it spans the skies, borne aloft on wings of wonder, flitting about in ethereal joy from silk soft flower to flower. Although it enjoys all, but nothing, just nothing can shackle it anymore!
Similarly, man is driven around in the world by the appetites of the flesh. The hungry senses propel him every day to dance to their tunes. But each effort seems an exercise in futility for a higher and yet higher joy. Alas he grasps only short-lived pleasure, leaving him panting for more.
Only when he begins to question his pursuits and think beyond food for his senses, does he sit still to ponder. Like the caterpillar he realises that just food is not enough. He withdraws his thought currents and contemplates deeply in solitude. Only in a rarified and deeply attuned moment does he come to realise or (as Carl Jung, a modern day psychologist puts it) “actualise” the true self! He realises that he is not a Crawler but, of choice, can be a Soarer in the limitless sky! He has tasted the ‘intimations of immortality ‘ , the staying power of Joy unrationed. No, it is not the joy of the human uniting with the divine. It is not oneness with another , but the absence of two!
Saran, President Chinmaya Mission New Delhi.
Email: prarthnasaran@gmail.com