Of realising divine design
   Date :31-Dec-2019

Of realising divine desig
 
 
By Vijay Phanshikar :
 
Maryadeyam Virajate ... (Within my limits, I remain ...) THIS used to be a final sentence in many a letter that learned people in the past wrote while signing off their letters, personal or official. That was a dignified, restrained way to say that whatever I might have written so far was as per my comprehension, and now I sign off within those limits. Of course, for the people who have almost forgotten the art of letter-writing -- thanks to the telephony and digital revolutions -- the importance of such a restrained yet profound statement at the end of the letter may not be comprehensible.
 

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But for those who wrote letters as regular practice and habit -- willingly or otherwise -- those two words Maryadeyam Virajate ... carried much importance as a formality and also as a statement of politeness and humility. Be that as it may, those two words also carried a spiritual meaning, if understood in that manner. Maryadeyam Virajate -- Within my limits, I remain -- suggested something bigger in import, something finer in metaphor. To understand what it could mean, let us drag those two words out of the ambit of letter-writing.
 
Let us bring the expression up for a spiritual scrutiny. The point, here, is about the limits -- Maryadaa -- within which I have to live and operate all along. I may try my best to push those limits farther so that I have a bigger domain to play within. But in reality, those limits also tell me that I have a restricted domain in which my writ runs -- not just in official parlance but also in terms of life in general. There used to be a little boy who, by stroke of misfortune, went totally blind when he was just nine months old. Born into a family with very moderate means, he grew up with that terrible handicap, yet developed a positive outlook with blind eyes.
 
The atmosphere at home and in the village where he was born and lived all along fostered spiritual bend of mind in the little boy. Eventually, he got married to a girl who really adored him as her mentor. And mentor he really was, not just to his bride but also to countless others as he grew older. For, as he progressed on the spiritual path, this blind young man assumed sage-like qualities that magnetised countless god-seekers to him. Not only did this young man advise them how they should live under the umbrella of the Divine, but also wrote as many as 117 books in different languages, espousing spiritual causes, discussing philosophical issues, debunking many modern postulates of science on the basis of his wisdom and scholarship.
 
On many occasions, this young man -- who lived a life 34 years in all -- travelled several miles in the night with a tin trunk on his head carrying the manuscripts of his books, to Amravati in Vidarbha, with no one to escort him, without any accident. In those days, the road from his village Madhaan to Amravati was just an apology for one. Yet, this man never fumbled, never fell down, never bumped into something terrible. How did all these achievements become possible in the life of Saint-Poet Gulabrao Maharaj? The answer is simple: He respected the limitations the Divine had woven around him -- blindness, limited resources. He knew that the Divine had put those limitations around him with a purpose. So, it became his life’s mission to understand that purpose of life.
 
So, early on as a teenager, he decided that blindness was no curse but actually a boon with which he could achieve the seemingly unachievable. He made his friends read out books to him. He dictated his ideas to them and thus were born his books. He also earned a massive circle of followers of what he called Madhuradvait Sampraday -- the cult that believed in the nectar-like sweetness in the devotional path, as per which Sant Gulabrao Maharaj considered himself ‘daughter of Sant Dnyaneshwar and wife of Lord Krishna’. This happened because he believed in Maryadeyam Virajate -- Within my limits, I remain! He refused to be cowered by limitations; he used those as the divine dimensions of his life chosen for a specific purpose. He found that purpose -- and immortalised himself in God’s name. This belief made all the difference to Sant Gulabrao Maharaj. And this is true for everybody -- without exception, provided everybody realises the divine design!