Dissolve the World in One Sitting

When Vyasa wanted to compose the Mahabharata, he needed someone who could write at the speed at which the epic was pouring out of him.

He went to Ganesha. And Ganesha agreed, but he put a condition.

He said Vyasa must not stop dictating, not even for a moment.

Vyasa agreed, but he put a condition of his own. He said Ganesha must write only that which he had understood.

Think about what this arrangement is really asking for.

Ganesha is not just writing down words. To write only what you have understood, at the speed of an unbroken dictation, across the whole vast Mahabharata, you have to understand each line the moment it comes to you.

What is its significance, what does it mean, what does it imply, what is the deeper lesson in it. And you have to understand all of this as fast as it is being spoken.

So here are two beings, both of them completely immersed in one intricate act, each holding the other to a discipline that does not allow the mind to wander even a little. Neither one can stop. Neither one can drift.

This is the first thing to notice. The immersion itself orders the mind.

Not the finishing of the work, but the doing of it. When your whole attention is consumed by the act, there is nothing left over to wander, and the scattered mind comes into order on its own.

There is a tradition in Tibetan Buddhism where the monks make a mandala out of coloured sand. They spend weeks, sometimes months, placing grain after grain of sand into an elaborate design of impossible detail.

And when it is finally complete, they destroy it. They sweep it away and begin again. The swept up sand is carried to a river and released into the water.

I have felt something close to this while making a rangoli on the floor of my home during Diwali. The same care, the same attention to each small detail, knowing very well that in a day or two it will be gone.

And every year we do exactly the same thing with Ganesha himself. During Ganesh Chaturthi, we make the idol, we welcome him, we do puja and aarti, we pour our devotion into him for days together.

And then we carry him to the water and dissolve him. We make him fully, and then we let him go fully.

So why do we destroy what took so long to make?

Because the gift was never sitting at the end. The moment you reach the goal, the game is over.

The mandala is swept away, the idol is dissolved in the water, and we start all over again. The whole benefit of the act is not in reaching the end. It is in what the process is doing to your interiority while you are inside it.

If you run towards the endpoint, you miss the point, because the endpoint only ends it.

But if you give yourself completely to the process, then the process itself becomes the force that gathers your scattered consciousness and brings the mind into order.

Now, why Ganesha? Of all the forms, why is he the one we make and dissolve like this?

Look again at what his role demanded. An intellect that could understand the Mahabharata at the very speed at which it was being spoken.

He is the symbol of the highest intellect. And every year we take this very symbol, we worship him fully, and then we dissolve him. This is itself the teaching.

Use your intellect fully, the way Ganesha used his, and the same intellect gains the power to dissolve all the chaos of the mind.

Because the chaos was never out there to begin with.

We are very sure that our disturbance is coming from the world, from our situations, from the people around us. But this is not fundamentally true.

The chaos is not created by the world. It is created by how you are holding the world inside you. It is the relationship between you and the people, you and the situations, you and everything around you.

And you can see this for yourself every single night. In deep sleep, everything is perfectly all right. Nothing troubles you. And yet your world has not changed even a little. The same people, the same situations, everything is exactly as it was.

Everything is at peace only because, in your experience, the world has disappeared. But this peace is of no use to you, because the moment you wake up, you come back, and the same things begin to trouble you all over again.

This is the entire meditative and spiritual journey. To dissolve the whole chaos of the mind while you are fully awake. Not by going into sleep, but with full awareness. And this is possible.

But to reach there, the mind must first be brought to a certain sharpness, a certain maturity, a certain crystallised and ordered state.

First, the process orders the mind, through immersion, through the whole of your attention given to the act. And only then can the ordered mind dissolve the world.

Ganesha wrote the entire Mahabharata in one sitting, without a single pause. Use your own intellect that fully, and you too can dissolve the entire world in one sitting of your own.

Pranam,
Yash from Yog Prachar

~ A Buffalo Yogi