Centuries ago, Indians learnt the art of conquering the mind. Seers from Mahavira to the Buddha to Sankara taught people how to subdue their mind in order to cope with suffering, destruction, slaughter, holocaust and desolation brought about by the Vedic order since time immemorial, where “the nature of things and the things of nature” or rta held sway over the life of mortals. That order climaxed in the epoch-altering genocide at Kalinga (261 BC) where a quarter-million people were slaughtered.
Kalinga forced a king, an emperor named Asoka to borrow a leaf out of Buddha's tenets not only to subjugate his own mind, but that of an entire race of people from the cold, wind-swept steppes of what today is known as Central Asia to the warm and cyclone-inducing equatorial waters of the Indian Ocean.
For over two millennia, since the reign of Asoka, the Indian mind took shelter in desirelessness and absence of expectations, fearlessness of thought, unchanging steadiness, equanimity, wisdom, non-attachment, non-action, goodness, total absence of perversion, endurance, friendliness, intelligence, contentment, gentleness and pleasant speech – each a cultivated virtue to free the individual from the instincts of acquisition and rejection.
So impactful was the conversion of a people and the subjugation of their mind so forceful, that it survived well past the first millennium since Asoka, through the subsequent 1,000 years of depredations by marauders, commencing with Mahmud of Ghazni and ended with the non-violent liberation of India from the British under the leadership of Gandhi.
India, and Indians, attained equanimity in the face of the threat of mass extinction of race and culture, from preaching and learning that the mind is only a fictitious movement of energy in consciousness. That wars and battles and idols and gods and goddesses… and their destruction were only moving images of the mind, a grand coincidence… a great hallucination! That no matter what, nothing really would change. That no matter how much things appeared to change, everything would remain the same.
That TIME alone really was, is, and will be, the great leveller. That Time alone is the ultimate reality. For Time is Death.
Omnipotent!
Omniscient!
Omnipresent!
Cut to General Election 2019: Our notion of Time is witnessing tectonic shift. You can see that in the forceful attempt to reassert and unwind the Mind of India… No matter what the resultant suffering. No matter what the cost of destruction. No matter what the desolation. In this final push of Hindutuva to reshape the Indian mind, and redefine Hinduism, the Voter alone, and not King Emperor, has the final choice!
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