Spiritless existence

Not far from Shirdi is the small town of Shingnapur, a renowned resort for those that seek to mend their equation with Shani or Saturn, the eccen

Spiritless existence behind closed doors (Getty Images)

tric astral power-centre. Interestingly, the town prides itself on being a 'door-less' town. "Even banks and jewellery showrooms have no doors here," claims the taxi driver who doubles as a guide. I ask "why?" out of curiosity.

Surprised by the question, the driver declares, "Nobody who dares to steal in Shingnapur can ever step alive beyond the portals of this town!" Such is the terror Shani strikes in the minds of the believer.

Shingnapur provides the opportunity to ponder over the practice of having doors and the prospect of doing away with these. Saturn, presiding deity of the town, leads from the front. His symbol, a large slab of black rock, is installed in the open. This is so everywhere: Saturn somehow disliked being housed in chambers. In animistic societies the practice is to install symbols of all deities in the open. Enclosures, let alone doors, are taboo. Primitive communities imbibe this virtue of their gods: they like to live in the open, in symbiosis with nature. Enclosures are for minimal use, mostly for shelter from inclement weather.

Verrier Elwin had found that the most inhuman punishment that government could inflict upon an aborigine is to shut him up in a cellar. The aborigine may agree to suffer the severest flogging, but he dreads to be locked behind doors. Such confinement can permanently damage his sanity. The Indian Penal Code considers judicial custody of an undertrial as an ordinary matter, but for an aborigine a lock-up is worse than death. Elwin, therefore, campaigned all through his life against the criminal law codes being blindly applied to tribal areas. Such is their detestation for confinement that to this day if the tribals in Bastar have to board a transport, they prefer the open truck to the 'enclosed' buses!

The moot point here is the direct relation between doors and our psyche. Whether the door is bolted and secured by oneself from within, or by another from without; whether the room one is lodged in is a prison cellar or a luxury suite, doors impact the mind. And their influence is more likely to be negative. A door always is a symbol of insecurity and self-exclusion. Both of these are contra-spiritual. The desire for safe doors indicates bhava-bhaya, existential fear. Prolonged habit of living behind closed doors only increases this weakness. It causes jadatva, grossness or hardness in life.

The more one seeks to protect oneself, the more does this fear vex the mind. The door cuts the vital bonds that connect us to the cosmos. It dries within us what Wordsworth would call the gentle 'sympathies' that keep us connected in nature. These sympathies generate love and activate the faculty of unfailing intuition. Doors, on the other hand, generate mental block. The door is unnatural, and it makes its user so, too. Every door, ultimately, imprisons the mind.

Rabindranath Tagore felt that the world gets broken up into fragments by 'narrow domestic walls'. The brick and mortar walls quickly create their parallels within one's mind, and this is the crux of the problem.

Is it possible to entirely do away with doors? The matter can be debated. What is important is to keep the spirit free. Kuvempu, the Kannada poet, calls upon his chetana, consciousness, to break loose and be 'un-housed'. "Aagu nee aniketana".