Crossing limits

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

The other night I shouted at my soulmate: You are crossing limits. Naturally she roared back: Yes, now I know my limits. I know now where you hold me; my place in your heart and in the protestation of your love!After she shut me up with a stern ‘goodnight’ I sank into a deep brown study. What has happened? What limit, I was sore about, did she cross, when she almost exploded saying reality is not an abstraction! Both reality and abstraction are without borders, boundaries; nothing is off limits in love. If love is not limited by space and time, language and culture, sense and mind, what limit did she transcend or transgress? I was nonplussed, my logic failed me to build an argument in my favour. Borders are off limits for trespassers. Laws and regulations set limits for people. Social time regulations can be understood. Auspicious moments have time limitations. Choice too operates within a framework- one cannot choose to kill another for revenge although revenge is an accepted heroic value.

Limits are always set by administration for smooth conduct of events, movements, communication and all social operation. Order, balance, harmony are maintained only when limits are honoured. Limits always presuppose a world without mystery. Logic of human perceptions is codified and simplified for smooth human process in living in the world. All limits are fixed, at times even arbitrarily, to make the world a home for man. If limits are not imposed morality will collapse and society will plunge into primeval chaos. Perhaps for this fear a Maker- Administrator of the world was invented by our ancestors called God.  All laws, limits, limitations were imaginatively made in the name of God. All freedom and all limits flew from god’s decree for keeping the world of creation orderly. Compassion, mercy, kindness, pardon, renunciation and such like values were presumed to be divine values to keep human anger, hate and violence in check. Theft of what belongs to others was/ is off limits. Murder, even self slaughter, was forbidden. All these rules and laws stemmed from a moral centre called God.

If that is true, how is it that all religions believing in the same God hate each other? Christianity and Islam, Semites and Islam, not to speak of Hindus and Muslims are always hateful of each other in spite of constitutional polities all over the world? If God is the ultimate limit of man and nature, how can the practioners of the same God’s moral laws fight between themselves? How could monotheism followed by Islam fail to recognize the gods of polytheistic Hindus? How could Christ, the Son of God be crucified...? Questions like these are not off limits to human consciousness.

This leads us to human freedom which is not necessarily a political truth. Freedom is of the spirit and it always transgresses all limits- political, ethical, social even natural. Freedom as I have said elsewhere is a defiant spirit. It does not recognise any limit anywhere. Man tries to embrace everything- nature society and the preternatural. The limits of nature have already been transgressed. Air, water, earth, sky and ether are all under attack by man’s limitless freedom. We destroy mountains, change the course of rivers, and reach Moon, Mars and now the Sun. Knowledge and our quest for knowledge has no limits. We quest for the destruction of the race too. Sapiens were never in greater danger of total annihilation than the21st century. The cyber war is about to begin. Banks are hacked; military establishments may be the next target for men who do not care for limits. The IBMs are no more a threat. A click somewhere will make all human achievements meaningless.

To return to my beginning, what limits did my love cross? Did I set any limits on love and its honey territory in my love for the only person out of the 700 billion humans? Love has no limits of body, mind, spirit or the Beyond. Any limit set by me is arbitrary and out of sync with God’s vast imagination.  Whatever limits are imposed by man for order, love sets its own limits which are limitless. Love is greater vaster and more life friendly than God. If man operates in love all borders, boundaries, rules, laws will be irrelevant. Love is the law of life and our total reality.