Tabula Rasa
Friday June 3 2005 09:43 IST
By Karmayogi
A computer expert found a breakdown in his software. He is not a trained professional expert. He is an amateur, but quite an expert at that. He could not restore the working of the software. He is a devotee too. He tried for several hours. His eight-year-old daughter is being reared in his tradition. She took over the remedy. The father, who indulgingly allowed the child to dabble with the instrument, gently told her that his best effort was useless and only if they reinstalled the software would it work. The child was emphatic, You dont know anything. I have prayed to Mother. She will make it work.
As soon as the child sat at the computer, it worked. Man comes into the world as a fresh flower. His mind is like a clean slate. He is innocent. As years pass, he becomes worldly-wise. Mother calls that membrane on the Mind onionskin. It is thin, but impenetrable. It stands between him and God.
There are others who grow up retaining their tabula rasa. They do not grow up into a child-like innocence. They end up being childish, naïve, unsuspecting. Their family calls them affectionately innocent. Innocence of several affairs at the age of 30 or 40 is not innocence, but ignorance. They may be good or otherwise. Unsuspecting goodness like Edmund Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo will be betrayed by rivals, colleagues, betrothed fiancées and ultimately by life. Dantes ended up in prison. He was a spirited young man. After 14 years of hell, he dominated life. It was because he was no longer naively innocent. He developed a conscious innocence, an innocence couched in inner strength. He was innocent not because he was weak and ignorant, but because he was calm inside from strength and incapable of human perversions. A proverb says, Learn even theft, but forget it. One needs to know the existence of the negative side of life, the evil, but must be capable of not being urged by it.
Such analysis often ends in, Well, we are like this. Am I going to change hereafter? It is human hopelessness. It is despair or frustration, an overwhelming despair or debilitating frustration. The truth is, Man thus chooses despair. Will he come forward to choose the opposite? Should he so decide, one thing is imperative. He has to DECIDE not to use his own little powers in his selfish favour by strategies that are impermissible. To choose optimism is difficult. To choose NOT to be your lower self is more difficult. One should be determined to be GOOD. That decision is a chink in the onionskin. Should he persist in that difficult effort, he will discover age is no bar, as is generally conceded. If childhood is fresh, age has WISDOM. As the child loses its innocence, the growing Man gathers information, knowledge and wisdom. What can be accomplished by the innocence of the child will again be there in age as conscious innocence of age. The tabula rasa will be there fortified with greater knowledge. As one grows, one will find nothing is lost if he desists from collecting human perversity, called by the Vedas crookedness.