Sunday 17 November 2013

Who is Dadaji? By Professor Nanilal Sen, MA, D Litt Colonia, New Jersey USA

Who is Dadaji? It's high time the question be raised. We judge things; we size up everything we come in contact with. We re-create, re-cycle the entire spectrum of existence around us and in our image. We continue doing so in oblivion to the fact that Dadaji is out to tear off all the films and filaments of mental images that shroud the integral nudity of Truth. We do it even though  Dadaji says, "Don't try to understand. There is nothing to understand herein. The very recipe you adopt for it befogs your vision and refracts it into irredeemable fragments." At other times he says, "How come they are out to understand this man? Him, who is come here along with the Universal Man? Him, the philosophy of a single word of whom is not comprehended by the entire world?"     Who is Dadaji? Some find it convenient to call him the "Miracle-man from India." Of a paramount Truth, he is. Diverse miracles flash forth from him like sparks belching out of a smelting workshop. Dadaji blurts out, "No, no. This man does nothing. He has no power, no agency, not even instrumentality. All this is His doing." In offbeat moments, Dadaji exclaims, "What! Do you think this diffusion of Aroma across continents and oceans is superficial? This multiple manifestations in far-flung places? This simultaneous presence among different groups of people in different places for hours together in mutually contrasting moods? This being wedged in between a couple making love at night so that they are not torn asunder from the yoke of His Love? This harnessing of the elements in nature to the convenience and will wishes (Supreme Will. Wish is personal to Dada for us.) of the people? This patting off of fell diseases, including cancer, the "perestroika" (restructuring) of a failing body, and the bringing back of the dead to life? These supernal Puja experiences? And, this down-to-the-earth conversion of silver into gold and back and forth? Can any one in human body come anywhere near performing it? It just happens. They are fait accompli, manifestation of His Will." Dadaji says he is nobody. Who is Dadaji? Some choose to call him a Herculean Yogi who must have had an unknown history of long, severe penance in the Himalayas. Dadaji denies it outright, and along with it, that he was the Yoga of Patanjali. He emphatically says, "He (Dadaji) trudged, a stripling of thirteen, through the Himalayas looking for misguided ascetics in order to rehabilitate them to normal life and the self-evident Truth. The Yoga of Patanjali is a midsummer night's dream twirled up by the sullen stomach, a poetic fantasy of the ego under duress. A psycho-physical acrobatics tethered to the mundane gravitation, it can never lead one even to the furthest penumbra of the arcades of Love of Krishna, nor even to Vaikuntha (free from limitation, illusion). You may get a ghost through calisthenics, not God, Who is enshrined in you. Real Yoga is loving submission to His Will, to be yoked to His pervasive consciousness." At other times, he would sound a bit pragmatic and assertive while exclaiming, "He has been thrust herein after a training in all the maneuvers and logistics, this twisting of hands and feet and all that trash. He has come here endowed with six paramount powers. In him, Govinda of Vraja, Krishna of Dwaraka, Mahaprabhu, and Ram Thakur are manifest in unison." Therefore, his Yoga of Being is beauty bewitching. Renowned Indian scholar Gopinath Kaviraj says about Dadaji, "He can create billions and trillions of worlds in a moment." Who is Dadaji? A demonstrably perceptive section of people are prone to dub Dadaji a saucy womanizer, a Don Juan, rather a Casanova raised to the "N-th" degree. Does he not elegantly kiss lovely damsels in public and hug them while we look on in our social impotency? Does he not ask them with impunity, "Would you marry me?" Dadaji would hardly swallow a hearty chuckle to hear this. He would confidently chime in, "Why, we are all women. The only Man is He. And, you can never appear on this earth without prior wedding to Him, the Truth, Mahanama. This prerogative of kissing, wooing, and wedding has been wrested by this man from Nature while appearing on this earth. He can't do without lovely women, who are vibrant with emotional rapture for Him. That is this man's nature. He cannot, of a truth, wallow in wants of ascetic prohibition."  


