Holi is a festival of colors. After playing Holi, it is difficult to recognize the people because they have different colors on their bodies and clothes. As if everybody has lost his identity. People in the streets look like flowers of different colors and shapes in a bouquet. Thus, Holi is the festival of shedding our identities and merging with each other. However, this merging is very superficial and temporary unless souls connect to each other. That is what Krishna taught us. Krishna played Holi with the Gopis whereby He connected to their souls. The connection was so strong that its fragrance can still be experienced in Brij and Vrindavan.
In today's world, the society is so fragmented and disconnected. There is a war taking place in every nook and corner of the society. Followers of one religion fighting the followers of the other religion, one spiritual sect fighting the other spiritual sect, and laughingly both calling themselves to be spiritual😀. There are fights across the organizations and with the divisions of the same organizations, fights among nations and within nations. People are fighting with their relatives. The husband is fighting with the wife, and the kids are fighting with their parents. It appears as if love has evaporated from the society, leaving the society quite dull and dry.
Holi gives two messages: one quite obvious and the other a little deeper. The obvious message is that we need to let go of the fixation on our identities to mingle. We may use any color for that. We have used different colors so far, such as the color of nationality, religion, caste, region, languages, etc to do away with the differences. Though the people using one color mingle with the other people with the same color, there is a huge resistance to mingle with the people with other colors. We fail to realize that all colors are just colors and unless people with different colors mingle with each other, we do not get the true colors of Holi. We can not play Holi with a single color. We put the color we carry on the face of the other person and he puts his color on our face and that is how we both play Holi. That is how we need to mingle across nations, religions, castes, regions, and languages in the true spirit of Holi.
The deeper message of Holi is given by Krishna to the entire humanity. We may shed our identities at the surface by mingling with each other. At the core, there is a strong feeling of separation. At a deeper level, we require a merger of the souls. If we play that Holi with the divine, we realize the futility of all the identities. We understand that all these identities have no purpose other than a limited functional role. That helps us put all these identities in the right perspective. That merger with the divide helps us play Holi with different souls, where all the souls have dropped their sense of separation and are colored with divine colors, ready to mingle with each other at the very core. That's the real spirit of Holi.
I wish everyone Holi and pray that Lord Krishna graces everybody with the awareness of true self so that we may come out of the narrowness we confine ourselves to, open to the wideness of life, and connect to each other with the divine colors.
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