This Diwali, I tried to explore the significance of celebrating the festival.
Every festival has three dimensions.
Physical
Psychological
Spiritual
Physical aspect of celebrating the festival is to make the body rejuvenate by taila mardana, auspicious food, and external celebrations.
Psychological aspect is to make the mind clean by replacing the ill thoughts with good thoughts. How? On this festival day, we pray God to give mental peace and pray for every other human well being. When we pray for others, the result is obvious. We get benefited. So psychologically it is when we pray for others, wish for others well being our ill thoughts will be cleaned. Also by lightning lamps, it cleans the ill thoughts.
Spiritual aspect of celebrating festival is to grow our life beyond physical. Our aspect of life is mainly physical. We never know the aspect of life beyond physical. Such aspect of life brings new dimension altogether. Exploring the new dimension of life is only possible when this spiritual being is well nourished. To nourish that spiritual being, we ceebrate with lights.
How to nourish the spiritual being and see the different dimension of life?
To answer the question, we need to understand what is blocking it? It's our identity or ego. We always do acts in the world by using ego. But we do not stop, we keep the ego grows even when the person is not with us by thinking about the incidents happened in the past and ensure that what we did right by all kinds of thoughts support the argument. The ego grows leaps and bounds by this. Then we have a big problem of dealing with people. If the same person comes, with ego we try to do all kinds of silly acts that make him/her suffer. We know this world only through our ego. If my relatives come, I treat them based on the ego, they treated me like this, I will treat like this. Some cannot do in physically, so they perform psychologically. So ego is the fundamental road block to experience the different world.
Ego is basically identity we created. The moment we destroy the identity our life changes. To kill that identity, our sages made a beautiful way with festivals.
How?
Every aspect of celebrating festival is to remove identity. We first clean the body to change the energy to be receptive. Next, we invite our friends, relatives and neighbours and celebrate together. We share the things with them and pray for others well being too.This will remove some part of ego. We go to temple and pray God for our well being. This removes some part of ego that I am great etc. Later, we help the poor by doing service. This means we are ready to give away our belongings or the accumulation which we think is ours.
Now coming to Diwali, why is it so significant in nourishing the spiritual being?
There are many stories why we celebrate Diwali. Every one know that Rama returned to Ayodhya or narakasura killed by Sathyabama.
But these are not just stories. They have inner meaning. Our stories are representation of our spiritual journey. In terms of Rama return means we are ready to remove the identity or ego. When ego is killed completely then we return to the Ayodhya (which can never be conquered).
Similarly narakasura killed by Sathyabama ( mother earth) means narakasura is ego born by our mind. When the mind kills ego then inner light activates.
So it's a message to all of us that lighting the lamp within brings us the different dimension of life.
So I wish everyone to light the lamps outside and inside to make this world best place to live.
