The spirituality of sneezing

Supposedly the above is an outpouring of wisdom from that wisdom incarnate – Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. This appears in the Inner Voice space of Hindustan Times of March 5, 2012.

Let me take a deeper look at this wisdom just so I can make myself wiser. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (from now on, it is SSRS) is one step ahead of the flat earthers. He says that “at night” nature “conceals the whole [my emphasis] world in its darkness and then in the day it brings it out.”

Flat earthers know that if they went to the edge of the earth they would fall off into the abyss beyond the earth. This obviously implies that there is another side to the flat earth. And, it did not matter whether that side is dark or bright. But, that is not good enough to our SSRS. His spirituality teaches that the whole world is immersed in darkness. This, we know does not happen. It is, in all probability, night/day where you are and day/night where your son/daughter or father/mother are (I am assuming the regular middle class TamBrahm family configuration)!  

OK, even if you come to his defense saying that it is qualified by “at night”, I have a question for you. In what way is that statement more meaningful than saying, “It is dark at night”?  Get it? All that mumbo jumbo is nothing more than a simple statement of elementary tautological observation – days are bright, nights are dark, because we define them so! This is no spirituality; not even chicken soup (or, mulligatawny) for the soul.

And, it does not get better further down the piece. “Expression has the opposite of it which is non-expression – the secret.” The seed is underground but it sprouts into visibility, the deep thinking guru says. That is, the seed is non-expression and the sprouts are its expressions – this is the only way I could understand what he is saying. Next comes, “The taller the tree the deeper it’s (sic) roots.” Bah humbug! If that were true the roots of palm trees must be coming out of the other side of the earth! By this measure I have an expression – non-expression pair that I will offer as example of SSRS’s philosophy.

You know how uncomfortable you feel when you are gathering to sneeze. That feeling is non-expression and when you do sneeze, that is expression! Now that you have sneezed, you might want to gulp down that chicken soup / mulligatawny to get spiritualized and feel comfortable! By the way, the sage has outed the secret – the seed is the secret and we all now know what a seed is!

Did you know that the soul searches for, according to defined set of criteria, suitable parents to express itself as their baby? “How a soul takes a body, the criteria for selecting … parents, are all a secret.” Therefore, we don’t. But, here SSRS missed a beat. The soul does more than search for a set of parents. It actually searches for a particular sperm and a particular egg, that fuse to give a body that it can take on lease!

I can go on and on mantras, death and such, through the rest of the piece. But I will stop here with a final observation. SSRS implies that he is “completely immersed in the mystery of life and this creation,” and therefore, he has reached the state of “samadhi.” Helpfully, he adds, “[g]etting steeped in mystery is devotion.” That is, never be inquisitive. He adds, ”Honouring and accepting it [devotion], the secret is revealed.” It has been revealed to Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.

Now, are you ready to fall at his feet and seek his blessings? Learn the secrets too, if you feel like it!

Raghuram Ekambaram

P.S By the way, physicists, biologists and scientists of other hues are, driven by curiosity, continuously immersed in investigating the mystery of life. Therefore, they have no devotion and they can never attain “samadhi”. The secret will never be revealed to them. Thank SSRS’s spirituality for that!