What is “Holi”….Holi means burning up all the unnecessary things in our life, including the memories of the past, so that you can be like a fresh life and exuberant.
As we all know that Phalguni refers to the fruit of life but today, studies have found that there is a certain movement of water in the soil during the full moon.
Specially during the Phalguni moon, the sun rises with full intensity in the northern hemisphere.
Which make the water naturally rise.
Means every tree and plant finds more nourishment around this time than any other time of the year.
That is why they are full of flowers and fruits.
Life bursts in every way.
Holi means recognising that life is an exuberant process.
On Holi, all over India, people apply colours to each other.
They are cover from head to toe in all kinds of colours to symbolise that the essence of life is exuberance.
The reason why life has become so serious for people is because of their inexperience in dealing with their cerebral capabilities, the two most fundamental faculties of memory and imagination.
People remember everything that they should not and forget everything that they should remember.
People imagine things that they should not, but they cannot imagine something that will make their life beautiful.
Most of human life goes in mulching on one’s memories.
A handful of people are experiencing life right now.
People are taking pictures and selfies of everything everywhere because they will go home and mulch on those pictures.
They are only capable of enjoying their memories, they are not capable of enjoying their life.
And this is a serious problem.
Our vivid sense of memory is one of the greatest faculties we have, but unfortunately, most human beings use this as a way of suffering.
They can sit here and suffer what happen even five to 10 years ago like it is happening to them now.
They are suffering something that does not exist.
Between life and memory, memory is information, life is a phenomenon.
If the phenomenon of life has to happen to you, you must know how to keep a little distance between you and your memories.
But the moment you put a negative label on situations that happen in the past, they are the ones that stick to you.
Holi is the day to burn them so that you can look at life as an experiential phenomenon once again rather than as information that you have from the past.
You can go far in life only when you can leave your past.
This is like a snake shedding its skin.
One moment it is a part of the body, the next moment it is shed and the snake goes on without turning back.
If every moment, one is like a snake leaving the skin behind, only then there is growth.
Holi means burning all the unnecessary things in our life.
On the streets across, people burn Holika, an embodiment of all sorts of negativity.
In southern India people bring out old clothes and other things that they do not need, put on top of one another on the streets and burn them.
As this is not about burning old clothes, this is about burning the memories of the past one year so that today you can be like a fresh life, exuberant and go on.
This is also the day when we burn everything that does not allow us to reach our fullness, our anger, our negativity, our hatred, our jealousy, our pettiness, our fears, anxieties, and many other things which crunch a human being into a small creature.
When you have these kinds of emotions and thoughts, you are just like any other creature.
They do not allow you to blossom.
So, burning up all those things which impede the possibility of your fullness is what Phalguni Purnima and Holi are all about.
Rahul Ram Dwivedi (RRD) is a senior journalist in 2YoDoINDIA.
NOTE : Views expressed are personal.
