You are polluted by food earned by doing beastliest deeds

 

Purity suggested is internal and external, mental and physical. The internal impurity is due to evil motives, illegitimate desires, harmful intentions, falsehoods spoken and intended to be spoken, plans and designs, projects and programmes based on basis of selfishness and attainment of selfish desires, currents and undercurrents, different colours and cap-boards, different flows of living (natural, as to be shown to the people, as desired and so on).

External impurity is due to visitations of unhealthy areas and places as epidemic-affected, burning and burial grounds, night-soil repositories, etc., due to impure touch of human corpse, a dead animal, a woman in menses, due to sexual cohabitiation, due to unearned food or food already contaminated during with attainment with actions of the most debased sort of living or earning etc.

You are more polluted by food earned by doing beastliest deeds.

This pollution is actual and not imaginary or superstitious. If one carefully analyses himself he can find it out. I want Maai-ists to understand everything in quite a scientific way by additions and subtractions, by weighings, sortings etc.

I quote my experience. For over twenty-two years I did not take onion or garlic, and never took food of any other except that cooked by me or of my own highest caste people the Naagars. I had to suffer many inconveniences with a sacrifice, I lived once for a full month on dry fruits because I would not take meals of any other hand. When I began to take meals without the said observance I was for full six months banished from the most delicate spiritual sublime thoughts. Absolutely no devotional currents no long meditations, no tears, no dashing head with wall, no rolling on ground. Absolutely a zero, a big cipher. I, however made the loss good gradually by devotion. The time I had to spend on self-cooking I did not misappropriate but I devoted the same to religious reading, meditation and devotion.

An interesting instructive instance may be given here. A saint was once a guest of a king. He was given best food in a golden cup and dish. The night over, he was tempted and he ran away before dawn with the cup and dish, King on hearing simply laughed and ordered no action be taken. However the saint returned and wrathfully asked “What food did you give me that changed my life-long purity of greedlessness ? Inquiry was made, and it was found that the food grains were from the confiscated grain bags of a plunderer, it was cooked by a Braahman who had swallowed up the jewelry of many maidens who entrusted their jewelry to him while going to pilgrimage and did not return and the service was made by a maid-servant who was accused of trying to poison a member of the royal family for a life-lasting prize.

Just as the purest rain drop imbibes the quality of the atmosphere and soil through which it passes, so the grain also assimilates several qualities right from the producer to the consumer.

A happy proverb is “The consumer’s name is engraved on every grain ” “Khaane walekaa naam likhaa hay daane daane men”.( खानेवालेका नाम लिखा है दाने दानेमे ।)

A Maai-ist must know the whole working. Food taken from an inferior is a loss, no doubt a spiritual loss, but it can be made good. It is on the other hand a simply meaningless foolishness to be attaching great importance to the food you take, whereas you actually live the life of the extortionate unscrupulous moneymaking worm or a sexually immoral profligate.

In a word the importance of food purity should be later and after your decision to live a life of purity in thought and ordinary walk of life in matters of your conduct and dealings with others. Maai-ists should not begin their progressive work at the wrong end. There must be a possibility of purification however remote thought, when a non-Braahman can be spiritually equal to the best Braahman and there must be a possibility when however great a Braahman may be, by certain pollution and degeneration, he remains nothing better than a non-Braahman.

Truthfulness means transparency and transparency means purity.

Before Mother’s worship begins, the very first prayer after repetition of Jay Maai is to purify us in the following words:-

Apavitrah pavitro vaa, sarvaavasthaam gatopi vaa |
yah japet Maai Jay Maai, Sa Baahyaabhyantara Shuchih ||

अपवित्रः पवित्रो वा, सर्वावस्थाम गतो पि वा ।

यः जपेत माई जय माई, स बाह्याभ्यन्तरा शुचिः ।।

Impure or pure, or gone to any condition of impurity though he repeats Maai Jay Maai, he is pure externally and internally.

~ Extract from the book : Mother and Mother’s Thousand Names , 1939 Edition

[Explanation of the Mother’s Name Satyaroopaa .]

Author : Mai Swarup Mai Markand