Who is Dadaji? If you further tickle and squeeze him, indulgently Dadaji will dish out a few chips of his monistic relish saying, "Why, he has his shower in the mellifluous grace of women; he is robed in women; women are his cosmetic and perfumery. He eats and drinks women; he talks women; he sits and sleeps on women; he is immersed in the threefold fluid of women, namely, steady, static, and profoundly singular. Narayana can never be sundered from "Nari" (women)." What is this fluid? It is the sap of His Expression, the joy of His overflowing as the manifest existence. Who is the woman? She is, in the words of Dadaji, "the Eternal Absolute”, the Radha, the relishable fluidity of existence in which Krishna lies constantly immersed, like the yolk of the egg in its whitish fluid. In next moment, Dadaji quips, "But, he is nobody. Even then, an intransigent knave like him has never tread the earth."  Who is Dadaji? Some people ecstatically call him "Mahaprabhu". Indeed, many of his traits and activities remind one of Mahaprabhu. Some assert he is Ram Thakur in a new body. Anandamayi Ma used to address him as "Govinda". The great savant, Gopinath Kaviraj, who, according to Dadaji, reached Integral Consciousness through discursive, bookish knowledge, saw Dadaji flanked by fluted Krishna to his right, by Mahaprabhu to his left, and Satyanarayana exhibited in the middle. Mr S.K. Roy, the Chief Justice of Orissa and Srinivasm, the great Vedantist of Madras, witnessed Dadaji dissolving in a mass of white dazzling light.  Who is Dadaji? Harvey Freeman, who has come out of Dadaji's heart, will not concede that Dadaji is anything less than, "beyond Satyanarayana". This may be quite in order from two standpoints. In the first place, Expression of Satyanarayana, of His joyous overflowing, must be greater than Himself. Secondly, Satyanarayana is a symbol of triple vacuity, namely, of mind, intellect, and intuitive revelation. Dadaji is all vacuity. Harvey knows this to be true.  Harvey (left) speaking at Utsav in Calcutta 1983  Who is Dadaji? Dr. Radhakrishnan, the philosopher-president of India, saw two Dadajis, one talking to him and the other watching. The great scientist, Mr S.N. Bose, collaborator of Einstein, used to call him "Tathagata" and epithet of the Buddha. Mr G.T. Kamdar, the salt baron of India and supervisor of the Satyanarayan family Bhavan at Bhavanagar, India, looks upon Dadaji as Narayana. Bruce Kell of Australia, that golden sprout of Dadaji's love, calls him Love Infinite. Prof. Dr. Peter Meyer-Dohm of Germany would call him the "balsam jewel of the heart." The bilateral or trilateral verbal rapport-drama staged continually in the heart chamber of Mrs. Ruby Bose of Calcutta, that profoundest rendezvous of Dadaji's Maha-Rasa, portrays Dadaji as "Govinda of Govinda."    Who is Dadaji?  Khuswant Singh, the eminent journalist, characterizes Dadaji as a cocktail of the past, the present, and the future messiahs. To Jatin Bhattacharya of Calcutta, whose residential address Dadaji says is the crematorium, and whom Dada calls "Purna Kumbha", Dadaji is fast gravitating towards the state of Satyanarayana.


