Monday, December 5th, 2011

Who Can Claim Perfection?

Toronto, Ontario

We all have human frailties. I have plenty. Gurus in our order list or identify four major defects found in humans.

1. Our senses are imperfect.
2. We have an inclination to cheat.
3. We are constantly deluded, for instance we surmise that the body is the self.
4. WE are all prone ot make mistakes.

Hers' one of my personal weaknesses. I sometimes start to fade while someone's talking to me. My eyelids get heavy and they begin to shut until I realize (or the person talking to me realizes) he/she is losing my attention.

"Are you fading?" asked my friend who was seated across from me at a table.

"Yes. I'm tired, sorry!" I said and I was tired from lack of sufficient rest the night before. I didn't have the guts to say that I wanted to have more of a two way dialogue which was clearly not happening. That was another weakness. I could be frank and be less polite.

You learn something about yourself as time passes, or you should be. I learn new things about our neighbourhood. On my walk today I explored at least two locations in our vicinity where I'd been walking for years, locations where two of my favourite artists (during the time when I hit adolescence) churned out masterpieces of acrylic work in a studio that I pass by regularly. It was a personal discovery. I didn't know all this time what's right under my nose.

What else did I realize about myself? Well, maybe age is slowly creeping up. At A group reading of the Bhagavad-gita, a length of two and a half hours, in Sanskrit through transliteration, on this Advent of the Gita, I realized I couldn't read with a gusto as before. Partially it was not the greatest lighting arrangement for which to read the seven hundred verses, but it was also a slow stamina deterioration.

I took the lead with the reading but my recitation was not the greatest and pronunciation, not the best. It was an offense to the Sanskrit language what people were hearing and therefore in pursuit of following, they in turn were left confused. After reading the first twelve chapters with six to go, I asked the crowd, "Shall we recite in English? Let's vote." So we did. Only one person preferred to stick to the mother tongue while the rest vied for rendering it in a language we could understand.

We all admitted to a weakness in pronunciation of the divine language. What to conclude? We're not perfect. If we were, we'd be God.

5 Km