The
9th letter of the alphabet is “I”, and the 9th virtue from the Bhagavad Gita, if you
remember, is “Straightforwardness”. But
we’ll come back to that.
One of the parts of the “I”, the curving
stroke standing on the right, is flowing, open at the top and connected at the
bottom. Our wise calligraphic experts from the 12th century are telling us that
this is the part of the mind, the “I”, that faces the outside world, to the
right. It deals with material things. It is our “ego”, the instrument used by
the mind to interact with the world. Its shape seems to tell us that we should
“go with the flow”, we should be easy and calm and practice tranquillity to
deal with this world, as no straight lines really exist here. Lines are mostly
non-straight, crooked, always changing direction one way or another. Any
pretension to “straightness” (which is not the same as “straightforwardness”)
is an optical illusion, for the straight line of the horizon is a mere fantasy
of the senses, and only produced from our puny individual standpoint, from our
tiny position in the world. In this letter, everything is curvy.
The top of the right “I” flows outwards,
at the highest point, meaning we should look upwards and outwards, but,
beware!, it stops there and continues no more. Back down towards the base, this
“outward-facing I” narrows in shape due to the turning of the nib of the
original hand-held pen and loses its thickness. This tells us to be careful not
to let it “disconnect” from the rest of the “I” on the left, which is much more
complicated than the right-hand part. If our “penmanship” fails us at this
point, we are left with a simple Roman “I” with one single stroke, bereft of
our “inner life”, as symbolised by the left-hand construction. With disconnection
from the left-side (next photo), we are thrown out into the material world and
left to fend for ourselves, attracted by sense objects, trapped by sense
objects, acting and reacting with no further sense of our “complete Self.”
It is significant in the masterful
creation of this letter that the simple right-hand stroke is connected at its
very base with quite a thick plume-stroke to the left-hand construction,
symbolising the “inner man”. What is an “I” just looking outward? When we
question this “outward I” as to who it is, we find that we do not know who or
what it is. This “worldly I” just appears and re-appears at every moment
asserting itself as the sum total of the entity which is, in fact, an unknown
entity. As each thought arises, we are not cognizant of where it comes from. So
how can we say we know who or what we really are?
And so, at the very base, the monks of a
certain monastery must have wanted to give a broader picture of the “I” by
connecting the outer man with the inner man, telling us the following: At the
very base of your thought of “I”, you are really connected to the inner world
of “I” in a beautifully flowing stroke that looks downwards and stops, as we
can see, with the same kind of point as on the right-hand stroke looking
upwards. This means that the attention of our inner “I” given to the material
plane must be as small and as tight and as controlled as possible. At a certain
blunt point, our interest in the material plane stops short and obviates
whatever is below. We should go no further down into the abyss of the senses;
give no further heed to Mammon and Satan. Stop there, and rather look above for
your answers…
(to be continued…)
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