Holy Mother Sarada Devi’s Life and Ideals – Influence on today’s Women Part 5

In today’s world we are seeing a great transformation. Interconnectedness, esp. through the digital world has opened up many new opportunities through mass education and awareness. The success of materialism in promoting a better life for all has brought in its wake the evils of manifold desires, dissatisfaction with status quo, disenchantment and general lack of peace and harmony. Perhaps these are all outcomes of the quality of rajas, or intense activity, accompanied by intense passion. Rajas is necessary for material prosperity, but it needs to be controlled by Sattva or the quality of peace and tranquility. Else we would see preponderance of misery and actions led by desires leading to many unintended consequences as we see in our society today – corruption, crime, atrocities, struggle for supremacy, rage and untold miseries.

As Swami Vivekananda pointed out, even in the rank atheist we see an urge, to love and to be loved, to find peace and happiness. People do not know where to find happiness and peace and often cling to material gains and fulfillment of desires as the primary means of attaining that state, without realizing that such happiness cannot last longer. After all, our inherent nature is divine and we are all working towards realizing that divinity, consciously for a few, unconsciously for most. Therefore everybody searches for that elusive peace and yet nobody finds it, instead taking shelter in sense enjoyments as the only means of fulfillment and thereby destroying own lives and that of others.

In today’s mad world the women has a pivotal role to play to ensure that harmony is restored. With increasing education, responsibilities and power and with greater and bigger role that today’s women are playing in the society, they need to be cognizant of the fact that mother nature has prepared them in a mould which is different from that of the men. That is why women are mothers and not men. It is women who can love, who can forbear and who can nourish and sustain. Therefore her responsibilities become paramount in restoring harmony and faith in the society. Vedanta says that there are interplay of two divine forces that shape the world – the force of avidya or ignorance which leads one to destruction, and the force of vidya or knowledge which leads to liberation. Both the forces are imagined to be stemming from the playful divine mother, who uses avidya to bind and vidya to release her sons. The two forces, like centripetal and centrifugal forces in physics, balance each other so that the world is sustained. As long as avidya predominates, materialism and all associated tendencies of passion, hatred, violence, display of power, politics, divisiveness, seeing multiplicity and differences, will predominate. Therefore it is upto us to take refuge in vidya maya, or the qualities of goodness, love, compassion, kindness and selfless acts. Women in the realm of vidya maya can make a great difference in the world as Holy Mother and her many followers have demonstrated with their lives. Such women can lead the society by being beacons of hopes for others and by demonstrating love, care and concern and ensure that the inherent goodness in people, which are covered under ignorance, can reveal themselves through the process – a fact that was demonstrated by the Holy Mother through the incidence of the bandit father (Dakat Baba).