Reflections: How I became a Mystic

Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man. So said Rabindranath Tagore. My own realisation of this came in quite an unlikely place.

Doing my clinical rotations in the Neonatal and Gynaecological wards has been quite an exalting experience. Watching a young mother holding her three day-old infant son and chatting happily away with him, as if he understood every word she said, struck a chord somewhere deep inside me. It woke me up to the immeasurable love that goes into conception and into parenthood. Into creating something out of yourself. Into nurturing a new lifeform as part of yourself and then tearing it away from you in a process of almighty pain. Into seeing it grow into an independent being with an all new individuality. Such is the joy of Life.

This, I realised, is the same joy that goes into making an oak tree from an acorn, into making two bacteria out of one. The same joy that made women and men out of monkeys and mushrooms from LUCA’s. I could see the oneness of life – the proverbial unbreakable golden thread – connecting me to the brownest seaweed, my most intricate neurones to the gut cells of earthworms.

There, in an unlikely place, drowned in cries of infants and the insane babbling of new mothers, I became something I never thought I’d become. No, I became something I thought I should never become. (In one crazy moment which Abraham Maslow might’ve called Self-actualisation,) I became a mystic.

There, holding the infant in my arms and watching his fingers curl around mine, I was lookining the glory of all Creation in the eye. And just one step beyond, I could feel the raiment of the Hand that wrote it all. In the sparkling eyes of the newborn, I saw a million promises of life, as it was conceived billions of years ago. I saw the hope that man is.

That was a moment of such emotion, such exhilaration and ecstasy, that its intensity cannot be captured even in the rhyme of poesy or the notes of music. While my friend was busy asking if the erythema on the soles, and the clumps of scant hair, were normal, I fell madly, insanely, in love with the symphony called Life.

Call me a mad guy. But I know I’m a happy guy.