In volume 2 of my Pastimes of Bahgavat you will have heard the strange tale of king Prithu’s birth. He was one of the first emperors to rule the entire planet, all seven continents. Many lesser rulers reigned under him but he was the supreme monarch over them all. This tale is of course of a time in our most distant and long-forgotten history on this planet. Forgotten by all except the mysterious text which I stumbled across once. I too was a seeker of truth in my distant youth. And now in my old age, with perhaps only days left to leave my legacy, I wish to share this tale with you dear reader, before it is lost forever and we become a lesser civilization of less informed seekers of the truth regarding our real identities as the children of legends.
King Prithu performed many marvelous feats of chivalry throughout his life and showed his noble heart in his actions. And perhaps I shall have the chance to share them with you one day. But now I want to tell you the equally profound tale of king Prithu’s demise. My recollection jumps here and there dear reader, so please forgive me if I prioritize certain pastimes before others. If I am suddenly swept away from this body, I want to first capture the most crucial pastimes here in this narration. And what wisdom is more crucial than the knowledge of how the great king used mystic yoga techniques to leave his body in full consciousness when his time arrived to return to the spiritual world?
Our time may come too one day, as this human form of life grows shorter and shorter with every passing hour. So much of it is used up in surviving and protecting our family that little is left for contemplation on the time of transcendence when we have to leave it all behind. Nevertheless, my search in my youth led me to these ancient Sanskrit texts, which I have read a long time ago. But now, near my own end in this material body, I turn to them again and find that the message they carry is even fresher than before. Somehow it rings clearer in my mind, perhaps due to the passing of time and the maturing of the brain and personality after decades more experience in the school of hard knocks.
And with my remaining time, which is certainly shorter than what I’ve already passed, the guidance revealed in the pastime of king Prithu’s demise appears more important than before. I am just a wondering seeker of keys and secrets along the path, that might remind me of those eternal truths which I have been seeking forever, or so it sometimes feels. And despite many dry years of fruitless discovery along this road of life, there have been those one or two occasions where – as if after a long drought – a sudden oasis appears. Words of wisdom flow like waters from a stone at a spring to quench the thirst of the caravan rider upon the desert plains of the material world.
Wondering through the desert of the material world like this, years can pass before our eyes. Wind storms can blow up sand that covers the whole sky, so that we lose sight of any path or landmarks or beacons along the way. We may even forget who we really are. After all, do we not spend some years as a youth, some as an adult in their prime and then some as a frail and forgetful old shadow of our former selves at the very end, when the body is but a bag of skin and bones.
And with each passing season we may don a different cap, or play a different role on the grand stage of life. Our parts we wear like masks to fit in with the surrounding cast on the stage in which we find ourselves. Directors try to shepherd us this way and that, like the lawmakers, or politicians and their crews of soldiers or academics. We simply wear the mask as they dictate, whether subtly or overtly, because we want to conform and avoid retribution. We comply because we want to get by. We play our roles.
And so who are we really? Who is the person donning these varying roles in life at differing times and toward different people, from one decade to the next? Sometimes even our names may change as our persona shifts, with some of us more fluidly than with others. In the end the weary traveler wants to drop the mask they carry about so dutifully for a lifetime. And who do they find behind that many temporary masks. Do we even remember?
Now at the tail end of my life’s journey, I set the mask aside and struggle to clear the cobwebs that clutter my long forgotten memories of an identity once held in a time long past. And as the dust begins to lift, memories return in fragments as do the words spoken in the ancient texts from a civilization long forgotten, except for a solitary few, holed up in their cloisters and caves with their libraries of books. And in these ancient texts the strange tale of king Prithu rings clear like a bell, of how he strategically retired from the throne and step by step walked the stairway to heaven, back to the eternal abode, his original constitutional position back home where we all belong.
So be sure to stay tuned for the next episode where I will reveal to you those steps one by one so that you too can climb up out of this masked pantomime and up to your place among the stars.
(image pixabay)
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