Walking beside the cart, I looked into the eye of the bullock by my side. It snorted. We were not even a yard apart. It had long black lashes which flicked the flies that settled on the moist surface of the lid. The eye was enormous. I admired it wishing I had big eyes just like that. I could dart them around and lash out with my eyelashes, but they were vacuous and inattentive. The beast stared ahead listlessly, seeming mesmerized and seeing nothing. We were both unconcerned I realized that we were so close together. We had grown accustomed to each other. The respectful distance that I had once maintained, had dwindled. The bull relied upon the pull of the rope to tell it where to go since it had been conditioned that way.
I thought about the talk that morning. I wondered why Krishnaji emphasized conditioning so often in his talks. “Beware of conditioning”, he had cautioned several times that day. “Be aware of the impact of conditioning upon your mind.” Was he implying that we were dumb like beasts of burden? What cheek, I thought, my heckles rising. It was such an unsavoury thought. After all the study we did, to think that we had sat there and let him poke fun at us; why hadn’t someone challenged him? There were more than three hundred of us and we had all remained mute. Mute like mules, I bridled, in self-righteous indignation and a touch of conscience for having let my side down.
The whip lashed and the bull snorted again. Its nose ring was made of iron. It was hung from the soft tissue that separated its nostrils. Imagining myself with such a ring, I did a quick double take. Looking askance, my understanding deepened for the animal’s condition. A golden ring would have been fine, I thought swayed by vanity, but a heavy iron ring would be unbearable. Imagine the heat of the metal and sniffing it all day..... was I glad it wasn’t fashionable for humans. I could hardly feel the rings in my ears but a nose ring was an entirely different matter.
For the first time in my life, I really felt for the animal. Looking at the tips of my nose made me cross eyed. There was two of everything that I looked at. I was seeing double. Gazing around the world cross eyed, I realized why the bulls were resigned to their fate. I understood why they mindlessly relied upon the pull of the rope to tell them where to go. To them the world would be an incomprehensible place and they were mesmerized either by pain or their fear of it.
Cross eyed and led by the nose, they would simply amble along after all..... they had to breathe through the hoop in order to live. They had no choice. Our paths parted. The driver shifted his weight on the balance beam, pulled the reigns and clicked his tongue to turn the cart towards the cattle sheds. I stepped on to a footpath which went through the bushes, up a gradual incline where a thicket hid our home from view. Blue hills framed the white washed house. They were a distinct blue much darker than the sky. There was not a cloud in sight to the west where they lay soaking up the sun in broad day light.
Years later, I thought back to that incident to understand how I too had fallen foul of the powers of conditioning. I had not realized then, that the force of conditioning had left its mark as I had fallen into a habit of interpreting life within a limited context of the known. If only I had explored conditioning, I would have saved myself from abstracting life in search of truth. But at the time I had been happily engrossed in the movement of thought and I had loved to watch the images playing upon my emotions. Conditioning by contrast seemed tedious to look at.
There was no way, “I” was going to be conditioned, I thought suavely...not me, no way. I didn’t fancy being some cross eyed numbskull burdened by the weight of some bone numbing backlash. I was going to protect myself from such a dreary plight. I would fly free, I thought, on a flight of fantasy and I need never come home to roost again. Conditioning was such a waste of time, I thought, as usual ignoring the obvious.
I had mapped out the regions of my mind to find out where we all slipped up in our search for freedom. I certainly wanted to be free if the opposite was containment. However I did not understand conditioning. I see now, that we could have explored it at much greater depth. To prepare the ground, one has to cover the ground with care. Providing compassionate grounds for learning is a start but the homework involves not just speculating upon truth, as I did but also in actively exploring at some depth on the impact of conditioning as well.
© 2022 Geetha Waters