Kabir says, win over Ram Woo him with words of nectar The fractured jewel of your mind Piece by piece, put it together Kabir’s poems abound with signals to the poora (whole), the ek (one), the saabut (unfragmented), the akhandit (undivided), the sakal (complete). Listening to him, we begin to recognise the crisis of our being as that of fragmentation, of dis-aggregation, of being splintered into multiple dualities. Nature vs man, man vs woman, Hindu vs Muslim, high vs low, public vs private, head vs heart, spiritual vs worldly, sacred vs profane.
..the list goes on.
Held in the thrall of these delusional and violent binaries, we function through identification and exclusion; through alignment and rejection. Is it any surprise then that much of the time we feel broken? Kabir gives us another architecture to imagine the shape of ourselves. In this design, our self is not constructed by claiming one side of a duality.
Rather we are fashioned as drops of water, of the same abundant substance as the ocean. We have within our small selves all the properties, all the constitutive molecules that make up the limitless whole. We are the many, held in the one.
We are fractal images of the ultimate reality. A drop falls in the ocean Everyone agrees The ocean held in a drop? A rare one sees The wave in the ocean Is the ocean itself Rising, water, falling, water Tell me how it could be Any other? Instead of ‘ocean’ You call it a ‘wave’ By doing so Does it lose its water? The world.
