Compassion please.

Adhikara in something is a real thing. You want to be trained in surgery before you go about cutting people open. But you also cut things open while you’re learning to be a surgeon. They used to dissect frogs not too long ago in class 11th. Because the experience of doing something on a smaller scale teaches you how to manage things at a greater scale later. Pretty obvious, no?

Now imagine a surgeon bursting into one such class, hurling the choicest abuses onto the students for not identifying frog organs, or cutting too deep. He decides to shut down the class because they’re not surgeons and cutting things open without knowing how to put them back together is dangerous business.

This is how so many people look like to me when they almost violently threaten anyone doing something they disagree with based on their birth or the material used or the form worshipped or the philosophy or ritual employed. Sure, you don’t do marriages around a funeral pyre. You don’t use swords to sew clothes, to take a Kabir doha out of context. But you also don’t avoid touching a sword unless you are fully certified. You don’t avoid feelings of love or admiration before you can arrange a marriage for yourself. NOR SHOULD YOU MAKE THISE PROCLAMATIONS FOR OTHERS!

As spiritual people we realise that people have sufferings. Since many lifetimes too. Someone decides after many lifetimes of such suffering, that they will seek the end to such suffering. If you’re heartless enough to be an obstacle for such people achieving basic function because they’re not part of your posse, then your adhikaras, your millions of purashcharanas, none of them have given you the reward that was perhaps the most valuable. Compassion. You’ve had adhikara, and yet you’ve not been able to use it to your advantage. What misery that must be.

Sure, don’t let people conduct entire anushthanas by reading stuff from books. But don’t brand them as heretics fit to be discarded, along with those close to them. Or is the inspiration for grown men with learning and discipline the actions of kindergarten kids threatening to tattle to the teachers because someone sat at their seat or got to their swing in the playground.

“Neha ma’am has said that the blue swing is for class 2 C only”.