Driving as a spiritual exercise

Feb 18, 2010, 12.00am IST

Stephen Isaac.
 
I am a driver with 35 years' experience, who is yet unable to say: "I am perfect."



Everyday I learn something new, or a memory prevents me from embarrassing myself. Preventing ego from disturbing my driving is a very beautiful spiritual exercise, because in Bangalore's traffic, your patience is tested to the maximum.


Being in the right can still get you into an argument or a fight, and I can make things worse if I let my ego erupt, and even though I have helped other drivers to drive better, I still have to keep learning and smiling. I will quote something here: "Today you are disciples, tomorrow you will be teachers, to be good teachers you must remain good disciples." So I continuously reassess myself by recollecting where I goofed up during the day.


Driving is also a form of meditation. My mind becomes a blank except for the information being relayed to it by my eyes, and which it instantly translates into action for my feet and hands to use. All done in nanoseconds. To enhance this meditation, I have to merge with the car and become one with it. I have this habit of becoming what I see. I become one with a kite soaring in the sky, to see the wonderful vista below through its eyes. It's the same looking at a tree, unless I become the tree I will never be able to experience the insect life teeming under the bark or running along the branches. The lizard, the squirrel, or the bird relaxing under the shade of the leaves. This is equivalent to being one with the Universe, one energy. This is one of the highest forms of meditation.


After merging with the car, and I am moving, every sound it makes becomes eloquent testimony of whether it is happy or not. Rolling into traffic my peripheral vision goes active, to warn me of any vehicle coming alongside, my side mirrors helping in this process. My eyes, never focusing on any given point, flicker from left to right continuously, assessing every vehicle in front and using their weaknesses if they exist, to ease past and keep moving with the least resistance. Memory is working full time about humps, potholes, crossings, both major and minor. The rear-view mirror becomes the eye in the back of my head, to know what is behind me at all times.

With all this happening, I still converse with my boss in the back seat, listen to the lyrics of the song playing on the radio effortlessly. I have goofed up sometimes, but God always took over to save the situation, and by His grace I have never had an accident. The most spiritual part of this meditative driving is that I always make sure I am not inconveniencing anybody, whether it is a pedestrian, cyclist, two-wheeler or anything else, including animals. Even vehicles hindering my way deliberately or not, I smile and let pass, thus avoiding any loss of concentration. So my awareness of being one with everything around me is heightened by caring.

This is a meditation of oneness, of knowing God's Oneness in everything animate and inanimate. "God's Oneness, my companions, is the only law of being. Another name for it is Love. To know it and abide by it is to abide in life. But to abide by any other law is to abide in non-being, or Death." How true, but can we get everybody to feel the same way? I don't know.