The Olympic Games are always a welcome feature, an occurrence vibrant, stimulating, informative, awe-inspiring. This event dots our calendar roughly twice in a decade or precisely, once every 4 years. Its origin dates back to 776 B.C., according to written records but it is believed generally to have been held Greece several centuries before the recorded 776 B.C., featuring mainly foot races and later on including others, starting with wrestling and pentathlon. The recently concluded Olympic 2012 featured competitions in 28 Olympic Sports which branched into 300 events with 205 nations taking part, throwing light on human artistry, mastery and excellence; It once again brought under the scrutiny of the huge floodlights of the stadium the limits to which the supposedly frail human frame could be pushed to and of course, what it had taken for that prowess displayed in many an athlete in the arena. From the East End of London reached the living rooms of many homes and public places all around the world, the song of praise of the physical body and its beauty and all the feats within its range. The scrutiny on physical culture always gets a boost, during the Olympic Games.
To become an athlete is the first steps towards becoming a true man. These words by The Mother keep ringing in the ears. And who is an athlete? Is he or she not an athlete who has mastered his or her body to an extent that reads “near perfection” in a bodily skill and ability? The Mother herself gives the method and the measure:
consciousness and control
discipline and mastery
Some mere words but what they hold in them! Even a moment of contemplation on these words indicate the mammoth task of working with one’s nature, a working with one’s habits, established thought patterns, one’s level of consciousness as to how one’s physical being functions, at each moment and so too one’s vital with all its desires and pulls and the movements of the mental nature, not devoid of its tricks and suggestions to follow the whims and fancies of the vital pulls. But then, once we see and become aware of these and also see and become aware that there must be awaiting for these elements of nature another fate more luminous, then we manage to turn around a clock within. To subject the physical being, together with the vital and mental, to the transforming rays of the Psychic Being is a way The Mother suggests, in a question and answer session. The habits are scrutinised, teased and found their knotted beginnings and new habits are worked in towards another more conscious gain, the vital puts her backing behind some high motive we keep for the being and provide support with her energy and force, and discipline sets in, with determination and a focussed mind. Then with continued movement in this direction, something called mastery comes in. What is this mastery? Mastery indicates some amount of flair, fluency, efficiency, a fine execution of a move, an action, a string of actions. These could be in any field accessible to the human, namely, sports, literacy, speech, culinary, art and craft and the thousand and thousand more areas of human scope.
This perfecting of the physical being is needed in order to express the divine principal more and more fully and wholly, in a body of beauty and suppleness and strength, a conscious body that is open to the Light. What does this spell for us, in our normal day to day existence? What does our body mean to us? What is its state now? How more could it be tuned and turned into an entity of Light through which a life of sadhana in whatever measure could be lived, and expressed the Divine Law?
Let us contemplate on this age old maxim:
Sarīram khalu dharmasādhanam
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