Life is Full of Colours!

The ‘Holi’ festival is a fun-filled and popular occasion for celebration. People play Holi with chandan or sandalwood powder and coloured water. The festival is celebrated around early March each year, coinciding with the full bloom of spring. People believe that bright colours represent energy, life and joy. Huge bonfires are also lit in the evening as part of celebrations.

Life should be full of colours! And each colour is meant to be seen and enjoyed separately, for if they are all mixed together, all the different colours merge and will appear all black. All colours like red, yellow, green and orange should exist side by side and simultaneously be enjoyed together.

Similarly, in life, different roles that are played by the same person should exist peacefully and distinctly inside him. For example, when a father continues to play his role of a ‘father’ in office, things are bound to go for a toss. In our country, a politician is sometimes a father first and a leader later!

In whichever situation we are in, we should play the corresponding role to the hilt and then life is bound to become colourful! This concept was called ‘varnashram’ in ancient India. This meant that everyone — whether a doctor, teacher, engineer, father, brother or son — is expected to play their roles with full enthusiasm. Mixing professions will always be counterproductive.

If a doctor wants to do business, he should run a business separately and that should be secondary to his first profession and he should not make business out of medicine. Keeping these ‘containers’ of the mind separate and distinct is the secret of a happy life and this is what Holi teaches us.

All colours emanate from white, and when they are mixed together again, they become black. When your mind is white and aware of consciousness — pure, peaceful, happy and meditative — different colours and roles emerge. We get the strength to play various roles with full sincerity against the background.

We have to dip into our consciousness time and again. If we only look at and play around with colours outside of us, we are bound to find blackness all over again. Between roles we have to take deep rests, in order to play each role sincerely. Now, the biggest impediment to deep rest is desire. Desire means stress. Even petty desires cause high stress — the higher goals give relatively less botheration! Desire tortures the mind at times. So what does one do?

The only way out is to focus attention on that desire and surrender it. This act of focussing awareness or sight on the desire is called ‘Kamakshi’. With awareness, desire loses its grip and surrender happens and then nectar flows out from within.

The goddess, Kamakshi, holds a sugarcane stem in one hand and a flower in the other. The sugarcane stem is so hard and has to be squeezed in order to obtain sweetness, while the flower is soft and collecting nectar from it is so easy. This truly represents life, which indeed has a little of both! It is far easier to obtain this bliss from the inside than it is to try to extract pleasure from the outside world — which needs a lot more effort. So lift your Spirit with joy of colour!

Wishing all Happy Holi!