Indo-Pak partition, religions and the Minds

On my friend Ali Chisti’s wall, was posted this scene from Krantiveer.  Soon the conversation drifted to the partition, the two nation theory, the reasons for partition, the validity or otherwise of the theory.. etc.  Today, my comments came from a different place.  Here they are:

great scene, but world doesn’t live in flesh and blood.. but in minds.  The identity of a person is created in the mind, it vanishes with the mind.  Even though memory may go.. the tendencies of the mind within the body remain unchanged.  A person who talks soft will continue to talk soft despite complete dementia.

What happened in 1947 is long gone.  Hundreds of thousands of people have died since then asserting or de-asserting that “event”.

What we have now.. today.. is a new situation.. our world.  We, collectively, are the Nehrus and the Jinnahs.  We are the Gandhis and the Ghaffar Khans.

Are we still making the same mistakes?  To look at the situation, one must divorce categorization of the identities.. but look at the “tendencies”.  Are we grasping them enough?

Whatever is “out there”… is in me.  The demonic and the divine, both rise in me.  I can see it.  I can sense it when they do.  As a human, thankfully, I exercise my discretion.. and sometimes I don’t.  Depending on where on the scale of demonic or divine I am, comes forth the expression of my person.

Its the same with all.  When the discretion in the society, or any unit of “mind” – one, two, a family, or society – loses the power to exercise discretion, catastrophic crimes or unprecedented miracles occur.  The larger the “mind-unit” and more intense the mind-unit, the greater the magnitude.  One mind-unit can do only so much.  Increase its intensity and it becomes a Buddha, who takes 30,000 people to Nirvana in a few years.  Increase the numbers of a number of ordinary mind-units; even cowards can commit genocides (1984 killings of Sikhs).

Its all about which side of the scale is the mind-unit, moving to?  Am I part of the “Discretion team” or the “Spectator team”?

It is said in Vedanta, that Human form is the only one which can take one to Moksha.  It is so, because it is the ONLY one which has the ability to exercise discretion.

There are levels of discretions: between what the society thinks (within a specific time and culture context) “Good” or “Bad”…. or between what “Is” and what “should be” – or the Truth of the Existence (not your, mine, his, its.. but of the cosmos) and what is a Fact (a “mind-interpreted” representation).  Partition theories, our conjectures on Cabinet mission are “mind-interpreted Facts”.  They are not the “Truth”.  Truth was the same for all.  Death and Destruction.  A time when the Human gave way to the Demonic.

Interestingly, the answer is not the “Divine” either, but the Human, for if at every moment… every microsecond.. that we face.. if we have the ability to use our discretion, we could be “living”.. otherwise, Divine or Demonic, we are simply flowing with our tendencies.. for as long as and as far as those tendencies can take us, before the pendulum swings the other side.

If we can seize the pendulum so it can stay with the Human and exercise discretion at every micro-second.. moment… we would be beyond the demonic and the divine.

Until then, catastrophes like the partition cannot be wished away.