Utsav: Three steps to bliss

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Swami Tejomayananda [1]

At the conclusion of Baisakhi, the harvest festival celebrated widely in north India to mark the beginning of the new harvest season, it is well worth reflecting on the need for the many festivals we celebrate and their significance.
Our lives, from time to time, become monotonous. We feel bored and crave change. Although our physical exhaustion is taken care of by sleep, our mental exhaustion continues to dissipate our energy. To rid ourselves of mental exhaustion, we tend to look outside for entertainment. Recognising this need for change, our culture provides us special festivals of a religious nature called utsav.
No religion will last long if it does not understand the desires of the people and insists on strict discipline at all times.
Festivals give us reasons for merrymaking, as well as a noble vision, inspiring us to live a fulfilling life. This is achieved by our festivals in three ways: preparation, practice and celebration.
Preparation: Through fasting, one withdraws from indulgence in sensual pleasures. Fasting does not mean just abstinence from food. We “eat” forms through our eyes, sounds through our ears, fragrances through our noses, and so on. All of this is actually feeding our mind, and our mind feeds on these sense perceptions and thereafter constantly runs outward, in their direction, becoming totally dissipated. True fasting is to have control over the sense organs and to cease from indulgence in sensual pleasures.
Practice: The second important aspect is to constantly think, worship, meditate and pray to the Lord. Performing japa (repetition of the Lord’s name) and puja helps us to purify the mind and to ardently pray to Him, “Lord, please manifest Thyself in my heart!”
Our minds constantly wander in many directions. Therefore, our true nature is not recognised by us. But when the mind is withdrawn from all external objects and there is single-pointed concentration through meditation, there comes a point when the last thought has ended and no new thought has arisen. This thoughtless state is called realisation, the birth of the Lord in the heart.
Celebration: When one recognises one’s true self, all ignorance, delusion and negative tendencies of the mind are destroyed. Thereafter, one lives for ever in the experience of the blissful self. This joy of realisation is represented externally in festivals by the lighting of lamps, by singing and dancing and by the distribution of sweets.
So let your life always be a celebration of the divinity within you!