To famous Indian actor Abhi Bhattacharya, that second self, that witness counterfoil of Dadaji? He only listens without speaking out; his eyes rolling in ruddy rapture of Dadaji-intoxication. Abhida quotes Dadaji as saying, "Abhi! You cannot comprehend how ineffable is Satyanarayana. Full, Fuller, Fullest-est,...-est,...-est. This is for the first time He has appeared in this world. This is for the last time also. If He has to come again, the universe will have to be created over again." Who is Dadaji? What does Dadaji himself say? What Dadaji says cuts both ways. One time he says, "He is a thousand times more powerful than Mahaprabhu."  Then he says, "Ram Thakur and Mahaprabhu were He, Himself. Leave this man aside. But, he has come here with all-out autocratic authority." Finally he eats all his words to say, "This is the last word on the issue. None of them is He, Himself, at bottom. He cannot come here as a man or any other being. He has manifestation through them." To Abhida's query, "Where had you been so long before your Advent?" Dadaji’s answer was, "In the repose of Self-identity."  Who is Dadaji? What more does Dadaji say? He says, "The Bridegroom has come to the bride. And, the bride is veiled with the tapestry of wanton sense-gratification. Who will lift that veil? The Bridegroom, of course. After that comes the dark night of hibernating separation. And, at long last, the Bridegroom will woo the bride into eternal repose." Dadaji is the Bridegroom. That is why he uttered once in seeming dejection, "They have not even recognized the Krishna of Vraja. How would they recognize Satyanarayana?" Who is Dadaji? During his world tours, Dadaji has been described by those who met him as "the Lagrangian (basic, key formula of a system) of the universe", "the Null Set", "the Black Hole of Infinite Galaxies", "the biofeedback arch-engineer of humanity", "Existence lying in state upon Existence", "the Absolute in overflowing stance", and so forth. As such descriptions are growing in number, our power of comprehension is progressively nearing its nadir (lowest point opposite the zenith). Who is Dadaji? A section of hard-boiled conservatives wonder if Dadaji is an atheist. Indeed, his revolutionary zeal knows no frontiers. Our traditional concept of spirituality evaporates before his persuasive logic. He does not believe in scriptures for they are overlaid with superstitious dogmas and self-defeating practices; they tend to promote the ways of the world. Dadaji would often assert, "What is the difference between the perusal of the Gita or the Bible and that of a pornographic fiction? How does meditation or turning the rosary differ from working in a field or a factory or even a brothel? We are prostituting ourselves constantly through all our activities, secular or sacerdotal (sacrificial). We are creating ghosts out of our minds and worshipping them. Divest yourself of mental images and idols. Where there is mind, there is meaning. Where there is motion because of want, there is emotion. Get beyond the trickery of the mind. Don't stifle it, lest you fail to enjoy His Love and the beauty of His Creation. Let the flapping of its wily wings be stuck in the savor of His Love. Truth will dawn on you in white radiance." Indeed, his iconoclasm (image-busting, demolition of idols) is more on the mental plane than the physical. Dada says our minds cannot do without idolatry that taints Truth. That is why he dismisses our religious experiences and visions as cooked up and tainted by mental flirtations.


Truth, to him, therefore, is a supramental, vibrationless, vacuous existence. Our Gods and Absolutes and Infinites are liquidated by the mildest stroke of the first vibration from his vacuous stance. Is it wrong then, to call him an atheist? Dadaji loves the atheists because they are free from the festering pseudo-spiritual obsessions of the mind.  Who is Dadaji? Was Christ ever a Christian, or the Buddha a Buddhist? This also serves as a pointer to our enquiry. We have to dispense with the mental crucible before we can get at the truth about Dadaji. Beyond mind, there is no meaning. How then to formulate the truth about him? No problem. We have to interpret the impression of the revelation on our mind which is neither dead, nor dormant, but is simply a passive receiver like the baby's. It may be what has so far been said about Dadaji are pure revelations to this and that mind. It were better had we not raised the question at all. Our impatience with this inscrutable phenomenon called Dadaji has lead us to such in impasse. Even then the above may serve as a Dadaji Concordance for the future generation.              Who is Dadaji? Some worldly-wise people, in an endeavour to cover up the stench of their own corruption, denounce Dadaji as a cheat, a swindler, a hypocrite. Dadaji squarely approves of it. He explains, "Yes, he is verily a cheat, a swindler, a hypocrite. No body other than such can deliver you the Truth. If occasion demands it, he will not hesitate to tell a thousand and one lies to see the Truth established. Mundane truth and falsity are cobwebs of the mind. They have no value to Him." Is it not one of the profoundest utterances of Dadaji? Does not one, who knows your past, present, and future, and yet counsels you in a worldly way, behave, as Krishna of Dwaraka did, like a cheat, a swindler, a hypocrite? Why, then carry coal to New Castle? Why bring our sham hypocrisy of evaluation to bear upon the hypercritical hypocrisy of Dadaji? How can you cheat on cheating? How dare you swindle the omni-swindler?     Dadaji holds a purse at Utsav in Calcutta 1989 Is it not better to cast off mental constructs and spell out "Dada, Dada" in full-throated ease, bask in his love, and feel great without looking before and after; following Cintamoni Mahapatra, Balaram-Vasanti Misra, Candramadhav, the Justice Hota, and a few others of Orissa, and Ann Mills of the USA? Dadaji has already taken charge of you. He is your destiny. The name is a palindrome (word, verse or sentence that reads the same backward or forward; Dada is a palindrome written the Indian way) yielding you the whole, whichever way you start from, that is unqualified existence. In fact, "HE HAS NOT COME AT ALL."  


By Dr N Sen 

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