Thursday, April 25, 2019

The Last Matryoshka

Stepping out of the last Matryoshka

Matryoshka is a wooden doll  which separates into two halves, top and bottom. The belly of this doll contains a smaller figure of the same sort inside, which has, in turn, another figure inside of it, and so on. The first Russian doll set was made in 1890 by Vasily Zvyozdochkin from a design by Sergey Malyutin, who was a folk crafts painter.  Traditionally the outer layer is a woman, dressed in a sarafan, a long and shapeless traditional Russian peasant jumper dress. The figures inside may be of either gender; the smallest, innermost doll is typically a baby turned from a single piece of wood.
         The human body is constantly remodeling itself. The body almost completely replaces itself every 7 to 15 years. We get a totally new skin coat every 27 days. Like the Matryoshka doll, a new doll emerges almost every month as the old one is shed off. During the course of life, the rampaging and ravaging time wears, weathers, erodes  the inner being, reshaping and  remodelling the mind, the personality continuously. The emotional Matryoshka dolls keep   getting uncovered by tough times, unforeseen problems, stacked up adversities. They all contribute and aid to split open the outer dolls of opinions, impressions, beliefs and convictions and reinvent a new entity. Each new doll, is  fresh, nascent,  with newer
outlooks and perspectives, newer vision and objectives. This is analogous to getting software updates. The software of emotions, of affiliations, of attitudes and associations needs to be updated regularly to deal with a very rapidly changing world. The updates have to be installed, the emotional Matryoshka doll has to be consciously  deconstructed. It is not a passive process, or a default setting. It is an endeavor. This process can be painful. Casting away the emotional exoskeleton  requires effort, will and resolve. Many pride themselves on very rigid, indoctrinated infallible convictions, perceptions and beliefs. They are reluctant to moult, to cast off the outer doll, which is plastered to the inner one by the glue of ego and ignorance. Such dolls are anachronistic entities, totally out of synch with their resurrected peers. The process of shedding misconceptions, beliefs, attitudes is a prelude to shedding the most difficult, last Matryoshka doll. Shedding the Matryoshka of the ego, the identity, is the most precarious of all. The very entity that's seeking and searching for what lies within has to be dissolved. The annihilation of the doll of  "me" cannot be "achieved". This is so because the one who wants to "achieve" this is none other than the "ego"  and the ego cannot destroy itself.  Discarding this last doll reveals no further dolls  but only an emptiness.  Emptiness is a concept that needs a container to qualify and conceive. The container segregates, isolates and  casts a spell of discreteness. The empty space felt it was separate by virtue of the confining doll.  The confining force is the ego that refuses to yield. The ego, that creates, nurtures and sustains all the successive dolls. The ego that forbids all attempts at communion. Vanquishing the last doll, merges inner and outer spaces to reveal the unbroken whole. The separation of inner and outer spaces was the illusion, created by series of Matryoshka dolls. The unbroken whole was unbroken, the presence or absence of the innumerable Matryoshkas notwithstanding.

Dr Deepak Ranade

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